The eminent German composer Wolfgang Rihm, one of the most frequently performed contemporary composers in Europe and a longstanding pillar of the Lucerne Festival Academy, has died.
“It is with sadness and at the same time with deep gratitude that we take leave of one of the greatest artists of our time and of one of Lucerne Festival’s most influential companions. Wolfgang Rihm was closely associated with Lucerne Festival not only as a composer but, since 2016, as Artistic Director of the Lucerne Festival Academy as well….”
“With Wolfgang Rihm, the music world loses not only a gifted composer, but also a universal scholar, who was as concerned with the promotion of young talent as he was about his personal commitment to cultural policy…”
“Music resembles life, is a reflection of its processes.“– Wolfgang Rihm
A toast to the luminously imaginative composer and musical thinker Roger Reynolds, who celebrates his 90th birthday today — and is still going strong. Within this year alone, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has presented his latest opus, KNOWING / NOT KNOWING, described by Ken Herman as “a 21st-century secular oratorio … that deftly fuses recorded and live media, alternates chorus and the spoken word, and juxtaposes live drama with instrumentalists in order to pose probing questions about the nature and range of human knowledge.” (Here’s a vimeo link to an excerpt from KNOWING/NOT KNOWING.)
As Roger Reynolds continues into his tenth decade, the urge to extend the limits of musical perception and meaning beyond those previously known remains as powerful a motivation as ever.
In March, the Center for New Music and Associated Technologies (CNMAT) and the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, presented a colloquium and concert celebrating this milestone birthday year. The Center describes Reynolds, who has also been an influential mentor at UC San Diego for more than half a century, as “a composer, writer, producer, and mentor, pioneer in sound spatialization, intermedia, and algorithmic concepts … [and] an inveterate synthesizer of diverse capacities and perspectives. … [His] projects with individual performers and ensembles, theater directors, choreographers, and scientists involve challenging interpersonal collaborations.” He has been, for decades, a sought-after mentor at UC San Diego.”
Some (by no means all!) other recent projects include his latest “sharespace” work, Persistence(for cello and computer musician), the ongoing Passage series, and Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House, a collaborative book exploring the evolution of a house design by the Greek composer/architect for him and his partner Karen. Reynolds is also a member of the international, Montréal-based consortium ACTOR, and the originator of the Bridging Chasms initiative, which seeks to improve cross-disciplinary communications. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2023.
Reynolds has also been collaborating with the Danish percussionist, and conductor, and producer Mathias Reumert on the release of no fewer than four new albums. The first two these, Wind Concertosand Watershed V, have already been released on Reumert’s Ekkozone label; still to be released later in the year are The Promises of Darkness and Watershed V/’O’o.
Here’s a link to the booklet essay I wrote for the extraordinary two-CD set For a Reason, which appeared last year on neuma records. (The neuma label, which prizes itself on offering “food for the mind’s ear,” has an extensive catalogue of music by Reynolds.) For a Reason includes examples of Reynolds’s longstanding collaborations with violinist Irvine Arditti (whose own eponymous string quartet celebrates its 50th anniversary this year) and percussionist Steven Schick.
Damien Geter’s much-anticipated new opera American Apollo will be unveiled this weekend at Des Moines Metro Opera. The librettist is Lila Palmer and revolves around Thomas Eugene McKeller, a Black hotel worker who became a model for the painter John Singer Sargent.
“As a work of historical fiction, the opera imagines the story behind Sargent’s spare, nude portrait and sensual sketches of McKeller, whose image was transformed by Sargent into white-skinned Greek gods featured prominently in murals throughout Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Themes of erasure, the white gaze, and the intimate relationship between the two men are explored in this powerful new work,” according to DMMO’s website.
In the cast are baritone Justin Austin as McKeller, tenor William Burden as John Singer Sargent, soprano Mary Dunleavy as Isabella Stewart Gardner, with David Neely conducting and Shaun Patrick Tubbs directing.
Writes Geter in his composer’s note: “As a composer, one of my goals is to help bring to life stories that have long been ignored in the traditional canon, and more largely, across the spectrum of human experience. It is safe to say that many of these unknown or forgotten stories belong to Black people and other folks of color who, because of white supremacy, have not been represented to the fullest extent with regards to the vast array of personalities, emotions, and multi-dimensions that we see in real-life people. Stereotypes tend to run amok in opera when it comes to people of color. ..”
Violinist James Ehnes, Seattle Chamber Music Society’s artistic director, performs with colleagues during a SCMS Chamber Music in the Park concert. SCMS’ Summer Festival runs July 1-26 this year. (Jenna Poppe)
Tonight is the opening concert of the 2024 edition of the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s annual Summer Festival. I wrote a preview for The Seattle Times here:
Sure, the Seattle Chamber Music Society has a menu of the usual star composers — Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák — for its Summer Festival running July 1-26. But this year, the festival is boasting an actual menu that will be designed onstage by Seattle star chefs. …
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.
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.’ . . ”
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 Allisoncreates 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.
Composer William White and librettist Jillian White on the creation of 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.
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.”
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.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 