April 13, 2024 • 2:14 pm Comments Off on Thomas Adès and the Danish Quartet
Wreath — for Franz Schubert is the latest creation from one of the world’s most-sought-after composers. “I am most grateful to the great Danish String Quartet for giving me the time and encouragement to realize and develop this new path in my work,” Adès writes in the freshly completed score.
My program notes for the Cal Performances performance in April 2024 can be found here.
Filed under: Cal Performances, chamber music, commissions, Danish String Quartet, Schubert, Thomas Adès
April 5, 2024 • 10:55 am Comments Off on Slow Meadow at the Good Shepherd Chapel
Tonight at the Good Shepherd Chapel, the Wayward Music Series is presenting the neoclassical soundscapes of Gregory Allison & Slow Meadow at 8:00pm. Tickets: $20 GA / $30 Reserved.
From the press release:
Gregory Allison creates with a single violin a sound that travels across great landscapes. He has toured the world with violin in hand and is endlessly inspired by the instrument’s journey around the globe, especially its use in South Indian Classical music. His live performance blends the Indian Classical melodic improvisation with his classical sensibility as a film composer, offering the listener a sonic journey through time and space.
He will be performing his 2021 debut album Portal in its entirety, along with new compositions for amplified violin and string quartet.
Gregory recently relocated to Portland, OR, after 5 years living in LA, where he started the
record label and recording studio Holy Volcano. He has released four albums on the label: one
solo (Portal), two with collaborator Tristan de Liege (A Light For Dark Moments and Life As A
Film), and as producer for the debut album from songwriter Ella Luna, Anything To Make It
Loud.
He is currently collaborating with electronic composers to create ReWorked versions of the
music from his debut solo record Portal. The first two pieces on the ReWorked album,
“Portal” and “Veritas” were reworked by Kalaido and Tristan de Liege will be released on
Holy Volcano on March 8 and March 29, respectively.
In 2023, Allison traveled to Kerala, India, to work with his South Indian Classical teacher of 10
years, Peroor Jayaprakash. The violin duo performed in Hindu temples with the classical
Carnatic ensemble, and recorded a set of nine classical pieces with a new fusion ensemble for
the largest media company in Kerala, The Manorama.
Slow Meadow is Houston multi-instrumentalist Matt Kidd. With a foundation of piano, string orchestration, and an ever-evolving electronic palette, Slow Meadow traverses the borders of neoclassical and minimalist electronic. His newest album, Upstream Dream, delivers a deeply personal and transportive experience that speaks directly to the ebbs and flows and mundanity and marvels of life. With sublime patience, understated elegance, and surreal atmosphere, Slow Meadow savors
the present, remembers the past, and imagines what could be.
Filed under: music news
April 4, 2024 • 11:46 am Comments Off on Harmonia Premieres William White’s Cassandra
Harmonia Orchestra & Chorus will present an ambitious program on 6 April that includes not only surefire works by Bernstein and Gershwin but a major world premiere titled Cassandra — the largest work to date composed by Harmonia’s music director, William White. The concert takes place at 7:30 p.m. at the Shorecrest Performing Arts Center (15343 25th Ave NE, Shoreline). Tickets here.
Harmonia will pop the cork with Bernstein’s effervescent Candide Overture and then add to the global celebrations marking the centennial of Rhapsody in Blue this year with a performance featuring the young New York pianist Joseph Vaz.
Filling the concert’s second half is Cassandra, an “opera-oratorio” in two acts about the mythic daughter of Trojan King Priam, a seer whose knowledge of what is to be is dismissed by everyone as the result of a curse imposed by Apollo. At the end of the Trojan War, whose terrible destruction she foresaw, Cassandra is taken captive back to Greece by Agamemnon and slaughtered by his wife Clytemnestra.
For the title role, White has cast Ellaina Lewis (recently seen at Seattle Opera in Blue and Malcolm X); the rest of the cast includes mezzo-soprano Melissa Plagemann, tenor Brendan Tuohy, and baritone Zachary Lenox.
Of the musical style, the composer writes:
“The chorus is given music that emphasizes its narrative role: it mostly sings in unison, evoking the declamatory sound of an Ancient Greek chorus. There are several moments where the chorus takes the role of “the people” (in “Agamemnon’s Return,” for example). They are also folded into the orchestration as “vocal instruments” (much in the manner of Holst’s The Planets or Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé).
Cassandra’s prophetic utterances are given a mystical halo of sound in the orchestra and chorus with the use of string harmonics, tinkly percussion (finger cymbals, triangle, crotales), uncanny warbling by the choral sopranos and altos, and a low piccolo that doubles all of her mystical incantations. The horrors that Cassandra describes are accompanied by thick chords in extremely dissonant clusters.
The score makes extensive use of Danny Elfman–style “Batman chords”: brass-dominated figures that make huge crescendos before being violently cut off. The orchestra is given two extended passages: “The Trojan Horse” and “The Journey Across the Sea” (the interlude between Acts I and II, which offers the one extended instrumental solo, a plaintive song for the English horn).
The climax of Act I, “The Destruction of Troy,” is the most extensive number in the piece, a dissonant, mixed-meter orgy of sonic annihilation.
Aside from Stravinsky and Herrmann, many of my usual musical influences make themselves known: Alfred Schnittke, Stephen Sondheim (as in Sweeney Todd), Gustav Holst, Mozart–Handel–Vivaldi (“Clytemnestra’s Rage Aria”), Carl Orff and Béla Bartók.”
The rest of White’s extensive commentary on the piece can be found here.
Filed under: George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, music news, new music
March 26, 2024 • 10:11 am Comments Off on A Visit to Sun Valley Music Festival in Winter
Here’s my report for Musical America on Sun Valley Music Festival’s recent winter season, which focused on the music of Brahms. Guest artist Jon Kimura Parker and members of the Sun Valley Festival Orchestra:
Ketchum, ID—In the 1930s, an ingenious combination of marketing and new technology (the design of modern chairlifts) transformed this former mining town and sheep-farming center into the country’s first destination ski resort—as well as a magnet for Hollywood celebrities….
continue
Filed under: Brahms, chamber music, Sun Valley Music Festival
March 25, 2024 • 9:52 am Comments Off on Vänskä and Trpčeski Make an Incandescent Match with Seattle Symphony
My review of the SSO’s latest program has been posted:
Any suspicions that the best-loved piano concerto in the repertoire might sound routine or stale were dispelled from the outset in this performance by Simon Trpčeski, by turns majestic, heaven-storming, intimate, dreamy and terpsichorean. The Macedonian pianist immediately warmed to the orchestra and audience, bringing an intensity of focus and purpose to his interpretation. …
Filed under: pianists, Prokofiev, review, Tchaikovsky
March 24, 2024 • 9:26 am Comments Off on RIP Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024)
A major loss for the music world: Maurizio Pollini, one of the genuinely era-defining pianists of the past half-century, has died at 82. Pollini was especially beloved at Lucerne Festival. I count his interpretations among my most meaningful musical experiences.
In the Washington Post, Tim Page writes: “For other listeners, Mr. Pollini was simply one of the greatest artists of his time, a musician who offered pristinely clear, clean, linear, and proportionate playing, yet found fresh and unexpected beauties in anything he took on.”
Page quotes Pierre Boulez’s portrayal of Pollini for the New York Times in 1993. “He does not say very much, but he thinks quite a lot,” Boulez said. “I find him very concentrated on what he is doing. He goes into depth in the music, and is not superficial, and his attitude as a musician is exactly his attitude as a man. He is as interesting as anyone could be.”
David Allen, in the New York Times, writes that Pollini “was that rare pianist who compelled listeners to think deeply. He was an artist of rigor and reserve whose staunch assurance, uncompromising directness and steadfast dedication to his ideals were evidence of what his colleague Daniel Barenboim called ‘a very high ethical regard of music.'”
Allen also summarizes the naysayers: “Pollini was long a subject of controversy. Detractors heard only cold objectivity, accusing him of being too distant, too efficient or too unyielding when compared with the great characters of the piano…” He points out that, in spite of the controversy Pollini aroused, the consensus emerged that he embodied “the definition of what it meant to be a modernist pianist, or at least what it meant to play the piano in a contemporary way.”
Filed under: music news, obituary, pianists
March 22, 2024 • 12:23 pm Comments Off on Lessons in Chemistry: The Complete Etudes of Philip Glass by Five in LA
An unforgettable evening this week spent with the Complete Etudes of Philip Glass, presented by Pomegranate Arts at Walt Disney Concert Hall as part of the Los Angeles Phiharmonic Green Umbrella series:
LOS ANGELES — The tradition of etudes for solo piano, by definition and connotation, evokes a single performer embarked on a Gradus ad Parnassum, a lonely and sometimes Sisyphean pilgrimage toward elusive perfection.
Filed under: Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philip Glass, piano, review
March 18, 2024 • 10:44 am Comments Off on CHOU Wen-chung Centennial Concert
If you’re in New York City this week, here’s a can’t-miss event: One of the major shapers of the contemporary music scene as we know it in America is the still-too-little known Chinese American composer, teacher and scholar CHOU Wen-chong. Miller Theatre will present a special concert on 21 March by Continuum Ensemble to honor his centennial. He was actually born in 1923, but events have been scheduled throughout the 2023-24 season to celebrate his legacy.
Chou moved to the US in his 20s to study and became an important figure in the American avant-garde musical scene. He spent much of his career pioneering a new synthesis of classical Chinese aesthetics with a Western contemporary sensibility. As a charismatic teacher based at Columbia, he was responsible for bringing the big players of the next generation over from China at the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the US — composers including Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Bright Sheng and Zhou Long — and has been dubbed (by Tan Dun) “the godfather of Chinese contemporary music.”
The Miller Theatre concert will be led by Joel Sachs, a longstanding figure at Juilliard who retired from his post there last year. This event will consider Chou’s legacy in cultural interchange and blending Eastern and Western styles — how he helped pave the way toward a more-inclusive aesthetic in today’s classical sphere.
Filed under: music news
March 12, 2024 • 7:55 pm Comments Off on Seattle is a (West) Coastal Haven for String Players
My latest piece for Strings magazine:
“To describe the beauties of this region will, on some future occasion, be a very grateful task to the pen of a skillful panegyrist,” reported Captain George Vancouver in 1792. Vancouver led the first European expedition to chart Puget Sound—as he dubbed what would become the US portion of the larger Salish Sea long inhabited by the Coast Salish indigenous peoples. Many of the British place names conferred by Vancouver have endured, but the area’s best-known city, Seattle, founded by white settlers in 1851, stands apart as being named after an indigenous leader, Chief Seattle (using the Anglicized version of his actual Lushootseed name, Siʔaɬ)…
Filed under: Seattle Chamber Music Society, Strings
March 6, 2024 • 5:17 pm Comments Off on Arditti Quartet at 50
Thursday marks the 50th anniversary to the day that Irvine Arditti and his colleagues gave their first concert. The Arditti Quartet would go on to become one of the leading advocates for new chamber music — from Ligeti, Xenakis, and Stockhausen (including the Helicopter Quartet) to their latest commissions from Toshio Hosokawa and Cathy Milliken.
My program text for the official 50th-anniversary concert at the Pierre Boulez Saal can be found here.
The program:
Jonathan Harvey (1939–2012)
String Quartet No. 1 (1977)
Cathy Milliken
In Speak for String Quartet (2023) world premiere
Toshio Hosokawa (*1955)
Oreksis for Piano Quintet (2023) world premiere
Intermission
Harrison Birtwistle (1934–2022)
The Tree of Strings for String Quartet (2007)
Filed under: Arditti Quartet, chamber music, Pierre Boulez Saal
Arts & Culture Stories from NPR
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 