December 5, 2006 — One of the great things about the internet is that several of the pieces on this concert were available for preview on the Bang On A Can website, and in fact you can still hear those previews to get a flavor of what I’m talking about. New music concerts are so hit-or-miss, it’s a shame more organizations don’t offer this service to help potential audience members pre-screen their events. If you’re listening to that preview, you will already have figured out that this concert was one of the good ones. (more…)
Tuesday night Thomas Ades was the guest pianist, filling Leonard Stein’s slot, in the Piano Spheres concert at Zipper Hall of the Colburn School. This brought out the largest audience I’ve seen in a Piano Spheres concert, even larger than the audience for Gloria Cheng’s series opener. The buzz about Ades has been good, to understate the reactions. Perhaps our important piano series is beginning to get the audience it deserves.
The program to let us hear Ades, the pianist, was not showy or flashy. It wasn’t new: the whole second half of the program is on his EMI recording. And while a few pieces were easy, even those were played with such commitment and conviction by Ades that I felt I understood what the composer heard in his mind while composing. The program started with a survey of 40 years of the piano music of Janacek; first was a grouping of five short pieces, beginning with a work from 1886 and ending with a fragment from 1928. This was followed “In the Mist” (1912) by the middle-aged, unsuccessful, teacher/composer whose opera had not yet been accepted by Prague; as pianist, Ades successfully presented the hesitency and introspection in Janacek. The Janacek was followed by two of his own works with elements of introspection, both early, both of which are on his debut recording, “Darknesse Visible” (1992) and “Traced Overhead” (1996). “Darknesse” has the brilliant student exploring and re-making a 1610 Downling song for lute; “Traced Ovehead” was a commission for the 25-year-old from the pianist Imogen Cooper; the title has been picked up as the title of a festival of the music and the conducting of Ades to be given at the Barbican in March and April of 2007.
The second half of the concert comprised ten of the short pieces in Niccolo Castiglioni’s “How I Spent the Summer” (1983), followed by three short works by Stravinsky. The concluding work was Conlon Nancarrow’s “Three Canons for Ursula” (1988), written for Ursula Oppens, for which the middle canon was thought to be unplayable and had been withheld. Kyle Gann has the story. Ades played the unplayable, without sweat, and without seeming to apply any more concentration than he did on the little waltz that Stravinsky wrote for children to be able to play. That man has talent.
On Sunday we attended the concert by the Philharmonic not on one of our series, despite the fact that the second half was a not-a-favorite symphony by a not-a-favorite composer. We felt that we could easily withstand the Tchaikovsky 6th to be able to hear Ades as composer and conductor leading the Phil in a performance of “Asyla” (1997). We first heard this in Ojai with Rattle conducting the Phil; the recording was an early transfer to my iPod. Sunday’s performance was another of those which I wish were available as a recording. I thought that Ades and the Phil gave a more interesting, and more persuasive, performance than Rattle’s recording. It’s a good work, and Ades is a good composer. In an unequal allocation of skills, Thomas Ades is also a pretty good conductor; yes, his technique with his left arm could use a little improvement, but he’s better than some other composers we know. His beat is clear and well-maintained; he handles changes of meter very smoothly, and watching him from the audience helps you understand what the music is doing.
It’s not fair. Pianist, composer, conductor. And young. And he seems to be a nice guy. I hope it’s true that he returns soon, and regularly.
By the way, that Tchaikovsky “Pathetique” was the first conducting assignment at a subscription concert by the Phil’s assistant conductor, Joana Carneiro. She led a very persuasive interpretation, making the symphony more cohesive and less painfully “pathetic” than usual. I lasted through the performance with no trouble. She deserved the audience compliments she received.
It’s that time of the year again, folks, when composers around the world turn their attention to Los Angeles, with bated breath, waiting to hear who is, in fact, the greatest composer in America and the world this year. Who has advanced the art, who has raised the human spirit, who has earned his (yes, pretty much always, it’s his) place in musical history.
That’s right, it’s Grammy time.
And the nominees for “Best Classical Contemporary Composition” [sic] are:
Boston Concerto
Elliott Carter (Oliver Knussen)
Track from: The Music Of Elliott Carter, Vol. Seven
[Bridge Records, Inc.]
Golijov: Ainadamar: Fountain Of Tears
Osvaldo Golijov (Robert Spano)
[Deutsche Grammophon]
The Here And Now
Christopher Theofanidis (Robert Spano)
Track from: Del Tredici: Paul Revere’s Ride; Theofanidis: The Here And Now; Bernstein: Lamentation
[Telarc]
Paul Revere’s Ride
David Del Tredici (Robert Spano)
Track from: Del Tredici: Paul Revere’s Ride; Theofanidis: The Here And Now; Bernstein: Lamentation
[Telarc]
A Scotch Bestiary
James MacMillan (James MacMillan)
Track from: MacMillan: A Scotch Bestiary, Piano Concerto No. 2
[Chandos]
Place your bets.
Pliable, our reliable friend across the pond, informs us that toute New York is aflame about a new 30-story Norman Foster edifice to be built on Madison Avenue. We must confess we have not been following this controversy owing to the pressing need to sort out this unpleasant Iraq business and to ponder the fate of the republic should it be determined that its leader is clinically unable to continue in office and that his backup is even loonier.
Noting that architecture has been an inspiration for a number of fine musical pieces, Pliable has issued a challenge to the Sequenza21 gang to respond to Norman’s efforts. If you can’t wait for the new building, perhaps you could write a ditty honoring Foster’s just opened Hearst Tower which is located less than 100 yards from where I’m sitting.
In an indulgent little piece in today’s NY Sun, Fred Kirshnit reorders the historical construct of the Big Five as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, LA, Chicago, Boston. His thoughs on the NY Phil:
Not even the best orchestra on the plaza.
Limiting our discussion to the modern era, the local Phil has been deficient for a long time. A pedestrian string sound, a tendency to lose intonation as a piece drags along, an inconsistent trumpet section, and a sometimes frightful set of French horns are just background for an ensemble that often seems to have little investment in its own performances. Add to the ensemble’s frustrating nonchalance a conductor in Lorin Maazel who simply cannot leave a piece alone and the net result is often blaring, leadfooted, and embarrassing. The worst part may be that, on certain evenings, they can still conjure a decent performance. At Avery Fisher, it often seems that attitude is more critical than aptitude.
Well, at least he got some things right.
Benjamin Britten, composer, pianist, conductor, pacifist, humanitarian, and visionary, died on December 4th 1976. The thirtieth anniversary of his death is being celebrated with the remarkable story of how he left not just a legacy of 20th century masterpieces, but also a remarkable music vision which is about to be realised after three decades. Take An Overgrown Path to Britten celebrated with new music campus.
Martin Bresnick turned 60 last month and he’s celebrating the event with two events at Zankel Hall this week. One piece will be on the Bang on the Can All-Stars program on Tuesday night and, on Saturday, the Yale School of Music will devote an entire evening to Bresnick’s music, including choral songs, a concerto for two marimbas, and a multimedia piece for solo pianist.
Steve Smith has a splendid profile of Bresnick in the Sunday New York Times which acknowledges the perhaps unfortunate fact that Bresnick is best-known for being the teacher of other composers who are more famous than he is. On the other hand, it’s hard to feel too bad for a guy who is the coordinator of the composition department at Yale, where he has taught since 1976.
I can’t recall ever hearing any of Bresnick music (an oversight I hope to correct on Tuesday night) but I suspect many of you have and perhaps some of you have even been his students. What do you think about him as a composer and as a teacher?
Ben Ratliff has a great review (and photo) in today’s New York Times of our amigo Darcy James Argue’s Thursday gig with his big band at the Bowery Poetry Club. Having your name mentioned in the same sentence as Charles Mingus and Bob Brookmeyer is a pretty damned inspiring head rush and we’re thrilled for Darcy and the gang. Read his postmortem and listen to samples here.
The big news out of Second City this week is that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will return to weekly radio broadcasts on WFMT-FM, 98.7 (probably in March 2007) and the CSO has founded its own record label. Our informant, Marc Geelhoed, informs us that the label, known as CSO Resound, will issue compact discs and digital downloads of live CSO concerts available from iTunes and the CSO website. The first release will be Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 with principal conductor Bernard Haitink and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung from last October. The recording will be available in early 2007, but the exact date and price of the release was not specified. BP’s gift of $3.4 million will fund the radio broadcasts, and the Boeing Company donated funds for CSO Resound.
This is the future of big time classical music.
Our weekly listen and look at (mostly) living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since it’s right there waiting online. (the “click picks” category at the bottom of the post isn’t working, but you can revisit all the previous “click picks” by visiting this link: https://www.sequenza21.com/index.php/?cat=29
Elizabeth Olivia Walling (b.1981 — UK)
Walling started out as a self-taught soprano and flautist. She began composing in 2001, and moved to formal composition and performance studies a year later. She’s been a member of New Music Brighton since 2003, and currently writes and performs with the recently-formed group Accident Ensemble. Her work bears a self-confessed “brazen” range of influences and styles which emerge from her long-standing interest in music of many periods: early liturgical and secular music, baroque, classical, modernist and avant garde, jazz and electronic. Recent experiments with electronics show a greater focus on using both modern and early electronic music technology in live performance.
Click on “Works”; you’ll find recordings of many pieces waiting (try Nani, nani, Cane Hill, or the Sanctus if you’re looking for a place to start). For someone who’s only been at composition for 4 or 5 years, there’s a real “voice” and a sophistication that usually doesn’t come so early.
Brian Kane (b.1973 — US, NYC)
Wonderful composer who also does double-duty as a fine jazz guitarist. California-born and trained, but dragged himself across the Rockies and Mississippi to be a post-doctorate Fellow at Columbia University for a while. And boy, does it show!… Besides lots of complete recordings of his work, the site also has quite a few interesting articles on all kinds of contemporary music topics. A nice touch: you can even get Brian’s music fed to you as a podcast, if that’s your thing.
Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970 — DE)
Ah, my first dead guy. And rather than a range of work, just one piece: Zimmermann’s fantastically fun Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu of 1968. From the notes there:
“I am presumably a mixture, typical of the Rheinland, of monk and Dionysus” — “… as the oldest of these young composers” : two self-revelatory sayings of Bernd Alois Zimmermann. In both of them there is not only a concentrated charge of psychological problems, of pessimistic estimation, of clear vision; two famous quotations of the composer who was regarded as being “difficult” in his lifetime, to whom success was denied — apart from his opera “The Soldiers” — who could be so ecstatically joyful and profoundly dejected; an all-round mind and, as many have put it, the last composer who was a master in every field. Perhaps Zimmermann is so popular with younger composers because they find in his works concrete material, comprehensible compositions, first-rate craftsmanship and well-formed material; a composer who, in spite of his basic philosophic tenet, never suppressed “inspiration” or a “flash of insight”, but encouraged spontaneity.
One of the best “pastiche” works I know, with quotes from all over the map (some are blindingly obvious, but see if you can catch the unusual, such as Stravinsky’s Symphony in C), masterfully squashed and skewed, and truly made his own. Every bit worthy of Jarry’s great Ubu Roi!
On the Friday before Thanksgiving, the Argento Chamber Ensemble took the audience at Symphony Space on a little transatlantic trip with an evening featuring four contemporary French composers: Fabien Levy, Gérard Pesson, Tristan Murail, and Philippe Hurel.
Of course for many readers, the phrase ‘contemporary French composers’ will evoke one word (especially with Murail being one of the composers in question) – spectralism. For those of you how aren’t familiar with the term, spectralism is an approach to composition that arises from the analysis of the partials of a particular sound or sounds (its spectrum). How this information relates to the music written naturally varies from composer to composer, but the results often have some relationship to the overtone series and often require the performers to navigate microtones and precise dynamic indications. Though spectral music has been around for 20+ years old in France now, it’s still making inroads with audiences in the United States. Indeed, the men and women of the Argento ensemble have helped pave many of these roads by featuring spectral music from both sides of the Atlantic in their concerts over the past six years.
On Friday night, however, the focus was squarely on the composers and their music rather than on the movement. Were it not for a few passing references in the program notes and the evening’s “Shades of Sound” title, listeners would’ve had little clue that the pieces presented belonged to a particular school. Even a listener acquainted with spectralism through its orchestral canon would have had reason to be surprised at what he heard. The only tendencies that the seven pieces on the bill overtly shared were attentiveness to detail and acute awareness of the sonic surface.
Hurel’s …à mesure opened the concert with a splash of tempered noise that periodically dissolved into octaves shared by the ensemble. Eventually the gyrations coalesced into a hocketed loop that then eerily settles into a conclusion.
Next came the U.S. premiere of Murail’s Les Ruines circulaires for clarinet and violin. Murail programmatically describes the piece as a mid-dream confrontation, and the image is apt. The music came to an intense gestural climax with the two instruments relentlessly climbing on top of one another only to tumble back down again and again.
The first half of the program wrapped up with the evening’s only electronic work, Levy’s Soliloque on Fabien, Tristan, Gérard and Philippe. This ‘meta-score’ (to use Levy’s terminology) takes samples of the other pieces with which it’s programmed and enmeshes them into a new purely electronic work (it also sticks the composers’ first names into the title – more info about it all here). It’s a neat idea, and it had some intriguing moments as its samples fluttered back and forth across the border of recognition. There was some nice spatialization too. Ultimately though, it suffered from sounding very Super Collider-y (perhaps an inevitable consequence since it was written entirely within the software).
The second half opened with my favorite work of the night. Tristan Murail is a composer of subtlety, and his C’est un jardin secret… for solo viola is a direct expression of that fact. Stephanie Griffin whispered her instrument into the piece by imperceptibly increasing the bow pressure. From that teasing opening, the piece enters into a sound world of timbre fused with melody. It’s gorgeous.
Pesson’s Rebus had the misfortune of following C’est, but it was the right piece to do so. The work is for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, and cello, and it takes Tavener’s In Nomine theme as its inspiration. In Rebus’s brief 2-minute span, the cantus firmus is spun into a series of bright, pleasant harmonies.
Swapping the viola for a trombone, Argento dug into Fabien Levy’s Risâla fî-l-hob wa fî’ilm al-handasa. The title is Arabic for “small treatise on love and geometry,” and the music is inspired by ornamentation in Islamic art. The first movement opened fiercely and then gave way to a second section that felt slow-motion-like in comparison. My favorite moments of the second moments arose from some interesting interplay between the bass clarinet and the trombone.
The night’s finale was Pesson’s Le Gel, par jeu, which the composer labels a danse macabre. The piece hops between some intense textures and scrounges through a few prominent quotes. Pesson cleverly replaces the traditional xylophone with a bass marimba that he uses to good effect. The whole thing loses a bit of steam about halfway through, but remains thoroughly listenable.
All in all, the concert was a testament to the diversity of the French new music scene and to Argento’s ability to show it off. Keep on eye out for the next Argento concert in January at Merkin.
Photo from Argentomusic.org