November 18, 2018 • 10:50 am 0
Tonight the Los Angeles Master Chorale gives the West Coast premiere of Reena Esmail’s moving This Love Between Us: Prayers for Unity.
Here’s my program essay for tonight’s concert, which pairs her oratorio with Bach’s Magnificat.
I also had the privilege of writing this profile of Reena Esmail for Musical America.
Filed under: American music, Bach, choral music, Los Angeles Master Chorale, new music, Reena Esmail
October 10, 2018 • 3:50 pm Comments Off on Andrew Norman’s Sustain
I finally had a chance to listen to Sustain, the major new Andrew Norman piece, thanks to the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s online, on-demand (free) broadcast of the 4 October 100th-anniversary season kickoff concert, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.
The entire program is terrific: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s LA Variations and the Beethoven Triple Concerto on the first half, with Sustain, an LA Phil commission and receiving its world premiere here, filling the second. But you should especially get excited about Norman’s composition. It’s a big piece, ambitious, visionary, otherworldly, spun from fascinating aural patterns that seem to wormhole and teleport across vast astronomical spaces.
Such purposeful originality here: the multilayered connotations of the title are by no means merely incidental. There’s no question now that Norman is a major, significant voice. Especially given its spatial conception, Sustain obviously has to be experienced live. But I highly recommend checking out the broadcast while it’s still available as a temporary compromise.*
Mark Swed writes: ” In an exceptional feat of musical transformation, we wind up in an indefinable new dimension. This is something new.”
And in the New York Times, Seth Coulter Walls discerns “a sublime new direction for the composer”: “Over the final third of ‘Sustain,’ this unusual merger between restraint and hyperactivity could hypnotize … Even when the dynamic level increases to an undeniable roar, there is a smoothness to the piece.”
*Look for the little link button (a bit hard to find) on this page, right below the words “in case you missed it – or want to relive the magic – we’re bringing it to you here on KUSC.org on demand!”
Filed under: Andrew Norman, Los Angeles Philharmonic, new music
October 2, 2018 • 2:25 pm Comments Off on Hip To Be HIP
Enraged Alcina (Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, mezzo-soprano) casts a curse on the love of Angelica (Sharon Harms, soprano) and Medoro (Brian Jeffers, tenor); from Jonathan Dawe’s Cracked Orlando: dramma per musica e fractals at Juilliard, 2017; photo by Nanette Melville
My story on the creative connections between early music performers and contemporary composers is the current cover story in Early Music America Magazine‘s fall 2018 issue:
When early and new music intersect, alliances are opening up a sense of fresh potential for both sides …
Filed under: early music, feature, new music
May 14, 2018 • 11:40 pm Comments Off on Ellen Reid: Excavating American Dreams
Here’s the piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s world premiere of reams of the new word by the team of composer Ellen Reid, librettist Sarah LaBrie, and researcher Sayd Randle.
“In classical and concert music right now, a lot of people are trying to think of how to reflect the world we feel we are living in and the world we want to be living in,” says composer and sound artist Ellen Reid…
Filed under: American music, commissions, Los Angeles Master Chorale, new music
November 29, 2017 • 8:40 am Comments Off on Seth Parker Woods Comes to Seattle
Here’s a recital debut I’m especially looking forward to: Seth Parker Woods at the Performance Chapel. My Seattle Times story on this remarkable cellist.
Performances by Chicago-based cellist Seth Parker Woods are not only ear-opening: They expand your perceptions of his instrument’s identity itself.
Filed under: cello, new music, Seattle Times, Seth Parker Woods
November 8, 2017 • 9:08 am Comments Off on The Magic Lute: Aaron Grad’s New Concerto for Electronic Theorbo
Aaron Grad
My story for the Seattle Times on Aaron Grad’s Strange Seasons, which will receive its world premiere this weekend:
Stories of falling head over heels for an instrument are not unusual. What is unusual is love at first sight — or sound — when that instrument is the theorbo….
Filed under: new music, Seattle Times
August 1, 2017 • 7:56 am Comments Off on Reena Esmail: Musical America‘s New Artist of the Month
The remarkable young composer Reena Esmail is Musical America‘s New Artist of the Month for August 2017:
At Chorus America’s annual conference this past June in Los Angeles, a general session devoted to the topic “The Medicine of Music” featured a singalong demonstration of a new interactive choral work titled Take What You Need. It wasn’t only the members of Street Symphony and the Urban Voices Project, a community choir of singers from LA’s Skid Row neighborhood, who appeared transformed as they sang this music by Reena Esmail. The large audience of choral professionals from around America joined in, visibly moved by this confirmation of musical meaning.
“It was such a powerful moment, because I’ve always wanted my music connect people to one another,” Esmail told me in a recent interview.
As Composer-in-Residence with Street Symphony (cofounded by LA Philharmonic violinist Vijay Gupta as a project to bring music to the homeless population), Esmail created the anthemic Take What You Need last year as a vehicle for the disenfranchised from the Skid Row community to join with professional musicians and tell their deeply moving personal stories. Following the model of the Kronos Quartet’s Fifty for the Future Initiative—in which Esmail herself has participated—Street Symphony recently made the piece available for free use to community organizations (on the website http://twyn.info/), who are encouraged to adapt it to accommodate specific performers and contexts.
“It started as a piece for string quartet and four singers but now there arrangements for everything from piano and one singer to orchestra and double choir. Even down to the very practical compositional choices, this piece is designed to value the needs of musicians and community alike, and to allow a warmth and mutual understanding to develop between them,” says Esmail.
A consistent focus of the work by this 34-year-old composer has been on mediating between cultural contexts that are normally kept separate. In 2016 she produced her most ambitious score to date, the oratorio This Love Between Us, on a co-commission from Juilliard 415 and Yale’s Schola Cantorum. Setting statements from the canonical texts of seven major religious traditions of India, This Love underscores “how each of these faith traditions approaches the topics of unity, of brotherhood, of being kind to one another” and blends Indian and Western classical styles in unique ways for each section. Writing it during the 2016 U.S. presidential election period added a layer of urgency and purpose, adds the composer.
Another major achievement of the past year has been the world premiere of her Clarinet Concerto, which Esmail wrote for the Albany Symphony and soloist Shankar Tucker. “In most situations, I am the conduit between Western and Indian music, but occasionally I get to work with a musician who has that dual training and can cross over like I do.” Esmail also enjoys an ongoing relationship with the Albany Symphony—next year will unveil another new commission, for Hindustani vocalist and orchestra, as part of their American Music Festival—which means, she says, that “I know the musicians, so I feel comfortable inviting them to try new ways of playing, and to join with me as I explore the spaces between these two musical worlds.”
Esmail refers to her unique manner of collaboration, which sets aside the abstract and instead is tailored to the character and knowledge of the performers she works with: “Western notation alone does not convey everything I want to share with my musicians. So I often make a recording of myself singing key melodic phrases as part of the ‘score.’ Indian music is essentially taught by call and response, and I want the Western performers to have a chance to interact with my work in that same way.”
The result is a 21st-century conception of what it means to “compose” music: “Our world is now connected to the point that the score doesn’t have to be limited to what can be written on paper. I want musicians to remain grounded in their own technique, but then to explore how that technique can enable them to move into new spaces.”
It’s a process that came in handy when Esmail was asked to collaborate with David Harrington of Kronos and violinist Kala Ramnath to shape Amrit (one of the works included in Kronos’ Fifty for the Future open library of a new repertoire for our time). “I was literally sitting between these two musical luminaries, translating between them in real time. It felt like I was translating between the leaders of two great nations, trying to convey their thoughts to one another in a way that felt direct but respectful, that acknowledged and honored the values of both of their musical traditions.”
Esmail spent most of her early life navigating between siloed cultural identities. She grew up in Los Angeles, her father a Muslim from Pakistan and her mother a Catholic raised in Kenya. “Because of my Indian diaspora background, I often felt that my choice to be a Western musician separated me from my cultural heritage. That is why so much of my work now exists between the traditions of Western and Indian classical music. I am often the musical Other in both directions: as the representative of Indian music among Western musicians or vice versa.”
But Esmail has turned this into a creative advantage—both for herself and for the performers she works with: “When you take a step outside of a single system of music, it allows you think a little more broadly, and to use your perspective to draw together groups of people who wouldn’t otherwise interact with each other.”
Although her parents are not musical, they encouraged Esmail to pursue her obvious passion. Initially she fashioned herself after singer-songwriters and Broadway composers before gravitating to classical piano, which remained her focus through high school, until she was accepted as a composition major at Juilliard. “One of my teachers at the LA County High School for the Arts saw that I was wired like a composer, even though I’d barely written any formal music at that point.”
After Juilliard, Esmail went on to Yale’s graduate program in composition. Her thesis was on collaborative practices between Hindustani and Western music, which she continues to foster through Shastra, an organization she cofounded with Payton MacDonald to encourage this cross-cultural work among musicians. Esmail speaks of her most significant mentors in terms of family: “Susan Botti is my composer-mom. She immediately understood who I was in a way no one else had up to that point. And Aaron Jay Kernis is my composer-dad. He knows how to ask exactly the right questions, and has often believed in my ideas before I did.”
A Fulbright to India proved revelatory. She studied Hindustani vocal music with sitarist Gaurav Mazumdar (whose appearance this month on the BBC Proms spotlights the connections between Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar) but also traveled far and wide across the country, interacting with professional musicians and local street musicians alike.
“I grew up bilingual, in an Indian family. But studying Indian music in India, in the only place in the world where I am not a minority, allowed me to engage deeply on so many levels. It gave me an irreplaceable sense of identity and belonging. I strive to recreate that feeling in the music I write.”
One upcoming project that especially excites Esmail is a piano trio she is writing for cellist Joshua Roman and his new music series at Seattle’s Town Hall. “While I divide my time equally between orchestral, choral, and chamber music, I think my voice as a composer feels most like a chamber music voice. I’m so drawn to this exchange and dialogue that happens in small ensembles, to this kind of intimate interaction between people.”
See profile at Musical America
Filed under: Musical America, new music, profile
July 15, 2017 • 3:11 pm Comments Off on At Play and In Flight: Some Recent Summer Festival Concerts with Seattle Chamber Music Society
composer-vocalist Lisa Bielawa; photo by Daniel Clark
The Seattle Chamber Music Society’s 2017 Summer Festival has now reached its midway point, with a delicious program last night devoted to French music (in honor of Bastille Day). The Taiwanese-American violinist Paul Huang in particular stood out (in the free prelude concert) with an account of César Franck’s Violin Sonata that was simultaneously passionate and also lucidly constructed. Paige Roberts Molloy matched Huang’s intensity with her strong keyboard personality.
Molloy played a big role in the main course itself, teaming with Max Levinson for a pair of four-hands piano delights: Debussy’s early Petite Suite and Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants (source of the orchestral Petite Suite we heard not long ago from the Seattle Symphony and Morlot).
The duo teased out the textural richness of the four-hands writing and also enjoyed teasing the audience with the ample humor of music-as-mimicry (especially in Bizet’s sonic imaginings of children at play). A similar angle, but magnified to a small ensemble of ten players, enlivened the concluding work, Saint-Saëns’ Carnaval des Animaux. Each of the composer’s clever vignettes was neatly etched and characterized, from the two-note joke of “Le coucou au fond des bois” (Anthony McGill as luxury casting on clarinet) to lightly shaded mystery in “Aquarium.”
Together with the less-often-heard piano suites, the hyper-familiar Saint-Saëns acquired a fresh coat of childlike wonder — or the wonder resulting from grown artists reimagining and trying to recapture something of that wonder. In that context, it also provoked some interesting questions about this particular subfield of “program music.” In contrast, say, to a grandiose R. Strauss tone poem, is it the miniaturism here — in terms of instrumentation as well as size — that makes these pieces tend to be more “about” a textural gesture?
Those works in turn made for an unusual context in which to revisit the String Quartet in F major by another great poet of childhood, Maurice Ravel. Huang, playing first violin, was joined by violinist Tessa Lark, Cynthia Phelps on viola, and Ronald Thomas on cello. They gave an engaging performance that paid special attention to Ravel’s fascinating rhythmic language, with remarkably vivid ensemble playing for the second and fourth movements. They also succeeded in balancing structural clarity with a drive and boldness that, from less-experienced musicians, might have risked murkiness.
Fictional Migrations
This Summer Festival week began with the excitement of a world premiere. The program on Monday (10 July) unveiled this year’s commission by the SCMS Commissioning Club: Fictional Migrations by Lisa Bielawa. An important and original voice among today’s composers, she is also a performer and has toured as a vocalist with the Philip Glass Ensemble.
The prolific Bielawa, born in San Francisco in 1968, has recently been earning widespread attention in the contemporary-music scene for her ambitious, trail-blazing, highly collaborative Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser. It’s a “made-for-TV-and-online opera” in a dozen episodes focusing on a gifted teenage girl who becomes obsessed with female visionaries across history.
Somehow among her many other projects, Bielawa found time to write the 12-minute Fictional Migrations. The fact that the piece is scored for flute, French horn, and piano is your first clue to its unusual character. Bielawa pointed out that she was initially intrigued — if not intimidated — by the challenge inherent in working with such an apparently “absurd” sonic combination.
Her approach is to avoid futile attempts at “homogenizing” these three instruments into something tamer but rather to accentuate, even exaggerate, their distinctive characters. In her introductory note, Bielawa points out that she also wanted to develop some “reveries” prompted by another composer she deeply admires, Olivier Messiaen. The latter was a household staple when she was growing up, since both of her musician parents were fans of the French master. Fictional Migrations is dedicated to the memory of Messiaen (in observance of the 25th anniversary of his death).
The most obvious Messiaenic influence is Bielawa’s allusion to birds and birdsong, a signature inspiration for Messiaen’s musical language. She writes that she had in mind the story of Alcyone from ancient Greek mythology “who, thinking her lover Ceyx is dead, throws herself into the sea, only to find herself transformed into a bird, flying towards him (also now in bird form).”
Bielawa also notes an impetus from “speculative fiction and the new surge of minority and feminist writers who are embracing this form — a cousin of science fiction that poses the question ‘What if?’ in relation to current cultural narratives.”
Fictional Migrations is not a piece of straight-ahead program music. Bielawa has instead constructed a “fictional” encounter among these very different sonorities. There’s not even an obvious throughline correspondence between the instruments and characters of the Alcyone story. Rather, Bielawa translates the pattern of Ovidian metamorphosis into instrumental terms: the flute and horn in particular at times play “themselves” but more often than not seem to be attempting to transcend their identities, to become something else — and to negate the gendered stereotypes of how they should sound. Bielawa shows that process at the very beginning, with an aleatoric section for piccolo at its most aggressive and shrill.
What’s more, the writing is hyper-virtuosic and highly individual for each instrument, so they are not encouraged to fuse into pleasant but bland “harmony.” The players were all first-rate. Lorna McGhee’s piccolo/flute conveyed an astonishing array of moods and affects, brilliantly articulated, while hornist Jeffrey Fair never lost his golden tone amid the dangerously difficult registral transitions. Bielawa had collaborated with pianist Andrew Armstrong, but a last-minute “cooking accident” sidelined him; in his stead, Jeewon Park accomplished the heroic feat of mastering the keyboard part, which is replete with thunderous, heavy waves and intricately nuanced figurations.
Bielawa has created an immersive, provocative soundscape, filled with “made-up birds,” she writes, that “exist in a world where prisoners fly out of captivity effortlessly, and we all magically transcend death and suffering.”
Framing the premiere were two pieces that also deviate from the chamber music “norm” in their scoring. The opener was Mozart’s K. 423 Duo for Violin and Viola in G major, with violinist Augustin Hadelich’s silky, exquisite phrasing itself was worth the price of admission; his partner was Michael Klotz, playing his viola with patrician refinement.
And a blockbuster to conclude: Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, with its double bass instead of a second violin to give an ampler sound. The players — Andrew Wan (violin), Richard O’Neill (viola), Ronald Thomas (cello), Joseph Kaufman (bass), and George Li (piano) — collaborated with in-the-moment flashes of color and expression that are what you hope for in live chamber music.
Review (c) 2017 Thomas May — All rights reserved
Filed under: chamber music, new music, review, Seattle Chamber Music Society
June 9, 2017 • 11:10 am 2
Carl Nielsen (1865-1931); photo from 1908
Last night was the first of two programs being led this month by Thomas Dausgaard, Seattle Symphony’s principal guest conductor. If you want to experience how Carl Nielsen’s symphonic music can deliver some of the most lofty moments in the concert hall, Dausgaard is the one to be your guide.
The symphonic music of Nielsen, the conductor’s fellow Dane, still awaits the level of recognition by the public at large that would be anywhere near commensurate with its quality. Dausgaard’s commanding interpretation last night made it clear that he regards this music on a par with the symphonies of Nielsen’s symphonist contemporaries, Sibelius and Mahler (whose Tenth Symphony Dausgaard has recorded with the SSO).
Last season Dausgaard led the SSO in Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony (“The Inextinguishable”). Unfortunately I had to miss that performance though I later heard lots of good buzz about it. One result is that it was decided at the last minute while planning the current season to make room for the Third Symphony from 1910-11.
I can see why. This is one of those remarkable collaborations between conductor and orchestra that simply works, for whatever reasons of chemistry and collective inspiration. It’s similar to how music director Ludovic Morlot has managed to turn the SSO into one of today’s premier exponents of Dutilleux.
Even without a history of being steeped in this music — of performing it over a long period (on the part of the players, that is) — the Nielsen sounded vital and necessary. The Third abounds in interpretive enigmas. Take, for instance, the title, Sinfonia espansiva, even though it’s not a particularly epic work. There’s also the issue of Nielsen’s scoring, which adds a solo soprano and baritone to the soundscape, but only for a portion of one movement (and without words — they’re just used as a timbral addition, though in context it seems they are symbolic, too).
Nielsen resorts to a conventional four-movement plan, but his originality permeates the Third. The powerful unison chords on A that launch the piece make for one of the most striking starts of any symphony — the Eroica‘s industrial revolution factories turned into something cosmic. (The opening of John Adams’s Harmonielehre also comes to mind.)
Nielsen goes on to stage the fundamental symphonic idea of conflict in an extraordinary way. It’s as if the two main impulses of the work — the primal urgency of the opening and an elated, out-of-doors exuberance of being lost in nature (one possible signification of the expansiveness intended) — are unfolding on separate tracks, within and across its movements.
Yet, in Dausgaard’s reading, they made sense as complementary, ultimately striving towards a synthesis. This is music the conductor has obviously internalized. Dausgaard conducted without score or stand to impede his interactions with the SSO, and from those opening shocks, he seemed to command an overview of the entire trajectory of the piece, through all its details.
Here was another sense of expansion: simple seeds that can sprout into something majestic. But Nielsen’s originality is to suggest that through ellipsis … He doesn’t need a gigantic movement, in which we see every frame, to get the point across.
The Andante pastorale was especially beguiling, almost implying a creation-of-the-world scenario that was far more than bucolic daytripping. The entrance of the male and female human voices (John Taylor Ward and Estelí Gomez, literally singing from on high in the organ loft) became the Nielsenesque equivalent of the evolution Mahler scopes out in his massive Third, but telescoped into a frame that seemed almost casual. The Rheingoldish E-flat major of the Andante‘s gentle ending was a moment to savor — such beautiful work from Jeffrey Baker on flute and Jeff Fair leading the dulcet horns.
Dausgaard elicited many other examples of superb solo work but also shaped the score’s contrapuntal richness in full dimension, allowing for light and shade and clarifying lines in the mid- and background as well. The almost manic dynamism of Nielsen’s climaxes emerged in doses of controlled ecstasy. Sinfonia espansiva turned out to be an epic in compact form.
Patrons were invited to stay on after Thursday’s concert to continue exploring Nielsen: a special dessert (Thursday only) offered the String Quartet No. 4 in F major, performed with fervor by violinist Stephen Bryant and violist Timothy Hale (both SSO players) and UW music students Erin Kelly (violin) and Chris Young (cello).
The concert’s first half featured a U.S. premiere: Snow, the second number in a pair of compositions by Helen Grime inspired by the artist Joan Eardley (1921-63). (The first is Catterline in Winter.) Dausgaard, who also serves as chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, joined with the BBC to commission these as part of a series called Scottish Inspirations. Snow was premiered at the 2016 Proms.
Helen Grime, who was born in 1981 and grew up in Scotland, spoke in an interview with the SSO’s Andrew Stiefel of what attracted her to Eardley’s paintings: “There’s a real bleakness that I think Eardley brings across beautifully in her paintings. You immediately get a strong feeling of the landscape, of the place, and of being there.”
Snow, Joan Eardley, c. 1958
Lasting about 9 minutes, Snow is an accomplished mini-tone poem of considerable imagination. “I wasn’t trying to re-create [the Eardley paintings] as musical pictures,” Grime remarks. “I wanted it to be like you were imagining the same scene in different ways.”
Grime showed herself to be a highly skilled orchestrator, but instead of using her large orchestral apparatus merely to create an atmospheric haze, Snow conveys a distinct impression of “moving on” to a different place by the end — what we’ve heard, the sounds that have happened, matter.
Also on the first half was a welcome return visit by Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto for Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Kuusisto made quite an impression with the Sibelius Concerto when Dausgaard invited him as part of his three-part Sibelius cycle in spring 2015.
a moment of interaction between violin soloist Pekka Kuusisto and Thomas Dausgaard; photo (c) Brandon Patoc
From that memory, I expected Kuusisto to take a notably original approach to such a familiar score, and he did not disappoint. He played up the contrast between where Mendelssohn famously starts out (with the soloist joining in almost at once) and where he takes us by the end. In this, Dausgaard was completely on the same page. It was fascinating to witness the active interactions and gestures between the two. The first movement had an added note of defiance to its pathos, while in the sparkling finale Kuusisto became a trickster, teasing and inciting the orchestra.
As with the Nielsen, here was an enigma: there’s something self-effacing about Kuusisto, yet he radiates a strong personality. He was at his finest in the middle Andante, phrased with the direct, unaffected emotions of the most serene folk song. And in an encore, Kuusisto showed another side of traditional folk music-making, with a slyly humorous performance of an example from his native Finland.
If you go: the program repeats Friday and Saturday (June 9 and 10); next week Dausgaard leads the SSO in an all-Strauss program (Four Last Songs and An Alpine Symphony), on June 15 and 17. Tickets at the links provided or call 206.215.4747.
(c) 2017 Thomas May. All rights reserved.
Filed under: new music, review, Seattle Symphony
June 8, 2017 • 10:19 am Comments Off on Spoleto Festival USA: Relishing the Challenge
Adrian Angelico (Marquise de Merteuil) and Christian Miedl (Valmont); photo by Leigh Webber Photography
Part Two of my report on the 2017 edition of Spoleto Festival USA is now live on Musical America (subscription required):
CHARLESTON, SC—Last year marked the 40th anniversary of Spoleto Festival USA, but this year’s edition underscores what I regard as one of the festival’s most admirable traits: a refusal to rest on laurels. Spoleto took a notable dare in programming Luca Francesconi’s profoundly unsettling Quartett among this summer’s opera offerings.
Filed under: Musical America, new music, review, Spoleto Festival USA
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