Filed under: photography
May 22, 2015 • 12:44 pm Comments Off on New Music from Bryce Dessner
New Music from Bryce Dessner
Getting commissioned to write a percussion piece to be paired with your mentor David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature is a pretty impressive vote of confidence. And the result was Bryce Dessner‘s enchanting Music for Woods and Strings (2013), commissioned by Carnegie Hall.
This piece has just been released on Sō Percussion’s new album. Dessner, also known as the guitarist for The National, describes the “chord stick” process he devised for the work: “Using sticks or violin bows, the players can sound either of two harmonies, or play individual strings, melodies, and drone tremolos.” This “hybrid dulcimer” sound, which he likens to “chord hockets,” shows the inspiration of American folk song tradition in its warmly layered rhythmic counterpoint.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic will premiere Dessner’s latest piece, Quilting, as part of the Next on Grand Festival of contemporary American composers, which has just gotten under way (with John Adams to lead a program on Tuesday.
A couple years ago, Dessner compiled a list of his own favorite contemporary works for BoingBoing, including both Adams’s Shaker Loops and John Luther Adams’s For Lou Harrison. I approve the man’s taste.
Filed under: American music, Bryce Dessner, David Lang, John Adams, John Luther Adams, Los Angeles Philharmonic, new music
May 21, 2015 • 10:02 am 2
Language Extinction
2nd-century mural from Teotihuacan, Mexico, depicting a person emitting a speech scroll from his mouth (via Wikipedia)
Fascinating New Yorker article by Judith Thurman on dying languages:
Linguists acknowledge that the data are inexact, but by the end of this century perhaps as many as fifty per cent of the world’s languages will, at best, exist only in archives and on recordings…. If the historical rate of loss is averaged, a language dies about every four months.
[…]
[T]he loss of languages passed down for millennia, along with their unique arts and cosmologies, may have consequences that won’t be understood until it is too late to reverse them.
[…]
If peripheral languages are to survive, they will have to find a way to coexist with what Bob Holman calls the “bully” languages.
Filed under: language
May 20, 2015 • 9:49 am Comments Off on “Musik ist eine heilige Kunst”
“Musik ist eine heilige Kunst”
After Kate Lindsey’s superb performance as The Composer in Seattle Opera’s Ariadne auf Naxos, I just can’t get Strauss’s music out of my head.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal: “He who wishes to live must surpass himself, metamorphose, forget. And yet, persist, not forget, be faithful – that is what everyone’s dignity means.”
Filed under: Kate Lindsey, Seattle Opera, Strauss
May 19, 2015 • 8:23 am Comments Off on Gustav at an Angle
Gustav at an Angle
Gustav Mahler by Auguste Rodin (1909); bronze (National Gallery of Art)
Filed under: Mahler, photography
May 18, 2015 • 8:55 am Comments Off on Seattle Opera: Buffing the Buffa in Ariadne
Seattle Opera: Buffing the Buffa in Ariadne
Kate Lindsey (The Composer) and Sarah Coburn (Zerbinetta); photo (c) Elise Bakketun
My review of Ariadne auf Naxos has now been posted on Bachtrack:
At the end of Seattle Opera’s previous production – a refreshing new staging of Handel’s Semele – the ill-fated heroine is burned by Jupiter’s glorious fire, but the god Bacchus emerges from her destruction: “born as my mother expired in the flames”, as Hugo von Hofmannsthal has the wine god explain in his libretto for Ariadne auf Naxos.
Filed under: directors, review, Seattle Opera, Strauss
May 14, 2015 • 7:31 am Comments Off on Pacific MusicWorks Retunes The Magic Flute
Pacific MusicWorks Retunes The Magic Flute
Cyndia Sieden and Mary Feminear
My review of Pacifc MusicWorks’ Magic Flute production has now been posted on the Musical America site. (The complete review is behind MA’s paywall.) This was a delightfully fresh take on the Mozart classic, matching historically informed performance values with a provocatively revisionist staging (including a newly commissioned translation/adaptaton of Schikaneder’s libretto):
SEATTLE — A couple years after the conductor, lutenist, and recent Grammy laureate Stephen Stubbs resettled in his native Seattle in 2006 — following three decades based in Europe (mostly in Germany) — he established Pacific MusicWorks, a production company focused primarily on presenting Baroque opera and oratorio in innovative collaborations. PMW’s latest project, which closed on Sunday, offered a fresh perspective on The Magic Flute by combining period instruments with a provocatively anti-traditional staging directed by Dan Wallace Miller and a newly commissioned translation and adaptation of the libretto by the playwright Karen Hartman.
Filed under: directors, early music, Mozart, opera, review, Stephen Stubbs
May 13, 2015 • 7:54 am 1
After Life: Music of Remembrance Premieres New Opera
Robert Orth (Picasso) and Catherine Cook (Gertrude Stein); (c) Michael Beaton
Just posted on Bachtrack, my latest review is of the world premiere of After Life by Seattle’s Music of Remembrance:
“Questions remember me,” sings the unnamed girl in After Life, the one-act opera by composer Tom Cipullo and librettist David Mason that received its world première on Monday evening in Seattle. Rounded up by the Nazis and sent from her orphanage in a French village to a concentration camp, the girl sings to us from the ‘other side’, the voice of a life stolen by the Holocaust. She knows she has been forgotten – yet the girl’s poignant questions make her presence indelible as she encounters the spirits of Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso in the afterlife: two famous figures who survived the war while also living in France.
Filed under: Holocaust, Music of Remembrance, new opera, review
May 11, 2015 • 7:10 am Comments Off on Not an Ima-Titian
Not an Ima-Titian
photo by Lucy Millson-Watkins/English Heritage
Titian’s Mistress, long regarded as a post-Titian imitation, turns out to be Titian’s painting, according to English Heritage conservator Alice Tate-Harte. From The Guardian:
It was a heart-stopping moment when the conservator Alice Tate-Harte gently cleaned off centuries of thick black paint and grime and uncovered square Roman letters spelling out the name TITIANUS. The reputation of the bare-breasted young woman in the painting was instantly transformed: she has turned out to be a genuine work by one of the most revered masters of European painting, not a much later imitation of his style.
[…]
The painting of a woman half-wearing a sumptuous gold braid-trimmed silk and fur robe was known as Titian’s Mistress but was believed to have been painted long after his death in 1576. It has been hiding in public view for centuries. Now cleaned of layers of overpainting covering up historic damage, including the time when it was slung into a chest of booty looted from the Spanish royal collection, it will go on display this summer for the first time as a genuine Titian at Apsley House, the palatial London home of the Duke of Wellington, now in the care of English Heritage.
May 8, 2015 • 5:41 am Comments Off on The Horror! The Horror!
The Horror! The Horror!
Daniel Cilli; © Steve di Bartolomeo
I wish I’d been able to see the American premiere of Tarik O’Regan’s opera based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was given by San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle in an all-too-brief production.
The intrepid Lisa Hirsch reports:
All things considered, it’s something of a surprise that Tarik O’Regan’s opera Heart of Darkness took four years to reach the United States after its 2011 premiere at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Studio Theatre. Its brevity and eloquence, as well as the small forces it requires, make it a natural for adventurous opera companies everywhere.
Leave it to the ever-alert Opera Parallèle, champion of contemporary and 20th-century opera, to remedy the situation. Its production, strongly cast and beautifully played, scores another success for the company and makes a strong case for the opera.”
Here’s Joshua Kosman’s assessment:
The immersive qualities of the opera have two sources. One is the kaleidoscopic inventiveness of O’Regan’s score, which uses a chamber ensemble and vivid vocal writing to conjure up the moral miasma of the African interior as Marlow encounters it, and to delineate the few nuggets of action that move the plot forward.”
And over at Bachtrack, Jamie Robles writes:
Opera Parallèle’s production visuals enhance the move from scene to scene, adding to the music’s flow. A large screen fills the back of the stage, and across it projections splash colorful images of Ohio-based illustrator Matt Kish, taken from his book interpreting The Heart of Darkness, which offers one illustration for each page of the novella. Kish’s work is similar to that of many graphic novel artists: highly stylized with geometric and simplified forms; the colors are bright and primary with heavy black outlines. The imagery has the simplicity of cartoons, and also their instantaneous impact. Interestingly, the artwork was similar to Phillips’ graphic reworkings of the pages in The Humument.
Filed under: new music, Tarik O'Regan
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 