Tag: concert review

Opera Parallèle Presents Golijov’s Ainadamar

Lobby - Ainadamar
Moving silently throughout the lobby and the theater prior to the start of Opera Parallèle’s recent performances were girls dressed entirely in white, carrying valises, and young women, also in white though their dress hems were soaked in red. These ghostly apparitions moved up and down the aisles and sat quietly among audience members, not interacting but making their presence felt. By the start of the show, all of Las Niñas had made their way onto the stage of the Lam Research Theater at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the opening scene of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar, which received its first San Francisco production earlier this month.

Golijov’s opera, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang (which was translated into Spanish by Golijov), dramatizes the life of Spanish actress Margarita Xirgu (1888–1969), muse to writer Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936; murdered by Fascist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War). In real life, Xirgu created the role of Mariana Pineda in Lorca’s play of the same name; Pineda was herself an Andalucian historical figure who also was executed for her unyielding commitment to liberal causes. The 90-minute opera shows Xirgu in the moments at the end of her life, preparing to go onstage in a production of Mariana Pineda, remembering her (non-romantic) relationship with Lorca in flashbacks and visualizing the circumstances of his execution. The opera concludes with Xirgu’s own passing and transfiguration.

Ainadamar - Fountain of Tears

Marnie Breckenridge (center) as Margarita Xirgu, flanked by chorus members, flamenco dancers, and Lisa Chavez (in bowtie) as Federico García Lorca
Photo by Steve DiBartolomeo

Xirgu, sung by soprano Marnie Breckenridge, and Lorca, a trouser role performed by Lisa Chavez, were joined by Xirgu’s student/protégée Nuria (Maya Kherani) and a chorus of treble voices, sung in these performances by a 13-voice women’s choir and the 15 young members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus dressed in white. Opera Parallèle’s production also featured five women flamenco dancers led by La Tania, who are seen during the opening chorus having their children torn from their arms by male soldiers, a reference to the tens of thousands of “lost children” who were stolen from Republican families by Nationalists for re-education.

Flamenco dancer La Tania

Flamenco dancer La Tania (in white) and four members of her troupe, with Breckenridge, above
hoto by Steve Dibartolomeo

By casting a chorus of young girls alongside the women, and also adding a corps of female dancers who at times appeared as mother figures, Opera Parallèle’s production, directed by Brian Staufenbiel, highlighted the impact of the war on women as well as intergenerational female relationships. While the score calls for a female choir (divided into three groups) to sing Las Niñas’ part, it does not specify children. This choice was a significant and thought-provoking shift from the 2005 production in Santa Fe directed by Peter Sellars, who had been instrumental in significantly revising the dramatic structure of the work after the initial performances in 2003 at Tanglewood. Whereas Sellars’s production, which had an ensemble of only eight adult women who often surrounded Xirgu like acolytes, placed its emphasis on far-right militarism and showed Lorca being shot in the ass repeatedly on stage after being called a maricón (faggot) during the “Interludio de Balazos” (“Gunshot interlude”), Staufenbiel placed Lorca’s killing offstage, instead bringing on three male soldiers to shoot the dancers, who had previously been shown protesting and lamenting Lorca’s imminent execution.

Jesús Montoya and Breckenridge

Jesús Montoya and Breckenridge enact the execution of Mariana Pineda by garrote
Photo by Steve Dibartolomeo

The score places a number of unusual demands on both the cast and the production team. Margarita Xirgu, nominally a soprano role given the luminous high Bs and Cs written for the final moments of her life, spends much of the opera singing at the bottom of and below the staff as a mature woman, but also jumps to usual soprano range for flashbacks to her youth. The role of Lorca is written astonishingly and consistently low, tapping into an unfamiliar husky timbre that is disorienting and intriguing in its power. The primary male role (there are three other small roles for men, in the passion play that surrounds Lorca’s death) is the fascist officer, Ruiz Alonso, who was played in this production by Jesús Montoya, a flamenco singer who produces a full-throated and passionately raw sound that isn’t taught in conservatory voice studios. (Montoya, who recorded the role for Deutsche Grammophon, has sung in multiple productions of Ainadamar, though this is the first one in which he has had to act the role on stage.) All of the performances, including Kherani’s crystalline Nuria, were vocally commanding, but Breckenridge’s committed physical embodiment of Xirgu provided the continuous thread that held the production together.

Chavez, Breckenridge and Kherani in the final trio

Chavez, Breckenridge and Kherani in the final trio
Photo by Steve DiBartolomeo

Because the vocal parts are often in unusual ranges, the singers are amplified throughout the performance. Also, there are prerecorded elements throughout the show—the sound of drops of water (Ainadamar, which translates as Fountain of Tears, is a reference to a fountain outside of Alfácar), galloping horses, gunshots, and a field recording of a prayer ceremony—in addition to extensive percussion and keyboard parts within a highly spirited and impressively cohesive 32-piece orchestra, conducted by Nicole Paiement. Unfortunately, these disparate elements required a more sophisticated and integrated sound design than what Opera Parallèle was able to provide, and as a result there was inconsistency in the levels of the singers and some occasional distortion at the performance I attended.

Nicole Paiement and Brian Staufenbiel with members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, at an open rehearsal

Nicole Paiement and Brian Staufenbiel with members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, at an open rehearsal

Ainadamar is Opera Parallèle’s first production since changing its name from Ensemble Parallèle. This small company, founded in 1993 by Paiement, has turned their focus to contemporary opera with several successful productions over the past few seasons—last year’s production of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby was an award winner in January’s National Opera Association competition—and the change brings their name in line with their current identity. The company has been making a concerted effort to open up the rehearsal process to audiences, offering sneak previews and open rehearsals to the public free of charge. Opera Parallèle’s season continues with a double-bill of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Samuel Barber’s A Hand of Bridge in April, and a workshop of the company’s first commission, Dante De Silva’s Gesualdo, Prince of Madness, in June.

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News in Brief: The San Francisco Girls Chorus announced this month that Lisa Bielawa—composer, longtime vocalist of the Philip Glass Ensemble, founder of the MATA Festival, and a Girls Chorus alumna—has been named artistic director, charged with overseeing the group’s programming and developing new artistic partnerships. Bielawa will divide her time between San Francisco and New York; principal conducting duties at the chorus will be assumed by Valerie Sainte-Agathe.

Kronos Quartet Wraps Residency with a San Francisco Celebration

Kronos Quartet

Photo by Michael Wilson

The Kronos Quartet wrapped up a three-year residency at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this month with a program devoted to San Francisco composers, and as I rode the train into the city I thought about the impact they have had on new music, classical music in general, and even popular culture. But even a global ensemble like Kronos is still a hometown band somewhere, part of a musical community in which they participate and which in turn supports them. This program of all San Francisco composers—Dan Becker, Stephen Prutsman, Nathaniel Stookey, and Pamela Z—was an acknowledgement of the influence San Francisco has had on Kronos, its home since 1978.

Dan Becker

Dan Becker

The concert, titled “Listen Local,” began with Dan Becker’s Carrying the Past, which incorporates excerpts of 78rpm recordings of his grandfather, who was a big band trumpet player in the 1920s. It opens with one of these excerpts and the string quartet slowly emerges from the scratchy, vintage sound. The intensity quickly builds and sharp exclamations cut through a tangle of complex, competing rhythmic patterns. Carrying the Past proceeds in sections separated by short interludes of big band excerpts alone, which serve as commas or points of stillness in the work. When the string quartet is playing the excerpts are often more abstract, especially toward the end of the piece where they mimic sci-fi whizzes, zooms, and pops. Kronos’s playing was razor sharp, especially in the keening, intertwining melodic lines played by violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, though I sometimes had difficulty hearing Sherba in the mix. (The quartet was amplified.) If their subtle use of vibrato on these high, sustained notes accentuated some minor pitch issues, it also created a sense of rawness and electricity.

Nathaniel Stookey

Nathaniel Stookey
Photo by Ole Lütjens

Next was world premiere of San Francisco native Nathaniel Stookey’s String Quartet No. 3, “The Mezzanine,” inspired by Nicholson Baker’s novel of the same name. Baker’s book is a probing account, extensively footnoted, Proustian in its attention to detail, of a man’s thought processes as he performs various mundane tasks during his lunch hour. “We composers often go to great lengths to discourage our audience from looking for connections between our music and the titles we give it,” Stookey wrote in the program note. “In the case of my third quartet, the music really is about escalators, drinking straws, shoelaces, vending machines, and cigarette butts.”

The escalator reference is clear in the quartet’s first movement. Fragments of whole-tone scales calmly ascend independently of one another, occasionally aligning to produce warm major sonorities. The second movement—a stream-of-consciousness mix of styles—contains frenetic, rhythmic episodes alternating with Baroque-like asides, a gentle trio anchored by Jeffrey Zeigler’s resonant cello pizzicati, and a melancholy habanera. Throughout the work phrases are often interrupted by abrupt changes to a crystalline musical texture marked by the use of upper registers, fleet melodic fragments, or spiccato runs. Perhaps this, as well as movements like the second that seem to end by wandering off mid-phrase, depict the thought processes of Howie, the protagonist of Baker’s novel. The final movement of Stookey’s quartet pits heavy, sawing triplet figures against a fiddle tune, played with gusto by Harrington. These two ideas alternate and eventually form an uneasy coexistence with the fiddle tune shouting to be heard over the triplets. In the closing bars the ascending escalator figures of the opening return and carry the music away.

Stephen Prutsman

Stephen Prutsman

After the break the Kronos Quartet performed four arrangements created especially for them by their long-time collaborator Stephen Prutsman. Violinist John Sherba took a starring turn in Prutsman’s arrangement of Indian film composer Rahul Dev Burman’s Mehbooba Mehbooba (Beloved, O Beloved), a bouncy Bollywood-style number depicting a sultry gypsy dance. Violist Hank Dutt was outstanding in Prutsman’s arrangement of Tanburi Cemil Bey’s Evic Taksim. It opens with wheezing, harmonium-like chords and unfolds like a recitative. Hushed, sustained harmonies support Dutt’s wonderfully rhapsodic playing. Every ornament and glissando was utterly natural, and his tone was so throaty, so richly textured you could almost reach out and touch it. Wa Habibi (O My Beloved), based on an Arab Orthodox hymn, was a chorale-like lament, while the closing arrangement of Ethiopian saxophonist Gétatchèw Mèkurya’s Aha Gèdawo projected the swagger and fury of warriors right before battle. Here Prutsman piled on layer after layer of aggressive musical gestures creating a dense polyrhythmic texture, and Kronos tore into their instruments, sounding as close to a howling saxophone as a string quartet can. They seemed to really be in their element with the works, savoring the glissandi and microtonal inflections in the works by Burman and Bey, and relishing in the chest thumping in Mèkurya’s Ethiopian war cry. It was the most warm, open playing of the night.

The world premiere of composer/performer and media artist Pamela Z’s And the Movement of the Tongue rounded out the program, and it proved to be an evocative, funny, touching, and brilliant work. Inspired by speaking accents, its twelve brief movements are each based on the interplay of composed music and recorded sound. Z describes her process in the program note:

To create the piece, I conducted and recorded interviews with a number of people who speak English with a variety of either regional, foreign language, or cultural accents. Combing through those recorded interviews, I hand-selected speech fragments (phonemes, words, phrases, and complete sentences) that I found to be sonically or musically interesting. I created hundreds of audio clips, which I used to construct the text collage that became a kind of armature for the work. Many of the motifs in the string parts were derived from the melodic and rhythmic material found in the samples of those speech fragments.

Pamela Z

Pamela Z
Photo by Donald Swearingen

The recorded material is the main focus of And the Movement of the Tongue and for the most part the string quartet plays a supporting role, which Kronos did with the perfect balance of expression and restraint. Most of the movements are based on a basic musical idea or texture, played by the quartet, that accompanies the recorded text collage. In the third movement, “Rain,” for example, pizzicato playing by the quartet mimics the irregular patter of rain drops while the text collage is a mash up of different pronunciations of the word “rain.” In “Tongue,” the fifth movement, recorded fragments of non-native English speakers talking about tongue placement in English pronunciation float on a bed of simple oscillating harmonies. In the eleventh movement, “I Don’t Know,” Pamela Z layers musical phrases—musical transcriptions of the spoken words and phrases in the text collage—over short, recurring melodic fragments. And the Movement of the Tongue is profound in a very human way. Like a great film score, the music suggests a context for the spoken words and illustrates their musicality as well. It hints at the small things, like accents, that distinguish us, and it also makes us acknowledge issues beyond our control, such as how others often choose to define us. For an encore Kronos played an arrangement of the Prelude from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Aside from the balance issues in Becker’s Carrying the Past, sound designer Scott Frasier did a nice job blending the live and recorded sounds, though I did feel that the quartet sound was a bit compressed and lacking in warmth. Laurence Neff’s lighting design was understated and beautifully coordinated with the music. Witnessing well-done stagecraft like that really makes me wonder why more groups aren’t employing it.
If this concert was about celebrating the vibrant San Francisco community of which the Kronos Quartet is a part, there was no better embodiment of this than the woman sitting behind me with her service dog. Before the concert started, one of the ushers said jokingly, “I hope your dog likes music,” to which the woman replied seriously, “Oh yes, she’s a long-time fan of Kronos.” When your hometown fans include multiple species, you know you’re doing something right.

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Dustin Soiseth is a conductor and co-founder of The Loose Filter Project. He lives in Oakland.

SFCMP Presents Sold-Out Reich Event

I’ve never seen the lobby of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as crowded as on January 28 before the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players’s concert of music by Steve Reich, built around Reich’s magnum opus Music for 18 Musicians. SFCMP had completely sold out the conservatory’s 450-seat concert hall in advance: it became one of those events where numerous people suddenly turned to Facebook the morning of the show to cast about for tickets. There was a sense of anxious jostling while trying to get into the performance hall that we don’t usually associate with new music concerts. This is the second season in SFCMP’s 42-year history that has been under the artistic direction of Steven Schick, the longtime champion of contemporary music for percussion. Given the enthusiasm surrounding this program—titled “Confirmation,” a reference to Reich’s pithy response when asked what he had gained after his 1970 trip to West Africa—it will be interesting to see what other interests Schick and SFCMP can tap into as his tenure progresses.

Steven Schick, courtesy of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

Steven Schick
Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

The repertoire was a reprise of a concert Schick had presented a year ago at University of California, San Diego (where Schick is a professor) with his new music ensemble red fish blue fish, augmented with members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Here, the core musicians were members of SFCMP, who were joined by conservatory students. The student musicians’ contribution to this effort was not insignificant: for Music for 18 Musicians, five of the percussionists, two pianists, and the four vocalists were drawn from the student body. (All told there were 21 musicians on stage.) It was an admirable example of this professional ensemble integrating its work with an educational institution to create an opportunity that would have been difficult to realize without SFCMP and Schick’s guidance.


The evening opened with the three percussionists of SFCMP—William Winant, Daniel Kennedy, and Christopher Froh, all pioneering musicians in their own right—and Schick performing Clapping Music, which began before the applause welcoming them to the stage had died down. It was performed two on a part, with Schick and Kennedy taking the base track and Winant and Froh moving out of phase. The musicians approached it with a sense of playfulness that would seem out of place with a pure process piece if it weren’t so purely enjoyable to see and hear four guys who clearly enjoyed the physicality of rhythm making sounds simultaneously simple and complex with just the skin on their hands.

Clapping Music

Steven Schick (left), Daniel Kennedy, William Winant, and Christopher Froh perform Clapping Music
Photo courtesy Neocles Serafimidis


The Conservatory Guitar Ensemble, under the direction of SFCMP guitarist and professor David Tanenbaum, followed with Electric Counterpoint, featuring conservatory alumnus Travis Andrews performing the solo part. While the piece was originally written for one musician prerecording ten guitar parts and two electric bass parts and then playing the eleventh guitar live in concert, this performance featured Andrews and the two bassists playing electric instruments with twelve members of the ensemble playing acoustic guitars. As the piece is built on a series of canons, the timbral differences between the electric and the acoustic instruments plus the spatial displacement of the electric instruments made for a disjointed listening experience where the various canonic lines (though sensitively played, especially in the second movement) failed to present in a balanced and unified way. At the top of the show, there was an announcement that the sound check had been limited due to a scheduling conflict with the hall, which may have contributed to this issue.

The hour-long Music for 18 Musicians (online score here) filled the rest of the program. I will assume that most NewMusicBox readers are familiar with this massive work, for two string players, two clarinetists, four treble voices, four pianos, three marimbas, two xylophones, and vibraphone. (Schick, on vibraphone, and SFCMP clarinetist Jeff Anderle, a Bay Area new music mainstay, took the cueing roles.) I suspect, too, that most NewMusicBox readers have already formed their own opinions about this piece since its first performance in 1976; for me, working as a production assistant on the 1997 Nonesuch recording of Music for 18 remains one of the greatest fortunes of my musical life, and I count myself among those unabashed lovers of this transcendent work that breathes and pulses like an organism.

There were some balance glitches that may have stemmed from the sound check issue noted above; in particular, the vocalists were often submerged and at points the high frequencies of the xylophones pierced aggressively through the texture. (Nevertheless, high soprano Sara Hagenbuch deserves recognition for her stamina and precision throughout.) Despite these occasional issues, SFCMP and their conservatory cohorts were able to deliver the essential delight of the piece to a hungry audience. One of the joys about experiencing Music for 18 live is being able to observe visually all of the organism’s components interacting, intertwining, handing things off to each other, shifting gears as a unit when a new entity steps into the aural picture. The most memorable moment of the evening came in the transition to Section VI, when Winant, who had been sitting to the side for some sections of the first 25 minutes of the work, stepped to center stage, raised a large set of yellow maracas, and suddenly unleashed a dance party. That was the point when I put the pen and notebook down, and started riding the waves.

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players’s next subscription concert is on Monday, February 25, at Herbst Theatre, featuring world premieres by Mark Applebaum and George Lewis, and works by Paul Dresher, Eve Beglarian, and Stuart Saunders Smith.

ZOFO Champions New Piano-Four-Hands Rep in San Francisco

On January 25, Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi, who perform together as the piano-four-hands ensemble ZOFO, gave an exciting concert of new works at Old First Church in San Francisco (where they are currently artists-in-residence). I thought that forming a piano duet was an interesting choice for two young pianists with successful solo careers, so I asked Eva-Maria Zimmermann for her perspective on what makes piano-four-hands such a compelling experience. She explained:

We often talk about piano duet as “the most intimate form of chamber music.” In “regular” chamber music, the pianist is separated from the other players due to the positioning of the piano, or through the instrument itself. In my experience playing piano quartets, I often felt that the string players had this wonderful circle of communication and that I as a pianist was an outsider—this has nothing to do with personality—it’s just how the players have to be positioned. [There’s] none of that when we play one-piano-four-hands. There’s a very direct communication going on and I feel part of a team as I never did before.

The challenges are that we share the same instrument, i.e. the same keyboard, pedal, and often bench. We have to choreograph almost every movement in order not to bump our hands (or sometimes feet) into each other. Keisuke and I love to think about the best way to move in order to bring out the character of the piece, as well as to make it look beautiful and compelling. The challenge is to move naturally although your space is limited—I sometimes think of figure skating. The slightest imprecision from one partner can destabilize the other partner’s pirouette or jump. For me the great thing of playing with Keisuke is, that—after having rehearsed intensively—I feel completely free in expression and movement in spite of all these challenges.

ZOFO

ZOFO
Photo by Max Kellenberger

Since forming in 2009, ZOFO, which is shorthand for 20-finger orchestra (ZO = 20 and FO = finger orchestra), has already debuted at Carnegie Hall, won a chamber music competition, and signed a multi-disc recording contract. Their first album, Mind Meld, was released in 2012 and received two Grammy nominations, and their second album, titled Mosh Pit, is due out later this spring. In addition to performing existing piano-four-hand repertoire and four-hand transcriptions of other works–Mind Meld featured two original works and two transcriptions, for example–they are also actively commissioning new works for piano-four-hands and this recent concert featured pieces composed especially for them by Stefan Cwik, Gabriela Lena Frank, ZOFO’s Nakagoshi, Nicholas Pavkovic, and Allen Shawn. I reached out to these composers via email before the concert to get their perspectives on composing for, and in some cases performing as part of, this ensemble.

The figure skating metaphor echoes the sentiments of composer Allen Shawn, who compared Zimmermann and Nakagoshi to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. In addition to composing for piano-four-hands Shawn has played much of the ensemble’s repertoire and shared similar thoughts regarding the unique experience of performing on an instrument normally played by oneself. “On the one hand, it is so intimate and wonderful to try to match the tone and articulation of your partner,” he noted, “and to somehow handle the pedaling, and become an ensemble. It is chamber music—but on the same instrument. On the other hand, it is a real challenge to collaborate on an instrument that you are used to playing alone. Suddenly you are playing half a piano, and you are sitting in a different place, and are physically oriented differently.”

Gabriela Lena Frank, an accomplished pianist herself, considered this different physical orientation when composing Sonata Serrana No. 1 for ZOFO. She explained that “one thing that dramatically altered the landscape was the positioning of each pianist high or low on the keyboard. Chord positions normally comfortable when you’re parked in front of middle C become very awkward when you’re to the left or right of it instead. There are also challenges in considering the lack of elbow room sitting in such close proximity to another person–you can’t just take all the space you’d like to getting a running jump on things anymore. And then there’s overall balance of registers–duos quickly sound like solos if you have one person sit out for too long. Yet, having both pianists play all the time usually means all of the registers are being employed which can lend a tiresome sameness to the sound.” Whether it was considering the implications of reduced elbow room or making the switch from composing at the piano to composing for piano, all of the composers talked about making these types of adjustments.

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The concert opened with a work by a composer who is undoubtably very familiar with the piano-four-hands medium, ZOFO’s own Keisuke Nakagoshi. His Synæsthesia is a beautiful, evocative work inspired by the synæesthethc abilities of Messiaen and Scriabin, and the presence of both composers is strongly felt. It begins with a quasi-mystical atmosphere—the harmonic language here is reminiscent of Scriabin’s late piano sonatas—with repeated chant-like notes in the middle register alternating with bird call flourishes at the top of the keyboard. After an early climax with huge Messiaen-like stacked sonorities, a consistent pulse emerges while melodic fragments coalesce into an eerie melody. It ends softly with ascending scale figures and a return of the chant-like tones.

In most respects these were the most extraordinary sounds and pianistic textures of the evening, and they were executed brilliantly. Nakagoshi spread his music across the keyboard. Melodic fragments were often enveloped by sustained tones or flourished but were never covered or muddled. Even the most orchestral textures were perfectly balanced. This level of virtuosic playing that was also supple and intimate—every texture clear and focused, every important musical idea projected—continued throughout the evening.

Next on the program was Allen Shawn’s Fantasy. Cast in a broad ternary form, the outer sections are by turns dark, wistful, and poignant while the contrasting middle section is more rhythmic, with macabre march-like figures and a hint of menacing dance band cacophony. Shawn wrote that his music has become “darker more of the time, more introspective” over the years and Fantasy definitely feels weighed down by struggle or stress. The work is unified by two nostalgic melodies—Shawn described them as “somewhat 19th century–echoes of Schumann or Mahler, perhaps” that reoccur in different contexts throughout the work, and the piece’s impact was due in large part to the different emotional landscapes that result, always clearly emphasized by ZOFO’s balanced and expressive playing. When heard against dissonant harmonic backdrops, the melodic fragments stood out like bewildered children surrounded by chaos and destruction.

Like Shawn, composer Stefan Cwik also used a melodic idea to unify his piece Acrobats, a short, action-packed work consisting of a theme and five variations. As a composer who normally composes at the piano, often using two grand staves, Cwik noted that he took care in making sure he was composing specifically for piano-four-hands. “If the piece was a set of etudes that explored techniques and textures that are only capable with four hands,” he pointed out, “then I would be forced to explore all of the possibilities of four-hand writing.” Explore them he does, and Acrobats is a showcase of what two people can accomplish on the same keyboard–including two changes of position and some plucking under the lid–but it is also a bit disjointed. The seams clearly show despite all the movements being played attaca. The most compelling sections were the second variation where great peals of sound mimic the overtones of large church bells, and the fifth variation where Zimmermann and Nakagoshi trade fleet figures back and forth as if playing tag on the keyboard. Despite its structural shortcomings, it was virtuosic and exciting.

Marantz Vorsetzer

Marantz Pianocorder Vorsetzer, the machine for which Chimera was originally composed.

After the break came Nicholas Pavkovic’s Chimera, originally written for performance on piano by the Marantz Pianocorder Vorsetzer, a device that turns any piano into a player piano. After hearing the original work, titled Contraption No. 1, Nakagoshi commissioned an arrangement for piano-four-hands. “Of course there was no notation at that point,” Pavkovic wrote, “and since I had simply flung notes around with abandon when creating the piece, it sounded rather fiercely unplayable. But I did manage to tame it into a format that 20 fingers could manage.” Pavkovic was inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis, in which a young woman’s struggle for class equality is undermined by her robot doppelganger. His program note explained that “Chimera is a kind of dialog between rational and irrational elements, fused by common musical material. A lyrical line is cloaked and interrupted by a second, insistent voice of mechanical wildness, a fugue state, a tangle of terrifying, uncontrollable associations and compulsions.”

Many composers who have written for mechanized keyboards have used them to compose complex music beyond the technical limits of humans—many of Nancarrow’s player piano works, or much of Zappa’s Jazz from Hell, for example—but by emphasizing the lyrical, Pavkovic takes a slightly different approach. The work, though difficult, was also intensely rhapsodic. Chimera proceeds in fits and starts with fiendish figures followed by more plangent lyrical melodic fragments—the rational voice lamenting the irrational one. Though certain moments were exciting, like in the middle of the work where repeated figures in the middle of the keyboard were paired with virtuosic melodic fragments and flourishes in the upper register, Chimera seemed too episodic; a series of musical ideas and gestures that almost, but don’t quite, form a convincing whole.

The final piece of the evening was also ZOFO’s first commission, Gabriela Lena Frank’s Sonata Serrana No. 1. It is a brash, vivacious work bursting with rhythmic vitality, and Zimmermann and Nakagoshi tore into it with obvious relish. The first movement, “Allegro Solar,” opens with a big, full-throated theme followed by delicate, scampering material and a rousing close (the loudest ending of the piece, actually). The second movement, “Scherzo Nocturno,” has roiling textures and dense harmonies that evaporate away in a wonderfully quiet, open-ended finish. “Adagio para el Anochecer (Adagio for Dusk)” built quickly to passionate outbursts and just as quickly subsided and closed with searching, repeated notes, like a parent wandering the neighborhood calling for a wayward child at dinnertime.

Preconcert Talk

Preconcert talk (l to r) Keisuke Nakagoshi, Gabriela Lena Frank, Nicholas Pavkovic, Stefan Cwik, and moderator Charlton Lee.

Speaking before the performance, Frank talked about being inspired by Bartók’s “gradations” when using folk material, meaning he sometimes used it in a more abstract sense and other times presented it front and center with little alteration. While Sonata Serrana No. 1 as a whole is influenced by musical elements from Frank’s Peruvian heritage, the final movement, “Karnavalito (Festive Song in the Quechua Indian style),” is the most overtly folkloric–raucous and dance-like with tremendous energy. It had the entire audience moving. After a bluesy call-and-response section between the two pianists, Frank sets up a final push to the end featuring rapid-fire chuta notes—the repeated notes heard in panpipe music—before ending in a wisp of smoke, like a carnival that packs up and steals away in the middle of the night.

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If up to this point I haven’t singled out the playing of Zimmermann and Nakagoshi all that much it’s because their performance was so assured, so confident. Their movements were so elegant and without ostentatious showmanship that they, as individual musicians, receded into the background. This was especially pronounced in Nakagoshi and Frank’s pieces, and I was reminded of a quote by the 17th-century Chinese painter Lu Ch’ai, which is one of my favorites: “The end of all method is to seem to have no method.” In their best moments, ZOFO simply disappeared into the music.

During the pre-concert talk Gabriela Lena Frank said that piano-four-hands was an “underdog” ensemble and she especially liked composing for ZOFO for that reason. A unique instrumentation hasn’t stopped other new music ensembles from creating repertoires for themselves, and ZOFO seems to be on that path, too. With outstanding musicians like Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi championing piano-four-hands, perhaps more composers will be encouraged to take up the cause.

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Dustin Soiseth is a conductor and co-founder of the Loose Filter Project. He lives in Oakland.

eighth blackbird: Shifted During Flight

eighth blackbird, photo by Luke Ratray

eighth blackbird, photo by Luke Ratray

“I didn’t expect it to be so charming…”
The ensemble eighth blackbird has set up shop in Austin for ten days populated with concerts, masterclasses, and lessons. I heard the above quote in the foyer during the intermission of the first of two concerts scheduled during their residency with Texas Performing Arts, and I’m inclined to agree with the sentiment. The group has always been more bon vivant than enfant terrible, their collective personality more welcoming than foreboding. I’m pretty sure everybody is smiling in their press photo. Having said that, not all audience members attending these shows know exactly what to expect. “New Music” can still shiver a few timbers among concertgoers, and when they see a program full of unfamiliar composers, some will look for the exit doors. Of course, eighth blackbird put any concerns to rest with their spot-on performances and engaging personalities.

The concert opened with Nico Muhly’s Doublespeak. Written in honor of Philip Glass’s 75th birthday, Muhly managed to pay homage to the man without aping his greatest hits. The work opened with repetitive germs played by violinist Yvonne Lam which grew bit by bit as the other players joined in, but just as the material began to gel, the work slammed to a halt, sputtered for a moment, and came back to life, this time with Nicholas Photinos leading the charge on cello. Muhly drew deeply from Glass’s harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary; driving rhythms filled out with simple harmonies drove the piece forward until about a quarter of the way in where Muhly injected a bit of chromaticism that seemed for a moment to draw the piece in a different direction. Soon the original texture returned, revealing something of a modified rondo. The sections bounced back and forth until the final moments of the piece, when Photinos and percussionist Matthew Duvall picked out syncopated hits together, the last hit ending the piece.

Flanked by Photinos and clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri as narrators, Lam performed Knee Play II from Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. These bookend entr’acte sections were used to facilitate set changes and to begin and end Einstein, and the presentation here of Knee Play II apart from the full opera allowed for focus on an otherwise somewhat utilitarian work. I have to say that I was surprised at the level of tension created by watching Lam perform the simple scales and arpeggios (played expertly and super quick folks, no doubt) that constituted the piece. Obviously it wasn’t an easy work, but seeing her chug away while Photinos and Maccaferri read—or chanted…or chanted slightly creepily—in monotone stereo certainly added to the tension. Will she miss? Will the narrative distract her from her duties? Of course, Lam didn’t miss a thing and Photinos and Maccaferri complemented her playing quite well.

The tension of Knee Play II was dissipated in short order by Tom Johnson’s Counting Duets. Described by Lisa Kaplan as “Sesame Street on crack,” the work was performed by Maccaferri and flutist Tim Munro in another duet, this one involving numbers spoken. While the cheeky introduction was endearing, it was the piece itself that hooked the audience, many of whom (present company included) were laughing out loud by the time the work ended. The four movements involved Maccaferri and Munro counting, hocketing, whispering, and yelling simple number sequences to/at each other while they constantly changed their physical position on stage relative to one another. I could talk about the simple additive processes (though written in 1982, similar at a DNA level to the final movement of David Lang’s So Called Laws of Nature) but at the risk of assuming composer intention here, I think that’s missing the point. The piece engaged the audience by laying bare the processes that drove it, giving them an opportunity to figure out each short puzzle as it played out. This, coupled with the visual impact of the tall and lanky Munro and the less tall Maccaferri rapidly yelling numbers back and forth at one another, made for one of the most engaging moments of the night: when both performers walked off stage and the lights were dimmed, seeming to indicate the end of the piece. As the audience began to enthusiastically applaud, Munro (now slightly horse from yelling) began the final sequence from stage right as Maccaferri responded from stage left. Everyone quieted down until they finished and returned to the stage to some of the loudest applause of the night. My wife and I are expecting a baby in a few months, and about halfway through the piece she grabbed my notebook and wrote what you see in the image below:
Sigler Baby Likes Sesame Street
So there you go. Everybody liked it.

In sharp contrast to the lightness of the Johnson, Aaron Jay Kernis’s Pieces of Winter Sky saw the return of the entire ensemble to the stage for this longer, more somber work. The third of four commissions of the night, the Kernis began with Kaplan and Duvall bowing inside the piano with loose bow strings, the thin, ethereal, overtone-laden pitches joined by harmonics in the other instruments. Short bird-song melodies were traded among the players, only to fade into nothingness before fully forming. A violin solo was accompanied by the bowing and scraping of cymbals by all five other members as the ghost of Winterreise passed through the room. Derek Bermel’s Tied Shifts is one of eighth blackbird’s chestnuts, and it was treat to watch and hear. A study in Bulgarian rhythms and careful choreography, the ante was upped in the visual impact department as the blackbirds moved about the stage. Arrangements of two of Ligeti’s mid-’80s piano etudes followed, including No. 4, Fanfares, which recalled the moto perpetuo intensity of the Glass, now spread across the ensemble. Finally, Andy Akiho’s erase, the commissioned work resulting from the ensemble’s 2011 composition competition rounded out the program. A tour de force, the piece careened through tutti roller coasters, glissando workouts in the piano and on the vibes, and noir-through-a-kaleidoscope excursions complete with Maccaferri conjuring with his bass clarinet. The piece shattered to a close with Duvall doing a bit of John Bonham to take us home.

I expected to see a fantastic show and was not disappointed, but what struck me most was how well integrated the whole program was. The Muhly lead to the Glass both musically and in terms of the relationship between the composers, and the blackbirds indicated that without making a big deal out of it. The Glass lead to the Johnson, the trio now a duet, and the symmetry inherent in the structure of the works linked them while their characters contrasted. Even across the bridge of intermission, connections were made such that the concert was more like a large piece itself, a reminder of what it was like when we bought albums (records, tapes, CDs, whatever) that were shaped not just by their content but by their ordering. It’s attention to these factors that give eighth blackbird their edge, and I’m certainly looking forward to their next show.

New England’s Prospect: Object Oriented

Compound Wave Siren

Karl Rudolf Koenig’s Compound Wave-Siren, used to investigate beat- and difference-tones? (From Silvanius P. Thompson, The Physical Foundation of Music, 1890)

Music which does not paint is nothing but noise.

—Jean d’Alembert

True absolute music, however, stands precisely in opposition to form. It has the God-given attribute of floating on air and being free of all material conditions.

—Ferruccio Busoni

They’re both wrong, of course. Even putting aside the new musicology staple that all music is programmatic in that it portrays the societal and political hierarchy out of which it emerges, there’s the whole complication of sound, which is both noise and part of the material world. Then again, we’re largely past the whole absolute/programmatic debate that so consumed the classical music world of a century ago. We can bat around the terms, but we don’t use them as critical or even moral cudgels anymore.

But that doesn’t mean the terms are null and void. One of the passing revelations of the Callithumpian Consort‘s concert in Jordan Hall on Saturday, January 26, was that exactly where along the absolute/programmatic continuum a piece is situated can, in fact, make or break the piece. It was two pieces on the concert in particular; and they were similar in certain ways: both deliberately limited in their sound world, both formally simple, both situated somewhere beyond the usual musical discourse of melody and accompaniment, tension and release. And yet I thought one piece marvelous, while the other, for me anyway, didn’t work at all. That very probably is as much about me as a listener as it is about the pieces themselves. But it all had to do with sound: it turns out that, in music that might plausibly be loosely gathered under the umbrella of post-serial experimentalism, music that deliberately wanders the no man’s land between musical sound and noise, the relationship between programmatic intent and sonic (and aesthetic) effect is actually pretty tricky.

* * *

The sound of tress/burl, a sextet by Marek Poliks, is, basically, harsh. A string trio (violinist Gabriela Diaz, violist Ethan Wood, and cellist Benjamin Schwartz) lets loose with bursts of forcefully edgy sounds: grinding double- and triple-stops, high whines, all heavily bowed near the bridge. They go on for a while—the stanzas never quite the same, but made up of the same elements—except for a sudden grand pause in the middle of their course. The entire thing (grand pause included) is then recapitulated, but translated into a different trio: piccolo (Jesse Rozinski), contrabass clarinet (Alexis Lanz), and piano (Elaine Rombola).
This was the second time I had heard the piece. At last summer’s SICPP Iditarod, tress/burl had seemed to me both intriguingly obsessive and, perhaps, too long—a contradictory impression, the more I think about it. In the context of this concert, though, even the intrigue was absent. I often enjoy purposefully harsh sounds, but it was almost as if the sounds weren’t harsh enough, or maybe not interesting enough in their harshness: I didn’t feel any invitation to consider what it is that makes a sound harsh or extreme, or any sense that these were even to be considered as sounds, in time, in a physical space.
Poliks writes this:

tress/burl was conceived negatively (anti-god, anti-sexism, anti-populism, anti-modern), but it ossified into something constructive (the paranoia and weakness of normative masculinity, aimlessly romanticizing itself in the face of its own obsolescence).

That’s a mouthful, and more than a little bit of jargon, but I respect the effort. There are a lot of pieces—including a lot of my favorites—that might be said to encompass some sense of romanticizing an obsolescent masculinity. One could plausibly argue that Ravel’s La Valse has something of that, or certain of Shostakovich’s more nominally propaganda-driven symphonies. One could argue that Richard Wagner was never not writing about the romanticization of an obsolescent masculinity.
But the program here was a barrier. Why? It comes back to the sound—an idea crystallized by another piece on the program.

* * *

Alvin Lucier wrote Braid for the Callithumpian Consort in 2012. The process is in the foreground: a string quartet (violinists Diamanda La Berge Dramm and Ryan Shannon, violist Danielle Rebecca Wiebe, and cellist Hsaio-Hsuan Sharen Chang) spend the entire piece winding through overlapping slow glissandi—the “braid” of the title. Against it, flute, clarinet, and English horn (Rosinski and Lanz joined by Elizabeth England) play sustained chords, designed to dovetail with the glissandi and then produce beating effects as the strings slide away.

Braid is one of the most ingeniously perfect pieces I’ve heard in a while. It strikes an exact balance between consistency and variety: the strings are constantly in motion, the winds never play the same harmony twice, but the meshing of the two always comes back to those same beating effects. The sound is completely mutable; the intent is completely uniform.

But why did Braid work so well for me, when tress/burl didn’t? In a way, they’re similarly extreme, hermetic, even obstinate. But the pieces fall on crucially distinct points on the absolute/programmatic continuum. Braid, for all its abstract quality, has a program, too, but it’s a program about sound, about illustrating something about the nature of physical sound in a musical context. Doesn’t all music do this though? Well, no—a lot of music takes the nature of physical sound for granted, or at least allows the listener to take it for granted, because the intent is something lurking a few interpretive layers removed from the sound itself: something about the theoretical grammar, something about the drama or theatricality of performance, or (the most traditional programmatic intent) something literary or otherwise extra-musical. This is why the experimental tradition that Lucier—and Poliks—are working in can be considered something distinct.

It would be a cliché to say that Lucier loves sound, and communicates that in his music. I realized that what’s really going on is this: the program/agenda/intent (choose your favorite term) behind Braid is one that reinforces compositional decisions that make what Lucier appreciates about the sounds what the listener appreciates as well—whereas the program behind tress/burl reinforces decisions that work against that. In fact, everything I didn’t like about tress/burl—the lack of sonic variety, the distancing nature of the sound itself, the didactic lack of formal surprise—could be justified as part of the program, an illustration of the brutalization of that romanticized masculinity. (Though I would consider that an incomplete illustration: if you don’t acknowledge the seductive nature of such romanticizations, you fail to completely understand them.) If a piece’s program is actually making the piece less effective as a sonic object, does that invalidate the program? Not necessarily. But when it’s being applied to a style where the nature of the sound is so central to the effect of the piece, it certainly doesn’t help.

* * *

The rest of the concert dealt with such concerns in a more glancing, implicit way. Edmund Caballero’s What is time, please? Convergences III, a world premiere, started off in a conceptually limited way: pianist Yukiko Takagi reiterating a fundamental pitch in all octaves and articulations while Caballero overlaid the notes with metallically reverberant electronic processing. After a few minutes, however, the piano part suddenly lets in handfuls of glassy, higher overtones, and the piece picks up significant steam, eventually turning into a computer-amplified evocation of the not inconsiderable glee of holding the sustain pedal down and keeping as many of the piano’s strings in play as possible: almost drowning in the instrument.

The finale was a classic, John Cage’s 1950 String Quartet in Four Parts, given a dazzlingly contemplative reading by Diaz, Wood, Schwartz, and violist Karina Fox. Here, the program (the four seasons as interpreted in Indian philosophy) and the process (mostly tonal harmonies rendered non-functional through random ordering) don’t so much mesh as provide a source and a medium for replication, a meditation on sounds that functions as a kind of stand-in for a meditation on nature. The opener was, on the surface, a complete contrast: Earle Brown’s 1965 String Quartet, performed by Diaz, Wodd Schwartz, and violist Mary Ferrillo, a rerun from last week’s Earle Brown Symposium. The form was rationally symmetrical, the sounds very much those of mid-century atonal modernism (though with twists here and there, as when, at the very center of the structure, a dissonant drone slides into the open strings of the instruments). What’s interesting about the Quartet is the way it both borrows something of the technique of film montage but flips it on its head: as the music switches between its textural modules, it’s the edits themselves that become the focus of attention, the point where the shots join taking on more importance than the shots themselves. It was diverting compositional aikido: musical decisions that make the decisions themselves the musical experience.

Two Concerts, Two Audiences

It’s always a good thing to have a trip correspond with some good new music concerts, and my week-long adventure to northern Illinois this past week allowed me to take Ellen McSweeney’s advice and attend two concerts in Chicago. Both events–the Chicago Composers Orchestra concert at the Garfield Park Conservatory and the Third Coast Percussion concert at the University of Chicago–were very successful and demonstrated why new music concerts can be diverse in content, in venue, and in audience to great effect.
Amidst Lush Plantlife
The Chicago Composers Orchestra is a relatively new group in Chicago, having been formed in 2009 by Roosevelt University grads Brian Baxter and Randall West, with a mission for “performance and advocacy of orchestral music by living composers.” The event was entitled “Amidst Lush Plantlife,” reflecting their decision to perform at the Garfield Park Conservatory, a two-acre botanical conservatory with several large rooms filled with many species of trees, ferns, and assorted flora. The entire concert spanned no less than three separate rooms, starting off with Occupy Orchestra by Seattle-based Byron Au Yong. Yong spread the musicians around the enormous Palm Room and allowed the audience to move freely through the space, casually chatting while the performance took place. It was hard to miss how many families were in attendance during this first portion, as there were many small children with their parents eagerly walking up to each performer and listening with open ears.

Once the first work was finished, the audience was shepherded into the Fern Room where Baxter’s Spring Song for strings and percussion was performed; also spatial in nature, the room was the complete opposite of the first–whereas the big room allowed one to walk up to the performers easily, the Fern Room shielded the performers altogether from my vantage point and made for a completely different listening experience. The remainder of the concert was held in a slightly more traditional setting, with the Horticulture Room set up with folding chairs both for the performers and audience. Works by Chris Fisher-Lockhead, Bruce Saylor, and the world premiere of Pos Metaphonos by Lawrence Axelrod (which featured Chicago Symphony bass clarinetist J. Laurie Bloom) filled out the rest of the program.

Three things stood out for me at this event. Obviously the venue is about as non-traditional as you can get–sight-lines are rarely marred by cacti or cycads in other halls–and once you got used to the slight ambient hum and the occasional choir of crickets, acoustically it was actually quite good. The ensemble itself, consisting of Chicago performers primarily in their mid- to late-20s who volunteer their services (ably led by guest conductor Stephen Squires, filling in for music director Matthew Kasper), played every work with an intensity and passion that proved their serious commitment to the music. Finally, the size and makeup of the audience really caught me off guard; here you had a concert of contemporary works for chamber orchestra by not-famous composers and there were over 250 people in attendance on a Wednesday night. There were obviously a good number of other composers and musicians there, but they were outnumbered by families with kids and other community members who seemed to really enjoy themselves. There were several details that showed that CCO was being smart in generating and keeping a good audience, including serving beverages and forgoing a ticket price as well as cultivating a strong relationship with the conservatory.
Third Coast Percussion
Two days later I had the good fortune to attend Third Coast Percussion’s concert in the International House at the University of Chicago. Since their formation in 2005, Third Coast has become one of the most well-known percussion ensembles in the country. The concert, simply titled “Metal,” covered four works written for a wide variety of metal instruments by established composers from across the spectrum of percussion ensemble literature. Utilizing two additional percussionists (Ross Karre and Greg Beyer), Third Coast took the audience through a thoughtful and well-balanced program, from John Cage’s First Construction (in Metal) and David Skidmore’s mind-blowing performance of David Lang’s The Anvil Chorus to James Tenney’s Koan: Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (my favorite performance of the evening) and Philippe Manoury’s massive Métal. Groups like Third Coast demonstrate why the percussion ensemble has become one of the staple instrumentations of contemporary music today.

The venue, compared to the CCO’s conservatory digs, was much more traditional in nature, though both groups utilized the spatial opportunities of their venues well–Third Coast’s performers began on stage and surrounded the audience by the third piece. As much as alternative venues have been celebrated over the past few years, one could not imagine this concert being as effective in a space that wasn’t as quiet and acoustically solid as the International House; the subtle interactions of timbres and harmonics in the Tenney would have been completely lost in a space with more ambient noise. The audience for this concert differed in several ways from the one at the conservatory. In general, they seemed to be relatively older and more formal than at the CCO concert; let’s say the number of bearded academics with horn-rimmed glasses had gone up considerably for this event. That being said, the size of the audience was practically the same and they were equally supportive in their ovations throughout the evening. This was not an event that audience members stormed out of, rather they seemed to either know what they were getting themselves into or were open enough to enjoy whatever was presented to them.

As there has been a fair amount of vitriol recently about the worth of one composer or another from within our own ranks, it was heartening to see two dramatically different and yet completely viable and successful concert events that were both celebrating contemporary concert music…especially in a city with a relatively young and emerging contemporary concert music scene. Both concerts had taken care of business as far as cultivating audiences, promoting their concerts, and making sure that the listeners were both involved and invited into the music-making process. The result of that hard work was an audience that was form-fitted for the occasion and ultimately a successful evening of music for all involved. This is not rocket science, as they say, and the more we focus on what is important and ignore the petty distractions of the here and now, the better.

ensemble dal niente: Hard Music Hard Liquor

As the performers stepped onstage for the seventh of nine pieces on ensemble dal niente’s Hard Music Hard Liquor program Friday night, I whispered to my husband: “This is going to be a really hard concert to write about.” By the end of an evening this aesthetically diverse, your head is spinning a little.

The show was called Hard Music Hard Liquor–a boozy celebration of new music virtuosity–but the challenges that it posed went beyond the realm of technique. Many of the pieces asserted strong and provocative ideas about the dynamic between composer, performer, and audience. These pieces asked us to consider important questions such as: How far can a composer push a player? Can a composer continue to assert himself in the performance of a piece, long after he’s handed over the score? What role do we play as observers, and how do our previous listening experiences affect the we hear these new works?

In Ray Evanoff’s Negotiating the Absolute Location of Buoyancy, we heard growls, groans, and whimpers–an arresting, ultra-subdued mad scene for solo French horn, spoken like a captive struggling to speak through a gag. In this case, the gag was the horn. At times I felt Matt Oliphant was locked in mortal combat with his instrument. Given the horn’s notorious difficulty, this piece sets the audience on edge, with Evanoff challenging us to hear music in the guttural, unpredictable sound palette that can sometimes characterize “mistakes.”

Stefan Prins’s Piano Hero #1, for midi-keyboard, video, and live electronics, performed by Mabel Kwan

Stefan Prins’s Piano Hero #1, for midi-keyboard, video, and live electronics, performed by Mabel Kwan. Photo by Ryan Muncy

Stefan Prins’s Piano Hero #1, for midi-keyboard, video, and live electronics, also opens in a way that terrifies the listener. The video–a man dragging pieces of wood and metal across a piano frame–seemed to be skipping and malfunctioning. But as it turns out, the “scratched DVD” sensation is one of the most important elements of Piano Hero’s sonic assault. The piece contains a particularly unsettling moment in which the live camera fixes on pianist Mabel Kwan–so we finally focus on her, rather than the man in the pre-recorded video–but as she continues to play, the keyboard makes no sound. Before our eyes, the performer is silenced by the composer and the system he created. (Indeed, Prins’s website describes the pianist in this piece as “a mere operator in a world of bits and bytes.”) But if the piece was a battle between the performer and the composed system, it appeared that Mabel Kwan eventually won, silencing the muscular video man with a long “game over” buzz while he continued to flicker powerlessly.

Chris Fisher-Lochhead’s Shredhaus is endearingly titled, given its tiny, lean-forward-to-catch-every-moment sound world. I was reminded of an electric guitarist practicing without an amp as I watched Jesse Langen “shred” on his acoustic without the help of his right hand. In the piece’s amazing (anti)climax, Langen’s left hand climbed closer and closer to the guitar’s pegs–the opposite direction of typical guitar heroes. The piece felt like a rock guitar solo turned delightfully inside out.

How far is Ferneyhough from Schubert? In Lemma — Icon — Epigram, Winston Choi played with an elegance and panache that made me feel that they’re closer than ever. How do we reconceive the virtuoso violin showpiece in the 21st century? Austin Wulliman presented the instrument’s brilliant colors and hard edges in Lee Hyla’s Passegiata.

Malin Bang’s Turbid Motion, performed by ensemble dal niente. Photo by Ryan Muncy

Malin Bang’s Turbid Motion, performed by ensemble dal niente. Photo by Ryan Muncy

After more than an hour of solo (and one duo) performance, it was a joy and a relief to see nine members of the ensemble gather onstage together for Malin Bang’s amazingly textured Turbid Motion and Fisher-Lochhead’s fantastic, zany arrangement of Frank Zappa’s The Duke of Prunes. Watching the ensemble interact with each other–smiling, cuing, provoking–was a stark contrast from watching them engage in lonely battles with ultra-challenging scores. It was a testament, I think, to the huge difference between what a solo piece can convey and what music scored for an ensemble can deliver. After a night of intense soliloquy, the evening ended with the sounds of a party.

John Luther Adams and Glenn Kotche go on Spirit Journeys with Ilimaq

Glenn Kotche and John Luther Adams’s collaborative relationship took root several years ago in Alaska. While on tour with the rock band Wilco,[1] Kotche rang up Adams and suggested dinner, and this initial meeting lead to a friendship as well as a collaboration on Adams’s newest work, Ilimaq. Though Kotche is best known for the Wilco gig, he is no stranger to the world of new music. He has collaborated with eighth blackbird and has been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and So Percussion among others. On the other side, Adams has a rock band background as well, so the two already had a great deal in common before that first dinner.

John Luther Adams (left) and Glenn Kotche

John Luther Adams (left) and Glenn Kotche

In true rock and roll fashion, the headliner [2] required an opening act, and On Fillmore, featuring Kotche on percussion and Darin Gray on bass, played just that role. Dovetailing with the pre-concert audience patter, bells began to peal at irregular intervals through antiphonally positioned speakers in the McCullough Theater on the campus of UT Austin. Also in keeping with rock and roll tradition, it was really loud and served eventually to transition most of the crowd from their how-do-you-do’s into full concert mode. Any stragglers were wrangled into place by bassist Darin Gray’s entrance. Looking a bit like a cross between a Stop Making Sense-era David Byrne and Tom Waits at his most junk-kit gravelly, Gray walked from the side of the room across (and above) the audience’s chairs armed with a variety of noise makers. Gray’s duck calls, whistles, clappers, and static generators (the last of these likely one of the wind gadgets overblown like crazy, making me occasionally yearn for the quiet peace of the antiphonal bells which were actually drowned out once or twice…) had an organic, natural quality and acted as an appropriate precedent to the Adams. Gray eventually made his way to the stage to join Kotche in a series of tunes peppered with reverb and other effects. Listening to two seasoned veterans lock together is always a thing of beauty, and Gray and Kotche delivered the goods; largely simple grooves and bass lines that took the listener from rock show to slightly surreal art presentation and back again. The latter description was delivered via the occasional noisemaker and the use of orchestral percussion (glockenspiel and crotales in particular) which, when used along with the insistent bass lines, obligated me to make the note, “Tom Waits Christmas” with a big smile next to it. It was fun, well played, and a great warm up for the Adams.

The second half of the concert was dedicated to the 45-minute Texas Performing Arts commission Ilimaq. The three-movement work was divided into three instrumental groupings on the stage: bass drum, cymbals/gongs, and drum kit. The first movement was in essence an extended bass drum roll, but eventually moved listeners away from the individual sound events and immersed them in a larger texture removed from time. Starting at a modest volume, the roll began to echo through the speakers placed around the hall. Kotche accelerated, decelerated, crescendoed, and decrescendoed throughout, but these small-scale changes were less important than the overall effect, which was that of a hypnotic thrumming. Despite the fact that I was listening to someone beat the hell out of a bass drum, I honestly felt like I could fall asleep in the middle of the whole thing. This was not out of boredom, however; I think that Adams was actually able to tap into the whole shaman/hypnotic thing and it was really quite effective. Adams creates the sense of “really big space” (and McCullough is not particularly expansive) in many of his works, and the opening movement of Ilimaq is no exception.

In the second movement, Kotche moved to a set of cymbals and gongs. Slow rolls played on crash cymbals were barely perceptible and came across like small waves crashing. The use of soft mallets made for little or no attack, and presented a great contrast to the visceral and constant attacks of the roll(s) in the first movement. Adams talks about creating an “aura” for the piece, an electronic background texture which reads/sounds like a bit like an ambient synth bed over which the percussion rides. This aura swirled around us through the speaker system, at times coming to the fore, but for the most part playing second fiddle to the percussion. This “all rounded with no edges/attacks” quality took a turn as the piece progressed, and more aggressive rolls resulted in the bite of the cymbal becoming all edge. This section was brief, however, and with a strike on the bell of the cymbal the movement ended.

The final movement saw Kotche move to a large drum kit positioned in the center of the stage. Armed with eight toms, eight cymbals, and two kick drums, Kotche seemed poised to play any number of epic rock drum solos, and Adams finale didn’t land far from that mark. Huge rolls, this time more akin to rock drum fills played across the kit, were punctuated with cymbal hits. Patterns of increasing and decreasing rhythmic values gave shape to the phrases, but any evaluation of the finer points and proportions is probably missing the point. This was about energy, movement, and frankly, sheer power, and Kotche gave it everything he had. I don’t think I heard a single individual who didn’t have something to say about the endurance required to play either of the outer movements, much less both of them. As the lightning and the thunder subsided, the bowing of a small gong signaled the end of the work.

Adams was in town for several days and spoke at two or three locations on campus about the work and the collaboration that took place. In one of these talks he spoke about writing music that embodies the out-of-doors as well as writing music that actually requires performance outside; music that should not be played indoors at all. Ilimaq could well be a harbinger of things to come, and not for the volume level alone. The hypnotic repetitiveness of the first movement, the introspective quality of the second, and the visceral, athletic elements of the third all begged to be let loose, to be performed and experienced in a venue as big as the music, and Adams’s great outdoors would be the perfect place for the next rendition of this work.


1. I know I’m getting old when instead of saying “Wilco” I say “The Rock Band Wilco”


2. Well, Kotche was the headliner but since this concert revolved around Ilimaq, I’m going with the piece as the headliner.

BluePrint and Mobius Trio Demo SF Conservatory Talent

Nicole Paiement

Nicole Paiement, founder and artistic director of the BluePrint new music concert series
Photo by Matthew Washburn/SF Conservatory of Music

Ten years ago, conductor Nicole Paiement started a concert series based at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music called BluePrint, a new music “project” specifically devoted to performances of contemporary music. The series’ performers are drawn from both the student body and the faculty of the conservatory, while the selection of composers is not limited by the boundaries of the school’s campus. BluePrint’s current three-concert season focuses attention on composers with roots in Latin America, though many of them (including Osvaldo Golijov, Carlos Sánchez Gutiérrez, and Roberto Sierra) currently live in the United States.

The November 17 concert at the conservatory’s Concert Hall featured four works by established composers (rather than students) for chamber ensembles and chamber orchestra. Paiement led the school’s New Music Ensemble in a performance of Gabriela Lena Frank’s Manchay Tiempo, for strings, piano, harp, timpani, and four percussionists, with her trademark crystal-clear conducting style; even viewed from the audience her beat patterns were easily readable throughout this complex, mixed-meter work. Frank, who is a Bay Area native of mixed ancestry which includes a strong Peruvian influence, translates the Spanish/Quechua title as “Time of Fear,” and relates it to childhood nighttime dreams about her mother being in danger. This evocative 13-minute piece begins with the rumbling of distant thunder and, with the entrances of solo strings playing harmonics and a sweep of the harp, Frank quickly establishes a mysterious and ominous place. The work is frequently unsettling, with aggressive wood slaps punctuating the music, and small germs that expand through dramatic crescendos into intense, driving rhythmic material. The work returns to the sound of distant thunder at the end, and closes with a lone solo viola voice gently breathing a slowly oscillating major third.

Also under Paiement’s baton, a student chamber ensemble and mezzo-soprano Kelly Newberry were given the opportunity to perform the premiere of an expanded and reorchestrated version of Chris Pratorius’s Madrigal: Neruda’s Poema XX, a work that he has returned to several times over the years. Pratorius, also based in the Bay Area, is half Guatemalan and a native Spanish speaker. His affection for Pablo Neruda’s famous Poema XX, from his Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty love poems and a song of despair), is evident from his careful text setting as well as his English translation, which was provided in the program. The narrator of the poem speaks longingly of a woman loved and lost, and counter to expectation Pratorius scores the work for mezzo-soprano, with a chamber ensemble of flute, bassoon, violin, viola, bass, harp, and percussion. Pratorius’s setting allowed for clear delivery of this passionate text throughout, at times alternating vocal statements with instrumental interludes, and scoring appropriately according to the singer’s range. Inspired by Monteverdi’s madrigals, Pratorius fills the work with moments of word painting, letting the bassoon quietly deliver a melody as the poet speaks of someone singing far away, and placing the harp in the high register when the narrator mourns his loss under starry skies. The work is framed at the beginning and end by low strings and harp, quietly laying the ground for a work steeped in memory and loss.

The BluePrint series is an excellent ongoing opportunity for students of the conservatory, at both the undergraduate and graduate level, to perform contemporary repertoire, sometimes independent of Paiement, and occasionally alongside faculty as fellow performers. A student woodwind quintet presented the oldest work on the program, Mario Lavista’s Cinco Danzas Breves from 1994 (though a recent recording of the work by the Bay Area woodwind quintet Quinteto Latino perhaps better revealed the dance-like qualities of Lavista’s self-described divertimenti). David Tanenbaum, the well-known advocate of contemporary guitar music who is also chair of the guitar department at the school, joined a student string quartet for Jorge Liderman’s fiendishly challenging Aged Tunes. The late Argentinean Liderman, who taught in the Bay Area at University of California, Berkeley, originally wrote Aged Tunes for Tanenbaum and Cuarteto Latinoamericano. The student quartet gave a solid performance, though one marred by some technical issues, but it was Tanenbaum who brought out the rhythmic clarity, singing lyricism, and playfulness of the piece.

***

Mobius Trio

Mobius Trio: (l to r) Mason Fish, Matthew Holmes-Linder, Robert Nance

There were no such performance concerns at a house concert celebrating the release of Last Light, a new CD by the Mobius Trio, a classical guitar trio composed of three recent San Francisco Conservatory graduates who studied with Sergio Assad and Tanenbaum. In the relaxed environment of this small private event for friends, family, and Kickstarter donors (plus one party-crashing writer), the Mobius Trio gave entirely serious performances of four works from the album, which exclusively contains music written for these talented and enthusiastic young musicians. Robert Nance and Matthew Holmes-Linder play six-string guitars, and Mason Fish performs on a seven-string instrument with an extended bass range that was crafted by Gregory Byers, a well-known luthier in Mendocino County.

Nearly all of the eight composers on the album are the Mobius Trio’s contemporaries, born in the 1980s; most were also students at the conservatory. (The outlier is Dan Becker, who is chair of the school’s composition department and taught several of the other composers.) All exhibit a comfortable familiarity with the guitar’s extensive possibilities – many of these composers are guitarists themselves – and Mobius executes the dizzying array of techniques and technical challenges written for them with ease and expressivity.

Last Light

Among the four pieces performed at the house concert was Making Good Choices by composer/guitarist Brendon Randall-Myers, who lived in the Bay Area for several years before entering Yale as a master’s candidate this fall. Randall-Myers takes full advantage of Mobius’s technical versatility in this piece, constantly surprising the ear by using different parts of the finger board and the body of the instrument, exploring multiple ways of eliciting sound from the strings, building dialogues between unpitched rhythmic material and harmonic motion, and juxtaposing dynamic extremes. By contrast, a place that inhabits us by Danny Clay (also a guitarist) revealed Mobius’s lyrical playing in a personal and heartfelt work that avoided being uncomfortably earnest through unexpected timbral choices and some genuinely tender melodic writing. (Excerpts from both pieces can be heard on the video Mobius produced for their successful Kickstarter campaign, which reached its goal in just five days.)

From a performance of Persian Dances by Sahba Aminikia at the Kennedy Center.
The trio formed only in 2010, but from the unity of their playing and the constant musical conversation that is visible to the eye in performance one could easily believe that they had been playing together for much longer than that. Last Light is a self-released recording project; the albums is currently available digitally at CD Baby. Even as a casual listener I’ve returned to this CD several times this week; for those NewMusicBox readers who compose for classical guitar, you should certainly check out this album and the Mobius Trio.