Richard Goode & Jonathan Biss at Jordan Hall

Thoughtful connections in Duo Piano Concert by Goode and Biss

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

Pierrot Lunaire at the Gardner Museum

Moondrunkenness Needed for Pierrot Lunaire to Come Alive

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

Concord Chamber Players at Concord Academy

Gandolfi Commission, Fine Bartok, Herald Concord Chamber Music Society 10th Anniversary

The Boston Music Intelligencer

Year in Reviews

I may've been off the blogging circuit for a little while, but I haven't stopped writing about music online:

• Fenwick Smith’s Thirty-third Annual Jordan Hall Recital Offered Wide Range of Material, 14 Sep 2009
• Frisson of the New at Mass MoCA, 03 Aug 2009 (if you read just one, read this one)
• Musical Insurrection to Institution: Bang on a Can, 08 Jul 2009
• BEMF’s Chamber Orchestra: Delightful One-To-A-Part Affair, 14 Jun 2009
• Turandot: Cipher of an Opera, 02 Jun 2009
• Juventas Presents Two Chamber Operas, 10 May 2009
• Oddball Program, Communal Group, 27 Apr 2009
• NESE Offers Program Heralding Upcoming Ballets Russes 2009, 06 Apr 2009
• Collage Offers Bold Gestures, Hints of Opera, and a Knockout, 02 Mar 2009
• Stimulating Presentation of Underplayed Repertoire, 13 Nov 2008

Post-Minimalist Weekend Post

I stepped out of my usual composerly circles to join the musicology department for a symposium with Robert Fink (UCLA). As predicted, he essentially did highlights from Repeating Ourselves. Since I'd read the book before, what I learned from the session was tangential to the actual presentation, but is still a interesting important point: if I want to sit around a table where the majority of those present are intelligent and assertive women, musicology functions are a sure bet.

Saturday was Steve Reich Day, with a symposium in the afternoon and a concert in the evening. The centerpiece of the symposium was hearing his newish Daniel Variations. After castigating a big chunk of us for not knowing who Daniel Pearl was ("Well, you should."), he explained how he met Pearl's father and was asked to write a piece about Pearl. The piece sets fragmentary texts from Pearl's writings and the biblical Book of Daniel (which involves a conflict between Jews and Babylonians).

Following the listening, was an extended Q&A. Not a lot of new info for anyone who hasn't read any interviews with or writings by Reich, but he made one interesting comment that stuck with me. Asked about the efficacy of politicized art, he said he had no illusions about saving the world. "Guernica" didn't prevent Dresden and Tokyo, but it made Guernica part of our vocabulary.

The concert in the evening covered his whole career: Drumming (Part One), Cello Counterpoint, Different Trains, and Sextet. Drumming changed a lot live. Thanks to Kilbourn Hall's natural wetness, there was some harmonies hung in the air after each attack. You could follow the cellular transformations, courtesy of having the visual of the performers. The drums were left standing on-stage before and after the piece, à la gamelan.

Cello Counterpoint was done with 8 live cellists, though with some amplification to balance out the lines. It bore a striking resemblance, harmonically and structurally to Triple Quartet. I had a similar bout of déjà vu (but not quite as strong) during Sextet, with the point of comparison being Music for 18 Musicians. Self-plagiarism doesn't offend me that much, but why has Reich dodged the bullet on this one when Glass has gotten so much flack?

I would like to use this page to inaugurate the "Different Trains...Not So Much a Fan" Club. First of all, kudos to Reich for making a 180-degree turn on his early aesthetic and turning out a text-based piece of program music (love those violins doubling the taped train whistles). The speech-as-music bit is fun, but not fun enough to steal the title for "Best Setting of the Word 'Chicago'" from Harry Partch.

My real problem with the piece is with the content of the program. The "different trains" conceit is reasonably clever, but not 27' clever. There's just not enough behind it to propel the piece for that duration. It doesn't present any major challenges to my ethical imagination. I know more than I want to know about the inhumanity of the Holocaust. Nuremberg more than adequately documented that. By 1988, I'd hope that an artist could have gone deeper into the material.

For me, Sophie's Choice is the exemplar of asking the hard questions on this terrain. Styron was willing (I'd say he even went out of his way) to find humanity among Nazis. Because of that, the eponymous choice becomes much, much more than you'd suspect. Reich only deals with one side of the situation in his quartet, and in turn is only able to present a victim's story. Targets of genocide deserve to have more than their victimization preserved.

***

[UPDATE: I neglected one important tidbit, which was that the Reich concert had a basically full house. When the usher came out to do the fire exit spiel, we got "Good eve— wow" instead of the usual "Good evening and welcome to Kilbourn Hall."]

***

Pictures from the show, courtesy of John Lam:


Drumming


Cello Counterpoint


Different Trains


Sextet

Kronos Quartet, 2/7/07

Kronos's show at Eastman Theatre featured only pieces that were commissioned by them or arranged exclusively for them. It brought out what I see as the very best and very worst of the group. I have tremendous respect for them as dedicated advocates of new music. They played one of their under 30 commissions with the same commitment they gave to their proven showpieces. I'm still unsure, though, about their "world music" projects and pop covers. I understand they program this music along with Steve Reich and Michael Gordon to show that they think it's just as good. However, underneath the colored lights and amplification, I'm still sitting in the neo-classical temple of Eastman Theatre listening to a string quartet. It's hard to get away from the feeling that they're engaged in some old-fashioned exoticism.

The program opened with Potassium, a Michael Gordon piece. Its amplified glissandi would be familiar to anyone who has heard Weather, but it is by no means a rehash of that piece. It uses a large-scale ABA form similar to Reich's Triple Quartet. There's a very narrow range of ensemble relationships (lots of staggered entrance glissandi), but a wide range of timbres and harmonies come out. It's a very physical piece. You feel like a chemical element is being synthesized before you, but no soft metal like potassium. You'd need some high-powered lasers to work with whatever Gordon had in mind.

"Oh Mother, the Handsome Man Tortures Me" is an Iraqi song, author unknown. The notes state that the arrangement they used is "based on a recording produced sometime during the Saddam period between the 1980s and 2002." The cello played a syncopated bass line that kept you on your toes. A fragment of the original recording was played as the song finished up.

"Raga Mishra Bhairavi" is an arrangement of sarangi music by Ram Narayan. The viola took its place here. The stage was dark so I couldn't quite tell, but it looked like John Sherba grabbed an electric sitar for this one.

Dan Visconti's Love Bleeds Radiant came in through the Kronos: Under 30 Project. My anal critic self thought it suffered from the typical young composer syndrome of too-many-ideas, but my adventurous programming self was intrigued by the idea of touring with something that's untested and uncertain. It gets that critical dialogue going between performer and audience instead of composer self and anal critic self. Maybe it's bad for every item on a concert program to be a proven masterpiece.

"Flugufrelsarinn," a Sigur Rós song, followed. I thought it was a very convincing arrangement that kept a lot of the band's sound intact. On the other hand, a friend who knows the band better than I do criticized the arrangement for not being loyal enough to the original.

Derek Charke, a new name to me, contributed Cercle du Nord III. It had a minimalist pulse but followed a seemingly programmatic form. There were occasional pre-recorded interjections of speech which were unfortuantely (intentionally?) hard to make out. I had trouble making sense of everything with only one hearing, but I can give it the compliment that I wanted to give it a second one.

"Lullaby" and "Tusen Tanakar (A Thousand Thoughts)" fell into Kronos's direct, sentimental style. Either you care or you don't.

The program closed with Reich's Triple Quartet. On recording, it seems like perhaps his most traditional piece. Three fast-slow-fast movements, arch forms, and large scale harmonic movement based on mediant relationships. In person, it seems as radical as any other. Throughout his career, Reich has found ways to get people to play their instruments in unusual ways. They're not necessarily original methods (sharing instruments comes from his study of Ghanaian drumming), but he always integrates convincingly into into his personal musical language.

Here he takes what is normally the most "intimate" of genres and turns a group into one cog in a larger machine: a live quartet plays against a tape of two others. When seen live, the combination creates a startling juxtaposition of the active and inactive (much like the usual fast music/slow music at the same time in other Reich). The music itself is incredibly lively, begging you to dance along with it. However, when 2/3 of the musicians are canned, the stage picture doesn't have enough energy to match. In addition, the group appeared intentionally deadened. Their gestures felt perfunctory and the lighting staying consistently dimmed and uncolored (both in big contrast to everything else that night). I always thought of the piece as good workout music, but in person the active/inactive juxtaposition is very unsettling. I wonder if I would feel the same way about the piece if it was performed by three live quartets.

Three encores ensued: "Beloved, O Beloved" from their Bollywood album (ebullient music, I'd like to hear the rest now), a Star-Spangled Banner à la Hendrix (the lighting projected distorted instrumental shapes on the side walls, the interpretation was about as radical as it was in '69), and "Lux Aeternum" from Requiem for a Dream (music that reminds you how "serious" the movie was).

Alarm Will Sound, 12/15/06

Alarm Will Sound played Kilbourn Hall a couple weeks ago. Since all of the group's members are Eastman alum, it was as much a concert as it was a homecoming: the audience was cheering before they heard a single note. The program was kind of an AWS sampler: the first movement from the Ligeti Piano Concerto, a handful of pieces by AWS composers, and a set of Aphex Twin arrangements. All of the pieces emphasized the kind of fluid virtuosity that is often featured in pieces for sinfonietta ensembles. The individual and ensemble challenges didn't seem to make anyone break a sweat.

Alan Pierson has a playful presence on-stage. His mannerisms suggest a little bit of the gawky kid next door. He conducts with a baton, but feels the groove with his whole body. The group as a whole is very comfortable using their bodies along with their instruments. It looked like they were, you know, having fun and stuff. Even when members weren't playing, you could also see them feeling the groove.

The rhythmically active nature of the program made the concert hall setting feel a bit stiff. There were times, especially with the Aphex Twin arrangements, when I wanted to get up and dance. The friends who went to the show with me felt the same way, but a (highly unscientific) lookaround during the danceable moments suggested we would've been in a very small group.

In general, the concert pointed out a lot of pitfalls in finding a halfway point between staid new music concerts and rock shows (generalizations to follow). When you go to one of the former, it's almost excusable when it feels uptight. The emphasis is placed on the music being played, not the individuals playing the music. Rock shows have a reversed dynamic. You go for the group, to see their current material and to follow their creative development. Pierson more or less said between pieces, "We're going to play some stuff we've been touring with for a while, then play some material off our latest CD."

Rock groups usually package together a personality, a sound, and a musical identity. For AWS to become the group they're trying to be, they'll need a similar package. They have the first two parts mostly together, but they've got a long way to go on the last one. The group has plenty of talented composers, but this show didn't reveal anyone that they could really rally behind. They've made it clear they can play anything they want, but I think their long-term success will depend on what they choose to play.

Charlemagne Palestine in Boston

Monday night was the kick-off concert for NEC's SICPP week. Stephen Drury presented Morton Feldman's Palais de Mari, followed by Charlemagne Palestine presenting his own Golden Mean. Drury's playing was very lovely. Though score for the piece is dry on dynamic markings (except for the initial ppp and some cryptic decrescendos), he tastefully added swells during some moments. Rather than evoke a Romantic sentimentality, it suggested more a shifting luminosity, the sun emerging from beneath clouds and casting a more golden light on the scene.

He really captured the piece's sense of vertical time. Listening to it is like exploring ancient ruins. One's thoughts are caught between the present and an imagined past. Time seems to bend accordingly. When you finally leave the area you feel as if you were there for only a brief moment (and accordingly, are humbled by that reality).

Though I hardly object to the number of Feldman recordings that are available, this recital was a reminder that the concert hall is really the best place to hear his music. The physical reality of the sounds permeating through space is an essential part of it. I don't mean this in a Cagean sense of taking pleasure in sounds as they are, but that this movement seems an important part of the piece's conception and orchestration. Drury evenly balanced its experimentalism with a sense of its connection to the classical tradition.

Palestine's set was begun with a little more fanfare. He was no doubt responsible for the giant crowd that was there (people had to stand in the aisles). At the beginning of the night, Drury thanked him for the best audience he's ever had. Note to hipster-seeking performers: an interview in the Dig is a sure way to round them up.

Everything you've heard about his playing style is true. Yes he has stuffed animals all around the pianos, yes he's a flamboyant dresser, yes he drinks cognac while playing. Despite his anti-pretentious habits, I was struck by his professionalism when setting up his mise-en-scène. He placed all the animals very quickly and intently.

He became more relaxed once his performance began. He opened with a few minutes of remarks, talking about the varying reception he's gotten over the years, definitely framing himself as an enfant terrible. He said he was glad to see that there was a new generation who was open to his way of hearing sounds. He talked a little about how his relationship with Feldman (the similarities end with them both being Russian Jews from Brooklyn), and made the usual comment about how much Feldman's personality differed from his music. This struck the audience as a joke, to which a surprised Palestine explained that he was just stating the facts.

He began playing by creating a drone by running a finger around one of his glasses. After a little, he sang along with it (he explained beforehand that he always got into a trance state before playing). Golden Mean begins as a motoric unison (using two pianos) and expands to a variety of other similarly hammered out sounds.

His interest seemed to be not in the fundamental pitches, but in the elusive harmonies found in the farther reaches of the overtone series. He didn't always play both pianos at the same time, though their sustain pedals were weighted down so they would always resonate. At a few points, Palestine sang in a modal fashion over the pianos, usually vocalises or what sounded like Hebrew. He cried "sound is sound!" a number of times throughout.

Palestine seems very concerned with creating a spiritual music. I think he would agree with Feldman and say that sound is his only deity, but they definitely have different notions of what that deity is. Palestine's music, despite its flirtations with Eastern thought, struck me as being very animist. All his hammering seemed like it was trying to tap the same energy reached by the man-animal deities that surrounded the pianos.

The audience's reaction to him was raging, loud and effusive (hipsters being hipsters, I suspect his swashbuckling stage manner and theatricality, with its dips into childhood imagery, had a lot to do with their enthusiasm). He shouted "sound is sound!" a few more times as he paced the stage, closing the show.

Rzewski at NEC

This week, the New England Conservatory is running a summer institute in contemporary piano music. Frederic Rzewski has come to coach students in playing his music; in return, several nights are being devoted to concerts of his music. Monday night featured his most famous contribution to the repertoire, The People United Will Never Be Defeated, along with a few other pieces that demonstrated the breadth of his output.

The one thread that tied the pieces together for me was their awareness of the performer. This music didn't push the players away in order to reach its ecstatic peaks. Rather, it dramatized their very presence. Having only heard Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues on recording, I only knew what it sounded like. The half-comical sight of watching Jung Hee Shin pounding away with her forearms provided bizarre counterpoint to the clangorous sound mass she conjured up.

The fragmentary design of The Road (part one was on the program) made it seem ill-suited for the concert hall. It would be interesting to hear it played by a friend in his home, letting him jump between sections and insert comments as he pleased. One of the sections featured the pianist rattling around on the piano with its lid shut. Some of John Mark Harris's gestures suggested a sped-up caricature of a piano virtuoso. If this moment was Rzewski's creation, it suggests an interesting sense of humor about the virtuoso pianist-composer tradition he falls into.

Whangdoodles was a partially improvised piece for piano, violin and hammered dulcimer (doubling on vibraphone). The piece consists of 108 segments that are freely coordinated between players. Every ten seconds or so they line up, but it is otherwise indeterminate. The instrumentation and concept would make it an interesting companion piece to Feldman's Why Patterns?

According to the notes, the piece is meant to express “the idea of an open, planetary approach to relationships of conflict: allowing real life to determine the course of action, rather than trying to force life into pre-conceived models.” In order to fully enjoy it, one must not search for a strongly-cast narrative (“pre-conceived models”), but instead be content with the sounds themselves. Listening in this mode, the happenstance moments when a clear beauty emerges are heard as simple gifts, not moments which one is otherwise deprived of. The idea of selfless listening (and ultimately acting) feels like well-trodden territory now, but the folk materials (Yiddish and Appalachian songs) which frame it provide a novel angle.

Stephen Drury presented The People United at the end of the night. His performance (from memory) was marked by a steady confidence, never distracted by the piece's kaleidoscope of styles. Despite his demeanor, he seemed to take a difference presence on stage along with each of the styles. The variations cast in a grand Romantic vein placed him on a grand stage, while those with echoes of minimalism brought a surprising intimacy to Jordan Hall.

The most striking moments occurred at the piece's moments of repose, when the virtuosity subsided into quiet, spare chords. While the rarity of these moments gave them a special poignancy, the high whistling accompanying them reminded one that even in musical moments which push towards transcendence, the audience cannot get there without the performer's efforts.