Tag: @cbcarey. @sequenza21

Choral Music, Concert review, early music, File Under?, New York

Stile Antico Sings Palestrina at St. Mary’s

Photo: Eduardus Lee.

Stile Antico Sings Palestrina at St. Mary’s

March 29, 2025

Church of St. Mary the Virgin

 

NEW YORK – Celebrating their twentieth year, the vocal ensemble Stile Antico brought a program dedicated to the 500th anniversary of the composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s birth to Miller Theatre’s Early Music Series. The concert was held at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in midtown, a space that Miller has employed to host a number of Renaissance music performances.

 

Stile Antico appeared with only eleven singers, instead of their usual complement of a dozen. Baritone Gareth Thomas was ill and couldn’t perform. Between numbers, several of the singers hid surreptitious coughs, leading one to think that a bug had plagued the group en route. The quality of the performance didn’t suffer: they still sang sublimely. 

 

The centerpiece of Stile Antico’s latest recording, The Golden Era: Palestrina (Decca, 2025), is perhaps his most famous piece, Missa Papae Marcelli. A great deal of lore has grown up around it, with a story that Palestrina wrote it in part to convince the more conservative members of the Council of Trent that they needn’t ban polyphony and revert exclusively to plainchant in services. Composers could write in multiple parts and still clearly convey the text. While it is unlikely that the Pope Marcellus Mass served as a test piece, Palestrina took pains to write polyphony that never obscured the words. Many composers, some even generations later, imitated what had come to be called the stile antico style of declamation and use of dissonance. 

 

Stile Antico’s performance of Missa Papae Marcelli on the recording is impressive, a standout that is among the best in a crowded field. Their diction is crystal clear, and the tone and blend of the ensemble is particularly beautiful. At St. Mary’s, the mass’s Credo was featured, and it was an expansive display that was well-paced to express the drama inherent in various passages of the piece. 

 

A number of motets by the composer were also included on the program. Tu es Petrus and Exsultate Deo displayed fleet runs and ricocheting exchanges. Sicut servus was performed with fetching delicacy, and Nigra sum sed formosa was imbued with stately elegance. 

Photo: Eduardus Lee.

Composers besides Palestrina who also served in Rome were on the program as well. Josquin’s Salve regina, with a stark bass motive and a texture frequently divided into duets, represented one of the most prominent elder statesmen of the early Renaissance. Jacques Arcadelt’s Pater noster is an example of the florid writing and frequent use of extra-liturgical texts and tunes that contributed to the aforementioned controversy at the Council of Trent. It is hard to lay blame at Arcadelt’s doorstep when hearing his music, which is pleasing in its bustling rhythms and multihued chords. Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Trahe me post te and Orlando de Lassus’s Musica dei donum represented works by esteemed contemporaries. The former has an austere yet attractive manner and the latter, a six-voice motet, is more intricate in presentation. Christus resurgens was by Gregorio Allegri, a composer of the next generation, who continued in Palestrina’s footsteps, composing music in stile antico style. The piece’s use of antiphony is particularly striking. Another later composer, Felice Anerio, who succeeded Palestrina in the Papal Choir, combined passages of relatively homophonic declamation with expressive chromaticism in his Christus factus est.

 

The program also included a new work, A Gift of Heaven by the English composer Cheryl Frances Hoad, who used the preface to a publication by Palestrina, in which he flattered the dedicatee, as the text for her piece. Sumptuous polychords undergirded a solo tenor imparting what Frances Hoad describes as “buttering up a patron.” 

 

Sadly, Stile Antico at eleven could not finish the program with the impressive 12-voice motet Laudate Dominum a 12. They substituted another Palestrina work, Surge Propera Amica Mea, with corruscating runs and an impressive final cadential section, creating an exuberant finale. The group returned to offer something completely different for an encore, “The Silver Swan,” a madrigal by the English composer Orlando Gibbons. It provided a delicately lyrical close to an evening of exquisitely well-performed music. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, Opera, Twentieth Century Composer

Michael Tippett – New Year (CD Review)

Michael Tippett 

New Year

Rhian Lois soprano

Ross Ramgobin baritone

Susan Bickley mezzo-soprano

Roland Wood baritone

Robert Murray tenor

Rachel Nicholls soprano

Alan Oke tenor

BBC Singers

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins, conductor

NMC Recordings

 

Michael Tippett’s final opera, New Year (1988) has finally been recorded. The work was produced in Houston in 1989 and Glyndebourne in 1990 and then fell out of the repertoire. The Birmingham Opera performed it last year, and the NMC double-CD recording is of a 2024 live semi-staged production by the BBC Scottish Symphony, conducted by Martyn Brabbins. 

 

New Year’s reemergence is propitious in timing. Combining elements of sci-fi, time travel, and fairy tales, it seems readily approachable for the streaming generation, with shows like Stranger Things, Time Bandits, and Severance providing a suitable backdrop. The opera also takes on social issues that remain important today, such as urban decline, poverty, racism, and Tippett’s ubiquitous concern for pacifism. However, the vernacular elements are the least successful of the piece, and the Jamaican accent adopted by one of the characters, Donny, played by baritone Ross Ramgobin, is cringeworthy today, and perhaps was back in the eighties too. 

 

Even by the composer’s standards, New Year is abundantly eclectic. Electric guitars, a large percussion section, and electronics combine with a traditional orchestra. Pop styles from the late eighties, notably rap and reggae, are enfolded in an otherwise modernist score with complexly chromatic parts for both soloists and chorus. The narrative itself is circuitous, with one part featuring a time traveling spaceship and the other a dystopian urban landscape. Thus, the challenges, never mind the costs, for any production are substantial.

 

Brabbins and company surmount most of them in a dedicated and well-prepared performance. The soloists are excellent, in particular soprano Rhian Lois, who plays the principal character Jo Ann, and Robert Murray, who plays the time traveller Pelegrin, both vibrant singers with considerable charisma to match their voices. Susan Bickley, the foster-mother to Jo Ann and Donny, is a warm presence, perplexed by their challenging behavior, agoraphobia for the former and misbehavior for the latter, and yet as nurturing as she can manage. The other time travellers, Merlin, played by baritone Roland Wood, and Regan, played by soprano Rachell Nicholls, provide excellent characterizations of their roles. Tenor Alan Oake as the Voice, the presenter of the action, is an authoritative presence. 

 

New Year is a multifarious and, in places, problematic piece. But one can scarcely imagine a better effort to present it to best advantage than this recording.

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
CD Review, Composers, File Under?

Satie (CD Review)

Satie

Alain Planès, Pleyel piano (1928)

François Pinel, piano duets, Marc Mauillon, baritone

Harmonia Mundi

 

In 2025, substantial attention is being paid to the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth. Pianist Alain Planès has instead decided to celebrate the centenary of Erik Satie’s passing with a recording of music from the various stylistic periods of the eclectic composer’s oeuvre. Most of the music are works originally for piano and transcriptions, but there is a set of four-hands pieces and another of songs. 

 

At age seventy-seven, Planès has maintained his technique and interpretive skill, accommodating the varying demeanors – lyrical, enigmatic, bumptious, and virtuosic – of Satie’s music. Historically informed performance has extended into the twentieth century, and the pianist observes this by using a 1928 Pleyel, a piano similar to those Satie would have played upon. 

 

There are pieces that recall Satie’s work in cafes and theaters, such as the Valse-ballet, which opens the recording. Even in idiomatic genre pieces, there is a quirkiness to the dynamics and phrasing. Two song transcriptions, La Diva de L’Empire, and Satie’s “hit tune” Je te Veux, close the recording in a similarly light-hearted vein. The Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes, some of the composer’s well known and best-loved works, figure prominently in the program. Planès plays them with delicacy and small touches of rubato and dynamic inflections, exactly where the score indicates these fluctuations in phrasing. 

 

Avant-dernières pensées (“Penultimate Thoughts”), Chapitres tournés en tous sens (“Chapters Turned Every Which Way”), and Embryons desséchés (“Dessicated embryos”) are three humorous piano suites from the 1910s. The earlier Pièces froides (“Cold pieces”) exhibit similar jocularity. Even when going for musical jokes – quotations, weird juxtapositions, and sudden dynamic shifts – Satie always creates music that is well wrought for the instrument and its player. Planès presents the humor wryly, never overdoing it to go for a cheap laugh.

 

Trois morceaux en forme de poire (“Three pieces in the shape of a pear”) is for piano four-hands. The first resembles a Gymnopedie with a jaunty flourish at the end, the second has digressive flurries of runs punctuated with staccato chords and an emphatic bass line, and the third juxtaposes a lilting duple time dance with stentorian cadences. François Pinel is an amicable duet partner. Baritone Marc Mauillon joins Planès for Trois Mélodies, his voice easily navigating the high tessitura of the music with expressive nuance. The first, “La Statue de Bronze” (“The Bronze Statue”) recalls the oom-pah ostinato of popular Parisian fare. “Daphénéo” is more impressionist in tone but still peculiar, with some of its text not easily translatable. “Le chapelier” (“The hatter”) is in a lilting compound time until its forte climax, which is followed by a delicate coda.

 

Satie is worth yet more anniversary commemorations, but if the only one were to be this excellent recording, it would still provide a significant homage for his influential music. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Lincoln Center, New York, Orchestras, Twentieth Century Composer, Vocals

Remaking a Rug Concert: Boulez at 100

David Robertson conducts NY Phil
Photo: Brandon Patoc

Sound On: A Tribute to Boulez

The New York Philharmonic, Conducted by David Robertson

Jane McIntyre, Soprano

David Geffen Hall, January 25, 2025

By Christian Carey – Sequenza 21

 

NEW YORK – If you think that audience development is a relatively new practice, then you may not have heard of Rug Concerts. In the 1970s, during Pierre Boulez’s tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, these were an experiment to attempt to attract young people and downtown artsy types to try a concert at Avery Fisher Hall. Instead of rows of seating, rugs were strewn about the hall, inviting audience members to lounge in informal fashion while hearing a concert. Revisiting the first of these concerts, its program was presented in its entirety, albeit to audience members in the conventional seating setup of David Geffen Hall: no rugs rolled out. 

 

The first half of the concert featured repertory works. J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major was given a period-informed performance by a small ensemble. Sheryl Staples, the concertmaster for the evening, providing the aphoristic solo part with suave elegance, and bassist Timothy Cobb and harpsichordist Paolo Bordignon were an incisive continuo pairing. 

 

Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 2 in B-flat is an impressively beautiful piece, especially considering that it was completed when the composer was just eighteen. I have heard three different conductors lead this symphony with the NY Phil, a proto-romantic and broadly lyrical rendition from Kurt Masur, a breakneck-pace version informed by early music practice given by Alan Gilbert, and Robertson’s, which deployed a chamber-sized orchestra and emphasized the classical elements in Schubert’s early instrumental music. One hesitates to make a Goldilocks comparison, but Robertson’s interpretation felt just right. 

 

The second half of the program consisted of music from the twentieth century. Anton Webern’s Symphony, completed in 1928, was a totemic work for the postwar avant-garde, notably Boulez. It is a set of variations that uses the 12-tone method in a way that points toward the systematic organization of serialism, and is also filled with canons, reflective of Webern’s dissertation on the Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac. The piece is aphoristic with a thin texture, but deceptively challenging to perform, to connect the web of its lines in convincing fashion. The NY Phil navigated these demands under Robertson’s detailed direction with an ease of delivery that one seldom hears in the performance of Webern. Principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, who was given particularly disjunct lines to play, demonstrated a keen awareness of the importance of legato in the piece, even when leaping through dissonances.

Photo: Brandon Patoc

Boulez’s Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé, composed in 1957, was one of the pieces that put him on the map as an important creator. Its vocalist is tasked with significant interpretative challenges and a detailed and rangy score. Jana McIntyre performed commandingly, rendering the surrealist poetry with a wondrous exuberance for its strangeness, singing clarion top notes and plummy ones below the staff. A singer to watch for. The percussion section, which channels more than a bit of gamelan influence, played superlatively. Robertson was a close colleague of Boulez, and is a former director of Ensemble Intercontemporain. His conducting of Pli selon pli is the most authoritative that we have left since the composer’s passing. 

 

The concert concluded with Igor Stravinsky’s concert suite version of L’Histoire du Soldat. Composed in 1918, it is for a septet of musicians and includes eight sections from the larger piece. One of the last pieces in Stravinsky’s Russian period of composition, it mixes folk tunes with prescient shadings of the neoclassicism that was to follow in his music. Three dances, a tango, waltz, and ragtime, were particularly well-played, with Staples animating the characteristic rhythms of each. Trumpeter Christopher Martin and trombonist Colin Williams played with crackling energy, McGill and bassoonist Judith LeClair navigated dissonant intervals with laser beam tuning, and Cobb and percussionist Chris Lamb imbued the march movements with propulsive kineticism. 

 

It is fortunate for the New York Phil that Robertson works in the neighborhood, just across the street as Director of Orchestral Studies at the Juilliard School. One hopes that they continue to avail themselves of his considerable talent and warm presence on the podium.

Photo: Brandon Patoc

 

by Christian Carey
Ambient, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, File Under?

Canyons compilation benefits LA Firefighters

Nick Norton.

 

Canyons compilation

Sequenza 21 friend Nick Norton has speedily put together a digital compilation called “Canyons” to benefit LA firefighters. It is a loaded setlist, with contributions from India Galley, Dustin Wong, Molly Pease, Isaac Schankler, Nicholas Deyoe, Warp Trio, and more. The release is pay what you like on Bandcamp (embed below), but don’t be stingy; the firefighters can use all the help they can get.

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Strings

Kalevi Aho’s String Quartets (CD Review)

Kalevi Aho

String Quartets 1-3

Stenhammar Quartet

BIS

 

Kalevi Aho (1949-) is a prominent Finnish composer whose oeuvre includes a number of orchestral and chamber works and a smaller body of vocal music. His string quartets are from relatively early in his career, the first from quite early, written when he was only eighteen. All three are included on a BIS recording made by the Stenhammar Quartet, a group from Sweden. 

 

The pieces are presented out of order, beginning with the second quartet, which was written in 1970, during his studies with Einojuhani Rautavaara at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. It was created just a couple years after his conservatively tonal first quartet (discussed below), but it’s clear that Rautavaara had given Aho a grounding in twentieth century music. After a sinuous opening Adagio movement is a Presto that begins with a chromatic fugue soon surrounded by flurries of dissonance, a welter of sound. The fugue speeds up alongside ascending glissandos, ending on slashing verticals and prestissimo lines moving in contrary motion. The last movement returns to an Adagio tempo, with yearning counterpoint and a diaphanous texture, closing with an open-spaced quartal harmony.

 

Best known of Aho’s quartets is his Third (1971), which is programmed frequently and considered one of the pieces that first garnered him significant attention. With most of the movements continuing attacca, it begins Vivace with a mischievous Bartôkian tune that is eventually offset by long legato phrases. The movement ends with a cello ostinato and altissimo register violin surrounding bustling inner parts. The second movement, marked Andante, builds up from the lower register in a fugue with a long legato subject. This condenses into tightly constructed vertical presentations of the subject, and concludes with held chords and pizzicato bass notes. The aphoristic Presto third movement features clarion violin lines against repeated notes in the viola and cello. It is succeeded by a fourth movement with shades of Shostakovich. It has a somewhat wayward theme that Aho once again treats fugally against acerbic harmonies. Swooping crescendos are succeeded by a Presto with quick filigrees in the violin countered by a duet texture in the lower strings and fragmented accompaniment from the second violin. In the sixth movement, clusters in the violins and lower strings, first in pairs then combined, take over, while the seventh is a relatively brief Adagio that returns to minor-inflected imitative writing. The finale begins with a triplet-filled melody in the violin while seconds in the other instruments provide a bitter underpinning. A countermelody in the second violin and repeated notes in the cello elaborate the proceedings, while secundal violin lines descend from the uppermost register. A midrange duet imitates the previous passage to conclude enigmatically. 

 

While it is juvenalia, the inclusion of the First Quartet demonstrates that even early on Aho possessed a fine musical ear and sense of formal design. At the time, the composer was playing the violin and he used the standard repertoire he had been assigned as models for the quartet. It is a mix of Baroque sequences and Romantic harmony. The first movement, marked moderato, is a set of variations built on a circle-of-fifths progression. The second, marked Andante-Vivace, is considerably charming, with a wending mixed meter folk dance at its beginning that is replaced by a brusque scherzo section. The dance returns, more emphatic this time. The Presto third movement is a moto perpetuo in 6/8, and the finale returns to an Andante tempo, with a Brahmsian principal theme that is, appropriately, supplied with a series of developing variations, including a minor key variant that is interesting both harmonically and in its rhythmic patterning. The return to major is given a stately rendition by the Stenhammar players, concluding the piece with a foreshadowing of Aho’s future talent.

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Flute, Strings

Persist – Ethel and Loggins-Hull (CD Review)

Persist

Ethel and Allison Loggins-Hull

Sono Luminus

 

The string quartet Ethel presents a characteristically diverse program of contemporary music on Persist, their first recording for Sono Luminus. They are joined by composer/flutist Allison Loggins-Hull and the resulting quintet are strong advocates for the emerging composers featured here.

 

The title work is by Loggins-Hull, currently a composer fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra. Her work is gracefully written and appealing. Persist begins with an ambling section with an angular flute melody, pizzicato strings and percussion instruments. This is varied throughout, juxtaposed with presto passages featuring quickfire flute lines accompanied by circling countermelodies in the strings and pulsating drumming. In 2024, the title’s meaning is self-explanatory and timely, and Loggins-Hull’s piece aptly depicts both the current exhaustion and perennial indomitability of the progressive movement. 

 

PillowTalk by Xavier Muzik opens slowly, with oscillating thirds in the flute and impressionist harmonies in the strings. Languorous in demeanor and gradual in its unfolding, the color chords are eventually augmented by a pentatonic tune in octaves and a more elaborate flute solo that dovetails with pizzicato cello. The violin then takes a turn duetting with the flute. A fast passage with sliding tones and birdsong affords some much-belated energy, indeed making up for lost time in its latter half. A return to slow music reminiscent of the opening brings the piece full circle. 

 

Migiwa Miyajima presents a stylistically varied four-movement piece with her Reconciliation Suite. The first movement, “The Unknowns” is rhythmically vibrant and hews close to the cinematic. The second, “Never Be the Same,” features a flute solo that explores the low register of the instrument with gradual accelerations and slowdowns. Partway through, the cello adds a drone to accompany it. The flute moves higher, and the rest of the strings join with lush harmonies. “Mr. Rubber Sole from the Digital World” has fun with ostinatos á la rock ‘n roll. The suite concludes with “The Blooming Season,” a lushly attired pastorale.

 

Sam Wu’s Terraria features the flute imitating shakuhachi and the strings using sliding tone and other traditional gestures from Chinese music. It also has passages of neo-romantic arpeggiations. Particularly affecting are the central passages in which high flute and midrange strings double a folk-like melody above a low drone. The second appearance of the arpeggiations is accompanied by energetic flute runs. Harmonics and brief melodies in the flute create an evocative denouement, after which the flute returns to the shakuhachi manner of the opening to close. 

 

Leilehua Lanzilotti is likely the best known of the programmed composers; she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. The final work on Persist is her We Began This Quilt There. It is about Lili‘uokalani, the first and only Hawaiian queen and last sovereign of the islands before their annexation by the US. She made artworks, including the Queen’s Quilt, while she was imprisoned. Kaona, hidden meanings, is a concept Lanzilotti feels is suggestive of the queen’s artwork. The three movements include quotations of prison songs and folk music. Lanzilotti allows these materials space to breathe, with the flute playing melodies over gentle strumming from the strings in the first movement. The second is brief but haunting with flute harmonics and pitch bends over a sustained midrange piece. The final movement, “Ku‘u pua i Paoakalani” is based on a musical composition by Lili‘uokalani, an ode for her supporters. Lanzilotti veils the ode with its musical surroundings. A buildup of triadic repeated notes in the strings is joined by the flute playing the song with the addition of repeated notes: a musical Kaona that concludes a beautiful and meaningful work. 

 

With Persist, Ethel and Loggins-Hull demonstrate their continuing commitment to compositional voices from a variety of geographies and backgrounds. The programmed works are diverse in terms of their impetuses and styles, but uniformly of high quality. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, CDs, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?, London, Twentieth Century Composer

Music for Trumpets, Bass Clarinets, and Saxophones (CD Review)

Music for Trumpets, Bass Clarinets, and Saxophones

Aural Terrains

 

Rebecca Toal, Katie Lodge, Bradley Jones, trumpets

Raymond Brien, Michelle Hromin, Eb and bass clarinets

Chris Cundy, Yoni Silver, bass clarinets

Robert Burton, soprano saxophone

Julie Kjaer, alto saxophone, Tim Hodgkinson, alto saxophone and conducting

Jason Alder, baritone saxophone, contrabass clarinet

William Cole, conducting

 

A live recording made in England’s Cafe Oto, Music for Trumpets, Bass Clarinets, and Saxophones includes both brand new compositions for the assembled musicians and important pieces from the contemporary canon. An example of the latter is John Cage’s Five (1988) which is performed by trumpeter Rebecca Toal, Robert Burton, playing soprano saxophone, Chris Cundy and Raymond Brien playing bass clarinets, and Jason Adler playing baritone saxophone. Cage’s late number pieces are known for their slow, soft character. Written a year after Morton Feldman’s death, Five can sound like a valediction to a recently departed friend. This is particularly true in the supple and well-coordinated performance here. 

 

The spectral composer Gérard Grisey’s Anubis (1983) is performed by Adler, here on contrabass clarinet. Thrumming mixed scalar passages offset short tritone based tunes in a sepulchral register. Adler also plays Giacinto Scelsi’s Maknongan (1976). Webs of conjunct melodies appear in the bottom octave, and there are several wide leaps. Scelsi uses what was then a forbidden interval in the avant-garde, the octave. The piece is tremendously challenging, and Adler performs it with intense commitment. 

 

Julie Kjaer  plays her solo alto saxophone piece Grain (2022). Single notes with gliding endings open the work, interrupted by plosive pops, the irregularities implied by the title. Grain gradually gains intensity, Kjaer building a motive out of the beginning tune that evoles into one with fast notes and altissimo glissandos. The piece’s climax is filled with rapid, wide ranging, howling lines reminiscent of free jazz. The coda disassembles the material until Grain concludes with a brief flourish. Kjaer is both a talented composer and a formidable saxophonist. 

 

Theatrum Mundi (2022) by Thanos Chrysakis is an imposing piece. Its seventeen and a half minute duration is filled with waves of angular lines, microtones, and glissandos. The harmony initially is built from clangorous verticals, with the climax adding overtone chords in intense crescendos. After its crest, a denouement counters, with repeated notes and multiphonics played pianissimo. Chrysakis’ Doe of Stars (2014) is played by Toal and Adler, who switches back to baritone saxophone. Microtones and multiphonics serrate the edges of post-tonal melodies and reconstruct dyads into shadowy shapes. The music morphs into rapid re-articulations of single pitches. A rollicking saxophone solo is followed by a winding unison melody, with a widely spaced dyad to close. 

 

Tim Hodgkinson stepped out of the saxophone section to conduct his work Spelaion (2022), and one can readily hear why. The piece has myriad contrapuntal entrances and complexly accumulating passages. The pile-up of corruscating lines and repeated pitches creates slowly evolving and fascinatingly distressed textures. The whole ensemble participates in Spelaion to close this extraordinary evening that revelled in intricate music and superlative music-making.

 

-Christian Carey

 

 

by Christian Carey
Choral Music, Classical Music, Concert review, File Under?

Musica Sacra at Carnegie Hall (Concert Review)

Photo: Tanya Branganti.

Music Sacra

Classics for Christmas: Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven

Musica Sacra Chorus and Orchestra

Kent Tritle, conductor

Simone Dinnerstein, piano

Susanna Phillips, soprano

Carnegie Hall

December 18, 2024

 

NEW YORK – Musica Sacra, directed by Kent Tritle, gave a concert of Christmas music on Thursday, but you didn’t hear caroling. The group presented choral pieces with Christmas texts, and topped things off with the Beethoven Choral Fantasy, a piece premiered in December 1822 but having little to do with the holiday. Still, the work, which is part piano concerto and part choral cantata, is festive and was jubilantly performed. 

 

Three movements from Bach’s Christmas oratorio started the concert by displaying the group’s radiant sound, from impressive high sopranos to sepulchral second basses. 

The orchestra acquitted themselves well, with bright trumpets and thrumming timpani drums creating a joyous atmosphere in Jauchzet, frohlocket, aur, preiser die Tage.

 

Francis Poulenc’s motet Hodie Christus natus est resembles the  language of his larger work, Gloria; both give tenors high melodic lines and the whole choir unorthodox, at times jazzy, harmonies to sing. Morten Lauridsen’s O magnum mysterium is now thirty years old, and has become a staple of choirs, especially at Christmastime. It was one of a few color chord pieces, with stacks of seconds added to triads, that were performed by the choir. Tritle takes it slightly faster than I am accustomed to hearing it, which better accommodates the chamber character of his choir. I liked that it had a sense of momentum.

 

Susanna Phillips sang the soprano solo in Mozart’s Exultate, jubilate with a warm tone and impressive coloratura. She returned to sing one of the soprano solo parts in the Beethoven Choral Fantasy. Two more a cappella works were shared. James Bassi, a talented choral composer, was in attendance for the performance of his Quem pastores laudavere, volubly applauding along with the enthusiastic acclamation that greeted his work, a mix of humming and singing with supple harmonies. Franz Biebl’s Ave Maria is another popular offering, with a similar, though more restrained, use of added-note chords to the preceding two contemporary works. It is the memorable and tuneful melodic writing, however, that makes it a special piece.

 

The piano soloist in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Simone Dinnerstein, kept in mind that Beethoven had improvised the solo in the first performance, and played with supple rubato and surprising dynamic shifts. When the orchestra joined, her soaring melody lines and virtuosic scales and arpeggios accompanied the singing, carrying brilliantly to be heard over both the chorus and orchestra. The tune given to the singers is originally from a Beethoven lieder, and sounds close to the one used in the composer’s Ninth Symphony. Indeed the piece feels in many ways like a sketch for the larger work. It was a rousing way to end the concert, and one felt suitably ushered into the season.

 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Concert review, File Under?, Piano, Twentieth Century Composer

Jeremy Denk at 92nd Street Y (Concert Review

Jeremy Denk, piano
Kaufmann Concert Hall
92nd Street Y

 

92nd Street Y

Thursday, December 2024

Photos courtesy of Joseph Sinnott

 

NEW YORK – When devising a recital program, pianist Jeremy Denk always provides thematic interest to abet the musical diversions. The centerpiece and entire second half of his performance at the 92nd Street Y was the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives, a totemic work in the repertoire of twentieth century piano music. Denk is an Ives specialist, having recorded both the piano and violin sonatas for Nonesuch (more on that later). 

 

The first half of the recital complemented Ives with a composer he revered (and quoted in the Concord Sonata), Beethoven. The Opus 90 Piano Sonata in E-minor is a two movement piece that moves to E-major in the second movement. It is relatively brief but chock full of mercurial scalar passages in its first movement. The second movement, at a slower tempo but still played with quicksilver ornaments, is a theme and variations of a fetching melody, “to be played in a singing manner.” The recital’s first half concluded with a sonata from Beethoven’s late period, his second to last to be written, Op, 110 in A-flat Major. The first movement, marked moderato cantabile, is slower than the usual allegro one finds in this part of a sonata. However, it has two distinct themes and a minor key development, keeping it in the sonata genre. It’s no accident that during this time period Beethoven was also working on the Missa Solemnis. The incisive second movement features bold attacks and anapestic cascades of short motives. The finale is fascinating, with material that imitates recitatives and quotes Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which is followed by a fugue in the tonic key. Denk played both sonatas fluently, occasionally looking out at the audience to share Beethoven’s mood with a bold visage.

 

Sandwiched between the sonatas was a group of miniatures that explored Black American musical genres. Scott Joplin’s rag Bethena began the group with characteristically syncopated rhythms and imaginative chord progressions. This was followed by The Banjo, a piece by Louis Moreau Gottschalk that Denk took at a spirited pace. Its refrain is a keen imitation of the African instrument transplanted to the US, but the piece takes off into stratospheric arpeggios and nimble runs that transform the material into a virtuosic vehicle. William Bolcom was a pivotal figure in the ragtime revival, and one of his rags, “Graceful Ghost Rag,” provided a stylistically true homage to the composer. A musical theater song, “Just in TIme,” by Jule Styne was presented in an extroverted arrangement by the pianist Ethan Iverson of Nina Simone’s iconic recording. 

Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,”  pays tribute to the American transcendentalists, an important philosophical movement for Ives. Its gestation is a moving target, the first edition composed between 1916-1920 and the piece, characteristic of Ives, being edited over and over until the premiere in 1938 by John Kilpatrick. It is intricately notated, with few barlines, complex rhythms, and overlapping lines and chords. Ives felt that the lack of conventional structuring would help the music to flow.

 

The first movement, “Emerson,” introduces the opening motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as an idée fixe that interpenetrates other movements of the sonata, but is developed, treated in counterpoint, and presented in the midst of shards of dissonance. As is Ives’s practice, frequent incongruous asides occur, including a stride passage in the middle of the movement and quotations of hymns and popular songs. This persists throughout.

 

The second movement, “Hawthorne,” begins with scherzo-like figures and continues to introduce sprightly material, even including a bit of ragtime, and later sonorities that are meant to evoke a church service, including bell sounds created by pressing the black keys with a block of wood. The Beethoven theme is only joined by the “main theme” of the piece in the third movement, “The Alcotts.” The polytonal voicing of the variations on Beethoven 5 move it into the harmonic world of Stravinsky. In the final movement, “Thoreau,” Claire Chase was the guest flutist that is an optional component of the sonata, providing a mischievous cameo. The piano meanwhile, incorporates snatches of popular music from the 1910s all the way back to the Civil War, the two themes, and Protestant hymnody into impressionist water music that signifies Thoreau’s residence at Walden Pond. 

This was an authoritative performance, unbelievably accurate and technically assured despite its herculean challenges. Denk is one of the great Ives interpreters of our time. The audience applauded for more, but how do you follow the Concord Sonata? Denk took off his jacket and picked up his wood block to indicate that the memorable evening was concluded. 

The 150th anniversary of Ives’s birth is being celebrated this year by a number of concerts and recordings. Denk’s recorded contribution is Ives Denk (Nonesuch). A double disc, it includes a remastered version of his benchmark recording of the piano sonatas as well as a recording of the violin sonatas with Stefan Jackiw. The violinist is an excellent partner, understanding the roles of quotation, collage, the doppler effect, and dissonance in these pieces. The revival meeting movement of the second sonata is incandescent, and the final movement of the first sonata opens with a thrill ride redolent with popular music. Its central section is slow, with folk melodies haloed by ambiguous arpeggiations. A gradual accelerando returns the music to its earlier demeanor, then the sonata concludes with a tremolandos and a fade. The entire Fourth Sonata, “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting,” is delightful. 

 

Denk’s traversal of the piano sonatas displays dazzling playing and thoughtful interpretations. Ives has emphatic tendencies, but his music can also display great tenderness. Denk embodies all of the contrasting shifts that result, providing detailed dynamic and articulative contrasts, shading the music with myriad tone colors. Ives Denk is one of my favorite recordings of 2024.

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey