Sequenza21

Thursday, May 3^rd: CUNY Composers Alliance. It’s more than collegial loyalty that compels me to mention last week’s student composers’ concert at the CUNY Graduate Center. We presented a great program of ambitious works ranging from a pocket violin concerto in the Romantic tradition, to a multi-media electronic sound-scape, to an insouciantly postmodern large-ensemble work, to gritty European modernism, and beyond. (There was also some tinkly, diatonic piano improvisation.) Programs do not get more pluralistic than this, and the performances were solid.

Friday, May 4^th: Serge Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet, NYC Ballet. Ballet, take two. Certainly the more accessible of the two recent ballet visits, Peter Martins’s new choreography to Prokofiev’s standby struck me as beautiful and enjoyable, though not so imaginative as Ballanchine’s work from the week before. But I still wish I understood the semiotics of ballet better. I was on firmer ground evaluating the risotto at Café Fiorello’s afterwards: not bad, but overpriced and salty.

Saturday May 5^th: TALEA Ensemble at Juilliard. A potent new music ensemble/collective of composers and performers, TALEA’s debut program of works by Jonathan Harvey, Salvatore Sciarrino, Gérard Grisey, Anthony Cheung and Alexandre Lunsqui was serious business. Cheung’s “Ebbing Flow” (clarinet, violin, cello, and piano) avoided the sustained soupiness that seems to be the typical pitfall of spectralist (and spectralist-inspired) composers. Flautist Daria Binkowski was awe-inspiring in Harvey’s “Nataraja” and Sciarrino’s “L’orizonte luminoso Di Aton,” the latter requiring the flautist to inhale through the instrument. Grisey’s “Talea” closed the concert, and, while the piece is fierce and incredible, it struck me, surprisingly, as too short and unbalanced formally. Conductor Vince Lee kept the larger pieces under admirable control.

Sunday May 6^th: Tom Cipullo, Glory Denied. Brooklyn College Opera Theater. BC hosted the world premiere of Cipullo’s opera based on the wartime and post-wartime ordeals of Vietnam veteran Col. Jim Thompson, the longest-held US prisoner of the war. Cipullo’s music can veer into syrupy Lydian-land, but the first act holds up relatively well. The second act unfortunately sacrifices musical and dramatic continuity for applause-nabbing solo arias, and the show ends up lacking impact despite its loaded subject matter. As Thompson’s unfaithful wife Alyce, soprano Gretchen Mundinger, a Masters student, clearly showed she’s ready already for a bigger stage.

It’s starting to look like the end of the season, and there are even more concerts than usual here in the Center to Universe to feel bad about missing. My own concert-going tends to come in unpredictable binges, the most recent of which began last weekend, resumed last Wednesday, and ended this afternoon (and continues this coming weekend). It’s not all new music, but I thought I’d chime in anyhow to share some highlights.

Saturday, April 28^th: Doug Wright, Scot Frankel, Michael Korie, Grey Gardens. So The Mom was in town, we couldn’t get tickets to the Met, and we settled for a musical. I figured Grey Gardens, based partly on the 1975 documentary, would be the easiest thing to stomach. And, indeed, it is a fine show. Of course, this being a musical, there are too many moments whose raison d’etre is purely to press this or that emotional button, but this rendition of the dilapidated lives of some cousins of Jackie O’s is dramatically sound, has some very deft lyrics, and ingratiating music. Chirstine Ebersole in a duel role – she’s the mother in the first half, the daughter in the second half – should be the favorite for the Best Actress Tony.

Saturday, April 28^th (evening): Stravinsky: Apollo, Agon; Bizet, Symphony in C. NYC Ballet. Anyone else out there utterly lost by ballet? I’ve resolved to stretch my artistic horizons and get with the program. This season, the NYC Ballet is celebrating the 100^th birthday of its co-founder, Lincoln Kirstein. This trio of Ballanchine ballets was enjoyable, though Apollo, with its breathtaking evocations of chariots and flight, left the greatest impact on me. The whole house released a loving sigh when the curtain rose on the Bizet to reveal a stage of white-tutued ballerinas – evidently the ballet version of instant gratification.

Wednesday, May 2^nd: Jeff Nichols, Le trombe d’oro della solaritá (trumpet, horn, trombone, percussion, and double bass). Nichols is a professor of music at Queens College, and his fluid, chromatically saturated music deserves to be better known. At the end of the Eugenio Montale poem on which the piece is loosely based, rays of sunlight strike the speaker’s eyes. Over the course of the twenty-minute piece, Nichols musically prepares this image by slowly transforming harmonies comprised of stacked semitones into harmonies of stacked perfect fifths. The process is neither pedantically foregrounded nor academically obscured, and careful listeners will not find the dense musical language disorienting. A marimba cadenza at the end leaves the ears refreshed after much brass-heavy music.

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In which the dean of composition at Eastman and the dean of music technology at Berklee demonstrate that they can’t tell the difference between recorded real orchestras conducted by Roger Norrington, Fritz Reiner and David Ziman and orchestral music created by a Mac Powerbook.  Roll over, Beethoven.