Month: March 2011

Contemporary Classical

Calling All Mutter Modern Maniacs

Among your name brand violinists, Anne Sophie-Mutter has been the most ardent champion of modern and new music.  There are few, if any, 20th century violin masterworks that she hasn’t played and/or recorded.  She rarely does a concert without modern pieces and her appearance with a group of  chamber music all-stars at Avery Fisher Hall at 3 pm this Sunday, April 3,  is no exception.  In addition to the Beethoven String Trio in G Major op 9, No. 1 and Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings, she will be teaming up with the brilliant young double bassist, Roman Patkoló, for the U.S. premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s  Duo concertante for Violin and Double Bass and the world premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s Dyade for Violin and Double Bass.

I have two pairs of tickets to give away for the concert to whoever can answer at least two out of three questions.  One of the answers is strictly hush-hush and won’t be announced until next Sunday’s concert but if you can attend the concert and want to take a stab, leave an e-mail address so I can contact you and tell you how to get your tickets if you win.

Ready?

1. Frau Mutter’s foundation has established a new award program for gifted musicians.  Who is it named for?

2. How did the person for whom the award is named get her first name?  (I don’t know the answer to this one myself but I have a theory and if your theory is the same as mine, you get points.)

3.  The first winner of the award in question will be named this Sunday.  Who do you think it will be?   Don’t forget to leave your e-mail with your answer because I’m not confirming the answer in print until Sunday night or Monday morning.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Lee Hoiby (1926-2011)

Lee Hoiby, one of the preeminent composers of song and opera in the 20th Century, passed away today at the age of 85. I was lucky enough to host Lee for a two-day residency here at SUNY Fredonia last September, which culminated in a concert of his works by students and faculty with Lee playing piano for every work…including a sing-a-long with the entire audience at the end. To see 20-year-old voice majors lining up after the concert to get his autograph was pretty special, and indicative of how much he meant to so many music lovers around the world. His publisher’s statement is below: (more…)

by Rob Deemer
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?, New York, Video, Women composers

Cutting Edge Concerts Kicks Off Tonight

Thus far, 2011 seems to be the year of the festival. From Tune Up to Tully Scope and beyond, a wide variety of adventurous outings have been offered in New York. Starting tonight, Symphony Space joins in the fun with their Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival.

If each festival has had its own identity – Tune Up reveling in the Park Avenue Armory’s generous space and acoustics, Tully Scope celebrating the diversity of its offerings and its newly remodeled digs – the emphasis of Cutting Edge seems, like so many events at Symphony Space, to be outreach and interaction.
All of the composers will be present at the concerts featuring their music. Each program will include onstage discussion between the featured composers and Victoria Bond. One hopes that meeting composers “in the flesh” and learning about their works firsthand will encourage audience members to approach their works with open minds and ears.
Tonight’s concert includes a world premiere by talented up and comer Hannah Lash, as well as a New York premiere by perennial audience favorite Peter Schickele. Kathleen Supove performs a work by Randy Woolf . Topping it all off is Hidden Inside Mountains, a new multimedia work by downtown luminary Laurie Anderson.
Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival is on four Monday evenings at 7:30 pm on
March 28, April 4, April 11 and April 25, 2011 at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre in
Peter Norton Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th Street in New York City.
More information about the Festival, including program notes, performer and composer bios, and
video interviews is available at  CuttingEdgeConcerts.org.
Tickets are $20 ($15 for students and seniors).
To purchase tickets, visit  SymphonySpace.org or call 212-864-5400.

 

 
Program for Monday, March 28, 2011

Hannah Lash: Folksongs (world premiere)
MAYA: Sato Moughalian, flute; Bridget Kibbey, harp, John Hadfield, percussion
MAYA’s appearance is supported by the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family
Foundation
Peter Schickele: Music for Orcas Island (NY premiere)
Renee Jolles, violin; Daniel Panner, viola; Maxine Neuman, cello; Kathleen Supove,
piano
Jon Deak: Bye Bye
Sato Moughalian, flute; Kathleen Supove, piano
Randall Woolf: Righteous Babe
Sato Moughalian, flute; Kathleen Supove, piano
Laurie Anderson: Hidden Inside Mountains
Laurie Anderson, video and music
by Christian Carey
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Opera, Review

Akhnaten at Long Beach Opera

Jochen Kowalski (center) and the Long Beach Opera Chorus in Akhnaten by Philip Glass

If you have the slightest interest in contemporary opera or modern drama, you must see Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, scheduled for one more performance by Long Beach Opera on Sunday, March 27. It is a brilliant update of Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, in which Glass’s music, staging by Andreas Mitisek, choreography by Nanette Brodie, and video projections by Frieder Weiss all combine into one amazing whole.

At the heart of the work is Glass’s monolithic score and libretto. The story itself is a series of tableaux depicting the rise (Act 1) and fall (Act 3) of Akhnaten and his dangerous idea—there is only one God, Aten, the Sun. (Act 2 is devoted to Akhnaten’s implementation of monotheism). Glass’s repetitive music, with its Brucknerian phrase lengths and static textures, creates a deep sense of ritual underlying each scene.

The modern operas favored by most American companies strike me as unsatisfactory hybrids in which a recent contemporary musical vocabulary is poured into a 19th-century dramatic form. With the typical American opera libretto adapted from a novel, film, or conventional play, the narrative is linear, the presentation of material straightforward, rarely employing any 20th-century dramatic innovations. What Glass did with his Einstein/Gandhi/Akhnaten operatic trilogy was to bring opera up to date with contemporary dramatic thought. Even though Akhnaten is almost 30 years old, it seems fresh and novel compared to the retooled verismo of so much recent American opera.

Another problem for me in contemporary opera (although it’s a problem over 100 years old) is that of vocal parts consisting of continuous recitative or through-composed arias or whatever you want to call them. In the Baroque through Romantic periods, an aria sung by a character operated according to clear structural principals—the da capo aria or classical number aria. What has replaced that organizing device in modern operas? Complete formal freedom—in many contemporary operas, the characters sing in a continuous recitative. Berg solved the problem by shaping the scenes in Wozzeck according to the principals of multi-movement instrumental music.

Glass came up with a somewhat similar solution in his operas—the sung vocal lines are an integral part of the musical process. The vocal parts in Akhnaten are like instrumental lines, an essential part of Glass’s overall musical fabric. The intellectual rigor of his writing allows orchestral instruments to be substituted for the voices in the Akhnaten excerpt of Jerome Robbins’s ballet, Glass Pieces, (Act 1, Scene 1) without any loss of musical sense or drama.

This vocal writing flies in the face of the American operagoer’s expectations. What, no high C for the soprano? No cadenza for the tenor? (The lack of big stage moments for singers is probably one of the reasons Akhnaten and similar operas are rarely produced in the U.S.).

This is not to say that there aren’t highly dramatic moments in Glass’s vocal parts. The first note sung by Akhnaten is one of the most startling entrances in all of opera. We see Akhnaten for an entire scene during his coronation, but it is not until the last scene of Act I that we finally hear Akhnaten sing; what comes out of his mouth is not the heroic tenor or deep bass we expect from an operatic king, but rather a hooty A above middle C sung by a countertenor. Yes, we knew Akhnaten was a countertenor when we first took our seat, but that does not mitigate the unnerving violation of our expectations when this figure of grandeur opens his mouth and issues forth a sound which would be more appropriate for a giant boy soprano.

Jochen Kowalski sang the title role with a vibrato so wobbly that he could be an honorary member of the International Workers of the World. Paul Esswood, who created the role of Akhnaten for the Stuttgart premiere and the subsequent recording, sang with little vibrato in a style more typical for an early music concert than an American opera stage. Akhnaten was a physically deformed man, yet Kowalski looked like, and played him, as an imposing authority figure. Kowalski’s attitude was firm, his blocking well-defined, his postures exact; it was too bad that his sense of pitch did not share these characteristics. Let’s hope his singing is more disciplined on Sunday afternoon.

The other two prominent roles were ably sung by alto Peabody Southwell as Nefertiti and tenor Tyler Thompson as the Amon High Priest (not “Amon” as the program identified him—Amon was the god). A recent graduate, Southwell already possesses a solid tone and a confident stage presence, and one suspects audiences will see even more of her as her voice matures. (more…)

by Christian Hertzog
Boston, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Interviews

An interview with Sir Harrison Birtwistle

Miss Music Nerd (AKA composer/keyboardist Linda Kernohan) recently had an opportunity to chat with Sir Harrison Birtwistle after hearing his Violin Concerto premiered by Christian Tezlaff and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  In the course of their conversation, Birtwistle discussed the impetus for writing a violin concerto, his difficulties with precompositional schemes (“I get terribly bored…by the time I’ve got 200 yards down the road”), and how he handles getting “stuck” while writing a work.

The entire interview (with some interesting links to other Birtwistliana) can be found here.

Ms. Hahn, if you’re looking for a new concerto to learn (hint, hint)….

by Christian Hertzog
Contemporary Classical

Hilary Plays for Japan

Hilary Hahn was supposed to be in Japan this week on a recital tour with her frequent collaborator Valentina Lisitsa but nature had other plans.  The catastrophic  twin disasters of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and powerful subsequent tsunami on March 11 took the lives of thousands of Japanese citizens and have left thousands more without homes, electricity, or access to clean water.

Hahn’s Japan concerts were understandably canceled so she decided to use the time to organize and play four Japan-relief benefit concerts in the United States this week.

“I had been looking forward to performing in Japan: the country is unlike any other, and the audiences are so dedicated and love music so much that it is always a pleasure to play for them,” Hahn writes.  “I first went to Japan when I was a teenager and have returned nearly every year since. My memories from my time there are vivid, and it is hard to picture a vibrant country that I know so well facing such a destructive crisis. My first thought was to organize a tour of fundraiser concerts: instead of playing in Japan this month, I might be able to play for Japan.”

Hahn will play four concerts around the country to help raise money for Direct Relief International (MD, GA, and NY concerts) and for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (VA concert). 100% of the proceeds will be sent to these charities and both charities have pledged 100% of the money will go to Japan relief and recovery funds.

The mini-tour begins today, March 24 in Baltimore, where Hahn will be joined by singer/songwriter Caleb Stine, violinist Yuka Kubota, pianist Yoshie Kubota, Baltimore School for the Arts students Tariq Al-Sabir and Robert Pate, and Suzuki students from the Peabody Preparatory. There will also be appearances by author Lia Purpura and historian Constantine Vaporis, both of whom recently contributed to an editorial exploring best non GamStop casinos 2025, underscoring Baltimore’s eclectic blend of cultural and modern interests. The Baltimore event is envisioned as a community-based collaborative project. Art, jewelry and more will be on sale by Baltimore area artisans. The concert will be held at St. John’s of Baltimore. Tickets are $20-$50 and are available in advance at Red Emma’s Bookstore, 800 St. Paul St. and with cash at the door.

Tomorrow, Friday, March 25 a benefit concert will be held at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Alexandria, VA. This concert, and the following in Spivey Hall at Clayton State University, Morrow, GA on Sunday March 27, will feature a shared program between Hahn and long time collaborator Valentina Lisitsa. Lisitsa, called “jaw-dropping” and “glorious” by The Chicago Tribune, was set to tour Japan with Hahn and helped to make these two benefit concerts a reality. The concert in Alexandria is free, but donations are highly recommended. Tickets for the concert at Spivey Hall are $75, available from Spivey’s box office: 678-466-4200 or www.spiveyhall.org.

Finally, Hahn will appear with special guests Josh Ritter, Chris Thile, and Caleb Stine on Monday March 28 at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. Tickets are available on the Galapagos website:www.galapagosartspace.com. This final concert brings together a eclectic group of performers whose love for music is contagious–the evening is a celebration of music making and artistic connectivity. The goal is not only to raise money for a worthy cause, but to take time to remember the joyous love of artistic creation that makes Japan such a resilient culture.

And, I might add, to remind us why Hilary is the Sequenza21 lifetime Prom Queen.

Feel free to repost and/or pass along this condensed schedule:
Thursday, March 24 – 7:30 p.m.
Baltimore, MD
Featuring: singer/songwriter Caleb Stine, violinist Yuka Kubota, pianist Yoshie Kubota, Baltimore School for the Arts students Tariq Al- Sabir and Robert Pate, and Suzuki students from the Peabody Preparatory
2640 Space at St. John’s
$20-$50

Friday, March 25 – 7:30 p.m.
Alexandria, VA
Featuring: Valentina Lisitsa
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Free, donations encouraged

Sunday, March 27 – 3 p.m.
Morrow, GA
Featuring: Valentina Lisitsa
Spivey Hall at Clayton State University
$75

Monday, March 28 – 9 p.m.
Brooklyn, NY
Featuring: Josh Ritter, Chris Thile, and Caleb Stine
Galapagos Art Space
$55

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

The Discrete Musical Charms of Pavia

If you’re looking for a place to hang out with some pretty famous composers, polish off your latest  music project and hear it played in a historic venue by professional musicians in front of a real audience, make new friends and music world connections, win a composition prize, and maybe even meet the girl or boy of your dreams (or bring them along if you already have), I have a suggestion for you:  Pavia.  Located a mere 35 clicks from the Milan airport, the ancient university town (pop. 70,000, 20,000 of them students) in northern Italy’s Lombardy region will host its annual highSCORE Contemporary Music Festival and Master Classes from July 6-18 and if you’re a composer and your music project is accepted, you can be there…for the price of about 20 minutes at Yale.

The highSCORE Festival is the brainchild of a 28-year-old composer and mathematical music theorist Giovanni Albini, who serves as Artistic Director, and his 30-year-old business partner, Paolo Fosso, computer scientist, musician, and marketer par excellence, who is Executive Producer.   I spoke to Albini last night via Skype and he was very excited about this year’s program.

“The idea is to bring together a group of talented young composers and have them work closely with our renowned faculty and special guests for two intense weeks of masterclasses, lectures, workshops and concerts,” Albini says. “Performances of the participants’ music during the festival are presented at cultural and historical sites throughout Pavia, such as the famous church of St. Peter in the Golden Sky where St. Augustine and Boetius are buried. We work directly with the F. Vittadini” Higher Institute of Music Studies, which is located here, and has 20 plus large, well-equipped rooms with Vertical and Grand Pianos that we use.”

This year’s faculty includes Giya Kancheli, who is guest of honor, dean of faculty Christopher Theofanidis, Mario Garuti, Paul Glass, Ugo Nastrucci, Ingrid Pustijanac, and Amy Beth Kirsten, who told me last night that she is “thrilled” to be part of the program.

“This is wonderful opportunity to be part of growing community of composers who have shared the highSCORE Festival experience and come away with a real sense of achievement and optimism about their futures in music,” she says.

All of the details you’ll need if you’re interested are on the Festival’s sharp new website.  Deadline for applications is April 8. For the 2011 edition you can submit music for:

> string quartet with or without electronics
> solo guitar (classical, acoustic or electric) with or without electronics
> solo double-bass or electric bass with or without electronics

“You don’t have to write something between now and April 8,” Albini adds. “You can submit something you’ve already finished and some sketches of what you plan to do in Pavia in July.”

by Jerry Bowles
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Houston, Strings

Musiqa presents: The Art Of Conversation

Spring in Houston is an intensely visual experience as the grass now nourished by rain and sun turns from brown to green. Flowers are blooming in unexpected places while birds of all shades of color return to take up residence in the surrounding trees. Everything looks and smells a little…fresher. Come Spring, Houston’s bird population as well as its amphibians and yes, insects, sing or otherwise rock their antiphonal and conversational repertoire all day and all night. Which leads us to one of the many highlights of what is now the last few months of the artistic season.

This Saturday, March 26th at 7:30pm at the Hobby Center’s Zilkha Hall, Musiqa presents “The Art of Conversation,” a unique blend of music and theater with the Grammy-nominated Enso String Quartet performing a program of Houston composers including two world premieres by Kurt Stallmann and Rob Smith, as well as quartets by Karim Al-Zand and Marcus Maroney. Interwoven with the music are two ten-minute one-act plays by Michael Hollinger, “Truth Decay” and “Naked Lunch,” featuring actors Briana Resa and Matt Hune under the direction of Julia Traber. The similarity of string quartet writing and performance to conversation between companions or even actors in a play inspired the concert’s name and cross-disciplinary programming. Houston, by the way, has a very lively theater scene with several forward thinking companies including Alley Theatre, Stages Repertory Theatre, Frenetic / FrenetiCore Theatre, Catastrophic Theatre, and and Bobbindoctrin Puppet Theatre.

Composer Kurt Stallmann

Commissioned by the Chamber Music America Commissioning Program, Kurt Stallman’s premiere Following Franz, Now for string quartet and electronics began with Stallman’s analysis of Franz Schubert’s unfinished string quartet Quartettsatz, a process that generated musical materials for his own quartet built directly from those contained in Schubert’s score. Going far beyond musical quotation, Stallman challenged himself by imposing only small changes to Schubert’s original materials – widening the opening range of pitches by a semitone, deriving all harmonic material from a few choice chords, or lengthening of the primary motif by a single sixteenth note – to develop a composition containing the “trace memory” of Schubert’s original work. Enso will perform Schubert’s Quartettsatz before Following Franz, Now so audiences can experience the transformation.

Composer Rob Smith

Musiqa Artistic Board member Rob Smith also directs the AURA contemporary ensemble at the Moores School Of Music. His composition for string quartet and The Art Of Conversation’s second world premier Spin is inspired by the manic energy and immediacy of contemporary pop music as well as the exhilarating if queasy sensation of spinning. “A circle of fifths harmonic progression, canonic passages, modal figures that loop around the tonic, and uneven rhythmic patterns” are all a part of Spin’s driving and energetic musical world.

“The Art Of Conversation” takes place March 26, 7:30 p.m. at The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, Zilkha Hall, 800 Bagby. Ticket prices are $20-$40 with 50% off for seniors and students with ID. You can purchase tickets at www.musiqahouston.org.

At 7:00pm, Musiqa’s Artistic Director Anthony Brandt presents “New to New Music,” a pre-concert talk geared especially for those new to contemporary classical music.

This Friday at 12 noon Central time, tune in to KUHF 88.7 to hear the Enso Quartet, Kurt Stallman and Rob Smith interviewed live on The Front Row. KUHF streams online, so those of you around the country, check it out.

by Chris Becker
Contemporary Classical

Sampling sound worlds

Since I’ve been at the University of Michigan, I’ve frequently pondered the nature of the “American” sound in contemporary music. I recognize the present state of American contemporary music a melting pot of almost every style imaginable, but I wonder further about common threads, the deeper musical and intellectual ideas American composers – my generation in particular – share.

I had the opportunity this past Sunday and Monday to experience a sample population – albeit it very small – of talented, ambitious student composers when I attended concerts at my undergraduate alma mater, Rice University, and my current school, the University of Michigan. I’ve been Sequenza21’s UMich beat writer since September, so I thought I’d use this unusual coincidence to analyze, a little more deeply, the commonalities and differences between these sets of musical minds. Though I have the larger community of composers in mind, my conclusions are relevant to/dependent on my individual experience and – alas – are limited in scope. If nothing else, I hope the following opinions will spark/provoke members of different musical networks to investigate the relationship between their personal or group sound and the rest of our musical society.

I’ll begin with what I think is the biggest difference between the two schools’ sound worlds: popular music influences more heavily permeate the new music at Michigan, both directly and indirectly. Freshman Zac Lavender’s Song Cycle in Three Movements is the most transparent illustration of this impulse I’ve heard all year at Michigan. The work consists of three pop songs that interpret common psychological themes in popular music (i.e. personal insecurity, the pressure of deciding one’s future, etc.) and are scored for a singer-guitarist and rotating battery of strings, drum set and electric bass. The individual songs were catchy – the second song, 17 Days Ago, is still stuck in my head – and the string parts were akin to producer/arranger George Martin’s work with The Beatles.

Based on last year, the much smaller composition studio at Rice could only boast one student with similar tastes: Joelle Zigman. I am not sure how her music has changed since I graduated, but her growth in the two years I knew her yielded a fusion of a pop-style musical surface with the more complicated textures and techniques she had learned as a student of contemporary music. Development like this is not unusual for composers, because many of us deeply love popular music. The degree of influence composer’s allow popular music to have in their concert works seems to be growing with time, and it wouldn’t surprise me if young composers’ works began to increasingly resemble the popular music they interact with daily.

(more…)

by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical, New York, Premieres

Lunatics, poets and composers giving sanctuary

(And Gods know sanctuary is something many of us might be searching for these days…) This Monday, 21 March, at 8pm in the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall (57th Street and Seventh Avenue, NYC), the ensemble Lunatics at Large begin a series of four concerts with five premieres, of works involving the collaboration of five composers and five poets. This little bit of numerology is titled “The Sanctuary Project“; Project Director Evi Jundt says:

We picked artists whose work we believed would be evocative of the theme ‘Sanctuary.’ First, the poets presented one new poem and some older works to the composers. The composers then chose which poet(s) they felt compelled to collaborate with. Each collaboration happened on its own terms: in one case, it resulted in a group of poems set to music in a song cycle; in another case, the poet helped find examples of folk music to be quoted in the composition. In the next stage, musical compositions served as inspiration for another new work by the poets. Finally, the poets – the initiators of the process – will join the musicians onstage to read their work in between performances of the chamber pieces.

The composers are André Brégégère, Mohammed Fairouz, Raphael Fusco, Laura Koplewitz and Alex Shapiro; the poets are Rob Buchert, Joanna Fuhrman, David Shapiro, Yerra Sugarman and Ryan Vine.

The Lunatics will present the same concert three more times, in actual sanctuaries: April 8, 8pm at Christ and Saint Stephen’s Church (122 West 69th Street, NYC); April 10, 7pm at the Synagogue for the Arts (49 White Street, NYC); and April 21, 7:30pm at WMP Concert Hall (31 East 28th Street, NYC).

by Steve Layton