Monotonous Forest

12 hours on the horizon

At the moment, I'm planning to stay for the entire length of this year's Bang on a Can Marathon, starting at 6:00 p.m. on Saturday night at the World Financial Center Winter Garden.  Among the many goodies on offer are Lisa Moore in a new piece by Annie Gosfield, Ensemble Nikel in Sahaf by Chaya Czernowin, the Bang on a Can All-Stars in a world premiere by Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, and a reprise of David Lang's the so-called laws of nature by So Percussion.  But BOAC may have saved the most potentially inspiring performance until the very end: Toby Twining Music in Stockhausen's Stimmung at around 5:00 a.m., just before sunrise.

[Photo: "Omega Sunrise" (2002) by Bob Harrison, via TrekNature.com]

Heavy metal

Alexander Mosolov's "Iron Foundry," part of a 1927 ballet called Steel, has been one of my favorite works, ever since hearing it on a remarkable disc released in 1994 by Riccardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (still available thanks to ArchivMusic.com).  It is three minutes of unstoppable orchestral power, and a huge percussion spine complete with sheets of metal.

Today with some help from Walt Santner, archaeologist du jour, the blog On an Overgrown Path has a link to a much older performance on LP thanks to Webrarian.co.uk, a fascinating site maintained by Chris Goddard, who has taken some audio rarities and converted them into MP3 files.  Russian Futurism doesn't get more fun than this.

Two hours in Brazil, four hours with Batiste

Last night began with pianist João Carlos Martins and his Bachiana Chamber Orchestra from São Paulo, in the world premiere of Mateus Araújo's Suite Brasileira, an engaging combination of Hindemith-like counterpoint with Brazilian folk music.  Martins, whose keyboard career has been dogged by hand injuries, also played the slow movements of two Mozart piano concertos, amazingly using only three fingers.  Carnegie Hall was packed with a sizeable Brazilian contingent, and no one could argue with the ticket price: $2.

Afterward I went down to Garage, to hear pianist Jonathan Batiste and his colleagues celebrating Batiste's graduation from Juilliard earlier in the day.  Although my original intent was to stay for an hour or so, I ran into one of Batiste's teachers, William Daghlian, and later still more Batiste groupies whom I met about a month ago at the pianist's graduation recital.  Batiste and his excellent band were so on fire that we ended up hearing his entire three sets, leaving around 3:00 a.m.  Amid Batiste's far-reaching improvisations, somehow Chopin even made it to the party.

Five weeks of food and reminiscence

Writing about Florent in today's New York Times, Frank Bruni has collected a loving parade of recollections about the restaurant from owner Florent Morellet, Darinka Chase, Calvin Klein and others.  Some typical Morellet creativity will be bubbling over during the final month or so before the closing on June 29.  Starting Monday, May 26, each week will focus on one of the "five stages of grief" (as identified by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross): denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, with surprises planned for each.  (I'm betting on "anger" as a sure-fire appetite enhancer.

I'll have a second helping

Over the weekend, the American Modern Ensemble presented what may have been the funniest concert of the season titled Food and Music, with unusual works by Barbara Kolb, Marc Mellits, Yotam Haber and others.  AME founder Rob Paterson offered his new Eating Variations, with hilarious texts by New York poet Ron Singer, and the concert ended with Aaron Jay Kernis's Quattro Stagione dalla Cucina Futurismo (The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine) based on Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's The Futurist Cookbook, first published in 1932.  Marinetti's surreal recipes have novel combinations of ingredients, and equally eye-opening methods of preparation, such as chunks of raw meat torn apart by trumpet blasts.

[Garden salad via The Gallery of Regrettable Food]

Departure

Among my most prized possessions is a copy of the catalog for the Museum of Modern Art's landmark 1959 show, Sixteen Americans, which was lying around the house when I was growing up.  It was my first exposure to contemporary art (or more accurately, reproductions of it).  One of those sixteen, and arguably the most influential, was Robert Rauschenberg, who died yesterday in Florida.  Michael Kimmelman's fine obituary is here.

[Photo: Satellite (1955, oil, fabric, paper, wood and stuffed pheasant on canvas), from the Whitney Museum of American Art]

"Grimes" redux

Although I found John Doyle's stark production of Peter Grimes at the Met last March profoundly moving, many carped about the set and the staging.  But musically, few could argue that it was almost celestial.  Conductor Donald Runnicles led a superb cast and an incandescent chorus in Britten's masterpiece, all anchored by the glorious Met Orchestra, and the movie theater broadcast will be repeated on PBS this week.  (In New York, Thirteen/WNET is showing it twice, on Thursday at 8:00 p.m., and on Sunday at noon.)

[Anthony Dean Griffey (center) and the cast of Peter Grimes.  Photo by Ken Howard, courtesy of The Metropolitan Opera]

Best thing I've heard this week

My introduction to the music of John Luther Adams was just last November, when David Shively of Either/Or performed "Roar," "Crash," and "Wail," three explorations of pure sound from The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies (2002).  (The other five are "Burst," "Rumble," "Shimmer," "Thunder" and "Stutter," and the entire piece is available with percussionist Steven Schick on Cantaloupe.)

So if you haven't seen Alex Ross's evocative portrait of Adams in The New Yorker, make sure you check it out and above all, listen to Dark Waves (2007), an utterly fascinating work for orchestra and electronics.  (The link is at the end of the article.)  It bears some resemblance to Ligeti's Atmosphères, but Adams uses the ensemble in an entirely original way.  At about 13 minutes long, it's easy to hear more than once; I have already listened to it three or four times.  And if there is any justice, it will appear on a concert program in New York soon.

Tag, I'm it

For those unfamiliar with the word "meme" (blogspeak version), it refers to an idea posted by one blog, which then asks others to respond, sort of like a chain letter but potentially more entertaining.  (I also like this definition, from Aware new media design of New Zealand: a "viral encapsulated idea, with built-in feedback loop.")  I was tagged by Tonic Blotter and shortly thereafter by Steve Smith, with the following assignment:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The result:

"We've spent a happy weekend together, all three of us.  We haven't talked about my scheme.  Or scarcely."

This regrettably brief excerpt from Michael Frayn's novel Headlong (1999) hardly shows this author's comic timing and intellect; he's the author of two of my favorite plays, Noises Off (1982) and Copenhagen (1998).  This story concerns a philosopher and his art-historian wife, who believe they have found a Bruegel painting in their chimney.  I'd offer more comments, but I haven't finished it yet, since it surfaced just last weekend in Philadelphia at one of my favorite haunts, The Book Trader. 

All right, I choose: Robert Kirkpatrick, George Hunka, Miguel Frasconi, Clayton G. Koonce and Emily XYZ.

[Vintage label from The Virtual Absinthe Museum]

Chicago snags Muti

From the 1980s, when I heard Riccardo Muti in some impressively programmed and played concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra, I have often been floored by his musicianship.  An alltime favorite combined three choral works: Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, Bruckner's Te Deum and Verdi's Four Sacred Pieces.  Although the Mozart shows up now and then, the last two are relative rarities in the concert hall.  Muti's Scriabin recordings with that ensemble are some of the most luxuriously phrased, and I love his operatic Mahler First Symphony, which is to my knowledge the only one of the composer's that he recorded.

So now he is in Chicago, and I can't help but feel slightly envious, especially since when Muti conducts the New York Philharmonic, the results are often explosive.  Just last January he all but cracked open Avery Fisher Hall with Scriabin's Le Poème de l’extase.  Yes, he could probably be even more adventurous in programming living composers in general (and some of his countrymen like Scelsi and Sciarrino in particular), but perhaps his Chicago tenure will encourage that.  On paper, it seems like a great orchestra, already shepherded by Pierre Boulez and Bernard Haitink, is making long-range plans for even more years of excitement.

[Photo: Riccardo Muti by Guido Harari]