A recommendation for this weekend in Seattle: “Witness to Courage” — Music of Remembrance, 3pm Sunday, Oct 26
MOR opens its new season with the West Coast premiere of “Crossing Borders” by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer (librettist of the Met’s hit “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”). The song, for mezzo and piano, draws from a secret diary kept by a teenage girl escaping Nazi-occupied Paris.
Also featured: works by Géza Frid and William Hilsley, written in prison and exile, and Paul Schoenfield’s “Sparks of Glory,” inspired by Holocaust resisters.
Linking music born of exile to today’s immigrant realities, MOR partners with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project and Jewish Family Service—donating 50 percent of ticket sales to support legal aid for immigrants across Washington, including those detained by ICE.
Born just months apart in 1925, Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian formed one of the most daring creative partnerships of the 20th century. Together, the Italian composer and American mezzo-soprano blurred the lines between composer and performer, intellect and emotion, experimentation and play. They expanded our understanding of what a voice could do and reinvented the relationship between music and theater itself.
The Seattle Chamber Orchestra opens its fourth season on Friday 24 October with acentenary tribute to these two kindred spirits. The program, designed by SCO Founder and Music Director Lorenzo Marasso, features Berio’s beloved Folk Songs, Sequenza for voice, and Sequenza for harp, alongside works by John Cage, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Claudio Monteverdi that were signatures of Berberian’s repertoire.
Gabriella Smith recording “Lost Coast” with cellist Gabriel Cabezas at Greenhouse Studios in Iceland. (Sandro Manzon)
Here’s my Seattle Timesprofile of the remarkable young composer Gabriella Smith. This week’s Seattle Symphony concerts will feature her innovative cello concerto Lost Coast, with Gabriel Cabezas as the soloist:
Her official bio reads like a manifesto: “Gabriella Smith is a composer whose work invites listeners to find joy in climate action.” The 33-year-old has built a creative world around that idea — one where music and environmentalism are inseparable…
The Seattle Symphony turned agile chamber band for its all-Baroque evening under guest conductor Ivars Taurins, joined by resident organist Joseph Adam. With the Seattle Opera season opening across town – the company orchestra comprises Seattle Symphony musicians – the program made a virtue of proportion and dramatic resourcefulness…. continue
I’d meant to post a link to my program note for John Adams’s brand-new orchestral piece, The Rock You Stand On, written for Marin Alsop, who recently led the Philadelphia Orchestra in the world premiere:
Listening to John Adams often feels like stepping into a drama already in motion …
JACK Quartet in rehearsal with Helmut Lachenmann; courtesy of JACK Quartet
To celebrate the 90th birthday of German avant-garde composer Helmut Lachenmann, the JACK Quartet perform his three string quartets in a single evening at Columbia’s Miller Theatre – and reflect on their long association with his radical sound world. My interview with the ensemble for The Strad:
Here’s my profile of violist Emma Wernig, Musical America’s New Artist of the Month for October:
In many chamber settings, the viola tends to blend into the texture—which made Emma Wernig’s playing all the more striking when I first encountered her last August on opening weekend at Tippet Rise. “Chamber music is my window into everything,” she says. “It’s the foundation of my solo work, my orchestral playing, everything…”
“You should always try to escape your own success,” Víkingur Ólafsson says. “Because that success so easily turns against you and limits you and your choices and what you want to do next” …
To open the season this weekend, Franz Welser-Möst leads the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus in the American premiere of Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch’s ambitious, nearly-hour-long Urworte, which sets Goethe’s famous stanzas to music.
Movements:
Daimon: Dämon (Demon)
Tyche: Das Zufällige (The Accidental)
Eros: Liebe (Love)
Ananke: Nötigung (Necessity) —
Elpis: Hoffnung (Hope)
Sunday’s concert will be livestreamed on Adella, digital home of The Cleveland Orchestra.
My introduction to the work can be found in the Cleveland Orchestra program notes here.
Composers often set aside ideas that strike them in a flash of inspiration, waiting until the right moment arrives to wrestle them down in detail and give them an enduring form. For Bernd Richard Deutsch, one such idea was to write a work exploring the elemental forces that shape our lives…. continue
MEMETERIA 