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).
Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony in rehearsal at Carnegie Hall
I’m still processing the experience of the Seattle Symphony’s concert Tuesday evening at Carnegie Hall — part of this week’s Spring for Music series, which will sadly constitute the final chapter of that worthy festival’s history.
By now the program itself is as familiar as a friend. I heard the second half twice in Seattle, some rehearsal sessions, and the entire program last Friday during the SSO’s epic “preview” evening of the Carnegie adventure for Seattle audiences. But Tuesday included an extra dimension of excitement: the New York premiere of Become Ocean, the reactions of major critics in a world music center, and the unmistakeable ambience of Carnegie Hall itself. Even disregarding my obvious bias, this was received as a triumph for the amazing talent of the Seattle Symphony and its music director Ludovic Morlot.
Of course there’s always a substantial amount of guesswork and gut instinct to rely on when it comes to a new composition. Most premieres tend to be somewhere in the vast “middle” range of quality and potential durability, but it’s certainly all too easy to get it wrong, to err in the direction of fatuous dismissal or foolhardy hyperbole. I know I’ve been guilty of both.
So it’s all the more thrilling when instinct kicks in early on in a first encounter with a piece — as it did for me and the John Luther Adams — and you sense that this might be an even greater achievement than you could have reasonably expected. On both occasions I was able to share the experience with trained musician friends who reaffirmed this “instinctual” response to Become Ocean. This time I found myself tuning in even more to an underlying sense of elegy in the music.
Certainly JLA’s big orchestral piece is at the furthest possible remove from any New Agey connotations or glib “environmental” message that some descriptions I’ve seen imply. (That’s not to deny or diminish the composer’s environmental commitment, which is not reducible to a bland gesture of political art.) Instead, this is challenging music, requiring a major effort from the listener while at the same time profoundly engaging the emotions. The days of either/or cliches like “tough” modernism versus “easy-listening” neo-Romanticism should be behind us.
There’s so much to say about this music and its effect, so much about its implications as a commission, that I’m working on a profile of John Luther Adams and Become Ocean. More on that when the time comes.
Meanwhile, the thoughtful dramaturgy of the program — combining JL Adams with Varèse and Debussy — was justly admired for its contrasts and cross-connections. Here’s a quick round-up of the critical coverage I’ve seen so far:
–Alex Ross, as usual, really gets it. He wrote the first substantial critique of Become Ocean after the world premiere last year in Seattle (which I had to miss). On Tuesday Alex found that “Carnegie’s mellow, resonance-rich space brought out the Wagnerian aspect of Become Ocean, favoring sonorities of strings and brass,” adding that from his position in the orchestral seats, “much of the score’s glittering detail was lost … “and the most delicate percussion effects disappeared as well.”
—New York magazine’s Justin Davidson neatly summarized the piece’s overall effect: “Serenity comes tightly wrapped up with terror.” He points out that, while Become Ocean is “about boundless nature,”it’s an indoor piece, ravishingly traditional in the way it relies on walls and floor and ceiling to convert raw sound into the illusion of shimmering surfaces and the violent deep.”
–Tony Tommasini writes in The New York Times of how Adams extends the familiar idea of an “organic” composition that evolves “in a swirling mass of sound,” pushing it in “an uncompromising, courageous way.”
–On that score, I was puzzled as to why Martin Bernheimer, in his positive review, insists on labeling Become Ocean “an extended tone-poem.” Even the loose or distant mimesis traditionally associated with the Romantic notion of that genre is merely one level to which JLA alludes.
–At New York Classical Review, George Grella found the programming concept to be mere “window dressing for abstract music about form, structure, and time.” Fair enough, but I disagree with Grella’s assessment of the orchestra’s playing in the Debussy as “surprisingly thin and light.” It was, in my opinion, anything but — in fact, unusually, and unconventionally, muscular and finely articulated, very far from “idées reçues” of French “Impressionist” music.
–On Bachtrack, David Allen offers an interesting and lengthy reflection in which he quotes Gurnemanz’s famous, enigmatic aphorism “Here space becomes time” anent Become Ocean. (I’ve been thinking of another Parsifal reference that comes to mind when I listen to this music, from the Prelude.)
Incidentally, I notice all these critics are male and would love to see a female critic’s reaction to this music. I know my pianist friend Judith was impressed on her first hearing, aptly likening the experience to an extended encounter with a Rothko painting.
Update: this isn’t a review of the concert, but Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim published a preview for The New York Times. There she writes that Become Ocean “submerges the listener in a swirling, churning wash of sound.”
Update No. 2: Just discovered that the world premiere of Become Ocean was covered for the local Seattle media by Melinda Bargreen. She didn’t much care for it:
But after the first 20 minutes or so, the musical ideas had pretty much run their course, and there were no further developments to justify sustaining the piece. (Some listeners in the balcony areas made a discreet but early retreat.) At least the music fell gratefully on the ear, delivering consonance rather than dissonance, and in its very length, “Become Ocean” evoked a sense of vast oceanic scale.
Interesting, too, to see some of the reader comments from back then:
“spiritdancer47,” mistaking the piece for a symphony, didn’t find much there there:
Having been a dancer for PNB, I am familiar with the extended time it takes for the orchestra in the pit to warm up. Listening to Adams’ symphony took me back to that time…and left me there. I would be one of the “early leavers.”
“proud2Bliberal” gave it more thought by trying to locate precedents:
“Become Ocean” was wonderful. It is the perfect piece for just putting your head back, closing your eyes and letting the sounds happen around you. It conveyed what it must feel like to be in Alaska near the ocean and the forests. The piece had a refreshing and genuine feeling, and somewhat of the personality of American experimentalists Charles Ives and Henry Cowell. Morlot was the perfect conductor for this work. Clearly the piece has its roots in Debussy’s “La Mer” and the ocean passages of “Pelleas.” As a French conductor, Morlot was able to conduct all of those “Debussyiste” sea rumblings (bruits, in French). It would be a great piece to have on a CD at home.
And I hope “vf” didn’t place a bet on this prediction:
“It would be unfortunate if the SSO took the Luther Adams piece to NYC, it would be a disaster, hope they reconsider. In comparison to the works of composers like Arvo Part or Phillip Glass Become Ocean is minor league at best.”
Reviewer Christopher Hart points out that the book offers fascinating examples of the many ways creative types “discover for themselves Flaubert’s famous advice that one should live like a bourgeois and put one’s bohemianism into one’s work.”
Thomas Mann evidently loved his kip, rising at 8am, enjoying a good hour’s nap in the afternoon and going to bed around midnight, in a separate bedroom from his wife. Richard Strauss appears to have slept a…
Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre presented by the New York Philharmonic in 2010; (c) Chris Lee 2010
My new feature for Symphony magazine’s Fall 2013 issue is available online now:
Total immersion: that was the radical brand of opera Richard Wagner hoped to inaugurate at Bayreuth. To enhance its effect, he famously made the “invisible orchestra” an integral part of his design. Yet the overall ideal of intensified theatrical illusion remained frustratingly out of reach, hampered by the limitations of the stage technology of the time. Cosima Wagner reported her husband’s sardonic joke in the aftermath of his deep disappointment over the first complete Ring: “Now that I’ve created the invisible orchestra, I’d like to invent the invisible stage!”
The concert hall has meanwhile long provided an appealing milieu in which to experience opera with another kind of immediacy—one that focuses on the musical dimension of this most collaborative of the…
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” Dan Kremer as King Lear; photo by John Ulman
To grapple with the challenge of staging King Lear has to be the Shakespearean equivalent of trying to produce an entire Ring cycle. The play is so vast, so all-encompassing, its web of theatrical and emotional motifs so intricately woven, that it’s no wonder old-fashioned — well, OK, ancient — critical opinion deemed the play simply “too huge for the stage” (A.C. Bradley).
But visionary productions over the past century have dispelled that misgiving. Or maybe it’s just that the course the world itself has undergone makes us more receptive to Lear‘s devastating dramatic truths. Sometimes it almost seems as if Shakespeare had written the script for our times — and we’re just bumbling along, trying to act it out. Things don’t just fall apart; they coil toward entropy.
In Seattle Shakespeare’s new production, the play’s apocalyptic dimensions are essentially eclipsed by the familial — and all-too-familiar — realism of dysfunctional relationships and personal psychology.
Linda K. Morris, Patrick Allcorn, and Dan Kremer; photo by John Ulman
Director Sheila Daniels conceives the tragedy as an intimate echo chamber of unstable characters who are progressively losing it. What they undergo entails a series of variations on the theme of Lear’s crack-up. Scene by scene (with the whole divided here into three acts), their attempts to impose order on events, to get closer to their desires, become increasingly desperate. The overriding impression isn’t so much of the grim inevitability of consequences — Shakespeare’s merciless updating of classical “fate” — as of psychological meltdown.
As the ex-monarch, Dan Kremer underscores this approach through the unpredictable variability of his temper. It works very well for the first sections of the play — particularly in how it clarifies the relationship between Lear and his daughters that has already charted the course of the tragedy long before it begins.
We see how Goneril (Linda K. Morris) and Regan (Debra Pralle), given neatly differentiated portrayals here, aren’t just self-serving but have been brought up to fear daddy’s mercurial outbursts. Elinor Gunn’s Cordelia shows a steely stubbornness she must have learned first-hand. That’s what keeps her from seeing the danger she puts herself in — not a martyr complex to speak truth to power.
As for their husbands, while the Duke of Cornwall compresses into a sadistic psychopath (Gordon Carpenter), Shakespeare gives amplitude to the Duke of Albany (Patrick Allcorn) to grow in self-awareness and influence.
What lacks the needed emotional force are the actual climaxes marking each way-station in Lear’s descent. Kremer’s scene on the heath becomes just another fit, his verbal torrent more a fest of self-pity. By the same token, the Lear Kremer depicts in the final scenes fails to stir any deeper pity than he already has at the beginning of his long humiliation.
Kremer is more compelling in his interactions with “the other half” — with the fellow victims of ruin who never seem to faze him as they cross his path and all head toward the final confrontations at Dover. His reunion scene with the blinded Gloucester (Michael Winters) is especially resonant in its unsettling blend of horror and comic absurdity.
Dan Kremer and Michael Winters; photo by John Ulman
Some stand-out performances by others in the cast tilt the focus of the play in interestingly unexpected directions. Eric Riedmann’s chillingly embittered Edmund — possibly the most accomplished single interpretation — conveys the malign intelligence of a Iago yet always feels human. It’s one of Daniels’ strengths to clarify each character’s motivations in a way that makes them psychologically persuasive, further emphasizing the intimacy of family connections in this production.
Riedmann moreover revels in Shakespeare’s poetry, articulating its sonorities and rhythms with a relish and variety I wish were not otherwise the exception in this cast. The only misstep is the close-to-campy exaggeration of the sexual dalliance between him and Regan.
Linda K. Morris and Eric Riedmann; photo by John Ulman
Winters makes Gloucester’s wishful gullibility work, and the scenes with his two sons are among the most vividly realized. In his guise as Poor Tom, Jorge Chacon draws on physical hints he’s shown us as the nervous if good-natured Edgar.
King Lear is notable for the overdetermination of the fool archetype. Along with the official fool (Todd Jefferson Moore), the disguised Kent (played as a “Duchess” by the splendid Amy Thone) and Poor Tom on the heath reinforce the fool’s function of bearing witness to the truth as they retreat most deeply into their roles. Thone and Jefferson have a winning dynamic together and help re-introduce some of the play’s larger perspectives — particularly, its obsession with the power of language to shape reality, both positively and negatively. This is what gives the humor they interject its edge.
After all, they continue to subject Lear to the treatment that outraged him when it came from Cordelia. But even to “speak what we feel” is a kind of rhetoric, if the mirror side of Lear’s fulminations and curses. Language is the one thing the dispossessed king is left with — the very language he obviously abused throughout his reign.
Dan Kremer, Craig Peterson, Sophie Paterson, Amy Thone, and Jonathan Crimeni; photo by John Ulman
The scenic conception is notably weak and lags far behind the many fine nuances of the ensemble’s acting. Daniels, who collaborated with set designer Craig Wollam, opts for a colorless, ultra-minimalist playing space with a backdrop of hanging plastic and linen sheets and a scaffold that rolls to and fro. It is a way of making the stage the world, but the process of stripping away so essential to the play’s arc has already happened by the start.
Melanie Burgess’s abstract-pattern, cheerless costumes seem out of sync with the high contrasts of Jessica Trundy’s lighting. I do like the effect of cruel illumination upon the arrival at Dover, but the veer toward a horizontal Rothko glow at the end puzzles. Robertson Witmer picks up on the script’s references to drums to create a sternly percussive sound design.
Seattle Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear plays through May 17 at the Cornish Playhouse (formerly Intiman) at Seattle Center, Wed. – Sun. Tickets here or call 206 733-8222.
It’s the birthday of one of my musical heroes, Duke Ellington (born on this day in my former hometown in 1899).
In his review of Terry Teachout’s new biography of the master, James Gavin describes the secret of his band’s sound:
Ellington played piano, but his real instrument was the orchestra. The sound he created was a tapestry of bluesy textures, lowdown swing and solo instrumental voices that growled, cried or wailed. Ellington led the band with a majesty that made him seem truly royal.
And here’s an excerpt from my essay for the National Symphony’s upcoming New Moves orchestral-ballet festival featuring music of the Duke — in this case, the giddy and infectious “Giggling Rapids”:
“Giggling Rapids” is a brief scene from Ellington’s belated debut as a ballet composer, The River. It dates from late in his career (1970) and was commissioned by American Ballet Theatre, with choreography by Alvin Ailey — his first large-scale collaboration with Ellington. The composer — uncharacteristically, notes Terry Teachout in his new biography — immersed himself in famous classical depictions of water to fuel his inspiration (think La mer, the “Sea Interludes” from Peter Grimes, Smetana’s own “river music,” the Moldau).
Like the mighty Mississippi, The River encompasses a multitude of meanings and perspectives. Ellington, in his memoir Music Is My Mistress, describes a guiding metaphor of life’s passage from birth to death and rebirth as the river courses on down to the sea. He likens the development of an individual to the river’s passage. “Giggling Rapids,” with its restless energy and catchy, joyous, ever-repeated motif, occurs more or less at the toddler stage, when this imaginary Everyman “races and runs and dances and skips and trips all over the backyard until, exhausted, he relaxes and rolls down the Lake” (the ensuing section).
Photo of Jeffrey Stock (l) and Marc Acito (r) by Jeff Carpenter.
It was just a little over a century ago that E.M. Forster published A Room with a View, neatly bookmarking the end of the strictly organized Edwardian era he so memorably satirizes. But amid its social critique, the novel traces a journey of romantic discovery. This is the journey undertaken by the heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, as the promise of love prompts her to challenge the code of conventional behavior she has been brought up to obey.
The success of the 1985 film A Room with a View, produced with characteristic opulence by the Merchant-Ivory team, won a new generation of fans over to Forster’s elegant fiction. After all, Lucy’s awakening begins during an actual journey, and the stunning Italian and English landscapes of the novel’s setting lend themselves naturally to cinematography.
But writer Marc Acito and composer-lyricist Jeffrey Stock decided that Forster’s vision is also ideally suited to the medium of musical comedy, and their hunch quickly attracted the interest of theaters devoted to nurturing new works. Following initial incubation at the Musical Theatre Lab at Running Deer Ranch (located at the base of Mt. Adams), Acito and Stock were invited by San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre to audition what they’d come up with. Nine months later, A Room with a View received its world premiere there in March 2012.
The British Library Board has released some online samples illustrating recent theories about the kind of pronunciation that would have been current in Shakespeare’s time. And it’s a far cry from the Very Serious Accent that sounds so at home among the aristos at Downton Abbey.
David Crystal, a British linguist who has also written about the social impact of texting, is a prominent expert in the field known as “original pronunciation.” OP is about putting the theory of how Shakespeare and his colleagues would have pronounced the Bard’s words into practice. You might think of it as a sort of linguistic equivalent to the historically informed performance practice movement familiar from early music. OP has been going strong for about a decade, starting with landmark productions of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida at the Globe Theatre in London.
We all know about the paradox of the New Media Age: information everywhere, our memories now downloaded onto our phones, instant access to any fact, but…is this overflow of info making us less critical? Just which of those “facts” are actually true?
Nowadays it’s not just the ocean of information that’s the problem: it’s how much bad information is out there, from dangerously misguided “medical” advice to half-baked assertions and those incorrect/half-correct little memettes on which music writers rely far too much — and in the process keep in circulation.
This is where the new media ironically end up working against the diffusion of knowledge. The problem is that certain factoids that sprouted up somewhere eons ago, in a seriously outdated book or note, might have represented the best knowledge back then (or sometimes just a brazen guess), but these end up getting repeated thanks…
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 