MEMETERIA

March 5, 2014 • 10:41 am Comments Off on Passio: Light in Darkness

Passio: Light in Darkness

Karen Thomas

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).

And: Seattle Symphony is presenting a special symposium on March 22-23 on the theme Creative Diaspora: Émigré Composers from the Former USSR. Speakers will include no less than Russian music authority Richard Taruskin. The symposium is scheduled in conjunction with the U.S. premiere of Alexander Raskatov’s Night Butterflies Piano Concerto.

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.

—Thomas May

Filed under: choral music, new music, preview

March 4, 2014 • 9:30 am Comments Off on No Joke

No Joke

John Adams; photo (c) Deborah O’Grady

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.

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Filed under: American music, essay, John Adams, new music

March 3, 2014 • 11:11 am 1

The Bach Passions Project in Seattle

Over the weekend, Stephen Stubbs and his Pacific MusicWorks company concluded their ambitious Passions Project with performances of the St. John Passion. The project included partnering with the Seattle Symphony for the St. Matthew Passion the previous weekend. Here’s my review for Bachtrack:

Adducing Simon Schama’s comparison of Rubens’s Descent from the Cross with the same subject as painted by Rembrandt, the conductor and Bach authority John Eliot Gardiner has observed that the differences drawn by the art historian – chiefly, between an emphasis on “action and reaction” in the former and “contemplation and witness” in the latter – might broadly be applied to Bach’s two great Passions as well: St John and St Matthew, respectively. Audiences in Seattle have been provided an opportunity to compare and contrast these unfathomably rich works on the basis of live performances of both, presented over consecutive weekends.

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Filed under: Bach, Pacific MusicWorks, review, Seattle Symphony

March 2, 2014 • 9:04 am 1

Another Look at Bach

Possibly the young J.S. Bach c. 1715 — or possibly not; painting by J. E. Rentsch, the Elder

J.S. Bach has been much on my mind of late. I need to make time to plunge into John Eliot Gardiner’s new book on the composer, especially after George B. Stauffer’s review in the recent New York Review of Books has whet my appetite.

In Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, Gardiner distills a lifetime of devotion and study to the music of the Thomaskantor (one of the epithets by which Germans refer to Bach). According to Stauffer, this weighty tome basically revolves around the great question of “just how Bach managed to express the inexpressible, especially with regard to death, and what life experiences stood behind his compositional decisions.”

Gardiner recently started serving as president of the Leipzig Bach Archive and has managed to create a controversial portrait by drawing on recent findings of the archive — a portrait dramatically at odds with the longstanding image of an obedient musical citizen:

Moving beyond the hagiographies of the past, he presents a fallible Bach, a musical genius who on the one hand is deeply committed to illuminating and expanding Luther’s teachings through his sacred vocal works… but on the other hand is a rebellious and resentful musician, harboring a lifelong grudge against authority — a personality disorder stemming from a youth spent among ruffians and abusive teachers. Hiding behind Bach, creator of the Matthew Passion and B-Minor Mass, Gardiner suggests, is Bach “the reformed teenage thug.”

What sounds especially fascinating is that, according to Stauffer, Gardiner roots his speculations in the music (though he apparently omits discussion of the instrumental and keyboard pieces), since he views the music as “the anchor to which we can return again and again, and the principal means of validating or refuting any conclusion about its author.”

The result is that Gardiner “forces us to rethink Bach’s life and how adversity and faith affected his vocal compositions. And [he] takes us inside his world, allowing us to see the works from the standpoint of composer, performer, and listener.”

Over at The Guardian, Peter Conrad points out that Gardiner takes Bach’s intense faith for granted in his exploration of the sacred music, yet “he still makes the effort to account for the emotional force and consolatory balm of Bach’s music in ways that are humanly engaging.”

He treats the cantatas as psychodramas, and thinks of the Passions as three-dimensional versions of opera which, rather than exhibiting the vocal and histrionic antics of sacred monsters in a fictional world onstage, address us directly when the soloists perform their hortatory arias and require us, in chorales that were sung by the entire congregation, to participate in Christ’s tragedy and in the divine comedy that is its sequel. Gardiner’s analogy for the way the Passions work comes from a literary form that could not be less spiritually exalted: he draws on theorists of the novel such as Bakhtin to explain the “dialogic threads” and complementary “subjectivities” that Bach draws together, and despite his own orthodoxy he makes frequent allusions to Philip Pullman, for whom art is our demonic repudiation of an oppressive God.

While the title Bach in the Castle of Heaven suggests something emphatically pious, Conrad adds, “Gardiner’s is a festive book, enlivened by the ‘joy and zest’ of Bach’s ‘dance-impregnated music.’ Those dances are sacral but also rowdily profane… Quoting the sociologist Émile Durkheim, he defines religion as a ‘collective effervescence,’ a shared ecstasy – more readily available, perhaps, in the mud at Glastonbury or clubbing under the arches in Vauxhall than at a church service in 18th-century Leipzig.”

Just like Shakespeare, Bach will always be the mirror of our own age as well.

Filed under: Bach, book recs

March 1, 2014 • 10:53 am 1

Collecting, Hoarding, and the Canon

CD collection of someone I know

David Wallis explores the psychology and cultural implications of hoarding in a recent essay for Nautilus. He points out that for the first time, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has listed hoarding as a clearly defined disorder. (And the topic fueled six whole seasons of A&E’s series about the havoc wrought by compulsive hoarding.) Wallis cites figures from the American Psychiatric Association claiming that “2 to 5 percent of the United States population suffers from” this disorder.

This point especially caught my attention: “Those with hoarding disorders, then, have an amplified sense of something that all of us cherish: Our deepest feelings for our families and close friends, and our artistic sensibilities.”

But apparently hoarders suffer from a weakening of capacity alongside this tendency to amplify positive qualities. This weakness involves problems with wiring in the part of the brain responsible for “motivation, executive control, and response to conflict.” Those suffering from a hoarding complex often “avoid the anxiety of throwing something away” simply by deferring the decision indefinitely. Wallis consulted with Monika Eckfield, a professor of physiological nursing at California State University, San Francisco:

“This is common to all of us,” Eckfield says. Like the neuroscientists, she believes hoarding becomes abnormal as a result of “mis-wiring” in the brain’s executive functions. Chronic hoarders “have a much harder time following through,” she says. “They get distracted. They get disorganized. They end up adding to the pile, and the idea of sorting through those piles is very overwhelming.”

Wallis concludes:

Modern science has clearly revealed why hoarding deserves the designation of “disorder”: It is reflected in physical differences in how the brain is wired. At the same time, it is something that reflects to us some of the qualities and decisions with which we all struggle: Consumerism, attachment, decision-making, time management — and, at some level, survival. I’m left wondering if it is any coincidence that it was in 2013, when society demands so much from us in each of these capacities, that hoarding has taken on full-fledged disorder status in the DSM-V handbook.

Admittedly this may seem like an odd leap to make, but it occurred to me that the phenomenon of “holding on” — of wanting to preserve a sense of the musical past — started becoming a serious factor in Western music during another period of intense social and political change: after the French Revolution and during the upheavals of the early 19th century. Within a few decades, a dramatically new paradigm had become the prevailing attitude.

Mendelssohn’s famous performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is just one example of this shift toward the concept of timeless masterpieces that should be handed down to the future. The old habit of allowing music to recede into oblivion with past generations — a consumable object that quickly went out of fashion — gave way to the permanent “canon” and an entirely new model of music history that continues to influence the way we think about composers today and even how composers think of themselves.

The dawn of recording enabled an exponential expansion of this tendency. Even more, it allowed for endless sifting through the past to make the claim for composers who had fallen through the cracks but who deserve rediscovery. If the “anxiety of influence” demands a kind of creative mutilation of the looming giants of the past, could it be that the canon — not so much who belongs to it but the rationale behind it — provokes an anxiety not unlike that found with hoarding?

Filed under: aesthetics, psychology

February 27, 2014 • 10:31 am 1

At the Frye: Noguchi in China

Isamu Noguchi. Peking Drawing (man reclining), 1930. Ink on paper. The Noguchi Museum.

Variations on the East-meets-West meme are certainly familiar in art history, but the details really do matter. Take the case of Los Angeles-born Isamu Noguchi, the son of an “East weds West” union.

Noguchi’s hugely influential career as a sculptor, landscape architect, and furniture designer is usually examined with reference to the inspiration he found in Japan during his initial sojourn there in 1931. But the exhibition Isamu Noguchi and Qi Baishi: Beijing 1930, which just opened at Seattle’s Frye Museum, brings us fascinating insights about the impact of a very different Asian source: the fruit of Noguchi’s six-month-long visit to Beijing (then known as Peking) from July 1930 to January 1931.

Having spent some time in Paris thanks to a Guggenheim grant — where he worked as Brâncuși’s assistant — Noguchi was already developing a reputation with his abstract sculptures (and celebrity portrait busts to bring in cash). After returning to Paris for a show, he headed East but decided to make a lengthy detour from his intended destination of Japan and stopped in Beijing.

It was during this period of intense personal introspection that Noguchi was introduced to the master ink painter Qi Baishi (1864–1957). As had been the case with Brâncuși, they shared no mutual language in the conventional sense — Noguchi spoke no Mandarin, Qi no English — yet the young artist, in search of a father figure, discovered a remarkable affinity for Qi’s work. (During his deferred trip to Japan, he hoped to make a connection with his estranged real father, the writer Yone Noguchi.) They became friends, and Qi mentored Noguchi in the medium of brush ink paintings.

Qi Baishi. Lotus and Dragonfly, 20th century. Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper. Michael Gallis Collection. Photo: Dennis Nodine

The result was more than 100 ink paintings known as the Peking Drawings. This exhibit, curated by Natsu Oyobe, is the first time a substantial number of these have been displayed alongside the work of Qi Baishi. “I did figure drawings, because that was what I knew how to do,” wrote Noguchi. “How ashamed I was of my limitations when I visited the painter Qi Baishi, whom I adopted as a teacher.” A selection of drawings created just before this life-changing trip is also on view, allowing us to assess the impact of Qi and other Chinese artists.

Especially striking is the difference in subject matter Noguchi chose, in contrast to the traditional themes of nature in Qi’s exquisite paintings: the human body, frequently nude, and mothers nursing or cradling babies in particular. In terms of scale, with their elongated dimensions, we can already see Noguchi’s later aesthetic foreshadowed.

In an essay in the fine accompanying catalogue, Lang Shaojun observes that “the basis of Noguchi’s painting remained essentially Western… His sketches are free and uninhibited, not subject to the constraints of a plastic realism associated with fine lines. Heavy ink sketching is superimposed on precise, delicate, realistic images. A layer of abstraction deconstructs and destroys the original sketch. The conscious intertwining of these two different methods creates a form-like body and its shadow, a shapeless non-shadow, an isomorph of a tangled national identity.”

Isamu Noguchi. Mother and Child, 1930. Ink on paper. Collection Samuel and Alexandra May.

Museum director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker pointed out during the press preview that Chinese scholars and art historians are keenly interested in this topic at present — and in the similar cultural cross-connections explored in the Frye’s adjoining new exhibit, Mark Tobey and Teng Baiye: Seattle/Shanghai (to be discussed in a separate post).

“When you come upon your own culture mirrored in art through these sorts of connections, from another culture, it makes you see things you didn’t realize were there,” she remarked. Because of the disruptions of history and political developments over the last century, “what we are learning about these relationships now is on the cutting edge of scholarship.”

Birnie Danzker’s own essay in the catalogue, “Grabbism: 1930s,” underlines the larger implications of the young Noguchi’s confident borrowings and the productive line of questioning these open up:

The debate about the true nature of Noguchi’s drawings and sculpture from the 1930s and whether his work is closer in spirit to that of his teacher Qi Baishi or to that of the Chinese modernist Lin Fengmian is a fascinating study in how, after a century of cultural exchange between modern China and the West, the phenomenon of mutual “misreadings” of Western and Western art…now constitutes an integral part of the history of art.

–Thomas May

Filed under: aesthetics, art exhibition, art history, Frye Museum

February 24, 2014 • 11:15 am Comments Off on Jenny Lin Plays Solo Stravinsky

Jenny Lin Plays Solo Stravinsky

What a refreshing listen: I’m getting quickly addicted to the Taiwan-born pianist Jenny Lin’s new release, which is the latest to come out on Arkiv Music’s Steinway & Sons label. It’s devoted to Stravinsky’s music for solo piano — along with a delightful mini-Firebird suite of three movements arranged by Guido Agosti for keyboard.

Yes, over the past year my ears have been oversated and oversaturated with Stravinsky’s orchestral music, especially the three big Russian ballets. But Lin has put together a nifty program that brings a fresh focus to the Russian’s musical thinking and evolution.

Lin’s crisply incisive attacks and sheer sense of fun are all part of a style shaped by musical intelligence and determination. And her playing shines light on Stravinsky’s concept of counterpoint as well as the ingenuity of his rhythmic inventions.

In his excellent booklet essay, Ben Finane quotes Stravinsky on his first forays into the jazz idiom, as manifested in the delirious Ragtime for 11 Instruments (1918), included here in a version transcribed by the composer:

My knowledge of jazz was derived exclusively from copies of sheet music, and as I had never actually heard any of the music performed, I borrowed its rhythmic style not as played, but as written. [so much for oral versus literary tradition.] I could imagine jazz sound, however, or so I like to think. Jazz meant, in any case, a wholly new sound in my music, and ‘L’Histoire’ marks my final break with the Russian orchestral school in which I had been fostered.

Pieces like the Piano Sonata of 1924 offer a fascinating glimpse into Stravinsky’s rethinking of Baroque and Classical elements — not just by way of cheeky “allusion,” but as knowingly perverse swervings from the paradigm. So, too, with his quasi-Bachian counterpoint and ornamentation that, to borrow Finane’s apt phrase, are “tempered with a saboteur’s delight.”

Filed under: CD review, piano

February 23, 2014 • 8:47 am Comments Off on Thought To Ponder

Thought To Ponder

What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’, which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.

–the critic James Wood reflecting on exile, homelessness, and “homelooseness” in the latest London Review of Books

Filed under: thought to ponder

February 20, 2014 • 9:16 pm Comments Off on The Cruelty of Strangers

The Cruelty of Strangers

Menotti’s The Consul at Seattle Opera; photo by Elise Bakketun

Here’s my City Arts preview of the production of Gin Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, opening this weekend at Seattle Opera:

It may seem odd for an opera company to be cagey about revealing the ending of a work written more than a half-century ago. But Seattle Opera is holding the cards very tight to its chest when it comes to The Consul by Gian Carlo Menotti. Seattle Opera’s production, which opens this weekend, marks the company’s first staging of the work and will certainly be the first live experience of it for many in the audience. Premiered in March 1950, The Consul enjoyed a flash of glory when it transferred to a Broadway theatre that year, playing for some 286 performances.

Set in a grey, unidentified totalitarian state in the middle of the 20th century, The Consul revolves around the plight of Magda Sorel and her husband John, a dissident who is forced, shortly after the opera begins, to go into hiding as an enemy of the state. Magda desperately attempts to negotiate the dehumanizing bureaucracy of the state Consulate to arrange for legal emigration.

There are obvious tinges of Kafka and other poets of modern alienation as Magda repeatedly tries to satisfy the baffling documentation requirements demanded by the Consul’s office. The secret police stalk her, closing in on her husband’s whereabouts. In the final scene, after they arrest John at the Consul’s office, “it comes down to whether the secretary will break the rules and do the right thing…” Or at least that’s how the cliffhanger synopsis on Seattle Opera’s website describes the ending.

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Filed under: directors, opera, Seattle Opera

February 19, 2014 • 12:42 pm 6

Seattle Chamber Players and Their Ice-Breaking Festival of New Music

Seattle Chamber Players

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 about Up-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.”

Filed under: acoustics, aesthetics, new music

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