Calendar for January 2013

January 4

Pianists Jerry Kuderna and Suzanne Bradbury, and counter-tenor Don Krim, present Claude Debussy's Preludes, Maurice Ravel's Alborada del Gracioso, Carlos Guastavino's La Rosa y el Sauce, and Peter Lieberson's Five Pablo Neruda Songs.  Berkeley Arts Festival, Berkeley, CA.


January 5

Squonk Duo and the Hurd Ensemble.  Lost Church, San Francisco, CA.


January 6

Guy Barash (Laptop and electronics), Daniel Davidovsky (Electronics), Ilia Silzov (Guitars), Yakir Sasson (Saxophones, Percussion and Toys).  Barbur Gallery, Jerusalem, Israel.


January 11

Joan Jeanrenaud's Your Body Is Not a Shark.  ODC Theater, San Francisco, CA.

David T. Little's Soldier Songs.  Michael Schimmer Center for the Arts, New York, NY.
       


January 12

Chris Forsythe, Blood Wedding, and the Heule/Shelton/Wick Trio.  Berkeley Arts Festival, Berkeley, CA.


January 13

Fortnightly Music Club.  George Gershwin's Three Preludes, and Maurice Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuitand Sonata for Violin and Cello.  Lucie Stern Community Center, Palo Alto, CA.


January 16

Josh Allen, solo tenor saxophone and Deconstruction Orchestra.  Berkeley Arts Festival, Berkeley, CA.


January 19

Pianist Sarah Cahill.  Berkeley Arts Festival, Berkeley, CA.


January 20

Pianist Greg Goodman and the Cremaschi/Goodheart/Ingalls Trio.  Berkeley Arts Festival, Berkeley, CA.


January 23

Dirtier: Bloom Project, saxophonist Rent Romus and pianist Thollem McDonas.  Berkeley Arts Festival, Berkeley, CA.


January 26

Opus 1: A multi-media event including Claude Debussy's Symphonie (1880), Arnold Schoenberg's Two Songs, Op. 1 (1898), Bela Bartok's Rhapsody for Piano, Op. 1 (1904), Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in Eb, Op. 1 (1907), Anton Webern's  Passacaglia, Op. 1 (1908), Alban Berg's Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1909), Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 1 (1909), Dmitri Shostakovich's Scherzo in F-Sharp Minor for Orchestra, Op. 1 (1919), Alan Hovhaness's Oror, Op. 1 (1926), and Mark Alburger's Psalm 6, Op. 1 (1975).  Berkeley Arts Festival, Berkeley, CA.


January 31

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presents Cool Music -- Clear Water: George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae,  Toru Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea, and water-themed selections from Debussy’s Images, along with world premieres by Eun Young Lee, Jen Wang, and Ramteen Sazegari.  Throckmorton Theatre, Mill Valley, CA.

Chronicle of November 2012

November 2

American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, Society for Music Theory joint conference, with Oxford University Press and Grove Music Online.  Sheraton, New Orleans, LA.

November 4

Two Centuries of Music in Brooklyn.  S. Stevan Dweck Center for Contemporary Culture
, Brooklyn Public Library Central Library
, New York, NY.


November 5

Death of Elliott [Cook] Carter [Jr.] (12/11/1908, New York, NY), at 103.  New York, NY.  "[He] had continued to compose into his 11th decade, completing his last piece in August [2013]. . . .  Carter died in his Greenwich Village apartment, which he and his wife bought in 1945 and where he had lived ever since.  Mr. Carter’s music, which brought him dozens of awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, could seem harmonically brash and melodically sharp-edged . . .  And though complexity and structural logic were hallmarks of his works, the music he composed in the decade leading up to his widely celebrated centenary, in 2008, was often more lyrical . . .  Carter, a protégé of the American modernist Charles Ives, acknowledged that his works could seem incomprehensible to listeners who were not grounded in the developments of 20th-century music. . . . Yet he had many advocates among players, and his works were frequently performed and recorded.  'As a young man, I harbored the populist idea of writing for the public,' he once explained to an interviewer who asked him why he had chosen to write such difficult music. 'I learned that the public didn’t care. So I decided to write for myself. Since then, people have gotten interested.'  Mr. Carter never lacked for commissions from major orchestras, soloists and chamber groups, and late in life he was able to impose conditions on those who sought his works. He refused to be held to deadlines, saying he would release his compositions when he felt they were ready. And for many years he would not accept commissions from orchestras that had not played his earlier music. . . .  In the mid-1980s, he observed that hardly a year went by without at least one New York performance of his Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano With Two Chamber Orchestras (1961).  His Cello Sonata (1948) . . . Piano Sonata (1946) and Night Fantasies (1980) are performed regularly and have been recorded several times.  Mr. Carter continued to explore new ground into his later years. He avoided opera for most of his career because, as he put it in 1978, 'American opera is a novelty, to be played once and that’s all, even when they’re good pieces,' and because he doubted he could find a libretto that interested him. Yet when he was 90 he completed his first opera, What Next?  The opera, with a Dadaistic libretto by Paul Griffiths, a former music critic for The New York Times, had its premiere in 1999 at the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden, with Daniel Barenboim conducting. It had its American premiere in a concert version at Symphony Center in Chicago in 2000 and its first staged performance in the United States at Tanglewood in 2006 — an event filmed and released on DVD.  As Mr. Carter’s centenary neared, the frequency with which his music could be heard only increased, making it clear that for at least two generations of young performers, even his thorniest works held little terror. In the summer of 2008, for example, the entire Festival of Contemporary Music at the Tanglewood Music Center was devoted to Mr. Carter’s work, with performances of dozens of pieces from every stage of his career (including several premieres). Mr. Carter attended most of the concerts. There were many such tributes that year, and the attention unnerved him, he said.  'It’s a little bit frightening, because I’m not used to being appreciated,' he said in an onstage interview at Zankel Hall the night after a celebration with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 'So when I am, I think I’ve made a mistake.'  Despite his years, he remained vital almost until the end. His last composition, 12 Short Epigrams, a piano work for Pierre-Laurent Aimard, was completed on August 13.  Another piece, Instances, for Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony (commissioned with the Tanglewood Music Center), was completed in April.  In June, the New York Philharmonic performed the premiere of Two Controversies and a Conversation.  'The applause for Mr. Carter, wheelchair bound but characteristically animated, [Steve] Smith wrote, 'resounded thunderously.'  . . . Carter . . . was . . . the son of a wealthy lace importer.  While . . . a student at the Horace Mann School, he wrote an admiring letter to Ives . . . who . . . responded and urged him to pursue his interest in music. When Mr. Carter attended Harvard, starting in 1927, Ives took him under his wing and made sure he went to the Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts conducted by Serge Koussevitzky, who programmed contemporary works frequently.  At Harvard, Mr. Carter completed a bachelor’s degree in English before deciding to study composition seriously.  He studied with a group of celebrated teachers, including Walter Piston, Edward Burlingame Hill and Gustav Holst.  He also received advice from Ives, although their friendship cooled after Mr. Carter made the mistake of showing Ives some compositions he had written in a neo-Classical style.  In 1932, after completing his master’s degree, Mr. Carter went to Paris for three years of study with Nadia Boulanger, both privately and at the École Normale de Musique. While in Paris in 1933, he was commissioned to write incidental music for a production of Sophocles’s Philoctetes at the Harvard Classical Club.  The work was his first to be performed in public.  Mr. Carter returned to the United States in 1935, settling first in Cambridge, MA, and then in New York City, where he began writing criticism for . . . Modern Music. In 1937 he began a two-year term as music director of Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan, for which he wrote the ballet Pocahontas (1939), a work with echoes of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the residue of an early interest in the music of the Elizabethan virginalists.  He also wrote incidental music for Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater. A choral work, To Music, won a 1938 contest sponsored by the Federal Music Project of the Works Progress Administration.  In 1939 he married Helen Frost-Jones, a sculptor and art critic. She died in 2003. Their son, David, survives Mr. Carter, as does a grandson.  Mr. Carter’s works of this early period are in neoclassical and neoromantic styles, their modernism kept in check because, as he later explained, the acidic experiments of the avant-garde seemed wrong for a world that was gripped by the Depression. Trying to write music that would appeal to a wide public, he composed an amusing setting of The Siege of Corinth (1941), to a Rabelais text, and his Symphony No. 1 (1942), an essay in a melodic, almost pastoral style.  By the mid-1940's Mr. Carter had won several prizes but had made little headway with the public, and he began to regard his consonant style as an unrewarding compromise.  In the Piano Sonata (1946) and . . . Woodwind Quintet (1948), he began writing with a sharper edge, and in the Cello Sonata he started the investigation of contrasting materials that remained a fascination. In this case the contrast was between a freely flowing, lyrical cello line and a disciplined, almost marchlike piano part.  The turning point in Mr. Carter’s style came in 1950, when a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters allowed him to leave a teaching post at Columbia University and spend a year in southern Arizona, outside Tucson.  During that year in the Sonora Desert he wrote a single 45-minute work, his String Quartet No. 1.  Recalling his desert sojourn, Mr. Carter said in a 1960 interview: 'I had been waiting for just such an opportunity to give form to a number of novel ideas I had had over the previous years, and to work out in an extended composition the character, expression and logic these ideas seemed to demand. I felt that I was constantly pushing into an unexplored musical realm.'  What he came up with was a process he called 'metrical modulation.' Each instrument has a distinct personality and moves at an independent rhythm. The effect is of a constant change of tempos. Thereafter, virtually all of Mr. Carter’s works were driven by the tension between independent and starkly contrasting elements.  In the String Quartet No. 2 (1959), for example, each instrument is given its own distinct vocabulary of intervals and rhythms. In . . . Double Concerto of 1961, the piano and harpsichord, each allied to its own chamber orchestra, speak in languages appropriate to their timbres. In the first half of the work, the opposing groups move toward consensus; in the second, they split apart.  Between the 1950s and the late 1970s, Mr. Carter typically spent several years on each new work and saw every piece as an opportunity to overcome new challenges, some purely musical and others narrative and dramatic.  'I just can’t bring myself to do something that someone else has done before,' he said in 1960. 'Each piece is a kind of crisis in my life.'  Starting in the late 1980's Mr. Carter’s production picked up speed, and by 2005 he was routinely producing streams of works, albeit short ones, every year, sometimes at the request of musicians who admired his work and sometimes spontaneously for musicians he admired.  When asked why his early works took so long to complete, Mr. Carter explained that his method of composing dictated his speed. 'I like to sound spontaneous and fresh, but my first sketches often sound mechanical,' he said. 'I have to write them over until they sound spontaneous.' Many of his scores were completed only after he had filled thousands of pages with sketches. He meticulously dated and saved these, an idea he said he got from Igor Stravinsky. Mr. Carter intensified his use of contrasting forces in works like the String Quartet No. 3 (1971) and . . . Symphony of Three Orchestras (1977). In these compositions the main ensemble is divided into subgroups, each of which is given a distinct set of movements. The movements are played simultaneously with those performed by competing groups. But they are not played in a conventional way, from start to finish. Instead, the players may be asked to play part of a first movement, all of a second and part of a third before returning to where they left off in the first.  In works like Syringa (1978), a vocal setting of the poet John Ashbery’s updated version of the Orpheus legend, the internal oppositions are set forth more clearly. As a mezzo-soprano offers an understated account of the Ashbery text, a bass vehemently sings fragments of Greek classical texts.   'I regard my scores as scenarios,' Mr. Carter said in 1970, 'for the performers to act out with their instruments, dramatizing the players as individuals and as participants in the ensemble.'  That interest remained with him. His String Quartet No. 5 (1995), for example, conveys his fascination with a quartet’s rehearsal methods, including the debates between players about phrasing and coloration. The work is in 12 connected movements, five of which are interludes that describe the discussions, with one player offering a phrase from the section just heard and the others responding with embellishments, humorous turns or consternation.  Some listeners found his music cerebral, elitist and devoid of emotion. Even some who respected Mr. Carter’s erudition and the detail inherent in his compositional method were unmoved by his music.  Reviewing the Concerto for Orchestra (1969) when Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in the work’s world premiere, Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The Times, 'It may be a tour de force of its kind, but to me it is essentially uncommunicative, dry and a triumph of technique over spirit.'  In the mid-1970's, Mr. Carter’s music began to return to forms that he had not addressed since the 1940's.  With A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975) and Syringa, he began reconsidering the voice, and he continued his exploration in In Sleep, in Thunder (1981) and Of Challenge and of Love (1994), vocal chamber works that in retrospect seemed steps on Mr. Carter’s path to opera.  Around the same time, Night Fantasies (1980), an evocative description of the fleeting states of thought one experiences between sleep and wakefulness, was the first in a stream of solo instrumental pieces for guitar, violin, trombone, flute, harp, clarinet, cello and piano. He also composed a series of concertos for various instruments, including oboe, violin and clarinet, and a 50-minute orchestral triptych, Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei. Indeed, Mr. Carter began composing at a brisk pace in the mid-1980s. Instead of spending several years writing a single piece, he was writing a handful of pieces a year.  Moreover, they seemed to reach out to listeners in a way that the earlier works had not. The Oboe Concerto (1987) and . . . Violin Concerto (1990) were decidedly lyrical, even though Mr. Carter’s harmonic language remained essentially dissonant. And in the Triple Duo, (1983) the dialogues within and between the three independent instrumental groups are slyly witty and even overtly comic.  Mr. Carter taught at several American conservatories and colleges, including the Peabody Conservatory, Queens College, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Cornell and the Juilliard School.  He was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for his String Quartet No. 2 in 1960 and . . . No. 3 in 1973.  A recording of his Violin Concerto won a Grammy Award for best contemporary composition in 1994. . . .  'There are many kinds of art,' he said in 1978, when asked what he had to say to concertgoers who felt that great music should have tunes that could be whistled. 'Some kinds are hard to understand for some people, and easy to understand for others. But if the works are very good, then finally a lot of people will understand them. And it seems to me that if a work has something remarkable to say, then someone who wants to whistle it will find something in it to whistle. But these things are very subjective.  Just this morning, I had a call from Ursula Oppens, who is playing my Piano Concerto. She said, ‘I finally know all the tunes in your concerto.’ I said, ‘Which tunes are those?’ And she whistled one. So there you are'" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 11/5/12].




November 9

Jerry Kuderna in Berkeley, The Bay Area, and Beyond.  Ross Bauer's Hither and Yon (from Birthday Bagatelles), Martin Boykan's A Little Star Looks Down On Me, Robert Helps's Three Etudes for the Left Hand, Roger Sessions's Five Pieces for Piano, Herb Bielawa's Now, Mark Alburger's Shuffle, Allan Crossman's Rondo a la Pollock, Ann Callaway's Etheria, Alden Jenks's The Tears of Gilles de Riaz, and Peter Josheff's In the Meadow.  Old First Presbyterian Church, San Francisco, CA.


November 10

San Francisco Sinfonietta, directed by Urs Leonhardt Steiner, premieres Jan Pusina's Springweather and Return, on a program with Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 4.  St. Mark's Lutheran Church, San Francisco, CA.

Student-Alumni Composer Recital.  Peter Schickele's Dona Nobis Pacem and Swing, Swing, Swing, Mark Alburger's Ecclesiastes Tropes, and Alejandro Sims's Call Drop Blues.  Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.


November 11

Dan Locklair’s In the Almost Evening.  Brendle Recital Hall, Scales Fine Arts Center, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC.

November 13

Lisa Moore presents 120 Years of Solo Piano, including Leos Janacek's In the Mists (1912), the New York premieres of Martin Bresnick's Strange Devotion (2010) and Paul Kerekes's I Move to Keep Things Whole (2011), the world premiere of Hannah Lash's Fast Chords (2012), Philip Glass's Etude No. 2 (1994), and Frederic Rzewski's Piano Piece No. 4 (1979).  Miller Theatre, Columbia University, New York, NY.


November 17

Beth Anderson's The Bluebird and the Preying Mantis, Dr. Blood’s Mermaid Lullaby, September Swale, Kummi Dance, Eighth Ancestor, and Skate Suite,  St. John's Episcopal Church, New York, NY.


November 18

Peter Josheff's Sutro Tower in the Fog and a trio version of John Cage's Piano Concerto.  Yerba Buena Cener for the Arts, San Francisco, CA.

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / December 2012

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC

December 2012

Volume 19, Number 12

Hans Werner Henze / Mark Alburger

Adventures Big and Small / Michael McDonagh

Einstein on the Tour / Michael McDonagh

Chronicle of October 2012

Illustration / Hans Werner Henze


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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Hans Werner Henze / Mark Alburger

Hans Werner Henze (July 1, 1926 Gutersloh, Germany - October 27, 2012, Dresden), the oldest of six children of a teacher, and showed early interest in art and music. That and his political views led to conflict with his conservative father, Franz, who had served in the First World War and was wounded at Verdun.  Books by Christian and Jewish authors were replaced in the Henze household by literature reflecting Nazi views.  The older boys, including Hans, were enrolled in the Hitler Youth.

Hans, who had heard broadcasts of classical music (particularly Mozart), began studies at the state music school of Braunschweig in 1942, studying piano, percussion, and theory.  He had to break off his education after being conscripted into the army in 1944, towards the end of World War II.  Trained as a radio officer, he was soon captured by the British and held in a prisoner-of-war camp.  In 1945, he became an accompanist in the Bielefeld City Theatre and continued his training under Wolfgang Fortner at Heidelberg University the next year.

Henze had successful performances at Darmstadt, including an immediate success that season with a neo-baroque work for piano, flute and strings, that brought him to the attention of Schott Music publications.  He also took part in the Darmstadt New Music Summer School, turning, in 1947, to serial compositions. 

During this time, he worked with 12-tone technique in his First Symphony and Violin Concerto.  In 1948, Henze became musical assistant at the Deutscher Theater in Konstanz, where he composed his first opera Das Wundertheater, based on Cervantes.  Subsequently, Sadler's Wells Ballet visited Hamburg, inspiring Henze to write the choreographic poem Ballett-Variationen , first performed in Düsseldorf in September 1949.

Following this, he became ballet conductor at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden in Wiesbaden, where he composed two operas for radio, his Piano Concerto No. 1, and the jazz-influenced opera Boulevard Solitude, a reimagining of Andre Prevost's Manon Lescaut (1731, also the basis of Jules Massenet's Manon, 1884).

In 1953, Henze left Germany in disappointment, in reaction against homophobia and the country's general political climate, and moved to Italy, where he remained for most of his life, at first settling on Ischia in the Gulf of Naples.  Also resident were William Walton and his wife Susana, who took a great interest in the young German composer.  Two years later, Henze's Quattro poemi for orchestra made clear that he had moved far from the avant-garde.   In January 1956, Henze moved to Naples, initially he suffering disappointment, with the controversial premiere of the König Hirsch (The Stag King, 1957, Carlo Gozzi) -- despite its lush, rich textures.

A trend towards opulence was continued that year in Ondine, for choreographer Frederick Ashton, where the influence of Weber, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky (both Russian and Neoclassic), and jazz can all be heard.   Henze's spikier Maratona di danza (Luchino Visconti) even includes an on-stage band.

Henze's Five Neapolitan Songs, for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, were also composed soon after his arrival in Naples, as well as Serenades and Arias.  During a brief stay in Greece, he completed the harsh cantata-esque Kammermusik (1958), dedicated to Benjamin Britten and written for Peter Pears, the guitarist Julian Bream, and eight instrumentalists.  That same year, with librettist Ingeborg Bachmann, Henze wrote the operas Der Prinz von Homburg (1958, after Heinrich von Kleist).

In 1961, the composer, with his gardener-partner Fausto Moroni, moved to a secluded villa. La Leprara, on the hills of Marino, overlooking the Tiber south of Rome.  From 1962 until 1967, Henze taught masterclasses in composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, in 1964 composing Choral Fantasy (1964) and Der Junge Lord (Bachmann, after Wilhelm Hauff).  In the final year at Mozarteum, he became a visiting Professor at Dartmouth College.

Political concerns became prominent in such works as Symphony No. 6 (1969), Violin Concerto No. 2 (1971), and Voices (1973).  Because or despite this, Henze became an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, London in 1975, with his activism reaching high point the next year with the premiere of We Come to the River.

At this point, Henze founded the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte in Montepulciano, where Pollicino premiered in 1980.  From here until 1991, he led a class in composition in the Cologne Music School. In 1981 he founded the Mürztal Workshops in the Austria, and two years later wrote The English Cat, subsequently followed by the setting up of the Deutschlandsberg Youth Music Festival.  1988 saw the foundation of the Munich Biennale.

His later works, while less controversial, continued in political and social engagement, including The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (Das Verratene Meer, 1990, based on Yukio Mishima's Gogo no Eiko).

Henze's Requiem (1993) comprises nine sacred concertos for piano, trumpet and chamber orchestra, and was written in memory of the Michael Vyner.  In 1995 Henze received the Westphalian Music Prize, which has carried his name since 2001.  The choral Symphony No. 9 (1997, Hans-Ulrich Treichel) is based on motifs from Anna Seghers's The Seventh Cross, as a defiant rejection of Nazism. Invited by Walter Fink, he was the tenth composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2000, but he did not attend due to illness.  2003 saw the successful premiere of L'Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe (The Hoopoe and the Triumph of Filial Love) at the Salzburg Festival, based on a Syrian fairy tale.  The next year included the composition of Sebastian im Traum (2004) and the reception of an honorary doctorate in Musicology from the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München.

Moroni cared for Henze when he suffered a spectacular emotional collapse during which he barely spoke and had to be encouraged to eat, living as though in a coma.  In the year of Henze's sudden recovery in 2007, he wrote Phaedra, and Moroni died after a lengthy battle with cancer.  Elogium Musicum (2008) with a Latin text by Henze, is an obituary to his partner of more than 40 years.


Works List

Kleines Quartett for Oboe, Violin, Viola, and Cello (1945)
Sechs Lieder (1945)
Kammerkonzert (1946)
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1946)
Concertino (1947)
Fünf Madrigäle (1947)
Sonatina for Flute and Piano (1947)
Sonatina for Piano (1947)
String Quartet No. 1 (1947)
Symphony No. 1 (1947)
Violin Concerto no. 1 (1947)
Apollo et Hyazinthus (1948)
Chor Gefangener Trojer (1948)
Kammersonate (1948)
Der Vorwurf (1948)
Whispers from Heavenly Death (1948)
Wiegenlied der Mutter Gottes (1948)
Das Wundertheater (1948)
Ballet-Variationen (1949)
Jack Pudding (1949)
Serenade for Solo Cello (1949)
Suite (1949)
Symphony No. 2 (1949)
Variationen (1949)
Chanson Pflastersteine (1950)
Die Gefangenen (1950)
Piano Concerto No. 1 (1950)
Sinfonische Variationen (1950)
Symphony No. 3 (1950)
Le Tombeau d'Orphée (1950) 
Das Vokaltuch der Kammersängerin Rosa Silber (1950)
Boulevard Solitude (1951)
Labyrinth (1951)
Ein Landarzt (1951)
Sinfonische Zwischenspiele (1951)
Der Tolle Tag (1951)
Der Idiot (1952)
Pas d’Action (1952)
Sodom und Gomorrha (1952)
String Quartet No. 2 (1952)
Tancredi (1952)
Tanz und Salonmusik (1952)
Wind Quintet (1952)
Das Ende einer Welt (1953)
Ode an den Westwind (1953)
Quattro poemi (1955)
Der Sechste Gesang (1955)
Symphony No. 4 (1955)
Vokalsinfonie (1955)
Die Zikaden (1955)
Concerto per il Marigny (1956)
Drei Tentos (1958)
Fünf Neapolitanische Lieder (1956)
König Hirsch (1956)
Maratona (1956)
Sinfonische Etüden (1956)
Hochzeitsmusik (1957)
Jeux des Tritons (1957)
Nachtstücke und Arien (1957)
Undine (1957)
Drei Dithyramben (1958)
Drei Fragmente nach Hölderlin (1958) 
Kammermusik 1958 (1958)
Der Prinz von Homburg (1958)
Sonata per Archi (1958)
Trois pas des Triton (1958)
Undine, Suite No. 1 (1958)
Undine, Suite No. 2 (1958)
L’Usignolo dell’Imperatore (1959)
Sonata for Piano (1959)
Antifone (1960)
Jüdische Chronik (1960)
Elegy for Young Lovers (Elegie für Junge Liebende) (1961)
Six Absences (1961)
Les Caprices de Marianne (1962)
Novae de Infinito Laudes (1962)
Symphony No. 5 (1962)
Ariosi (1963)
Being Beauteous (1963)
Cantata della Fiaba Estrema (1963)
Los Caprichos (1963)
Lucy Escott Variations (1963)
Muriel ou Le Temps d'un Retour (1963)
Quattro Fantasie (1963)
Three Arias (1963)
Divertimenti (1964)
Der Frieden (1964)
Der Junge Lord (1964)
Ein Landarzt (1964)
Lieder von Einer Insel (1964)
Tancredi (1964)
Zwischenspiele (1964)
The Bassarids (Die Bassariden) (1965)
Mänadentanz (1965)
In Memoriam: die Weisse Rose (1965)
Double Bass Concerto (1966)
Double Concerto (1966)
Fantasia for Strings (1966)
Der Junge Törless (1966)
Muzen Siziliens (1966)
Moralities (1967)
Piano Concerto No. 2 (1967)
Telemanniana (1967)
Das Floss der Medusa (1968)
Versuch über Schweine (1968) 
Symphony No. 6 (1969)
El Cimarron (1970)
Compases para Preguntas Ensimismadas (1970)
Memorias de "El Cimarrón" (1970)
L'Usignolo dell'Imperatore (1970)
Das Floss der Medusa (1971)
Fragmente aus Einer Show (1971)
Der Langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer (1971)
Prison Song (1971)
Violin Concerto No. 2 (1971)
Heliogabalus Imperator (1972)
La Cubana, Oder Ein Leben für die Kunst (1973)
Tristan (1973)
Voices (1973)
Carillon, Récitatif, Masque (1974)
Sonatina for Trumpet (1974)
Heb Doch die Stimme An (1975)
Kindermund (1975)
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975)
Ragtimes and Habaneras (1975)
Amicizia! (1976 )
Capriccio (1976)
Mad People's Madrigal (1976)
Royal Winter Music, Sonata No.1 (1976)
String Quartet No. 3 (1976)
String Quartet No. 4 (1976)
String Quartet No. 5 (1976)
We Come to the River (1976)
L'Autunno (1977)
Aria de la Folía Española (1977)
Der Taugenichts (1977)
Ländler (1977)
Sonata for Violin (1977)
S. Biagio 9 Agosto Ore 12.07 (1977)
Trauer-Ode für Margaret Geddes (1977)
Il Vitalino Raddoppiato (1977)
 Five Scenes from the Snow Country (1978)
Margareten-Walzer (1978)
 Orpheus (1978)
The Woman (1978)
Apollo Trionfante (1979)
Arien des Orpheus (1979)
Barcarola (1979)
Dramatische Szenen aus "Orpheus" I (1979)
Epitaph (1979)
Etude Philarmonique (1979)
El Rey de Harlem (1979)
Royal Winter Music, Sonata No. 2 (1979)
Sonata for Viola and Piano (1979)
Sonatina for Violin and Piano (1979)
Toccata senza Fuga (1979)
Drei Märchenbilder (1980)
Montezuma (1980)
Pollicino (1980)
Sechs Stücke für Junge Pianisten (1980)
Spielmusiken (1980)
Cherubino (1981)
Euridice (1981)
Le Miracle de la Rose (Imaginäres Theater II) (1981)
Variation for Brass Quintet (1981)
Von Krebs zu Krebs (1981)
Canzona (1982)
Nach Lissabon (1982)
Un Amour de Swann (1983)
The English Cat (1983)
Orpheus Behind the Wire (1983)
Sonata for Piccolo Trumpet, 2 Trumpets, Fluegel Horn, Bass Trumpet, 2 Trombones, and Bass Trombone (1983)
Three Auden Songs (1983)
L'Amour à Mort (1984)
Deutschlandsberger Mohrentanz No. 1 (1984)
Une Petite Phrase (1984)
Sonata for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Cello, Percussion, and Piano (1984)
Symphony No. 7 (1984)
Deutschlandsberger Mohrentanz No. 2 (1985)
Fandango (1985)
Kleine Elegien (1985)
Konzertstück (1985)
Liebeslieder (1985)
Selbst- und Zwiegespräche (1985)
Eine Kleine Hausmusik (1986)
Ode an Eine Äolsharfe (1986)
Serenade for Solo Violin (1986)
Allegra e Boris (1987)  
Cinque Piccoli Concerti e Ritornelli (1987)
La Mano Sinistra (1988)
Piece for Peter (1988)
Clavierstück (1989)
Drei Lieder uber den Schnee (1989)
Für Manfred (1989) 
Das Verratene Meer (1989)
Fünf Nachtstücke (1990)
Paraphrasen über Dostojewsky (1990)
Gogo No Eiko (1990)
An Sascha (1991)
Das Haus Ibach (1991)
Piano Quintet (1991)
La Selva Incantata, Aria and Rondo (1991)
Zwei Konzertarien (1991)
Adagio for String Sextet (1992)
Introduktion, Thema, und Variationen (1992)
Minette (1992)
Pulcinella Disperato (1992)
An Brenton for Viola (1993)
Adagio, Serenade (1993)
Heilige Nacht (1993)
Lieder und Tänze (1993)
Requiem: 9 Geistliche Konzerte (1993) Symphony No. 8 (1993)
Appassionatamente (1994)
Für Reinhold (1994)
Heimlich zur Nacht (1994)
Toccata Mistica (1994)
Le Disperazioni del Signor Pulcinella (1995)
Hirtenlieder (1995)
Venus und Adonis (1995)
Notturno (1995)
Erlkönig (1996)
Le Fils de l'Air (1996)
Leçons de Danse (1996)
Minotauros Blues (1996)
Neue Volkslieder und Hirtengesänge (1996)
Pulcinellas Erzählungen (1996)
Serenata Notturna (1996)
Sieben Boleros (1996)
Violin Concerto No. 3, Three Portraits from Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1996)
Voie Lactee o Soeur Lumineuse (1996)
Zigeunerweisen und Sarabanden (1996)
Symphony No. 9 (1997)
Sechs Gesänge aus dem Arabischen (1998) 
Fraternité (1999)  
Ein Kleines Potpourri for Flute, Vibraphone, Harp, and Piano (2000)
Symphony No. 10 (2000)
A Tempest (2000)
Olly on the Shore (2001)
Scorribanda Sinfonica (2001)
L’Heure Bleue (2001)
Scorribanda Pianistica (2003)
L'Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe (2003)
Fünf Botschaften für die Königin von Saba (2004)
Sebastian im Traum (2004)
Phaedra (2007)
Elogium Musicum (2008)
Der Opfergang (2010)
An den Wind (2011)
Gisela! Oder die Merk- und Denkwürdigen Wege des Glücks (2010)

Adventures Big and Small / Michael McDonagh

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

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

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

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

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

Einstein on the Tour / Michael McDonagh

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

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

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

Chronicle of October 2012

October 20

San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra presents Adventures Around the Lake with a Unicorn: Mark Alburger's Triple Concerto for Bassoon, Contrabassoon, and Harp ("Family"), John Bilotta's Thurber Country, Allan Crossman's Two Walks (Lakes Merced and Merritt), Lisa Scola Prosek's Overture to L'Avventura, Edgar Varese's Octandre, and Davide Verotta's Dances to Mytilini.  Old First Presbyterian Church, San Francisco, CA.


October 21

Sonic Harvest.  Anne Callaway's Speak to Me my Love and Peter Josheff's Sutro Tower in the Fog.  Hillside Club, Berkeley, CA.    


October 23

Minimalism's Evolution, with Ensemble Signal.  Michael Gordon's Light is Calling (2001) and Industry (1992), Philip Glass's Selections from "In the Summer House" (1993), the U.S. premiere of Donnacha Dennehy's Overstrung (2010), Giacinto Scelsi's Duo (1965), and Louis Andriessen's Selections from "Xenia" (2005).  Miller Theatre, Columbia University, New York, NY.


October 25

WNYC Soundcheck Live! Pan Sonatas Steel Orchestra and the Brooklyn Philharmonic Players in the world premieres of Ted Hearne's But I Voted for Shirley Chisholm, Chris Cerrone's Flows Beneath, Matt Marks's Bluetooth Islands, and music of Kendall Williams, plus Tim Fite's Copycat, and Arnold Schoenberg's Accompanying Music to a Film Scene, Op. 34. World Financial Center Winter Garden
, New York, NY.

Percussionists Steven Schick, William Winant, Daniel Kennedy, and Christopher Froh perform Cage’s Constructions.  Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA.


October 26

Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach (Robert Wilson).  Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA.  Through October 28.

October 27

Death of Hans Werner Henze (b. 7/1/26, Gütersloh, Germany), at 86.  Dresden, Germany.  "[He was] a prolific German composer who came of age in the Nazi era and grew estranged from his country while gaining renown for richly imaginative operas and orchestral works.  Born into a European generation that wanted to make a fresh start at the end of World War II, Mr. Henze . . . did so without wholly negating the past. He wanted a new music that would carry with it the emotion, the opulence and the lyricism of the Romantic era, even if those elements now had to be fought for. Separating himself from the avant-garde, he devoted himself to genres many of his colleagues regarded as outmoded: opera, song, the symphony.  By the early 1960s Mr. Henze was an international figure with enthusiastic admirers in the United States. His Fifth Symphony was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, which gave the work’s premiere in 1963, with Leonard Bernstein conducting. More than 40 years later, the orchestra took part in commissioning one of Mr. Henze’s last orchestral works, the tone poem Sebastian Dreaming.  He maintained relationships with other American institutions as well, including the Boston Symphony, which commissioned his Eighth Symphony (1992-93), and the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he was composer-in-residence in 1988.  His music expressed passionate but mixed feelings about his German heritage. His Nazi-era childhood alone would have produced, at the least, ambivalence about that heritage, but his homosexuality only further estranged him, particularly from the bourgeois West German society of the immediate postwar years. And he found little sympathy at home for his embrace of the Romantic past.  He had to escape, and in 1953 he abruptly left for Italy. But he went on writing operas for theaters in Germany, where he was far more popular than any other composer of his time. That success brought him material comfort, and he came to give a fair physical impression of the kind of well-to-do burgher he might well have feared and despised in his youth: tight-suited, bald, energetic even when still. What failed to fit this image of stiff propriety was his unfailing charm, his sardonic sense of humor and his fondness for his many friends.  As he grew older, the matter of Germany became increasingly important to his music. Having written his Cuban-inflected Sixth Symphony (1969) -- produced during a period when he spent a great deal of time in Cuba -- he composed his Seventh (1983-84) for the Berlin Philharmonic, taking Beethoven as his model. Again with Beethoven in mind and again writing for the Berlin Philharmonic, he made his Ninth a choral symphony -- and a drama -- telling a story of desperation and hope set during the Nazi epoch. . .  After army service in 1944 and 1945 he studied with Wolfgang Fortner at the Heidelberg Institute for Church Music and with the French composer René Leibowitz. He soon became acquainted with the modern music that had been banned by the Nazis -- notably Stravinsky and Berg, as well as jazz -- and gained the means to create a sprightly style that carried him through an abundant youthful output. By the time he was 25 he had written three symphonies, several ballets and his first full-length opera, Boulevard Solitude (1951).  In his Second String Quartet (1952) he drew close to his more avant-garde contemporaries, but the moment quickly passed. The next year he left his post as music director of the Wiesbaden State Theater to settle on the Bay of Naples, and his music at once became luxurious and frankly emotional, as exemplified by his fairy-tale opera King Stag, first performed in Berlin in 1956.  It was an exultant period, which also brought forth his Fourth Symphony (1955); the full-length ballet Ondine (1956-57), produced with choreography by Frederick Ashton at Covent Garden; Nocturnes and Arias, for soprano and orchestra (1957); and Chamber Music, for tenor, guitar. and octet (1958).  In his next opera, The Prince of Homburg, first produced in Hamburg in 1960, he caricatured German militarism within a style fashioned after the bel canto operas of Bellini and Donizetti. After this came Elegy for Young Lovers, to a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, about a poet’s use of his family and acquaintances in his art. The story’s alpine setting offered Mr. Henze the opportunity for glistening, radiant music, scored for a chamber orchestra. The work had its first performance in Schwetzingen, Germany, in 1961, and has been more widely seen than any of the composer’s other operas.  The Young Lord, presented by City Opera in 1973, is the only of one Mr. Henze’s full-length operas to have received a professional staging in New York (His one-act opera The End of a World was presented by Encompass New Opera Theater in 2003).  Working again with Auden and Kallman, he went on to a much bigger operatic project, The Bassarids, a remake of Euripides’ Bacchae, which was presented at the 1966 Salzburg Festival. The undertaking provoked a creative crisis, out of which Mr. Henze re-emerged as a radical socialist. He had contacts with student leaders, taught and studied in Cuba for a year, and composed several explicitly political works, among them The Raft of the Medusa (1968), a semi-dramatic cantata protesting racism and other forms of discrimination, and El Cimarrón (1969-70), a concert-length work for baritone, flute, guitar and percussion telling the story of a runaway slave.  But once again Mr. Henze moved swiftly on. By the time he composed what might have been his biggest essay in political engagement  the opera We Come to the River, with a libretto by the English socialist playwright Edward Bond, produced at Covent Garden in 1976 -- his musical interests had returned to his more characteristic moods of nostalgia, reverie, burlesque and erotic passion. Among his other important works of this period is Tristan for piano, orchestra and tape (1974), a symphonic poem on the medieval legend including quotations from Wagner’s treatment of it.  In 1976 Mr. Henze founded a festival in the small Italian town of Montepulciano, where he pursued his ideals as a musician in society, working with local performers and drawing other, younger composers to do the same. He was extraordinarily open and encouraging to student composers, and there are many whose careers he made by crucial advice or an important break.  Further works with Mr. Bond followed: the ballet Orpheus (1979) and the surreal-satirical opera The English Cat (1983). But Tristan had signaled a rapprochement with Germany.  From his home near Rome, his principal place of residence since 1961, Mr. Henze made increasingly frequent and lengthy returns to his native country, and in 1988 he established a biennial festival of new music theater in Munich.  He had begun his artistic life in the theater, and he found it hard to leave. Having announced that L’Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe) (The Hoopoe and the Triumph of Filial Love, which had its premiere in Salzburg in, 2003) would be his last opera, he went on to produce a Phaedra for the Berlin State Opera in 2007 and Gisela!, an opera for student singers, for the Ruhr Festival in 2010.  The crowning work of Mr. Henze’s late period is Elogium Musicum for choir and orchestra (2008), which he wrote in memory of Fausto Moroni, his companion of four decades, who died in 2007. At once vast and intimate, Mediterranean-Classical in its sunlight and German-Romantic in its expressive depth, it is also a fitting memorial to its composer" [Paul Griffiths, The New York Times, 10/28/12].

Irregular Resolutions, 8th Annual New Music Concert. John Bilotta's Brain Freeze and Renaissance Songs, Carol Belcher's Los Lazos del Ayer, Gary Friedman's Sticks and Tones, Steve Mobia's Nudge,
Ed Dierauf's Masonic Tectonic, and Davide Verotta's The Sofa.  Community Music Center, San Francisco, CA.

San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presents John Cage's Musicircus, Yerba Buena Center fot the Arts, San Francisco, CA.


October 30

John  Zorn Halloween Celebration, featuring the world premiere of Ceremonial Magic and organ improvisation.  St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, New York, NY.