Songs

BMOP, CD Review, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano, Songs, Vocals

Winterreise on DG (CD Review)

Franz Schubert – Winterreise

André Schuen, baritone and Daniel Heide, piano

Deutsche Grammophon

 

Winterreise is the third recording of Schubert’s cycles/song sets (Schwanengesang isn’t a cycle – it has multiple poets) by baritone André Schuen and pianist Daniel Heide. These were some of the last pieces written by Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828), and he sang them at the piano to console himself about worsening health (syphilis likely contributed to his early demise). Of the three, Winterreise is the best suited to Schuen’s voice, a full lyric baritone. The recordings of Die Schöne Müllerin and Schwanengesang are excellent, but his mature sound and the dramatic interpretations Schuen adopts are ideal for the pathos of Winterreise. He captures the narrator’s vacillating inner monologue with declamation ranging from delicate pianissimo singing to roaring rage. Heide has collaborated with a number of singers and instrumentalists, but his work with Schuen is among his best partnerships. He plays with nuance and a fluid sense of the rhythmic component of the piece.  The latter affords Schuen room for small fluctuations in tempo to emphasize particular words. 

 

From the tramping outside his former girlfriend’s door in “Gute Nacht” onward, the tempos are well-considered, never languid even in the most tragic songs. Instead, the duo treats the winter’s journey taken by the narrator as inexorable, a quest without a prize. Along that line, the mystery of the cycle is how it ends, with the song Die Leiermann (the organ-grinder): Who is the organ-grinder? Is he real? A symbol of death? Or the final delusion of the protagonist as he succumbs to the elements? The duo perform the song  understatedly, in such a way as to leave the enigma of these questions intact. Winterreise appears on a number of excellent recordings – here is one more.

 

Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, File Under?, New York, Songs, Violin

Saturday, March 30th: Kafka Fragments at Tenri

Saturday, March 30th: Kafka Fragments at Tenri

On Saturday at 8 PM, Kafka-Fragmente by  György Kurtág will be performed at Tenri Cultural Institute (43A West 13th Street,New York NY), by soprano Susan Narucki and violinist Curtis Macomber (tickets). Earlier this week, they performed it at another venue also abundantly supportive of contemporary classical music, Buffalo University.

 

Kafka-Fragmente is based on aphoristic texts by Franz Kafka from his diaries and correspondence. As is his practice, Kurtág brought the composition together gradually, collecting fragments over time and completing the piece in 1985. At seventy minutes in duration, until his opera Fin de Partie (2018), it was the composer’s longest piece. Not only are the forty movements based on brief texts, they are also miniature in design. The text-setting is exquisitely detailed, and the musical language is frequently dissonant and angular, drawing both from postwar modernism and Eastern European folk traditions of declamation and string performance.

Narucki and Macomber are both new music specialists. I have remembered a number of their performances with great pleasure, especially Narucki’s creation of the role of Mama in Elliott Carter’s opera What Next? and Macomber’s authoritative rendition of Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronism No. 9 for violin and tape.

To get acquainted with this distinctive music, listen below to excerpts from the soprano’s Avie CD The Edge of Silence, consisting entirely of vocal chamber works by Kurtág. It received a Grammy nomination in 2019, and demonstrates her command of the composer’s individual and demanding work.

 

 

Here is Macomber’s recording of the Davidovsky.

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Songs

David Biedenbender Portrait CD on Blue Griffin (Review)

“I remember first reading Robert Fanning’s poetry in 2014; it was as if he was able to give voice to feelings and experiences in a way that made them feel like my own. His words reveal a world of profound beauty that transcends the page.” 

– David Biedenbender

 

Shell and Wing – YouTube

 

 

David Biedenbender

All We Are Given We Cannot Hold

Blue Griffin CD

Lindsay Kesselman, soprano; 

Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Kevin Noe, Artistic Director;

Garth Newel Piano Quartet with Mingzhe Wang, clarinet; Haven Trio. 

 

If a composer is able to find a poet who is a muse, they are fortunate indeed; a living poet, doubly so. David Biedenbender engaged in close collaboration with Robert Fanning in creating two vocal pieces that are programmed on his Blue Griffin CD All We Are Given We Cannot Hold. Soprano Lindsay Kesselman has bonded with these works in a special way as well, imparting both words and music assuredly, her beautiful voice, dynamic control, and impressive upper register making her an ideal advocate for Biedenbender’s work. 

 

Shell and Wing is for soprano and chamber group, here the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Kesselman treats Fanning’s poetry sensitively, delivering a rousing performance in “Shell” and imparting “Wing” with touching delicacy. The use of pitched percussion and piano is noteworthy here and elsewhere in Biedenbender’s music, with Ian Rosenbaum’s vibraphone and pianist Oscar Mikaelsson performing overlapping rhythms. Strings and winds create corresponding passages, with multiple strands of activity yet a strong sense of support for the vocal line. The piece ends in a hushed fashion, Kesselman’s singing down to a whisper.

 

Biedenbender composes in a language that encompasses extended tonality and chromaticism, with a particular interest in varieties of rhythmic expression. “Red Vesper,” performed by Garth Newel Piano Quartet and clarinetist Mingzhe Wang, doubles a sustained string harmonic and repeated piano notes, to which a clarinet melody and pizzicato are added. Quickly, the sense of repeated notes is supplanted by a modal chord arpeggiated in various ways with pitches slowly accumulating. String harmonics once again take notes from the harmony, extending them into a sustained melody. Sliding tone in the strings and the clarinet tune surround a wide-ranged version of the piano’s harmonies. The intensity builds, with the repeated patterns corruscating into a multifaceted surface. Thick piano chords and an emphatic cello solo begin the last section, which then concludes with each separate strand successively evaporating.  

 

Solstice was composed for the Garth Newel Piano Quartet. The four-movement piece depicts the seasons’ solstices. Each has a different demeanor: “Summer” lazily and gradually unfolding into exuberance, filled with harmonics, repeated note patterns, and added note harmonies; Autumn elusive, replete with colorful chords, string glissandos and more repetition of single notes, with a romantic melody arriving partway through; Winter mournful, rife with dissonant intervals in pointillist textures and sul ponticello strings; Spring glistening with post-minimal figuration and slabs of bright harmony. One of the most interesting facets of this piece is the composer’s use of varieties of rhythmic overlap: Hocketing figures, doublings, contrapuntal interactivity, and ostinatos that land together and apart. Biedenbender’s love affair with the voice notwithstanding, his instrumental music is equally compelling.

 

Kesselman is part of the group Haven Trio. Joined by clarinetist Kimberly Cole Luevano and pianist Midori Koga, the soprano performs all we are given we cannot hold, a song cycle with settings of Fanning. “The Darkness, Literal and Figurative” features an oscillating two chord pattern in the piano, descending lines in the clarinet, and a delicately delivered yet rangy vocal line. “One and a half miles away” is declamatory, with repeated piano bass notes. “Watching my Daughter through the One Way Mirror of a Preschool Observation Window” is one of the most touching of Fanning’s poems, analogizing the view of his young child with the view he hopes to get of his grown children from the beyond. A duet between Kesselman and Luevano alternates segments of the main melody, while Koga plays swaths of harmony. The distant thunder of bass octaves and a clarinet cadenza accompany a recitative from Kesselman in “Model Nation,” ultimately replaced by piano ostinatos and scalar mirroring from the clarinet to reframe the high-lying singing into flowing melody. The cycle’s final song begins with dissonances from piano and clarinet; upon Kesselman’s entry these are filled in with pantonal harmonies. There is a winsome character present, with the narrator observing the clippings from his children’s haircuts; rather than sweeping them up, allowing the wind to take them. “The wind will take what we forget to sweep. And cannot keep.” An allied sentiment to watching his daughter in preschool, the sense of impermanence delivered with seamless line from Kesselman and lyrical rejoinders from Luevano and Koga. all we are given we cannot hold is one of the finest song cycles I have heard this year. Biedendbender’s music should gain wider currency. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Composers, File Under?, Songs, Twentieth Century Composer

This Island: Susan Narucki and Donald Berman on Avie (CD Review)

This Island

Susan Narucki, soprano; Donald Berman, piano

Avie Records

 

Soprano Susan Narucki has long been known as an advocate for contemporary music, as has collaborative pianist Donald Berman. On their latest recording, for Avie, the duo present a program of art songs by female composers active in the first half of the twentieth century. Three of the song sets are world premieres.

 

Narucki was inspired to begin collecting the songs for this recording by Rainer Maria Rilke. Specifically, in one of his letters he mentioned the Belgian Symbolist poet Émile Verhaeren, one of the most highly regarded poets of his country. After reading some of Verhaeren’s poetry, and finding it captivating, the soprano set about looking for songs that employed it.

 

The program Narucki assembles uses Verhaeren as a focal point, though other poets are also included. The liner notes discussing the program are well-curated. I wish they were more legible in the CD booklet, but looking at them online allows an easier time reading Narucki’s fine essay. Narucki and Berman are an excellent performing partnership. Both are fastidious in presenting detailed interpretations of art songs. At the same time, they are consummately expressive performers.

 

Belgian composer Irène Fuerison (1875-1931) created  an entire group of Verhaeren settings, Les heure claires, Les heures aprés-midi, Les Heures soire, Op. 50. The poet wrote dozens of love poems, and Fuerison selected from among these a half dozen that  celebrate long-lasting love. As with some of the other programmed composers, the influence of Debussy and Ravel looms large. Ô la splendeur de notre joie has a rhythmically intricate ostinato in the accompaniment and a juxtaposition of speech-like repeated notes and soaring melodies, rendered with considerable warmth by Narucki. 

 

Nadia Boulanger collaborated with her teacher Raoul Pugno on Les Heures Claire (1909), settings of Verhaeren from which Narucki programs four selections. After the passing of her sister Lili, Nadia gave up composition for teaching. Dozens of prominent composers studied with her, including a number from the United States. Still, it is unfortunate that she didn’t afford herself the opportunity to compose more, as is made clear by Les Heures Claire. Le ciel en nuit s’est déplié is reminiscent of Gabriel Fauré’s songs, with a dash of Debussy. Vous m’avez dit has a simply constructed yet lustrous melody. Que te yeux claire, te yeux dété features a number of modal twists and turns and a soaring vocal melody. The final song, Ta bonté, is slow paced and elegant, a touching close to an appealing song set.

 

Three songs from 1947 composed by Henriëtte Bosmans are settings of twentieth century Dutch poets Adriaan Roland Holst and J.W.F Werumeus Buning. Dit eiland features plaintive, angular singing and similarly wide-ranging lines in the accompaniment. After a passionate beginning, it ends in a hush with enigmatic harmonies. In den regen has an emphatic vocal line buoyed by a spider web of arpeggiations in the piano. Once again, Bosmans relishes pulling back the dynamics and pacing partway through, with supple singing and figurations returning as an echo in the piece’s denouement. Narucki’s pianissimo declamation is exquisite. In Teeken den hemel in het zand der zee, Bosmans uses whole tone scales and pandiatonicism in a gradual unfurling of the words, sumptuously expressed, over carefully spaced chords.

 

Elizabeth Claisse is an enigmatic figure, only known to have written 4 Mélodies in 1922-23. Despite Narucki’s exertions, there doesn’t appear to be anything known about her biography. Could it be a pen name? One wonders. It is a pity there isn’t more of her work to sing, because this set of songs by various poets, while derivative, is quite well wrought. It begins with Issue, an Yves Arnaud setting that uses a few chromatic chord progressions that are proto Les Six. One hears Stravinsky’s influence in the stentorian bitonal tremolando chords that open the third song, Philosophe, a setting of Franz Toussaint’s troping of Keng-Tsin. The final song is the sole Verhaeren setting, Les Mendiants, of a piece with Poulenc. Berman’s voicing of its darkly hued harmonies is particularly beautiful, and Narucki counters with richly colored sound.

 

The last group of songs are by Marion Bauer (1882-1955), who taught contemporary music at NYU and wrote one of the first books in English that discussed the Second Viennese School and other twentieth century composers. Milton Babbitt was among her students. She also spent a great deal of time in France, and the influence of French composers on her work is clear. Four Poems, Op.24 (1916) are settings of the American Symbolist John Gould Fletcher, whose evocative imagery is an excellent complement to Verhaeren’s work. These were Bauer’s first songs, yet they are artfully written. “Through the Upland Meadows” is a miniature drama that features several juxtaposed motives. Here as elsewhere, Berman’s sense of pedaling and phrasing is flawless. Narucki explores a variety of dynamic contrasts and vocal colors that embellish the word painting. Her high notes, well-displayed here, are glorious. “I Love the Night” has a boldness that resembles an aria and includes a thrilling piano postlude. “Midsummer Dreams” uses the lilting 6/8 feel, like a boat on water, to create another vivid scene. “In the Bosom of the Desert” completes the recording with a song that begins slowly, with a high-lying emphatic vocal line, and then moves to a lyrical mid-tempo with the voice sitting in the middle register, performing parlando. The beginning melody returns, this time with an embellished modal  accompaniment. Bass octaves emphatically build to the song’s climax, where Narucki performs the final high notes with glistening intensity.

This Island is extraordinarily well curated. One hopes it will engender further treasure hunts for forgotten female composers. Furthermore, the program eminently suits Narucki and Berman, both in terms of taste and temperament. It is one of the best recordings I have heard thus far in 2023.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, Piano, Songs

Lucy Fitz Gibbon/Ryan MacEvoy McCullough: the labor of forgetting

The program so sincerely produced on the labor of forgetting, the debut release from False Azure Records, reminds me of Pauline Oliveros, who once said, “Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.” Indeed, the music of Katherine Balch (b. 1991) and Dante De Silva (b. 1978), in the handling of soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon and pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, underscores the agency of listening as a process in physical flux, even when its subjects are fixed in time and space. The aural objects herein, as grandly interpreted as they are intimately assembled (if not the reverse), bend details into hooks on which we are invited to hang the keys of our distractions while not forgetting the darkness nipping at our heels.

De Silva’s Shibui (2009) opens in mourning, paying respects to Deborah Clasquin, a mentor for both De Silva as composer and McCullough as performer. The piece’s title, lifted from the Japanese tongue, refers to the tartness the latter might taste, but also to a quiet sense of understatement or even a sullen look. As an invisible integration of Bartók’s Élegy op. 8b no. 1, it barely bends under the weight of its allusions. Gentle chords are hammocks for the heaviest emotions, all of which are given rest until they can stand on two feet.

Four Years of Fog (2016) for just-tuned piano follows with a gaze into early adulthood. The whimsical tuning, contrived yet unabashedly beautiful, illuminates as much as it obscures. Subtitles like “Blissfully Ignorant” and “Sickness and Exile” read familiarly to anyone who has lived (or is living) those inevitable stages. And yet, as the octave ails behind closed eyes, we open our ears to a healing sound, unbidden to dance because the notes dance for us. Thus, are we born again, slapped in the rear like the piano at the end into self-awareness.

“Only once did she feel loved by a man / on what we might call / the wash of the cellular level.” So begins Balch’s estrangement (2020), which sets the poetry of Katie Ford (b. 1975) in an astonishing song cycle. Intended as the dark side of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, it turns the paradigm of north-bearing love into a spinning compass. Fitz Gibbon renders a body through her voice and McCullough the molecules it inhales and exhales. As in the textual play of György Kurtág, though with more attention to punctuation, Balch holds every syllable accountable for its unfolding, allowing the mind to fantasize and count it for reality. Fitz Gibbon clothes the words mindfully, flipping the operatic switch on and off at will, morphing from lullaby to whisper to microtonal shiver to aphasic slur without hesitation. This lends the bearer of language power over the flesh being described or unwritten. The fifth movement is especially impactful in its restraint, as is its successor, “the film,” in which the mise-en-scène of a relationship is repeated to the point of fallacy. The tenth movement, “only the song,” is the most visceral for its stops and starts, as if challenging sustained beauty as an illusory complex.

The final movement concedes that sustain, darkening it with images of disunity: “Sometimes she thought of her love for him / like a donated heart / preserved in a jar.” Hearing De Silva’s Shibui (reprised in just intonation) in closing, we feel the caps spun onto the jars of our own hearts. Birds in the background remind us of where we are and, more importantly, where we were never meant to go. We are always alone in our hearts, thus sung until the lungs of our identities empty themselves and move on without us.

If any of this seems morbid and hopeless, it’s because the honeycombed hardships of its upbringing are proven for their sweetness. Fitz Gibbon and McCullough, like the artists animating their throat and fingers, understand that the upswing of retrospection is fruitless without falling into lessons of self-reckoning. And while we may tell ourselves the pandemic is behind us, any act of restoration in its rubble is a lie without the mortar of care. Let this album be one slather in the right direction.

the labor of forgetting is released to the wider world on November 4, 2022.

by Tyran Grillo
Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Songs

Contemporary Art Song at Monk Space

On Tuesday, May 30, 2017 Tuesdays@Monk Space hosted a concert titled Vicki Ray and Richard Valitutto present New Song. Every seat was filled in the cozy Koreatown performance space with an audience looking forward to an evening of contemporary art songs from some of the finest musicians and composers in Los Angeles.

Four Elemental Songs (2014), by Vicki Ray was first and this consisted of four short movements based loosely on the natural elements of air, fire, water and earth. Elissa Johnston was the vocalist, accompanied by the composer at the piano. Luftpause, the first movement, began with a light, airy strumming of the piano strings that was soon joined by Ms. Johnston singing in German to create an alluring, mystical feel. The simple piano gestures involved just a few conventional key strokes, and Ms. Ray often reached into the piano touching or plucking the strings to achieve additional effects. Luftpause ended on a quietly gentle note, in great contrast to the strident opening of the second movement, Fire Song. Rapid trills in the piano plus the shifting and changing phrasing recalled the dancing flames of a fire. Ms. Johnston’s strong singing heightened the drama, perfectly capturing the powerful text by Susan Stewart.

Siren Song followed, adapted from a poem by Margaret Atwood, and based on the familiar myth of mermaids luring sailors to a watery death by beautiful singing. Ms. Ray again reached into the piano, producing an unexpected series of notes that sounded more like a harp or guitar. In fact nowhere in this movement were conventional keystrokes heard and the unorthodox sounds nicely complimented the mysteriously beguiling vocals. Siren Song was masterfully realized but equaled in inventiveness by the last movement, Pritam Basat, which began with a thumping, percussive effect in the lower piano keys. The rolling, rhythmic character of the music felt south Asian, in keeping with the Sanskrit text “My beloved dwells in the cave of my heart.” As the piano grooved along, forceful vocal passages arced overhead to provide a strong finish. Four Elemental Songs is a remarkable combination of extended piano techniques and solid singing that brings a fresh perspective to the venerable art song form.

The west coast premiere of kennen schon nicht mehr (2017), by Nicholas Deyoe followed and for this soprano Justine Aronson joined piano accompanist Richard Valitutto on the stage. Written for the performers and based on poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, kennen schon nicht mehr began with a simple descending scale in the piano, followed several quiet chords. This was soon supplemented with a bit of dissonance and a series of dark, thick chords that created a faint sense of the ominous. The vocal entrance by Ms. Aronson was deliberate, but subdued, matching the pensive tone of the text: “We don’t know what we spend: All that’s named is past and each being Invents itself at the last second And will hear nothing.” The words were sung in German, and this added to the expressive feeling as the piece proceeded along its somber path. About midway through a series of solemn piano chords in the lower register rang out like church bells, further darkening the mood, while sustained tones in the voice soared overhead with a beautiful combination of strength and fluidity.

As the piece concluded, the church bell tones returned, but with a more hopeful feel from a masterful adjustment to the original chords. “Now we wake up with our memory And fix our gazes on that which was: Whispering sweetness, which once coursed through us. Sits silently beside us with loosened hair.” kennen schon nicht mehr is ideally matched to the sentiment of the text, and to the formidable talents of the performers for whom it was written. Every nuance of language and music was expertly portrayed in this highly evocative work.

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by Paul Muller
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Houston, Opera, Songs

Soprano and magic maker Misha Penton presents Elliot Cole’s “Selkie, a sea tale”

MishaSelkie

(Houston, TX) Houston-based soprano, writer, and impresario Misha Penton (pictured above) is back with another genre blending evening (two actually) of music for classical voice. Accompanied by pianist Kyle Evans, cellist Patrick Moore, and dancers Meg Brooker and Yelena Konetchy, Penton will present a specially staged concert of composer Elliot Cole’s Selkie, a sea tale with lyrics by Penton. Cole, a graduate of Rice University and now Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, will be in attendance for Saturday’s performance. The concerts are timed to celebrate the release of a CD recording on Selkie, a sea tale. CDs and download cards will be available for sale at the performances.

As artistic director of Divergence Vocal Theater, Penton has produced and sung in several creatively staged and intensely collaborative concert events featuring light and film projections, puppetry, stage acting, and modern dance and music from composers including Cole, George Heathco, and Dominick DiOrio. The 2010 Houston premier of Selkie featured an elaborate media and lighting design within a theatrical installation. The multimedia elements for Friday and Saturday’s performances include new choreography by Brooker and Konetchy and the screening of a video for the song “Softly Over Sounding Waves” directed by Penton.

Penton writes: “Selkies are ephemeral half-human, half-seal beings. They are transformative creatures that inhabit liminal spaces; exist at the edge of dusk and dawn; in the between-time of solstice and equinox; and where root meets earth and sea washes sand. When the moon swells to its fullest, selkies shed their seal skins, reveal their human form, and dance on our northernmost beaches, their skins ready for the taking. Selkie, a sea tale’s poetry is a dreamscape of human fragility, longing and loss, written from a sailor’s wife to her selkie love and culminates in her willingness to release him back to the sea.”

In addition to singing and mastering some truly challenging music for the voice, Penton has a gift for instilling each of her live events with a seductive, highly stylized vibe that embraces both the contemporary and the archetype. Symbols and references to fairy tales, Greek mythology, and gothic literature are all a part of her creative palette, giving each Divergence Vocal Theater event an air of magic and ritual. Penton also possesses a wicked sense of humor that compliments her very serious passion for making great collaborative art. Making magic takes a lot of work! So if you’re in Houston, don’t sleep on this unique spin on the genre of contemporary chamber opera.

Misha Penton and Divergence Vocal Theater present Elliot Cole’s Selkie, a sea tale, music by Elliot Cole, lyrics by Misha Penton, March 29 & 30 at 8:00 p.m. at 4411 Montrose Gallery, with Misha Penton (soprano), Kyle Evans (piano), Patrick Moore (cello), and Meg Brooker and Yelena Konetchy (dance). Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. CD and digital download for Selkie, a sea tale available April 1.

by Chris Becker
Birthdays, Brooklyn, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, File Under?, Songs

Brassland is Ten – let the downloads begin!

Nico Muhly. Photo: Samantha West

It’s hard to believe, but one of the primary forces that fostered the “Indie Classical” phenomenon of the aughts is celebrating its tenth birthday. The Brassland imprint, which curates artists such as the National, Clogs, Doveman, and Nico Muhly, is celebrating their anniversary by sharing music: a different free download of a song from their catalog every weekday throughout November.

Thanks to the kind folks at Brassland, below we share a stream of tomorrow’s pick: Nico Muhly’s “Skip Town,” a bonus cut from his Mothertongue CD.

Be sure to visit the label’s “song a day” giveaway site or their Facebook page to collect all the goodies (schedule below).

INTRODUCTION WEEK

Tu 1 Clogs — Lantern
We 2 Buke & Gass — Riposte
Th 3 The National “High Beams”
Demo (unreleased)
Fri 4 Nico Muhly “Skip Town” (iTunes bonus track) Mothertongue
DEEP CUTS WEEK
Mo 7 Baby Dayliner — High Heart & Low Estate
Tu 8 Pela — All in Time EP
We 9 Doveman “.…” > “Sunrise” (medley)
With My Left Hand I Raise
the Dead
Th 10 Erik Friedlander — Maldoror
Fr 11 Devastations — S/T (Devastations)
RARE + UNRELEASED WEEK
Mo 14 Bryce Dessner “Rose of Lincoln”
The Lincoln Shuffle (web
exclusive)
Tu 15 Baby Dayliner “When I Look Into Your Eyes” Demo (unreleased)
We 16 Doveman
“Honey” > “Only Love Can Break
Your Heart” (medley)
Live Session (unreleased)
Th 17 Clogs “Elevenses”
Live Session (unreleased)
Fri 18
Jujulele (Bryce & Aaron
Dessner side project) “Satie” Demo (unreleased)
GREATEST HITS WEEK
Mo 21 The National — S/T (The National)
Tu 22 Baby Dayliner — Critics Pass Away
We 23 Devastations — Coal
Th 24
Clogs (featuring Shara
Worden) —
The Creatures in the
Garden of Lady Walton
Fr 25
Doveman (featuring
Nico Muhly) — The Conformist
NEW BAND WEEK
Mo 28 Jherek Bischoff
“Secret of the Machines”
(Instrumental) TBA
Tu 29 This is the Kit “Spinney”
We 30 People Get Ready “Uncanny”

Nico Muhly: “Skip Town” by Brassland

by Christian Carey
ACO, Brooklyn, Choral Music, Composers, Concerts, Experimental Music, File Under?, New York, Songs

Early October Events – an Embarrassment of Riches

Too Many Concerts and Cloning is Still Illegal!

Tricentric Orchestra. Photo: Kyoko Kitamura

October in New York is becoming an embarrassment of riches in the new music world. So many wonderful concerts to hear in town! But the plethora of notable events can be a source of frustration too: sometimes you wish you could be in two places at once. (I have a sneaking suspicion that Steve Smith has figured out a way to do this!) So, while we won’t get to review everything, there’s nothing saying we can’t preview as many events as possible! What follows are some, but rest assured not all, of the excellent upcoming goings on.

–        Starting Wednesday evening (Oct. 5) running through October 8 at Roulette is one of the biggest festivals celebrating the music of Anthony Braxton yet seen in the United States.  It includes performances by the Tricentric Orchestra, the US debut of the Diamond Curtain Wall Trio – Anthony Braxton (reeds, electronics), Taylor Ho Bynum (brass), and Mary Halvorson (guitar) – and two world premieres. The first, Pine Top Arial Music, is an interdisciplinary work integrating music and dance. The second, which is the culmination of the festival, is a concert reading of Acts One and Two of Trillium E, Braxton’s first opera. Those who can’t make the festival, or who want ample Braxton at home as well as live, can enjoy two new recordings of his music. The first is a freebie: a Braxton sampler featuring a diverse array of pieces (including an excerpt of the opera) that’s available for download via the Tricentric Foundation. The second is a recording of Trillium E in its entirety, available from Tricentric on October 11 as a download or 4 CD set.

–        On October 6, Ekmeles, everybody’s favorite New York group of experimentally inclined youngster vocalists, shares a triple bill with Ireland’s Ergodos and Holland’s Ascoli Ensemble at Issue Project Room’s new 110 Livingstone location (details here). Ekmeles will perform Kaija Saariaho’s Sylvia Plath setting From the Grammar of Dreams, two short pieces by James Tenney, and two US premieres. The first, Madrigali a Dio by Johannes Schöllhorn, incorporates singing, spoken word, and even boisterous shouts in a vocal work that explores counterpoints between pitched and un-pitched vocalizations.  Peter Ablinger’s Studien nach der Natur explores a plethora of sounds from the natural world as well as manmade noises: mosquitoes, quartz watches, the Autobahn, smoking, electric hums – all replicated by the human voice. Mr. Ablinger was kind enough to allow us to share a small score excerpt below.

–        Also on Thursday, October 6 (drat it to Hades!) is the premiere of the Five Borough Songbook at Galapagos. Twenty composers were asked by Five Boroughs Music Festival to each contribute a single work to this project. Participants include Daron Hagen, Tom Cipullo, Lisa Bielawa, and other heavyweights in the songwriting biz.

–        On October 8 at 7 PM at the Tenri Cultural Institute (ticket info here), the Mimesis Ensemble is doing a program of “Young Voices,” featuring three youngish composers who specialize in vocal music.  It’s a program that’s a bit more traditional in approach than is, say, Ekmeles’ wont, but it presents some noteworthy repertoire. Thomas Adès’ Three Eliot Landscapes and Gabriel Kahane’s current events inflected Craigslistlieder are featured alongside several works by Mohammed Fairouz.

–         On October 9 at 7:30 PM, Sequenza 21’s own Armando Bayolo will make his Carnegie Hall debut (as the kids say, whoot!). Armando’s Lullabies, a newly commissioned work, will be premiered at Weill Recital Hall by Trio Montage (more information here).

–        Just around the corner is the ACO’s SONiC festival, Ekmeles’ concert on 10/21 at Columbia (a humdinger of a program!), Bridge Records’ Anniversary Concert at NYPL, and, yes, the Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert at the newly revivified Joe’s Pub on 10/25. But those previews will have to wait for another post! In the meantime, there are pieces to compose, papers to grade, and both my wife’s and my birthdays this weekend. October is the month that keeps on giving: it’s good to be busy, right?

Peter Ablinger's Studien Natur (a wee excerpt)
by Christian Carey
Awards, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Deaths, File Under?, Songs

RIP Peter Lieberson (1946-2011)

We’re saddened to learn from David Starobin of the passing of composer Peter Lieberson in Israel, due to complications from Lymphoma. He had been battling the disease since 2006 and for a time it had been in remission. But in late 2010, Lieberson travelled to Israel to seek treatment for a recurrence of the cancer.

Alex Ross has posted a touching remembrance on The Rest is Noise.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJoqGx_F_1o[/youtube]

Lieberson’s music was an extraordinary mixture of disparate strands of influences. It encompassed  an intuitive post-tonal vocabulary, rooted in dodecaphonic training but also capable of lush verticals and, particularly in his vocal music, supple lyricism and sweeping melodies. In later years, his interest in meditation and Zen Buddhism contributed another layer of resonances and an intriguingly metaphysical counterweight to some of the modernist tendencies of his oeuvre.

Among the many honors he attained was the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize, which he won in 2008 for Neruda Songs. Although he was a finalist for the award on multiple occasions, the Pulitzer Prize eluded him. Back in 2004, I suggested that this injustice made him the “Pulitzer’s Susan Lucci.”

Of course, during this sad time, one can’t help but think of the passing of Lieberson’s late wife, the extraordinary mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, also of cancer. Lieberson wrote a number of memorable pieces for her, including the aforementioned Neruda Songs. If there’s a signature example to use when we advocate for our government to continue to fund medical research, I’d offer this one up: two brilliant creators in the prime of life laid low so cruelly. Both had so much yet to offer. It’s a tragedy that we’re bereft of their artistry and humanity far too soon.

by Christian Carey