Contemporary Classical

Mantra Percussion Premieres

Mantra Percussion has a gig this Tusday in Manhattan–at 8pm at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church (619 Lexington Ave @ 54th).  It sounds like a promising program, with new piece by Eric Km Clark, Aaron Siegel, and Craig Woodward, and a new arrangement of David Lang’s “Little Eye.”  Mantra member Mike McCurdy (how’s that for alliteration?) helpfully put together some audio notes on the program, which you can hear here:

David Lang, Little Eye: http://homepage.mac.com/mccurdymike/Sites/mantra/lang.mp3
Eric Km Clark, Deprivation Music #7: http://homepage.mac.com/mccurdymike/Sites/mantra/clark.mp3
Aaron Siegel, Our Reluctance is Overstated: http://homepage.mac.com/mccurdymike/Sites/mantra/siegel.mp3

Enjoy!

by Galen H. Brown
Composers, Interviews, New Amsterdam, Performers, Podcasts, viola

My Ears Are Open. This week on the podcast: Nadia Sirota

For those of you keeping track, this week’s episode is the second of three highlighting violists. Last week, Elizabeth Weisser; this week, Nadia Sirota. Nadia has some good advice for musicians: it may sound obvious, but that thing that makes you unique is the thing that makes you special. Not only is this good advice for performers but it’s good for composers to remember as well. The more we can embrace our “craziness”, the more comfortable we can be with ourselves. Musicians on the podcast talk a lot about working and collaborating with composers, but Nadia actually has some suggestions for making these relationships work in mutually respectful ways. Nadia also has a new CD, first things first, which will be released on New Amsterdam Records on Tuesday, May 19 (Steve had a nice pre-release-party-post last week).

Looking ahead, the week of May 31 will feature violist John Pickford Richards, and during the month of June I’ll be talking with pianist Seda Röder and conductor/composer Brad Lubman.

May 31 also happens to be the annual Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City– are there any musicians you would like me to try and track down for an interview? I will also be in Chicago in early June – is there anyone in the second-city I should be in touch with? If you have suggestions please email them to:

podcast@jamesholt.net

And for those of you new to the show, you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking here, point your blog-readers here, or find it on InstantEncore by clicking here.

by James Holt
Contemporary Classical

Xiayin Wang Premieres Works by Hickey, Danielpour

The brilliant young pianist Xiayin Wang will perform back-to-back world premieres of Sean Hickey’s Cursive and Richard Danielpour’s Enchanted Garden, Preludes Book 11, two new works for piano,  in her performance at Alice Tully Hall Monday night, May 18th at 8 PM. Included in the program are works by Haydn, Chopin, Ravel, Scriabin and Liszt. 

Of Cursive,  Hickey says “The piece begins with a seven-note ostinato in the right hand which serves as a fixed idea throughout the entire work. But the nature of this falling pattern is such that it immediately spawns other related figures. The piece concludes with a flurry of arpeggiation and hand over hand runs, as if this were the denouement of an agitated story, written in a florid prose.”

Danielpour says of Enchanted Garden:  “The “garden” in question refers to the garden of the mind. In [this] second book, the preludes are evocative of memories in real life, which, when recalled, have their own “dreamlike” quality. To the philosopher, the question, “what is reality” will come to mind, while to musicians and music lovers, both our dreams and realities celebrate life.”

Wang’s debut CD on Naxos arrives May 26th and is devoted to the piano works of Alexander Scriabin arcing his early, middle and late period compositions. 

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Next Up is First Things First

All the talk last week was for Darcy James Argue’ s Secret Society CD and release gig. The show got rave reviews, the CD’s winging its way into the world, and that’s swell. But I want to do it all over again this week, for another New Amsterdam release that I think is every bit a magical in its own way:

I first pointed you to the amazing young violist Nadia Sirota here back in 2006. I said she was “fast track” but totally fresh then; the track, if anything, has only gotten faster but the freshness has remained through it all. Her crazy performance schedule has included The Meredith Monk Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Continuum, ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), yMusic, and the Wordless Music Orchestra, Max Richter, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Stars of the Lid, The Swell Season, Sam Amidon, Doveman, Bryce Dessner, Gabriel Kahane, and Valgeir Sigurðsson, Grizzly Bear, Ratatat, Doveman, and My Brightest Diamond. Not only that, she also daily co-hosts WNYC’s Overnight Music show!

But now it’s her chance to shine on her own. Next week New Amsterdam is releasing Nadia’s first solo CD, appropriately titled First Thing First. All of the composers represented (Nico Muhly, Judd Greenstein, Marcos Balter) as well as the perfomers (cellist Clarice Jensen and the Chiara Quartet — which happens to have as violist Nadia’s brother Jonah!) are her personal friends. As much as a setting out, it’s a celebration of an intimate web of personal relations and creative energy.

Just as with DJA last week, Galapagos Gallery (located in DUMBO, 16 Main Street, corner of Water Street) is hosting a release show this Friday, May 15th at 8pm, tickets $12. Two of the composers (Nico & Judd) All of the composers and all of the CD’s performers will be on hand, so you can’t get a better experience than that.

by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Orchestral, Orchestras, San Francisco

SF Symphony serves up Mason Bates world premiere

[Ed. note: Polly Moller is not just busy telling you about concerts like the one below — while she’s out there pushing for the other guy, I want to mention the she herself has what looks like a great gig, with Pamela Z and Jane Rigler, May 17th at the Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa Street (between Harrison & Alabama), SF. tickets are $10, and you can see more here. Go, Polly! …OK, on with the show…]

Mason BatesSequenza21 readers are a quirky and unpredictable bunch.  But I’m willing to bet that any of them who show up on Wednesday, May 20, Friday, May 22, or Saturday, May 23 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco will not spend the first half fidgeting around, waiting for the marvelous Yuja Wang to take the stage, so they can text their friends about what kind of gown she’s wearing.  No, our readers will be on the edges of their seats ready for the world premiere of The B-Sides by Mason Bates!

The internet got a taste of Bates’ new work on April 15th, when the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, led by San Francisco’s own Michael Tilson Thomas, played the final movement, “Warehouse Medicine”, in Carnegie Hall.  Bates explains in the program notes that his five-movement piece is “informed by the grooves of electronica as well as the modern masters of orchestral sonority, and might also be said to inhabit the ‘flipside’ of the symphonic world – a place where drum-n-bass rhythms meet fluorescent orchestral textures.”

The B-Sides is dedicated to MTT, who commissioned it.  The maestro invited the composer backstage during a concert intermission in November 2007, “between Tchaikovsky and Brahms,” Bates recalls.  “He suggested a collection of five pieces focusing on texture and sonority—perhaps like Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. Since my music had largely gone in the other direction—large works that bathed the listener in immersive experiences—the idea intrigued me. I had often imagined a suite of concise, off-kilter symphonic pieces that would incorporate the grooves and theatrics of electronica in a highly focused manner.”

Something else Sequenza21 readers are likely to do, if they attend the Friday, May 22 show, is stick around for Davies After Hours. It’ll be hard to resist, with Bates morphing into his alter-ego, DJ Masonic, and joining SF Symphony Resident Conductor Benjamin Schwartz to host a hybrid concert/reception they call Mercury Lounge: Mercury Soul Comes to Davies. DJs and chamber ensembles will offer their reflections on the night’s concert…which oh, by the way, includes Sibelius’ Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Opus 63.

Tickets are available online, and also by phone from the San Francisco Symphony Box Office at (415) 864-6000.

by Polly Moller
CDs, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Other Minds, Recordings

Between the Rocking Cradles

Given the rarity of records and performances of the music of Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) through the 1970s, my first encounters with him were like everyone else: references in the “populist music of the 30s and 40s” section of 20th-century history books, and as arranger of the American version of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera that we all knew from the old (& wonderful) original-cast recording. Works such as his iconic The Cradle will Rock and Airborne Symphony were still talked about, but quite hard to track down and hear. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that revivals and reassesments began, with good biographies coming even later.

Though his trajectory parallels Weill’s or Copland’s in some way, moving from serious, cutting-edge classical to more readily accessible forms derived from popular music and musical theater, Blitzstein stuck with the agitator’s role to the end: works with a strong social message, whether against dictators of fascism or capitalism, and solidarity with the dispossesed and outsider. His reward as a political outsider was to be blacklisted in the red-scare 50s; and as a sexual outsider (though married, Blitzstein was rather openly gay) to be beaten to death in Martinique.

But before all that, there was the 20-something student from a well-to-do Jewish family, studying in Europe with both Arnold Schoenberg and Nadia Boulanger. This younger self, as John Jannson’s Blitzstein website writes, was “a self-proclaimed and unrepentant artistic snob who firmly believed that true art was only for the intellectual elite. He was vociferous in denouncing composers – in particular Kurt Weill – whom he felt debased their standards to reach a wider public.”

That young, arty-elitist composer is the one that our good friends at Other Minds have set out to document, with a new CD hitting the shelves May 12th. Titled First Life, it contains a number of unpublished and barely-heard works from the late 20s and early 30s, given passionate performances by pianist Sarah Cahill and the Del Sol String Quartet. This is smart and energetic music, filled with then-experimental flourishes, and well worth putting on your shelf or in your playlist.

WNYC’s Sara Fishko recently profiled the CD, as well as the rest of the great Other Minds CD catalog, on her The Fishko Files program; it’s still up for listening here.

by Steve Layton
Chicago, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Percussion, Performers

These Windy City Kids Are Wicked Good

Since 1995 Chicago’s Percussion Scholarship Program has been shaping all kinds of mallet-whackers from grades 3 through 12. The program, under the direction of CSO percussionist Patricia Dash and Douglas Waddell, percussionist with Lyric Opera of Chicago, with amazing direction and arrangements by Cliff Colnot, has been growing something phenomenal. The kids’ musicianship and commitment seems to me every bit as stunning as Dudamel’s Venezuelan El Sistema stuff everybody’s been going gaga over. Don’t believe me? Just take in our young crew’s monster ride through Colnot’s arrangement of Dimitri Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32W2IBkVqUk[/youtube]

Incredible. The group’s big spring concert is coming up again this May 17th, 1:30 pm in Buntrock Hall at the Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Avenue. And it’s free, meaning not much better value can be had for a Sunday’s afternoon.

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Sunday and Monday: Donald Hall at Works and Process

Works & Process celebrates Donald Hall this weekend. The 14th U.S. Poet Laureate will read and discuss his work.

New musical settings of Hall’s poetry by Drew Baker, George Lewis, David Del Tredici, Joshua Schmidt and Charles Wuorinen are performed for the first time. Performers include a host of New York’s finest: Mary Nessinger, Tom Meglioranza, Lauren Flanigan, Judith Bettina, James Goldsworthy, Moran Katze, Fred Sherry, Peter Kolkay, David Del Tredici, and Lois Martin.

Musical Premieres – settings of Donald Hall (Works & Process Commission)

DREW BAKER: THE SEA (mezzo-soprano & cello)

DAVID DEL TREDICI: THE POEM &THE MASTER (soprano & piano)

GEORGE LEWIS: THE PAINTED BED (tenor & viola)

JOSHUA SCHMIDT: ROUTINE (baritone & bass clarinet)

CHARLES WUORINEN: MOON CLOCK (baritone & bassoon)

Sun and Mon, May 10 and 11, 7:30 pm

The Peter B. Lewis Theater / Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

1071 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street

Subway – 4, 5, 6 train to 86th Street / Bus – M1, M2, M3, or M4 bus on Madison or Fifth Avenue

$30 General / $25 Guggenheim Members / $10 Students (25 and under with valid student ID)

(212) 423-3587, M-F, 1–5 PM or visit www.worksandprocess.org

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, San Francisco

All living composers, all the time

Del Sol String Quartet

Or at least it sure seems that way, when you’re dealing with the Del Sol String Quartet. San Francisco’s longtime champions of new music have a drool-worthy concert on tap for this Friday, May 8th, entitled Mestizaje. Of the four contemporary quartets scheduled for the evening, three are new pieces written for Del Sol, and two are world premieres.  Drool away:

  • Tania León (b. 1943, Cuba): [String Quartet No. 1] (2009, world premiere)
  • Paul Yeon Lee (b. 1970, Korea): “Ari, Ari… ari” (2009, world premiere)
  • Philip Glass (b. 1937): String Quartet No. 5 (1991)
  • Linda Catlin Smith (b. 1957, USA): “Gondola” (String Quartet No. 4) (2007)

Composers Tania León and Paul Yeon Lee will be there in person to answer questions at the post-concert reception. You can also meet the Del Sol members – violinists Kate Stenberg and Rick Shinozaki, cellist Hannah D’Addario-Berry, and violist Charlton Lee (who’s known as “hunky Charlton” behind his back, and no, I won’t reveal my sources).

The concert begins at 8 p. m. in the Presidio of San Francisco’s Main Post Chapel, located on Fisher Loop near the Golden Gate Club. There’s free parking, and if you would rather not drive, you can take the Muni 29 Sunset bus. Tickets are $25.00 for adults, $20.00 for seniors, and $12.00 for students and kids, all sold at the door.

by Polly Moller
Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Orchestral, Orchestras, Performers

Review — S.E.M. Excitment at Tully

Music by Wolff, Sciarrino, Kotik, Carter, and Ligeti / Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, Ostravská Banda, FLUX Quartet; Petr Kotik, Conductor /Alice Tully Hall, May 6, 2009

Conductor/composer Petr Kotik has been an impressive advocate for contemporary music in New York for forty years. Residing in the US since 1969, he has been running the S.E.M. ensemble since 1970: performing a wide range of repertoire, commissioning works and cultivating successive generations of young players into seasoned new music performers. S.E.M.’s orchestral unit has been active since ’92; Kotik’s also been running Ostravská Banda, an international chamber orchestra comprised of S.E.M. players and young European counterparts, since ’05. Both of these groups, as well as the FLUX string quartet, another youngish ensemble devoted to new music, were featured on Wednesday night’s Tully Hall performance: a program of brand new chamber music and three contemporary works that seem destined for the core repertory.

Christian Wolff’s Trio for Robert Ashley (commissioned for the concert) employed three of the FLUX members – violinist Tom Chiu, violist Max Mandel, and cellist Felix Fan – in a fragmentary multi-movement piece. Indeed, its juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated musical materials set the tone for an evening devoted to unorthodox formal presentation. Sustained notes were set against skittering, Webernian motifs. Single lines evaporated into pensive rests while vigorous tutti were all too ephemeral; evaporating into the silence from when they came.

In its US premiere, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Vento D’Ombra made quite an impression. Another work which employed silences as well as fragmentary gestures as signatures, it focused on tiny musical cells – mostly dyads and trichords – as well as a cornucopia of special effects. Wind and brass players breathed through mouthpieces without fingering notes, strings played scordatura and microtones. The whole was a meticulously shaded pointillist canvas of brief gestures, undulating slides, and pianissimo staccato dabs.

Kotik’s own String Quartet was cast in a lengthy single movement. Impeccably performed by FLUX, it was centered on an ambling, long-breathed melody played by the quartet in unison (later in octaves). Only gradually did this evolve into two-voice counterpoint, with a violin countermelody that took on greater urgency. Tutti passages ratcheted up the tension quotient still further, evocative of some of the brilliant polyphonic passages from Ligeti’s second quartet. The idée fixe unison passage returned at pivotal junctures, requiring precise coordination and tuning on the part of FLUX: both were readily supplied.

Elliott Carter’s recent ‘second piano concerto,’ Dialogues, is a fascinating companion piece to the monolithic concerto from the 1960s. Written for a much smaller orchestra, it allows the soloist to take on an enlarged role. In a clever inverse of its larger precursor, the pianist often overwhelms the ensemble, cowing it with brilliant virtuosity. Daan Wandewalle was an excellent protagonist, supplying brilliant cadenzas, thunderous verticals, and an overarching sense of shaping and musicality. (more…)

by Christian Carey