In celebration of Louis Andriessen’s seventieth birthday, the first UK performance of his The Hague Hacking was scheduled for the Prom concert on August 17.  The piece was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and first performed with that orchestra by the pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque and Esa-Pekka Salonen, who were the performers for the Proms, playing this time with the Philharmonia Orchestra.   There were several sources, or perhaps references embedded in The Hague Hacking: the piano parts make use at the beginning and subsequently in the piece of the notes of the beginning of the Lizst Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which Andriessen knew not so much from knowing the piece itself as from knowing its use in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, The Cat Concerto (Warner Brothers used the Lizst in a similar way in a fairly well known Bugs Bunny cartoon, Rhapsody Rabbitt); the work also uses a Dutch “sing-along ballad” about The Hague, O, O, The Hague (Andriessen suggested in an interview that the text of this song is vulgar), whose notes are presented first at lengths which render it unrecognizable, but on subsequent reappearances faster, finally, apparently, at the end of the work, at its original speed; in addition the work’s Dutch title, Haags Hakkûh, makes allusion to the slang name (the second word of the title) for what we are told in Robert Adlington’s program note is a “a distinctive kind of dance, characterized by quick ‘chopping’ foot movements, that emerged in Dutch nightclubs in the 1990’s.

All of these allusions are very subtle, however.  If one knows they’re there, the notes of the Lizst are recognizable, but if one wasn’t looking for them they could easily be missed.   The surface of the piece is full of fairly rapidly zig-zagging hocketing notes in rhythms that one could see coming from some kind of house music, but since the bass is fairly consistently in long notes, certainly not suggesting any kind of dance music, the sense that there’s some kind of clubby dance music going on is absent.  O, O, the Hague not being a particularly well known tune, outside of Holland anyway, a non-Dutch listener has to take its presence there on faith.   What one hears if one isn’t worrying about all these subtle allusions is an engaging,  mostly slow, rather monumental work with very active surface texture, although not as lively as all the preliminary information suggested.  The orchestration is forcefully sonorous and bell-like and the piece makes an impressive sound.

The concert also included three dances from El amor brujo by De Falla, and two works of Ravel, the Mother Goose ballet (the movements from the original four hand piece, which Ravel turned into a ballet, changing their order and adding music, mostly short interludes connecting the movements, and Bolero.   The performance of Mother Goose was astounding and unforgettable due to  beauty of the playing, particularly of the winds, and its great subtlety. (more…)

At the suggestion of an admirer of Sequenza21, I filled out and submitted an application last night to A National Summit on Arts Journalism, a project of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program, which will feature five competitively-chosen projects at its annual conference on October 2. It would be great if S21 were one of them.

I hope the judges don’t take away too many points for typos. The form was one of those where you paste your stuff in but you can’t see it all while you’re working or fix it later and I’m getting a little senile besides.

Our application is now online here and you can leave comments which I hope some of you will do.

If you have a project of your own you want to submit, better hurry. Applications close Monday.

HDTracks.com

Over the years since the advent of the MP3 file format, every now and then some misinformed or luddite journalist writes an article about how MP3 and digital downloads are killing music because MP3 has lower fidelity than CDs.  I always maintained that MP3 encoding wasn’t nearly as bad as the doomsayers claimed, and that in a few years when file storage got cheaper and internet bandwidth got broader digital downloads would outstrip CDs in quality.  My rationale was that 44.1kHz recording makes CDs high enough in fidelity that there isn’t enough demand for higher quality to make a replacement medium economically viable–the failure of SACD to take over the market seems to support this theory.  With digital downloads, however, there’s no need for new hardware standards–most media players and computers can play 96kHz audio no problem, somebody just needs to sell the recordings.

That’s where HDTracks.com comes in.

(more…)

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…)