Chronicle of May 2010

May 26

neoLIT Ensemble. Bargmusic, New York, NY. "[T]he full roster includes mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, with the musicians playing in whatever combinations their programs demand. [In this program] . . . the group performed without its singer. NeoLIT also has a specialty. All its players are women, and as its program biography puts it, the group is 'especially devoted to the presentation of works by women composers.' But that is evidently not an exclusive mandate. Though the program it originally announced was devoted fully to women, a last-minute change brought Paul Moravec to the lineup and gave over the entire second half of the program to his Tempest Fantasy. Even so, the first half offered music by six composers working in a variety of styles. The opening piece, Alexandra du Bois’s Soleil sur Mer (2007), was commissioned by Bargemusic, and Ms. du Bois paid tribute to the floating concert hall by naming both movements barcarolles, after the gently rocking 19th-century boat song form. Actually, neither movement sounds much like a classic barcarolle, and the two bear little similarity to each other. The first, subtitled 'Brouillard' and meant to evoke fog, is slow, gloomy and not especially memorable. The second, 'L’Été,' is bright-hued and lively, with a birdsonglike theme that stays in the ear. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Divertimento (1983) for flute, clarinet, violin and cello begins and ends with gestures bearing Beethovenian echoes, but within that frame the music is vital and inventive. The second movement in particular, a vigorous Allegro, begins with a rhythmically steady pizzicato figure, shared by the violin and cello; the flute and clarinet briefly weave an inviting line around it. Ms. Zwilich’s work presented an updated, freewheeling look at Neo-Classicism. Barbara S. Buckley’s Quintetta (1953) offered a purer view, its three movements carefully chiseled and beautifully compact. In Dust (2001) Belinda Reynolds used spare, dark-hued cello and clarinet timbres to create a starkly meditative memorial to the victims of the attacks of Sept. 11. Erin Svoboda, the clarinetist, and Aminda Asher, the cellist, gave a beautifully focused, melancholy account of the score. Amelia Lukas, the flutist, played East Wind, Shulamit Ran’s gracefully chromatic 1987 showpiece for solo flute, with a fine balance of virtuosity and poetry. The first part of the program ended with Tania León’s Parajota Delate (1988), a rhythmically zesty vignette in Ms. León’s signature blend of folkish and formal styles. Mr. Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy (2002), the work for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, is based on the Shakespeare play and uses its central characters -- Ariel, Prospero and Caliban — as the subjects of the first three movements, with 'Sweet Airs' and a Fantasia filling out the set. Mr. Moravec’s writing is always accessible and transparent, and the ensemble responded to its easygoing, picturesque charms with a cheerful, energetic performance [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 5/31/10].


May 27

Keys to the Future — a festival of solo contemporary piano music organized by the pianist and composer Joseph Rubenstein — 10 pianists highlight a range of styles in works by 19 composers. Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY. "Jazz was an integral component of the exuberant Five Études in Different Intervals (1992) by Nikolai Kapustin, who once played piano in a big-band jazz orchestra. Stephen Gosling performed the technically intricate and virtuosic work with aplomb. Also jazz-infused was Richard Danielpour’s vivacious Mardi Gras (1992), part of his Enchanted Garden, a set of preludes for piano. Blair McMillen offered a dynamic performance of the work, in which the rapid sequences of jagged rhythmic patterns are punctuated by a momentary lull in the festivities. Mr. Rubenstein performed one of his own scores, the evocative, chromatically meandering Romance No. 2 (aurora) (2007). He opened the program with Bruce Stark’s gentle, introspective Yours (2002), which had a slight New Age sheen to it. A meditative mood also permeated Vuk Kulenovic’s Virginal, (1982), sensitively rendered by Karen Hakobyan. Insistent themes resurfaced throughout the tranquil, arresting work, with delicate, ephemeral motifs repeated with increasing intensity, until a fiery outburst shattered the serenity. A quietly persistent theme restored the calm. Judd Greenstein’s First Ballade (2008), played by Mr. McMillen, began similarly on a serene note before slowly building in intensity. Paying homage to a famous composer or theme is a long-standing tradition, continued by Barbara White in her Mirage (homage to Ravel) (2002), whose gauzy textures evoked the mirage of its title. There was also a Ravelian tint to Philippe Hersant’s pictorial Six Éphémères (2003), given a colorful performance by Mr. McMillen. In “Autumn Wind,” the first movement, trills and rapid, rising figurations in the right hand evoked the wind. “An Ant,” the fourth section, depicted that tiny creature with scurrying sounds and solemn gestures, while the ominous whirlwind of Hurricane concluded the suite with dramatic intensity" [Anne Midgette, The New York Times, 6/1/10].



The New York Philharmonic, conducted by Alan Gilbert, in Gyorgy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "Encouraging evidence that Alan Gilbert’s bold artistic vision for the New York Philharmonic has been embraced by the public could be seen in two words on a poster outside Avery Fisher Hall on Thursday night: 'SOLD OUT.' What had sold out were three performances of Gyorgy Ligeti’s musically audacious opera Le Grand Macabre, a bleakly satirical tale set in an 'anytime' century, first performed in Stockholm in 1978. In the piece a spectral, booming figure who proclaims himself Death comes to the decadent, carefree principality of Breughelland and announces his intention to destroy the world at the stroke of midnight. Presenting a staged production of this challenging modernist work was Mr. Gilbert’s most ambitious project for his first season as the Philharmonic’s music director. Here, courtesy of the Philharmonic, was the New York premiere of a piece that by rights the Metropolitan Opera should have produced long ago (The only previous American staged production was at the San Francisco Opera in 2004). Tackling Le Grand Macabre is one way that Mr. Gilbert is taking the Philharmonic into the 21st century [N.B. we are talking about a 20th-century opera here - ed.]. The risk was that audiences might not follow him. But [the] presentation was an exhilarating success, offering an eager and excellent cast, a brilliant and assured performance of Ligeti’s daunting score and a disarming production, designed and directed by Doug Fitch, that makes ingenious use of playful video images. The audience, with noticeable contingents of young people, laughed right through and seemed enthralled. Ligeti, who died at 83 in 2006, was not a natural for musical theater. When he came upon a play by Michel de Ghelderode about the end of the world, presented both as calamity and farce, he found a subject that inspired him to fashion his own kind of opera. He wrote the libretto with Michael Meschke. The original version of Le Grand Macabre, with long spans of spoken dialogue, came across almost as operatic cabaret. Nearly 20 years later, Ligeti revised the score, removing chunks of dialogue, turning some speaking roles into sung ones and lending the overall opera more musical continuity, without losing the riotousness, the spirit of macabre musical theater. That version, introduced at the Salzburg Festival in 1997, was performed here. The opera opens with a raspy prelude for 12 honking car horns, all precisely pitched. The first character we meet is Piet the Pot, the land’s official wine taster, here the robust tenor Mark Schowalter in a poignantly comic performance. Typically tipsy, Piet blesses Breughelland as a place where no one knows a care. The scene is supposed to take place near the remains of a decayed graveyard. Mr. Fitch’s production employs a stage extension in front of the orchestra but achieves most of its effects through videos. Using two stands, rather like puppet booths, in full view of the audience, stagehands make close-up videos of mini-sets, flats and props, which are then projected onto a screen in the shape of a sunburst that hovers over the orchestra. Sometimes singers pop into the booths for close-ups. So when Nekrotzar, the persona of Death, emerges as if from the underworld, we first see the comically menacing face of this character, played by the formidable bass-baritone Eric Owens, as a ghoulish video image. Though the videos are wildly imaginative, a great deal of the action is simply staged on the extended platform, with the singers in surreal sci-fi costumes designed by Catherine Zuber. Early in the first scene, for example, we meet the soprano Jennifer Black as Amanda, and the mezzo-soprano Renée Tatum as Amanda’s devoted male lover, Amando. They wear primitive grass skirts and bodysuits that make them appear naked from the waist up, showing off Amanda’s buxom breasts and Amando’s muscled chest. Ligeti gives them melismatic intertwining melodies against the astringent harmonies of the orchestra, which this pair sang beautifully. The original libretto was in German, but Ligeti wanted the text to be translated into the language of the audience hearing it (The premiere was sung in Swedish). For this performance in English, the decision was made not to use supertitles, and it was the right choice. During intricate musical stretches, some of the words do not come through clearly. But the revised score is still thick with spoken and half-sung lines. So it would have been distracting to see the texts projected. The charismatic bass Wilbur Pauley, as the henpecked court astrologer Astradamors, and the lush-voiced mezzo-soprano Melissa Parks, as his brutishly domineering wife, Mescalina, were wonderful. The soprano Kiera Duffy, as an unearthly tall Venus, was suffering from a cold and could not sing. Her understudy, Audrey Elizabeth Luna, sang the role from the side as Ms. Duffy acted in costume. Somehow it made this mystical moment in Ligeti’s score, where the strings play haunting Neo-Baroque passages, all the more magical. The young countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo brought a clear, penetrating voice and dramatic flair to the role of the gluttonous, cowardly Prince Go-Go, looking like a butterball, with his head protruding from his scaly globe of a costume. He is served by two quarrelsome advisers, the White Minister (the appealing tenor Peter Tantsits) and the Black Minster (the virile bass Joshua Bloom), who engage in some nimble bits of physical comedy. The soprano Barbara Hannigan deftly dispatched the coloratura leaps and runs of the punishing part of Gepopo, the chief of the secret police, while bringing demonic zaniness to her portrayal. Choral elements were richly sung by the New York Choral Artists, performing sometimes from the stage, sometimes from the balconies. The hero of this production, of the whole endeavor, is Mr. Gilbert, who conducted the score with insight, character and command. The Philharmonic players seemed inspired as they executed this complex music with skill and conviction. Mr. Gilbert brought out Ligeti’s wildness. Yet moment after moment was ravishing, like the fractured, hazy, strangely elusive scene when Piet, Astradamors and Nekrotzar drink themselves into a stupor, which causes Nekrotzar to bungle his chance to destroy the world. Actually, he turns out to be another impotent imposter, right at home in Breughelland. The opera ends with a passacaglia for vocal ensemble and orchestra, as the citizens, not sure whether they are alive or dead, agree that the best course is to have no fear, let come what may, and enjoy yourself. Not just opera, but challenging contemporary opera in an inventive and effective production, has come to the Philharmonic, thanks to Mr. Gilbert and his colleague Mr. Fitch. This was an instant Philharmonic milestone" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 5/28/10].

May 29

Mark Alburger videos his Psalm 1: 1-5. Redondo Beach, Half Moon Bay, CA.

Spoleto Festival, USA presents instrumental music of Wolfgang Rihm, conducted by John Kennedy. Simmons Center Recital Hall, College of Charleston, SC. "Kennedy is the director of the festival’s Music in Time series, and in that capacity he offered a wonderful setup for the opera: a concert of instrumental music by Mr. Rihm from the 1980's . . . . The program consisted of four segments from the Chiffre-Zyklus (Cipher Cycle) for chamber orchestra, pieces seemingly calculated to show how much music can be written without serious resort to melody. Rhythm, dynamics and instrumental color are everything. Melody scarcely amounts to more than fragments and, occasionally, ostinato figures. The piano appears prominently but almost entirely in its guise as a percussion instrument. Structure is modular, with clangorous episodes separated by long moments of intense quiet or actual silence. Though unpredictable from moment to moment, the music -- at times almost voluptuous, at others edgy -- affords a gratifying logic with its repeating motifs, within movements and from one to another. Mr. Kennedy’s players supplied crack performances. Lydia Brown, in particular, handled that demanding piano part, unpianistic as it was, with aplomb" [James Oestreich, The New York Times, 6/1/10].

May 30

Spoleto Festival, USA presents the American premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s monodrama Proserpina, conducted by John Kennedy. Memminger Auditorium, Charleston, SC. "Kennedy provid[ed] a steadying hand. The work is a tour de force for soprano -- in this case, Heather Buck -- positively awash in lyricism: for at least half of its 45-minute length, limpid, flowing Straussian melody . . . [i]n this setting of a text by Goethe . . . . The Fates, represented by a chorus (women of the Westminster Choir), singing wordlessly at first, draw Proserpina inexorably into their midst, and the director here, Ken Rus Schmoll, has added a silent actor (Jason Bruffy) as a glowering and ultimately grasping Pluto. But the evening belonged to Ms. Buck, who sang beautifully in the plush melodies at the start and adapted expertly to increasing angularity and high-flying acrobatics as Proserpina’s plight grew dire. Mr. Schmoll’s spare production, with a set and modern-dress costumes designed by Marsha Ginsberg, provided Ms. Buck with a mostly blank slate, and she was equally compelling as a sheer stage presence, whether self-absorbed or interacting with the chorus and even the orchestra. Mr. Rihm’s music ranges widely and ingeniously through contemporary styles and includes a sort of historical framing, as he seamlessly weaves in patches of music from Goethe’s era. The Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice appears in the orchestra at Proserpina’s line, 'Your peaceful wandering, blessed ones,' and a bit of the Queen of the Night’s vocalizing from Mozart’s Zauberflöte creeps into Proserpina’s rendering of 'Through the night I will pursue him.' As in the orchestral concert, Mr. Kennedy and the orchestra were superb advocates for Mr. Rihm’s imaginative music" [James Oestreich, The New York Times, 6/1/10].


May 31

Death of Benjamin Lees (b. Benjamin George Lisniansky, 1/8/24, Harbin, China), at 86. Glen Cove, NY. "[He was] Benjamin Lees, an iconoclastic American composer . . . [whose] work . . . was lyrical, tonal and widely described as approachable . . . . He . . . had recently returned to the New York area after living in Palm Springs, CA, for many years. Known for his versatility, Mr. Lees wrote for symphony orchestra, solo instruments, voice and chamber ensembles. After coming to prominence in the 1950's, he received commissions from major American orchestras; his solo and chamber works were given premieres by distinguished artists like the pianist Gary Graffman, the violinist Ruggiero Ricci and the Budapest and Tokyo String Quartets. At the same time, however, Mr. Lees stood somewhat apart from the marquee names of contemporary music. That stance, to judge from his characteristically candid interviews over the years, suited him just fine. 'I want a composer who communicates,' he told The New York Times in 1982, 'not one who plays cerebral games.' Among Mr. Lees’s best-known compositions are his Symphony No.4 ('Memorial Candles'), for soprano, violin and orchestra, written in 1985 . . . and Symphony No.5 ('Kalmar Nyckel') . . . . His Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, composed in 1964, remains one of his most widely performed pieces. In 1960, Mr. Lees’s Symphony No.2 (1958) drew an admiring review from the Times critic Howard Taubman at its New York premiere, performed by the Cleveland Orchestra in Carnegie Hall under George Szell. With the symphony, Mr. Taubman wrote, Mr. Lees 'proclaims himself as a composer of marked individuality.' . . . Above all he disdained serialism, a compositional technique most closely associated with Arnold Schoenberg . . . . 'I tried the technique, but couldn’t do it,' Mr. Lees told The Los Angeles Times in 1992. 'It was like making love to a corpse.' Described most often as conservative or Neo-Classical, Mr. Lees’s style was known for its thoughtful construction (he was a watchmaker’s son), attention to the sonorities of individual instruments, and rhythmic and melodic twists. His champions praised his music for being accessible to the ordinary listener. His detractors criticized it for precisely the same thing. . . . [He was] the son of Jewish parents who had fled pogroms in their native Ukraine. The Lisnianskys came to the United States in 1925, Americanizing their name in the process. They settled first in San Francisco and later in Los Angeles. Benjamin began piano lessons at 5 and started composing as a teenager. After Army service in World War II, he attended the University of Southern California; he later studied privately for several years with the American modernist composer George Antheil. Mr. Lees came to wide public attention in 1954, when his composition Profile for Orchestra was performed by the NBC Symphony on a national radio broadcast. In the 1960's and 70's, Mr. Lees taught composition at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Queens College, the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School before concluding that teaching was not for him. 'Either you have a talented student, in which case you’re frightened because you don’t want to ruin the talent, or you have someone who has a very nice personality but no talent and should be taking animal husbandry,' he told The Los Angeles Times in 2004. . . . Mr. Lees’s work has been widely recorded. In 2003, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for Kalmar Nyckel. The recording, for Albany Records, was by the Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, a German orchestra, under Stephen Gunzenhauser. Honored, Mr. Lees attended the awards ceremony in Los Angeles. He did not win. (That year’s Grammy for best classical contemporary composition went to the American composer Dominick Argento for his song cycle Casa Guidi.) Mr. Lees was philosophical. After the ceremony, as he told The San Jose Mercury News in 2004, “' came back, I took out the garbage, and life goes on'" [Margalit Fox, The New York Times, 6/7/10].

Chronicle of February 2009

February 1

Death of Lukas Foss, at 86. New York, NY. "[He] also had a home in Bridgehampton, NY. His wife, Cornelia, announced his death. Although he was a German émigré, Mr. Foss was, from the start of his composing career, considered an important voice in the burgeoning world of American composition, along with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter and Leonard Bernstein. And like Bernstein, he enthusiastically championed the works of his colleagues. But where Bernstein, in his compositions, melded jazz and theater music with a lush symphonic neo-Romanticism -- or wrote theater music outright -- Mr. Foss preferred to explore the byways of the avant-garde, focusing at different times on techniques from serialism and electronic music to Minimalism and improvisation. But as he moved from style to style, his voice remained distinctive, partly because he distrusted rules and never fully adhered to those of the approaches he adopted, and partly because a current of mercurial wit ran through his work. He took particular pleasure in finding common ground between opposing languages and techniques. His String Quartet No. 3 (1975), for example, is essentially a Minimalist work, but it has a mildly atonal edge and uses dynamics more dramatically than other Minimalist works of the time. Sometimes Mr. Foss would combine contemporary styles with those of the distant musical past. His Baroque Variations (1967) is a partly improvisatory, partly mischievous deconstruction of works by Handel, Scarlatti and Bach. In his Salomon Rossi Suite (1975) and Renaissance Concerto for flute and orchestra (1985), fragments of 16th-century works are refracted entertainingly through a modernist lens. The British musicologist Wilfred Mellers once described Mr. Foss’s body of work as 'a pocket history of American music during the 20th century.' Mr. Foss was aware that his detractors regarded his style-hopping as the sign of a dabbler, and that the critics complained that he tended to follow stylistic trends rather than to originate them. He rejected those criticisms and took particular pride in the fact that even listeners who followed his music closely never knew what to expect of his latest works. 'I would agree that my curiosity has led me absolutely everywhere,' he told The New York Times in 1979. 'But I make one qualification: I’ve never done anything at the O.K. time. In other words, I’ve never been a bandwagon jumper. I’ve never belonged to any school. I’ve never written a 12-tone piece when it was fashionable to do so.' As a conductor, Mr. Foss held several important posts, or more precisely he took several minor podiums and transformed them into important ones. In the seven years he directed the Buffalo Philharmonic, from 1963 to 1970, he joined forces with composers on the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo to raise the city’s profile as a center of musical experimentation. When he took over the Brooklyn Philharmonia in 1971 it was essentially a community orchestra that played a handful of concerts every season. Within five years, he had revamped the roster, polished its sound considerably, expanded its regular programming and added special series like Meet the Moderns, in which he presented an inclusive overview of contemporary composition. By the time he relinquished the podium, in 1990, he had turned the orchestra, renamed the Brooklyn Philharmonic, into one of New York City’s most vital ensembles. Mr. Foss also directed the Jerusalem Symphony (1972-76) and the Milwaukee Symphony (1980-86). 'I conduct because I love to make love to the past,' he said in a 1975 interview with the New York Arts Journal. 'I think man has this need, and the need to discover the future as well. The more my own composition is busy with exploration and experimentation, the greater is my need to keep my tie with the past which made me a musician in the first place; my tie with Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and Wagner and Verdi and Handel and Schubert.' Mr. Foss was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, the son of a lawyer and a painter. The date was probably Aug. 15, 1922, although in 1997, when he was honored with several concerts of his music on his 75th birthday, he said that he was not entirely sure when he was born. 'The weird thing is that I’ll never know if it’s really my 75th birthday,' he told The Times, 'because I have no birth certificate. I have a passport, but the birth date on it was the result of guesswork.' When he was 7, Mr. Foss began studying piano and music theory with Julius Goldstein Herford. He started composing almost immediately, and sketched out an opera when he was 11. When the Nazis came to power, in 1933, the family fled to Paris, where Mr. Foss enrolled at the Conservatoire and studied piano with Lazare Lévy, flute with Louis Moyse, composition with Noël Gallon and orchestration with Felix Wolfes. After his arrival in the United States, in 1937, he continued his studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. The pianist Isabelle Vengerova, the conductor Fritz Reiner and the composers Rosario Scalero and Randall Thompson were his principal teachers. After his graduation in 1940, he pursued further studies in conducting with Serge Koussevitzky at Tanglewood and in composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale. He became an American citizen in 1942. He received his first important commissions in the early 1940s, including incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s Tempest, which he later arranged as a suite for orchestra. His 1944 cantata The Prairie, based on Carl Sandburg’s poem, showed that he had assimilated the pastoral American style that was Copland’s specialty at the time. Koussevitzky gave the work its premiere with the Boston Symphony, and in 1944 it won the New York Critic’s Circle Award. Koussevitzky then hired the young composer to be the pianist of the Boston Symphony, Mr. Foss remembered, 'so I could have a job and compose.' Mr. Foss’s music in this early period was tonal and eclectic, and he was already showing his ability to move easily between styles. Works like The Song of Songs (1946) were dramatic and emotional; his String Quartet No. 1 (1947) was more chromatic and abstract, and his first mature opera, The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1949), based on Mark Twain’s story, was even folksier than The Prairie. Several prominent conductors -- Reiner, George Szell, Eugene Ormandy and Ernest Ansermet, among them -- performed his works. Mr. Foss performed them, too: he conducted the premiere of his First Symphony in 1946, and was the soloist in his Second Piano Concerto in 1951. He also occasionally appeared as the soloist in a Bach or Mozart concerto on programs that also included his orchestral music. A turning point in Mr. Foss’s career came in 1953, when he succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as the head of the composition department at the University of California at Los Angeles. As a way to try to lead his composition students away from what he called 'the tyranny of the printed note,' he encouraged them to improvise. To set an example, he formed his own Improvisation Chamber Ensemble in 1957. In his own music, improvisatory sections mingled with fully scored passages. A major work from this period was Time Cycle (1960), a four-movement vocal setting of texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, with either chamber or orchestral accompaniment. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere and made the first recording of the work. 'Lenny was interested in my ensemble,' Mr. Foss explained in 1997, “and he was upset that I didn’t give him my 'Improvisational Concerto,’ which Ormandy did with Philadelphia. He complained that Time Cycle didn’t have any improvisations, and I said, ‘O.K., we’ll come and improvise between the songs.’ I was joking, but he took it seriously, so we did it, and we recorded it with the improvised interludes.' Mr. Foss expanded his vocabulary further in the late 1960s. In Concert for Cello, composed for Mstislav Rostropovich in 1966, and in Baroque Variations, he toyed with the tension and interplay between Baroque and modern musical impulses. Currents of humor run through these: in the cello work, the live cellist and a recorded cello line gradually distort a Bach sarabande; in the Bach section of the Baroque Variations, a bottle is smashed with a hammer, and Johann Sebastian Bach is spelled out in Morse code by a xylophone. In Paradigm (1968), Mr. Foss used an electric guitar (or optional sitar) as a nod to the world of psychedelic rock music. He never used rock techniques as such, but he used borrowed amplified timbres again in Geod (1969), which includes electric piano and organ, and in a later work, the elegiac Night Music for John Lennon (1981), which includes a plaintive electric guitar line. Although synthesizers and tape interested him only peripherally, he mimicked electronic timbres in his 1972 wind quintet, The Cave of Winds. And he continued to mine the latest stylistic innovations. His Three Airs for Frank O’Hara’s Angel, composed in 1972, touches on moves that were then exclusive to the early Minimalists. Mr. Foss’s 1978 setting of the Wallace Stevens poem 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird and his quasi-Minimalist Solo for piano (1981) show lingering traces of his interest in the avant-garde. . . . After the early 1980's, Mr. Foss’s music became increasingly listener-friendly. But he did not consider this more mellow style to be an abandonment of his earlier exploratory approach. 'I’m not sure the works I’ve done since my so-called avant-garde period are less adventurous,' he told The Times in 1997. 'The whole point now is that I can be just as crazy tonally as I was before atonally. Crazy in the sense of unexpected'" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 2/1/09].



February 3

Anne Akiko Meyers, in selections from her new album Smile. Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY. "The bulk of Ms. Meyers’s program consisted of works from the disc, an eclectic collection of mostly short, tuneful pieces: Charlie Chaplin’s nostalgic Smile, Astor Piazzolla’s seductive Milonga en Re and Introducción al Ángel, Michio Miyagi’s wistful Haru no Umi (Sea in Spring). She played with an unfailingly sweet tone, molding her phrases like a singer. The pianist Akira Eguchi, Ms. Meyers’s partner here and on the CD, played with his customary clarity and taste. . . . Borrowing a bit of nightclub jargon, Ms. Meyer announced that she would be “closing her set” with Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow. Her gorgeous phrasing in that well-worn chestnut had a refreshing spontaneity. Along with her encore, an unaccompanied arrangement of Gershwin’s Summertime, it made you wish there had been another set to come" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 2/5/09].


February 4

Cellist André Emelianoff. Merkin Concert Hall, New York, NY. "[The concert featured a] number of talented colleagues performing a disparate clutch of works, bound together by Mr. Emelianoff’s imposing intellect and probing curiosity . . . . Emelianoff, according to his program notes, hears similarities between the Serenade of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and the second movement of Debussy’s Cello Sonata, also labeled Serenade. To illustrate, he programmed the Schoenberg movement side by side with the Debussy work . . . . Happily, the music gave no cause for complaint. Mr. Emelianoff approaches old and new works alike with a refreshingly old-fashioned physicality; his intonation can slip during charged moments, but the personality in his playing more than compensates. The Cadenza from George Perle’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, for instance, had a soulful gravity that smoothed the music’s rough whorls. The pianist Noreen Polera was a marvel throughout the evening, managing a wide range of styles with authority and taste. The flutist Patricia Spencer, Mr. Emelianoff’s longtime colleague in the Da Capo Chamber Players, was a playful foil in Elliott Carter’s Enchanted Preludes. Serena Benedetti, a soprano, sang beautifully in the Debussy numbers. Meighan Stoops, another Da Capo member, showed an impressive agility and a supple sound on bass clarinet as Mr. Emelianoff’s partner in Three Little Expressions (Homage to Brahms), a likably gabby new duet by Gunther Schuller that opened the second half of the program" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 2/6/09].

Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Franz Welser-Most, in Georgy Ligeti's Atmospheres and Richard Strauss's An Alpine Symphony. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. The orchestra sounded terrific . . . in its glittering, rhapsodic and beautifully textured performance of Strauss’s 50-minute tone poem. . . . Ligeti’s Atmosphères [is] a landmark 1961 work of just 10 minutes, an experiment in complete musical stasis through a matrix of hushed, shimmering, fidgeting inner voices and out-of-focus harmonies. The ingeniously constructed score is actually a pile-up of individual lines of counterpoint. But the subdued flow and constricted thematic contour of the lines create a mass of organic, cosmic sound, full of riveting colors and hauntingly dissonant clusters. It certainly makes a difference to have this exploration of myriad instrumental effects played by a deluxe orchestra. . . . The Strauss performance was brilliant. Completed in 1915, when Strauss was over 50, the piece recalls an Alpine hiking venture he took as a boy. It is scored for an enormous orchestra, complete with an organ, a wind machine, a thunder sheet and batteries of brass playing offstage. With technical skill and cinematic flourish, Strauss evokes the scenes of the adventure: the stirrings of daylight as the boy wakes up, the climb up the mountain, the sounds of a waterfall, a sudden and battering storm. But Mr. Welser-Möst took the “symphony” part of the piece’s title seriously, emphasizing its structural coherence. Nor did he overdo the musical picture-painting, instead bringing restraint and textural subtlety to his shaping of the music" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 2/5/08].


February 5

Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard in J.S. Bach’s Art of Fugue and Elliott Carter’s piano works. Zankel Hall, New York, NY. "[You might think that the two composers] have little in common beyond braininess and intensity. But the force of Mr. Aimard’s imagination and musicality helps you see it his way, at least most of the time. There are all kinds of reasons this pairing should not work. Bach’s music, however chromatic it gets, dwells in a thoroughly tonal universe, where key relationships are the flesh, bone and spirit of musical syntax. His rhythmic world is thoroughly ordered too, and though his structures are complex, they are built of themes simple enough to hum after a single hearing. Mr. Carter, by contrast, has set tonal harmony aside and couches his musical lines with complete rhythmic freedom, shaping phrases as anything from long lines to short, jagged bursts. Melodies? They’re in there, but if you want to hum them, you need to spend time with the scores and have a good ear for difficult leaps and odd meters. But Mr. Aimard chose his Bach and Carter groupings carefully, finding works by Mr. Carter that, if only briefly, moved to the same heartbeat as the Bach fugues that immediately preceded them. He began with the Contrapunctus I and II from The Art of Fugue, and Mr. Carter’s Two Diversions (1999) proved an apt modern rejoinder, beginning in the same relatively sober tones as the second of the Bach pieces. Bach’s Contrapunctus XII, a mirror fugue (actually two fugues, the second an inversion of the first) was a sensible mate for Mr. Carter’s fitful Night Fantasies (1980), an involved evocation of sleeplessness. Mr. Aimard played the Carter with a fluidity that gave it a phantasmagorical quality. Probably the most striking segue began with another mirror fugue (Contrapunctus XIII) and moved on to the Fugue on Three Subjects, which Bach left unfinished. Usually, the dangling, interrupted phrase with which the work trails off comes as a shock. But Mr. Aimard leaped right into Intermittences (2005), which begins with a burst of chords that, for a second, sounded like a continuation (though a strange, modern one) of Bach’s idea. The work that followed, Caténaires — the zesty perpetual-motion piece that Mr. Carter wrote for Mr. Aimard in 2006 — was the perfect conclusion to the program. Its almost tonal feel and its insistent drive make it more akin to Bach than any of Mr. Carter’s other works. It was, in a peculiar way, the exception that proved Mr. Aimard’s point" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 2/6/09].


February 6

Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur. Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY. "Not many opera buffs would argue that . . . Lecouvreur is a great work. Still, this well-made and effective music drama, which enjoyed an enormously successful 1902 premiere in Milan, is a prime example of the verismo style then flourishing in Italy. Loosely basing the work on the life of Adriana Lecouvreur, a tremendously popular actress of the Comédie-Française in early 18th-century Paris, Cilea deftly balanced elements of unabashed melodrama with touches of subtle humor during backstage scenes with the acting troupe. The music is modest and appealing, with a couple of 'gotcha' arias. Thanks to a line of great Italian sopranos who have found the title role irresistible, Adriana Lecouvreur has clung to a place in the repertory of major houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, which brought it back after 15 years . . . in a performance stylishly conducted by Marco Armilliato. You can understand the appeal of the character. Adriana is a dedicated artist, a worldly woman who falls for a dashing count, Maurizio, who has made political enemies. She vies for his affections with the ruthless Princess de Bouillon, who used to be Maurizio’s lover and will not let him go. . . . The Ukrainian soprano Maria Guleghina sings the title role, opposite Plácido Domingo as Maurizio, the role of his Met debut 40 years ago. Ms. Guleghina brings her trademark vocal and dramatic intensity to her work. Yet the music also calls for a soprano with Italianate legato and creamy lyricism. Ms. Guleghina sings with fervor and honorably tries hard to shape phrases with subtlety and nuance. . . . At that 1968 debut Mr. Domingo sang Maurizio opposite Tebaldi, no less. Now 68, he remains a wonder of vocal longevity. He missed the dress rehearsal because of a cold and took time to clear his throat and warm up during the performance . . . . But soon he was singing with vigor, stylistic insight and ringing top notes. Some of the music was transposed down to suit Mr. Domingo’s current comfort zone. 'That’s cheating,' purists might complain. But the trade-off is a Maurizio sung by a major tenor who still sounds like one. The mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina dominates every scene she is in as the princess, singing with dusky colorings, supple phrasing and unforced power. The baritone Roberto Frontali brings dignity to the role of Michonnet, the good-hearted theater director who adores Adriana. Ms. Guleghina was at her best when it counted most, in the musically rich final act. Believing that Maurizio has sent her a nosegay of wilted violets to indicate, brutally, that their relationship has died, she breathes in the flowers’ scent, then sings a tragic aria, Poveri fiori. In fact the princess has sent the violets, which are spiked with poison. During the ovations audience members tossed flowers to both Mr. Domingo and Ms. Guleghina. No violets, thank goodness" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 2/8/09].

Cleveland Philharmonic in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 and George Benjamin's Duet for Piano and Orchestra. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "New York audiences have heard this piece interpreted often enough by Russian orchestras and conductors (most notably Yuri Temirkanov) to look for a brutal, caustic edge in the playing, often at some cost in refinement. The Cleveland Orchestra — with a refinement bred in the bone, which served beautifully in the long string lines — relied instead on sheer magnificent force to create a sense of indomitability if not brutalization. Mr. Welser-Möst staked a lot on an experiment in this work, stationing brass players high in the balconies and thus enveloping the audience in the performance. This sort of thing is tricky to arrange quickly in an unfamiliar setting, and the effect was not entirely successful. Having sat idle through much of the first movement, the trumpeters and trombonists on one side of the balcony made their first entrance at the height of the invasion turmoil and, finally set loose, raced ahead of Mr. Welser-Möst and his other troops. Though they quickly fell back into line, some slippage between stage and balcony in other movements kept a listener on guard. But a real payoff came in the final peroration, which set off a mighty ovation. The . . . program opened with the New York premiere of Mr. Benjamin’s Duet for Piano and Orchestra, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard as soloist. Mr. Benjamin evidently thought long and hard about what the program note calls “the inherently disparate sound qualities of the piano and orchestral instruments,” matters that composers have historically taken for granted. For various acoustical reasons Mr. Benjamin decided to scrap the violins and emphasize tuned percussion instruments, harp and pizzicatos in the remaining strings. And though the work opens with a cadenza of sorts, Mr. Benjamin largely avoids concertolike opposition between soloist and orchestra. What results is an attractive if unremarkable 15-minute piece in a spare post-Bartokian idiom. The structure is loosely episodic with, for example, ominous trombones giving way to sweet stirrings from the harp. Though much of the piano writing sounds fairly rudimentary, there are blistering passages, which Mr. Aimard handled with his customary ease" [James R. Oestreich, The New York Times, 2/8/09].


February 7

Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus performance of Leos Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass and Claude Debussy's Nocturnes. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "This is a thrilling work of immense originality that is too seldom heard, and will probably be heard even less as the recession cuts into orchestras’ budgets for large, expensive choral presentations. The Glagolitic Mass, completed in 1927, is named for the ancient alphabet originally used to convey its text in Old Church Slavonic. That text is more or less familiar to fanciers of choral music from a cappella settings by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and others for Russian Orthodox services, at which instruments are forbidden. Janacek uses instruments with a vengeance, and brilliantly. Leos Janacek (born in 1854) was a late bloomer as a composer, and his characteristic style is intimately related to speech in its rhythms and contours. The exchanges of phrases and snippets between chorus and orchestra in the Mass, and their endless transmogrifications, are wondrous to hear. The music itself foreshadows Messiaen in some of its harmonies and Minimalism and even current sampling techniques in its repetitions. Above all this is a work of savage conviction, and Mr. Welser-Möst drew an impassioned performance from orchestra, chorus and soloists. The most prominent of the vocal soloists was the soprano Measha Brueggergosman, who projected over the orchestral clamor better than one might have expected . . . . Debussy’s Nocturnes . . . seemed more concerned with sonic clarity and impact than with atmosphere and mystery: a dubious choice in a work that begins with Clouds and ends with Sirens (the female variety)" [James R. Oestreich, The New York Times, 2/8/09].


February 8

Concert performance of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. St. Mark's in the Bowery, New York, NY. A long line of people eager to get into . . . [the] agitprop musical . . . and grateful for the warm weather, waited patiently . . . . Maybe the current economic crisis makes it an opportune time to hear this leftist 1937 theater piece — a gritty if heavy-handed Brechtian allegory of capitalist greed and oppression of laborers — with music, lyrics and book by Blitzstein. But then, The Cradle Will Rock is a landmark music-theater work that audiences have heard about but seldom get to see, which also accounts for the packed house at this one-time, minimally staged concert performance from Downtown Music Productions in conjunction with the East Village Concert Series. The original 1938 Broadway production was directed by Orson Welles and produced by John Houseman. Set in 'Steeltown, USA,' The Cradle Will Rock follows the campaign by Larry Foreman to unionize workers at a factory owned by the corrupt, rapacious businessman Mr. Mister [!]. Assorted characters are ensnared in the struggle: Mr. Mister’s haughty wife and spoiled children, a family-store druggist barely hanging on, sellout artists in pursuit of patrons, a Liberty Committee of anti-union agitators, and the Moll, a good-hearted prostitute. Blitzstein’s score brashly mingles jazz, popular song, church chorales, marches, arias and recitative. A gifted musical parodist, Blitzstein evokes these diverse styles while still displaying a keen ear for the modernist musical languages of his day. In many ways this bare-bones performance, with a cast of 19 singing on book and accompanied only by a piano, was appropriate to the piece. More than the work’s political agenda, the hectoring tone of The Cradle Will Rock is its most dated element. . . . The best performances were subtler, like Laura Newman’s tender, streetwise Moll and Steve Sieck’s beleaguered Harry Druggist. Jeannine Otis, as a bereft factory worker whose pro-union brother has died on the job in a suspicious accident, stopped the show with the wrenching song Joe Worker. Blitzstein’s vision and the ingenuity of his music still came through in this performance. There was the madhouse scene at the night court, when the citizens of the Liberty Committee, mistakenly arrested by a cop sent to shut down a union rally, break into a complex, multi-voiced chorus. In Freedom of the Press, for Mr. Mister and Editor Daily (Michael Schilke), the music is cleverly Neo-Classical and spiked with dissonance in the manner of Prokofiev. The time may be ripe for a full production of The Cradle Will Rock, with Blitzstein’s original orchestrations. Leaving the theater I overheard several people muttering variations on 'Nothing changes'" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 2/9/09].


February 10

Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Levine, in Gunther Schuller's Where the Word Ends. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "The 83-year-old composer . . . has long been affiliated with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which has introduced many of his works. “Where the Word Ends,” [is] a 125th-anniversary commission from the orchestra . . . .
The work is scored for a vast orchestra, and musicians were crammed onto the Carnegie stage. Almost two-thirds of Mr. Schuller’s catalog of nearly 200 works are orchestral pieces. A former horn player in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and other ensembles and the son of a New York Philharmonic violinist, Mr. Schuller (who once said he “was born in an orchestra”) has been particularly influenced by Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Where the Word Ends, a 25-minute work divided in four sections played without pause, opens with a gentle shimmering trill in the strings before rapid figurations are played over bold statements from the lower strings and brass. The colorful, theatrical score builds in intensity to a riotous conclusion before an introspective Adagio with lush string melodies. The lower strings provided a steady ostinato pattern in the Scherzo, over which a flurry of dialogue ensued among brass and percussion and other instruments. The hints of jazz reflect Mr. Schuller’s significant experience as a jazz performer and composer" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 2/10/09].

Recordings

Georgy Ligeti. Lux Aeterna, Drei Phantasien Nach Friedrich Holderlin, Sonata for Solo Viola. Robert Heppener. Im Gestein. Susanne van Els, violist; musikFabrik; Cappella Amsterdam, conducted by Daniel Reuss. Harmonia Mundi France. "Ligeti’s mesmerizing Lux Aeterna, from 1966, is a bona fide avant-garde hit, partly because of its exposure in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The work wears its years lightly; Ligeti’s slowly shifting harmonic clouds and throbbing tone clusters conjure cosmic mystery like little that came before or after. On this richly rewarding CD by the Dutch chamber choir Cappella Amsterdam, Daniel Reuss leads a broadly paced, pristinely voiced rendition, enhanced by an atmospheric yet finely detailed recording. A sense of time-loosed drift also saturates Ligeti’s Drei Phantasien, a cappella settings of selected lines from three Friedrich Hölderlin poems composed in 1982. But here the music often turns animated, even eruptive, in response to especially potent emotional triggers in the texts. The chaotic passages recall some of Ligeti’s more experimental works of the ’60s, but the calmer sequences seem to reach back further still, to medieval polyphony and folkloric sources. In the Sonata for Solo Viola (1991-94), three of the six movements surround and separate the choral works here; demarcations between the ancient and the postmodern crumble as Ligeti taps fiercely demanding techniques to evoke folksy rusticity. Susanne van Els makes it sound effortless and natural. The Dutch composer Robert Heppener, born in 1925, two years after Ligeti, flourished briefly in the 1950s before he was overshadowed by more experimental composers. Im Gestein, Mr. Heppener’s 1992 setting of six Paul Celan poems, applies floating harmonies and luminous textures not unlike Ligeti’s to more conventional modes of expression, accompanied with brilliant daubs of instrumental color (performed here by the ensemble musikFabrik). Libera me, Domine, a Gregorian plainchant, concludes this unusually thoughtful, compelling collection" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 1/18/09].

The Light That Is Felt: Songs of Charles Ives. Susan Narucki, soprano; Donald Berman, pianist. New World Records. "MOST artists crave the limelight, but Charles Ives often worked in isolation, his day job in insurance providing the financial means to indulge his passion. He wrote nearly 200 songs and published 114 of them privately in 1922, describing their publication as 'a kind of house cleaning.' The painterly details of Ives’s songs are vividly conveyed by the bright-voiced Susan Narucki and the pianist Donald Berman on a new disc whose 27 diverse selections (most from H. Wiley Hitchcock’s 2004 critical edition) highlight Ives’s multiple influences. Those included European Romanticism and religious and secular American tunes, which he meshed with his own inventive, radical harmonies. Like Bartok, Ives used both simple folk melodies and dissonance, sometimes blending them. Gentle, melodic songs are interspersed here with more tumultuous works, demonstrating the wide spectrum of Ives’s emotional and musical palette. The spare and evocative Where the Eagle Cannot See is followed by the theatrical, astringent intensity of General William Booth Enters Into Heaven. The heavy weariness of Like a Sick Eagle is aptly conveyed by Ms. Narucki and Mr. Berman, before they plunge into the violent waters of Swimmers, whose wildly turbulent piano part underpins a soaring vocal line. The disc opens with the wistful, tonal Songs My Mother Taught Me and concludes with the Romantic Romanzo (di Central Park). Also included are the pictorial Tom Sails Away, with its lively evocations of town and family life, and The Housatonic at Stockbridge. Romantic, Brahmsian songs like Du Bist wie Eine Blume (You Are Like a Flower), Feldeinsamkeit (In Summer Fields) and Minnelied (Love Song) reflect Ives’s interest in German lieder. His less familiar, moody settings of translations of poems by the medieval Italian poet Folgore da San Gimignano are more harmonically imaginative" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 1/18/09].

Tarik O'Regan. Scattered Rhymes. Orlando Consort; Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by Paul Hillier. Harmonia Mundi France. "The technique that pop musicians call sampling — taking bits of one recording and using them as elements in another — is very old news in classical music. In the 16th century, composers created parody Masses built around quotations from popular (and usually secular) songs instead of using plainchant, as earlier composers had done. The British composer Tarik O’Regan stands . . . in Scattered Rhymes . . . takes thematic fragments from a famous Mass as the basis of an elaborate setting of Petrarch sonnets and an anonymous 14th-century love song. Mr. O’Regan borrows his themes from the oldest existing polyphonic Mass by a single composer: Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame, composed in the 1360s. Mr. O’Regan’s often dense rhythms and counterpoint make it hard to spot the source material within the work’s invitingly variegated textures. But he means you to hear it; he suggests performing Scattered Rhymes alongside the Machaut, as the Orlando Consort and (in the O’Regan only) the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir do here. The Orlando singers make the juxtaposition less odd by singing the Machaut with a velvety modern tone, a very different sound from what you can hear on the Ensemble Organum’s conjectural 1995 recording on Harmonia Mundi, which presents the work in more rough-hewn timbres. As a performance of the Mass, it sounds pleasant but newfangled; as a companion piece for the O’Regan, it works beautifully. Two similar pairings are also included. Douce Dame Jolie is first performed in Machaut’s version, as a single unaccompanied line, and then in Mr. O’Regan’s playful reconfiguration, with the melody sped up, slowed down, harmonized and otherwise toyed with. And a beautiful account of Dufay’s Ave Regina Caelorum precedes Gavin Bryars’s serene, textually quirky Super Flumina" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 1/18/09].

Richard Rodgers. Allegro (libretto by Oscar Hammerstein). Sony Classics. "The first complete recording of Allegro, the unsuccessful 1947 Rodgers and Hammerstein show, fills a gap in the library of Broadway cast recordings. . . . The music looks both backward and forward. If some numbers have the singsong effervescence of early Jerome Kern, the dissonant title song about the frantic pace of city life is avant-garde for its time; there is a singing Greek chorus" [Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 2/1/02].

Chronicle of October 2005

October 1

Premiere of John Adams's Doctor Atomic (libretto by Peter Sellars). War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, CA. 'As part of her initiative called The Faust Project, [Pamela] Rosenberg had approached [John] Adams with the idea of writing an opera on a 20th-century American Faust: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who presided over the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bombs. Though initially hesitant, Mr. Adams, who thinks big, could not resist. Nor could his longtime collaborator, the director Peter Sellars. In a risky stroke Mr. Sellars assembled a libretto from interviews with the project participants, history books, conversation transcripts, declassified documents and poetry. His cut-and-paste job has produced a libretto of heightened emotional resonance and surprising dramatic continuity. With Mr. Adams's haunting score, what results is a complex, searching and painfully honest if somewhat problematic opera. Doctor Atomic is the ultimate waiting game. It begins in June 1945 as the physicists, scientists and military personnel who are working at Los Alamos, N.M., are poised to test the first atomic bomb. The rest of the two-and-a-half-hour opera takes place on the night before and the morning of July 16, the day the first bomb was tested at the site that Oppenheimer, inspired by a John Donne poem, called Trinity. In a sense, not much happens: only that Oppenheimer and the other participants grapple with their consciences as the countdown to detonation, quite literally, commences. The Oppenheimer of Doctor Atomic is a true Faustian figure, a questing, cultured, brilliant and arrogant man, vividly portrayed by the charismatic Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who sings with burnished tone and makes every word count. As Mr. Sellars explained in a preperformance talk, Oppenheimer understood that by pushing science to new limits he would unleash barely imaginable forces in the world and even more fearsome forces within mankind. But he willed himself to turn off the part of his brain that processes ethical qualms about his work. The 'best people' in Washington will make these decisions for us scientists, he argues. In his talk, Mr. Sellars bemoaned today's culture, in which the government and the news media simplify everything with 'ridiculous crudeness.' Welcome to opera, he said, where we do not shy from ambiguity and complexity. Still, it takes great music to achieve this. Doctor Atomic, Mr. Adams's third full-fledged opera, may be his most inventive and emotional score to date, and the conductor Donald Runnicles drew a keen, compelling and assured performance from the orchestra. In his days as a fledgling composer, Mr. Adams rejected the academic atonality he was steeped in as a student and embraced minimalism, jazz, electronics, and experimental styles. But once over his rebellion, he increasingly allowed himself to incorporate elements of the more complex techniques he had been exposed to. In Doctor Atomic, Mr. Adams, 58, breaks new ground in that sphere. Whole spans of the orchestral and choral music tremble with textural density. Stacked-up clusters and polytonal harmonies have stunning bite and pungency. Skittish instrumental lines come close to sounding like riffs from a serialist score. The vocal writing is wondrously varied, sometimes jittery and naturalistic, sometimes melismatic and elegiac. You hear evocations of sci-fi film scores and bursts of Varèsian frenzy. When he needs to propel the music forward, Mr. Adams, true to form, creates a din of pummeling rhythms, fractured meters and jolting repeated figures: call it atomic minimalism. Yet tension runs even through the long, ruminative, wistful episodes, like the poignant bedtime scene between Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty. A sensitive and long-suffering alcoholic, Kitty was portrayed with touching vulnerability by the mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson, though her diction was frustratingly mushy. Like Wagner's Erda, Kitty sees all too well the implications of the work that consumes her dazzling but remote husband. It seems right that the couple sometimes converse in a private language of quotations from sensual Baudelaire poems, for they cannot face each other with unblinking honesty. There are Wagnerian touches to the music beyond its orchestral lushness and bigness, in, for example, Mr. Adams's way of using the orchestra to comment on the story and the characters. One telling instance comes in a short scene with Gen. Leslie Groves, the blustery Army commander on the project. For a moment Groves forgets the mission and is drawn by Oppenheimer into a conversation about his weight problem. Dynamically portrayed by the husky bass Eric Owens, Groves shows Oppenheimer his calorie counter and talks about his diet regimen, which is not going well. Groves's chatter is enshrouded in luminous harmonies and pleading melodic lines, as if the orchestra sees the one person with the power to postpone the test in a fleeting moment of human frailty and tries to talk sense to him. Act I closes with a transfixing scene for Oppenheimer, when he recites that Donne sonnet, Batter my heart, three-person'd God, an abject surrender to God. Mr. Adams's setting is like some contemporary evocation of an intricately contrapuntal Renaissance song with a tortured melodic line and unstable modal harmonies. Other standouts in the cast include the baritone Richard Paul Fink, who uses his stentorian singing to mask the manipulative ways of the physicist Edward Teller, who would become Oppenheimer's nemesis during the McCarthy years. The elegant baritone James Maddalena (who created the title role in Mr. Adams's "Nixon in China") portrays the meteorologist Jack Hubbard, who must suffer the tirades of General Groves. The mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton made an impact in two mysterious scenes as the Oppenheimers' maid, who sings totemic songs to the couple's children. The tenor Thomas Glenn brought his sweet voice and boyish innocence to the role of Robert Wilson, a young idealistic physicist plagued with guilt about the test. Alas, the musical performance was troubled by balance problems, which were not helped by the use of amplification. Electronic elements have long been part of the Adams style. Since the large orchestra was electronically enhanced, the solo singers had to wear wireless microphones. Introducing amplification into opera is Mr. Adams's prerogative. But if you are going to abandon 400 years of tradition and amplify singers to get the balances right, then get the balances right. All other aspects of Mr. Sellars's production are remarkable. Adrianne Lobel's striking sets use movable columns and sliding lab tables filled with plutonium cores and other gadgets, set against a silhouette of New Mexico mountains. The costume designer Dunya Ramicova dresses the chorus as 1940's scientists, technicians and workers, who remind us that the Manhattan Project employed thousands of workers. The choreographer Lucinda Childs uses dancers to "physicalize the anxiety of waiting," in Mr. Sellars's words, and lend a quality of abstraction to the affecting and graceful staging. The waiting, of course, culminates in the detonation. Before he composed a note Mr. Adams knew that any attempt to depict an atomic explosion in music would be clichéd on arrival. His solution is ingenious. As the moment approaches and the battering-ram orchestra seems to be sounding inside your head, suddenly all goes quiet and we experience the detonation as if we were 200 miles away in Los Alamos. The music is delicate, strange, melodically dispersed, harmonically tentative. You sense the atmosphere crackling, the world changing. The calm voice of a Japanese woman is heard. We know what comes next. But that is for a sequel. Maybe Ms. Rosenberg is already on the case" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/3/05].


October 11

Juilliard Orchestra, led by Dennis Russell Davies, in The Juilliard School presents its 100th Anniversary Concert. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "And that was it for hoopla. There were no speeches, ceremonies, awards, potted-history films -- just a concert, with a newly commissioned work as its centerpiece, and scores by Webern and Schubert at either end. Some listeners may have wanted a greater sense of occasion, but simply showing what the school's young musicians can do made tremendous sense. The piece commissioned for the concert was the Manhattan Trilogy by Einojuhani Rautavaara, the patriarch of contemporary Finnish composers. Mr. Rautavaara is much loved internationally these days, and for good reason. But it would be unnatural not to wonder why this quintessentially American conservatory didn't program a new American work as the main draw of its anniversary concert -- or even as one of the outlying scores. Perhaps the presence on the podium of Mr. Davies, a particularly eloquent interpreter of American music, made the absence of any all the more puzzling. Maybe it's a silly question. There are new American scores elsewhere in the season, and at this point, American composers are doing well enough in the world not to need a boost at every local celebration. There is, in any case, a Juilliard connection here: Mr. Rautavaara was a student there in the 1950's, and his three-movement, 20-minute work is a reminiscence of the hopes and anxieties of his student years. It is a wistful, conservative work. The outer movements, Daydreams and Dawn, are cast in consonant but freely modulating chord progressions, with achingly beautiful solo lines darting through the thick textures. Even the central Nightmares movement, though darker and more freely dissonant, often has a lush quality. If Mr. Rautavaara is remembering tensions and uncertainties here, as the program notes suggest, he is doing it from a comfortable distance. Mr. Davies let his musicians revel in Mr. Rautavaara's rich textures, and they played it as if they had lived with it for years. It sounded, in any case, like the most thoroughly rehearsed of the three scores on the program, although the performances of Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra (Op. 6) and the Schubert Ninth Symphony offered little reason for complaint. There were, for example, fleetingly tentative moments in the brass during the outer movements of the Webern, but the salient feature of the performance was the fluidity and seamlessness with which these young players moved through the constantly changing textures" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/13/05].



October 20

Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Can Pierre Boulez ever have imagined that four short piano pieces from his steely, rigorously dodecaphonic and anti-establishment "Notations" would be played as an encore during a recital at Carnegie Hall? And who would have thought that this radical early Boulez work would sound so right coming after an exhilarating performance of Schumann's crowd-pleasing Carnaval? But this is what Pierre-Laurent Aimard pulled off in his stunning . . . recital . . . . As those tuned in to contemporary-music circles know, in 1977 Mr. Aimard, then just 19, became a founding member of Mr. Boulez's avant-garde Ensemble InterContemporain in Paris, remaining with the group for 18 years. But since then, Mr. Aimard has been branching into standard repertory, winning wide acclaim for his extraordinary pianism without losing his identity as a musician immersed in his own time. Mr. Aimard enjoys playing old and new works together in provocative contexts. He opened this fascinating program with four of Debussy's Préludes, Book I. Seated at the piano, he waited for well over a minute, until stragglers in the audience arrived and the house was quiet, so he could start the mysterious and searching Delphic Dancers, which begins in a whisper. In this haunting performance, with harmonically unhinged chords voiced so tellingly and textures boldly blurred, Debussy's alluring prelude sounded like the radical work it was and, in a sense, still is. The Wind on the Plain followed, sounding here like an onrushing intimation of a Ligeti étude. Mr. Aimard then began the hushed Sounds and Perfumes Swirl in the Evening Air, but stopped just moments into it because something else was swirling in air at Carnegie Hall: coughing. He begged the audience's pardon and reminded everyone that coughing is "the enemy of music." With the house now utterly quiet, he continued, then ended the set with a jocular yet curiously unsettling account of Puck's Dance. Having presented Debussy as a modernist, he played Mr. Boulez's staggeringly difficult Piano Sonata No. 1, written in 1946 when the composer was in his early 20's and instigating an assault on the musical status quo in Paris. Even those who find Mr. Boulez's serial works baffling had to have responded to the subtlety, color, rhythmic bite and rhapsodic sweep of Mr. Aimard's arresting performance. He then gave a coolly beautiful and commanding account of Ravel's formidable Gaspard de la Nuit, played without a hint of sentimentality, never milking this inventive score for virtuosic flash. The Schumann was not what you might have expected. Mr. Aimard played with plenty of Romantic impetuosity and even a judicious use of rubato. Yet this was also a bracing and vigorous take on Schumann's suite of dances, evocations and portraits. In introducing the Boulez encore, Mr. Aimard explained that, like the Schumann work, Notations is also a suite of short character pieces, all derived from a few basic motifs. The audience must have gotten the connection, for on this night, Boulez won as many bravos as Schumann, thanks to Mr. Aimard's ingenious artistry" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/22/05].



October 29

Christopher Taylor plays Gyorgy Ligeti's Etudes. Miller Theatre, New York, NY. "Do not make assumptions about the American pianist Christopher Taylor from his bookish, gangly and endearingly nerdy appearance. Beneath that professorial persona is a demonically intense artist with a stunning technique and searching intellect. In recent seasons Mr. Taylor, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has been finding the Miller Theater at Columbia University an ideal place to try out programs that most mainstream concert presenters would never go for. In the process he has attracted a following, which explains why a capacity crowd was drawn to . . . hear his recital devoted to the complete études for piano by Gyorgy Ligeti. Surely, most of this noticeably young audience could not have been familiar with these cutting-edge works by this Hungarian master composer. Just knowing that Mr. Taylor was up to something again was apparently enough to fill the hall. At the Miller in 2001 Mr. Taylor gave an exhilarating performance of Messiaen's complete Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus, some of the most visionary and challenging music ever written for the piano. Last year he returned for a program of contemporary études, 27 demanding works by George Perle, William Bolcom, Derek Bermel and Mr. Ligeti (Book 1, the first six, of the études, composed in 1985, though the composer, who is 82, has spoken of writing more). While Mr. Ligeti has written about being frustrated with his own limited piano technique, Mr. Taylor, in his program note, writes that producing marvels like these études requires "complete mastery of the instrument's potential as well as flawless intuition concerning the hand's abilities." Mr. Ligeti points to unusual sources of inspiration for these works, including the polyrhythmic music of sub-Saharan Africa, the jazz composers Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans, the mechanistic piano pieces of Conlon Nancarrow, and even the fractal geometry of Mandelbrot and Peitgen, which particularly interests Mr. Taylor, who graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from Harvard in 1992. There are surprisingly serene episodes in several of the études, like the wistful opening section of White on White, with its churchly harmonies, and the brittle, gently clanking passages in Fém, which suggests music made by breezes blowing through a pagoda. Some études have less overt challenges, like Vertige, in which the pianist must execute twisting strands of bizarre, hard-to-finger chromatic runs. But most of the études are vehemently intense and ferociously difficult, like the crazed À bout de souffle, with its pummeling chords and arm-blurring repetitions, or The Devil's Staircase, which makes Liszt's Mephisto Waltz seem like a jolly little Hungarian dance. Mr. Taylor played them all with incisive rhythm, lucid textures and, where the music allowed, alluring colors. Still, the sheer effort involved in playing these works was something to behold" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 10/31/06].