This Friday and Saturday October 22 and 23, Andrea Liberovici’s multimedia work Mephisto’s Songs premieres a part of the Apollo Theater’s Salon Series. I’m not familiar with Liberovici, but I am familiar with Mephisto’s featured performer singer Helga Davis. In addition to Ms. Davis’ amazing vocals, the piece includes recorded narration by Robert Wilson and cello improvisations by The Kronos Quartet’s awesome Jeffrey Zeigler. Live musicians for this performance include Clarice Jenson (cello), Fred Cash Jr. (bass), and Abe Fogle (drums).
Some of you may be familiar with Helga Davis as a host of WQXR’s Overnight Music. She works frequently with composers Paola Prestini and Bernice Johnson Reagon who, in collaboration with Robert Wilson, created the critically acclaimed opera The Temptation of Saint Anthony with Davis singing the role of Hilarion. And some of you truly hip folks may know that she sings on two scores I composed for dance, Like Dirt for Racoco Productions and La Spectra for Movement Pants Dance. Davis is also a distinctive and powerful composer. Her solo shows combining song, spoken word, theater, and video at venues that include New York City’s Whitney Museum or Galapagos are not to be missed.
Check out the Apollo Theater website for ticket information for their Salon Series. An article about another one of Liberovici’s recent projects can be found here.
The music season has definitely kicked into gear all across the country. Sure, I will always love and find inspiration via New York City; I just received a great CD from a new friend in Brooklyn and the other night skyped for the first time with another NYC friend and collaborator who helped lead Burnt Sugar in a recent musical tribute to James Brown at the Apollo Theater (Salon Series at the Apollo is looking really, really cool. Miller Theatre, you have been warned…).
But I’m excited by the music new I’m reading from all the coasts (and Midwest). Here’s yet another great concert event taking place in my new home – Houston, Texas.
This Saturday, October 16th, Houston’s contemporary music group Musiqa launches its 9th season with the world premiere of composer Stewart Wallace’s chamber piece for She Told Me This composed for and performed by Mezzo Soprano Zheng Chao with a libretto by Amy Tan. Sara Jobin, Assistant Conductor of the San Francisco Opera, conducts. A native Houstonian, Wallace is best known for his opera Harvey Milk , which premiered in Houston in 1995. Zheng Chao’s recently diagnosed and current battle with lung cancer in part inspired Wallace to compose this piece especially for her. You can read more about Chao and her story here.
Saturday’s program also includes a world premiere dance performance by Dance of Asia America to works by Lei Liang and Lou Harrison as well as two pieces by composers Anthony Brandt and Todd Frazier commissioned for the recent anniversary of Rice University’s Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.
It all takes place Saturday, October 16th, 2010, at 7:30 p.m. in Zilkha Hall of The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. A pre-concert screening of a film about Stewart Wallace and Amy Tan’s collaboration takes place at 7:00 p.m. You can purchase tickets at www.musiqahouston.org
There are a few more concerts happening in New York this week that you should know about, and then I’ll give the concert updates a rest for a while. Promise.
Tonight (Tuesday, October 12), is your last chance to see the New York premiere of Kraft by Magnus Lindberg. 7:30pm, New York Philharmonic, Avery Fisher Hall. If you somehow haven’t heard about this, you can read the s21 posts about it here, here, and here; the New York Times articles and videos here, and here. You can even find some info over at Huffington Post. Check on ticket availability here, and see you tonight!
Thursday (October 14), like most nights here, is full of fantastic concerts to check out. Here are two that I strongly recommend: Option #1, Transit presents So Percussion, Tristan Perich, and Corps Exquis (a collaboration between Daniel Wohl and six video artists) at Galapagos (8pm). Option #2, Talea Ensemble is presenting a concert called KINETICS (also at 8pm at the Rose Studio at Lincoln Center); they will perform music by Philippe Leroux, Luciano Berio, Frank Denyer, Manfred Stahnke, and a world premiere by Alexandre Lunsqui appropriately titled Kineticstudies. Good luck choosing!
Friday (October 15) is the season opener for the American Composers Orchestra (7:30pm. Zankel Hall). Their program is called “Mystics & Magic” and they will present John Luther Adams, Jacob Druckman, Wang Jie (winner of ACO’s 2009 Underwood New Music Readings Commission), Alvin Singleton, and Claude Vivier. And they will also be welcome two truly amazing soloists: soprano Susan Narucki (for Claude’s piece), and pianist Ursula Oppens (for Alvin’s piece).
Saturday (October 16) I’ll be checking out A House in Bali over at BAM. Of course, this is actually being presented the 14-16th, so take your pick. There’s no need to go into details about it here, you can read my earlier post for more information.
My tweet right after the concert on Thursday: “Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft: some very beautiful passages + intriguing spatial effects amidst a joyously chaotic maelstrom of sound.”
It’s a fascinating piece and a gutsy one for the New York Philharmonic to present. I do question the wisdom of programming it alongside Joshua Bell playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto. It threw some of the more conservative ticket-holders a curveball, as they had no idea (unless they’re checked out the promo videos on YouTube) what the Lindberg had in store for them.
There were far more than the “handful” of walkouts Anthony Tommasini noted in his otherwise superlative review in the New York Times. From where we were sitting in the Third Tier of Fisher Hall, we had a birds-eye view of a steady exodus of disgruntled patrons: perhaps 10-15%.
On Friday, I talked about the walkout phenomena with my analytical studies class. One issue we discussed was the notion that many orchestras seem to have of “one audience” vs. the possible lifesaving way forward of cultivating “many audiences.” The former notion seems pretty entrenched at the Phil. I’m glad to see that Alan Gilbert and some of the folks in the press office are exploring ways to curate and cultivate multiple kinds of music-making at the NYPO and leverage social media to find new audience sources. Last year, Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre was a terrific example of that.
But Thursday’s concert seemed to me to be a holdover of the former way of thinking. Get people to come to hear Joshua Bell, and then have the conductor give a lecture explaining why they should like a loud piece with oxygen tanks and multiple gongs in the midst of the audience. I don’t entirely blame the folks who stormed out for being upset, although I do wish they’d taken the hint and left after the concerto if they weren’t up for an adventure.
Still, for those who stayed, it was quite an adventure. Here’s Lindberg discussing the piece.
How often does a promo video (and indeed, program booklet) from the NY Philharmonic namecheck experimental industrial postpunk collective Einstürzende Neubauten? This is perhaps the first time! But one can really see the connections between the group’s aesthetic and Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft in the videos below: check out their percussion setup!
There’s one more performance of Kraft on Tuesday. If you’re in New York, I heartily recommend checking it out!
Finally, it’s almost here, after over a year of waiting, the east coast premiere of Evan Ziporyn’s new opera A House in Bali.
Our friends in Boston get to check it out first this weekend: Friday and Saturday, October 8th and 9th, at the Cutler Majestic Theater (219 Tremont Street). The good folks at Bang on a Can have even made a special offer available for these two shows – just click here for the offer.
Then, the next weekend, the whole production is coming down to NYC for performances at BAM, October 14-16th, as part of the 2010 Next Wave Festival.
While I know that I have been waiting a year to see this, I realize that people may not know what A House in Bali is all about.
A House in Bali (featuring a rare U.S. appearance by the 16-member Balinese gamelan orchestra Salukat intertwined with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, western opera, live video feeds, and traditional Balinese dance) tells the “East meets West” story of composer Colin McPhee and his immersion in Balinese music and culture. The trailblazing work directed by Jay Scheib with libretto by Paul Schick follows the course of McPhee’s sojourn to Bali, his encounters with anthropologist Margaret Mead and painter Walter Spies, and their ultimately tragic relationship with dancer I Sampih, a Balinese youth whom McPhee mentors after the boy saves his life. In addition to Gamelan Salukat and Bang on a Can All-Stars, featured performers include Dewa Ketut Alit, recognized worldwide as one of the top Indonesian composer-performers of his generation, renowned American tenor Peter Tantsits as Colin McPhee, mesmerizing dancers Kadek Dewi Aryani and Desak Madé Suarti Laksmi, celebrated Balinese masked dancer I Nyoman Catra, tenor Timur Bekbosunov, soprano Anne Harley, and Nyoman Triyana Usadhi.
Over the past couple years I have been able to sit down and talk with most of the members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who will all be performing in these Boston and New York productions. None of the interviews are about A House in Bali specifically, but they are all about these musicians’ experience working with composers. Click on a name to go straight to the audio: Evan Ziporyn, Vicky Chow, Robert Black, Ashley Bathgate, and Derek Johnson (subbing for Mark Stewart).
And, if any of you can’t seem to get enough of Evan, he also has this show at Carnegie on October 30th… if you aren’t already going to this or this.
Despite there already being many musical highlights since Alan Gilbert joined the orchestra as music director, of late the NY Philharmonic has also had its share of successes offstage. Their PR office has steadily been increasing the orchestra’s presence on a variety of social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube among them. This no doubt in part helped to get out the word about their performances of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre. For social media, many people check out Hubspot Integrated Lead Gen tools which have proven to be helpful.
Their latest addition is a Tumblraccount. Tumblr is a handy platform for sharing media heavy blog posts. In addition to my blog here, I maintain a Tumblr page for File Under ?, putting up videos and audio excerpts that often dovetail with what’s going on here at Sequenza 21.
One imagines a number of ways that the Philharmonic can employ Tumblr, providing one-stop shopping for various videos, audio excerpts, program notes, and press releases: materials that inform both audience members and press folks alike.
To give people an extra incentive to visit their Tumblr blog, the orchestra is entering all of the folks who “follow” the site by Nov. 1 in a ticket drawing. A lucky social media maven will win a pair of tickets to hear them at Avery Fisher Hall!
There was a time – somewhat long ago – when recitals by string players and pianists were the well-subscribed while others raised eyebrows. In the postmodern era, things have become somewhat more egalitarian, and one is likely to see all sorts of combinations gracing recital stages. Still, a duo of Metropolitan opera musicians – flutist Patricia Zuber and percussionist Greg Zuber – are making the case for a pairing that is still somewhat unusual to become a part of the chamber music mainstream.
The trick for those who are part of an unusual pairing is to find, commission, and, essentially, create a literature for themselves. The Zubers have done all three in preparing their program for a recital this Sunday at Symphony Space. They include a transcription of a Villa-Lobos piece by Greg Zuber, a 1996 work by Gareth Farr, and two commissions: by William Susman and Alejandro Viñao.
The pair gets a little help from two guest percussionists on the program’s finale, George Crumb’s An Idyll for the Misbegotten.
So, a flute and percussion program featuring both old and new, transcriptions, commissions, and special guests. What are some other unconventional groupings you’ve heard in recital that have worked well? What are some pairings you’d like to hear?
You can check out a teaser video of the Susman below.
Steve Reich’s latest Nonesuch CD recently arrived, sans artwork in a little cardboard case. The disc features Double Sextet and 2×5, his collaborations with Eighth Blackbird and Bang on a Can. The former piece won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The latter is his most explicit use of rock instrumentation to date.
According to the Nonesuch site, it’s still in the “pre-order” phase of activities, so we’ll be good and hold off on a proper review ’til it’s closer to the actual release date (9/14).
Suffice it to say, if you’re a regular visitor to Sequenza 21, you’re likely going to want one, possibly three, copies of this recording. An intergenerational summit – minimalist elder statesman meets post-minimal/totalist ace performers – that, in terms of importance, is more or less the Downtown version of Duke Ellington and John Coltrane.
This Thursday evening, the Locrian Chamber Playersare presenting a concert at Riverside Church in New York City. The program features music by Harrison Birtwistle, Judith Shatin, John Luther Adams,and Frank J. Oteri. Frank is a fixture on the NY scene. He’s the composer advocate for the American Music Center and is Founding Editor of their web magazine New Music Box.Frank is indeed a persuasive advocate on behalf of other composers, but he’s not asked about his own music nearly often enough. In the interview that follows, we focus primarily on Brinson’s Race, the piece that appears on Thursday’s concert. But along the way, we are given a window into Oteri’s approach to composition and his harnessing of a veritable smorgasbord of musical interests and influences.
Photo credit: Jeffrey Herman
CC:First, let’s talk about the dedicatee. Who’s Robert Overstreet? How did you meet him?
FJO: Robert Overstreet was a fascinating man who collected art and taught for many years at Auburn University in Alabama where he was Professor Emeritus of Communication and founded The Reader’s Theatre. All his students called him “Doc.” After he retired, he moved to back to where he grew up, in rural Georgia where he maintained a small farm. We first met in 1996 and since then had had countless conversations about art, literature, music, travel, and martinis–he had at least one every day. He wrote tremendous letters (all handwritten). He was one of the last people with whom I maintained a mail correspondence; although I regret that I was far less prompt in answering his letters than he was in answering mine. He died in December 2005.
Could you tell us a bit about Brinson’s Race – the place? How did you come to decide to write a work about this location?
Over the years I had the pleasure of making several visits to his country home, an estate called Brinson’s Race, in Emanuel County, one of only two counties in Georgia to vote against secession prior to the American Civil War. Overstreet’s family lived on this land since that time and the land even includes a family cemetery. Since Robert Overstreet’s death, his daughter Laura Overstreet Biering has maintained Brinson’s Race as a family farm as well as a retreat. She set up a nice website for it that gives some more detailed history of the place and even talks about my piece of music (http://www.brinsonsrace.com/).
Trumpet plus string quartet is an interesting combination – one that you don’t see on concerts too terribly often. How did you decide on the instrumentation?
Every year Robert Overstreet used to present a chamber music concert in nearby Twin City which consisted of works from the standard repertoire. After hearing a recording of my 1985 song cycle Two Transfers for tenor and string quartet, he asked me to write a piece especially for one of his concerts scored for trumpet and string quartet. As far as anyone knows it was the first world premiere in Twin City. While the trumpet and string quartet idea was completely his, I think clash between a solo brass instrument and a closely-related group of strings is an interesting sonic metaphor for the clash of me, the ultimate city dweller, discovering a place that is so deeply rural.
The way you use it reminds me in certain places of Ives’ Unanswered Question. Not necessarily linguistically, but in terms of having the trumpet ‘work against’ or run ahead of the strings in certain places. Was Ives a touchstone for the piece? Were there others you’d like to mention?
Ives has always been one of my personal heroes. There are many other role models for this piece, among them, believe it or not: Arnold Schoenberg, Milton Babbitt (the first movement actually incorporates a serial approach to duration, albeit one that does not sound as you might expect it to), Philip Glass (the early strict additive process pieces), John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Henry Cowell, Conlon Nancarrow, Elliott Carter and Johannes Brahms, to some extent though admittedly it might be hard to hear their influence in here, and even Ornette Coleman and J.S. Bach.
But perhaps the biggest touchstone for me about this piece is that it was the first new piece I started and completed in the 21st century and, in retrospect, it marked a new phase in my composition. It was the first piece I composed after my performance oratorio MACHUNAS and the first lengthy piece of instrumental chamber music I had composed in a very long time.
Also, Brinson’s Race was the first substantial new piece of music I conceived of after starting to work at the American Music Center. In my first year at AMC, I had a lot less time to compose and I was still trying to complete the vocal score for MACHUNAS. Then I had a very heavy case of writer’s block for musical composition. The amount of music I was being exposed to was daunting and rather intimidating. The polystylism of Brinson’s Race I think is a direct result of being exposed to such a variety of music. In addition, it began a new interest in very formal design that has remained a hallmark of almost all the music I have composed since then.
It’s hard to believe that it has been five years since Hurricane Katrina. The CD release of Ted Hearne’sKatrina Ballads on New Amsterdam Records is a grim reminder that New Orleans still remains a devastated city, one that has yet to recover from the storm, doubtless at least in part due to all manner of official incompetence and governmental neglect. Source recordings that chronicle the previous administration’s bungled handling of the disaster serve as a jumping off point for Hearne’s scathingly satirical, yet often affecting, song cycle.
The record’s out on 8/31, but there’s a release party at Le Poisson Rouge to welcome the album on 8/24 at 7:30 PM. In the meantime, we’ve got a teaser video:
Here’s CBS News’ take on the city’s condition when President Obama visited last year. I’ve also linked some more recent articles from Slate in the comments section below. While Chris Becker’s comments suggest that improvements have been made, it seems like there’s still a lot to do for New Orleans to fully recover. If Hearne’s song cycle can serve as one of many reminders for us to stay the course and continue to rebuild the city, I’m all for it.
There was a time – somewhat long ago – when recitals by string players and pianists were the well-subscribed while others raised eyebrows. In the postmodern era, things have become somewhat more egalitarian, and one is likely to see all sorts of combinations gracing recital stages. Still, a duo of Metropolitan opera musicians – flutist Patricia Zuber and percussionist Greg Zuber – are making the case for a pairing that is still somewhat unusual to become a part of the chamber music mainstream.
The trick for those who are part of an unusual pairing is to find, commission, and, essentially, create a literature for themselves. The Zubers have done all three in preparing their program for a recital this Sunday at 
Steve Reich’s latest 
