The timing gods may be with me…I’ll just happen to be in NYC for the day today and just might be able to make it down from LaGuardia to 153 Bleeker Street to see Signal performing Steve Reich’s Double Sextet and his original Sextet under the watchful eye of Brad Lubman. Tickets are $30 if you haven’t purchased them yet and there are shows tonight at 7:30pm & 10pm…if you happen to see a slightly disoriented guy with a cane (from a goofball injury last week) at the later show, that’ll probably be me.

The Ojai Music Festival came to a triumphal ending last night with a raucous, committed, glowing performance of Louis Andriessen’s “Worker’s Union” (1976). The performance of the Andriessen began four and a half hours after the start of the Sunday evening concert. The six musicians of eighth blackbird came on stage and played two or three iterations. Then one of the other musicians of the evening came on stage from the wings and joined in. Then another. Then two more. Then four more came through the audience. Then more. Almost three dozen playing and joining in “Workers Union”, including Tom Morris, the Festival’s Music Director, on percussion. We in the audience wanted to join in the joyous noise; it wasn’t enough to just yell out our approval, we needed to join in at the end of a long day and a great festival. It’s a shame that the musicians didn’t go back into the audience to let us join in.

Saturday night’s concert ranks up there close to Salonen and the Finns or to Dawn Upshaw in Berio and Golijov as the very best events from Ojai. To start was “Quasi Sinfonia” by David Michael Gordon (2008), a wild, woolly, noisy, charming chamber symphony for 16 musicians (the blackbirds and 10 friends). This was performed without conductor, no small feat in itself for a festival ensemble, but even more accomplished for a work that occasionally seems to change meter with each measure. (blackbird cellist Nick Photinos must have strong neck muscles; his time-keeping through head motions seemed more effective in maintaining the beat for the ensemble than many conductors can achieve with their arms and a baton. His beat made it easier for me to follow what Gordon was doing, I know.) Think of a toy-derived non-traditional instrument: Gordon came close to finding a way to use it in the work. This was fun, riotous, but fun.

And then… The blackbirds plus Lucy Shelton plus dancer/costumer Elyssa Dole performed “Pierrot Lunaire” in what was the best of five versions I’ve seen. (Yes, better than that done by the WDCH house ensemble. Sorry, E-P.) Sometimes the movements and stage bits that the blackbirds like in performance seem to detract from my hearing the music; sometimes their stage business seems to me like busyness. But not here. Their shifting ensembles helped make clear the music’s shifts of resources and colors. Lucy Shelton offered a just-right blend of “low art” (cabaret) with the high art of the formal salon. Matthew Duvall, the eighth’s percussionist, was a perfect Pierrot in his ice-cream-suit and bow tie. This was a model performance. (I think that people do a dis-service to this work by trying to add a storyline. I wish they could accept the work for what it is, instead of trying to make it more “important” with a story. This performance gave us a non-story line, a series of memory fragments, and it certainly worked for me.)

Sunday morning’s concert was “Music for 18 Musicians” (yes, Reich, of course), performed by the blackbirds and 13 friends. (The performance used an extra person; I think this was to provide some rotational relief.) I was glad to hear it, but where I was sitting (too close) the volume from the pulse strokes absolutely dominated the sound. The balances were off; some voices were missing. I felt we needed Reich to re-set and focus the audio system. However, I should point out that I was in a small minority in this opinion. Others around me had no problem. So perhaps it was the way those notes reverberated in my skull…. Perhaps.

And then the evening concert began at 4, opening with Reich’s Pulitzer-winning “Double Sextet” played by the blackbirds and six friends, with the ‘birds dividing themselves equally between the two units. For this performance the musicians just stood and played, with no choreography. I appreciated it. The pairing of this work with “18 Musicians” was perfect, for both pieces. Clearly, “Double Sextet” is something that must be added to our libraries.

We then had ten sets, divided into three segments, of friends plus blackbirds. When Mark Swed publishes his review, probably tomorrow, I’ll add a link so that you can read the professional’s comments. For me, however, here are a few vivid memories.

First, Carla Kihlstedt gave a solo performance, singing and on the violin, of seven songs by Lisa Bielawa, a composer new to me. This was a work of art. Having seen the Upshaw/Sellars production of Kurtag’s “Kaftka Fragments”, I assert that the Kihlstedt/Bielawa arrangement deserves a degree of comparison.

The next vivid recollection is of the “recorder” ensemble QNG performing a set of three pieces, in which a Taverner extract was sandwiched between two contemporary works. The four musicians in the group are enormously talented, and they use a range of instruments, including contemporary “recorders” that have a square cross-section and flapper valves, giving some delightful partials that you haven’t heard before.

I enjoyed the two works by Steven Hartke. Jeremy Denk accompanied Lucy Shelton in recording-worthy performances of seven Stravinsky songs. Amy Briggs gave knuckle-busting performances of four piano etudes by David Rakowski. I’m doing a dis-service to the others by not mentioning them. This was a great evening, even though it was a bit of a smorgasbord, and “Workers Union” was a grand conclusion.

Next year’s Music Director will be composer George Benjamin.

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!

The Friday night concert at the Ojai Music Festival was the premiere performance of “Slide”, a musical work of theatre by Steven Mackey and Rinde Eckert, and performed by the two with eighth blackbird as performer/musicians.

For the title, think of those cardboard holders of 35mm photographic images. The composition was named for a series of related psychological experiments in which subjects were shown out-of-focus images from slides, and asked to guess the subject of the image, which would then abruptly come into focus. In “Slide”, the principal character is the psychologist who ran the experiments, sorting through his box of materials from the tests, trying to decide what to keep and what to discard. He finds aspects of his own life suddenly becoming interspersed with the images of the slides and contending for interpretation, within focus and out.

For the performance of “Slide”, Steven Mackey was narrator and guitarist, and Rinde Eckert was the psychologist, Renard. The members of eighth blackbird served variously as members of a chamber group with Renard, or as friends, subjects, participants, and perhaps ghosts of Renard’s memories.

The work is identified as a song cycle of 11 songs, with supporting on-screen images, but the work moves continuously through the set, without pause. While watching and listening it is often difficult to be aware that one song scene has ended and another has begun, difficult until you realize this has happened. Mackey said that he tried to compose some music that could be out-of-focus, suddenly snapping into recognition.

The work of 80 minutes of performance is too complex to grasp in a single hearing. I, and I think most of us in the audience, felt the power and sweep of the music (especially of a “song” titled “Addiction”), without feeling that we had yet grasped the central image or idea. But while this was happening to you as watcher, it was too difficult to become a neutral, evaluating observer. The blackbirds, of course, did well in their on-stage performance roles, and Rinde Eckert was a compelling center. The music was fascinating; you wanted to follow it and know what it was presenting.

As “opener”, we had a short set by Tin Hat. I’m biased. Their music grabbed me when they opened with a middle-eastern, folk-tinged, blues-compatible version of Satie (which I could once play on the piano because the notes were easy to hit correctly). These musicians will appear later in the festival.

The Saturday morning concert was by Jeremy Denk, and he captured us. His recital opened with the Ives Sonata No. 1, the one completed thirty years later by Lou Harrison. The way Denk performed this, he created no doubts that this had been a faitful realization of Ives, nor that it was anything other than a major work by a major composer. What playing!

And then Denk came back and played the “Goldberg Variations”. Denk’s Bach was a composer who could have fun with a composition, and certainly did with this one, piling one variation on top of another, a keyboard “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” Denk’s Bach liked musical jokes and the play of ideas; he wasn’t merely a composing whiz. With the quiet reprise of the aria, the notes then died away and we heard the crows in the oaktrees, and then the faint noise of traffic. Finally some clod in the audience had to show that he really knew the work had ended as he became the first to break the spell with loud applause. We hated to leave for lunch.

The freeway ends a few miles from Ojai. You have to slow down to get there. You look at the hills and at the valley floor. You look at the trees. You think about the concerts you’ll hear over the next hundred hours.

The group eighth blackbird was named Music Director of this 63rd instance of the Ojai Music Festival, and this initially-surprising choice is looking to be one of Thomas Morris’ more inspired ideas. They’ve put together an exciting program. (Yes, I do say that almost every year.) Here’s an eighth blackbird blog about this year’s event.

Last night’s opening concert was a perfect beginning. The focus of the concert was George Crumb’s great 1974 “Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III)” for two amplified pianos plus two percussion (plus additional sounds). Lisa Kaplan (of 8th) and Jeremy Denk were pianists, and Matthew Duvall (8th) and Doug Perkins were percussion. I’m in favor of a Crumb revival; this was a delight.
The concert began with Duvall, Perkins, and Todd Meehan playing Thierry de Mey’s “Musique de Table” (1987) for three amplified “tables” (flat wooden slabs with a hollow sound chamber). Here’s a YouTube recording of the work. After this start, Kaplan and Denk played a two-piano (plus recorded electronics) version of John Luther Adams’ work “Dark Waves” from 2007, an escape from the mundane, a contemplation. The first half closed with Takemitsu’s “Rain Tree” (1981) for vibraphone (Duvall), marimbas (Perkins and Greg Beyer) and crotales. The performance didn’t evoke rain, but it bring us in the audience into its own quiet world.

This was a lovely evening.