Monotonous Forest

Over the weekend

Saturday night at Garage, I caught two sets by the young jazz pianist Jonathan Batiste, whom I first heard a scant two weeks ago in New Orleans, where he was one of the guest artists with Irvin Mayfield and his sensational New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.  Trained at Juilliard, Batiste is a huge fan of Thelonius Monk, who figures prominently in his programming.  Try to hear him in a small space, to better see his hands in action, flying at the keyboard. [Photo: www.jonathanbatiste.com]

Unfortunately I couldn't stay up to hear Batiste play to the bitter end, since I had to be sprightly awake the next afternoon for the final concert by the MET Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.  With James Levine still recovering, conductor James Conlon changed most of the program to a tasty assortment of opera arias by Erika Sunnegårdh, René Pape and Ben Heppner.  All three singers demonstrated why they have international stardom, but Pape stole the show with his two nuggets from Don Giovanni and I Vespri Siciliani.  And as usual, to hear this powerhouse ensemble in the Carnegie acoustic was unalloyed delight, both in a lithe Mozart "Linz" Symphony and the closer, a furiously dramatic Tchaikovsky Francesca da Rimini with a memorable turn by the orchestra's star clarinetist, Anthony McGill.

Squeezing in some listening at home

Ingvar Lidholm (b. 1921): Kontakion (1978, Gennady Rozhdestvensky/Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Chandos).  Written for the orchestra's first trip to Russia, and well worth hearing.  I'll be comparing it soon with a more recent version by Blomstedt/Leipzig, on their recent recording of Sven-David Sandström's High Mass.

Daniel Jones (1912-93): String Quartets (Delmé Quartet, Chandos) - A friend in Montréal sent me this, from a Welsh composer who was apparently a friend of Dylan Thomas.  Jones' mid-century idiom doesn't use particularly new or extreme techniques, but but these are nevertheless beautifully crafted pieces, in a very concentrated language.

That "lived in" look

Hearing the Emerson String Quartet play three Shostakovich string quartets last night (Nos. 10, 11 and 12), I marveled once again at the superior results when artists become increasingly more intimate with particular works.  At this stage, the Emersons must have done these quartets hundreds of times, and it shows. 

[Photo: Dmitri Shostakovich, from http://www.devinci.fr/chostakovitch]

Text in space

Last night a friend invited me to the Yvon Lambert Gallery, showing new photographs by Jenny Holzer, who for the last few years has been projecting words on buildings and then photographing the results.  This series uses the New York Public Library and Rockefeller Center, among other buildings in New York and Paris.  [Photo: Jenny Holzer.  Click image for slide show.]

In conversation

What: Look & Listen Festival
When: Saturday night, May 6, 2006, intermission
Where: PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York City
Who: (right to left) Me, talking with composer David Lang, artist Suzanne Bocanegra and composer Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez.

[Photo by Ron Gordon]

Music for furniture

Over the weekend, the densely populated Look & Listen Festival offered some startling voices new to me, such as Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez and his harrowing Luciérnagas ("Fireflies") and Sarah Kirkland Snider with her graceful Stanzas in Meditation, mixed with "old" music such as Boulez's Sonatine (played with verve by Pat Spencer and Linda Hall), Ravel's gorgeous Introduction et Allegro and Bartók's String Quartet No. 5, the latter with the fiery Borromeo String Quartet. 

More on the entire festival in a few days.  But if I had to single out one piece it would be Thierry deMey's extraordinary Musique de Tables (1998), for which Jason Treuting of So Percussion joined Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duvall of eighth blackbird, all sitting in front of amplified wooden "tables" which they scraped, brushed, thumped and knocked in intricately choreographed rhythmic patterns, using nothing more than their bare hands.  Every millisecond had meaning, including the wittiest page turn in memory.

Kind of blue

Last week I caught Robert Wilson's astonishingly beautiful staging of Wagner's Lohengrin at the Met, and it's hard for me to imagine that this haunting production was soundly thrashed on opening night in 1998.  It is possibly the most minimal, abstract production of any opera the company has ever done.  For some idea of Wilson's language, imagine the geometry of Mondrian and the subtlety of Rothko, coupled with the mysterious light wielded by sculptor James Turrell.  The memorable, indomitable cast included Karita Mattila, René Pape and Klaus Florian Vogt (in his eye-opening Met debut), and the great Met Orchestra was in full throttle with conductor Philippe Auguin.  Wilson's vision seemed exactly right for material.  [Photo: Playbill] 

Listen or look, or both

Beginning tomorrow night, the Look & Listen Festival celebrates its fifth anniversary with three nights of concerts in art galleries in Chelsea, all with excellent musicians at the helm.  Thursday at the Robert Miller Gallery features music by Osvaldo Golijov, Anthony Davis, Maurice Ravel, Lisa Bielawa, Sarah Kirkland Snider and Joshua Hilson, performed by the Daedalus and Biava string quartets, among others.  At intermission will be a talk with Bielawa, photographer Bill Henson (whose work will be on display) and vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, hosted by WNYC-FM's John Schaefer.  [Above left: from Untitled Series 2000-2002 by Bill Henson.]

At Betty Cuningham on Friday, the lineup features Julia Wolfe, Marcelo Zarvos, John King, Béla Bartók, Harris Wulfson, Erin Gee and Juliana Trivers, with the Borromeo String Quartet and Ethel. Schaefer returns to speak with Zarvos, Gee, and painter Judy Glantzman.  [Above right: She Juggles (2006), oil on canvas by Judy Glantzman.]

Saturday is at PaceWildenstein (the 22nd Street location) with works by Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez, Pierre Boulez, David Lang, David Little, Thierry deMay and Ryan Dorin, performed by eighth blackbird, So Percussion, and flutist Patricia Spencer with pianist Linda Hall.  The host is yours truly, talking with Lang and Sánchez-Gutiérrez, as well as artist Suzanne Bocanegra.  The show is work from the 1960s by Alex Katz.  [Above left: exhibition catalog cover, Alex Katz Circa 1960: Out of the Box, by Barry Schwabsky]

New Orleans matters

What better way to extend an emotional weekend in New Orleans than to return with a stack of CDs from the Louisiana Music Factory?  As the New York Times reported this morning, this year's JazzFest had an overwhelming number of Louisiana-based musicians -- 92% was the estimate -- so why settle for anything but them? 

Strange Fruit: Irvin Mayfield with the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, and the Dillard University Choir.  Mayfield's set late Friday afternoon had it all: 18 musicians mixed with guests like trumpet wizard Kermit Ruffins and the young virtuoso pianist Jonathan Batiste, all conducted brilliantly by Mayfield with occasional assistance from his son, perhaps four years old, standing next to his dad and playing tambourine.

Live on Frenchmen Street: The New Orleans Jazz Vipers.  Their claim to fame seems to be that they don't use percussion (you'd never know) but they got my attention with the very first track, a sunny "Exactly Like You" by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy MacHugh, made famous by Nina Simone.  Recorded live at the Spotted Cat in New Orleans.

Ol' New Orleans Home: The Palmetto Bug Stompers.  Hooked again by the opener, Nat King Cole's "Call the Police."  Sly and hilarious.  Just like their name, somehow you can imagine the band scattering if the lights were turned on.

After the Rain: Irma Thomas.  Recorded shortly after Katrina, this has won kudos far and wide and justifiably so.  Sad but not hopeless, mournful but not saccharine. 

JazzFest Live 2005: Rebirth Brass Band.  One of the best of the many superb brass-happy groups, recorded onsite at the festival last year.