Contemporary Classical

Three Moments musicaux with Hilary Hahn

I.

Early in our conversation yesterday, Hilary Hahn, loquacious and genial throughout, was chatting openly about music and athleticism; about how half her practice time was geared towards staying in shape; how solo recitals were more physically draining than chamber and concerto performances; how different halls, players, even A’s demanded great flexibility; and how flexibility and one’s ear were integral to the athleticism she strove to maintain. I commented on how some pieces were meant just to be big flashy fluffs, and that this was fine; have fun, play fast, show ’em you can hit those notes – not everything’s supposed to be late Brahms. But this, she replied, was not how she saw things. All the music she plays, she believes in entirely; were she to suspect a piece of superficiality, she would not play it; practice time is precious and is for profound music alone.

II.

This April, Hilary Hahn (via Deutsche Grammophon) brings us that feste Burg of twelve-tone serialism, the Schoenberg violin concerto. Hahn’s been wanting to record the piece for years. First she needed to book some performances to force herself to learn the (very difficult) piece. Though no orchestras she contacted had actually played it, she was able to muscle enough of them into agreeing to the project that she could let her interpretation grow on the concert stage for a few years before entering the recording studio. She decided to pair the Schoenberg with the Sibelius violin concerto, and Esa-Pekka Salonen (naturally) conducts. The two concertos show off one another very, very well. The Schoenberg’s tense chromatic saturation finds release in the expansive diatonic washes of the Sibelius. Hahn sees the project as an attempt to release each concerto from narrow pre-conceptions: the Schoenberg is really more Romantic than academic, and the Sibelius is more international than Finnish.

III.

Hahn was born in Virginia, but home, as one suspects and as she frankly admits, is on the road. She enjoys the non-stop traveling and hotel stays. Her life, she claims, is simpler when touring than when staying put. While on tour, she keeps an online journal, in which recently she’s been pretty active. (She once considered doing a creative writing MFA.) Her journal is intended for anyone who might come across it, she says, but young people considering a musical career are her primary audience. Having been blessed with good connections in the local music community as a kid, she wants those who aren’t so lucky to feel connected to what actually happens when concerts are made. She wants kids to realize international music stars go through many of the same aches and pains as everyone else. Currently concertizing in Switzerland, before the end of the spring Hahn will be back in the States playing, among other programs, some concerts with Josh Ritter. She is taking the summer off to row.

by David Salvage
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown

Young Yalies United Will Never Be Defeated

New Yawkers could do worse at 8 p.m. on March 1st, than drop by Roulette, plunk down a $10 and slurp-munch free refreshments, all while checking out this great little posse of 80’s-born composers’ music:

Timothy Andres will present two recent works: Play it By Ear (2007), for a mixed chamber group of nine players, and Strider (2006), “ambient music” for vibraphone and piano. Both pieces will feature the best young musicians from the Yale School of Music, with the composer on piano.

Lainie Fefferman has a new electric guitar quartet called Tounge of Thorns (2007), which she describes as a “7-minute giant pulsing sound inspired by the Velvet Underground’s ‘Venus In Furs’”. Tounge of Thorns will be played by Dither. Lainie and Alex will also perform a brand-new piece with Lainie singing and Alex playing melodica and piano.

Jennifer Stock will perform on laptop in her piece The High Line (2006), based on sounds recorded around the abandoned High Line railway structure in Manhattan. The piece also features soprano Ali Ewoldt, who recently made her Broadway debut in Les Misérables, and star cellist Ezra Seltzer. We’ll also see and hear Grainery (2006), a video project with processed piano soundscape.
 
Alex Temple will contribute The Last Resort Party Band (2006), “cabaret music from an alternate universe,” featuring composer Emilia Tamburri on alto saxophone and Yale musicians. Next comes a new piece for clarinet and electric guitar, Slightly Less Awkward People (2007), featuring James Moore (of Dither) and Sara Phillips Budde (of NOW Ensemble). Alex will also perform his David Lynch-inspired Inland (2007), for melodica and piano. (Why the preponderance of melodica? “Despite being a silly-looking instrument,” says Alex, “the melodica can be used to make serious music.” I hear you, Alex. I had one next to me all through my own college years…)

This is all a production from IGIGI (pronounced “ee-ghee-ghee”), a close-knit group of composers formed at Yale College. They work with the best New York and New Haven-area musicians to premiere new works, give repeat performances, and put on concerts featuring all genres of “cutting-edge” music. IGIGI produces the annual New Music Marathon, an all-night concert at Yale featuring student works, contemporary favorites, improvisation, and performance art. IGIGI’s history stretches back at least thirty years; its predecessor was called A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, which gave rise to the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Calling All Elis

The Yale at Carnegie concert series will honor distinguished faculty member Ezra Laderman at Weill Recital Hall at 8pm on March 3 with a program that features a career-spanning range of Laderman’s chamber works, from his 1954 Bassoon Concerto to the New York premiere of Interior Landscapes II for two pianos, written in 2007.

Laderman (b. 1924) continues the line of distinguished composer-pedagogues at Yale, which has included Paul Hindemith, Krzystof Penderecki, and Jacob Druckman. His ties to the Yale School of Music run deep; after joining the YSM community as a composer-in-residence in 1988, he served as the Dean of the school from 1989 to 1995, and currently holds the position of Professor of Music in the Composition department.

There’s a podcast of a live performance of Laderman’s Concerto for Clarinet and Strings with David Shifrin, clarinet and Ransom Wilson, conducting members of the Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale, on Yale’s fabulous netcast page. If you haven’t discovered the Yale School of Music Netcasts page, get on over there. It has more than 100 downloadable podcasts of music and interviews with music luminaries, dating back to Aaron Copland.

And those of you who know Professor Laderman, leave your mosaltovs here.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

“Music is life, and, like life, inextinguishable.”

Alex Ross has a splendid piece titled Inextinguishable  about Carl Nielsen in the New Yorker (yes, the New Yorker) this week.  I must confess that I had not paid a lot of attention to Nielsen until Alex tagged him as “most underrated” in the comments section here a couple of years.  Since then, a series of wonderful new recordings–including the opera Maskarade and Thomas Dausgaard and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra/DR’s recording of Nielsen’s orchestral works–have been released by the Danish national recording label Dacapo    I have found myself playing them every few days for months now and I always hear something fresh and new.  I owe you one, Alex.  

On the subject of record labels, Pliable points to a review in the Guardian by Andrew Clements which begins with the provocative sentence:  “Considering how much third-rate music has been included in Naxos’s American Classics series, Elliott Carter has so far been poorly served by the budget-price label…” 

Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde.

by Jerry Bowles
CDs, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Recordings

Surprise!!

Toub: darfur pogrommenJust when you thought we’ve been musically laying low… There’s a brand-new online-only CD release by fellow S21 regular and composer David Toub, realized by yours truly (Steve Layton, for those of you who don’t read the bottom post tag). It just became available on iTunes (US, also now or very soon in UK/Europe, Australia and Japan) on my little NiwoSound label; expect its appearance on eMusic as well very soon. The CD is in the “electronic” genre at both places, but purely as a matter of expediting the release; if it’s not classical I don’t know what is!

David’s darfur pogrommen, composed only a few months ago, is another expansive minimalist essay; its single continuous movement clocks in at 47 minutes. There’s no real attempt at programmatic writing; rather — like many of David’s other pieces — the title is a marker of a moment, that can call up whatever associations the listener might have in relation to it.

The piece is for open instrumentation. David’s own first recorded version used synthy string sounds, but I decided to give it a kind of “old school” treatment: a Reich-Glass hybrid with a vibraphone and electric organ taking the two primary parts, and electric piano and two more organs adding secondary voices. It trades a little lushness, but finds a bright, hard and uncompromising edge.

The biggest influence is still “classic” 60s-70s Glass, but David has his own way with how figures intuitively expand and contract, the harmonies involved, and his preference for alternating and pulsing notes. But later in the piece there’s a spot that to my ears definitely pays tribute to Morton Feldman as well. Surprising and beautiful!

Though there are many clearly defined sections in the piece, like so much of David’s work there’s just no way to get the whole flow with separate tracks. So if you want it, it’s all or nothing. (You can preview 30 seconds of the beginning on iTunes, but it’s a laughably hopeless indicator of what unfolds…)

Anyone wishing to burn the download to disc can also download and print this PDF file, which gives you the entire cover art and inner notes. More musically, you can freely download the PDF of the entire score from David himself.

Oh yeah: play it LOUD.

by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Grammy, Recordings

Owww, Canada

Growing up in a podunk, nil-culture, border-ish town in Washington State, half of my classical education came by way of drifty, static-filled, late-night AM listening to the CBC. Not only work by Stravinsky, Boulez, and Xenakis, but a whole raft of amazingly strong Canadian composers: R. Murray Schafer, John Rea, Claude Vivier and the like. Many of these recordings were CBC productions, and were something that gave me an early admiration of our northern neighbor’s commitment to the arts.

But now comes word that the CBC may be essentially shuttering its recording production; what little may remain will likely be committed to the more “relevant” world of pop. Happening just in the wake of the Grammy win of violinist James Ehnes and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra under Bramwell Tovey, of their disc of concertos by Walton, Korngold and Barber, it all seems especially ironic and bitter.

by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, San Francisco

You Can Trust Your Car to the Man Who Wears a Star

filling.jpgDance is always about music, and music is, more often than not, about dance. But how does dance animate music, and music animate dance? This seemed to be the central question when I caught Program 1 of the San Francisco Ballet’s 75th anniversary season at the War Memorial Opera House February 9th. Classical ballet and modern dance sometimes plays against and even ignores the music’s rhythmic structure which would never happen in the deservedly popular Dancing With The Stars. But we rightly or wrongly cut the highbrow forms a bit more slack.  

Virgil Thomson’s music for SF Ballet’s founding choreographer Lew Christensen’s Filling Station (1938) brought these thoughts center stage. And though the composer has defined his score as a collection of waltzes, tangos, a fugue, a Big Apple, a hold up, a chase, and a funeral, one was barely aware of these disparate forms. Instead, what caught the ear and eye was the happy disjunction between these elements, not their literalness. But that’s odd when you consider how this ballet, to a story by Lincoln Kirstein, is routinely described as a pop piece.

Well, maybe, but one which uses vernacular movement — way before the Judson Church crowd did it — in still fresh, even startling ways. The moves for James Sofranko’s filling station attendant Mac were exaggerated but somewhat naturalistic too. But the gestures Christensen devised for the other dancers, like the hilariously bombed Rich Girl Erin McNulty, tended to be more stylized, as Thomson’s music shifted gears — jubilant one moment, deadly serious the next — as in his viola-dominated tango for her, which didn’t make rational, but emotional sense. Thomson was always a subtle and sly composer, and his clever but utterly sincere moves were on full display here, and. Martin West’s orchestra made the music go on many levels. Thomson once told me that everybody’s after freshness and this score couldn’t have been more fresh, and perfectly modern because of that. 

Modernist choreographers have tried their hand at setting dances on Bach’s music, with Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco being one of the most famous. SF Ballet Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson, who’s sometimes been too much of a Balanchine acolyte, seemed to break free of the master in his 7 For Eight (200 ), to music from Bach keyboard concertos composed between 1729 and 1741, and the music’s mathematical lucidity and calmly ordered sequences seemed to make him go further and deeper than he usually does.

Bach is regularly advertised as peerless and one certainly felt that here in Tomasson’s 7 sequences for 8 dancers which were as contained and deeply expressive as the music, with 3 duos alternating with 1 trio, 1 quartets, and 1 solo.

Company star Joan Boada shone, but so did all the other dancers here who negotiated Tomasson’s from a classical vocabulary moves with both elegance and gravity. David Finn’s subtly modulated lighting scheme of mostly bluish greys and off blacks made the stage pictures both beautiful and highly suggestive ,which the costumes by Sandra Woodall — who dressed Kronos years ago — unobtrusively complemented The expert piano soloist here was Michael McGraw. 

Would that Balanchine’s 1967 mostly general dance, Diamonds, from Jewels, were as successful or interesting as the two dances which preceded it. Instead it came off as a kind of white on white version of Balanchine’s hommage to Sousa; The Stars and Stripes, with the stage almost always full of the 32 member corps executing endless formations and deformations with lots of chandelier-like port-a-bras, which though meant to look elegant ended up being cloying, with 4 of the 5 movements of Tchaikovksy’s 3rd Symphony serving as the score. Balanchine was as much as an entertainer as a high art guy–his long association with Stravinsky– but this just seemed like admirably danced fluff. Martin West’s pit band accompanied with effortless grace,well-judged tempos, and transparent ensemble throughout. And in none of the 3 pieces did he ever encourage his orchestra to push. This is a deservedly acclaimed company with a very fine orchestra.     

by Michael McDonagh
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

In Gent

“Deze naam zegt jullie allicht niks, Marco Antonio woont nu nog in Gent, maar verhuist binnenkort naar Deinze. Als solist voor kamer- en orkestmuziek heeft Marco Mazzini internationaal opgetreden in volgende toonaangevende plaatsen : Carnegie Hall (New York), Tama Center (Tokyo), Paleis voor Schone Kunsten (Brussel), Bijloke concertzaal (België) en in het Conservatorium van Parijs.”

Terrific article about our amigo Marco Antonio Mazzini in Deinzeonline.  Alas, it appears to be in a foreign language but the pictures are nice and the video is splendid:

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by Jerry Bowles