Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Dear Galen:

It was good to see you at the BMOP concert earlier tonight [Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, conductor, Jordan Hall, Boston--May 27--Takemitsu Tribute]and to talk briefly face to face. Since I didn't see you afterwards and wasn't able to compare notes, I should say that my overwhelming impression of Takemitsu's music for me is the same as that that I have to every Ligeti piece I encounter: that he was clearly such a good musician, and heard everything beautifully, and considered and thought out everything carefully and incredibly well: that he was just such a good composer. [second half: Takemitsu--Requiem (1957), Three Films Scores, November Steps(1967)] I was particularly impressed by the Requiem, which seemed so powerful and compelling. The films scores were appealingly slinky, lush, or however else one might want to describe them. It struck me that even though Takemitsu's notes for November Steps said "...a composer should not be occupied by such things as how one blends traditional Japanese instruments with an orchestra..." he certainly did a good and canny job of providing linking timbral elements between the shakuhachi and biwa and the western instruments. It seemed to me that the performances were really wonderful, matching the elegance and beauty of the writing with elegantly and luxuriously beautiful playing. One might have wished for something from the last 37 years of Takemitsu's life, but I suppose complaining about it would be churlish.

As I told you earlier, I thought that Ken Ueno's piece [Kaze-no-Oka "Hill of the Winds"--first performance, comissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard] was really strong and I liked it a lot. The beginning, which Ueno said in his notes "concentrates on transcribing the Japanese concert of sawari (roughly translates to beautiful noise or touch and speaks of the prioritization of sound in Japanese traditional music)"], full of thumps and plunks, microtones, and, most especially multiphonics from the contrabass clarinet and baritone saxophone, also did a good job of laying down the common elements with the shakuhachi and biwa, and made an imposing introduction to the extended section for the Japanese instruments (which can stand alone as an independent piece). Since, unlike you, I hadn't read the program notes beforehand, I kept waiting (with great anticipation) for the orchestra to come back in and wondering how he was going to do it. Just about the time I was losing interest, or beginning to do, they stopped and the piece was over, without the orchestra ever coming back in (disapointingly, as far as I was concerned). In his spoken introduction, he did say something about the music for the two instruments being a separate piece, but I'd (hopefully) imagined something like the Berio Sequenza/chemins, with the orchestra surrounding--in a number of senses--the soloists, but that's not the way it happened.

Tan Dun's Water Concerto had a very very strong beginning, I thought, and always demonstrated a great sensitivity to and ingenuity with timbre and instrumental writing, but, for me, it pretty soon began to seem awfully thin--it had everything one might want except substance (and actual music). It might have seemed quite good had it had a movie going on in front of it, since it was attractive and pretty lively. But it was also extremely unspecific. The playing, especially that of Robert Schultz, the soloist, was pretty fabulous, but watching even the most insteresting percussionist splashing around in water loses its interest before too long.

I'm sure you had different (maybe even wildly different) thoughts about the concert, and I'd be very interested in hearing them.

All best,

As ever,

Rodney

posted by Rodney Lister 5/28/2005