Chronicle / Of November 2015

November 3

Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron.  Paris Opera, Paris, France.  Repeated 11/6 and 9.  "As Moses sings in the opening scene, [God] is “unique, eternal, omnipresent, invisible, unrepresentable.”  That’s the paradox of Arnold Schönberg’s . . . landmark opera Moses und Aron . . . in a visually dazzling, thrillingly radical production . . . .  If God is unrepresentable, as Schönberg and Moses have it, how to stage this opera, which is essentially a long argument between Moses and Aron about the clash between the purity of an idea — in this case, the revelation of a single God -- and its corruption when it is put into words and images? . . .  Moses und Aron . . . was originally written by Schönberg as an oratorio in the early 1920's and then transformed into an opera from 1930 to 1932 (Born Jewish in 1874 in Vienna, Schönberg converted to Protestantism at 18, but reclaimed his Jewish identity after confronting Nazi anti-Semitism. It seems likely that the composition of “Moses” was part of a personal confrontation with religious thought). . . .  The huge chorus (117 people, including 30 children, in this production) must whisper and shout, sing and speak. The effect is complex, dissonant and powerful . . .   This “Moses” starts slowly, almost sleepily, with an old-fashioned double tape reel spooling into the hands of Moses as the wonderfully atmospheric opening chords and choral voices begin. . . .  An orgy and virgin sacrifices are enacted with stylized violence, given form in dances of knotty intertwining" [Roslyn Sulca, 11/4/15].

November 10

Violinist Leila Josefowicz and Pianist John Novacek, Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.  "Josefowicz took every rhythmic detour in Erkki-Sven Tuur’s Conversio (1994), which starts stuck in a rut, confused and circling, and seems to get out by remembering how to be silent, despite interruptions by slashing chords.  She gave the highways and byways of  [John] Adams’s Road Movies (1995) childlike wonder.  The music seemed to wake, disoriented, from a nap at the end of the first movement, Relaxed Groove, and overdose on sugar in the hyperactive finale, 40 Percent Swing.   Her repertoire of tone was just as broad in the dances of [Manuel da] Falla’s Suite populaire espagnole, with ethereal halftones in Nana, caustic aggression in Polo and a wheezy fug in Asturiana.  If the heavenly light of Messiaen’s Theme and Variations began a little dim, it blinded by the end.  Most affecting of all was the encore, Claus Ogermann’s arrangement of Charlie Chaplin’s Smile, at first watery, then content [David Allen, The New York Times, 11/11/15].

Arnold Schoenberg’s The Book of Hanging Gardens (Stefan George) and Alban Berg's Five Orchestral Songs on Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, performed by Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber.  Park Avenue Armory’s Board of Officers Room, New York, NY.   "[Gerhaher] said that the cycle is 'like Christmas, 15 times over.' . . . Schoenberg creates an entirely new set of colors for every emotional nuance, likening each stanza to a gift . . . . Schoenberg’s The Book of Hanging Gardens is situated in a monstrously fertile landscape in which every luscious plant and sinuous animal conspires to heighten the poet’s erotic agony.  , , [I]t’s the piano part that charts the topography, and Mr. Huber’s warm and attentive playing brought each to life.  Mr. Huber also stole some of the spotlight in Berg’s Five Orchestral Songs on Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, in which the poet looks 'beyond the borders of the universe' for consolation.  The piano arrangement maintains much of the watercolor delicacy of the original orchestral score, allowing Mr. Gerhaher’s clear, sometimes painfully fragile voice to skirt the border between singing and speaking" [Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times, 11/11/, 2015].

November 13

As part of a series of attacks across Paris, three gunmen conduct a mass shooting during a sold-out (1,500) Eagles of Death Metal concert, killing 89 concertgoers and wounding 200, before two of the attackers detonate explosive vests, and the third is killed by police.  Bataclan, Paris, France. "[Eagles of Death Metal] from Palm Desert [CA], mixes driving blues-rock of 1970's vintage with a heavy dose of humor.  For fans of Eagles of Death Metal, the band’s name is part of its irreverent charm.  'We kind of have a rule with Eagles of Death Metal that it’s the fun show, and we want everyone to belong' Jesse Hughes, one of the group’s two leaders, said in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.  But as news spread across social media, fans -- as well as many more who had probably never heard of the group before -- expressed horror over the scene at . . . Bataclan. . . .  The band’s members were reported safe. . . . The band, formed in 1998, is closely associated with Queens of the Stone Age, which specializes in the fuzzy guitar sounds of 1970's metal.  Joshua Homme, the leader of Queens of the Stone Age, is the other primary member of Eagles of Death Metal, which was on a European tour . . . .  Homme, who rarely tours with Eagles of Death Metal, was not with the group . . . .  U2 announced that it had canceled a concert scheduled in Paris on [November 14].  'We watched in disbelief and shock at the unfolding events . . . and our hearts go out to all the victims and their families across the city tonight,' the band said in a statement. 'We are devastated at the loss of life . . .  and our thoughts and prayers are with the band and their fans'" [Ben Sisario, The New York Times, 11/13/15].  "Designed in 1864 by the architect Charles Duval, [Bataclan] refers to [Jacques Offenbach's] Ba-Ta-Clan . . . but it is also. . . the expression 'tout le bataclan' (the whole caboodle), the oldest written use of [this locution] which predates Offenbach in a journal entry of . . .  [November, 11 1761] by [Charles Simon] Favart" [Wikipedia, 11/14/15[.

Yefim Bronfman Plays Sergei Prokofiev Sonatas Nos. 1-4. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.  "Before the pianist Yefim Bronfman’s concert on Friday evening at Zankel Hall, Clive Gillinson, executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, requested a moment of silence in honor of the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris.  Mr. Bronfman has a businesslike demeanor: After a curt nod to the audience he sat down and plunged straight into Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 1 without a moment of mental preparation or any of the customary fussing with the piano bench. He seemed to channel the rage and grief of multitudes into his magnificently communicative playing in this concert, the first of three this season featuring Prokofiev’s nine piano sonatas in chronological order.  Prokofiev eventually deemed his short Piano Sonata No. 1, a student work, 'a naïve and simple little piece,' but there was nothing trivial about Mr. Bronfman’s performance, in which the melody emerged with stately warmth amid the tumultuous chords. In the enigmatic, lyrical Piano Sonata No. 2, he conveyed the work’s roiling, unstable moods, with a gently seething Andante and a brilliantly articulated Vivace.  Prokofiev’s single-movement Piano Sonata No. 3 also traverses eclectic terrain. With a silky touch, Mr. Bronfman rendered the serene moments starkly against the emotional outbursts elsewhere. The Piano Sonata No. 4 is equally tense, its dark undercurrents illuminated here with riveting intensity and the bravura finale dazzling for its energy and clarity" [Vivien Schweitzer, 11/16/15].

November 14

Philip Glass's Appomattox.  Kennedy Center, Washington, DC.  "Since the first version of Appomattox was given its premiere in 2007 at the San Francisco Opera, many states have passed laws making it harder to vote, and, in 2013, the Supreme Court effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act. So [Philip] Glass and [librettist  Christopher] Hampton significantly revised the opera and made voting rights a central theme. . . . The rethought opera harks back to the days before texts were considered sacrosanct, when composers like Handel, Verdi, and Puccini continued to tinker with and transform their finished works over the years. The new Appomattox, even though its subject is history, can feel as timely as a Twitter feed, with its explorations of race, police violence, civil rights, and voting rights. And it is joining a long operatic tradition of using historical subjects in ways that resonate with contemporary issues — from the way Verdi’s Va Pensiero chorus in the biblical epic Nabucco came to be heard as a nationalist anthem to how his Don Carlo used Spanish history to weigh in on realpolitik and the church. . . . The original version of [Appomattox] portrayed the final days of the Civil War, and dramatized Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the village of Appomattox Court House, Va., before flashing forward to brief scenes from Reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. While the first act of the new, expanded Appomattox is still set in the 19th century, the second is now devoted to civil and voting rights. The opera now opens with Frederick Douglass visiting the White House in 1865 and telling Abraham Lincoln he would like to see 'voting rights for all free men of color.' In the second act, a century later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visits the White House to press President Lyndon B. Johnson on the Voting Rights Act.  Mounting an opera about voting rights in the nation’s capital is 'so fitting and appropriate,' said Representative John Lewis of Georgia, whose skull was fractured by a state trooper during the 1965 march in Selma, Ala., that became known as Bloody Sunday, and who said he had been surprised to learn that he was a character in the opera. . .  .  One dramatic thread that has been expanded in the revised opera seems especially timely in the age of the Black Lives Matter movement: the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, the 26-year-old civil rights marcher whose death in 1965 at the hands of a state trooper led to the historic marches in Selma. . . . [When] Francesca Zambello became the artistic director of Washington National Opera in 2013 and, she recalled, was 'shocked' to discover that the company had never staged an opera by Mr. Glass. She said that she found the idea of mounting Appomattox appealing, but worried that the original version felt unfinished.'. . . Glass clearly relishes the thought of bringing a political opera to Washington. . . . Given the fast pace of change in the country, Mr. Glass added that he wondered if this version of Appomattox would be the last.  'I can easily imagine,' he said, 'saying we have to write a new third act'" [Michael Cooper, The New York Times, 11/10/15]. "[11/14/15's presentation was] also called a world premiere.  For this year’s 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, Mr. Glass and Mr. Hampton condensed the events of 1865 and wrote a new second act that dramatizes President Lyndon B. Johnson’s passage of that seminal piece of legislation in 1965 against the backdrop of protests. A chilling epilogue, set in a Mississippi jail in 2011, shows the unrepentant murderer of three rights activists spewing hatred and boasting of his crime. . .  This Appomattox . . . is a frustratingly uneven work that presents well-known historical facts on a conveyor belt of forgettable music. . . . The score to this first act features some of the most nondescript music Mr. Glass has written, with a soft, string-heavy orchestration laced here and there with percussion. The language is made up of Mr. Glass’s trademark undulating arpeggios and cloudy modulations but never builds up to the transcendent poetry of his music for the Gandhi opera Satyagraha.  An arrangement of the Civil War song Tenting on the Old Campground opens the opera on a note of guileless vulnerability that is unrelated to the ensuing three hours of generic music. When the black journalist T. Morris Chester, sung resplendently by Frederick Ballentine, delivers an anguished report on the post-Civil War massacre of black soldiers, the orchestra sounds mildly detached.  'My heart is too full to say more,' Lee, sung with great warmth by David Pittsinger, tells his troops after he has told them of the surrender.  . . . Mr. Glass only offers a squiggly line of undulating strings to fill in the blank.  The period of Reconstruction is an even bigger blank.  Instead, Act II fast-forwards to 1965.  The characters of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (the sonorous bass Soloman Howard, who sang Douglass in Act I) and President Johnson (the baritone Tom Fox, doubling as Lincoln) bring forth some of the freshest writing from Mr. Hampton . . . .  This new act is altogether brighter and more confident -- entertaining, even, despite the acts of racist violence invoked in upsetting detail. A few rousing and idiomatic orations by Dr. King (written by Mr. Hampton) provide Mr. Glass with the kind of musical dramaturgy lacking in the older material. The reverend’s rising rhetorical cadence and call-and-response with his congregation is a natural fit for opera and Mr. Glass’s music in these scenes is the most successful" [Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, 11/15/15].


November 17

Olga Neuwirth's In Nacht und Eis, Pierre Boulez's Dialogue de l’Ombre Double (two versions), George Lewis's Emergent.  Sawdust, New York, NY.  "[New York] has not done right lately by Pierre Boulez, who turned 90 in March.  The . . . Philharmonic -- of which he was music director from 1971 to 1977, in a tenure now often criticized as recondite in its programming (untrue) and dire in its ticket sales (ditto) -- did nothing to honor the birthday.  Nor did our other major cultural institutions.  It has taken a series of concerts this week at National Sawdust . . . for Mr. Boulez to be the focus of a sustained tribute here.  And it’s a well-plotted tribute that does justice to a composer, conductor, pianist and theorist whose influence looms peerlessly large over the past half-century of music.  The four concerts juxtapose Mr. Boulez’s works with those of other artists and, appropriately, center on his Dialogue de l’Ombre Double (1984), which recurs throughout the week.  Dialogue is, as you can imagine, a conversation, but it’s unexpected: between a clarinetist (here the alert Joshua Rubin) and that musician’s recorded self. Skipping, fluttering, demanding, the score moves with perplexing yet alluring smoothness between live and amplified sound, as the recorded lines slip stealthily around the room, from one speaker to another.  Mr. Boulez later created versions of the piece for different instruments, and in 1995 made one for [bassoonist Pascal] Gallois. The bassoon brings a more grounded, earthy quality to the score than the clarinet, especially since Mr. Gallois’s interpretation, while just as virtuosic as Mr. Rubin’s, is less pert and more natural.  In Olga Neuwirth’s new version of her In Nacht und Eis for two bassoons, Rebekah Heller matched Mr. Gallois in inspired naturalness. The music, a genial if passionate partnership, moves from low, oscillating growls to husky floods of notes. George Lewis’s Emergent surrounded the flutist Claire Chase with electronic echoes of her ferocious yelps, like the ricocheting calls of a flock of excited birds. . . . Eight months late, it’s the birthday gift [Boulez] deserves" [Zachary Woolfe, 11/18/15].

New Juilliard Ensemble in the New York premiere of William Primosch’s From a Book of Hours, plus Du Yun's Quatrain (Slow Portraits iii), Michael Zev Gordon’s Sehnsucht, Elliott Sharp’s Wannsee Noir, and Gyorgy Kurtag’s Brefs Messages.  Paul Hall, Juilliard School, New York, NY.  “'Why so little Rilke-music?' a critic from The New York Times asked over 20 years ago, noting how many composers have kept a respectful distance from this great poet. Among those who have heeded the challenge of setting his texts is the composer James Primosch, who has turned to Rilke’s religious poetry for a number of songs that elegantly combine personal fervor and worldly sophistication. . . . Primosch’s From a Book of Hours [is] set to devotional texts Rilke first published in 1905.  With one evoking 'the calm between two notes' that get along with difficulty, yet 'are reconciled, with trembling, in the dark rest,' it’s the sort of poetry that’s aching to be sung.  Alexandra Razskazoff gave a beautiful performance of this captivating work, which benefited as much from her richly faceted, slinky soprano as from the expressive clarity she brought to the German text. Art song requires a singer to lavish as much thoughtfulness and art on diction as on musical phrasing, and Ms. Razskazoff appears to have the makings of a great recitalist.  The ensemble, under the assured direction of Joel Sachs, sounded most comfortable in this work, with its late-Romantic language laced with idiosyncratic colorings. In some of the other works, all premieres, there was a certain respectful rigidity in the playing that seemed more concerned with getting it right than making it speak.  Du Yun’s Quatrain (Slow Portraits iii) plunged the listener into a noisy bazaar of sounds and styles, in which Moorish melodies played on the oboe wrestle for attention with Chinese-flavored violin solos, hard-edge percussion and conciliatory strains from guitar and harp. In the end the music seemed to dissolve into thin air like a mirage.  Michael Zev Gordon’s Sehnsucht for mixed ensemble opened with the kind of musical gestures one might expect in a work titled Longing: a flourish that won’t quite let go of its final note; a swelling cello sigh. But what followed was a fascinating play on textures with moments of fit-to-burst tension, pulsating with microtonal heat, that eventually led to a delicate, fragile ending.  Jaunty short ensemble phrases and spirited solos, interspersed by flat patches of sustained dissonant chords, characterized Elliott Sharp’s Wannsee Noir with spotlight-stealing turns by the trumpeter Matthew Mead and cheeky challenges by the clarinetist Shen Liu and the bass clarinetist Kristina Teuschler.  A polished performance of [Gyorgy[ Kurtag’s Brefs Messages (Op. 47) also offered opportunities for individual players to shine in a witty and economically drawn series of portraits that investigated the nature of musical conversation and community" 9Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, 11/18/15].


November 18

Olga Neuwirth's In Nacht und Eis; Pierre Boulez's Incises, Dialogue de l'Ombre Double, and Piano Sonata No. 2; and Elliott Carter's Two Diversions and Two Thoughts About Piano.  National Sawdust, New York, New York.

Julliard Opera presents Francis Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1947) and Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Oder der Tod Dankt Ab (The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Abdicates, 1943).  Peter Jay Sharp Theater, New York, NY.  "Though contrasting in style and mood, are both [the Poulenc and Ullman are] lunatic satirical responses to the carnage of World War II.  The zaniness of Les Mamelles starts to become evident in the title, since Tiresias is the male name adopted by Thérèse when she declares her independence, wanting to make war instead of babies, growing a beard and shedding her breasts (Balloons, the inevitable stand-ins for free-floating breasts, are about all I remember from Seiji Ozawa’s presentation of the opera with the Tanglewood Music Center in 1997).  But France needs to repopulate, according to the stated (tongue at least partly in cheek) moral of the opera, which is based on a 1917 surrealist play by Guillaume Apollinaire written in reaction to another devastating war. So Thérèse’s unnamed Husband has to learn how to make babies without her and does so prodigiously in some unexplained manner . . . producing 40,049 of them in one day.  Der Kaiser is an altogether darker affair. Ullmann, who was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944, composed it inside the belly of the beast, at the Terezin concentration camp, to a libretto by a fellow inmate, Peter Kien.  An allegorical figure, Death, who has been rendered all too obsolete by mass slaughters, squares off against Emperor Überall, pretty much a dead ringer for Hitler, if slightly more rational in the end. Even Kien and Ullmann, it seems, could not imagine the worst. . . . The “Kaiser” production is especially evocative, incorporating the creators’ prison experience into the play, as it were, with a striped-pajama motif in most of the costumes, designed by Paul Carey. That Terezin inmates did not wear stripes matters little in this fanciful context.  As announced beforehand, the performance of Mamelles, set in Paris (or Zanzibar; it is never quite clear), was dedicated to “the spirit of the French people" [James R. Oestreich, 11/19/15].


November 19

Olga Neuwirth's In Nacht und Eis, Sabrina Schroeder's Flatspin (stircrazer IV), Franck Bedrossian's Transmission, Mario Diaz de Leon's The Soul is the Arena, and Pierre Boulez's Dialogue de l’ombre double.  Sawdust, New York, NY.

November 21

The Opus Project presents Opus 35: Numbers Up.  Selections from Jean Sibelius's Jubal, Albert Roussel's Chinese Poems, Alexander Scriabin's Piano Preludes, Sergei Rachmaninoff's The Bells, Gustav Holst's Songs for Voice and Violin, Arnold Schoenberg's Six Pieces for Male Chorus, Cyril Scott's Pierrot, Karol Szymanowski's Violin Concerto No. 1, Ernst Toch's Cello Concerto, Sergei Prokofiev's Melodies without Words, Alois Hába's Mother, Paul Hindemith's The Serenades, Paul Creston's Symphony No. 2, Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1, Samuel Barber's A Hand Of Bridge, Alan Hovhaness's The Lord's Prayer, Benjamin Britten's Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Vincent Persichetti's King Lear, Gyorgy Kurtag's Holderlin Gesange, George Crumb's Makrokosmos - Volume II, Robert Muczynski's Piano Sonata No. 3, Mark Alburger's Missa California, and Michael Stubblefield's Six Short Piano Pieces on Twelve-Tone Circles.  Diablo Valley College Music Building, Viking Drive, Pleasant Hill, CA. 

Luigi Nono's Polifonica-Monodica-Ritmica, Pierre Boulez's Éclat and Le Marteau sans Maitre, and Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontra-Punkte.  Sawdust, New York, NY.


November 22

New York Youth Symphony in Maurice Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, George Gershwin's An American in Paris, and the premiere of Gabriella Smith’s Lost Coast.  Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Lost Coast . . . is a 20-minute work featuring solo cello . . . inspired by a five-day backpacking trip the composer took on the remote Lost Coast Trail in Northern California.  The score is like a landscape in sound, unfolding in a shimmering haze with earthy string sounds, flecks of woodwinds, swelling brass bursts and thematic fragments that never quite coalesce into themes. The solo cello has long, demanding stretches of scratching sounds, slides and rhythmic bursts hand-tapped on the body of the instrument" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 11/23/15].

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center performs Arnold Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie No. 1.  Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "The highlight was an arresting performance of Schoenberg’s breathless Kammersymphonie No. 1, performed here in Anton Webern’s ingeniously effective arrangement for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 11/23/15].


November 23

MusicNOW presents Ted Hearne's Law of Mosaics, Kaija Saariaho's Petals and Daniel Wohl's Glitch.  Harris Theater for Music and Dance, Chicago, IL.  "Kaija Saariaho's 1988 Petals, for cello and electronics, [was] an otherworldly soundscape played with literally crunching virtuosity by [Chicago Symphony Orchestra] cellist Katinka Kleijn.  In his electro-acoustic piece for string quartet, Glitch (2009), Wohl makes the pops and clicks of old vinyl records, the skips of scratched CD's and other accidents of recording playback an integral part of the piece.  The conceit results in a series of increasingly violent confrontations between acoustical order and electronic distortion, before looping consonances restore calm.  Hearne's string-orchestra opus Law of Mosaics (2012) attempts nothing less than a grand deconstruction of several hundred years of string-orchestra music, in six movements. The starts and stops that play hob with linear momentum (the lifeblood of much Baroque string music) in the opening section give rise to postmodernist mashups of Bach, Vivaldi, and Mahler later on. It was all done with enormous punch and precision by an ensemble of CSO string players and guests, under the firm guidance of conductor Christopher Rountree" [John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, 11/27/15[. 

Juilliard String Quartet in Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 1.  Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY.  "Joel Krosnick, the quartet’s cellist since 1974 and its longest-serving member by far, announced in May that he would leave the group at the end of this season. With no musician remaining on the roster who played with any of the Juilliard’s founding artists, a new era for a hallowed institution awaits.  The cello, first grand, then ruminative, plays alone at the start of Elliott Carter’s Quartet No. 1, written during a period in the Arizona desert in 1950-51. Mr. Krosnick rendered this solo with craggy glory, later plucking with gruff majesty as the violist Roger Tapping unspooled a velvety, elegiac line.  The group was endlessly agile in the twists of Carter’s quartet, defined by its myriad, complex shifts of tempo.  Lively dances suddenly opened into rhapsodic yearning; a moody dialogue between cello and viola was interrupted by hovering, glassy high tones in the violins (Joseph Lin and Ronald Copes).  Sudden floods of spidery runs and bursts of quivering energy were like sparks popping from a fire in a desert night.  Now largely characterized by the sleekly intense sound of Mr. Lin, its first violinist since 2011, the ensemble can beef up, too, broadening into the Carter quartet’s passages of sunset richness" [Zachary Woolf, The New York Times, 11/24/15].


November 24

Juilliard Orchestra, conducted by Alan Gilbert, in Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra.  Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.  "Gilbert and his players conveyed the dramatic conflicts and complexities of the music, especially in the opening Präludium, in which a mass of quivering figures and hazy textures crest into tortuous outbursts, and the final movement, a hurtling . . . deconstruction of the march idiom. The piece culminates with pummeling percussive hammer strokes that surely nod to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. The performance was at once raw and radiant" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 11/25/15].

Music on the Edge.  SubCulture, New York, NY.  "in [Eric Moe's] Let Me Tell U About R Specials (2005), live and prerecorded flute lines chatter like customers at a table, trying to talk as a waiter’s sampled monologue interrupts. . . .  Burr Van Nostrand’s Fantasy Manual for Urban Survival (1972), an underappreciated trio for alto flute ([Lindsey] Goodman), cello (Dave Eggar) and prepared piano (Mr. Moe).  In six movements, including one that has the flutist and cellist intone a [Friedrich] Hölderlin poem (Hälfte des Lebens) in Sprechstimme over evocative, wintry tones, Mr. Van Nostrand’s distinctive voice pushes each instrument’s sonic boundaries to the breaking point.  The mood is predominantly violent, an allusion to campus violence during the Vietnam War. The composer allows the flute and cello to arrive at havens -- single notes in which their timbres seem to merge -- but these oases don’t last long before carnage intrudes. Yet it’s the sadness of these moments that seems to be the piece’s essence, particularly in three movements marked Schwangesang (Swan Song). . . . Roger Zahab contributed two for percussion (Lisa Pegher, tremendous): A Spunky Twenty-Eight (1998), a fanfare for snare drum and tom-toms, and the alluring Deceived by Starlight (1996) for vibraphone. [Mathew] Rosenblum’s Northern Flicker (2012) is a more ambitious percussion work, a pounding showpiece of rhythmic flair.  Mr. Moe played a piano dance dedicated to him by Lee Hyla, One Moe Time (Waltz for Eric), its rhythms distorted by abrasive runs. And Amy Williams’s First Lines (2006), with the composer at the piano, created satisfying miniatures from the opening lines of several poems. Shhhh, my grandmother is sleeping, from verse by Marilyn Chin, prompted snores from Ms. Goodman’s flute" [David Allen, 11/25/15].


November 27

Marin Alsop conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Samuel Barber's Second Essay for Orchestra, and Anna Clyne's Masquerade.  Chicago, IL.  "Like her famous mentor, Leonard Bernstein, Alsop can be a dervish on the podium when the music is fast, busy, and highly charged. But she is her own musician in terms of considered emotional response and the way she conveys intensity of feeling to her players. . . .   [Anna] Clyne's brief Masquerade . . [is] an ideal curtain raiser, the swirling sounds eventually coalescing into a quotation of an old English drinking song, complete with rhythmic hiccups.  The conductor's recordings of the complete Barber orchestral works for the Naxos label reveal her as one of the composer's most eloquent champions. Her sensitively shaped, deeply felt reading of Barber's Second Essay for Orchestra returned to the CSO repertory one of the finest American orchestral scores of the 1940's, and 'brava' to her for that.  Alsop got her feel for jazz, and for Gershwin's music in general, early in her career when she operated her own swing band, so the idiomatic ease with which she had the CSO musicians tugging at the jazzy rhythms of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue came as no surprise. . . .  Pianist Jon Kimura Parker . . . continued in the same high-energy, jazz piano with his solo encore, the bouncy Blues Etude by his late, great fellow Canadian, Oscar Peterson" [John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, 11/27/15[.


November 30

Willima Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, directed by Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford, music by Patrick Doyle.  Garrick Theatre, London, UK. "When it comes to writing music for the plays of William Shakespeare, few living composers can claim as much experience as Patrick Doyle, the two-time Academy Award nominee who has collaborated with Kenneth Branagh on screen adaptations including Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, and Hamlet.  Doyle has written music for more than 40 movies, most recently Disney's live action Cinderella, which was released earlier this year. His latest effort represents a return to his roots on the stage. . . .  For The Winter's Tale, which co-stars Branagh and Judi Dench, Doyle has composed songs and dances as well as thematic music. He said he usually takes his inspiration from the actors' delivery of Shakespeare's verse. . . . In person, Doyle, 62, is friendly and animated. He speaks at an allegro gallop, with a thick Scottish accent that itself is often musical in its tonal variations. Growing up, he studied piano, singing and the tuba, and he graduated from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music.  Early in his career, he worked as a music director and actor in the British theater and joined Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company in 1987. Their first collaboration was a stage production of Twelfth Night.  'It was clear that I was part of this team instantly,' Doyle recalled. 'I could read his mind. I got him. There's a kind of telepathy between us.'  The Winter's Tale is part of Branagh's new company . . . . Doyle is scoring the entire season, which includes Terence Rattigan's Harlequinade, currently in repertory, and an upcoming staging of Romeo and Juliet.  Working with Branagh, Doyle is often on set with the director and is sometimes required to come up with music on short notice. For Cinderella, he received a call the day before a big ballroom scene was shot asking for a waltz to be performed on playback as cast members entered the room.  'It was finished by 10 p.m. that night because it had to be ready for the sound department the next morning,' recalled Doyle. For The Winter's Tale, he had to write most of the score in the first week of rehearsals. . . .  The Branagh-Doyle partnership is similar in some ways to the close collaboration between Laurence Olivier and composer William Walton . . .    Walton worked with Olivier over three decades and wrote music for his film adaptations of Henry V, Hamlet, and, Richard III.  'Both have tended to work with one particular director, so they build up a kind of relationship with a shorthand and set of expectations, [Notre Dame Shakespeare specialist Peter] Holland said.  When writing the opening music for Much Ado About Nothing, which is heard over Beatrice's line, 'Sigh no more, ladies,' Doyle said he adapted an unused melody from his score for Branagh's 1991 thriller Dead Again.  The reworked tune became a recurring theme throughout the movie.  'You learn by experience,' said Doyle.'You come up with a strong theme. That's part of your technique as a dramatic writer. That's the joy of it'" [David Ng, Los Angeles Times, 11/27/15].

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.

Coming Unstuck at Cabrillo / Michael McDonagh

Anniversaries are always welcome occasions, and the Santa Cruz-based Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music celebrated its 51st year with a typically varied series of programs of which I alas only caught one on August 10, at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.  Festivals are mix and match affairs, and the program paired pieces by two "emerging" composers -- Enrico Chapela (b. 1974 ) and Andrew Norman (b. 1979 ) -- with the latest symphony by Philip Glass, led by Brad Lubman, who along with Carolyn Kuan, served as co-music director for Marin Alsop.

Hearing divergent voices in the same room is both a challenge and a pleasure though it was hard to know at first encounter what Norman and Chapela had up their sleeves.  Were they full-[grown artists or just up and coming ones?  Norman more or less got off the hook with Unstuck (2008) which he said was about his writer's block, or "how can I stitch bits and pieces into a coherent whole"?  It's a tried and true modernist ploy which in the hands of someone like Poulenc, who was accused of being a pasticheur, can sound both surprising and new. but in Norman's was a mostly stop-and-go effort which wanted at once to be a serious endeavor and a romp.  Rambunctious Ives-like material shared the stage with what sounded like send ups of jazz and rock, plus seco or espressivo writing a la Mahler or the New Viennese School.  The dial kept turning but to little avail, though Unstuck worked perfectly well as a curtain raiser which Lubman and company rendered with vigor and point .

Mexican composer Enrico Chapela's electric cello concerto Magnetar (2011), which he wrote for Berlin-based Johannes Moser who premiered it with the LA Philharmonic and played it here, is a horse of a different color, but not quite.  It observes the Baroque-Classical three movement fast-slow-fast with cadenzas, but mostly failed to put new wine into these old bottles.  Chapela's remarks from the stage made me fear that his idea of barely-glimpsed star phenomena was better than his realization could ever hope to be.  Still the interplay between the canned Moser cello which was hooked up to a patch and was all silhouette with its guts out -- is this post-modern life in a nutshell? -- and his live accomplices kept one awake, though it felt like five movements instead of three.  And it didn't help that Chapela found time to diss from the stage yet seemed to glancingly quote three of the best cello concertos in the Western canon: Haydn, Dvorak, and Elgar.  It was brash, bold, and frequently loud, and the massed overtones clotted on the verge of pain.  Philip Glass's Symphony No. 10 (2012) aced the night, not because he's a famous composer, but because simplicity has been the biggest casualty in the modernist wars.

Glass's music however is rarely simple yet always clear, and great composers from Monteverdi to Verdi have written clearly and succinctly, even Brahms and Beethoven, and you could call the latter's Symphony No. 5 minimalist because it's reduced to its bare elemental essentials.  The Glass 10 is equally succinct and its five movements go inevitably from its first to last note.  His trademark syncopations are here, plus his 3+ 2 or 3 and 2 combinations which function as lead or inner voices often disguised.  The music advances logically and with point, its textures growing generally more complex with each successive movement, though there's nothing as extreme as the piercing piccolo tritones in the third and final movement of the composer's massive and more densely scored Symphony No. 9 (2012).  It's virtuosic, superbly orchestrated , and its densities and rhythms both cross and contrary surprise and even startle the ear.  Lubman and his overworked band observed the letter but not the spirit of the work, and his percussion and string sections sometimes seemed to "spell" their parts instead of embedding them into the musical sentence.  It was amusing to hear the audience applaud after movement one, and erupt in cheers after a nanosecond pause at the end, as they did at the Tenth's UK London Proms premiere this summer in a tighter and more convincing reading by Nicholas Collon and his Aurora Symphony.

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.

Einstein on the Beach at 37 / Mark Alburger

In 1973, the Philip Glass Ensemble performed at the Festival d'Autome in Paris, run by Michel Guy, who would later commission Glass's Einstein on the Beach, created with Robert Wilson.

Glass first saw Wilson's work that year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in one of the all-night performances of The Life and Times of Josef Stalin.  In the spring of 1974, the two artists decided to meet every Thursday for lunch, whenever they were both in New York, at an almost deserted, small restaurant on Sullivan Street.  Later they were occasionally joined by Christopher Knowles, a 14-year-old poet with some neurological impairment, who would eventually contribute texts to the project.  Wilson, always interested in famous historical figures, proposed Charlie Chaplin as the major character of a large joint project, or, alternately Adolf Hitler.  Glass countered with Mahatma Gandhi, later the portrait subject of Satyagraha.  It was Wilson's further suggestion of Albert Einstein that provided joint inspiration, as the scientist had been one of the composer's heroes in childhood.

The Wilson title in its original form was Einstein on the Beach on Wall Street, which Glass liked, and was never discussed again.  Somewhere along the line the moniker was shortened, although the composer recalls not when or why.

While neither artist had read the 1956 novel or seen the film, the opera is connected to Nevil Shute's work in an indirect manner.

The libretto was jointly conceived and created by Glass and Wilson, with an overall dramatic shape cast well before the music was written.

Since Einstein had been an amateur violinist, it was Glass's notion that the character should be playing the violin somewhere between the musicians and the group of dancers and singers.  Both artists began, and sometimes ended discussions with the question, "Is Einstein here?"  Sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn't...

Further spoken texts by Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs were incorporated, with the sung libretto of numbers and fixed-do solfege syllables reflecting the composer's study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Einstein on the Beach was written for the Philip Glass Ensemble (three woodwinds [doubling saxophones, flute, and bass clarinet], two electric organs, and one solo soprano voice), solo violin, vocal soloists (soprano [from PGE] and tenor), and chorus (16 voices SATB).  The original Tomato recording featured small (vocal quartet) and large choruses (14 singers) -- a distinction not observed in the 1994 Elektra Nonesuch version.  The "naive" (i.e. non-operatic, non-vibrato) tones of the vocalists were amplified, as were the fresh, raw, sythetic sounds of the instrumentalists.

Glass's work, intended to be the official Bicentennial gift of France to America ("The U.S. . . . sent us a flag.  Can you believe it?  A flag.  And that was that"), was written from spring through fall of 1975, at a rapid Mozartean pace.  The scenes were written in order, with the exception of the connective "Knee Plays", composed at the conclusion.  Most of the music was composed between 1 and 4am in Glass's garage.

Despite the humble studio, Glass and Wilson both had impressive organizational networks, and rehearsals began five-days-a-week, increasing to six as the winter wore on.  The three-hour practices allowed equal intervals for music, dance, and staging.

The four month period barely allowed for the memorization of the almost five-hour work, a duration not revealed to the singers until well into the rehearsal process, for fear of mutiny.  Taking a cue from tablaist Alla Rakha, Glass began each practice at the beginning, reviewing previously learned material, the proceeding incrementally onward.

As in Glass's earlier minimalist works, additive and cyclic structures play central roles, to which are added cadential formulae developed in Another Look at Harmony.

The three main musical/visual references of TRAIN, TRIAL, and SPACESHIP are scattered about rationally among the four acts and five connecting KNEE PLAYS of the opera, each growing and changing.  Two DANCES splayed symmettrically at the beginning of Act II and end of Act III serve as equidistant pillars, with further referential interconnection.

The four-hour forty-minute intermissionless work, beginning even before the arrival of the audience, is an episodic, non-narrative piece.  Indeed, the composer asserted in 1987 that, "after more than fifty performances of Einstein, I have never seen the entire work straight through wihout interruption, though many people constantly assure me that they have, as it were, taken it as a 'whole.'"

After a year of preparation, Einstein on the Beach had its premiere at the Avingon Festival, France, on July 25, 1975, conducted by Michael Riesman, with violinist Bob Brown.  A program note advised that the audience could leave and return at will.

Einstein caused a sensation in its first performances, and subsequent ones in Venice, Belgrade, Brussels, Paris, Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, before the first American performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on November 21, 1976.  Sellout audiences loathed or loved it, and some had sequential reactions.  The Times assigned its theatre critics Clive Barnes and Mel Gusnow to cover the event.

Despite the success du scandale, Glass returned to driving a taxi, as he had during most of the decade thus far.  Shortly after the Met premiere, a society woman got into his cab and, seeing his name and picture displayed (as required by New York law), announced, "Young man, do you realize you have the same name as a very famous composer?"

The artistic collaborators, who bankrolled Einstein, lost about $100,000 on the production.  Later Glass would be able to let other people do the producing, and get a composer's royalty.

Einstein on the Beach was revived in December 1984 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with staging by Harvey Lichtenstein.  As in the premiere, Lucinda Childs, Robert Wilson pupil Sheryl S. Sutton, and Samuel M. Johnson portrayed the primary characters.  Video documentation, which appeared on public television subtitled as The Changing Image of Opera, provided a model for future interpretations, including Achim Freyer's Stuttgart State Opera prodution in 1988 (following the director's 1984 premiere of Akhnaten) in an abstract style, with new spoken texts from the early 20th century, at the Stuttgart State Opera.  This version was also conducted by Michael Riesman.  Freyer also went on to mount all three "portrait" operas (Einstein, Satyagraha, Akhnaten) on three consecutive nights in January of 1990.

A 1992 revival included the participation of Wilson, Glass and Childs at McCarter Theater, Princeton University, and subsequently went to Frankfurt, Melbourne, Barcelona, Madrid, Tokyo, Brooklyn

The team that had organized an abortive New York City Opera production in 2009 put together another effort to remount the work in 2011, and, after a month of rehearsals overseen by Glass, Wilson and Childs, the first performance in 20 years took place on January 20, 2012, in the Power Center, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with two additional performances directly following.

Kate Moran and Helga Davis appeared in the Childs and Sutton roles, and violinist Jennifer Koh played the role of Einstein in the preview and alternated with Antoine Silverman the performances.

The tour schedule followed as:


March 16

Opéra et Orchestre National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, Opera Berlioz Le Corum, Montpellier, France.  Through March 18.


March 24

Teatro Valli, Reggio Emilia, Italy.  Repeated March 25.


May 4

Barbican Theatre, London, United Kingdom.  Through May 13.


June 8

Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity, Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto, CA.  Through June 10.


September 14

Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House, Brooklyn, NY.  Through September 23.  


October 26

Cal Performances University of California, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, CA.  Through October 28


With upcoming performances including:


November 9

The National Institute of Fine Arts, Teatro del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico.  Through November 11.


January 5, 2013

De Nederlandse Opera / The Amsterdam Music Theatre, Het Muziektheater. Amsterdam, Netherlands.  Through January 12


March 8

Hong Kong Arts Festival, Hong Kong Cultural Centre Grand Theatre, Hong Kong, China.  Through March 10


Two recordings have been issued.  The first, Einstein on the Beach, as performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman, with Paul Zukovsky violin (Tomato, 1979), has become somewhat of a collector's item since its reissue by CBS Masterworks / Sony Classical.  Due to the threat of a lawsuit, CBS was obliged to change Robert Palmer's orignal liner notes.  Lucinda Childs, Sheryl Sutton, Paul Mann, and Samuel M. Johnson perform the opera's texts, with Iris Hiskey taking the soprano solo role.  This original recording was held to 160 minutes in order to fit onto four LP's, and utilizes "paired overdubbings," where alternate measures are recorded on alternated tracks and then mixed totether for a continuous sound.  Engineer Kurt Munkacsi and Glass first made use of this technique in Northstar (1977)

The second, Einstein on the Beach, perfomed by the Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman, with Gregory Fulkerson, violin, Elektra-Nonesuch (1993), is a radical departure from the first album's radical departure.  Its duration is 190 minutes, thanks to compact disc technology.  Michael Riesman conducted both recordings.   Childs and Sutton repeated their roles, while Jasper McGruder replaced the late Mr. Johnson's role, and Jeremy Montemarano voiced "The Boy".  Most of the participants in the Nonesuch recording had performed in Einstein on the Beach during its 1992 world tour.

A 77-minute "highlights" CD from the 1984 Brooklyn Academy of Music performances, accompanied by a DVD documentary, was released by Philip Glass's personal label Orange Mountain Music in early September 2012, and a complete recording, 217 minutes long, was released as a download from the iTunes Store.

Chronicle of September 2012

September 4

Cage100. The Stone, New York, NY. "For a composer who was a true rebel, a pioneering American maverick, John Cage was frequently celebrated in programs and festivals at the world’s most prestigious concert halls. The festival, organized as part of a longer series by the composer Miguel Frasconi, opened . . . with a performance of . . . Cheap Imitation, a piece written in 1969 for solo piano, but played here in a new arrangement by Mr. Frasconi for eight toy pianos. . . . With its just-the-basics ambience, the Stone was an ideal place to hear the Noisy Toy Piano Orchestra, an ensemble that includes heroes of New York’s contemporary-music scene like Stephen Gosling and Kathleen Supové, play the gently tinkling sounds of this 40-minute Cage piece" [By Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/6/12].


September 5

100th birthday of John Cage.

New York Chamber Music Festival: John Cage at 1001. Symphony Space, New York, NY. "The . . . concert began with Dawn at Stony Point, New York, a sound recording from 1974 . . . [which] consists of quiet sounds from cars whistling by in the distance, ambient street noise, crickets and chirping birds. 'Everything we do is music,' Cage often said, a central tenet of his philosophy. . . . Four percussionists from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra (Charles Barbour, Robert Knopper, Duncan Patton and Gregory Zuber) sauntered one at a time onto the stage and took a seat on two couches. . . . Then they segued smoothly into Cage’s Living Room Music. This 1940 piece has intricately notated, quite sophisticated rhythmic patterns, played here by the percussionists tapping small sticks on cups, glasses, household objects, magazines, cardboard, whatever. In one section, Story, the players spoke a line from Gertrude Stein ('Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around'), breaking it into rhythmic fragments, repeated words and syllables ('ti ti ti ti'), essentially using Stein as a prototype of rap. The performance was exhilarating and sweet. And the living-room setting was perfect. There was another arresting percussion piece, Third Construction from 1941. And for a performance of Branches (1976), the four Met players were joined by several more percussionists, stationed throughout the hall, including the balconies, to create a 'surround sound' of delicate, restless, rippling percussion music. The program ended with a rare performance of The City Wears a Slouch Hat, a 30-minute radio play from 1942 with a text by Kenneth Patchen, a patchwork of snippets and stories from urban life. The play describes people wandering rainy city streets, ducking under awnings, being held up by robbers and telling tragic personal tales (that may be made up) to strangers. Morris Robinson performed a role called the Voice; Karen Beardsley Peters was Woman; Jon Burklund was Man, MC, Second and Third Voices. The text is full of aural references to street noise, telephones, ocean waves, falling rain and more. Cage backs the text with a varied and rhapsodic score of sound effects, played here by six percussionists. Of special interest was a short work from Cage’s early 20's, when he was exploring his own kind of music for 12 tones: the Sonata for Two Voices (1933), played by the violinist Cornelius Dufallo and the cellist Wendy Sutter. This skittish piece is the work of a young composer grappling with the modernist currents of his time. Yet even writing in this more formal language, Cage’s quirky mind and rhythmic inventiveness come through. The piece suggests another path he might have taken. Thankfully, he found his own way" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/6/12].


September 6

Twelve in 12. Trinity Wall Street, New York, NY. "The season opened . . . with the first in a series of four midday concerts . . . celebrating the Pulitzer Prize-winning composers of the last dozen years. . . . The bookends . . . were half-hour pieces: Steven Stucky’s Sonate en Forme de Préludes, for oboe, French horn and harpsichord, and Paul Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy, for violin, cello, clarinet and piano. The Stucky, despite the seeming formality of its title, reads more like an extended fantasy, and its seven movements are more fancifully titled: Night Music, Jugglers, Fireworks, and the like. The Moravec, on the other hand, with movement titles like Ariel, Prospero, and Fantasia, is more classically scaled and plotted in its five-movement structure. Neither is particularly advanced in idiom. In Mr. Stucky’s sonata the harpsichord (played by Eric Dudley) lays the groundwork, from the tentative, softly rising figures of the opening to the churning Glassian arpeggios of the fireworks finale. The oboe (Christa Robinson) layers on plaintive melodies, with the horn (Kate Sheeran) sounding calls around them. The works in the Trinity series are not the ones that took the prizes, the lone exception being Mr. Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy, which won in 2004. This is indeed a well-wrought creation, heavily influenced by Gershwin in its jazz-leaning harmonies and its plain-spoken lyricism but with a voice of its own. Geoffrey Burleson thrived on a piano part that becomes at times almost concertolike. The third composer, Zhou Long, was represented by Dhyana, a piece half the length of those two but in some ways more eloquent. The title denotes a Buddhist concept, 'cultivation of thought,' and Mr. Long takes his scoring (as many have) from that of Schoenberg’s epochal Pierrot Lunaire . . . . With those instruments Mr. Long often emulates the qualities of Chinese instruments in a colorful work whose pointillistic, mostly nonlinear textures rivet the attention through understatement. Dialoghi, also by Mr. Stucky, is a short piece for solo cello written for Elinor Frey, who spoke about it and played it. Based on conversations between Mr. Stucky and Ms. Frey, it spots variations on a six-note motif derived from the name Elinor through a texture of virtuosic filigree. Before the concert Sleep Talking, from Ornette Coleman’s album Sound Grammar, which won the Pulitzer in 2007, was piped in -- a welcome introduction, with its riffs on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which will be a running theme of the cultural season with the approach of the 100th anniversary of its premiere in May 1913" [James R. Oestreich, The New York Times, 9/6/12].


September 7

Long Beach Opera presents the U.S. premiere of Gavin Bryars's The Paper Nautilus. Long Beach, CA. "By chance, Bryars happens to be a British minimalist composer who performed a complete [Erik Satie] Vexations in London in 1970 with one other pianist, and he credits that with influencing what became his own enthrallingly repetitive, meditative musical style" [Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 9/11/12].

Jacaranda presents Cage 100: Erik Satie's Vexations. Miles Memorial Playhouse, Santa Monica, CA. c. 24 hours through September 8. "When it comes to Erik Satie's Vexations, I have thus far been a grazer. On the several opportunities I have had to experience a performance of the work, which entails repeating the same page of mystically unstable music 840 times, a 24-hour proposition give or take a couple of hours depending upon tempo choices, I have always (perhaps conveniently) had obligations keeping me from a full performance of it. That was the case again for a performance . . . that began [September 7] at 7 and concluded [the next day at] 6:56 p.m. Thirty-two pianists were employed, each occupying the piano bench for about 45 minutes. . . . According to John Cage, who organized the first notable performance of the work in New York in 1963, 70 years after Satie wrote it in Paris, the world is different before and after a performance of Vexations. It teaches you, Cage discovered, the difference between a concept and an experience. A somewhat dazed [director Patrick] Scott confirmed that notion when I asked him about it a few minutes after the final chord sounded, and others in the Vexations endurance club have said as much. Performances are maybe more common than you would imagine. An hour before the Santa Monica one ended, another had begun in Berkeley. We guard our time jealously, but Cage organized the Vexations marathon (12 pianists -- one was John Cale from the Velvet Underground -- played in that early performance and the New York Times sent a tag team of critics, one of whom was drafted to perform) with the alarming proposition that we should not. 'Why are we so stingy,' he asked, 'about time? What, for heaven sakes, is so precious about a half hour, an hour, an hour and a half?' Giving up ownership of time, Cage asserted, opens us to new experience. Satie gives little indication of how Vexations should be played, and the pianists I heard during my three visits were varied. Mark Menzies on [the] morning [of September 8] was very slow and uninflected. Mark Alan Hilt [later in the day] gave a different personality to each repetition, making a drama of the work. But somehow that made little difference. Vexations has the capacity to create the sensation of well-being, the awareness of continuity of time as a physical flowing substance.


September 8

Cage 100: John Cage's The Perilous Night and the first live public performance of The Ten Thousand Things. Santa Monica Bay Woman's Club, Santa Monica, CA. "[This venue is] where the composer had given his first concert in the early '30s. After a talk by Eric Smigel about the process through which Cage began the removal of his ego from his music, Aron Kallay performed The Perilous Night for prepared piano, a 1944 work of roiling expression written during the dark war years and when Cage's marriage was coming unraveled. . . . The Ten Thousand Things [consists of f]ive solo pieces with impossible time lengths as titles (such as 26'1.1449" for a string player) are written in graphic notation meant to keep performers open to the possibility of new discoveries. Cage allows for performing all simultaneously, which apparently had never been done before live (they've been recorded), although a short one 59½" for a string player) fell through the cracks. The performers -- pianists Vicki Ray and Kallay, bassist Tom Peters, percussionist William Winant and reciter John Schneider were exquisite. Every sound sounded considered, alive, worthy of our wonder.


September 9

Cage 100. John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes. Annenberg Community Beach House, Santa Monica, CA. Adam Tendler presented Cage's hour-long [masterpiece] for prepared piano . . . . He wrote the Sonatas and Interludes in the late '40s at the time he discovered a manuscript of the neglected Vexations and began in this luminous score the process of stripping predetermined expression from his music in the search for tranquillity. An exuberantly expressive pianist, Tendler vividly displayed his enthusiasm for every phrase by attempting to stop and start time at will" [Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 9/11/12].


September 10

Composer-harpist Zeena Parkins's Spellbeamed: Fixexploded; Fixabolished, with the JACK Quartet and members of the Ne(x)tworks Ensemble. Roulette, New York, NY. "Parkins said that she had long had the recurring image of her harp as a patient. So . . . [she] treated the instrument as exactly that. A harp lay on its side on a table. Wearing surgical gloves and acting, the program said, as the 'guide,' Ms. Parkins handed various implements -- from a bundle of horsehair to a glass shard -- to Shayna Dunkelman, the 'researcher,' who used them on the harp, eliciting a variety of sounds alternately harsh, whispery and liquid. All the while the veteran vocalist Joan La Barbara read from Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin’s classic essay about collecting books, her voice distorted and deepened to the point of unintelligibility. Even after this opening sequence ended, Benjamin remained the spirit overlooking Spellbeamed, which shared a central concern of his work: the challenges and possibilities of translation. As Ms. Parkins said during the question-and-answer session, if traditional notated music arises from assigning meaning to 'dots on five lines,' why not see if, and how, it could arise from other things? So she asked the players to respond to objects and projected images, to transcribe spoken descriptions of objects and then, somehow, perform those written texts as a score. Spellbeamed, though intricately planned, felt refreshingly spontaneous, with exciting tension between the notated passages and the improvised ones (To the credit of the conductor, Ted Hearne, it flowed smoothly between the two). As disarmingly everyday images -- an old box of paper clips, a shoe, a bus -- passed by on a screen, Ms. La Barbara responded with her classic sounds: keens, creaks and warbles. She was joined by Ms. Parkins and Shelley Burgon on two harps and Christopher McIntyre on trombone in almost mystical growls. While the opening of Spellbeamed made it very literal, treating the harp as an object of experimentation is nothing new for Ms. Parkins, part of a generation of performers who exposed new horizons for the instrument far beyond its genteel reputation. Bringing in amplification and electronic effects, she made the harp shriek, hiss and dissolve in reverb. The sound world of the new work was attractive but less revolutionary: a noirish mix of sometimes Wagnerian sweep (with beef provided by Mr. McIntyre’s trombone) and dissonant spikiness, with memorable moments of nearly silent murmurs in the strings. Its conceptual underpinnings were the more intriguing aspect, an apt tribute, so close to the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth, to his similar broadenings of what a score can mean" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 9/12/12].


September 11

Erik Jekabson String-tet in Anti-Mass. Freight and Salvage, Berkeley, CA.

Los Angeles Philharmonic in George Gershwin's Cuban Overture, Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait and Billy the Kid Suite, music from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (arranged by David Newman). Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA. "Billy the Kid provided surprising context to the evening. Copland celebrates the American spirit but also uses the Wild West as a lens through which to examine the complexities of patriotism. He makes the celebration of Billy's killing both entertaining and unsettling. Copland reveals how Billy and Lincoln, one operating outside of the law and one trying to make law, embodied something essentially American. They both died at the hands of those who disapproved of what they stood for" [Mark Swed, The New York Times, 9/12/12].

American Contempoary Music Ensemble in Steve Reich's Different Trains, Triple Quartet, and WTC 9/11 (2010). Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY. "In it, as in an earlier watershed string quartet, Different Trains (1988), Mr. Reich bases his melodies on recorded voices: here, those of Norad air traffic controllers and New York firefighters caught during the attacks; of friends and family members recalling being near the World Trade Center that morning; and of volunteers who sat with the remains, observing the Jewish ritual of shmira. The piece is intensely personal: Mr. Reich had an apartment just blocks from ground zero. Out of town on the morning of the attacks, he was in contact with his son’s family in the apartment. The confusion, agony and unresolved questions in the piece bear witness in startling, uncomfortable ways. For some listeners, including me, the piece is nearly unbearable. . . . [A] couple seated near me exited abruptly midway through the work, never to return. Mr. Reich composed WTC 9/11, like Different Trains and his Triple Quartet (1998), for the Kronos Quartet, which has performed the works together in a single concert. ACME played all three pieces in chronological sequence for its concert, which was broadcast live on the Internet by NPR Classical and the Web-radio station Q2. NPR has posted a recording of the concert. The approach proved illuminating, not least for providing a view of WTC 9/11 not predicated exclusively on horror and anguish. Hearing the piece after its precursors, you could discern how it refined and extended the speech-melody technique Mr. Reich first used in Different Trains, and how its grating dissonances and keening melodies resembled those of Mr. Reich’s abstract Triple Quartet. At the work’s end a portentous silence filled the room for long moments before rapt applause ensued. Four ACME members -- Caroline Shaw and Ben Russell, violinists; Nadia Sirota, violist; Clarice Jensen, cellist -- opened the concert with a superb account of Different Trains. In the Triple Quartet and WTC 9/11 the same four players remained the center of attention as others played lines usually provided by a recorded accompaniment. Mostly the additional players maintained supporting roles, thickening harmonies and providing propulsive rhythms, as the primary quartet handled melodies. But here too were moments of fresh perspective, as when Anna Elashvili, a violinist, elegantly echoed lines played by Ms. Shaw during the middle movement of the Triple Quartet. The conductor Donato Cabrera coordinated ensemble performances efficiently, and Richie Clarke, a sound engineer, maintained lucid balances throughout" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 9/12/12].


September 14

Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach. Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, NY. "Some works of art become mythical, either because they are so important or because few people actually know them. Einstein on the Beach, the . . . intermissionless four-and-a-half-hour opera by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, qualifies on both counts. . . . Questions abound: Will a classic from the past, especially one full of timebound pop-culture references, look dated today? Will its eccentricities of pacing and form seem more or less convincing than they once were? And for those of us who loved the work in its previous incarnations, to what extent will these recast Brooklyn performances test the strength of our nostalgia? Even the creators and some of the performers have been newly encountering the work since preparations for the current tour began late last year. Mr. Glass and the choreographer Lucinda Childs, another key collaborator, had never actually seen the piece before, since both previously performed in it. Einstein on the Beach represents the apex of the early work of Mr. Glass and Mr. Wilson, and it played a crucial role in their careers. Mr. Glass has become perhaps the most prolific and popular of all contemporary composers, with a particular passion for opera; the success of Einstein led European impresarios to commission him to write operas as the term is more conventionally understood, starting with Satyagraha in the Netherlands in 1979. Mr. Wilson was already beginning to transcend SoHo amateurism. Einstein sealed his transition into a world-wandering director and designer who would mix riveting original works with highly stylized, controversial -- but, in many quarters, much admired -- stagings of classic operas and plays (On the side Mr. Wilson acts, designs furniture, makes remarkable video art, collects artifacts from all over the world and oversees his ever more ambitious Watermill Center on Long Island). Beyond the careers of its creators, Einstein was perhaps the proudest product of the extraordinary Lower Manhattan performing-arts scene in the 1970s. Its dreamy, painterly beauty; its mystical longueurs; its hypnotic music; its allusions to the brilliance and danger of Einstein’s work without ever quite stooping to the mere telling of a story: all spoke to a generation that still exerts a powerful hold on American, and global, vanguard arts. Einstein was called an opera because Mr. Wilson liked to call all his big pieces (The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, Deafman Glance, and others) operas. It was scored not for an orchestra but for the Philip Glass Ensemble [and] chorus . . . [A] passel of SoHo artist-denizens both sang and danced, the singers dancing roughly and the dancers singing roughly. . . . [Lucinda] Childs and Sheryl Sutton and a few others told elliptical stories and acted out slow-motion tableaus (Patty Hearst holding her rifle, the young Einstein and his wife on a train’s caboose platform). That it didn’t mean anything, or so it seemed, infuriated some people (the critic John Simon dismissed Mr. Wilson’s previous work as a gay pothead bad joke) and thrilled others. At a news conference in Avignon, France, where Einstein was first performed, Mr. Wilson answered questions with bird squawks. Einstein was commissioned by Michel Guy and the Avignon Festival and had its first five performances there. It went on a wildly admired six-city European tour and washed ashore in America on November 22 and 29 at a sold-out Metropolitan Opera House. This was hardly because the Met was foresighted enough to present it. It merely deigned to rent the house on two Sunday nights when it would otherwise have been dark. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Glass gained prestige (or notoriety) but lost a cataclysmic amount of money. Mr. Wilson went deep into debt, and Mr. Glass was back driving a cab soon after taking his curtain calls at the Met. In 1984 Harvey Lichtenstein and the Brooklyn Academy produced a revival. It was meant to tour but never did. There was another revival in 1992, again in Brooklyn, and this time in six European cities but nowhere else in the United States. Linda Brumbach, who manages Mr. Glass, finally put together an ambitious itinerary for 2012. The tour was cast and initially rehearsed at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan, then had full-stage rehearsals and three preview performances in Ann Arbor, Mich., early this year. The tour proper began in Montpellier, France, in March and proceeded to Reggio Emilia, Italy; London; and Toronto. After Brooklyn come Berkeley, Calif.; Mexico City; Amsterdam; and Hong Kong. There is talk of extending performances, maybe even into 2014, with cities like Melbourne, Australia; Los Angeles; Buenos Aires; and São Paulo, Brazil, under discussion, and perhaps Bahrain, Berlin and Paris. Mr. Wilson is sentimental about the original French commission and would love for the final performances to be at the Bastille Opera. But adding new cities is expensive. The touring company numbers 65. So how is Einstein the same, how is it different and how does it hold up? No effort has been made to update the piece; there are still plentiful references to events (the Hearst trial) and pop culture of the mid-70s. But Mr. Wilson thinks it still works well. 'I’ve been curious myself as to why it does,' he said recently. 'One reason is that the bones are good, the structure is good.' (Mr. Wilson is fond of skeletal metaphors; he has always called his entr’actes knee plays.) For him the alternation of lively and meditative, slow and fast scenes provides a proper sequence of contrasts. For those of us steeped in Lower Manhattan performing arts of the ’70s, Einstein represented in part a grand (and it turned out, more or less final) flowering of the warmly human collegiality of that time and place. Of course there were tensions and rivalries. I can still remember the squabbles over who got credit for what. But mostly the 1976 Einstein cast was an assembly of artists, skilled in some things and amateurish in others, but with a kind of venturesome summer-camp atmosphere prevailing during the rehearsals and performances in Avignon. None of those in it knew what it was, but they began to realize soon enough that it was great. 'The first company was like the Living Theater or the Open Theater,' Mr. Glass said. 'No one had any money, but we did have that communal feeling. The theater spilled over into our personal lives. Life and art mixed together. Bob and I were just two guys in our 30/s. Later that went away. It would be surprising if those feelings were still there. This new cast feels almost honored to be in this piece.' What happened in 1984, 1992 and now 2012 has been a gradual professionalization of the company and a widening age difference between the creators and the performers. In 1984 Ms. Childs took over the choreography of the two long Field Dances from Andrew deGroat. Mr. Glass insisted on a separation of singers and dancers to get better singers, which meant a separate group of better dancers. According to both Mr. Glass and Mr. Wilson, Mr. deGroat was accustomed to the more natural, variably trained dancers of the original cast. Ms. Childs could stretch the capacities of more trained dancers, and her formal, almost intellectualized choreography seemed to suit the music and the imagery better" [John Rockwell, The New York Times, 8/31/12].


September 29

New York Philharmonic, conducted by Alan Gilbert, with Daniil Trifonov, in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3.  Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY.  Repeated October 2.  "[T]here were certainly no awkward moments during the terrific performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 . . . .  A slender man with an exuberant stage presence, Mr. Trifonov is certainly a virtuoso with a demonstrably prizewinning technique, evident as he fluidly sailed through bravura passages, his fingers moving in a blur through rapid octaves and chords. But he offered far more than mere virtuosity, which is now common among young pianists showing ever more dazzling technique. Mr. Trifonov demonstrated an elegant touch and witty grace in more lighthearted moments and poetic insight in more introspective passages.  After this concerto’s New York premiere in 1922, Prokofiev lamented that American audiences did not appreciate the piece, though he would surely be gratified to see its popularity almost a century later" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 10/1/12].