An update: Here’s another (unnumbered) volume in the Albany Records series featuring George Walker‘s music. (The label also has a series focusing on Mr. Walker as pianist.
Highlights are Music for 3 (1971) and his Piano Sonatas No. 3 (1976) and No. 5 (2003), along with several songs to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Robert Burns, and others.
Albany Records has added a fourth volume to its laudable series of recordings of music by George Theophilus Walker. At 92 (going on 93), Mr. Walker remains an active composer and was recently nominated for New Jersey’s Hall of fame — he resides in Montclair — and if he wins, it would make a lovely addition to his accolades. They just happen to include a slew of honorary doctorates, AASCAP’s Aaron Copland Award, induction into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame … oh, and a Pulitzer, which he received in 1996 for his Whitman-inspired Lilacs.
These are sensitive but rigorous performances and give a wonderful spread of Mr. Walker’s career, from Antifonys for String Orchestra (love the title), originally composed in 1967 for double string quartet, and the Pulitzer-winning Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra to several compositions that prove Mr. Walker’s creative energy has not dimmed.
I’m especially attracted to the 2012 work Sinfonia No. 4 (“Strands”), which I recently heard as part of the National Symphony’s innovative New Moves series. (My notes on the piece are here.) To be honest, the account on this CD is a good deal richer and more compellingly shaped than what I heard in the live performance. Conductor Ian Hobson, leading Poland’s Sinfonia Varsovia, not only gets the solemnity and idea-dense intricacy of this music but knows how to articulate its drama, its transitional energy.
Mr. Walker explains that the guiding idea behind the title “Strands” involves an “interplay” of thematic material that’s both severely compact and, with the subtle introduction of two quotations from spirituals, visionary and affirming. Given the task of writing a short “concert opener” with this commission, he chose a complex, densely argued soundscape over an easy crowd-pleasing rouser. It’s powerful stuff.
I hadn’t realized Mr. Walker originally wrote Lilacs with Vinson Cole in mind. Mr. Cole has had an illustrious career at Seattle Opera — I’ve heard his exquisite tenor on several occasions — but he was “unable to sing the part” at the world premiere in 1996 by the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa. They had commissioned Lilacs as a brief work for a concert to commemorate the legendary tenor Roland Hayes. Mr. Walker therefore was asked to reconfigure the piece for a soprano, Faye Robinson, who sang the solo part in the premiere. (Geoff Gehman has the whole story here.)
On this recording Albert Rudolph Lee provides the originally intended tenor solo, singing this demanding, high-lying part with emotional fervor and conviction. As for the “eight minutes” originally stipulated by the commission, we’re fortunate that Mr. Walker followed his muse and composed a characteristically eloquent piece of 14 minutes (divided into four sections), the whole packed with gripping ideas and fragrant sound colors.
Further evidence of Mr. Walker’s phenomenal creative drive at an advanced age is found in Movements for Cello and Orchestra, another product of his 90th year (2012). Dmitry Kousov is the splendid protagonist in this inventive rethinking of the cello concerto format.
For more information on this American treasure, Ethan Iverson has conducted an interview at dothemath.
This weekend brings the next installment in the National Symphony Orchestra’s current NEW MOVES: symphony + dance festival. I enjoyed researching this material to write the program essays for all three programs, which are being conducted by the Omaha Symphony’s Thomas Wilkins. Each program pairs classic American rep with music by living composers.
This second of the three programs features the Timpani Concerto No. 1 (“The Olympian”) by James Oliverio. Here’s a bit of my intro to his work:
The composer, educator, and new media producer James Oliverio (now based in Florida) has been redefining what it means to be a creative artist in the 21st century. “As composer there are two main ‘instruments’ that I work with: the symphony orchestra and the digital media studio,” he says, envisioning a music of the future that bridges the gap between traditional acoustic instruments and our rapidly evolving digital world. “Ultimately I want to unite them — to remove the distinction between my digital and orchestral endeavors,” adds Oliverio, an acclaimed pioneer of globally synchronized performing arts collaborations. (The rest can be found here.)
More on the amazing Jauvon Gilliam, principal timpanist of the NSO, from Andrew Lindemann Malone’s blog post. Writes Malone:
Not everyone who attends orchestral concerts knows that the timpani is not a fixed-pitch instrument; drummers tune them through the use of a foot pedal. So to play the right notes, you have to have both your hands and your feet in the right spot. With the typical orchestral complement of four timpani, this is challenging enough; as Gilliam says, “it’s like a choreographed dance. You can overshoot it, you can undershoot it, it’s just like if you do a pirouette.” To really master the instrument, “you almost have to have four different brains or have your brain in four different compartments.”
[…]
It’s an unusual role for an instrument that normally sits in the back and makes everything sound fuller and more forceful, but Gilliam doesn’t mind the change. “My job is to support people. I really enjoy that, that’s what I love about my job,” he says, but performing a solo is a “different way of doing things, and it allows me to expand my talent. It allows me to be a better musician.”
The concerto is also, he says, “the hardest thing I’ve ever played” — a challenge worthy of the title “The Olympian,” and a summit only scalable for a man who’s sure on his feet.
Here’s Jauvon Gilliam’s own blog post on “The Olympian.”
And here’s a radio interview WETA’s Nicole LaCroix conducted with Wilkins (beginning), Gilliam (6:15), and Oliverio (at 9:15).
Since my essay is included in this recording, I have to recuse myself from offering a review, but I can say that I consider The Gospel According to the Other Mary among John Adams’s most profound accomplishments. It certainly probes new ground for this ever-evolving, brilliant musical mind.
As for the critical reactions I have seen, nothing yet has come to my attention that seriously grapples with the full complexity of this score.
A curious note: Gospel was among this year’s Pulitzer finalists. I think it’s a safe bet that this year marks the first time two composers sharing the same last name were up for the same prize, which in this case was taken by John Luther Adams for Become Ocean.
If you haven’t had a chance to explore this Adams/Peter Sellars collaboration, do yourself a favor.
And the winner is … John Luther Adams. This is especially exciting news, since Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony will be taking Become Ocean, the large-scale work they recently commissioned from Mr. Adams, to Carnegie Hall next month as the centerpiece of their Spring for Music program.
The Pulitzer Prize citation states:
Awarded to “Become Ocean,” by John Luther Adams, premiered on June 20, 2013 by the Seattle Symphony, a haunting orchestral work that suggests a relentless tidal surge, evoking thoughts of melting polar ice and rising sea levels (Taiga Press/Theodore Front Musical Literature).
In his review of the world premiere last June for The New Yorker, Alex Ross memorably wrote:
Anyone who has gone down a stretch of road and then reversed course knows that a landscape does not look the same when viewed from opposite directions. One mystery of “Become Ocean” is how different the material often sounds during the second half of the [overall] palindrome [structure]. The section after the first climax is thick with minor chords, particularly in the brass. Somehow, as these chords loom again in the buildup to the final climax, they take on a heavier, more sorrowful air. There is a sense of unwinding, of subsiding, of dissolution… That a piece constructed with such fanatical rigor can convey such potent emotion is the greatest mystery of all.
In an interview from 2011 with Molly Sheridan of NewMusicBox, Mr. Adams explains that his music is “never about representation or reproduction” but about “authentic personal experience, about the primary experience of being there and paying attention.”
Music is not what I do; music is how I understand the world. I hope that if I find myself in a singular place: wilderness, urban, indoors, outdoors, real, imaginary—doesn’t matter—if I find myself in a real place, a true place, and I am paying attention, then maybe I hear something that becomes music. If that happens, then I hope the music floats away, takes on a life of its own, and becomes something else to you when you hear it. What I may have experienced, what I may have been reading, or looking at, or listening to, or thinking about when I was in that place working on the music really doesn’t matter. What matters is the music and how it touches you.
My preview of Wayfinders, Holcombe Waller’s biggest show to date and coming to On the Boards this week, is now live on CityArts:
“Pushing boundaries” and “defying genres” are among the most tired clichés in arts writing these days. But along comes a visionary like Holcombe Waller, who manages to push the boundaries of the genre defiers, and genuinely eye-opening things happen. Seattle audiences have a chance to experience Waller’s most ambitious—and decidedly boundary-ripping—project to date when Wafinders comes to On the Boards for its fully staged premiere on April 10-12.
There’s no real point trying to caption Wayfinders with a label—song cycle, music theater, video space opera?—since Waller’s new work maps out a region of its own, synthesizing these elements into a deliriously hypnotic performance experience.
“Ultimately it’s about the evolution of consciousness that we see happening in connection with our technology,” Waller explains. “Wayfinders imagines a distant future where our conscious and technology merge and become interdependent.” In that headspace, how do we navigate a sense of identity? How do we connect with others while our own reality changes as we become increasingly entangled in and dependent on our technology?
My latest concert review is now live on Bachtrack:
The music of Alexander Raskatov remains relatively little known in the United States. Smart concert programmers, though, should take note of the effectiveness of his new Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, “Night Butterflies”, as demonstrated in this performance by Tomoko Mukaiyama and the Seattle Symphony. With these concerts, Ludovic Morlot gave the work a persuasive American premiere, fully alert to the score’s psychological fascination. The SSO co-commissioned Night Butterflies with Het Residentie Orkest Den Haag, which presented the world première in the Netherlands last May.
UPDATE on Saturday 22 March, 9:42: I just learned that Richard Taruskin will not be at the Conference to give the keynote speech; he’s prevented from traveling on account of illness. The lineup given here appears to have just been updated.
Living in exile, crossing borders, starting over—are there any experiences more definitive of the modern era? Along with their concrete political and social consequences, these experiences have shaped cultural expression. What, for example, does it mean to be a “Russian” composer today? Does it even make sense to keep referring to national musical styles in this century of instant global connectivity?
I’ve always admired the quality and imagination of Karen Thomas’s programming for Seattle Pro Musica, but their upcoming program, titled Passio: Light in Darkness, has me champing at the bit, to put it frankly.
“The concept for Passio is music related to Lent and the deep human emotions this season has inspired composers to explore,” says Thomas, who not only directs Pro Musica but is herself a composer. And that can also take the form of completely secular works like the little match girl passion by David Lang, which draws on models from Medieval mystery plays and J.S. Bach’s Passions to retell a children’s story of searing, tragic simplicity.
The fact that Pro Musica will be presenting match girl (in the area premiere of the choral version) is by itself enough of a sell: this just happens to be one of the most haunting and inspired choral compositions by an American composer in recent years. But the program also includes a “re-discovered” rarity from the Russian choral rep: Passion Week by Rachmaninoff contemporary Alexander Gretchaninoff (1864-1956). Plus, there will be sprinklings of music by Benjamin Britten, Thomas Weelkes, and living composers like Paul Mealor and Kay Rhie. All of these selections, in different ways, highlight the special strengths of Seattle Pro Musica — and of the smaller ensembles comprising the company.
Seattle Pro Musica
Lang, an LA native now based in New York (and known as one of the co-founders of the innovative Bang on a Can new-music outfit), has fast forwarded the American maverick lineage into the 21st century. Lang is also an adventurous collaborator who has worked with the likes of photographer William Wegman and the film director Jonathan Parker (scoring the 2009 indie comedy (Untitled). But for the little match girl passion, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2008, Lang engages in a remarkably original “collaboration” with sources you don’t normally associate with each other. He uses the tradition of musical settings of the Christian Passion narrative as a model for his retelling of an incredibly poignant children’s story by fairy-tale master Hans Christian Andersen.
The root of the word “passion” is from the Latin term for suffering. Lang strips away the traditional religious associations of the Passion story but uses the narrative techniques that were pioneered and perfected by Bach — “commentary” passages interpolated into the ongoing story — to recount the suffering and death of the little girl in Andersen’s story who tries to sell matches on a street corner on a brutally cold New Year’s Eve. Or, another way to put it, as Lang himself does: “There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus — rather, the suffering of the little match girl has been substituted for Jesus’, elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane.”
There have been many musical adaptations of Andersen’s tale — TV musicals, operas, a synthpop video by Erasure, a concept album by The Tiger Lillies. But nothing I know comes close to the gut-wrenching impact of Lang’s treatment. His post-Minimalist score is deceptively simple, in keeping with the story. Spare harmonies and other archaisms evoke the starkness of early Medieval chant (think Perotin — that far back); tiny gestures generate maximal emotional response.
“There’s an extremely intimate quality to it,” Thomas explains. “Lang’s music has an immediacy and at the same time a kind of emotional reserve about it, because of the way he writes for the voices to evoke the Evangelist in a Bach Passion or a Greek chorus. So there’s a certain coldness and detachment as well that makes the tragic story that much more poignant as a result.”
Over the past two weeks, in concerts featuring the same vocal soloists, I’ve taken advantage of the rare opportunity to experience and compare the two great Passions by J.S. Bach that survive. (Pro Musica also performed the St. John Passion two seasons ago.) So it should be especially fascinating to encounter Lang’s piece, which I’ve long treasured since on recordings, with this context fresh in mind. Yet on its own terms, match girl is an immediately gripping and effective work, a mix of modern morality play and music theater — but with none of the preachiness that can sometimes creep into, say, a performance of Brecht.
Alexander Gretchaninoff in 1910
As for Gretchaninoff’s Passion Week, Karen Thomas points out that it will beautifully complement the pared-down sound of Lang’s little match girl passion by taking us to another extreme of lushness and blooming choral texture. Premiered in Russia in 1912, Passion Week sets texts from the Russian Orthodox liturgy that are used as prayers during the week that culminates in Easter. Gretchaninoff, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, was part of the Renaissance of Russian choral music in the early 20th century that’s also represented by Rachmaninoff’s beloved Vespers (1915).
“In Gretchaninoff’s setting you can hear the influence of early Russian music and chant even more clearly,” says Thomas. “And he writes even more extensively for the low range of the basses than Rachmaninoff. This will sound especially compelling when heard in the acoustic space of St. James.”
Thomas adds that the prayers Gretchaninoff sets combine mystical and liturgical texts. They tend to be “more of a personal reflection” on the events of Good Friday, for example, than the librettos Bach set for his Passions. But this music fell into oblivion in the wake of the Soviet Union’s official crackdown on the Russian choral movement that had begun to take flight. Gretchaninoff himself stayed for a time but finally emigrated to the U.S. in 1939. His Passion Week wasn’t revived until the 1990s. Thomas believes these may be the first Seattle area performances.
An additional note: Yet another composer involved in the Russian choral movement — and another Rimsky student — will be in the spotlight next month when Cappella Romana presents the recently rediscovered Passion Week of Maximilian Steinberg, “the last major sacred work composed in Russia before Stalin’s 1932 crackdown (April 11 and 12).
Seattle Pro Musica’s Passio – Light in Darkness concerts take place on Saturday and Sunday, March 8 and 9, both evenings at 8 pm at St. James Cathedral. Tickets here.
On the road: after being in the spotlight in Madrid for the Orquesta Nacional de España’s Carta Bianca Festival, John Adams is being celebrated this week by the Toronto Symphony with the New Creations Festival. The festival culminates on Friday with one of Adams’s most fascinating recent works, Absolute Jest. Here’s the essay I wrote for the original version of Absolute Jest on the occasion of its world premiere by the San Francisco Symphony and the Saint Lawrence String Quartet in 2012:
More than three decades have passed since the San Francisco Symphony gave its first world premiere of music by John Adams (the choral-orchestral Harmonium in 1981). The event marked the beginning of a longstanding relationship between composer and orchestra that has resulted in the commissioning of several landmark works: Adams’s breakthrough orchestral composition, Harmonielehre (a new recording of which the SFS has just been released), El Dorado, the millennial “nativity oratorio” El Niño, the opera A Flowering Tree, and My Father Knew Charles Ives.
Seattle Chamber Players (SCP) just concluded Icebreaker, its biennial two-day festival of new music. This year’s edition, the seventh in their history, was titled open source, with a focus on high-tech music-making.
Artistic director Elena Dubinets — a key figure responsible for the Seattle Symphony’s smart programming — organized a stimulating and provocative program of five compositions spread over two evenings at Seattle’s terrific On the Boards space. SCP’s core members consist of Laura DeLuca (clarinet), David Sabee (cello), Mikhail Shmidt (violin) — all members of the Seattle Symphony — and Paul Taub (flute).
Their ranks were supplemented by a chamber orchestra of fine colleagues, with Alastair Willis conducting for the majority of the two concerts. (The requirements for some of these pieces should count as training for a certification in air traffic control — that’s how nerve-wrackingly intricate they are.)
open source ranged far and wide in terms of ambition, scope, and attitude. There was room for pieces featuring cheeky allusions and playful “rewiring” of musical codes as well as epic-scale updatings of the Gesamtkunstwerk meme and its goal of a total-immersion experience.
Pieces like Spam! by the Portuguese composer Luís Tinoco (on hand as this year’s guest composer) offered a sardonically comic take on the flotsam and jetsam of spam email in our procrastination-information culture. Another type of saturation provided the impetus for a music-and-video piece by the German composer Michael Beil, the title of which did double duty as the name for the festival itself.
The ideal of “open source” culture touches on utopian attitudes of sharing and pooled creativity. In Beil’s retooling of the hypnotic barcarolle from Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, it also suggested a new angle on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” for this era of hyper-reproducible artifacts. In practice, though, open source turned out to be rather less fascinating than in the abstract, on paper.
The Greek composer Yannis Kyriakides also started with a promising concept in his recent Karaoke Etudes, to which this observation by Douglas Coupland serves as an epigraph: “21st-century life is karaoke — a never-ending attempt to maintain dignity while a jumble of data uncontrollably blips across a screen.” And this time, in practice, the interplay of pop-culture artifact, memory, improvisation, and oblique visual cues — with its mix of beguiling innocence and bemusement — cast a charming spell.
The two highlights of open source — a concerto-with-film by Michel van der Aa and a psychedelically tinged “video-opera” by Fausto Romitell — were substantial, visionary pieces featuring extremely complex and sophisticated media synchronizations. (The once-ubiquitous “multi-media” really has started to sound like a quaintly old-fashioned term — something like “mimeograph” or “xerox.”)
And both of these therefore represent one-of-a-kind works. It was a real coup for Elena Dubinets and SCP to score the Northwest premiere of the Dutch composer Michel van der Aa’s Up-close, which had its West Coast premiere in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series just last month. I’ve recently written aboutUp-close — scored for solo cello, string ensemble, and electronic soundtrack — and its radical reimagining of the concerto format as a hybrid of film and live theater.
Simply put, it was thrilling to experience this significant new composition in live performance. As the solo cellist, Julie Albers also had to perform a scripted part in tandem with the images from van der Aa’s filmic counterpoint — a mysteriously never-explained narrative involving an older woman and her traumatic memories (having to do with coded messages, communication, and an implicit backdrop of the Dutch Resistance in the Second World War).
I found Albers’s stern, grainy, edgy sound extremely effective and dramatically compelling. Her phrasing captured the desperation of her “character” with a deeply felt immediacy. I also admired how alert she was to the amazing spectrum of nuances van der Aa has written into the part.
To be able to present a contemporary composition as significant, as cutting edge, and as emotionally engaging as van der Aa’s Up-close underscores the value of SCP’s Icebreaker festivals. Seattle audiences would benefit from more of this kind of boldly planned and executed new work — an undeniable peak of this edition of the festival.
So, too, was the big work on the first night: An Index of Metals by the Italian composer Fausto Romitelli, who died a decade ago (only in his early 40s). Romitelli’s video-opera for soprano and ensemble turned out to be case in which what’s “on paper” pales by comparison to the live experience in real time.
Fausto Romitelli in 2001
Dubinets neatly summarizes Romitelli’s part-sculptural, part-industrial preoccupation with sound, which he thought of as “material to be forged”:
Anything but a formalist composer, Romitelli did not shy away from hybridization, breaking down the barrier between art music and popular music. Distortion, saturation, psychedelic rock-inspired compositions and “dirty” harmonies were part of his musical universe…”
Romitelli’s final work, An Index of Metals, has been characterized as an artistic final testament that synthesizes everything he had developed in his process of treating sound as malleable matter. Remarking on the starting point for his compositions in general, Romitelli wrote: “The grain, thickness, porosity, density, brilliance, and elasticity are the main aspects of these sound sculptures resulting from amplification and electroacoustic treatment as well as simple instrumental writing.” He explained the guiding idea behind An Index of Metals as follows:
The aim … is to turn the secular form of opera into an experience of total perception, plunging the spectator into an incandescent matter that is both luminous and sonorous, a magma of flowing sounds, shapes, and colors, with no narrative but that of hypnosis, possession, and trance. It is a lay ritual, rather like the light shows of the the 1960s or today’s [i.e., at the millennium] rave parties in which space, having assumed a solid form through the volume of sound and visual saturation, appears to twist into a thousand anamorphoses. Rather than calling on our analytical ability, like most contemporary music, “An Index of Metals” aims to take possession of the body with its over-exposition of senses and pleasure.
Granted, that could merely amount to a lot of gobbledegook signifying nothing. But the incredibly meticulous planning that went into this realization paid off: the SCP and their collaborators succeeded in conveying the re-enchanted performance dynamic that has to be there for Romitelli’s magic to work.
In one sense, you could say Romitelli’s rejection of the “analytical” in favor of Dionysian immersion and sensory overload — what the composer calls “the fusion of perception” and “the henceforth limitless body in the furnace of a ritual mass of sound” –makes for a contemporary reincarnation of Romanticism.
Certainly Index recalls the psychedelic Romanticism of groups like Pink Floyd (whose “Welcome to the Machine” from their 1975 album Wish You Were Here gets sampled at the start), but aspects of early-20th-century modernist fusions enter the mix as well. On top of all that, Romitelli uses high tech to fuse sound, image, and spatial perception into a delirious feedback loop of continual “translation.”
The video elements comprise three separate films (created by Paolo Pacchini and Leonardo Romoli), while a solo soprano, accompanied by 11 amplified instruments, sings a text by the Solvenian writer Kenka Lekovich (translated into English).
As the soloist, the Polish soprano Agata Zubel was mesmerizing and indeed “elemental.” (Zubel and SCP have recorded an album together — Cascando — which took a prize in the Polish equivalent of the Grammies in 2011.)
And what an assignment the soprano is given — to project musical-emotional sense from the foggy, twilit timbres of Romitelli’s soundscape. To the fluid stream of video images she sings Lekovich’s texts of “Hellucination.” It all induced a state of awe — an awe both majestically terrifying and ecstatic.
As Romitelli writes, he wanted Index to present “a violent, abstract narrative, denuded of all operatic artifice, providing an intiaiton rite of immersion and a trance of light and sound.”
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 