Month: September 2015

Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

Da Capo Performs Double Centennial Concert

Photo Credit: Janette Beckmann Caption: Members of the Da Capo Chamber Players (Left to Right:) Curtis Macomber, violin, Patricia Spencer, flute, Jay Campbell, cello, Meighan Stoops, clarinet, Blair McMillen, piano
Photo Credit: Janette Beckmann
Members of the Da Capo Chamber Players
(Left to Right:) Curtis Macomber, violin, Patricia Spencer, flute, Jay Campbell, cello, Meighan Stoops, clarinet, Blair McMillen, piano

On Thursday October 1st, the Da Capo Chamber Players commemorate the hundredth anniversaries of two recently deceased American modernists: Milton Babbitt and George Perle. They will perform Babbitt’s When Shall We Meet Again and two works by Perle: Sonata a Quattro and Nightsong. David Fulmer, a Babbitt student, contributes the world premiere of Cadenza, a piece built out of his violin concerto’s hyper-virtuosic solo part. Rounding out the program are Jason Eckardt’s After Serra and Fred Lerdahl’s Times 3.

Though it is more modest in scope than other centennial tributes one can hear this season – particularly Juilliard’s Focus Festival, devoted entirely to Babbitt – the Da Capo event features several players who collaborated closely with Babbitt and Perle. Indeed, both of the Perle works were written for the ensemble. It promises to be an intimate evening filled with finely honed performances.

Thursday, October 1st at 8 PM
Merkin Concert Hall,
129 West 67th Street, NYC, NY

by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Review

American Composers Forum Concert in Los Angeles

acf5-jeffsummersThe Los Angeles chapter of the American Composers  Forum (ACF-LA) held its annual meeting and concert over the weekend of September 11-12, 2015 at newly-refurbished Clausen Recital Hall on the campus of  Los Angeles City College in Hollywood. Many of the groups in Los Angeles doing new music participated, and the resulting concert was over three hours long, requiring two intermissions. The 200 seat venue was completely filled, mostly by performers and composers. The night before there was another ACF-LA concert by wildUp at REDCAT in Disney Hall, so in just a couple of evenings you could have enjoyed a good cross-section of the local new music scene.

The evening began with greetings from Jack Van Zandt, ACF-LA Chapter President and Dr. Christine Park, Chair of the Music Department at LACC. Each performing group also had a spokesperson give a short introduction about the music and goals of their respective organizations.

The first to present was People Inside Electronics and Brightwork newmusic came on stage to perform like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment, by Benjamin Broening. The electronic re-processing of the acoustic sounds from the Brightwork ensemble gave this a shiny, shimmering feel that contained some lovely tones. Silences between the passages allowed the electronics to deliver ghostly echoes that added to the ethereal feel. There was a beautiful flute solo and some bowing of the vibraphone bars that seemed to cast a spell. Benjamin Broening was present – as were most of the composers – and he acknowledged the applause and the fine reading by Brightwork.

The second piece presented by People Inside Electronics was Sad Trombone, by Isaac Schankler. The group gnarwhallaby was on hand in their trademark black coveralls to reprise this work, having premiered it in March of this year. This is a trombone concerto that includes piano, clarinet and cello in addition to reprocessing electronics. Sad Trombone is a fearsome combination, with dark textures, piano crashes, lively syncopated tempos and primal trombone sounds supplied by Matt Barbier. All of this is taken into the microphones, reprocessed, amplified, and returned to the speakers mounted over the stage. The result was a powerful, complex sound that washed over the audience in great waves. The ensemble playing was excellent given the difficulty of the music and the strong presence coming from the speakers. The energy and power in Sad Trombone and the muscular playing by gnarwhallaby was enthusiastically acknowledged by the audience.

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by Paul Muller
Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Los Angeles

Gerhard Stäbler and Kunsu Shim in Los Angeles

southland1On Friday September 11, 2015, the Curve Line Space Gallery  in Eagle Rock was the venue for a concert titled Collaborations 1.1 featuring the works of Gerhard Stäbler and Kunsu Shim as performed by members of the Southland Ensemble. Stäbler and Shim, German experimental composers, are on a three-city tour of the US, sponsored in part by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and the Goethe Institute. Seven pieces composed between 1986 and 2007 were presented, ranging from conceptual works to those with graphical scores and standard notation. The warm evening and exquisite acrylic paintings by Sue Tuemmler complimented the amiable atmosphere present in the audience and the gallery.

The first piece was by Kunsu Shim In Zwei Teilen – I, and this was performed by violin, viola, cello and recorder. The first notes were barely audible – a light, high arco sound from the cello followed by about a minute of silence. A short chord from the strings and recorder was heard and then another long, soft tone from the cello. The combination of quiet sounds and long silences worked to focus the listening and the result was a sense of keen anticipation. More hushed tones from the cello followed and with a pleasantly dissonant final chord from the strings and recorder, the piece concluded.

Hart Auf Hart by Gerhard Stäbler was next and this had several performers scattered around the floor with portable radios and a graphical score consisting of bar codes overlaid by a grid of numbered coordinates. A series of numbers and letters were called out – much like a bingo game – the performers consulted their scores, and some began tuning their radios. The tuning proceeded fairly rapidly, and short bursts of voices and music were heard as well as loud static. The voices coming from the radios were fragmentary and did not add any sort of narrative. For some performers the score indicated silence, and the radio was turned off. The piece continued in this way, coordinates were called out at intervals and radio sounds were heard coming from different corners of the performance space. All of this produced an interesting texture, if not any definite form. The changing patterns and locations of the sounds produced an intriguing sense of space and movement for the stationary listener. Towards the end of the piece, the performers gathered around an open microphone and all of the radio sounds were now projected from a single speaker, flattening the previous sensations of distance and location. With a burst of loud sounds and static the piece suddenly ended.

The third piece on the program was Gerhard Stäbler’s ]and on the eyes black sheep of night[ for piccolo, clarinet and violin. This was a conventionally notated piece that began with a dissonant tutti chord and gave off a feeling of remote loneliness. The piccolo played two alternating high notes and the others joined in similarly in their registers. The effect was like listening to a clockwork oscillating back and forth with a sort of familiar regularity. The coloring became more intense, adding a bit of anxiety. A sudden and almost painfully loud dissonant chord in the violin and piccolo disrupted the calm and captured everyone’s attention. There was a brief return to the more gentle feeling, but ]and on the eyes black sheep of night[ ended on a second tense chord as if to underline the journey from the comfortable to the anxious.

Luftrand, by Kunsu Shim, followed and this was for violin, viola and cello. Soft, muffled tones – almost a whisper – were heard, followed by silence. The players began each passage together and the quiet chords had a mysterious and secretive feel. Everything was soft and tentative, with never a strong bowing action or loud note. The players exhibited good ensemble and a soft touch to produce the delicate sounds that felt like a series of quiet sighs. Midway through, the string tension on each instrument was reduced and this produced a new sound – less purely musical perhaps, but more evocative. The now-lower notes seemed to be enveloped in a thick fog that greatly added to the mystery. Luftrand with its subtle, muted tones invites a deeper and more rewarding concentration from the listener.

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by Paul Muller
Contemporary Classical

BBC Proms—Boulez, Grime, Mason

One of the major threads of the programming of the 2015 Proms concerts was the 90th birthday of Pierre Boulez. This commemoration is both testimony to the importance of Boulez to the music of the second half of the twentieth century, and also to his importance in the history of the BBC and to the Proms. The Prom on August 12 situated a major work of Boulez, Figures – Doubles – Prismes in the context of two of his musical forebears, Ravel and Stravinsky. On August 26, in the concert which was the Proms debut of the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden, another major work of Boulez’s, was presented alongside an important work of his contemporary György Ligeti. “…explosante-fixe….” began as short work (a page of musical notation with several pages of written instructions) which was part of a memorial tribute to Stravinsky organized by the magazine Tempo. The notes of this fragment gravitated to the note E♭, Stravinsky’s musical initial (S=E♭). Boulez produced various expansions of this original material for different ensembles, each version, like the original, called “…explosante-fixe…” and involving live electronics, but each seems to have been unsatisfactory to the composer due to technological difficulties. This “…explosante-fixe…”, which is a sort of concerto for flute, two ‘shadow’ flutes, and a chamber orchestra, with electronics, written between 1991 and 1993 (after further technological advancements), is not exactly a final version of the work, since the plan for the piece was that a relatively simple statement of the material, “Originel,” ending with an E♭, would be arrived at after moving through a cycle of seven “Transitoires,” which in turn were mediated by electronic “Interstitiels.” The present version has only two Transitoires (VII and V). One might be grateful, though, for this, since as it is the work is thirty-four minutes long; and at that length the constantly changing glittering texture and the shimmering instrumental writing remains continually fresh and beguiling. The performance, by soloist Sophie Cherrier, with shadow flutists Dagmar Becker and Anne Romeis, and a subset of the orchestra, the SWR Experimental Studio, conducted by François-Xavier Roth, was ebullient and aurally seductive and thrilling, and was altogether completely satisfying.

“…explosante-fixe..” was set along side of Ligeti’s Lontano, a work for huge orchestra, which, using more or less the same micropolyphonic techniques that in his earlier iconic orchestral masterwork Atmosphéres produced clustery sound masses, evokes the textures and ethos of late nineteenth century orchestral music. Ligeti said that as he was writing Lontano he had in mind some lines from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,”

“…The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn…”,

and as Stephen Johnson wrote in his program note, the work has several moments when it seems that a window is flung open, revealing a startlingly new vista, with yet another vista in turn opening up, continuing into infinity. The orchestra and Roth, just about perfectly realized the beauty and poetry of this work, following it with one of the most important works of one of the most important influences on Ligeti, the Bartok Concerto for orchestra.

The BBC Proms Matinee on August 29, presented by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Thierry Fischer, offered three other important works of Boulez’s, this time situating them with works of younger composers following in his wake, Helen Grime and Christian Mason. The concert opened with Memoriale, an intermediate version of “…explosante-fixe…”. Boulez was working on developing the work at IRCAM with the flautist Lawrence Beauregard during the early 1980s, but Beauregard’s untimely death in 1985 at the age of 28 caused Boulez to suspend his work, after writing Memoriale in his memory. The seven minute long piece is a meditative flute solo (played in this performance by Michael Cox) surrounded by a quietly and elegantly whirring instrumental texture. The clarinetist Mark van de Wiel performed Domaines, an unaccompanied solo work which is possibly the signal product of Boulez’s interest in controlled chance. The work consists of six ‘cahiers,’ or pages, which can be played in any order, which are then followed by six ’mirroirs’, mirror versions of the original ‘cahiers’, which can also be played in any order; each of the cahiers and mirroirs contains six fragments whose order can be varied in a particular way. Eventually, like “…explosante-fixe…” Domaine was expanded by the addition of six additional instrumental sections for from one to six instruments. This rather dazzling solo virtuoso piece received a completely dazzling performance.

The concert concluded with Éclats/Multiples, yet another, in principle, unfinished work consisting of, at the moment, an approximately ten minute long piece for fifteen players, featuring the contrast of instruments whose sound is hard, unchanging, bright, and clanging, and produced percussively, with those whose sound can be prolonged, and whose continuity and speed of figuration can be decided, within certain bounds, by the performers, followed by an approximately seventeen minute long piece for twenty five players (adding nine violas and a bassett clarinet), expanding, darkening, and prolonging the more sustained music from the first part. The performance of the work was vivid, fluent, eloquent, and engaging, and was a suitably spectacular ending for the concert and for the Proms’s birthday celebrations.

Between the works of Boulez were works of composers who, having been born about sixty years later than he was, might be considered part of his progeny. Both Helen Grime and Christian Mason have worked with Boulez and both attested in discussions with Tom Service before the performances of their pieces, proudly and happily claimed to have been profoundly influenced by him, particularly by his ear and mind for detail. Helen Grime’s A Cold Spring, for ten players, is in three movements: a prelude featuring fluttering parts for two clarinets, a serious singing movement featuring a solo horn, and a concluding much more dramatic movement in which the clarinets reappear as featured players. It is concisely and elegantly made and attractively orchestrated. Christian Mason’s Open to Infinity: a Grain of Sand, which was commissioned jointly by the BBC and the Lucern Festival, received it’s UK premiere. Its three movements, played without a break, spurred on by the Blake poem referenced in its title, explore the relationship between the material of the work and the larger parts and, in turn, the whole which it generates. It begins with a rather static, chordal movement, followed by agitated and rhythmically active music, which develops a dramatic trajectory, and ends with slower contemplative music which evolves into a sort of slow motion struggle towards its end. All of this arises from and fades back into the sound of the crotales which all fourteen of the performers play in addition to their other instruments. The pacing of the work and the drawing out of the arc of its argument is masterly and compelling. The playing of the members of the London Sinfonietta throughout the concert was a demonstration of how to bring all this very difficult music to vivid life.

All of these performances are available on the BBC iplayer.
(August 26: http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/emdc8g#b06709hk ;
August 29: http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e4pxj5#b067x658 ;
or the individual pieces can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02pcr1d )

by Rodney Lister
Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, New York

Locrian Chamber Players Return to Riverside

On August 27, 2015, the Locrian Chamber Players gathered on the 10th floor of Riverside Church to present a program of classical contemporary music. The Locrian Chamber Players set themselves apart from other contemporary music ensembles in two ways. First, LCP only programs works that were composed in the last ten years. Second, they withhold the program notes until the end of the concert, leaving the audience members with fewer distractions from directly engaging in the program. As one who often finds himself buried in the program notes, this approach was incredibly refreshing, and successful.

 The program opened with Daniel Thomas Davis’ Thin Fire Racing, an art song for mezzo-soprano, piano, and clarinet. The work is a selection from Follow Her Voice, a set of songs based on Sappho’s Fragment 31, here translated into English. Mezzo Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek’s performance matched the fiery intensity of both Sappho’s text and Davis’ setting. While clarinetist Benjamin Baron and pianist Jonathan Faiman expertly supported her, both were also given moments to shine.

 To offer a change in mood, the second piece on the program was Shafer Mahoney’s Shining River. This duet was played by flautist Catherine Gregory and harpist Victoria Drake. In contrast to Thin Fire Racing, Shining River is calm, pensive, and deeply internal. Gregory’s long, lyric lines complemented the gently bumping harp to create the image aptly suggested by Mahoney’s title.

Another Ecstatic Opening Out by Victoria Malawey received its New York premiere. For this piece, violinist Keats Dieffenbach and cellist Kristina Cooper joined Gregory and Drake. The interesting textures and timbres Malawey creates within the ensemble are striking. The sounds of the flute blend almost seamlessly into the violin and then further from violin to cello. A pizzicato cello complements the steady churn of the harp, with Cooper’s timbre seemingly growing out of the colors of the harp.

 The first half of the program concluded with Mei-Fang Lin’s Mistress of the Labyrinth for solo piano. In contrast to the melodic and lyrical pieces presented before it, Mistress of the Labyrinth is rough and aggressive, with a dissonant and pointy harmonic language. The piece is labyrinthine, expansive and winding, never fully revealing to the listener exactly where it is leading.

 The second half of the concert opened with Cantico dell creature by Caroline Shaw. Another very old text, this piece is a setting of an Italian text by St. Francis of Assisi. While the lengthy text did yield a substantial piece, Shaw’s setting did much to offset the formulaic nature of Assisi’s poetry.

 For the finale, Cooper and Dieffenbach were joined by Baron, violinist Anna Lim, and violist Daniel Panner in Aaron Jay Kernis’ Perpetual Chaconne. The omnipresent falling motive that opens the piece creates a sense of perpetuity. As the piece builds and intensifies, it almost seems to exist outside of time. As most of the thematic detail seems to develop and open up upon itself as the piece progresses, in a fascinating way, listening to this piece feels much more like the expansion of the a single moment, the meticulous inspection of a single detail, than a large-scale progression over a long period of time.

by Cortlandt Matthews