Tag: orchestra

The Seemingly Less Elusive Orchestra

Orchestra Hall

An orchestra hall in Zagreb. To many composers, every orchestra hall seems equally far away.

While I listen to music from all time periods on recordings, when I attend a live concert it is almost always because it features contemporary American music, and usually a premiere. After all, time is limited and much as I might want to be able to, I can’t possibly hear everything; a concert featuring a premiere at least contains music I wouldn’t be able to experience without having to travel to an appointed place at a time determined by someone else’s schedule. So it might seem strange that between last Thursday and this coming Friday, I will have attended a total of six orchestra concerts, all of them presented by Carnegie Hall. What’s even stranger about that is that all six programs feature nothing but music by American composers.

Last Thursday, I attended the latest installment of Orchestra Underground, the American Composers Orchestra’s series at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. Of course, it is the mission of the American Composers Orchestra to present concert programs devoted exclusively to music by American composers, so it’s not particularly unusual for them to feature such a program. Although the variety in their latest concert offering was off the charts even by their standards—Michael Daugherty’s Trail of Tears, one of the most substantive flute concertos I’ve ever heard; Aaron Copland’s classic Clarinet Concerto; and composer/singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane’s Crane Palimpsest, a song cycle performed by Kahane (on vocals, guitar, and piano) with the ACO combining stanza’s from early 20th-century American poet Hart Crane’s To Brooklyn Bridge with Kahane’s own lyrics. If that wasn’t variety enough, the concert opened (again, opened!) with a piece by Milton Babbitt—From the Psalter, a relentless setting of Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney’s versions of three Old Testament psalms for soprano and strings. Any concert that opens with Babbitt is making a statement, and this dedicated performance—especially enhanced by the assured singing of Judith Bettina—is hopefully a sign that his extraordinarily thought-provoking and challenging music will remain in the repertoire even though he is no longer with us.

Saturday night was an all-American program by the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in Carnegie’s main hall, though admittedly all was not new. Although it’s a piece I love, I certainly didn’t need to be at Carnegie Hall to hear yet another performance of Copland’s Appalachian Spring; I believe I’ve even heard Orpheus play it live before. And Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti is also not terra incognita, although Orpheus gave the premiere performance of a newly created instrumental suite arranged by Paul Chihara. What was completely new, however, was Clint Needham’s When We Forget, a world premiere that is part of Orpheus’s ongoing Project 440 initiative, and Chris Thile’s mandolin concerto, Ad astra per alas porci (named after John Steinbeck’s personal motto, a corruption from Virgil’s Aeneid meaning “to the stars on the wings of a pig”), a work which Thile has performed with eight orchestras all over the United States but never before in New York City. When Thile played a passage from a J.S. Bach partita as an encore, despite how excitingly he played it, it was old music that sounded like an interloper—quite a change from the usual paradigm of new music at an orchestra concert.

And starting Tuesday, the San Francisco Symphony will be in residence at Carnegie Hall for four concerts devoted exclusively to the music of American mavericks—Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Morton Feldman, plus the New York premieres of new pieces by Meredith Monk, Mason Bates, Morton Subotnick, and John Adams.

Now if only there was this much contemporary American music on orchestra concerts all year round. But then again, if there was, I’d never have time to be at home to work on my own—decidedly non-orchestral—music. Then again, with all this new orchestra music filling my ears, I might eventually find myself wanting to write for this extraordinary ensemble which I’ve loved the sound of for decades but which has always seemed somehow unrelated to my own personal life and times. Of course, if American orchestras featured a work by a living American composer on every single one of their programs, perhaps I and countless other people I know would not think that the orchestra somehow does not belong to us. Then again, given the current business model and infrastructure for orchestras in this country, there’d be no way for them to perform all the music all of us would write if every composer suddenly felt inspired to do so. There’s already so much great contemporary American orchestral music that already exists that rarely if ever gets performed, so why add to that pile? There are currently a staggering amount of new music-oriented chamber groups which offer myriad possibilities for getting one’s music played. Were it possible for there to eventually be a similar flowering of new music oriented orchestras, there just might finally be a golden age for new American orchestral music.

Christopher Rouse Named NY Phil Composer-in-Residence

Christopher Rouse

Photo by Jeffrey Herman, courtesy Boosey & Hawkes

During a media briefing by the New York Philharmonic in WQXR’s Greene Performance Space in Lower Manhattan, it was announced that American composer Christopher Rouse has been named the Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic, following the three-year tenure of Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg in this position. Rouse’s two-year tenure will include performances of a number of his works (including Phantasmata (1985) and Seeing for Piano and Orchestra (1999) with soloist Emanuel Ax), plus the world premiere of a New York Philharmonic commission (April 17-20, 2013). Rouse will also serve as an advisor in collaboration with New York Philharmonic Artistic Director Alan Gilbert in programming the Philharmonic’s CONTACT! new music series.

In his introduction of Rouse during the press conference, Gilbert extolled Rouse’s music which he has previously recorded with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. “Chris has an ear for sense and a sense of human psychology that is really penetrating. I literally have never heard one note of Chris’s that doesn’t speak to me as a deep and powerful statement.”

“I’m thrilled to be doing this,” acknowledged Rouse. “Phantasmata was really the first orchestral commission I had, so it’s something of a golden oldie. I’m thrilled that Seeing, which the orchestra commissioned, is being revived yet again. […] The new piece that I’ll be writing is still a little amorphous.”

Christopher Rouse has had a long history with the New York Philharmonic which dates back to hearing their recordings as he was growing up in Baltimore, as well as watching them on television during Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. As an adult, Rouse has composed numerous works for the Philharmonic including his 1992 Trombone Concerto (written for the Philharmonic’s principal trombonist Joseph Alessi) which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. (Read a 2008 NewMusicBox interview with Christopher Rouse.)

The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence position was the result of a $10 million gift from Henry R. Kravis endowing the residency as well as the awarding of an annual $250,000 Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music which was awarded for the first time last year to French composer Henri Dutilleux.

New England’s Prospect: The Haunted Mansion

Allow me to walk between the tall pillars
And find the beginning of one vine leaf there,
Though I arrive too late for the last spring

—James Wright, “Entering the Temple in Nîmes”

Symphony Hall in Boston is a temple, and proud of it, from the plaster casts of Greek and Roman statuary keeping classical watch to the cold-comfort design of the seats. But, like many temples, Symphony Hall is now part sacred space, part museum, harboring gods both potent and obsolete. At its best, John Harbison’s Symphony No. 6, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s only world premiere this season, also captured something of that dance between the spark of immediacy and the accumulation of history.

Diana of Versailles

Diana of Versailles – Photo by Peter Vanderwarker

The performances last week (I went Saturday night, January 14) were conducted by David Zinman, one-time music director in Baltimore, now settled in Zurich, but there was another conductor palpably absent: James Levine, the symphony’s dedicatee, and, as Harbison indicated in interviews, in many ways its subject. Levine has always been one of Harbison’s champions; the symphony was commissioned on his watch (as was Harbison’s 5th) and he would have conducted it had not health problems forced him from the BSO podium last year. But apart from its portrait of Levine, Harbison’s 6th also seems to be a reflection on the symphony itself, the form, and the idea of writing one, adding to a considerable, even burdensome repertoire.

It was the culmination of a two-season survey of Harbison’s symphonies. “The hardest thing to win back for the big genres of symphony and string quartet,” Harbison wrote in the program book, “is some kind of naturalness, some escape from the self-consciousness of our artistic time.” But consciousness of time was present in this Sixth from the start. It opened with a setting of James Wright’s poem “Entering the Temple in Nîmes” for mezzo-soprano (Paula Murrihy, in rich, sharp-faceted voice). The Temple of Diana becomes the focal point for a multitude of eras and traditions, as Wright, from his modern vantage, regards the “young Romans”:

Though they learned her name from the dark rock,
Among bearded Greeks,
It was here in the South of Gaul they found her true
To her own solitude.

That’s a lot of transfers on one ticket. Harbison’s setting oriented the traffic around the voice, starting with a leaping, unaccompanied mezzo line; the leap became the seed of much of the symphony’s motivic grillwork. The voice turned more recitative-like as the orchestra moved in, the focus shifting to the architecture of the temple. The shift was punctuated by an interloper, a cimbalom, whose jangle Harbison would return to throughout the symphony, rounding off passages while, sonically, remaining outside them.

The second movement was built around a long string line. The line itself, winding, full of angular leaps and variable speeds, was almost reminiscent of Elliott Carter, but the musical habitat was more traditionally Mahlerian—where Carter might playfully interrupt and jump-cut his way along such a wire, Harbison gradually added orchestral and harmonic mass in a way that started to feel dutiful, like a debater affirming the possibility of the Great American Symphony with ever more orotund rhetoric.

The last two movements, though, struck out into intriguing backcountry. Both started off with material strongly echoing (consciously or subconsciously, I don’t know) the one inarguably Great American Symphony, Copland’s Third, but both played off standard ideas of symphonic greatness as much as they pursued them. The scherzo-like third movement began by carving a grid of triplets into all manner of off-kilter syncopation, but in the middle, things got seriously interesting, contrasting implications coexisting—straight rhythms vs. swing, busy contrapuntal chatter vs. glacial background-radiation harmonies—as Harbison divided the ensemble into ever-more-unorthodox chamber combinations. (A sudden garnish of stately harmonics from two solo violas—later reprised by two cellos—was particularly bewitching, like a shape-note echo.)

The fourth movement was more imposing, the sound in large blocks. (Much of it was in a particular vein that Harbison has mined before: imagine isolating the tallest, most dissonant harmonies from a big band chart and then quilting them together.) But here, too, the music seemed to surprise even itself. At one point, the granitic procession shuddered to a stop, suddenly seeming to backtrack, retracing its steps, looking for the path. The ending, too, was more an abreaction than a catharsis, ruminating to a halt rather than emphatically sending itself off; the cimbalom came back, but as part of a final inventory, the music taking one last look around the house before closing the door.

Harbison is, on the one hand, a composer of symphonies with a technique to match: the bend-but-don’t-break tonality, the chain-of-custody working out of ideas, the cultivation of a monumental austerity in his orchestration. But he also seemed, in this symphony, to be more comfortable weighing musical options than flat-out asserting them. Those points in the symphony that seemed to spin off into a kind of considered ambivalence were not only the most engaging, but also cast the rest of the piece in a more fertile light. Maybe it was a reflection of the overwhelming sense of unfinished business surrounding Levine’s tenure and departure, or maybe of something in the composer’s own temperament, but Harbison’s Sixth was hard to put a finger on in a most interesting way.

Zinman, throughout the concert, projected structure more than mood. Having suffered through enough concerts where that calculus was inverted, I can’t say it was a bad thing; still, there was a cut-and-dried sense to the whole evening. Carl Maria von Weber’s Euryanthe Overture was bracing and chipper. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, was similarly clean and straightforward; Andsnes’s firm clarity of touch was commendable, and it was nice to hear a Beethoven interpretation unburdened with a need to foreshadow the entire Romantic era, but the overall temperature stayed low.

The performance of the Harbison was solid and admirable, but the ghost at the banquet loomed; Levine would probably have stretched those ambiguities out to wondrous effect. The concert closed with Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, where Zinman’s direct approach yielded the fewest dividends, countless delicious details of the piece subsumed. The ensemble and virtuosity were impeccable, but the pranks themselves had the slapstick energy of a news report.

***

The previous week’s BSO concerts were to have been the subscription series coming-out party for conductor Andris Nelsons, the odds-on favorite to take over Levine’s music directorship. Nelsons instead begged off to stay at home with his wife and newborn daughter, and BSO Assistant Conductor Marcelo Lehninger stepped in to lead the concerts. (I heard the January 7 performance.)

The original program largely remained, though, including the American premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s From the Wreckage, a trumpet concerto written for Håkan Hardenberger, who was the soloist for these performances. (Nelsons started out as a trumpeter as well, hence the programming.) Why it took seven years for From the Wreckage to make it across the Atlantic, I’m not sure—the piece turned out to be a fine entertainment.

Turnage’s jazz influences are apparent, but it’s the space between influence and appropriation where the action really happens in his music. At its best, Turnage’s music is more like a still life of jazz, pinned and painted with full memento mori overtones, decay and spoil rendered with exuberant brushwork. From the Wreckage, jump-started by string harmonics and Hardenberger’s het-up flugelhorn, unfolded in waves of noir alternatives: sultry and suspicious, then grim, brittle, and Brechtian, then a fractious, Rite of Spring-style assault. Even the piece’s gimmicks paid off, whether it was having Hardenberger move from flugelhorn to trumpet to piccolo trumpet over the course of the concerto, or scattering four percussionists among the orchestra in order to pass around clockwork ticks, a surround-sound time bomb. From the Wreckage was rich, dark fun.

Lehninger (who stepped in at the last minute to conduct the premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s Violin Concerto last season) was awfully impressive, though he started slow: the opener—Haydn’s Symphony No. 88, swapped in for the originally scheduled No. 90—was secure but one-dimensional, full of the sort of high-contrast subito-this-and-that engendered by Haydn’s reputation for humor, the elbows to the ribs outnumbering the actual witticisms. But the rest of the concert was superb. The Turnage was bold and lush. And the finale, a stop-pulling tour of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, was terrific, cogently argued, sweepingly grand, big-boned and brash.

I had a great time, but, then again, I am an incurable Richard Strauss fan. But it was the sort of performance that recalled how far-out Strauss’s music really was and is, a facet dulled by his post-Schoenberg last-Romantic reputation, his political dealings, and, perhaps, his personal diffidence. Lehninger and the BSO, though, got it, how confrontational, how unapologetic, how punk the tone poems are, and how good performances of them depend on pushing those aspects to the fore, wallowing in the attitude. Put it this way: it is a credit to conductor and orchestra that those in the audience who aren’t Richard Strauss fans must have been absolutely miserable.

That might be wishful thinking, but this season at the BSO, one has had to take any such line-in-the-sand musical verve where one can get it; the spark of novelty has been in short supply. Living composers can be counted on one hand; the only piece left on the slate that Boston hasn’t already heard is Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto (scheduled to be conducted by him in April). It’s been a long time since the BSO was a hothouse of new music, and whatever energy James Levine was able to inject in that regard is petering out. The temple is feeling ancient.

The Addictive Roller Coaster Ride (The 2011-2012 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute Blog, Day 3)

Thursday was the first day of rehearsals with the orchestra. This is something I had been anticipating with great excitement! Right before rehearsal began, we had another opportunity to practice our public speaking in the Green Room, to the handful of auditors who were there, and Diane Odash.

Then the first three pieces, Michael’s, Andreia’s, and mine, were rehearsed from 10 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. The orchestra sounds extraordinary, of course—this is something you know before you hear them, but you don’t really understand the thrill of it until you actually are there in the house with your score in your hands, tensed up with the excitement of hearing your piece come to life.

My piece is a premiere, so I’ve never heard it before now. I have a pretty good aural imagination, but not even the most fabulous sound I can envision in my head can compare to the actual experience of having some hundred people on the stage doing exactly what I have asked them to do. It is, as Steven Stucky said in his orchestration seminar, one of life’s greatest thrills, but also a great responsibility, and a humbling experience.

My personal perspective about writing music and having it played feels addictive: those first rehearsal glitches, where your piece is still unknown to the players cause a certain amount of terror in a composer, but once you start to hear them smooth out, and the piece start to assemble itself into the entity you created, you get a burst of energy like nothing else—a surge of power, a sigh of relief. (This is assuming your piece lives up to your hopes for it—that you did your job as a composer the way you meant to!)

It’s almost like the thrill you get from riding a roller coaster: as the coaster creeps up the rails to the highpoint from which the real ride begins, you can’t help feeling terrified; the ride begins and your body thinks that it is headed for destruction, pumping adrenaline through you at an alarming rate—but then, your mind wins as you tell your body that you’re not going to die, you’re just on a thrilling ride. This feeling of having conquered your fears and proved them to be groundless is exhilarating: you can’t help wanting to ride the roller coaster again and again, and somehow it never loses its power to deliver this jag.

Maestro Osmo Vänskä brought each of our pieces into being, consulting with us to fine-tune the details: revisions of any tempi or dynamic markings, changes to any articulations, etc. I can’t wait to hear the dress rehearsal tomorrow, when the pieces will have come to life even more vividly.

 

(Maestro Vänskä talking about the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute and his commitment to performing the music of our time.)
Following the afternoon rehearsals, we all filed into the Green Room for a session with Steven Stucky, Stephen Paulus, Frank J. Oteri, and Alex Shapiro moderated by Aaron Jay Kernis about becoming a part of your community as a composer, increasing your potential audience and helping them feel welcomed into experiencing new music as opposed to feeling alienated by it.

Finally we all walked over to The King and I, a Thai restaurant where we all unwound together over some fabulous Pad Thai, spring rolls, calamari, and many more yummy dishes that I’m currently too tired to remember. I’m almost ready to call it a night and close my computer, sinking into the comfortable bed at the Hotel Ivy.

I’m here with my husband and my one-month-old baby girl, Beatrice. More about that tomorrow—it has been a bit of a juggling act to be a new mother and attend such an intensely packed event, but I feel strongly that both roles can be balanced, and that we (especially women) should not sacrifice one for the other. I say especially women because it’s a little less complicated for men, I think (especially in the case of breastfed babies); I have several male colleagues who have had children at the same point in their lives as I have, but very few female colleagues who have. Although it’s a challenge, I feel I am being political in my choice to have a family and a career simultaneously.

When I was at Harvard I lived for a semester with Jill Lepore and her family. (Jill is a staff writer for The New Yorker.) Jill used to say that the greatest act of feminism these days is to have both a career and a family; we are told too often that in order to keep up with our male colleagues that we can’t have children. This simply isn’t true. It’s hard, yes, but very important to be able to have this if we want.

Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox and get into bed for tonight.

[Ed. Note: Our next installment will feature score samples from each of the six works; in addition, you can hear a live stream of the concert at 8:00 p.m. Central Standard Time.—FJO]