On Saturday at 2:30, Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music continued with its second concert. The FCM performances contain generous helpings of music. While established composers such as George Benjamin, David Rakowski, and John Corigliano were included Saturday, curator Augusta Read Thomas programmed a great deal of music by the “emerging” generation and by composers underrepresented on US concerts. Some highlights:

Jacob Bancks’ Rapid Transit, for mixed chamber ensemble, received its premiere. A TMC commission, the piece started out slowly, alternating nervous percussion flurries with chorale-like pan-modal verticals. Eventually, the winds picked up the percussion’s rhythmic ideas, and the ensemble was off to the races. Bancks created a clever amalgam of ‘transit sounds,’ using brass for car and train horns and percussion for the various noises that routinely besiege commuters. The faster sections also employed a more chromatic pitch field to further ratchet up the tension. While some details of pacing between the ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ sections might be rethought, Bancks’ compositional language is attractive and the overall impression was quite promising.

Judd Greenstein inverted the famous Boulez essay title, “Schoenberg is Dead,” to create his own work title: Boulez is Alive. In this piece for solo piano, Greenstein detached and deconstructed the modernist elements of his postmodern aesthetic. As the composer acknowledges in his program note, he wrestled with modernism during his training, ultimately rebelling against it. The surface of Boulez is Alive contains evidence of this struggle, with Notations-like angularity pitted against an insistent, gradually emerging tonal center and ostinato figuration. If the piece served to exorcise some demons for Greenstein, it also proved to be a fine performance vehicle for the excellent pianist Makiko Hirata.

Another performance highlight: Pianist Gregory DeTurk played the hell out of three piano etudes by David Rakowski. He reveled in the quick arpeggiations and repeated notes of E-Machines, gave a jaunty rendering of Taking the Fifths, and created a wonderful, lyrical ambience on Les Arbres embué. For anyone who thinks that Rakowski’s etudes are all about mixing jocularity with virtuosity, they need only listen to the latter piece to hear an example of considerable depth and poignancy.

This is the second time I’ve heard Akrostichen-Wortspiel by Unsuk Chin, and it is a piece well worth revisiting often. Korean-born and based in Berlin since the late 1980s, Chin draws upon a host of reference points, ranging from her own background to studies with Ligeti, work in electronic music, and an interest in the writings of author Lewis Carroll. (more…)

The opening concert on Tanglewood’s 2009 Festival of Contemporary Music on Friday featured several works by established composers and a TMC commission. This year’s festival is curated by Augusta Read Thomas. Rather than creating a unified theme for the five days of performances, Thomas has put together a varied group of offerings. In her opening remarks in the TFCM program booklet, she emphasizes,”This is not a festival with a house style.” Instead, what has thus far unified the proceedings are well-prepared, dedicated performances by youthful yet artistically focused musicians.

Christopher Rouse‘s percussion ensemble piece Ku-Ka-Illimoku is a great curtain-raiser: splashy, noisy, and abundantly virtuosic. Based on Hawaiian ceremonial drumming, it provides metric twists, turns, and overlays aplenty. Rouse hasn’t composed a piece for percussion ensemble since Bonham back in the late 1980s; one wishes he’d return to the genre.

Matthias Pintscher‘s Lieder und Schneebilder proved a tougher nut to crack. These settings of e.e. cummings poems for soprano and piano (sometimes prepared) are almost willful in their angular deployment. While cummings’ idiosyncratic typography seems to invite close attention to phrasing and line breaks, Pintscher’s use of ellisions and sprechstimme often seemed problematically placed. Still, Pintscher excels at creating evocative timbres and complexly hued harmonies.

Flutist Brook Ferguson, who was one of the leading lights at last year’s TFCM (devoted to Elliott Carter), was the soloist in Pierre Boulez‘s mémoriale (…explosante-fixe..Originel). Once again, Ferguson wowed with impressive control, beautiful tone throughout the flute’s compass, and attention to the score’s myriad details. The ensemble made the piece sound effortless (which it certainly is not) under the fine direction of Gergely Madaras.

While David Lang has certainly subsequently eclipsed Illumination Rounds, one of the earliest pieces in his catalog, one can see why it often gets played. Violinist Katherine Bormann and pianist Brett Hodgdon reveled in its con fuoco opening, which juxtaposes repeated unison notes and secundal dissonances. The piece’s inspiration tends to lag a bit in the middle; but the performers here made a great case for its sudden return to the opening material, rallying to end with a flourish. (more…)

Wednesday night was the debut of the Orchestra of the League of Composers/ISCM — an improbable eighty-five years after the organization’s founding. As Jerry pointed out earlier, the NY Times included strangely sweeping and sadly misinformed coverage leading up to the concert. However, this did little to dissuade an enthusiastic audience from attending the performance. They were treated to quite an evening. Below are a few highlights:

-Lou Karchin: An excellent choice as conductor. Lou did a fine job leading the orchestra in a varied and challenging program.

-Musicians: Anyone acquainted with new music in New York was apt to recognize a number of the area’s finest participating. It showed.

-John Schaeffer: Despite appearing a bit rumpled onstage, the radio host lent star power, a sense of flow, and good-natured humor to the proceedings. His interviews with composers before each of their pieces were played combined user-friendly setups of the music with questions designed to let the audience get to know a bit about each composer’s approach and personality.

-Having one of the venerable co-chairs of League of Composers/ISCM’s represented on the concert was a classy move. The evening included a stunning performance of In the Distances of Sleep, Carter’s first settings of Wallace Stevens for mezzo-soprano and small orchestra. Soloist Kate Lindsey shined in these songs at the Tanglewood Carterfest last summer. If anything, her performance here was even more lovely; assured, nuanced, and tremendously attentive to every detail of diction and dynamic.  Schaeffer interviewed Carter before the performance. In response to a query about his continued productivity, Carter replied, “I’ve become fanatic about it. I don’t have any jobs to do any more. I can sit in a room and write music all day, and there’s nothing that pleases me more!”

-Gharra: Christopher Dietz’s sheepish admission that he knew little about ISCM prior to winning their composition competition(!) demonstrated that the organization still needs to do more to get out the word during this time of revitalization and re-branding. Still, Dietz’s captivating music is likely to have made the audience forget the gaffe rather quickly. He came up with the title (meaning “desert storm”) after composing the piece – with the help of Google and in consultation with an Egyptian-American cab driver. But Gharra’s strikingly dramatic formal design and fluidly varied pitch language – which encompassed everything from extended minor-key passages to supple microtonal bends – was worthy of the appellation.

-Alvin Singleton’sAfter Choice was simpler in design, but eloquently so. A string orchestra piece, it consisted of intertwining arcomelodies and pizzicati, often in two-part counterpoint or – even starker – played in unisons or octaves. Written in homage to jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins, it didn’t feature anything so overt as jazz inflections. Rather, Singleton based the piece on string parts from a previous orchestral work that Jenkins had admired.

-Julia Wolfe’s The Vermeer Room is filled with beautifully sculpted, imaginatively scored verticals. The harmonic language and orchestration proved quite persuasive. I’m not sure I ‘grok’ the piece’s pacing just yet; I want to give it a second hearing before weighing in.

-Charles Wuorinen’s Synaxis featured four soloists in a sinfonia concertante that draws on the Orpheus myths as loose touchstones, Schaeffer was eager for Wuorinen to more precisely describe the connections between musical and extramusical inspiration; but the composer made it clear that this was no piece of program music.  Instead, the audience was treated to a showcase for four superlative soloists: oboist Robert Ingliss, clarinetist Alan Kay, French horn-player Patrick Pridemore, and double bassist Timothy Cobb. Cast in four movements, Synaxis gave each a chance to play with abundant virtuosity. The bass part displayed particular flair, and required more than a bit of courage: jaunty leaps, high-lying passages, and fleet bowed flurries. With its combination of careful ensemble coordination and bravura showmanship, Synaxis seemed an apt – and appropriately ambitious – way to end the 85th season of League of Composers/ISCM. Let’s hope for more orchestra concerts during their 86th year!

I was saddened to learn today that John Kreckler passed away earlier this week. John was probably best known to composers, performers, and new music audiences as the co-director of the Locrian Chamber Players, a New York-based ensemble that performs exclusively music less than a decade old.

I’d just seen John at the Locrian concert last week. Diva Goodfriend-Koven was performing two of my solo flute pieces. The atmosphere was light and friendly. He sat with me at the dress rehearsal, and joked that I should have given Diva more corrections after the run through (I hadn’t had much to say – Diva’s playing was really extraordinary!).

Before the concert, John gave introductory remarks about Locrian’s mission and their fifteen year-long history. He didn’t join in the after-concert festivities, begging off due to a trip early the next morning; but otherwise, John seemed fine. It’s hard to believe that he’s gone.

Although many knew about his work advocating for others’ music, John was an accomplished composer in his own right. His works were performed at Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, Aspen, and the American Institute of Arts and Letters. A program was devoted exclusively to his work at the Kendall Gallery in New York. Interestingly, during one of his performances, a conversation about the rise of the Bitcoin casino among the audience caught his attention, highlighting the intersection of art and modern technology. He wrote a piano concerto, several string quartets, and two song cycles based on the poetry of Langston Hughes.

John was born in Wisconsin. He received his Bachelor of Music degree cum laude from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He got his Master’s degree and Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with David Diamond, Milton Babbitt and Stephen Albert. He taught at both the Juilliard School and the Aspen Music School.

Survivors include his father, Ed Kreckler, and two sisters, Renee Vandeberg and Cindy Orvel.

There will be a service on Tuesday at 7PM at the Bernard F. Dowd Funeral
Home in Queens.  Their address is 165-20 Hillside Ave., Jamaica, NY.

Phone: (718) 739-8117.

They have onsite parking and there’s a subway stop on the F line nearby.