Contemporary Classical, Minimalism, Video

Blushing at the Hem of Redemption: Uva Lunera’s “Trozos De Mí”

“Not even Arvo Pärt’s Gregorian chants could save her.”

When life tears your heart out, music has a way of suturing it back into place before you lose consciousness for good. This is what it feels like to immerse oneself in Trozos De Mí (Pieces Of Me), the latest project from Bogotá, Colombia-based pianist and composer Valentina Castillo (under the stage name Uva Lunera). Having previously explored her idiosyncratic blend of minimalism, groove, and songcraft across a travelogue of studio and live settings, she has produced what is, so far, her most intimate and transformational multimedia experience.

Combining sound, text, and video, Trozos De Mí is a journey, not in the sense of moving nomadically from one place to the next but of exploring the same place over and over until it becomes something totally different by the scuff marks of footprints and the stains of blood (and other effluvia) left behind. It is the latter we follow into this, her second full-length album, which by virtue of its unraveling gives us plenty of fiber to twine around ourselves in empathic understanding of the ache it so honestly captures.

Through the machinery of eight major organs surrounded by the skin of an “Opening” and “End,” the figure we glimpse beckons with one hand and holds us off with the other. We sustain this push and pull like the tearing of a muscle. What at first announces itself as an excruciation morphs with each touch of the keyboard into a lull of healing. That cusp between debilitation and revivification is where Castillo is most in her element as a performer, so that her recollections of fierce romance rage like an oil fire on a stove sucked of its oxygen by the range hood of memory.

From the fragments of “Deleite” (Delight) to the reparations of “Podéis Ir En Paz” (You Can Go In Peace), she rounds the edges of every shard just enough to be holdable without cutting through the fingers. And what a blessing that is when those fingers are the primary salvation bringers in a world of broken instruments. In the manner of bodies close and electric yet playing out the dances and separations that define every infatuation, she gives herself to the moment, knowing that whatever pieces she loses are opportunities for the clay of retelling to take their place. In “Deja Vú,” especially, she molds those traumas of repetition into something grander, less hesitant. As hurt turns into laughter and back into hurt, she leaves the piano to dance—the only coping strategy that makes sense as she delves deeper into the missing time of her autobiography.

And so, from the throes of adulthood to the quietude of childhood, she wraps herself in “Una Mantita” (A Little Blanket), a lullaby that reaches like starlight through slatted blinds without ever touching her sleeping face. Instead, that maternal glow is interrupted by “Padre,” whose stoic malevolence carves a shadow of resistance. Couched in this forlorn image is the tale of a Catholic priest (“Yes! I’m not the only one who calls him ‘Father,’” she quips) who prompts songs of forgiveness in the daughter he abandoned. However, that forgiveness must be gifted to herself, so tender that it can only be felt, never seen. This paternal hurt reaches its breaking point in “Un Duelo, Una Pausa” (A Duel, A Pause), in which drummer Rafa Lozina evokes a body scarred by too many paper cuts, each page a blade of awakening.

In closing, we are swept into a theme song for moving on. With terms settled and corporeality mended, she looks back while keeping one toe dipped into a future yet to be sung. Thus, her state of mind is always present with the listener. She sits before you, face to face, holding your hands in hers, the only completion of a circuit needed for us to know its electricity.

Trozos De Mí is available to experience in full on YouTube here. Let yourself go, and it will catch you.

by Tyran Grillo
Chamber Music, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Percussion, Women composers

2025 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood

2025 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood – July 24 – July 28, 2025

Tanglewood Music Center in the cool green Berkshires of Massachusetts (credit Aram Boghosian)

Every summer since 1964, the Tanglewood Music Center presents its Festival of Contemporary Music. According to Tanglewood’s materials:

The Festival of Contemporary Music (FCM) is one of the world’s premier showcases for works from the current musical landscape and landmark pieces from the new music vanguard of the 20th century. FCM affords Tanglewood Music Center Fellows the opportunity to explore unfamiliar repertoire and experience the value of direct collaboration with living composers.

Over the four FCM concerts (of the total of six) I heard carefully honed performances by the Tanglewood Fellows, Fromme players and the Mexican percussion quartet Tambuco.

Gabriela Ortiz is the director of FCM this year, the latest in the many high notes that the Mexican composer is enjoying. In the past season, she was composer in residence at Carnegie Hall, Curtis Institute, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León; her commissioned works were premiered at New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, and she won three Grammy awards.

Ortiz’s FCM programming traced the lineage of Mexican composers from Chavez to Lavista to Ortiz herself and to her student Diana Syrse, showed off the versatile talents of the Mexico-based percussion ensemble Tambuco and the incredible capacity of the Tanglewood Fellows to learn and perfect carefully honed performances of a mountain of new music.

Two beefs: Each program ran at least 25% longer than its stated duration. Each was densely programmed, and the ultralong set changes between each piece (often involving dozens of percussion instruments) were not accounted for in the production schedule. Nor were the often-lengthy introductions by Ortiz.

And, rather than presenting a spectrum of works by a range of composers, Ortiz programmed a great deal of her own music with a smattering of other works to provide context. This was in contrast to previous years in which a broader survey of music was presented.

Ortiz’s music is high-quality and thoughtful, employing interesting sounds and techniques, rhythms and sonorities, often telling a story in vivid colors and gestures. But pretty much every piece wore out its welcome, going on long after I felt it should have ended, without bringing in new ideas or furthering the experience of the piece.

A member of Tambuco playing the marimbula at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music 2025 (credit Gail Wein)

Which brought to mind a question that nags me from time to time – why don’t composers have editors? Authors of books have them. Journalists have them. But no one seems to be telling a composer, “Draw a double bar already, would ya?” Come to think of it, it may be the test of time that serves this purpose. There’s a lot of music written over the past 500 years that is justly neglected. Conversely, there’s good reason that many war horses in the canon have endured. It’s collective taste making, standing the test of time.

The program on July 25, “Mexico, Cuba, the U.S., and One Hundred Years of Percussion” featured, predictably, a barrage of percussion, and in every piece at least one unusual instrument was on stage. In Ortiz’s Rio de las Mariposas for two harps and steel drum, the disparate instruments blended surprisingly well. The glass harmonica gave Mario Lavista’s Musicas de Cristal a soundscape all its own. The soft slow music was enhanced by the ambient rustle of trees outside Ozawa Hall. Amadeo Roldán’s Rítmica V and Rítmica VI included a cascade of diverse instruments, the most unusual of which was a marimbula, a cross between a giant mbira (African thumb piano) and a cajón (a wooden box which the percussionist slaps with their hand). Hearing the mechanical sirens in Edgard Varese’s landmark Ionisation, was the peak of a memorable performance of that iconic 20th century work.

On July 26, the program “Music of Migration and Exile” included music by Ortiz and the Mexican-American composer Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon. This program, as all the others that I heard at the FCM, were marked by truly spectacular performances by the fellows. All around they play like much more seasoned pros, and with an enthusiasm and bravado that more experienced hands sometimes lack.

Zohn-Muldoon’s Suite from Comala is an extract of a larger work based on Pedro Páramo, a classic Mexican novella by Juan Rulfo. Zohn-Muldoon added guitar to this score for Pierrot ensemble plus percussion and guitar. The combination worked especially well in this alluring work, as the guitar sometimes aligned with the strings, and at other times with the percussion.

In addition to the programs I detailed above, the festival highlighted the talents of the American composers Ellen Reid and Gabriela Smith. It was great to hear some concert music from Mexico that doesn’t often get to U.S. stages. And there’s nothing like getting to revel in the sounds of contemporary concert music for four days, especially in the picturesque environs of the Tanglewood Music Center.

by Gail Wein
Contemporary Classical

BBC Proms Barraine, Copland, Shaw (not necessarily the one you might think), Part, Berio, and, of course, Rachmaninov

The Prom on July 31, presented by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Joshua Weilerstein, as so many of the concerts during this stretch of time, included a work of Rachmaninov, the Symphonic Dances, which ended the concert. It began with Symphony No. 2 by Elsa Barraine, a composer unknown before this point to this listener. Barraine was a French composer, trained at the Paris Conservatory, where she was a student of Paul Dukas. The fact that she was a woman and Jewish and politically active made her life, both personal and professional, difficult during the time leading up to the second world war. She survived the war, and in her later life taught at the Paris Conservatory and was a theater inspector for the French Ministry of Culture. She died in 1999. Barraine’s Second Symphony was written in 1938 and is subtitled ‘Voina’ (Russian for War). The tension of the time are inescapable in various ways, including that the second movement is a Funeral March. The work, which is relatively brief, lasting 17 minutes, is masterful, with a brilliantly transparent texture and orchestration. This listener is anxious to discover more of her music.

By far the dominant personality of the concert was the soloist, clarinetist Martin Fröst, who played in concertos by Aaron Copland and Artie Shaw. He came on stage with swagger and immediately owned the room. Not only was he selling things big to the audience, he was always in a very obvious way in just about continuous contact with members of the orchestra, causing one to wonder exactly who was actually conducting the orchestra. His encore, which consisted of his playing the first prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier while the audience, with some help from member of the string section of the orchestra, sang the tune which Gounod wrote for it to accompany, was really sort of magical, and in some ways the most memorable part of the concert. The Copland concerto, written for Benny Goodman, and therefore inescapably influenced by jazz (although written at a later time than Copland’s “classic” jazz pieces, the Piano Concerto and Music for the Theatre), seemed to this listened to be a very uneven piece. The first of the two movements, an expansive and expressive slow movement, is very very beautiful; the second seems somewhat aimless and repetitive. The Artie Shaw Concerto took its form, the form it was presented in the concert, as two sides of a 78rpm recording, and became a great hit for him. He is quoted in Alyn Shipton’s notes of the pieces as saying, “I didn’t really write anything–I just dictated a frame.” Exactly. Nonetheless, both the Copland and the Shaw provided Fröst with a platform for his playing, which was excellent in every respect, and his personality which is mammoth. The performance of the Rachmaninov which was the second half of the concert was excellent and beyond any kind of reproach, even if less magnetic than the music and playing of the first half.

This concert was followed by a late night concert presented by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by Tônu Kaljuste., which celebrated the 90th birthday of Arvo Pärt. Pärt’s choral music, which is more apparently placid and spacious, unlike his more active–at least on the surface–and aggressive instrumental tintinnabuli music, is expertly written and very beautiful. It’s also not terrible varied stylistically and musically. That variety in this concert, which included eight of his pieces, was provided by other people’s music, including works of Rachmaninov, (again) Bach, and the Estonian composer Galina Grigorjeva, but most noticeably by the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis’s Curse Upon Iron. All of the pieces on the program received performances that were apparently flawless, and characterized by gorgeous sound.

Rachmaninov was once again the headliner of the Proms concert on August 1, presented by The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kazuki Yamada. Yunchan Lim was the soloist in the Fourth Piano Concerto. With so much of Rachmaninov’s music featured—three pieces on three consecutive concerts in three days, one wondered if it was some kind of Rachmaninov year. The answer must be that every year is a Rachmaninov year. In the case of the concert on August 1, the pieces not mentioned were The Chairman Dances by John Adams and Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. The Adams is a skillful and brilliantly orchestrated piece. A quotation from Virgil Thomson, “It’s the perfect appetizer. Nobody’s appetite was ever spoiled by it and nobody missed much by missing it.” might apply. An alarm of some sort interrupted by Rachmaninov, causing an unanticipated break between the first and second movements.

The Berio Sinfonia, aside from being one of his most important works, is also the archetypal 1960’s composition. It was written for and is dedicated to Leonard Bernstein, who conducted its first performance, and it features, in its third movement, a sort of collage of pieces and styles and elements, along with a text from Beckett, within the frame of the third movement of the Mahler Second Symphony. That movement is preceded by a movement based on scraps of from Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked, and another movement which is a memorial to Martin Luther King, an orchestration of a chamber work of Berio’s whose text is the phonemes of King’s name (in a sort of staggering racist statement Richard Taruskin criticized the piece because it could not have been understood as music by King–an assumption of his about King), and is followed, after an interlude, with a finale which Berio wrote, ‘might be considered the veritable analysis of the Sinfonia, carried out through the language and medium of the composition itself.’

This performance, in which the orchestra was joined by members of the BBC Singers, was brilliant and completely compelling, and as good as one could ever imagine happening, especially since the sound person who was in charge of the amplification of the voices, not only controlled that just about perfectly, but clearly knew the music and knew which parts of the texts needed to be heard clearly. Everything about the experience was exhilarating and memorable.



by Rodney Lister
Contemporary Classical

BBC Proms Birtwistle Bacewicz Lutoslawski

The performers for the Prom concert on July 28 were the BBC Scottish Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. The first piece, and, for a certain cohort, the most important was Earth Dances by Harrison Birtwistle. Written during 1985 and 1986, it is one of his major single movement pieces for large orchestra. The work features six strata, each with a characteristic intervallic “hierarcy,” register, and rhythmic characteristic. The interaction and progression of those strata, which defines its structure, produces a sense of a certain menacing quality and a sort of subterranean intensity, driving to a climax which Jonathan Cross in his program notes likened to that of the Sacrificial Dance in The Rite of Spring. The piece in the ends suggests that one might want to parse the title a little and consider whether it consists of an adjective and a noun or of a noun and a verb….or both simultaneously. In any case the piece has an almost overwhelming intensity which the performance vividly realized. It was followed by the Beethoven Third Symphony, also vividly realized.

The Prom on July 30 was advertised as being about the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto, with soloist Vadym Kholodenko, with no mention of the other two works on the program, Grażyna Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra (1948) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1950-54) by Witold Lutosławski, or the orchestra involved, the BBC National Orcchestra of Wales, or of the conductor, Tadaaki Otaka. Certainly from a box office standpoint that seemed to have been a good move, since the hall was packed, and the arena was just about completely shoulder to shoulder. The concerto actually includes the piano so often in the orchestral texture that it can be overlooked, and many of the most striking moments are actually orchestral ones, and these stood out due to the really uniformly beautiful playing of the orchestra. Kholodenko’s own playing, with a beautiful sound and great nuance was really much more prominent in his encore, Rachmaninov’s Polka de VR.

The concert opened with Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra, written in 1948, which is a sort of mid-century take on the Baroque Concerto Grosso. It begins with a lean and rhythmically propulsive movement followed by an intense and haunting slow movement whose thicker and more varied texture introduces solo parts, which become even more important in the frolicsome final movement. Paul Griffith’s program notes on the Lutosìawski emphasized its composer’s difficulties as a modernist in the political situation of the time in Poland before that very modernism became a token of Poland’s separation if not independence, at least aesthetically, from the Soviet Union. Following in the footsteps of the Bartok Concerto for orchestra in it’s apparent use of folk material and, at least ostensibly, more traditional tonal language, the Lutosìawski is dazzling in its orchestration and textural variety, especially in its final movement. The playing of the orchestra in the final work, as in the whole concert, was striking and memorable, for the unfailing beauty of sound, but most especially for the aptness of the quality of that sound for ever expressive moment.

In the past it was possible to hear these concerts on BBC Sounds anywhere in the world. This year they’re only available in the UK.








by Rodney Lister
CD Review, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Recording review, Recordings, Twentieth Century Composer

Tobias Picker, NOVA (Recording review)

Tobias Picker

NOVA

Various Artists

Bright Shiny Things

 

Composer Tobias Picker won a Grammy for his 2020 operatic version of The Fantastic Mister Fox, and many pianists have first encountered him through the diatonic piece The Old and Lost Rivers. Picker has another side to his musical persona that is in no small measure reflective of his time as a student of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and Charles Wuorinen. The Bright Shiny Things recording NOVA includes chamber music that celebrates these high modernist roots, as well as forays into postmodernism. 

 

The title work is the latter, a riff on both the appropriate accompaniment, at least in Manhattan, for a bagel and cream cheese, as well as a send-up of one of Franz Schubert’s most enduring chamber pieces, the Trout Quintet. The result is lively, with tongue in cheek humor giving way to expert writing for the instruments, the composer distinguishing himself as a performer, undertaking the piano part. 

 

The recording sessions for NOVA were completed at various times, and some of the performers are no longer living. The late Lynne Harrell’s performance in Suite for Cello and Piano is memorable. He plays with yearning legato in“Serenade,” its first movement, and puckish pizzicato in “Daylight,” its second. Ann-Marie McDermott, who is still with us, also distinguishes herself, with expressive and assured playing throughout. The third movement, “Lament,” is more dramatic than doleful, and Harrell performs with incendiary phrasing. The suite’s final movement, titled “Alone,” is still a duo, but it is lonesome and solitary in its demeanor. Another departed musician, Peter Serkin, plays Three Pieces for Piano with sensitivity and virtuosity in equal measure, elucidating the complex phrasing of “Svelto,” its first movement, emphasising the dynamic and rhythmic nuances in the second, “Liberamente,” and, performing the assertive gestures of the “Feroce” third movement con brio. 

 

Happily most of the performers are still around to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Pianist Ursula Oppens makes multiple appearances, with Charles Neidich in “Nocturne,” a brief, gentle duet, and solo in the more extensive “Pianorama.” Violinist Young Uck Kim and Emmanuel Ax collaborate well on Invisible Lilacs, a three movement piece with an opener marked “Fast,” which it certainly is here, a pensive “Elegy,”, and a concluding “Moto Perpetuo” movement that is impressively played. 

 

The disc’s final piece, Blue Hula. features Speculum Musicae, a chamber ensemble that boasted some of the best performers of modern classical music. It is a formidable piece that suits them well, with a finely etched gestural profile of corruscating lines. As the piece progresses, its rhythmic drive increases, culminating in the breakneck pace of the third movement, marked “very fast.” 

 

NOVA presents another side of Picker’s music, one that embraces complexity but sacrifices none of the directness of expression that characterizes his more recent music. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Robert Wilson (1941–2025)

To progressive musicians, Robert Wilson will always be most closely associated with Einstein on the Beach (1976), which in addition to being Philip Glass‘s most masterful and iconic work, is the one that most optimistically proclaimed the future of new music theater, liberated from narrative forms and the affected European accoutrements of opera singing and traditional orchestras. That disappointingly few works in its lineage have subsequently managed to approach its impact suggests that it may have been more of an outlier than a paradigm shift—a pinnacle of American minimalism at its most monumental, succeeded by a drift toward postminimalism and neoclassiciam with Glass himself abandoning his avant-gardism to fulfill commissions for more conventional linear operas.

Philip Glass and Robert Wilson in 1976 (photo: Robert Mapplethorpe)

Wilson leaves behind a music theater project begun with Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, who has committed to completing it for an anticipated 2026 debut. We will look forward to UPSIDEDOWN: a journey as a late testament.

As it turns out, I had a personal connection of sorts with Wilson. He and my mother (then named Anne McCall) and her best friend (who later wrote books under the pen name Katya McCall Walter) were a close-knit group of three at Waco High School in the 1950s. She recalls helping him with his classwork there and during his brief enrollment at Baylor University (where her father was Chancellor) before decamping for Austin then New York. I discovered this by accident in 1984 after complaining to Mom—who taught psychology at Occidental College and didn’t particularly follow the art world—about Los Angeles’ failure to support Wilson’s ambitious Summer Olympics project. I casually mentioned that like her, he was from Waco:

“Robert Wilson? Robert M. Wilson.”
“Yeah.”
“I went to high school with a Robert M. Wilson. I helped him with his trigonometry. He said ‘McCall, I’m gonna flunk this class’, but he managed to get through it. He was into theater, I remember him putting rabbits onstage.”
“Really? Did you know he’s, like, the most famous experimental theater director in the world today?”
“No, I didn’t! Good for him. He was close friends with me and Carolyn. We were kind of a threesome. You know…[pause]…I think Robert was gay…”
“You got that right Mom!”
“…and his father was a pretty stern Methodist minister that I don’t think he had a good relationship with. He felt more comfortable hanging out with us because, you know, we didn’t care. He went to Baylor for a semester, then went to New York and that was the last I saw of him.”

Photo courtesy of Žibuoklė Martinaitytė

 

by Michael Schell
Composers, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music: Orchestra Concert

Thomas Wilkins conducts TMC Orchestra.
Photo: Hilary Scott (courtesy of BSO).

 

2025 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music

Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra

July 28, 2025

 

LENOX – This year’s Festival of Contemporary Music was curated by composer Gabriela Ortiz. Born in Mexico City, Ortiz is one of the most prominent Latinx figures in twenty-first century classical music. Among other honors, she is composer-in-residence at Carnegie Hall and the Curtis Institute. Revolucióndiamantina, a recording of her music by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, won three GRAMMY Awards in 2025. This year, FCM has spotlighted music from Mexico, as well as that of women composers. After four chamber ensemble programs, including one consisting entirely of music for percussion, the festival concluded with a concert performed by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Wilkins and two fellows, Yiran Zhao and Leonard Weiss (Zhao is a former student of mine, so I will limit my remarks to saying that her teacher was proud). TMC is a student orchestra, but their talent and hard work abetted a high level of playing throughout. All of the concert’s music was written in the twenty-first century by living composers.

 

Bioluminescence Chaconne (2019), by Gabriella Smith (b. 1991), is built around overlapping ostinatos. String tremolandos are prominent in the beginning, and glissandos take on an increasingly important role. The piece has a gradual buildup to a powerful central section with brash tutti and stretches of syncopated percussion, followed by a return to its opening demeanor to conclude. Smith is a violinist, and it shows in the deft deployment of strings here. She has cited Bach’s D minor Chaconne as a touchstone, but its form repeats in a more symmetrical fashion than the shape of Bioluminescence Chaconne. The first word of the title may be more telling, as Smith has suggested that her experiences scuba diving, accompanying a team of researchers, was an inspiration for the piece. The piece works well, so well that next year the Boston Symphony Orchestra is playing it too.

 

Ellen Reid (b. 1983) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, and her piece When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist (2019) was commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to a large orchestra, it features three sopranos in wide ranging wordless parts encompassing animated and sustained passages. Zoe McCormick, Kerrigan Bigelow, and Sarah Davis sang skilfully, blending well together and with the orchestra. Like Smith, Reid uses ostinatos, and these are contrasted with aching pitch slides and clusters. When the World… is likely her most dissonant piece, with both major and minor seconds featuring prominently in the motivic and harmonic material. Weiss brought out dynamic contrasts and imbued the legato sections with a strong sense of line.

 

Reid wrote When the World…  for the NY Phil’s Project 19, which celebrated a centenary of women’s suffrage in the United States. Her program note suggests that it doesn’t directly reflect this issue, and is instead focused on an emotional artistic journey, delineated in stages not dissimilar to those frequently found in grieving, moving from questioning to anger to acceptance.

 

Ortiz had two pieces on the program, one concluding the first half and the other played after intermission. Guest flutist Alejandro Escuer was the soloist on Altar de Viento (“Altar of the Wind,” 2015), a concerto specifically written for him. Escuer’s proficiency with extended techniques is comprehensive, and Ortiz makes good use of them in the piece. Escuer’s approach is also attuned to rhythm, and he even moves a bit during interludes where he isn’t playing, underlining the dance rhythms so often present in Altar de Viento. Indeed, the percussion section once again got a workout, playing traditional dances and new music gestures with equal aplomb. The rest of the orchestra was game to groove as well, and Wilkins led them through myriad metric shifts with suavity and clarity.

 

Hominum, Concerto for Orchestra (2017), is an imposing half-hour long piece. One of Ortiz’s finest, it was premiered in 2017 by another exemplary student ensemble, the Juilliard Orchestra. There’s nothing about the concerto that suggests it was sculpted with emerging artists in mind, as it is quite challenging. Composers who write a concerto for orchestra usually provide each cohort of the ensemble with music that spotlights their capacities and instruments’ essential characteristics. Ortiz revels in exploring the many textures that an orchestra can achieve in the twenty-first century. The virtuosity that talented musicians possess is explored as well. Hominum is at turns vivacious, brash, reflective, and powerful, and served as a rousing closer for FCM.

 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Piano

John Williams’ Piano Concerto at Tanglewood

John Williams takes a bow after world premiere of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra w Emanuel Ax, Andris Nelsons and Boston Symphony at Tanglewood (credit Gabriel Scott)

The audience greeted John Williams like he was a rock star.

Indeed, this composer’s music for blockbuster films like Star Wars, Jaws and Jurassic Park is well known and loved by billions around the world. People, including those in attendance at Tanglewood on Saturday night, July 26, love him for his concert music as well. Williams appeared on stage after the crowd-pleasing premiere performance of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with soloist Emanuel Ax and the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by Andris Nelsons.

Williams has been a mainstay at the BSO for decades, having been music director of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993; and composed numerous scores especially for the venerable ensemble and some of its principal players. He began writing the newest work in his immense catalogue of concert music in 2022, at age 90, this one specifically for Ax and the BSO.

For this three-movement work, Williams drew his inspiration from jazz greats Art Tatum, Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson. From the very start in the “Introduction – Colloquy (Art Tatum)”, the composition launched into bold jazz chords from the soloist. The rhythms went beyond ragtime, instantly recalling Tatum’s trademark stride piano style.  The textures, timbres and sonorities of the jazz-infused score were as vividly colorful as Williams’ film scores. The rich viola solo of the second movement “Listening (Bill Evans)” was straight and somber, infused with angular and dissonant sonorities. The clamorous timpani opening the work’s third movement (“Finale. Presto (Oscar Peterson)”) echoed the beginning of Gershwin’s majestic Piano Concerto in F. This movement was the most virtuosic of the already technically demanding piece, using the entire range of the keyboard. Thunderous ovations followed the final chord.

Concert-goers who departed the grounds after the triumphant world premiere missed a powerful reading of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. Any flaws early in the performance were brushed aside as the second movement unfolded with crisp execution, the rocksteady timpanist emphasized the foundations of the tonality for most of the third movement, and the confident swagger in the secondary theme. Nelsons brought it all to an exciting conclusion full of contrast in both dynamics and tempi.

The BSO brass deserve a medal. They were knockouts in both works on the program. From the colorful character of John William’s concerto to their mighty display in the Mahler, they shone in every which way. The entire horn section standing for the final section of the Mahler was emblematic of the section’s performance throughout.

by Gail Wein
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Just Intonation, Los Angeles

Brightwork Ensemble – My Dancing Sweetheart

Microfest Records has released My Dancing Sweetheart, a new album that features music by composers Ben Johnston, Bill Alves and Helmut Oehring. The performers are all first-rate Los Angeles musicians and include Stacey Fraser, vocals, Aron Kallay, keyboards, Shalini Vijavan, violin and Nick Terry, percussion. Subtitled “Just Songs”, My Dancing Sweetheart is an accessible and engaging introduction to the world of Just Intonation and contemporary tonal palettes.

Just Intonation is a tuning system that is based on optimizing the frequency ratios between the notes in the scale. Our conventional 12 Tone Equal Temperament tuning, by contrast, assigns specific frequencies to each note, allowing fixed pitch instruments to play in any key and transpose music easily. This simplifies harmony and chord progressions and has been the standard tuning system for western music since the mid-19th century. By fixing the frequency of notes, however, the Equal Temperament system compromises somewhat the intervals between the notes in the scale. Just Intonation tuning addresses this but requires the re-tuning of the instruments to a specific fundamental frequency. The advantage lies in that the resulting scale tones are more closely related harmonically and bring out the purity and consonance of the intervals.

American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) was an early champion of Just Intonation and he built a number of experimental instruments to perform his works. Other composers followed during the 20th century, including Lou Harrison, Ben Johnston, Pauline Oliveros and James Tenney. Experimentation has been a consistent feature of the Los Angeles new music scene in our 21st Century, and the performers on this album have many years of concert experience playing in alternate tuning systems.

My Dancing Sweetheart is subtitled “Just Songs” and so it is appropriate that the first two works on the album, Calamity Jane and Ma Mie Qui Danse were composed by tuning pioneer Ben Johnston. Kyle Gann, composer and student of Johnston, has stated that: “Not all musicians realize it, but Ben Johnston, was a major figure in the Midwestern new music world in the 1970s and ‘80s, comparable to John Cage on the East Coast or Lou Harrison on the West. He looms even larger in the world of microtonal music, for his string quartets, sonatas for retuned keyboard, and other works are among the most compelling works ever written in alternate tunings.”

Composed in 1989, Calamity Jane is based on a series of fictional letters by the notorious wild west character to her daughter. These are a series of short pieces – all less than three minutes – sung by soprano Stacey Fraser, accompanied by Aron Kallay, Shalini Vijavan and Nick Terry. What does alternate tuning bring to Johnston’s music? As John Schneider explains in his eloquent liner notes: “The addition of these new notes provides the composers with an extraordinary new palette of melody and harmony, supported by a retuned piano, and in Calamity Jane, an equally facile violin.”


Johnston, however, does not overwhelm the listener with the unorthodox. Like Harry Partch before him, whose music was inspired by a lighthearted look at depression-era life on the road, Johnston begins Calamity Jane with something familiar: a 39 second soprano solo in a quiet, confessional style. “No. 1 Freely, Like Speech” is a short letter to Janey, Calamity Jane’s young daughter, that lovingly describes her family resemblance: “I like this picture of you: your eyes and forehead are like your father, lower jaw, mouth and hair like me.”. Ms. Fraser’s poignantly expressive vocals here are approachable and compelling, establishing an intimate human connection that carries through the entire work.

More letters follow describing various episodes, and these can be energetic, playful or solemn. “No.2 In Motion with a beat”, is an action filled letter to Janey explaining how Calamity met her father, Wild Bill Hickok, during a shootout near Abilene, Kansas. The stirring vocals are augmented by piano, percussion and violin, establishing an undercurrent of tension and movement. The dynamic balance of the ensemble is ideal; the sound engineering by Scott Fraser is up to his usual high standards. The vocals throughout are critical and are allowed to dominate.

“No. 4 Rather Slowly, but moving forward”, is just that, with the accompaniment in alternate tuning, There is a lovely violin line along with a programmable keyboard that nicely matches the mood for this piece. Ms. Fraser’s vocals have strength in every register and make for a solid exposition of the complicated narrative. “No. 5 Lively but not too fast” has a country music flavor, and describes a dust up in the Deadwood saloon between Calamity Jane and some judgmental local women. A nice beat and a wandering violin line by Ms. Vijavan frame the exuberant vocals.

“No. 6 Waltz-like” is a bit more matter-of-fact and describes the tricks and stunts Calamity performs as part of Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. This piece features a solid beat in the accompaniment in a lively tempo along with agile singing by Fraser.

“No. 7 Slowly” is Calamity Jane slowly singing her recipe for a cake, with most of the lyrics consisting of a simple list of ingredients. The vocal pitch rises with each item listed until Ms. Fraser is singing in a very high register, but she never loses power or control on the ascent. The movement concludes with “This cake is unexcelled and will keep good to the last crumb 20 years.” The final movement is “No. 8 Freely, like Speech” and closes out the diary of letters by Calamity Jane to her daughter. This bookends the first movement with a vocal solo lamenting Calamity’s coming blindness in old age. Sweetly and expressively sung, this is introspective and especially poignant.

Calamity Jane has all the elements of an appealing story: drama, excitement and intrigue populated by likable and colorful characters. The use of alternate tuning never seems to intrude on the narrative, and compliments what is a fine ensemble piece, artfully performed. The dominance of the vocals forge a special human connection with the listener, masterfully sung by Stacey Fraser. Calamity Jane nicely threads the needle between what a listening audience will enjoy and what they might learn about contemporary alternate tuning.

The second Ben Johnston work on the album is Ma Mie Qui Danse, written in 1991. For inspiration, Johnston travels to the opposite end of the personality spectrum, away from the irrepressible Calamity Jane, reaching out instead to adorable innocence. The text of Ma Mie Qui Danse is taken from audio recordings of Johnston’s three year-old granddaughter who, as children often do, sang her own improvised poetry. Building on this, Johnston also included some appropriate selections from the works of Emily Dickenson. This piece is performed as a duo with soprano Stacey Fraser and Aron Kallay on the keyboard.

“No 1. Sprightly” is the first movement, and introduces the granddaughter. A bouncy piano accompaniment provides the launching pad for a number of short, jumpy phrases in the vocals. The singing is agile and angular, full of the starts and stops of toddler enthusiasm, as can be seen from this fragment of the text:

“cause we go a seek and we go very boy
oh, did you remember him’
he was tamer me
and he had and he greet me
for six hundred money
and dream
Mister dream
how he gave me Santa”

Other movements based on the Emily Dickenson texts are more reserved, as with movement “IV. Slow and Tranquil”, The singing here is both forthright and mature, and in a more conventional style.

“A bird is of all beings
The likes to the dawn.
An easy breeze does put afloat
The general heavens upon.”

As the movements proceed, the contrast between the broadly expressive Dickenson and the enthusiastic outbursts of youth constantly refresh the ear, enhancing the feelings expressed by each. The accompaniment and the alternate tuning compliment the emotional force of the singing. The last movement, powerfully sung with a spare accompaniment, sums up the perspective of Ma Mie Qui Danse:

“The child’s faith is new
Whole – like his principle
Wide
Like the sunrise
On fresh eyes
Never had a doubt
Laughs at scruple,
Believes all sham but Paradise!”

Ma Mie Qui Danse is a delightful musical pairing of youthful exuberance and mature reflection.

Bill Alves has contributed two works to the album, Time Resonances (2012) and A Sonatina (2016). These are both single-movement pieces of about 7 minutes each. Alves is a composer and educator, as well as the co-author of a scholarly biography of Lou Harrison. He is co-director of Microfest, the annual festival in Los Angeles dedicated to microtonal music.

As Alves explains in the liner notes, Time Resonances is “…a technological elaboration of a medieval musical genre known as a ‘mensuration canon,’ a piece in which the melody is combined with itself but at a different speed.” Stacey Fraser performs all the parts separately, and these are then combined electronically at different lengths but with no change in pitch. Time Resonances opens with gentle bell tones in various registers. Sustained vocals enter, creating lovely chords that mix well with the bell tones. There are no lyrics in this, just abstract ahhhs and ohhhs. The tempo is moderate with independent vocal lines soaring and gliding in and around each other. The feeling is gently mystical with a sense of standing outside of time. The dynamics rise and fall but only moderately, producing graceful tides of sound. Interesting harmonies develop and subside, slightly dissonant at times. The singing is disciplined and the electronic processing precise. Time Resonances masterfully combines the abstract with the human voice to evoke in the listener a glimpse of the infinite.

The second Alves piece, A Sonatina, draws its inspiration from the poetry of Gertrude Stein. Alves writes in the liner notes about Ms. Stein: “At times, she went even further, making language into a fascinating abstraction, which has long appealed to me as a composer, as has her musical perspective of language, her use of repetition, and the seeming simplicity of her supposed ‘difficult’ works.” All these elements can be found in A Sonatina, performed by Stacey Fraser, Aron Kallay and vocalist Donna Walker.

The piece begins with a string of high piano notes in a fast repeating phrase, simple at first but slowly gaining more structure and complexity. The vocals enter, first spoken by Donna Walker and then sung by Fraser as a sustained melody. The active piano accompaniment by Aron Kallay is controlled and decisive, contrasting nicely with the expressive singing. About midway through the piece, solitary deep notes from the piano add a welcome foundational counterpoint to the continuing melody. A Sonatina is beautifully reflective, and artfully marries the text of Getrude Stein to some really lovely music.

The final work of the album is Die Stille Stürtzt (2015) by German composer Helumt Oehring. This work is sung solo by Ms. Fraser. Die Stille Stürtzt translates in English as The Silence Falls, and is inspired by the poetry of Hungarian exile writer Ágota Kristof. The liner notes explain that the text is “…the search for identity in an unfeeling world.”

The singing is slow and expressive, residing mostly in the lower soprano registers. The sound is lush and lovely, with the soloist easily carrying the entire piece. Sung in German, the language perfectly compliments the sensitivity of the text. The feeling is intimate and slightly wistful:

“The silence tumbles down in the trees, the pale forest
Crooked to the earth and your white face
tired, somewhere you are thinking of me, the one,
who loved your eyes closing from the inside.”

Die Stille Stürtzt manages to bond German and Hungarian sensibilities into a solemn musical formulation that is immediately understood in any language.

The ‘Just Songs’ of My Dancing Sweetheart offer an accessible connection to the experimental past, and brings a new appreciation for Just Intonation and other alternate tuning systems that stand at the cutting edge of contemporary music.

My Dancing Sweetheart is available on Spotify. The album was produced by Aron Kallay and includes a 55 page file that includes the track listing of the album, liner notes, the complete texts for all the pieces and a wealth of background information on the composers and the performers.

by Paul Muller
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Concerts, File Under?, New York

Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio and Friends

Photo: Michael Priest.

Bell-Isserlis-Denk Trio and Friends

Midsummer Musicfest at Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd Street Y

July 9, 2025

 

NEW YORK – July often finds New York-based musicians playing in summer festivals well outside the city. The 92nd Street Y’s Midsummer MusicFest enticed a small handful of luminaries back to town to play chamber music at the venue’s Kaufmann Concert Hall. Violinist Joshua Bell, cellist Steven Isserlis, and pianist Jeremy Denk have joined forces before, but not for a while in New York. In 2024, to commemorate the one hundredth year of his passing, they toured programs of music by the French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924). They revisited these works at the Y on Wednesday, July 9 and Saturday, July 12. 

 

As Isserlis pointed out in remarks from the stage, Fauré isn’t usually mentioned in the same breath as Debussy and Ravel, but he probably should be. The likely reason is that relatively little of his music was large-scale, and of these only the orchestral arrangement of the Pavane and the Requiem are regularly programmed. On the other hand, his songs and chamber music are a rich repertoire demonstrating abundant compositional gifts; memorable melodies, vivid harmonies, and consummate craftsmanship. Isserlis’s case for Fauré was eloquent, and the playing by the trio, joined by violinist Irène Duval and violist Blythe Teh Engstroem, even more so. 

 

One of the most challenging aspects of playing Fauré’s music is the issue of tempo, namely how much rubato one should use. Reports of the composer’s frequent performances as a pianist suggest that he preferred steady tempos, with flexibility where indicated, seldom admitting extravagances. This became even more true in his late performances, where profound hearing loss meant that coordination with collaborators became all the more important. 

 

In their renditions of the Violin Sonata No. 1 in A Major, Opus 13, Bell and Denk proved that one can be amply expressive without excessive rubato. Their version of the sonata presented its many beautiful tunes and intricate phrasing with both detailed attention and luminous warmth. Its soaring first theme is tempting to exaggerate in the aforementioned manner. Bell instead played expressively, never overdoing it. The audience at the Y couldn’t restrain themselves from bursting into applause after the conclusion of the first movement, enthusiasm trumping any worries about a faux pas. Fauré was ambidextrous, and even when they are not virtuosic, his piano parts can prove challenging. Denk enjoys a good challenge, and he inhabits Fauré’s music with estimable suavity. The sense of ensemble reminded one that these are avid chamber musicians who, by long association, are attuned to one another with razor focus. The second and third movements were no less impressive, and the applause after the entire work’s conclusion was no less resounding. 

 

Isserlis joined Denk for a duo version of the Barcarolle in F-sharp Minor, Opus 66. The cellist has performed Fauré’s Cello Sonata with Denk, but on this evening he contented himself with arrangements of some of the composer’s best-loved piano pieces, their melodies underscored by the addition of cello. In the second half, he also performed the Sicilienne, Opus 78, and Berceuse, Opus 16. The pieces recast in this way underscore memorable melodies, and elsewhere resonant bass notes are doubled and thereby amplified. Denk made sure that the piano, despite inherently different attack and decay profiles from the cello, was in sync with the string instrument, making for a beautiful blended sound. 

Photo: Michael Priest.

Duval and Teh Engstroem performed with the trio in the Piano Quintet No. 1 in D minor, Opus 89. The resulting group had a simpatico interaction, its opening allegro movement’s interlacing lines being given particular attention, and throughout a buoyant sense of phrasing. D minor is often used in funereal contexts, the Mozart Requiem and Bach’s D minor Toccata for solo violin to name two. Even in its lyrical slow movement, Fauré’s Piano Quintet never seems to plumb dolorous depths. Instead, the piece feels like a dramatic journey that seldom loses hope for a destination. The concluding third movement was an ample payoff. Instead of ending in minor, it is in D major, with its main theme principally scalar in design. There are little modal inflections around the edges, imparting an impressionist ambience. The performance itself was effusive and unerring, with pinpoint execution of complexly overlapping entrances, thoughtfully nuanced dynamics, and rousing tutti passages. Its close was triumphal in character.

 

There may not be many hits among Fauré’s orchestral works, but the quintet is chamber music writ large. It is an ambitious piece cast in three sizable movements that clocks in at around a half hour in duration. The composer took great pains to create the version that audiences hear today, starting it around 1887 and taking nearly twenty years to finalize the score. He wrote a second in C minor, completed in 1921, and they both have set a high standard for the genre. The Y’s Midsummer Musicfest fete of Fauré did well by him, and one hopes that it doesn’t take an anniversary year for further championing of this fine composer. 

 

  • Christian Carey
by Christian Carey