Electric Sarod, Guitars, Electronics / Michael McDonagh

Life is basically ambiguous.  We don't know what we're doing even when we're doing it, but art, which is our organized experience has to be clear.  It has to have a beginning, middle, and end, even in these post-modern times.  These things came to mind when I caught an evening of improvised music by Bay Area musicians Lisa Sangita Moskow and Guillermo Galindo, on January 11, at the intimate and welcoming Far Leaves teahouse which has been at its present Berkeley location for almost three years.

Sangita and Galindo's work has been largely in the "world music" and "new music" scenes, respectively and you'd this would make for a forced or even incompatible pairing, but their musical interaction here sounded both natural and logical. And it reminded me of what my late friend Earle Brown told me that Coltrane. He always played the absolutely necessary note in his improvisations, and so improvisation, as its commonly understood, is not just going postal, but playing the only the essential within a firm musical structure.

Everything sounded inevitable here, and Sangita and Galindo's "sources" which ranged from Indian ragas to what sounded like Native American chants and rhythms, to blues jazz, and a very smart version of New Age "space music " were unselfconsciously merged. Plus the scale types and tunings -- Galindo used two guitars -- one being a Moog -- tuned differently, with electronics both recorded "sampled " and processed in "real time "-- and all his sounds were varied and more importantly -- surprising. Thin textures say a drone on Sangita's electric sarod alternated with sometimes thick ones on Galindo's guitars cum electronics.

What could have been a gimmicky concert ended up being one with real music, and Sangita and Galindo's improvs never outstayed their welcome which is always the sign of scrupulous artists who know they're playing for themselves -- from their own inner needs, if you will -- but there are always others in the room. The audience in the jam-packed little tea house was deeply attentive throughout which means of course that these two remarkable artists struck communicative gold. A lovely and deeply satisfying concert, with beautifully shaped music with a beginning, middle, and end.

Short and Shorter / Michael McDonagh

Theme programs are always fun, especially if the pieces glance off each other, or conjoin in interesting ways, and irrepressible and imaginative composer-conductor Mark Alburger's latest installment in his Opus series -- 12, on December 28, at Berkeley Arts Festival -- engaged both ear and mind.  Famous -- even seminal -- names abutted the scarcely known, and the collision of the big time and the small fry was instructive.  What makes a great composer and what makes a minor one? Well the evidence was here if you're into judging, and who isn't these days?

Central and Eastern European composers have usually been the bread and butter of American concert programs and this one featured lots of them, though there was a sprinkling of Americans and Brits.

The main fascination of this one seemed to be atypical rarities by heavy hitters like Arnold Schoenberg whose 1907 setting of Heinrich Ammann's poem Jane Grey was typically overwrought and I was minded of the composer's retort to David O. Selznick when he showed him a cut of The Good Earth replete with earthquakes and revolution. "With all that going on what do you need me for?" Well, this was chromatic melodrama big tim,e which soprano Heather Klein grounded with her clear and supple tone.  Igor Stravinsky's 1919 Three Pieces for Clarinet, which specifies one in A, and one in Bb, was a more substantial effort -- transparent, fluid, often plaintive, and derived no doubt from Russian folk sources objectified.  Michael Kimbell gave a rich and rhythmically secure account of it and the audience responded warmly to this supposedly "cold " composer.  Bela Bartok's II. Scherzo from his 1912 Four Pieces for Orchestra sounded like a dry run for The Miraculous Mandarin with its chopped up ostinatiand extreme contrasts in tone, which the Opus band projected with accuracy and verve. 

Humor's in short supply in the works of most high modernist composers, who always seem to replay the tired old cliche of the Western neurotic artist, so Sergei Prokofiev's IX. Humoresque Scherzo, from his originally-for-piano Ten Pieces (1913 ), was a breath of fresh air -- cheerful and exceedingly well made, though we went back to the suffering artist model with Shostakovich, and a video projection of Lilya Zilberstien's account of two movements from his 1926 Piano Sonata, written when he was just 20, struck me as dry and overly-complex, afflicted with the "notice me, I'm important" persona which was to drive his whole career.  And speaking of careers, I found the IIa. Nocturne from Kurt Weill's 1925 Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra odd, oddly scored, and completely underwhelming, with none of the snap and polish of his later justly-treasured works for the musical theatre. Paul Hindemith's introduction to his first opera Murder, Hope of Women (1918) -- Alburger announced from the stage that its librettist was Oskar Kokoschka -- was, however ,a real find, with vibrant thick sonorities and a true sens du theatre.  I've always found it strange that Hindemith has often been considered an "academic" composer, but, hey, fashion -- and I don't mean what people are wearing -- and gossip have always ruled the day.

The pieces by Britten -- in his 100th anniversary year -- were predictably tepid British entries (it must be the food) -- and Oliver Knussen's "I just wanna be German" Trumpets (1973), which was shown as a video with Linda Hirst soprano and the Oliver Knussen Ensemble, was a dull-as-dishwater Brit version of Sprechstimme .

Why must everyone fall to their knees before the Germans ?  I've never bought Richard Wagner's Holy German art -- who are you kidding ? -- though I had a wonderful time in Berlin this fall making a film version of my Sight Unseen -- a theatre piece for one performer -- with my lovely German actor friend Hermann Eppert.

And lest I forget, Alburger's 1978 Procession 1 -- Vivace-- from his Four Processions -- has the infectious charm and vitality which runs through his subsequent work.

The Opus Project Orchestra, though obviously underrehearsed and in a deeply unwelcoming venue -- they were squeezed to one side of an incredibly unresonant wall -- played with enthusiasm and commitment throughout.

Writers

CRISTINA SCUDERI is a post doctoral researcher (Ph.D. in Theory, Techniques and Restoration of Music, Cinema and Audiovisual - University of Udine), journalist (pubblicista), who graduated with full marks in History of Music (University of Padua) and graduated in Organ, Harpsichord and Electronic Music (Conservatories of Padua and Venice). She is "cultore della materia" for the chair of History of Modern and Contemporary Music at the University of Padua and Technical Consultant of the Civil Court of Udine. Since 2005 she is responsible for the organization of Contemporanea New Music Festival and for the International Composition Competition Città di Udine (Taukay Music Publishing House).

MICHAEL MCDONAGH is a San Francisco-based poet and writer on the arts who has done two poem/picture books with artist Gary Bukovnik, Before I Forget (1991) and Once (1997), the former being in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Berkeley Art Museum, and the New York Public Library.  He has also published poems in journals including Mirage, and written two theatre pieces -- Touch and Go, for three performers, which was staged at Venue 9 in 1998; and Sight Unseen, for solo performer.  His critical pieces have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Review of Books, 3 Penny Review, California Printmaker, Antiques and Fine Art, The Advocate, High Performance, and In Tune.  He writes for The Bay Area Reporter and heads the Bay Area chapter of The Duke Ellington Society.  He co-hosted nine radio shows on KUSF with Tony Gualtieri with whom he now shares a review website -- www.msu.edu/user/gualtie3 -- which has also been translated into Russian and appears in Intellectual Forum.  He is currently working on a collaboration with pianist-composer Ric Louchard.

MARK ALBURGER is Editor-Publisher of 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, an award-winning ASCAP composer of concert music published by New Music; Music Director of The Opus Project, San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra; and San Francisco Cabaret Opera; Instructor in Music History and Theory at Diablo Valley College, author and subject of articles in The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd ed.), and Grove Online; music critic, musicologist, oboist, pianist, recording artist, and vocalist.  He is currently at work on Abducted by Aliens, Op. 222.

Fellow Travelers / Michael McDonagh

It's often said that the West coast leans towards Asia and the East coast towards Europe. Just think of Lou Harrison, John Cage, and Henry Cowell's Asian-inflected work in California in the 1940's, and the vastly different musical landscape at the same time in the East -- meaning, of course, New York, which was dominated by an influx of European emigre composers from Kurt Weill to Bela Bartok, to name just two. And now, with the rootlessness of post-modern life, and the porous effects of globalization, the East seems to have become the West, and vice versa, meaning both sides are faced with the same socio-economic and artistic crises. The six works by six composers at San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra's Fellow Travelers concert (November 9, Old First Church) seemed to point up these differences and commonalities in widely different ways.

David Sprung's New York background -- he studied there with Italian masters Vittorio Rieti and Dallapiccola -- and his work as professor emeritus at California State University, East Bay, merges these apparent contradictions into a unified whole in his Haiku, for Tenor, Wind Quintet, and Piano  (2013).  It was charming (a virtue in short supply these days), transparently scored, and deeply evocative, due in large part to Michael Desnoyer's mellifluous voice.  Italian-born San Francisco resident Davide Verrota's Invitation (2013), for solo piano, seemed to evoke one of the West's first encounters with the East, namely the heavily modal, hence exotic sound of Debussy's The Sunken Cathedral (1910), which Verotta didn't quote directly, but surely knows, and his sonorous block chords, which Verotta produced with commanding grace, conjured depths and distances not dissimilar to Debussy's.

Composer-oboist Philip Freihofner's Filled with Moonlight (2012) also had an Eastern (or in this case specifically a Japanese) feel, and, though Freihofner wrote about his use of tone-clusters here, the piece struck these ears as a kind of slowly unfolding arabesque, punctuated and magnified by gentle dissonances.

The germ for Lisa Scola Prosek's upcoming opera, The Lariat, was a set of expanding melodic gestures set within a subtly scored frame.  Her writing is always magical and cooly seductive and the solo part, for Native American soprano Desiree Harp, was beautifully shaped and sensitively projected.  Scola Prosek's musical language here was not Asian per se, but it did sound modal with the between-this-and-that feel which this kind of writing always suggests.  Her son Eduard Prosek's The Curse (2013) -- from his EP Willow Tree, with the composer on solo guitar, backed by the SFCCO, was vigorous and surprising, and happily free of the earnest posturings of his fellow 20- somethings' "deep" takes on love and loss.

Mark Alburger always does something entertaining and sometimes profound, and his Double Concerto ("Fellow Travellers") (2012), which was played here by pianists Eytan and Gabriel Schillinger-Hyman, is mapped, like many of his pieces, on another work, and in this case it's largely but not exclusively based on Francis Poulenc's 1932 two-piano concerto which uses Javanese gamelan-like and Japanese gagaku-like writing in salient places which is, of course, where the East goes West.

The SFCCO's ensemble throughout the evening was pitch perfect and super-tight with each instrumental choir blending into the whole, or standing out when intended.  "Colleagues" has always sounded and still does sound pretentious but these musicians here weren't just competing for God- knows-what, but actually friends. And, indeed, Fellow Travelers.

Lost and Found / Michael McDonagh

Philip Glass.  North Star (1977).
Philip Glass: Farfisa, Yamaha, and Hammond organs, Fender Rhodes piano, Arp synthesizer
Dickie Landry: soprano, tenor saxophones; flute
Joan LaBarbara, Gene Rickard: voices

Re-issued as part of Analog (2006)
www.orangemountainmusic.com 0029

 
North Star: Mark di Suvero (1977)
Francois de Menil, director
Barbara Rose, writer
Philip Glass, composer

North Star: Mark di Suvero (1977, digital re-issue, 2011)
www.microcinema.com

Mark di Suvero at Crissy Field, May 22, 2013 - May 26, 2014, San Francisco, CA. www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/568

Documentaries about artists and their work are often dry affairs with frequently faceless music.  The subject tends to get lost in artspeak or woozy generalities and the music just marks time.  But Francois de Menil's North Star: Mark di Suvero (1977, re-issued by Microcinema, 2011) is an incisive look at a vital American sculptor, scored by the equally vital American composer Philip Glass.  It's a far cry from one about an academic public sculptor or the imperative towards the future that the New Vienna School and its disciples were driven by, because both artists work squarely in the present tense.  Who looks to tomorrow when today's enough, or as di Suvero puts it here: "The artist has to reject whatever the present society is doing to create the new image, that new form, to discover a new approach to the universe."

Pairing di Suvero with Glass is apt because sculpture, like music -- and music, like sculpture -- exists in space, and is perceived as space-in-time.  We may remember what we saw or heard a certain way, and then see and hear it differently another time.  This is clearly true of Glass's score, which I've known since its original incarnation on a Virgin LP, and which has struck me as obsessively redundant or gloriously fresh, depending on how I listened, in seemingly opposed moments.  The directness and simplicity of the materials is startling -- even mundane -- but Glass's imagination makes it work.  Keyboard vamps punctuate at surprising times.  Nonsense syllables circle each other. The intevallic material sometimes suggests School-of-Paris Perotin, like those long homophonic lines in early Glass pieces such as Music in Contrary Motion (1969), though it's tersely abbreviated here. The brevity of the music and its sometimes industrial sound tease and jolt the ear, and Glass' gift for weight, timing, and color is apparent in this early film score, which counts as his second full one, after Gordon Quinn's documentary Inquiring Nuns (c. 1977).

Film composers are used to having their scores thrown out (Hollywood has trashed about a half dozen of Glass's in the last few years, and Kubrick famously threw out Alex North's for 2001), or having the music they wrote for specific cues end up in entirely different places.  Glass avers that he wrote pieces for di Suvero's sculptures seen in the film; but none of these are heard complete, and many become partial bits for completely different pieces.  Glass may have had an agreement with de Menil to let the director use whatever he wanted for his cuts, with a view to releasing his score as an LP, which, as he notes, has "a different sequence . . . chosen in order to produce an independent and coherent listening experience. "

The music seems to work both ways, and the widely varied cinematography by de Menil, Alon Metzger, and Christian Blackwood situates and reveals di Suvero's work as well as his persona.  The sculptor comes off charming, passionate, articulate and vulnerable, in less than an hour's running time.  And it isn't often that a film and its music leave us with wanting something more, not from lack, but from abundance, squarely glimpsed.

Writers

MARK ALBURGER is Editor-Publisher of 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, an award-winning ASCAP composer of concert music published by New Music; Music Director of The Opus Project, San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra; and San Francisco Cabaret Opera; Instructor in Music History and Theory at Diablo Valley College, author and subject of articles in The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd ed.), and Grove Online; music critic, musicologist, oboist, pianist, recording artist, and vocalist.  His Double Piano Concerto ("Fellow Travellers"), Op. 204, will be premiered at Old First Concerts in San Francisco on November 9.

PHILLIP GEORGE is an editor for New Music, and serves on the staff of 2IST-CENTURY MUSIC.

MICHAEL MCDONAGH is a San Francisco-based poet and writer on the arts who has done two poem/picture books with artist Gary Bukovnik, Before I Forget (1991) and Once (1997), the former being in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Berkeley Art Museum, and the New York Public Library.  He has also published poems in journals including Mirage, and written two theatre pieces -- Touch and Go, for three performers, which was staged at Venue 9 in 1998; and Sight Unseen, for solo performer.  His critical pieces have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Review of Books, 3 Penny Review, California Printmaker, Antiques and Fine Art, The Advocate, High Performance, and In Tune.  He writes for The Bay Area Reporter and heads the Bay Area chapter of The Duke Ellington Society.  He co-hosted nine radio shows on KUSF with Tony Gualtieri with whom he now shares a classical-music review website -- www.msu.edu/user/gualtie3 -- which has also been translated into Russian and appears in Intellectual Forum.  He is currently working on a collaboration with clarinetist-composer Rachel Condry.

CAROL MARIE REYNOLDS is a Bay-Area music consultant, critic, pianist, and student of languages and literature.

Joan Jeanrenaud and Company / Michael McDonagh

Sometimes a phone interview is the way to go, even if you live in the same town.  And so it was on a rainy Friday afternoon this past December that San Francisco-based composer and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud and I "sat down" for a chat about her latest music theatre collaboration, Your Body Is Not A Shark (January 11-13, San Francisco;  17-20, Santa Cruz).  The celebrated and much-sought-after musician was the Kronos Quartet's cellist from 1978 until 1999, when she "retired" due to having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which she's been successfully battling ever since.  With such a broad musical history behind her, plus a solo career as a composing and performing cellist and music theatre collaborator before her, it's hard to know how to begin.  But how did it feel to play and record the second cello part in Vladimir Martynov's Schubert-Quintet ("Unfinished") after Schubert's Quintet in C, D.956, with Kronos two years ago? "We had so much fun. I really enjoyed playing with them again. It was like I'd never left," she recalls in a voice which still has a tinge of her Memphis, Tennessee roots.  "And I've always loved the cello because it's such an expressive instrument, and composing -- though I'd never thought of being a composer before --  became a way of being really involved in music and playing."

Her current music theatre adventure seems to have as many texts and sub-texts as music itself.  The focus of the project, which involves three other women -- Cid Pearlman, choreographer; Denise Leto, poet; and Maya Barsacq, who conducts seven string members of the chamber orchestra, Cadenza, in Jeanrenaud's score -- is human fragility, in both body and spirit. That should be something everyone can relate to, or as the composer puts it "all of us have issues to deal with and the interesting thing is how you take that and make it your own," which in her case means living with MS, which felled conductor-pianist Daniel Barenboim's cellist wife Jacqueline Du Pre, but also involves Leto, who's disabled, and whose words will be projected as she writes.  The piece casts the net even further by using a dance company of six, which ranges in age from 18 to 62, and Jeanrenaud says that the navigation of Pearlman's moves will naturally be more effortful for the 62-year-old.  The ten-section piece, which the composer calls "a collage of interesting elements," will also feature ace new music percussionist William Winant, "and there are a couple of sections of just me and Willy which are quite rhythmic."

There's a strong visual look as well. "One piece has the orchestra creating a bed of sound, and there are staging elements like a bed platform that moves around.  Stairs and chairs are used, and there's a desk where Denise will be seated while the audience watches her."  Jeanrenaud has also added sound files to her score, which though not a visual element, will likely add both space and sonic weight to this intensely collaborative whole.  It's an ambitious and hopefully pertinent work for our increasingly fragile time where everybody either puts on a tough face or gets in touch with what's really happening around and in them.  But one thing's certain: the composer-cellist is one of the most gifted musicians of her generation, and like any true artist, or human being for that matter, she's here to learn.  She put it this way in a firming up e-mail regarding her time with the great French cellist Pierre Fournier who was renowned for the elegance and depth of his playing.  "Working with Fournier was a great transition from being a student to becoming a professional musician.  My lessons were very clarifying regarding technical issues I would be uncertain of in my own practice. It was wonderful working with him! "

Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra / Michael McDonagh

You don't have to have a degree in international studies to realize that change isn't happening in the first but in the third part of "our world."  Just look at Egypt, or much closer to the United States, Latin America, where Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has become a major and much feared player on the world stage.  And while the navel-gazing West keeps saying that everyone but them and their cronies are "on the wrong side of history" real living vital history has passed them by, or as the great Egyptian singer Um Kulsumm used to say when explaining why she would arrive at the train station way before it was scheduled to leave -- "wait for that which won't wait for you."

Going to a concert these days is a bit like going to a lecture.  Read the program notes, talk politely with friends, and when the downbeat comes sit on your hands.  But then history isn't going to wait -- how could it when it's head and shoulders next to you  -- for your approval, and conductor Gustavo Dudamel and his Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela,  on the first stop of their '12-13 US tour at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall on November 29, weren't waiting for anything, much less a train.  The first of their two touring programs showcased three pieces by three superb composers who turned European art music on its head. Carlos Chavez (1899-1978) was, by anyone's reckoning, a major figure, both as a composer, and like his U.S. compadre Copland, an inveterate organizer and promoter.  His 1935 Symphony No. 2  ("Sinfonia India") -- one of six symphonies -- was thoroughly classical -- in this case meaning restrained -- and impeccably made, which Dudamel and his band projected with great clarity and verve.  Chavez was sophisticated, though his Sinfonia India is now more of the past -- self-consciously fashioning an identity for his people as Copland did for his -- but a perfect curtain raiser for the rest of the concert.

Being gifted in more ways than one seems to have worked for and against Spanish-born composer and later Cuban, Mexican, and U.S. resident Julian Orrbon (1925-1991), who was a writer, teacher, scholar, and master of sound.  His Tres Variaciones Sinfonicas (1953) -- Slonimsky dubbed Orbon a neoclassicist -- but  this didn't prepare the listener for how it felt  live.  The fact that Orbon took his basic material for Variaciones 1 and 2 from a pavana by 16th century composer-lutenist Luis de Milan, and an organum-conductus from the 11th century master of the Notre Dame school of Paris, Perotin -- would lead one to think that the results would be derivative, but they're anything but, and they don't adhere strictly to their forms.  His pavana is a grand court dance of stunningly weighted colors -- every orchestral choir gets to shine -- with a typically mid-20th-century focus on rhythmic cross-cutting, which doesn't sound tied to its Iberian original.  Orbon's organum-conductus is a reflection/refraction from its capella source, with lines and gestures appearing and disappearing at will.  But the on youtube performance led by the gifted young Venezuelan conductor Cesar Ivan Lara and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra in Caracas, Venezuela, the work is more fluent, and mysterious.  It's also idiomatic, and the slightly archaic medieval-sounding lines and cadences are solid, evanescent, yet in no way Gallic.  Dudamel was on much firmer ground with Variacion 3 -- Xylophone -- which Orbon derived from an Afro-Cuban dance tune, and Dudamel's band mined its strong colors and rhythms to a T, with the trombones near the end punching out their vamp as if there were no tomorrow.  I don't know how Dudamel found this piece, but thank God he's taking it around, and perhaps other conductors will take it up, for it's a knockout.  The Zellerbach audience erupted in cheers after the last note sounded.

What can one say about a force of nature like Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940)?  A genius certainly... a master colorist for sure.  And one with a passion, imagination and rhythmic acuity composers have seldom commanded.  I've known and loved Revueltas' work via recordings and performances for years, but hearing his composer friend Jose Ives Limantour's four-movement suite drawn from his cues for Chano Urueta's 1939 film La Noche De Los Mayas live was a caballo de un color diferente.  Revueltas seems to have been a largely instinctive composer -- one imagines him writing rapidly like other under-the-gun film composers and in white heat like Arnold Schoenberg.  But how fast you deliver the goods has precious  little to do with what you produce.  You might have five years and produce a bad opera, as my late composer-friend Earle Brown once put it to me, or you could have scant minutes and come up with gold.  Revuetlas's imagination operated in full force here.  The massive tuttti which bookends the beginning and end of the first movement -- with lyric material in between -- must be the main title, the subsequent Noche de Jaranas: Scherzo -- is a clear-as-air indigenous Mexican dance -- and the following Noche de Yucatan a tender meditation for strings.  The movement sounds vaguely Mahelerian at one point, which of course prompted one western writer to call the section Mahlerian -- can we ever get rid of the west?  But the movement most people will take home is its final raw savage Noche de Encantamiento -- Night of Enchantment -- Theme, Variations 1-4, and Finale, which has the biggest range and drama, compared to the succeeding three.  Revueltas was a very succinct composer -- one has to be when writing for the theatre, and it would be wonderful to see his music with the original film.  But any music lives or dies on its own merits, and Revuletas's here certainly thrives.  Delicate, tender in the second movement, urgent driven in the fourth, with its sudden out-of-nowhere silences, and just as sudden eruptions of fierce fiddling in opposing choirs, and polymetric enchantments in all.  Massed wind tritones, plus 12 percussionists  -- with one "doubling " as a wailing singer "on conch" -- which was probably what happened in the film.

The audience erupted in cheers as the last fff note sounded, and Dudamel's superb 179-at-least-member band, with a large ace percussion contingent, and cellos sitting center stage as in an 18th-century layout -- exhibited perfect ensemble and perfect unanimity of purpose.  The third part of "our world" is clearly leading the way.

Adventures Big and Small / Michael McDonagh

Sometimes a busy schedule can work to advantage.  You may not be able to squeeze everything but you can get a lot done.  And so it was that I went to Berkeley, on October 20, to see and review four films in the Arab Film Festival and then decamped to the city for the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra's Adventures Around the Lake with a Unicorn, at Old First Church.  I got there late, and the piece in progress was Allan Crossman's 2012 Two Walks, of which I seem to have caught the second A Walk at Lake Merritt, an imaginative chromatic affair, which , not wanting to disturb the performers, I heard in the vestibule.  And this odd vantage point once again exposed the sonic shortcomings of this brick walled hall.  High pitches tended to blur, overtones dropping in and out with a kind of "soundless" thud.

The venue's acoustic was far more forgiving with John Bilotta's five-movement Thurber Country (2012) which didn't push the sonic envelope, but was nevertheless well-crafted, and certainly charming. Lisa Scola Prosek's 2012 overture to her opera-in-progress L'Aventura, set to premiere in 2013, is easily one of  her best pieces.  The two excerpts here -- Si, che sono triste, perche' mi mancano le stelle -- for orchestra, with the Scola Prosek at the piano, and Bocca baciata -- which she sang with co-soprano Maria Mikheyenko -- featured deft part writing, seductive yet contained colors, and piquant or calming harmonies.  It called to mind what late composer-friend Virgil Thomson once said about his teacher Nadia Boulanger. "She taught you that writing music was like writing a letter.  All you had to do was say what you had to, and then stop."  Scola Prosek's music here was that letter, and the hall thankfully didn't get in its way.

I'm not sure what to make of Mark Alburger's 2012 Triple Concerto for Bassoon, Contrabassoon, and Harp (" Family"), though its scoring was certainly unorthodox, and the family in question -- Michael, Lori, and Samantha Garvey -- and the orchestra seemed up to its not inconsiderable demands.  The first of its three movements -- "Allegro " -- was easily the best -- tight, its musical argument apprehendable -- while the other two seemed incompletely thought out, and therefore less expressive. But the orchestra, under Alburger's firm beat, gave it their all.

Too bad I missed Varese's 1923 Octandre, and the opening Dances to Mytilini (2011), by Davide Verotta, who can be a very striking composer.

The performers throughout l sounded completely engaged, which isn't an easy feat in our "economic downturn " times.  But then music, and art have always mattered most when there's trouble at your door.  Boccacio was right.  Tell stories whatever the night.

Einstein on the Tour / Michael McDonagh

What becomes a legend most?  Well, in the case of two legends -- composer Philip Glass and director/designer Robert Wilson -- an international tour of their first and most famous of their five collaborations, Einstein on the Beach (1975), which began in Ann Arbor, Michigan in January 2012, goes on to Amsterdam in Jan 2013, and ends in Hong Kong in March 2013.  But there's an irony.  The piece "that broke all the rules of opera" -- there's no story, and certainly no star-crossed lovers, murder, or even betrayal -- is an endeavor on a par with the scale, ambition, and work force of 65 (onstage and off) of a standard repertory work, with according to lighting supervisor John Torres -- 800 cues, with about 75 each for its Dance 1 and Dance 2.  Its incarnation at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House, the University of California's Zellerbach Hall, and Mexico City's Palacio De Bellas Artes was the product of 4-5 days of tech (each scenic element and the actors and dancers are lit separately) and cast rehearsals, with about a week's lodging for all at each stop.  But did Einstein live up to or even exceed its reputation as a seminal work of 2oth century music theatre?  Judged by what I saw in New York and Berkeley, it clearly did, and it also drove home the simple fact that seeing it with others in a darkened theatre is a far more complete experience than hearing it at home alone on even the best sound system, and I've listened to both its original 1979 Tomato LP recording and its 1993 Nonesuch CD set many times over the years.  But let's face it: music is as confrontational as anything else.  It's like meeting someone online, and then live.   The latter is no longer an invention, but something implausibly real.

And much of Einstein does seem implausible.  Is the train which inches forward and back in Train One to Glass's rapidly shifting and rapidly modulating music really the Night Train and a Building; is the white toy plane slowly going up across the screen the one that causes the final scene, The Spaceship, which seems to be about nuclear catastrophe?  Are the two largely immobile and hieratic trials about something more than their exquisite tableaux look?  Glass has said that what you see is all -- "that's it" -- while Wilson says, "Here, it's a work where you go and can get lost.  That's the idea. It's like a good novel.  You don't have to understand anything."  One can easily come up on the side of either Glass or Wilson, but that's not the point, and it certainly isn't the matter because Einstein is something to be encountered live.  And it felt live in entirely different ways at BAM and Zellerbach:  the full bore purity of the sound with large banks of black speaker monitors at the Gilman, and the thicker, sometimes muddled sound in the Art Brut concrete interior of  Zellerbach which paradoxically allowed the music's different lines with their combination tones to come through loud and clear.  The images were just as astonishing each time, with dancers leaping from behind the masked proscenium at Gilman, and from the black curtained flies in Zellerbach.  The Trial looked even more epic and inscrutable at Zellerbach, and felt different too.  Was it personal circumstance that made me feel that Glass's colors in Trial One -- which he lays down as methodically but ineluctably as Arnold Schoenberg's Farben movement in Funf Stucke Fur Orchester (1909), was too little, too long in the first presentation, but felt just right in the second?  But then how long is long and how short is long?

Or maybe my response to Trial and other parts of Einstein has more to do with what Glass experienced perceiving his score for Mabou Mines 1965 production of Beckett's Play where the "quickening " he felt was in a different place each time.  And Einstein, if it's about anything, is about our experience of space, and/or time, in different times when we experience ourselves and time in a fresh way.  Time in the moment stilled, or perhaps open to another space, and time, in this present time.  And I think if Einstein questions anything, it's this.  Forget the critics saying Einstein's the new Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk.  It ain't.  It's just "very fresh and clean."  An eternal Gertrude Steinian "continuous present" in which nothing external obtrudes.

Khalife and Company / Michael McDonagh

What can one say about artists as revered in the Arab world -- or as Philip Glass would say ''that part of our world" -- as Lebanese composer-oud master-singer Marcel Khalife and the late great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) other than that their work conspires to join our estranged hearts in this relentlessly divided world. These simple truths came home when Khalife and his 12-member Al Mayadine Ensemble played a 2-hour plus concert on April 22 at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Auditorium to a deeply attentive and warmly responsive audience.

Words and music are sound as sound, and what is sound but a fusion of the public with the private which Khalife and Darwish's work has always celebrated. Words and music have to be necessary like bread or water if they are to have meaning, and the sounds here could have drawn tears from a stone because Khalife treats his listeners as equal partners.

It doesn't hurt that his vocal settings have always been unfussily direct, even childlike simple, unlike some of his American counterparts who clot their settings with accidentals -- a holdover from the New Vienna School and its imitators -- to make them "deep." Khalife and Darwish are aided and abetted by Arabic music's quarter-tone anchored modes with their innately expressive resonance, and by the language's vowel with consonant combinations so different from Hebrew's largely consonantal ones, to say nothing of English with its impossibly unmusical diphthongs, like "spring."

I know because my poem dead serious -- for Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was recently beautifully translated into Arabic by the gifted young Palestinian artist/filmmaker Ahmed Walweel, who made its shadowed phrases sound a lot more musical. And what beauties in this program.

"Prepare the land for me so I can rest / because I love you until I'm weary ... / Your morning is fruit made for song / and the evening's made of gold /" Darwish says in The Pigeons Fly (Yateer el Hamam), which Khalife sang with slowly building insistence as his oud and Mark Elias' double bass drone seemed to come from beneath time. " The voices -- Khalife's. his wife Yolla's, and Oumayama Khalil's -- in Her Eyes (Aynaha). Khalife's ensemble, like Glass's, Paul Dresher's, or Steve Reich's, serves the practical demands of his music and all were superb and deeply accomplished here.

The French accordionist Anthony Millet -- Lebanon was of course a French protectorate -- dovetailed his sounds into Omar Guey's violin. The Romani Ismail Lumnanovski coaxed highly ornamented gipsy, klezmer, duduk, and even western flute-like sounds from his clarinet, and Kenan Adnawi -- oud -- and Feras Charestan -- quanoun -- from tragically embattled Syria, supplied evocative supportive colors. And the percussionists. The Macedonian Aleksandar Petrov on the Balkan parade drum tapan -- you can see it in Darwish's funeral www.youtube.com -- which he, both seated and seated -- hit vigorously with 2 large and small sticks. Michel Baklouk -- on Arabic tambourine -- riq -- and Hafez El Ali Kotain -- on the Arabic taba, or dumbeck -- brought their sounds center stage.

And there was Kahlife's superbly gifted composer- pianist son Rami -- his percussionist brother Bachar was in Paris taking care of his 2 young children -- who discreetly accompanied, and in the rapturous concluding number, Oh Fishermen, Haila, Haila (Al Bahriyyeh), brought the house down with his visceral, hugely imaginative and thoroughly thought out "take" on this tune which included a quote cum variation of Coltrane's Giant Steps which sounded massive and completely inevitable here. And if music and words together don't get you where you live, what's the point?

Or as someone once said -- "The avant garde's the oldest thing in the world," which is why Khalife and Darwish's work means and continues to mean much to so many, because it never left the room of the house where our collective hearts have always lived.

Reminiscing in Tempo / Michael McDonagh

New York was abuzz with 9/11 activity and Fashion Week when I was there the second week of September for a working vacation. There were of course 9/11 musical events all over town, and the media, ever ready to milk a hot story, commemorated and pontificated on the 10th anniversary of "the attacks" -- with special editions crowding the newsstands and shelves of Duane Reade and CVS. The musical events on that overcast day ranged from uptown at Merkin Hall where clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh told me he and his pianist and fellow composer Dinuk Wijeratne played a set as part of a Musicians in Harmony program which celebrated New York's enormous ethnic-cultural diversity, while composer-pianist Jed Distler went it alone at The Jazz Gallery on Hudson, scant blocks from ground zero, where I saw a few cops in navy blue out on the street.

How does one respond to an event of the magnitude and horror of 9/11? Distler's solution was to write 110 for 911 (2003), for speaking pianist and electronics, from the Bob Holman curated collective poem Tower Two, which combined efforts of 110 poets -- the number of stories in the tower -- famous and obscure.

Distler's 911 skillfully theatricalized both moment and mood with a large compendium of styles which underscored, amplified, and sometimes played against the words, from the stark opening, to Holman and Eileen Myles' "In times of crisis, poets lose words. Find some: / soul, soul I say..." to strident passages, with clusters at "love should be put into action" which alternated with nearly motionless lyric ones, and different kinds of vernacular music, including boogie woogie. But there was never a sense of pastiche in the equally wide-ranging music and text, sometimes recorded, but more often spoken or sung by Distler, with hair-trigger timing.

Any piece stands or falls on the inspiration and technique of its performer and Distler's technique combines a thorough grounding in the classical tradition with solid jazz chops, his assaults on the piano sometimes evoked the visceral force of the great and not well enough known Randy Weston. 110 for 911 is an accomplished work, and the small but deeply attentive audience in the gallery's intimate space seemed both entertained and moved. Distler followed it with 2 touching encores – Ellington's exquisite The Single Petal of a Rose and a Bill Evans-like ballad for a new friend. Because maybe as one line in Distler's has it "We are all just walking each other home."

We're vulnerable. That's all.

Glass x 2 / Michael McDonagh

We like to think that concert music is something other than sound we hear with others in a room. Of course it is, but music is a physical fact we encounter first hand and try to wrap our minds around later, and the large and attentive audience at Philip Glass's San Francisco Performances program of his solo piano works seemed to know the difference when they gave him a warm welcome even before he'd played a note at his from memorized 8o-minute intermissionless recital at YBCA's Novellus Theater on April 30. Real affection like that for a composer, especially a controversial and popular one like Glass, is rare, and that's just for starters.

Glass has never been a virtuoso pianist -- he once quipped that he writes the hard keyboard parts for his ensemble's music director Michael Riesman -- but he's a thoroughly engaging and utterly sincere one. He began with Six Etudes – # 1, # 2, # 3, # 6 , # 9, #10 -- from his first book of Ten (1994-99), which are deeply personal, listener friendly yet demanding for the player who has to keep a steady pulse while executing Glass's often rapid and rapidly shifting figures in sometimes irregular metres. His approach here was miles away from his 2002 recording of the set for www.orangemountainmusic.com on a Baldwin grand, which he played here on a Hamburg Steinway Model D, with its typically brilliant, hard Germanic sound. Glass has composed a lot since that CD, and the differences in how he hears now were everywhere apparent. # 1, with its fanfare-like opening which reappears in different contexts, sounded more dramatic, but not as smooth, the driving figures of unequal lengths in # 3, looser, almost improvisatory. But the real news here was how the composer's sudden attacks and releases, and frequent yet tasteful rubato -- ritenuti and diminuendi -- made these pieces in the moment fresh. And his pedalling exploited the massing overtones in a logical but non-systematic way, each sound adding sound to sound like rising floors in a house with interconnecting rooms. The pull backs in tempo in #2 like emotion refracted; the low hammered figures in # 10 like the insistent drone of an Indian harmonium, the ascending melismatic one an integral decoration in a complete structure. Glass's Etudes extend the classical tradition of Chopin and Debussy's sets in an entirely individual way, though unlike Debussy he gives no clues to what they're about.

The other pieces here were just as unique. The 1980 series of alternately lyric/static and active/dramatic variations, Third Series Part IV, which Lucinda Childs renamed and choreographed as Mad Rush -- its opening figuration suggests Schubert's song Du bist die Ruh -- were less exploratory than the Etudes, but very affecting, especially in the soft slow parts. It's as much of a stand alone piece as Glass's 1989 Metamorphosis #1-# 5 series which he made from 2 separate scores -- one for for Errol Morris's documentary The Thin Blue Line, and one for two concurrent Dutch and Brazilian theatre versions by different directors of Kafka's story Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) -- we heard #2-#4 -- which encapsulate the isolation of its "hero" Gregor Samsa, who awakens one morning and finds himself turned into a giant cockroach. Its fragile bell-like themes and suspended harmonies, which Glass played with great sensitivity, are a perfect transformation of Samsa's spiritual state into sound, and deeply touching, too.

Dreaming Awake (2006), which Glass wrote and recorded as a limited edition, with a facsimile of his manuscript score, benefit for his Tibetan spiritual teacher Gelek Rinpoche's Ann Arbor, Michigan, retreat center Jewel Heart, is a rapidly changing lyric piece whose warm fluid harmonies draw on the discoveries the composer made in his award-winning score for Stephen Daldry's 2002 film The Hours, which suggest the here and gone feeling of the heart's many facets with consummate grace.

In Glass's Orbit / Michael McDonagh

Philip Glass always does the unexpected. Or, as he said to me when we were talking on the phone about his subsequently Oscar-nominated score for Errol Morris's 2003 The Fog of War, "I'm a bad person to interview because I never stay on the subject." Well, yes and no. Yes, because Glass's focus on the work in front of him is unflinching, and no, because his instincts always lead him to surprising solutions. His latest two-act 155-minute intermissionless opera Kepler (2009) which American conductor Dennis Russell Davies and his Bruckner Orchester Linz, premiered at the Linz Opera September 20, 2009, as part of that city's celebrations as this year's Cultural Capital of Europe.

Kepler lived in Linz, Mozart's Symphony No. 36 was dedicated to it, Bruckner was choir director there, and two of the Nazis' death camps -- Malthausen and Gusen, whose specialty was getting rid of the intelligentsia -- were scant kilometres from its city limits. But then darkness is never far from light.

And darkness as distinct, or in contrast/opposition to light, is the motor that drives Glass's Kepler, but not in a Manichean way. Glass is far too subtle to put his cards on one table. Instead, being a practical practicing Buddhist, he seems to have chosen the unglamorous "Middle Way " which means seeing "things as they are" and in Kepler's case this is -- war, strife, and anyone who dares question him. The mathematician-teacher-astronomer-astrologer-provocateur, who lived from 1571 to 1630 -- seems to have been at the epicenter of cultural ferment, and The Thirty Years War (1618-1548), which began more-or-less as a conflict between Catholics and Protestants, and ended up devastating much of Europe, with a death toll as high as 11.5 million people (a little less than half of the top figure for the 1914-1918 War). Glass dramatizes these stresses in direct and indirect ways. And his in German and Latin libretto -- assembled by Austrian artist Martina Winkel, from Kepler's theoretical writings on the laws of planetary motion and other major discoveries, his enemies list, passages from the Lutheran Bible, and poems by Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664 ) -- works both as reportage and evocation.

The oratorio-like piece for the 79-member Orchester is partially staged here with effective lighting and Karel van Laere's costumes. The superbly gifted Bass-baritone Martin Achrainer (Kepler, the only specified character), Sadie Rosales (Soprano 1, substituting for Cassandra McConnell), Cheryl Lichter (Soprano 2), Katherina Hebelkova (Mezzo), Pedro Vaszquez Diaz (Tenor), Seho Chang (Baritone), and Florian Spiess (Bass) functioned as aspects of Kepler's often beleaguered psyche, and the 40-member Linz chorus, moved incrementally through the work.

The first 2o-or-so minutes, after a wonderfully transparent orchestral prologue with lovely chromatic figures for the strings, was pretty hard going. But then things began to progress by leaps and bounds. Kepler outlined his theories and his conflicts. He feels that heaven's not a place inhabited by "divine beings " but a "clockwork," which suits Glass' formal processes to a tee.

The chorus, operating as both character and commentator, gave Kepler heft, and vivid and enormously varied contrasts. Glass has always written superbly for massed voices. The choruses in Satyagraha (1979) are contemporary watersheds, and those here were both affecting and powerful, especially Vanitas! Vanitas!, which the full vocal ensemble sang on the lip of the stage facing the audience, with the onstage orchestra seated behind.

Those who think Glass hasn't developed from his classic 1965-1974 period -- when he invented an entirely new, from-the-ground-up language for himself -- have obviously not been listening. And the range, variety, and depth of the music here suprised the ear, delighted the mind, and touched the heart. The composer used Latin-American rhythms in several sections (particularly the Caribbean montuno) which provided tension and drama in equal measure. His command of the orchestra bore the sure mark of a master.

The sheer variety of the textures, from lean to fat, are never clotted -- even in a stunning stretch depicting the devastation both physical and psychic of The Thirty Years War, which, as the Synopsis has it "becomes a threat to all mankind" -- and couldn't be more horrific and poignant. The orchestration was apt, colorful, and expressive throughout, with Glass keeping the six percussionists and sole pianist on their toes. Languid meditative stretches, particularly those describing Kepler's love for the starry heavens, alternated with ones where Glass used opposing contrapuntal tactics (in similar and contrary motion), complex/stacked-up rhythms, and polyharmonies. There were tritones, anchors in minor thirds, and an abundance of perfect fourths and fifths in the vocal and bass lines, as in the opening section of Act 2.

One could argue till kingdom come as to whether Kepler is a "real opera " (Tosca it ain't), or an opera-oratorio like Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1927). But who cares when you have a work of such thrilling depth and power? It's well-known that Glass has been attracted to scientists, as in Einstein on the Beach (1976), Galileo Galilei (2001), and his evocations Stephen Hawking in both the Prologue of The Voyage (1991), the score for Morris's documentary Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1992).

But Kepler is in large part an epic mediitation on death, as in the eponymously titled ninth movement of Glass's 12-movement Symphony No. 5 (1999). Or, as the Latin chant John Barry used in The Lion in Winter (1968) puts it Media vita in morte sumus: "in the midst of life we are in death." And you can't get more serious and essential than that.

Davies and his orchestra, chorus, and soloists gave full measure. And the soloists never stinted on clarity, nuance, or dramatic projection. It was thrilling to see the justly-awarded Rosales stepping in on short notice -- score before her -- and delivering the goods bigtime. And Glass looked close to tears as he took his curtain call, though it was hard to see him through the roaring standing ovation which erupted as soon as the double basses played their completely exposed last notes.

Love and Rockets SFCCO / Michael McDonagh

[Allan Crossman's Plasticity, a concerto for the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and Sonoglyph, the latter invented and performed by Tom Nunn [above])

We like to think that we live in the light, or as the current phrase goes -- "it's all good" -- when everything really seems to happen in the dark where angels are wrestled with. This came forcibly to mind when I caught the SFCCO's June 13 concert Restless Dreams at San Francisco's Old First Church. The program, of eight pieces by eight composers, also bore out music director Mark Alburger's from-the-stage-quip that it was Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony in reverse -- instruments were added instead of subtracted as it progressed. Restless Dreams also appeared to go from meditation to conflict, or light to dark.

Philip Freihofner's Obelisk, which the composer wrote over a long period and "finalized" for this concert, could be described as meditative and/or minimalist in gesture. We tend to think that only loud pieces are powerful, but Freihofner's soft one, which Rova Saxophone Quartet's Steve Adams played -- he was backed by a repeating figure on synthesizer -- with passion and point, hit home.

Lisa Scola Prosek's Voodoo Storm, performed here by clarinettist Rachel Condry, trumpeter Eduard Prosek, cellist Juan Mejia, and pianist Scola Prosek was delicate and expressive, with subtle yet highly individualized part writing -- Condry giving way to Eduard Prosek and vice versa -- and it ended, in mid phrase, as so much in life does.

Davide Verotta's Verso L'immagine Feroce, for larger forces under Martha Stoddard, with Verotta on piano, was poetic because it got under one's skin, albeit subtly. It also seemed to incarnate Verotta's concept of an "emotional state . . . that is completely beyond our grasp," and was a far more substantial and convincing piece than his last one, which the SFCCO played this winter.

Michael Cooke's piece was meditative in an entirely different way. His variations on Lu-Chuan Sheng's famous Taiwanese lullaby A Baby Sleeps, which had Gangqin Zhao on the plucked-but- much-smaller-than-a-koto guzheng and the composer on the impressive-looking black sheng -- a kind of mouth organ -- found him abandoning his usual bag of metric tricks for something simple and heartfelt, and Alburger led his sizable forces here with unobtrusive grace.

Loren Jones's Eagle Bear Woman and Two Islands, for a large ensemble conducted by John Kendall Bailey, was also of Asian inspiration, its second part being in Javanese/Balinese style. And there was a tremendously evocative interplay between the seen -- written notes -- and the unseen -- freely-improvised non-notated parts.

Allan Crossman's Plasticity, for Sonoglyph and Chamber Orchestra, was equally well-made. It also got lots of its expressive character from the divergent styles the composer employed. And it was very entertaining to watch Tom Nunn play his homemade amplified with contact mikes sonoglyph -- an electro-acoustic percussion board -- while the orchestra watched him (this was a sort of concerto) or dug into their parts.

Alburger's always a surprising composer and his three-part King David Suite (The Young and The Restless) provided a series of pleasant jolts. The composerr likes to base his pieces on ones by other composers -- he calls their musical structures grids, and the grid, or scaffold here was Arthur Honegger's 1929 cantata Le Roi David which Alburger wreaked gleeful havoc on -- he changed its metric and tonal make-up and addied discreet but pungent decorations to the original's lean and mean neo-baroque style. Alburger's take on the soap-opera goings-on of this part of the Hebrew Bible -- 2 Samuel -- had the added virtue of being transparently scored, and his orchestra was right on the money throughout.

Restless Dreams reached its literal climax with Erling Wold and fognozzle's In the Stomachs of Fleas, which the composer in his hilarious onstage intro said was a baldly programmatic piece -- he mentioned Hector Berlioz's 1830 Symphonie Fantastique, which has just about everything, including a witches' sabbath. Wold and fognozzle's scenario, which had rats spreading the plague in 1899 San Francisco was even more extreme. Granitic chords assaulted the ear, and the volume -- fognozzle's part was amplified -- made it sound as loud as Varese's Ameriques (1918-21), but not as much fun. Still, this was an impressive piece, with the SFCCO, under Alburger, at full bore. And the spectacle of a lightshow, manned by in-the-pews-behnd-the-altar fognozzle on way-loud electronics cum SFCCO, made a thunderous but not exactly joyful noise.

Rzewski Reviewski / Michael McDonagh

It's sometimes said that composers are either German or French, and American vanguard one Frederic Rzewski, with his much vaunted admiration for Beethoven, is clearly on the German side. But how could he not be when some of his composition teachers like Luigi Dallapiccola and Milton Babbitt forsook a flowing lyric line for a jagged dramatic one, whose aim is not to seduce the ear, but to wow with intellectual rigor? But that doesn't mean that Rzewski's work is insincere, or lacks power -- it has that in spades -- but that it tends to be aimed at the mind and not the heart. It's often confrontational, too. But that's a good thing because any real musical interaction, like any real human one, has a built in confrontational element, and confrontations help us grow.

Rzewski's 1976 solo piano piece The People United Will Never Be Defeated (El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido) is certainly a work in which he confronted the musical possibilities of all kinds of things that had been appearing in his output -- he was 38 at the time he wrote it -- until then and his discoveries here power lots of his subsequent work. It's as much as a watershed piece for him as Glass's massive ensemble work Music In 12 Parts (1971-74) was for him. It's also a kind of compendium of rhythmic, harmonic and coloristic approaches to Chilean composer Sergio Ortega's song for Salvador Allende on which it's based. There are sex variation sets of six each plus a coda, and Rzewski seems to use every possible pianistic device throughout.

He's easily one of the greatest pianists around, and having been a pupil of Charles Mackey who was himself a pupil of the great Russian virtuoso Josef Lhevinne, Rzewski knows that tradition from the inside out, and you get all kinds of takes on it here. The shadow of Beethoven weighs in, of course, as does alot of the standard classical tradition, as well as whiffs of blues and Native American modes. It was amazing to watch Rzewski, on May 16 at the Mondavi Center in Davis (CA), draw on all these musics with such concentrated vigor and technical ease and make them his own. He used every imaginable kind of touch, both conventional and unconventional, and tactic. He played legato and with rubato -- one of the most beautiful stretches, Variation 23 (as fast as possible), was a kind of minimalist groove, with what sounded like alternations from major to minor, in a steady tempo, with terraced dynamics -- and produced loud sharply opposed sonorities Walls of sound would sometimes collapse into extreme quietude without the slightest warning, and then go back to a kind of catclysm reined in by Rzewski's superb technique. Though describing his sound world is probably a fool's errand, Rzewski does seem to fall into the New England Transcendental tradition of Ives, Ruggles, and Earle Brown at his most granitic, with lots of European echoes thrown in. His performance, which clocked in at 62 nonstop minutes, was alot different from that of Ursula Oppens, for whom he wrote it (I reviewed her Berkeley performance several years ago for www.sfcv.org as The King Regrets), but equallly powerful and musically convincing.

Rzewski's Nanosonatas, from which he played Books V and VI (2008) showed what he's been up to lately, and while 32 years separted them from The People United, both pieces were obviously the work of an artist with an abiding interest in drama and timbral variety. The Nanosonatas also share Rzewski's predilection for moving between consonance and dissonance, delicacy and violence, the clangorous and the calm. There was also a wide range of color and density in these elliptical pieces -- even the portraits of the composer's children in Book VI sounded private -- which are to short to be etudes, and not properly sonatas, but something in between. They're also mercurial, like Rzewski, who delivered himself of many lively opiinions and convictions in a post performance chat with Mondavi Center's executive director Don Roth. The Nanosonatas may be slighter in musical content and complexity than The People United. Still their composer gave this 38-minute set the same care and attention he gave to that bigger and obviously imposing piece. Rzewski didn't phone anything in, which is always the sign of a true and very serious artist, who's really in the moment, or in his case, element, or elements, given the physical and intellectual nature of his work. And his audience in the Mondavi Center's smallish and welcoming Studio Theatre clearly listened hard and asked him penetrating questions in the subsequent question-and-answer session.

On Becoming Gandhi / Michael McDonagh

My dear late best friend Danny Cariaga, classical music critic extraordinaire of The Los Angeles Times, once observed that people went to Wagner's operas when they were new because they had more time. But now, with the onslaught of e-mails, IMs, cells with text messaging, to say nothing of headsets, call waiting, call forwarding, numeric pages and the like, time seems fractured beyond repair.Are we really that far gone? And if so how can we get back to the unalterable truths of life, like love and death?

These questions came to mind when I caught The Metropolitan Opera's penultimate performance of Philip Glass's1979 opera Satyagraha on April 28. One of its subjects is time itself, and Glass's mature music has always played with our perceptions of it. How long is short, and how short is long? Glass's exquisite and utterly involving three-act meditation on Gandhi -- its subtitle is M.K. Gandhi in South Africa (1893-1914) -- shows how he transformed himself from an ordinary barrister thrown off a train into one of the most seminal spiritual and political figures of the last century whose ideas continue to reverberate. A tall order, for sure, but one that co-director designers Phelim McDermott and Juilan Crouch's Improbable Theatre made incredibly vivid and tremendously moving.

Glass and his scenarist Constance De Jong, assembled their libretto from the The Bhagavd-Gita (Song of the Lord), and the verses they culled from it pinpoint what Satyagraha is really about: self-mastery in the service of spiritual growth. Gandhi developed his non-violent passive resistance movement, satyagraha (roughly translated as "truth force," or even "the force of love" during his work in South Africa, which Glass's opera dramatizes in seven highly allusive and mysterious scenes. The composer cites his absorption in the Khatikali theatre of Kerala, South India, and the extended and abruptly short mosaic-like approaches in Brecht plays like Gallileo and, of course, his own (with Robert Wilson) Einstein on the Beach (1975), as inspirations for Satyagraha though a Western source, or point of reference, is Stravinsky's (from Sophocles via Danielou) and Cocteau's opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1926-27) though their aim, like the ancients, was to provoke pity through terror. Glass's aim is entirely different. His music and its staging strive to educate the audience in the most non-didactic way to what Gandhi and his followers were all about. And he and his collaborators here do this through slowly evolving sonic and visual images which provoke, distance (the Brecht, Lehrstuck and Stravinsky neo-classic tactic -- and enthrall.

Much has been made of Glass's supposedly "simple " music, as if his "poverty of means" translated into poverty of effect, and affect,but nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, he fashions each scene as a series of ground basses or chaconnes, but his imagination is in full flower here, even through this is his first orchestral piece since his Juilliard days (1958-1962). And it really does show how he's bent his pit band of 3 flutes, 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, violins 1 and 2, violas, cellos, and double basses, and a Kurzweil synthesizer, to his own deeply expressive ends.

Act 1's opening scene, The Kuru Field of Justice, unfolded from its 2+3, 2+3, 2+3, 2+2… rhythmic structure, like a steadily opening flower, with Gandhi (tenor Richard Croft ), in barrister suit and briefcase at the lip of center stage, being set upon -- his valise rifled by the supers -- as his solo's joined by that of mythological figures Prince Arjuna, in blue face (tenor Bradley Garvin), and in Indian cap and white tunic pants Lord Krishna (bass Richard Bernstein), while warring parties, representing the internecine conflict of the Kuru clan, in Victorian and Indian dress, face off, and larger than life papier mache puppets, do battle.

The succeeding scene, Tolstoy Farm (1910), was just as imaginatively realized, as Gandhi, his wife Kasturbai (mezzo Maria Zicak), Gandhi's German secretary Miss Schlesen (soprano Rachelle Durkin), Mrs. Naidoo (soprano Ellie Dehn); and Improbable's co-workers built Gandhi's ashram in miniature. And nowhere could Gandhi's and Glass's means be shown to more effect than in the long (6o+ minutes, though 31 minutes in Christopher Keene's CBS LP set ) single scene of Act 3 -- Newcastle March (1913) where the composer's "limited means " -- roughly three themes / harmonies,became Gandhi's much longed for peace -- which seemed to burrow into the listeners' psyches / hearts, until all was "released" at the final but not so final cadence / chord.

Glass' music has always trafficked in the down to earth and the mystical, and Satyagraha provides both as two sides of the same coin. And it's not for nothing that the third, and concluding scene of Act ii, Protest features more textural, harmonic, and yes, melodic variety than all of the rest of Satyagraha combined. The Met's forces rose to its challenges as true "athletes of the spirit," proving that it shares deep yet deeply contrasting familial resemblances to its other siblings in Glass' portrait trilogy, Einstein and Akhnaten (1983). And that his spectacularly moving 2005 opera of John Coetzee's 1980 Waiting for the Barbarians – which Orange Mountain Music will release this June – continues even more difficult explorations of the human condition. "A man lost in a cruel and stupid dream / But still I keep walking / Walking."

This Metropolitan Opera / Improbable production differed in many respects from the Bruce Ferden led (sadly dead from AIDS in 1993) version of the David Poutney / Robert Israel 1980 Netherlands Opera production (which I caught twice -- and once with Danny Cariaga -- at the San Francisco Opera in 1989). And its immersion in themes of social injustice – will they ever be solved? – continued in Glass's SF Opera commission, Appomattox, which bowed last November.

Writers

Mark Alburger (b. 1957, Upper Darby, PA) is an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Cabaret Opera / Goat Hall Productions, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music, Music Critic for Commuter Times and San Francisco Classical Voice, and Instructor in Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson, Joan Panetti, and James Freeman at Swarthmore College (B.A.); Jules Langert and Ted Blair at Dominican University (M.A.); Roland Jackson at Claremont University (Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger has composed 163 major works over the past 35 years, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue is being issued on discs from New Music. Alburger's multiple blogs are: markalburger.blogspot.com, markalburgerworks.blogspot.com, markalburgerevents.blogspot.com, markalburgermusichistory.blogspot. com, 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com

MICHAEL MCDONAGH