April 23, 2024 • 3:51 pm 0
Mozart’s remarkable return to opera seria at the end of his life with La Clemenza di Tito is the choice for this year’s spring production by Juilliard Opera. Directed by the wise Stephen Wadsworth and with Nimrod David Pfeffer, the performance is on 24, 26, and 28 April at Alice Tully Hall at 7.30 pm. Tickets here.
My program essay for the production can be found here.
Filed under: Juilliard, Mozart, music news, program notes
April 15, 2024 • 8:41 pm 0
On Tuesday 16 April, the Iranian American composer Gity Razaz’s new song cycle Flowing Down the Widening Rings of Being will be introduced to Seattle. The program, at 7.30 at Meany Center on the University of Washington Campus, is being presented by the Israeli Chamber Project with Lebanese American tenor Karim Sulayman.
Flowing Down the Widening Rings of Being is based on poetry and prose of Rumi and Rainer Maria Rilke and is scored for tenor, violin, viola, cello, clarinet, harp, and piano. Commissioned by the Israeli Chamber Project. Gity Razaz, who was born in Tehran in 1986 and now lives in New York, is deeply influenced by the constantly changing, at times tumultuous, realities of the world, including her identity and personal journey as an immigrant. This process of what Razaz describes as “uprooting and rebuilding” occupies much of her work, resulting in music that is emotionally charged and dramatic, while still maintaining mystery and lyricism. Her compositions are her means of responding to a hyperactive, disconnected world and offering transformation to listeners.
In an interview with I Care If You Listen, Razaz says why she chose to juxtapose the two poets in her new song cycle: “Rumi and Rilke lived about 700 years apart and on nearly opposite sides of the earth, and with completely different religious backgrounds. Yet their philosophical and imaginative perspectives on some of the most existential topics in the history of mankind are eerily similar. In the poems selected for this project, I was attracted to the almost identical poetic imagery they both used in the poems which I ended up selecting for this project: they both use the imagery of ‘widening rings and circles’ to describe life and existence. Rumi calls for embracing uncertainty and living the ‘questions,’ ‘flowing down the always widening rings of being’ while Rilke acknowledges life’s unyielding truth, and moves through it with the confession that ‘I live my life in widening circles.’ . . ”
Program for the concert here.
The complete program is as follows:
SAMUEL BARBER: Knoxville: Summer of 1915
GITY RAZAZ: Flowing Down the Widening Rings of Being*
CLAUDE DEBUSSY: Sacred and Profane Dances for Harp and String Quartet
ZOHAR SHARON: The Ice Palace*
NAJI HAKIM: The Dove
ROBERT SCHUMANN: Three Fantasy Pieces, Op. 73
Filed under: Meany Center for the Performing Arts, music news, new music
April 5, 2024 • 10:55 am Comments Off on Slow Meadow at the Good Shepherd Chapel
Tonight at the Good Shepherd Chapel, the Wayward Music Series is presenting the neoclassical soundscapes of Gregory Allison & Slow Meadow at 8:00pm. Tickets: $20 GA / $30 Reserved.
From the press release:
Gregory Allison creates with a single violin a sound that travels across great landscapes. He has toured the world with violin in hand and is endlessly inspired by the instrument’s journey around the globe, especially its use in South Indian Classical music. His live performance blends the Indian Classical melodic improvisation with his classical sensibility as a film composer, offering the listener a sonic journey through time and space.
He will be performing his 2021 debut album Portal in its entirety, along with new compositions for amplified violin and string quartet.
Gregory recently relocated to Portland, OR, after 5 years living in LA, where he started the
record label and recording studio Holy Volcano. He has released four albums on the label: one
solo (Portal), two with collaborator Tristan de Liege (A Light For Dark Moments and Life As A
Film), and as producer for the debut album from songwriter Ella Luna, Anything To Make It
Loud.
He is currently collaborating with electronic composers to create ReWorked versions of the
music from his debut solo record Portal. The first two pieces on the ReWorked album,
“Portal” and “Veritas” were reworked by Kalaido and Tristan de Liege will be released on
Holy Volcano on March 8 and March 29, respectively.
In 2023, Allison traveled to Kerala, India, to work with his South Indian Classical teacher of 10
years, Peroor Jayaprakash. The violin duo performed in Hindu temples with the classical
Carnatic ensemble, and recorded a set of nine classical pieces with a new fusion ensemble for
the largest media company in Kerala, The Manorama.
Slow Meadow is Houston multi-instrumentalist Matt Kidd. With a foundation of piano, string orchestration, and an ever-evolving electronic palette, Slow Meadow traverses the borders of neoclassical and minimalist electronic. His newest album, Upstream Dream, delivers a deeply personal and transportive experience that speaks directly to the ebbs and flows and mundanity and marvels of life. With sublime patience, understated elegance, and surreal atmosphere, Slow Meadow savors
the present, remembers the past, and imagines what could be.
Filed under: music news
April 4, 2024 • 11:46 am Comments Off on Harmonia Premieres William White’s Cassandra
Harmonia Orchestra & Chorus will present an ambitious program on 6 April that includes not only surefire works by Bernstein and Gershwin but a major world premiere titled Cassandra — the largest work to date composed by Harmonia’s music director, William White. The concert takes place at 7:30 p.m. at the Shorecrest Performing Arts Center (15343 25th Ave NE, Shoreline). Tickets here.
Harmonia will pop the cork with Bernstein’s effervescent Candide Overture and then add to the global celebrations marking the centennial of Rhapsody in Blue this year with a performance featuring the young New York pianist Joseph Vaz.
Filling the concert’s second half is Cassandra, an “opera-oratorio” in two acts about the mythic daughter of Trojan King Priam, a seer whose knowledge of what is to be is dismissed by everyone as the result of a curse imposed by Apollo. At the end of the Trojan War, whose terrible destruction she foresaw, Cassandra is taken captive back to Greece by Agamemnon and slaughtered by his wife Clytemnestra.
For the title role, White has cast Ellaina Lewis (recently seen at Seattle Opera in Blue and Malcolm X); the rest of the cast includes mezzo-soprano Melissa Plagemann, tenor Brendan Tuohy, and baritone Zachary Lenox.
Of the musical style, the composer writes:
“The chorus is given music that emphasizes its narrative role: it mostly sings in unison, evoking the declamatory sound of an Ancient Greek chorus. There are several moments where the chorus takes the role of “the people” (in “Agamemnon’s Return,” for example). They are also folded into the orchestration as “vocal instruments” (much in the manner of Holst’s The Planets or Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé).
Cassandra’s prophetic utterances are given a mystical halo of sound in the orchestra and chorus with the use of string harmonics, tinkly percussion (finger cymbals, triangle, crotales), uncanny warbling by the choral sopranos and altos, and a low piccolo that doubles all of her mystical incantations. The horrors that Cassandra describes are accompanied by thick chords in extremely dissonant clusters.
The score makes extensive use of Danny Elfman–style “Batman chords”: brass-dominated figures that make huge crescendos before being violently cut off. The orchestra is given two extended passages: “The Trojan Horse” and “The Journey Across the Sea” (the interlude between Acts I and II, which offers the one extended instrumental solo, a plaintive song for the English horn).
The climax of Act I, “The Destruction of Troy,” is the most extensive number in the piece, a dissonant, mixed-meter orgy of sonic annihilation.
Aside from Stravinsky and Herrmann, many of my usual musical influences make themselves known: Alfred Schnittke, Stephen Sondheim (as in Sweeney Todd), Gustav Holst, Mozart–Handel–Vivaldi (“Clytemnestra’s Rage Aria”), Carl Orff and Béla Bartók.”
The rest of White’s extensive commentary on the piece can be found here.
Filed under: George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, music news, new music
March 24, 2024 • 9:26 am Comments Off on RIP Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024)
A major loss for the music world: Maurizio Pollini, one of the genuinely era-defining pianists of the past half-century, has died at 82. Pollini was especially beloved at Lucerne Festival. I count his interpretations among my most meaningful musical experiences.
In the Washington Post, Tim Page writes: “For other listeners, Mr. Pollini was simply one of the greatest artists of his time, a musician who offered pristinely clear, clean, linear, and proportionate playing, yet found fresh and unexpected beauties in anything he took on.”
Page quotes Pierre Boulez’s portrayal of Pollini for the New York Times in 1993. “He does not say very much, but he thinks quite a lot,” Boulez said. “I find him very concentrated on what he is doing. He goes into depth in the music, and is not superficial, and his attitude as a musician is exactly his attitude as a man. He is as interesting as anyone could be.”
David Allen, in the New York Times, writes that Pollini “was that rare pianist who compelled listeners to think deeply. He was an artist of rigor and reserve whose staunch assurance, uncompromising directness and steadfast dedication to his ideals were evidence of what his colleague Daniel Barenboim called ‘a very high ethical regard of music.'”
Allen also summarizes the naysayers: “Pollini was long a subject of controversy. Detractors heard only cold objectivity, accusing him of being too distant, too efficient or too unyielding when compared with the great characters of the piano…” He points out that, in spite of the controversy Pollini aroused, the consensus emerged that he embodied “the definition of what it meant to be a modernist pianist, or at least what it meant to play the piano in a contemporary way.”
Filed under: music news, obituary, pianists
March 18, 2024 • 10:44 am Comments Off on CHOU Wen-chung Centennial Concert
If you’re in New York City this week, here’s a can’t-miss event: One of the major shapers of the contemporary music scene as we know it in America is the still-too-little known Chinese American composer, teacher and scholar CHOU Wen-chong. Miller Theatre will present a special concert on 21 March by Continuum Ensemble to honor his centennial. He was actually born in 1923, but events have been scheduled throughout the 2023-24 season to celebrate his legacy.
Chou moved to the US in his 20s to study and became an important figure in the American avant-garde musical scene. He spent much of his career pioneering a new synthesis of classical Chinese aesthetics with a Western contemporary sensibility. As a charismatic teacher based at Columbia, he was responsible for bringing the big players of the next generation over from China at the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the US — composers including Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Bright Sheng and Zhou Long — and has been dubbed (by Tan Dun) “the godfather of Chinese contemporary music.”
The Miller Theatre concert will be led by Joel Sachs, a longstanding figure at Juilliard who retired from his post there last year. This event will consider Chou’s legacy in cultural interchange and blending Eastern and Western styles — how he helped pave the way toward a more-inclusive aesthetic in today’s classical sphere.
Filed under: music news
March 1, 2024 • 6:17 am Comments Off on Seattle Chamber Orchestra Presents Wayne Marshall in Recital
Seattle Chamber Orchestra, led by Lorenzo Marasso, presents the remarkable organist Wayne Marshall in recital on Saturday evening, 2 March, at 8pm at Plymouth Church in Seattle.
Among the organ works that Marshall will perform is Passion Symphony by Marcel Dupré, which began as an improvised performance in 1921 that was later notated and published. Marshall will play the Plymouth Church’s Fisk organ.
Admission includes a pre-concert talk and the performance, accompanied by drinks and appetizers.
From Seattle Chamber Orchestra’s commentary on the program:
“During his 1921 Christmas tour in the United States, Marcel Dupré engaged the audience at the renowned Grand Court Organ within Philadelphia’s John Wanamaker Department Store by improvising on four suggested melodies. These included two Christmas tunes (“Jesu redemptor omnium” and the well-known hymn “Adeste fideles” or “O Come All Ye Faithful”) as well as two Easter chants (“Stabat mater dolorosa” and “Adoro te devote”). Three years later, Dupré transcribed and published these improvisations as Symphonie-Passion, Op. 23. The symphony’s four movements serve as a musical narrative of Christ’s life, with the following titles: 1) “Le Monde Dans L’Attente Du Saveur” (The World Awaiting the Savior); 2) “Nativité” (Nativity); 3) “Crucifixion”; and 4) “Résurrection” (Resurrection). Dupré’s improvisational style showcases hypnotic effects through the use of ostinatos. The first movement features repetitive chord patterns alternating between groups of five and seven. In contrast, the second movement explores melodic contours, gradually revealing a familiar melody in a solemn manner towards the end. The third movement incorporates a prominent and weighty pedal part, culminating in the emergence of the sorrowful “Stabat mater dolorosa.” The final movement bursts into a joyous and cacophonous resurrection, employing a traditional French organ toccata of that era, characterized by rapid intricate hand movements over a resounding slow melody played with the pedals.
British conductor, organist and pianist Wayne MARSHALL is world-renowned for his musicianship and versatility on the podium and at the keyboard. He served as Chief Conductor of WDR Funkhaus Orchestra Cologne 2014-2020, became Principal Guest Conductor of Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi in 2007 and is a celebrated interpreter of Gershwin, Bernstein and other 20th century composers. Recent conducting highlights include his critically-acclaimed debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker, a widely-praised new production Porgy and Bess at Theater an der Wien, a concert version of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess with the Prague Radio Philharmonic and UK touring with Chineke! and BBC Singers. As organ recitalist, he has an exceptionally varied repertoire and performs worldwide to an audience of millions. He gave a spectacular online recital at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in the 19/20 season and future plans include returns to Philharmonie de Paris and Royal Albert Hall. Throughout 2018 he played a key role in leading the Leonard Bernstein centenary celebrations including Bernstein’s Mass with Orchestre de Paris at the Philharmonie de Paris. He also made his debut with Zurich Philharmonie in an all-Bernstein program and conducted the rarely-performed White House Cantata in Utrecht with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. He conducted the first performance of the highly-acclaimed Orchestra Chineke! at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Recent notable organ recitals in the 19/20 season included Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; Kimmel Centre in Philadelphia and Symphony Hall in Birmingham. He is a regular performer at the BBC Proms and appeared in the 2012 season as organist and was co-presenter of the Barenboim Prom in 2014. Wayne was honored with an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2021. In 2004 he received an Honorary Doctorate from Bournemouth University and became Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 2010. Since its inception Mr. Marshall has also joined the Board of Directors of the Seattle Chamber Orchestra.”
Filed under: music news
February 9, 2024 • 10:32 am Comments Off on Sound Salon: Sweeter than Roses
Sound Salon (the series formerly known as Byron Schenkman & Friends) has a lovely program coming up Sunday evening: English Baroque love songs for voice, oboe, viol, and harpsichord. Sweeter than Roses (the title of the program, taken from a Henry Purcell song), presents soprano Grace Srinivasan, oboist Curtis Foster, Adaiha MacAdam-Somer on viol, and artistic director Byron Schenkman on harpsichord in music not only by Purcell and Handel but by such less-familiar figures as Elisabetta de Gambarini, John Stanley, and William Babell (all associated with Handel’s work), as well as by Thomas Arne and Ignatius Sancho, who escaped enslavement and became “a successful businessman, published author and composer, and champion for the abolition of slavery,” as Schenkman notes.
The concert is on Sunday 11 February at 7 pm at Benaroya Hall.
Program
Sonata in C Minor for oboe and continuo
“Behold and listen” from op. 2
“I feel new passions rise” from op. 9
“Come away death”
The Complaint “Take, oh take, those lips away”
Hornpipe in B-flat Major
“Sweetest Bard”
“Oh let me weep”
Suite in D Minor for harpsichord
Sonata no. 1 in B-flat Major for oboe and continuo
“Sweeter than roses”
“Halcyon days”
Filed under: Byron Schenkman, early music, music news
January 26, 2024 • 2:23 pm Comments Off on Celebrate Asia with Seattle Symphony
This year’s edition of the Celebrate Asia concert presented by Seattle Symphony marks the 16th season of this annual tradition. Associate Conductor Sunny Xia will helm the orchestra in a program of works by two very special composers with Seattle connections, as well as classics by Beethoven and Grieg. The concert takes place on Sunday 28 January 2024 at 4pm at Benaroya Hall. Tickets are available to purchase here. There will also be a Celebrate Asia Market starting at 3pm before the concert and after the performance, featuring the Seattle International Lion Dance Team (at 3pm) and CHIKIRI and The School of TAIKO (post-concert).
The extraordinarily precocious Korean American composer August Baik is a graduate of the 2022-2023 SSO Young Composers Workshop, where his Chuseok Overture for Orchestra was first introduced. The Young Composers Workshop is a unique program that give students the opportunity to workshop compositions with an experienced local composer and Symphony musicians.
The wonderful Paul Chihara‘s new Piano Concerto-Fantasy will receive its US premiere, with Vietnamese American pianist Quynh Nguyen as the soloist. Chihara was born in 1938 in Seattle (and was forced with his family to live in an internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, during the Second World War as a result of Executive Order 9066). Chihara wrote Piano Concerto-Fantasy for Quynh Nguyen as part of an intensive recent collaboration involving her recording of his complete piano works on the Naxos label. She gave the world premiere in October 2022 with the Vietnamese National Symphony at the Hanoi Opera House as part of a concert commemorating normalization of US-Vietnam diplomatic relations.
Chihara found inspiration for Piano Concerto-Fantasy “in traditional Vietnamese melodies and modes, as well as his own experiences composing scores for television and film about the Vietnam War,” according to Quynh Nguyen. The music, she adds, “embodies a sense of longing for the peaceful past and for the future and its possibilities. The piece is virtuosic and intensely melodic with French and Eastern harmonies and jazz-tinged sections, and phrases reminiscent of Russian classical works. These elements are juxtaposed within the story, reflecting my personal journey of studying music in Vietnam, Russia, France, and the United States, and how their diverse cultures have shaped my life. The concerto reinforces how music transcends politics, language and culture.”
The program will also include Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 and Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite.
Filed under: music news, new music, Seattle Symphony
January 12, 2024 • 1:04 pm Comments Off on Dr. Samuel Adler on “Building Bridges Through Music”
From the Arts Empowering Life Foundation in Cape Cod: the latest lecture in the Building Bridges through Music series presents composer, mentor, and mensch Samuel Adler on “95 Years to Speak to Our Time.” The lecture will be streamed starting at 3.30pm ET here.
From the press release:
At age ten, Samuel Adler narrowly escaped Nazi Germany during Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass.” As he and his father collected sheet music in the loft of the synagogue, saving all that they could on that terrifying night, soldiers heard them from down below. It was the sudden collapse of the pipe organ that allowed Adler and his father to run and escape through an underground tunnel. His family took the last train out of Germany with their bags full of sheet music, paving the way for Adler to study and nurture his musical gifts in America.
At age ninety-five, he continues to compose, sharing his prolific musical gifts. Known for building bridges through the international language of music, as well as his optimism and “life-affirming spirit,” he is uniquely positioned TO SPEAK TO OUR TIME.
The risk-taking composer of 400 published works taught for sixty three years at Juilliard, and Eastman, and has given masterclasses and workshops at over 300 universities world-wide. Having studied with Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith, Randall Thompson, and more, he knows just about everyone on the twentieth-century American music scene and has received numerous awards including ASCAP’s “Aaron Copland Lifetime Achievement Award.” He believes that one should compose in the “energy of his time” and he is without doubt one of the greatest living composers and conductors.
Filed under: lectures, music news
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 