The British-born, Berlin-residing Rebecca Saunders is this summer’s composer-in-residence at Lucerne Festival. Tonight brings the culminating event of her residency: the world premiere of her piano concerto to an utterance. She wrote it while working closely with the soloist Nicholas Hodges, in her signature fashion, to explore aspects of the instrument’s sound potential.
The premiere was originally to have taken place last summer and had to be postponed because of the pandemic. In another twist, Ivan Volkov, who was originally scheduled to conduct, had to bow out just last week for reasons of health. Composer-conductor Enno Poppe will lead the newly named Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. They will then take the work to Musicfest Berlin.
“The solo piano within this concerto was conceived as a disembodied voice,” explains Saunders. “It seeks to tell its own story, wavering, almost painfully, inevitably failing to sustain its uncertain striving. It seeks to attain the silence of its end through its own excessive speaking: an incessant, compulsive soliloquy on the precipice of non-being.”
The clip above is from a piece titled “Study,” based on the solo part, that Saunders presented last year at the Musikfest Berlin.
toan utterance is the tenth in the series of Roche Commissions sponsored by the pharmaceutical giant Roche. The latest composer to be commissioned has also been announced: Thomas Adés, who will write a violin concerto for Anne-Sophie Mutter to be unveiled in the summer of 2022.
The 25th annual George Enescu Festival is now underway in the composer’s native Romania. This year’s edition, held between 28 August and 26 September 26, is presenting over 3,500 international and Romanian artists. Most of the performances take place in Bucharest, but some are planned for other cities around Romania.
Paavo Järvi conducted the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra in the opening night concert–Ensecu’s Romanian Rhapsody Op. 11, no. 2, the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 on Saturday, with Hilary Hahn as the soloist. A complete listing of events programmed for this ambitious festival can be found here.
Saturday evening, 28 August, at Seattle Center, starting at 7pm, Seattle Opera returns to performance with a live audience with a “Welcome Back Concert” consisting of highlights from Die Walküre. More than 2,000 people are expected to attend this special outdoor opera performance, which I’m chagrined I will have to miss.
It’s sold out but jumbo screens will allow anyone who strolls down to the Seattle Center Campus to enjoy the performance at various non-ticketed areas.
The cast: Angela Meade, Eric Owens, Alexandra LoBianco (most recently Seattle Opera’s Tosca), Raymond Aceto, and Brandon Jovanovich. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra will be led by the group’s former leader MaestroLudovic Morlot.
I’m looking forward to Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello, the first album collaboration between Paola Prestini and former Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler (her husband).
Zodiac presents Zeigler’s performances of Prestini’s solo cello works, along with poetic interludes featuring the writings of Anaïs Nin (which are read by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings fame), Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Natasha Trethewey. The album also includes Prestini’s score for We Breathe Again, an award-winning documentary performed by musicians Tanya Tagaq and Nels Cline and others.
Filmmaker Murat Eyuboglu has additionally created a full-length film featuring dance and choreography by Butoh master Dai Matsuoka and New York City Ballet soloist and “Rogue Ballerina” Georgina Pazcoguin.
It’s heartbreaking to learn of the death on Friday of Michael Morgan, a much-loved conductor and generous colleague who devoted three decades to his work with the Oakland Symphony. “Our entire organization is grieving a profound loss,” Jim Hasler, the Symphony’s Board Chair said. “Michael’s impact on our community and the national orchestra field cannot be overstated – and he has left us too soon.
Writes Joshua Kosman in his touching tribute: “Michael was an excellent conductor, but more than that, he was a superb music director. His overall ambition was less to perform the symphonies of Beethoven or Schubert well — though naturally that was also part of the plan — than to find ways for the Oakland Symphony to be a force for good, in both the artistic and the civic arena. That’s why his programming was so restless and innovative, so devoted to championing the work of the underrepresented and the little-known.”
“In the manner of an older generation of conductors who came to an area and stayed put, Mr. Morgan spent the last 30 years of his life mostly in the Bay Area and its environs,” according to Tim Page in his Washington Postobituary.
Here’s a sample of Michael Morgan’s artistry — a clip of him conducting the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra in John Corigliano’s 1977 Clarinet Concerto:
Running August 19-22, Tippet Rise on Tour: August Festivalwill premiere seven short classical performance films captured at unusual locations across the country: from a tractor barn in Colorado and Ensamble Studio’s Cyclopean House in Massachusetts to the Noguchi Museum in New York City.
The films feature cellist Arlen Hlusko; flutist Brandon Patrick George; pianists Michael Brown, Jenny Chen, and Anne-Marie McDermott; violinist Geneva Lewis; and the vocal ensemble The New Consort.
The festival is free to everyone. The films will stream each day at 8PM ET. Starting at 7:30PM ET this Thursday, August 19 is a live “backstage” gathering via Zoom that will include a discussion with Tippet Rise co-founders Cathy and Peter Halstead and Ensamble Studio’s Débora Mesa and Antón García Abril, the creators behind three monumental sculptures at Tippet Rise—the Domo, the Beartooth Portal, and the Inverted Portal.
Thursday’s location is Cyclopean House, the Brookline, Massachusetts, home and workplace of Débora and Antón, where violinist and rising star Geneva Lewis will perform an eclectic mix of works. Next up is New York and the Jerome Robbins Theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center for a performance by Brandon Patrick George, flutist of Imani Winds.
Friday, August 20, brings a visit to one of the most tranquil and beautiful places in all of New York City—the Noguchi Museum—for a program of new works and poetry performed and read by cellist Arlen Hlusko, followed by a film featuring pianist Jenny Chen at the Blue Gallery in Manhattan.
Saturday, August 21 is set in a tractor barn nestled in Colorado’s Vail Valley at nearly 9,000 feet, where pianist Anne-Marie McDermott devotes her program to Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat major.
The festival concludes in New York on Sunday, August 22 with two films: one beneath a church in Brooklyn at The Gymnasium-Gymnopedie, featuring the solo-voice ensemble The New Consort, and then again at the Blue Gallery for a performance by pianist Michael Brown, featuring a work of his own composition, Breakup Etude for Right Hand Alone, along with works by Chopin and Mendelssohn.
Full program details:
August Festival | Day One | August 19, 2021 | 6PM MDT Geneva Lewis, violin KAIJA SAARIAHO: Nocturne HEINRICH IGNATZ BIBER: Passacaglia EUGÈNE YSAŸE: Sonata No. 5 in G Major for solo violin, Op. 27 Filmed at Cyclopean House, Brookline, Massachusetts Jean Coleman, filmmaker; Noriko Okabe, audio engineer. Duration:
Brandon Patrick George, flute JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH: Partita in A Minor for solo flute, BWV 1013 TŌRU TAKEMITSU: Air DAVID LANG: Thorn Filmed at Jerome Robbins Theater at Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York Tristan Cook, filmmaker; George Wellington, audio engineer. Duration: 21’
August Festival | Day Two | August 20, 2021 | 6PM MDT Arlen Hlusko, cello JOHN CONAHAN: Philly ‘hood Flashes NICHOLAS YANDELL: Restless/Release MICHELLE ROSS: Haiku DAVID JAEGER: The Blue Trees Rise Again (1. Landscape, 2. Evening, 3. Conjure You) SETH COLE: Mi’Mahalah L’Mahol (From Sickness to Dancing) Filmed at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Long Island City, New York Jean Coleman, filmmaker; Noriko Okabe, audio engineer. Duration: 20’
Jenny Chen, piano FRANZ LISZT: Three Concert Études, S. 144, Étude No. 3 Un Sospiro FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Barcarolle in F-sharp Major, Op. 60 FRANZ LISZT: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 10, in E Major, S.244/10 Filmed at Blue Gallery, New York, New York Xuan, filmmaker; Noriko Okabe, audio engineer. Duration: 25’
August Festival | Day Three | August 21, 2021 | 6PM MDT Anne-Marie McDermott, piano FRANZ SCHUBERT: Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960 Filmed at Tractor Barn, Edwards, Colorado Tristan Cook, filmmaker; Jim Ruberto, audio engineer. Duration: 45’
August Festival | Day Four | August 22, 2021 | 6PM MDT The New Consort, vocal ensemble (Madeline Apple Healey, Rhianna Cockrell, Clifton Massey, Nathan Hodgson, Brian Mummert) CARLO GESUALDO: “Moro, lasso, almio duolo” CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI: “Zefiro torna e’l bel tempo rimena” TED HEARNE: Ripple SAMIH CHOUKEIR, arranged by Shireen Abu Khader: Lau Rahal Sawti Filmed at Gymnopedie, Brooklyn, NY Jean Coleman, filmmaker, Noriko Okabe, audio engineer. Duration: 30’
Michael Brown, piano MAURICE RAVEL: Jeux d’eau MICHAEL BROWN: Breakup Etude for Right Hand Alone (2020) FREDERIC CHOPIN: Impromptu in F-sharp Major, Op. 36 ALEXANDER SCRIABIN: Poème in F-sharp Major, Op. 32, No. 1 FELIX MENDELSSOHN: Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 14 Filmed at Blue Gallery, New York, New York Xuan, filmmaker; Noriko Okabe, audio engineer. Durati
This evening in Lucerne (at 6.30 pm local time), the 2021 Summer Festival begins with Riccardo Chailly leading the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in a program of Mozart and Schubert. The concert is being streamed on arte.
The summer’s theme, quite aptly for these times, is “Crazy” — the German word verrückt having especially rich connotations that extend from mental imbalance to the dislocations and ruptures that seed a paradigm shift.
Photo (c) Jorge Gustavo de Araujo Elias. Pictured: Elisabeth Remy Johnson, harp; Mercedes Smith, flute; Zach Boeding, oboe; Marci Gurnow, clarinet; Madeline Sharp, viola
It’s only my first time in these parts, but already I can understand the deep, magnetic sense of connection that draws people back here again and again. Upon passing through the elk antler arch at Jackson Hole Airport (the only U.S. airport located within a national park, incidentally), I soon began to feel the charm of a place that hasn’t been flattened out by plastic predictability. Even with lingering smoke from the latest Western fires imposing a thin pall, the capacity for this landscape to inspire awe was undimmed.
With its marriage of valley and dramatic, looming scarps, it’s obvious how the Jackson Hole area beckoned as an ideal spot to make music. The GrandTetonMusicFestival opened on 2 July, following the all-too-familiar hiatus, and is now into Week 4 of a seven-week season — which also marks the Festival’s 60th anniversary.
Last night I began with the first of the week’s offerings, a chamber music evening at Walk Hall, GTMF’s home performance space. It was decently attended, taking into account the reduced-capacity seating plan and a sudden shift in mask policy. (Just last night, in the wake of the new CDC announcement, the official recommendation switched to suggesting that vaccinated and unvaccinated people both wear masks indoors.)
Part of a series curated — and engagingly introduced by — Adelle Eslinger Runnicles, the concert presented a flavorful sampling of periods and instrumental formations, starting with a transcription by Phil Brink for low brass of J.S. Bach’s D minor Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 for solo violin (Michael Mulcahy, trombone; Jared Rodin, trombone; Craig Mulcahy, trombone; Jay Evans, trombone; JáTtik Clark, tuba). The Baroque fondness for transcription aside, Bach’s masterpiece sounded of a different era — not Romantic exactly, but funereal, ritualistic, the opening to new vistas in the later variations remarkably fluid and gentle.
Unmistakably Romantic phrasing beguiled in Saint-Saëns’s Fantaisie for Violin and Harp, Op. 124, featuring Eunice Keem on violin and Elisabeth Remy Johnson on harp. Exquisitely balanced and fully engaged in playing off each other, the duo cast a spell throughout this late-period piece’s range of moods.
Johnson also performed in Kimberly Osberg’s Just Another Climb,* joined by colleagues Mercedes Smith on flute, Zach Boeding on oboe, Marci Gurnow on clarinet, and Madeline Sharp on viola. If the Saint-Saëns suggested a leisured dreamscape, Just Another Climb packed the punch of an involving musical short story, its impact belying the brevity of the piece’s duration (about four minutes) — and making this a real highlight of the evening.
The young, Portland, Oregon-based Osberg, who was present in the audience, was inspired by the feat of the first “manless” ascent of the Grand Teton made in 1939 by Margaret Bedell, Anne Sharples, Margaret Smith Craighead, and Mary Whittemore — upon which achievement Craighead remarked: ” Craighead wrote: “This may have been of importance to the record of events, but to us it was just another climb.”
This first performance before a live audience emphasized Osberg’s colorfully individualistic writing for each component of the ensemble. The result was an assuredly paced musical storytelling that found freshness in a diatonic idiom, using evocative gestures to hint at but not dictate a plausible narrative. I’m eager to learn more about this composer and hear what she can accomplish with a longer form.
The program’s brass theme sets the stage for the main new work on this week’s orchestral concert, Five Hallucinations for Trombone and Orchestra by Carl Vines. It returned in John Stevens’s Triangles for horn (Josh Phillips), trombone (Jay Evans), and tuba (JáTtik Clark), a piece from 1978 that (not always convincingly) juggles with jazz vernacular.
Concluding the program was a rendition of Beethoven’s C minor String Trio from the Op. 9 set by violinist Louise Morrison, violist Chiara Kingsley Dieguez, and cellist Thomas Carpenter that reveled in the tension between the first movement’s ominous energies and the halcyon release of the Adagio. The long time away from live performance could be sensed in some issues of balance and phrasing, but the richness of this score — Beethoven declared these trios among his finest compositions of the period — came through, most notably in the spidery enigma of the concluding measures.
Originating at a palatial, 17th-century hunting lodge near Madrid, the Zarzuela is a dramatic form of musical storytelling that once dominated the stages of Spanish-speaking counties in worlds both old and new. Opera stage director Emilio Sagi will lead us on a historical survey of an art form rarely appreciated—or even known—in modern-day America
Sunday, July 18, 1 pm: Baroque Opera in the New World
The arrival of Spanish colonists in what they thought was a “new world” forever changed human civilization and its course in history. Laura Prichard will travel with us back in time to the Baroque Era in Latin America, where unique forms of classical music and opera flourished. From boy choirs singing a cappella to the lost operatic works of Mexican composers like Manuel de Zumaya, this lecture will have you yelling Bravo! for all things Mexican Baroque.
Sunday, July 25, 1 pm: Contemporary Latin Stage Works
In today’s operatic landscape, the old classics still reign, and the roster of new works premiered by major companies is dominated by composers of European and American birth. Meanwhile, composers throughout Latin America continue to tell their own stories and heritage through our beloved art form of opera. Multidisciplinary artist Albert Montañez returns to Opera Aficionado to shine a spotlight on new stage works from the contemporary Latinx world.
TICKETS: $5–$40
Students, educators and individuals in need: $5/session.
General admission: $20/session, discount available for multiple-sessions order.
Louis Andriessen has died at the age of 82. His publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, announced the death this morning of the eminent Dutch composer:
Boosey & Hawkes is sad to announce the death of Louis Andriessen, one of the most original and influential composers of the contemporary era. He died this morning (1 July) in De Hogeweyk dementia village in Weesp, near Amsterdam, aged 82. Andriessen leaves behind a corpus of remarkable music including the ensemble work De Staat and the opera Writing to Vermeer. A generation of younger composers were taught by him or were indebted to his unique fusion of jazz and minimalist styles.
Andriessen wrote in a wide range of idioms, including orchestra and chamber works, songs, choral pieces, music for brass band and solo works for piano, bassoon, organ, harpsichord, violin, oboe, percussion and trumpet. Perhaps most visible were his collaborative theatre works and operas, which adapted an eclectic array of texts. For De Materie, a genre-resistant theater work created with Robert Wilson for the Netherlands Opera, Andriessen incorporates documents pertaining to 17th-century shipbuilding, a decree on Dutch independence from Spain, the diary of Marie Curie and the straight-lined art of painter Piet Mondrian. Near the work’s end, as staged in 2016 at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, a flock of 100 sheep joined the cast.
On The only one, the world premiere of which Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted with the LA Philharmonic in May 2019:
Two artistic discoveries influenced Andriessen as he wrote The only one. The first was a collection of poems by the Flemish poet Delphine Lecompte from The animals in me. “These witty, intelligent, experimental, and sometimes scabrous poems immediately fascinated me. My focus turned to faraway America, with its great tradition of songwriting,” he says.
His second discovery was the work of Nora Fischer, an Amsterdam–based singer known for developing dynamic creative projects that fuse classical and pop music. Andriessen says, “The depth of her versatility has strongly influenced the musical language of the piece.” He further explains that “the piece flirts a bit with certain kinds of pop songs and light music, and starts out with a beautiful song.”
“Andriessen used bits of old music, an allusion to the Dies Irae motif and some Minimalism, a jazz riff here and a Mexican brass allusion there, as he often has,” says the Los Angeles Times. “But he always remakes it into a complex and powerfully blatant new thing, and here edge-of-your-seat operatically so.”
Andriessen’s final work was May for choir and orchestra, a tribute to Frans Bruggen setting texts from the Dutch impressionist poem by Herman Gorter and premiered at the Concertgebouw in December 2020:
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 