Sequenza21

As a boy, Joe Polisi dreamed of being a major league baseball player.  Alas, not everyone grows up to be Derek Jeter so Joe “settled” for becoming Dr. Joseph William Polisi, president of The Juilliard School since September 1984, bringing to that position his previous experience as a college administrator, a writer in the fields of music, public policy and the arts, and an accomplished bassoonist.  And, Wednesday, he made it into the Hall of Fame–not the one in Cooperstown, but the The American Classical Music Hall of Fame, a national institution, based in Cincinnati, the biggest little town in America IMHO,  that aspires to sustain and build interest in classical music by recognizing people and institutions that have made a significant contribution to the field.

Dr. Polisi was honored at a luncheon at Juilliard  (attended by your correspondent in a rare public appearance), along with six other 2010 inductees– Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Conductor Marin Alsop, composers William Bolcom and Philip Glass, the Emerson String Quartet (pictured above), and the music service organizations ASCAP and BMI.  On hand to accept their awards were the Emerson String Quartet, Dr. Polisi, ASCAP and BMI. Philip Glass will be honored in Cincinnati this fall, William Bolcom in Ann Arbor and Marin Alsop at a location and time to be determined.

The Classical Music Hall of Fame is the brainchild of Cincinnati businessman and civic leader David A. Klingshirn and inducted its first members in 1998.  It is located in historic Memorial Hall, which is next door to Music Hall, home of the Cincinnati Symphony and the Cincinnati Opera.  The  Inductees to the Hall of Fame are nominated by a specialist field of musicians, music educators, leaders in the music industry and its living inductees.  Nominations are made in six categories:  composer, conductor, performer, educator, performing ensemble and institution devoted to music.  Nominations are reviewed by the distinguished National Artistic Directorate members who recommend a final slate for endorsement by the Board of Trustees of the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.

Among the highlights of  Wednesday’s lunch and ceremony: composer John Corigliano spoke affectionately of the “human” side of ASCAP and its concert division’s work with classical composers.  Fellow composer Bruce Adolphe spoke eloquently of BMI and its relationship with classical music.  And Ara Guzelimian, dean and provost of Juilliard, introduced the Emersons with a brilliant historical review of recorded chamber music that was so eloquent it made me wish I hadn’t forgotten to bring my tape recorder.

Oh, also had a chance to meet and chat with human dynamo and exceptionally cute person Nina Perlove, who is the recently appointed executive director of the ACMHF, in addition to teaching flute at nearby Northern Kentucky University and polishing her image as “the internet flutist” with videos that have been viewed more than 7 million times on YouTube.   Look for the Classical Music Hall of Fame to become much more visible in social media spaces.  And don’t leave a huffy comment about the “cute person” crack.  I’m old (68 this week) and mostly harmless.

We like to think that concert music is something other than sound we hear with others in a room. Of course it is, but music is a physical fact we encounter first hand and try to wrap our minds around later. The large and attentive audience at Philip Glass’ San Francisco Performance’s program of his solo piano works seemed to know the difference when they gave him a warm welcome even before he’d played a note at his from-memory 8o-minute intermission-less recital at YBCA’s Novellus Theater. Real affection like that for a composer, especially a controversial and popular one like Glass, is rare, and that’s just for starters.

Glass has never been a virtuoso pianist–he once quipped that he writes the hard keyboard parts for his ensemble’s music director Michael Riesman–but he’s a thoroughly engaging and utterly sincere one. He began with 6 Etudes – # 1, # 2, # 3, # 6 , # 9, #10–from his first book of 10 (1994-99), which are deeply personal, listener friendly yet demanding for the player who has to keep a steady pulse while executing often rapid and shifting figures in sometimes irregular metres. His approach here was miles away from his 2002 recording of the set for Orange Mountain Music on a Baldwin grand.  Here, he played on a Hamburg Steinway Model D, with its typically brilliant, hard Germanic sound. Glass has composed a lot since that CD, and the differences in how he hears now were everywhere apparent. # 1, with its fanfare-like opening which reappears in different contexts, sounded more dramatic, but not as smooth, the driving figures of unequal lengths in # 3, looser, almost improvisatory. But the real news was how the composer’s sudden attacks and releases, and frequent yet tasteful rubato– ritenuti and diminuendi–made these pieces in the moment fresh. And his pedalling exploited the massing overtones in a logical but non-systematic way, each sound adding sound to sound like rising floors in a house with interconnecting rooms. The repeated pull backs in tempo in # 9 like emotion refracted; the low hammered figures in # 10 like the insistent drone of an Indian harmonium, the ascending melismatic one an integral decoration in a complete structure. Glass’ Etudes  extend the classical tradition of Chopin and Debussy’s 2- book sets in an entirely individual way, though unlike Debussy he gives no clues to what they’re about.

The other pieces here were just as unique. The 1980 series of alternately lyric–static and active–dramatic variations, Third Series Part IV, which Lucinda Childs renamed and choreographed as Mad Rush–its opening figuration suggests Schubert’s song “ Du bist die Ruh “–were less exploratory than the Etudes, but very affecting, especially in the soft slow parts. It’s as much of a standalone piece as Glass’ 1989 Metamorphosis #1-# 5 series which he made from 2 separate scores– 1 for for Errol Morris’ doc The Thin Blue Line, and one for 2 concurrent Dutch and Brazilian theatre versions by different  directors of Kafka’s story Metamorphosis ( Die Verwandlung ). We heard #2–#4 –which picture its “hero “ Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a giant insect. Its fragile bell-like themes and suspended harmonies, which Glass played with great sensitivity, are a perfect transformation of Samsa’s spiritual state into sound.

Dreaming Awake (2006), which Glass wrote and recorded as a limited edition benefit for his Tibetan  teacher Gelek Rinpoche’s Ann Arbor, Michigan retreat center Jewel Heart, is a logical yet rapidly changing lyric piece whose warm fluid harmonies draw on the discoveries the composer made in his BAFTA-winning score for Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, which suggest the here and gone feeling of the heart’s many facets with consummate grace.

Stage / film / dance timings are ultra precise and Glass’ playing of his accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which formed a part of their music theatre piece made from  Gins poems Hydrogen Jukebox (1989), with his late friend Ginsberg reading it on tape, and Glass’ timings and reading was both precise and enormously affecting. And Glass charmingly offered 2 perfectly played encores–“Night on the Balcony” from his co-written with Gambian kora composer-player Foday Musa Suso score for JoAnne Akalaitis’ 1989 production of Genet’s play The Screens, and “Closing” from his deservedly popular 1983 CBS records debut  Glassworks.

A packed house at YBCA’s Novellus heard a revival that same evening of Glass’ score for his 1979 collaboration with choreographer Lucinda Childs and late artist Sol Le Witt, Dance–he provided the film– which her newly formed company performed to a Philip Glass Ensemble recording of the 5 -part  piece, though only Dance I and III – in different keys and combinations for solo voice, winds, keyboards,  I bright with flutes and piccolo, III darker with saxes playing chords – and Dance V–for organ , mistitled here as Dance II , were done here. I’ve had Glass’ original Tomato Records LP of Dance I and III, and the full 2-CD 5-part set of Dance for years. And so it was a very great pleasure to see the general dances of I and III bracketing the solo of Caitlin Scranton in Dance II ( IV ) with Childs’ magisterial performance projected on a scrim over hers. The dancers rapid from the flies quick moments found and lost . Just like life.