Not Shy and Retiring Review / Erik Wilson

April 14th marked a day for musical greatness, as Not Shy and Retiring: Mark Alburger's 55th and Friends was held at the Community Music Center in San Francisco. None can argue that having so many accomplished musicians perform in a single night isn't extraordinary. The first performance of the night was a great one. Sarita Cannon sang Samuel Barber's Sure on this Shining Night. This was certainly a wise opening gambit in musical beauty. Next was Ann Calloway's Vladimir in Butterfly Country. With the composer at the piano, bass Richard Mix offered great yet equally compelling contrast, and the story behind the song proved surprisingly engaging.

More great soprano singing followed with Annemarie Ballinger in Craig Cornelia's Flight and Kurt Weill's Stay Well. Then the instrumental ante was upped in Steven Greenman's In torbe funem vind (In the Sack of the Wind), as Darren Sagawa offered excellence in his violin, along with pianist Alla Gladysheva, and soprano Heather Klein. Oboe-d'amorist-composer Gary Friedman displayed more instrumental variety in his Three Happy Oboists, where he was joined by Thea Davidson and Moria Little, the latter on English horn. The otherwise unaccompanied double-reed sounds grew weary to the ear, however, and individual movements were additionally arguably cliched. Despite all this, the instrumentalists did their best in performing these rhythmically complex pieces.

Pianist Mikako Endo performed Alden Jenks's Unrestful Sleep and provided redeemed interest to the recital. The music was expertly realized, despite the fact that this was possibly the most difficult work presented. Next, John McGrew's Three Haiku Songs took the stage. While soprano Maria Mikheyenko was definitely in the spotlight, it was still noteworthy and impressive that presenter Mark Alburger was revealed an oboist as well, further proving the expansiveness of his musicianship. Pianist-composer Helena Michelson was next up to demonstrate her musical prowess in The Game. After this, Sheli Nan's Saga: I Want a Man on a Motorcycle turned out to be the first theatrical presentation of the night (unusually late in the game, considering Goat Hall's reputation as a music-theatre organization). While the story behind the theatrics was interesting, and Nan obviously has a deep artistic mind, it was a little strange to hear such conventional music being mixed with contemporary themes.

The anticipation was put to rest when the man of the hour, Alburger, went on stage for the performances of his most recent compositions. The first "Novel" of The Decameron was performed with soprano Cannon, bass Wayne Wong, and Alburger singing tenor. This piece was the most unique of the entire presentation. With interesting words and back story, what instantly grabbed the listeners' interest were the tremendous tempo changes. Breakneck speeds are commonly risky, yet Alburger certainly made them work. Triple Concerto for Bassoon, Contrabassoon, and Harp ("Family") topped all as the best performance of the evening. Despite the fact that Alburger is wont to deprecate his piano playing, he is actually quite talented in this arena as well. A most arresting aspect of the work was harpist Samantha Garvey's command of her instrument, in counterpoint to the expert playing of her parents, bassoonist Michael and contrabassoonist Lori. With only the quartet of players, one looks forward to the complete orchestral performance of this piece in June with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. Without a doubt, Mark Alburger's 55th and Friends was an impressive and influential series of performances.

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.

John Cage Centenary Percussion / Mark Alburger

All life is about arbitrariness and intention, as John Cage's life in music clearly shows. In this year, marking the hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth, Cage celebrations have been arbitrarily popping up around the country and the world, and one at San Francisco's Community Music Center, on April 29, made clear the joys of taking in events -- sonic and otherwise -- as they unfold.

The joint concert, presented by Daniel Kennedy's Sacramento [State University] Percussion Group and Chris Froh's Percussion Group [U.C.] Davis, offered an overview of Cage's percussive output from 1933 through 77, in a series of committed performances that brought humor, profundity, and virtuosity to the fore.

The oldest work, Sonata for Two Voices, refers to a "two-lined" texture, and was here renditioned by the Noyce Duo of Boyce Jeffries and Nick Micheels on marimba and vibraphone. Its three classically-styled movements of Sonata, Fugato, and Rondo leave a double-edge take-home message of clarity and obscurity.

Living Room Music (1940) is a personal favorite, the second movement of which has been performed by this writer many times over the years. The score calls for a quartet of unspecified household instruments, in this performance updated to include a plastic 100-CD stack container, as well as a more "period-accurate" old TV set. Sacramento performers Phylicia Morris, Dannie Styles, Isaiah Abdul-Rahman, and the director set up a schtick of ordering pizza on a cellphone and then launched into "To Begin" in an arresting array of exciting rhythms. "Story", a spoken collage in the spirit of Ernst Toch's Geographical Fugue (1930), manifests a very classicist sentiment, despite its hilarious content, in its wealth of variety in contradistinction to its economy of means (everything based on Gertrude Stein's line "Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around"). The third movement, calling for one of the players on a single-line melody instrument, was here realized on grand piano, with the other performers banging away on the lid. The fourth section was a ternary reflection of the first.

Credo in US (1942), as well as Living Room, are both big enough deals to merit their own articles on Wikipedia. And rightly so. Credo is another romp, with amazing syncopations and sonics derived from tin cans, muted gongs, buzzers, tom-toms, a minimally prepared piano (just hands dampening the strings), radio, and record player -- all wildly delivered here by Kevin's Barr and Sakamoto, Victor Nava, and Lien Do of UC Davis. While records are cued to the other musics in terms of attack-and-release, the content is not specified beyond Cageian suggestions of "Dvorak, Beethoven, Sibelius, or Shostakovich." The only found music that could be made out in this performance was a very funny opening usage of the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde. Wagner was and is spinning...

Amores and She Is Asleep (performed by Andy Davidson, Ian Marci, and others) are both from 1943, and continue to demonstrate that Cage, at least in his early years, knew how to write music and certainly knew what he was doing. The works of the 1950's and beyond have left detractors to believe, not so much so.

But there is much to love. Radio Music (1956), is, along with the more famous Imaginary Landscape No. 4, indeed for radios, but in this case 8 soloists, rather than the 24 duettists sharing 12 machines. For the Community Music Center, the combined group of Sacramento-Davis performers (Serrena Carlucci, Breanna Hale, Ian Marci, Scott McAuliffe, Kaity Roblyer, Danny Zagunis, Morris, and Styles) took on another Cage idea of "sound-sculpture" and walked solemnly around the audience with their boomboxes. The result was one of profound sadness, with most of the stations tuned to various statics (frequencies and durations all pre-determined by the composer), and various random sonic ejecta of popular music floating on the surface.

Possibly least convincing is Child of Tree (1975), for ten plant materials, determined by chance operations, with the exception that one of the instruments should be a pod (rattle) from a Mexican poinciana. Jonathan Raman gave it his all in execution, however, demonstrating that, once again, variety can come from an economy of means. Great tingling sounds from the cactus, for instance.

But Telephones and Birds (1977) is another found masterpiece. Three performers (Hale, Zagunis, and McAuliffe) sit at an electronics-strewn table (a typical Cage conceit) and roll I-Ching sticks, which determine what telephone numbers to call to hear amplified "bird-lover alerts" throughout America (and perhaps the world). Didn't even know there were "rare-bird hotlines", but we heard them in interesting and alarming overlaps.

It was an evening of revelation -- as is so often the case with Cage -- in sound and psychology.

Chronicle of April 2012

April 2

Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival: James Joyce and Tendrils of ’30s Swing. Symphony Space, New York, NY. Programs through April 30. "The composer Victoria Bond has never been afraid to experiment with unusual combinations, musical and otherwise, in her Cutting Edge Concerts. The series, now in its 15th season, used to bring together musicians and representatives of other disciplines -- chefs or architects, for example -- in the hope of finding some sort of philosophical common ground. . . . The series, which includes five weekly concerts in the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater at Symphony Space, has traditionally focused on contemporary classical music in conventional styles. But this year’s prospectus includes flirtations with indie-classical hybrids. At the opening installment on Monday evening, the first half of the program was devoted to unalloyed jazz, with works by Daniel Jamieson and Jim McNeely, performed by Mr. Jamieson’s Danjam Orchestra, a modern version of a big band, with a heavy complement of woodwinds and brasses, as well as electric guitar, piano, bass, drums and a vocalist who mostly doubled some of the instrumental lines. The jazz composers were represented by two scores each: A Desperate Act and Phantasm, by Mr. Jamieson, and two pieces inspired by Paul Klee paintings, Der Seiltänzer (The Tightrope Walker) and Tod und Feuer (Death and Fire), by Mr. McNeely. Their styles were not radically different, perhaps because Mr. Jamieson studied with Mr. McNeely. They share an approach to harmony and color, and their music sounds rooted in 1930s swing, with touches of the chromaticism, deliberately loose intonation and melodic angularity of later incarnations of jazz. The second half of the program began with Ms. Bond’s Leopold Bloom’s Homecoming, an inventive amplification of a passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses, for tenor and piano. Joyce’s writing -- and Ulysses, particularly -- has yielded reams of music over the last few decades, most notably the lush settings of Stephen Albert. Ms. Bond’s score is spare and direct: the questions asked of Bloom, about how he spent his day, are spoken rather than sung, and Bloom’s musings are alternately lyrical and introspective, depending on Joyce’s wide-ranging imagery. Rufus Müller, the tenor, projected it with clarity, spirit and a warm, enveloping tone, and Jenny Lin gave a graceful account of the vital piano writing. N. Lincoln Hanks’s energetic four-movement Monstre Sacré closed the program. The sacred monster of the title, Mr. Hanks explained, describes musicians whose peculiarities and social lapses we tolerate for the sake of their artistry. The only one he identified in his comments was the pianist Glenn Gould, which explains the passing references to Bach’s English and French suites, but not those to Gershwin, Prokofiev and other composers who flit through the piece). The success of Mr. Hanks’s work was that it offered you enough purely musical twists that you stopped wondering which monsters he had in mind" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 4/3/12].



April 8

Anna Caterina Antonacci. Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "Antonacci alternated . . . Fauré works with song sets by Reynaldo Hahn, the Venezuelan-born French composer, including selections from Venezia, settings of poems in Venetian dialect. In Hahn’s song La Barcheta (The Little Boat), a man with love on his mind ushers the becoming Nineta onto a boat in the moonlight. Each verse ends with a yearning 'Ah!' As sung by Ms. Antonacci, these expressions were not milked for effect but seemed to be the subdued sounds of internalized desire seeping out. . . . [She] end[ed with] a solemnly beautiful performance of Licinio Refice’s 1935 song Ombra di Nube" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 4/9/12].


April 10

Michael Brown performs his Constellations and Toccata and George Perle's Classic Suite. Weill Recital Hall, New York, NY. 'George Perle’s Classic Suite (1938), is actually an old work that Mr. Brown and Shirley Perle, the composer’s widow, recently discovered in a box of unpublished manuscripts. Cast in the rhythms of Baroque dances (an Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Gavotte and Gigue) but couched in a mildly dissonant harmonic language, the suite is a lively dialogue between eras, with a touch of the lyricism that would distinguish Perle’s later music. Mr. Brown played it with energy and clarity, qualities he also applied to his own rugged Constellations and Toccata (2012), a work with a spare, atmospheric opening movement that gives way to a sizzling perpetual-motion finale. He read both works from an iPad, and he is repeating his own piece at his next recital" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 4/11/12].


April 14

Fresh Voices XII: Not Shy and Retiring -- Mark Alburger's 55th and Friends, a benefit for Goat Hall Productions and San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. Mark Alburger's The Decameron, Triple Concerto, and Psalm 92, Samuel Barber's Sure on This Shining Night, Ann Callaway's Vladimir in the Country, Chris Corniela's Flight, Gary Friedman's Three Happy Oboists, John McGrew's Three Haiku, Sheli Nan's Saga, and music of Lisa Scola Prosek and Kurt Weill. Community Music Center, San Francisco, CA.

Tod Machover's Remembering H.M. Cambridge, MA. Through May 13.

April 29

John Cage Centenary Percussion. Community Music Center, San Francisco, CA

Recordings

Zack Browning. Secret Pulse. Innova.

Jennifer Higdon, Andrea Clearfield, James Primosch. Metamorphosis. Innova.

Edge Study. Bruce Friedman, Trumpet; Motoko Hondo, Keyboard Synthesizer. Analog Arts.

Ethel. Heavy. Innova.

Forward Energy. The Awakening. Jazz on the Line.

Jeremy Haladyna. Music from the Mayan Cycle. Innova.

Steve Heitzig, Lori Laitman. Wild Songs. Polly Butler Cornelius, Soprano. Innova.

Erdem Helvacicolu. Eleven Short Stories. Innova.

Howl. James Roman, Saxophone; Nicholas Roth, Piano; Mark Engebretson, Computer. Innova.

Ilkilk. Grampus. pfMentum.

Kevin Kastning, Carl Clements. Dreaming As I Knew. Greydisc.

David Keberli. Caught in Time. Innova.

Dylan Mattingly. Stream of Stars. Contemporaneous. Innova.

Nick Vasallo. Monuments Emerge. Innova.

Volti. House of Voices. Innova.

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / May 2012

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC


May 2012

Volume 19, Number 5


Going It Alone by Going It Together / Mark Alburger

Chronicle of March 2012

Illustration / Bill Frisell


Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
CORRESPONDENTS


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Going It Alone by Going It Together / Mark Alburger

When Harry Partch felt drawn to microtonality, he pretty much had to go it alone, by inventing his own musical instruments. But he enlisted the help of many others in bringing his artistic vision to light.

So the legacy continues in the early 21st-century, with two San Francisco Bay Area composers of international importance, heard over the last several weeks -- Tom Nunn (February 17) and Erling Wold (March 22) -- who have forged their own sound worlds independently, through the welcome collaboration of many.

Nunn's is the closer analog, as one of the direct aesthetic descendents of Partch, continuing the tradition of instrument-building. A retrospective, organized by consumate musicians David Michalak and Rent Romus (the latter of Edgetone Records), at San Francisco Community Music Center, found the composer in the company of his exotic-looking and named sonic creations, including the Crab, Sonoglyph, T-Rodimba, Skatchboxes, and Lukie Tubes -- which produced live hit-and-scraped sounds from such material as cardboard, metal, and plastic electronically amplified.

In the spirit of community, all the works on the program featured the expert collaboration of the improvising composer with others of his aesthetic ilk, including Bart Hopkins (on Fingerbars and Moe), pianist-composer Allan Crossman (whose intriguing Sonoglyph-concerto Plasticity, premiered by the San Francisco Composer Chamber Orchestra, was heard hear in a piano reduction), and "blues-brothers" Mike and Gary Knowlton. Most of Nunn's collaborators, such as vocalists Ron Heglin and Aurora Josephson, cellist Doug Carrol, percussionist Karen Stackpole, and saxophonist John Ingle took off from where John Cage and free jazz provided springboards, in music that was ephervescent and free, ranging from the hilarious to the solemn.


The celebratory in the serious was also an informing principal in Erling Wold's Certitude and Joy, premiered on March 22 at South of Market's Bindlestiff Studio, through April 1. And while Wold also originally garnered attention with his early microtonality, his music since at least the mid-nineties has evolved post-minimally in the spirit of Philip Glass and John Adams, to encompass an energetic and gorgeous sound world of arch rhythms (how about a time signature of 15/8 with 20 syncopated dotted-16th notes?) and sinuous recitatives. Wold is at heart another do-it-yourselfer: composing and writing his libretto (the latter arguably a first for him here), self-producing (with the interesting assistance of Paul Dresher), and for this piece even appearing as actor, dancer, and singer.

But what a wealth of further talent he has assembled here, with actors Bob Ernst (portraying "Erling Wold") and and Talya Patrick (the focus of dramatic attention), dancers Kerry Mehling (who also served as the amazing choreographer) and the suprisingly-lithe Travis Santell Rowland, beautiful and powerful singers Laura Bohn and Jo Vincent Parks, and the dexterous and wizardly piano duo Zofo (Eva-Marie Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi) -- all wonderously under the direction of Jim Cave.

And the story: a dangerous, sensitive, and sympathetic mixture of the Abraham's Sacrifice story (also a focus for Benjamin Britten's War Requiem and the current author's Sex and the Bible), the Crucifixion, and Oakland's LaShaun Harris, who threw her three young sons into San Francisco Bay in 2005. A tour-de-force all around, with perhaps Wold's loveliest vocal melodies and comparatively clearest storyline of his chamber operatic career.