Monotonous Forest

Three's a crowd, but here, just right

3 Vets Offer Stellar Mendelssohn / Images of Brazil.  The Juilliard Journal, May 2010

Today's deserving Alaskan

A bright spot in my day was learning that John Luther Adams has won the 2010 Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, awarded every two years to a classical music composer "of outstanding achievement who had a significant impact on the field of composition."  The prize comes with $100,000, as well as a performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  Frank Oteri has all the details.

Coincidentally, the CSO is already scheduled to play Adams's Dark Waves (2007, for orchestra and electronics) in October.  But don't wait until then to hear the piece.  If you haven't already heard the magnificent performance that Alex Ross included in his 2008 New Yorker profile of the composer, the link is still here (scroll down to the end of the article).

[Photo of Mt. McKinley by Bruce Molnia of Terra Photographics, via Earth Science World Image Bank]

New music from the Philharmonic, round two

If the second installment in the New York Philharmonic's Contact! series ended up as something of a mixed bag, never mind: both the orchestra and music director Alan Gilbert should be commended as strongly as possible for continuing the series.  Certainly the audience is there; Symphony Space was sold out.  And just to be clear: to hear fresh thoughts from young composers is not only exciting from a listener's point of view, but should be an essential part of the orchestra's mission.  And it didn't hurt that the musicianship was at a uniformly high level.

Maestro Gilbert led members of the orchestra in three world premieres, by Sean Shepherd, Nico Muhly and Matthias Pintscher.  Of the three, Pintscher's songs from solomon's garden made the strongest impression, with Thomas Hampson as the baritone soloist.  Pintscher called the texts some of the most "beautiful love poetry ever written," and Hampson, singing the texts in Hebrew, bore this out with some deliciously fluid singing.  And as in his other works (e.g., his Five Orchestral Pieces from 1997), Pintscher has a keen ear for arresting orchestral colors.  Afterward, I recalled last fall's opening night at the Philharmonic, when Renée Fleming sang some seldom-done Messiaen.  It is heartening to hear world-class artists give care, passion and artistry to unfamiliar pieces.

The host for the evening was WNYC's John Schaefer, always comfortable onstage eliciting offbeat comments from composers.  In a humorous introduction, Shepherd explained that his title, These Particular Circumstances, came to him when he was observing the untitled piece in rehearsal.  It is an accomplished effort in seven sections: “floating, circling, spinning, grinding, sinking, teetering, soaring," and combines some ferocious gestures with musical quotations (including an amusing one from Holst's The Planets). 

Muhly's Detailed Instructions is in three movements, with a slightly unusual orchestration (no violins), and he also got some laughs with his easygoing preface.  The first movement has a sweetly pulsating texture, the middle sounds slightly Copland-esque, and the last clearly nods to Philip Glass.  The ovations for the two were long and loud, and again, a concert like this is exactly the kind of risk-taking in which the Philharmonic should be engaged.  To judge from the audience response, the risk is paying off, bigtime.

Update: for more writers' comments, see the Q2 blog post, here.

Gut strings, wooden flutes, and valveless horns

On Saturday night at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the American Classical Orchestra will mark its 25th anniversary with a performance of Beethoven's evergreen Ninth Symphony, preceded by Handel's Coronation Anthems, all on period instruments.  For the Beethoven, the soloists and combined choirs total over 150 singers, and the Handel will be accompanied by almost 30 dancers from Ballet Hispanico and Purchase College.

Where opera and Twitter intersect

Once again, The Omniscient Mussel is coordinating a contest ripe for hilarity, #Operaplot 2010.  Full rules are on the site, but in a nutshell, readers are invited to describe an opera's story using the length of a Twitter post, i.e., a maximum of 140 characters.  Anyone with a Twitter account can enter (and it might be worth creating one just for this purpose). The top prize: two tickets to The Marriage of Figaro by the Opera Theatre Company (in Dublin), hotel accommodations for three nights, and up to 1,000 Euro toward airfare.

My favorite, one of the top five from 2009, neatly summarizes Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle: Here's my castle. Are you afraid? No, I'm going to open all those damn doors! Are you afraid? No, let me in! Who's that? Oh shit.

Miss Mussel wrote me a lovely little note, suggesting that some contemporary operas might show up to counterbalance all the Tweets about La bohème (funny as they may be).  So take heart, fans of the operas of Henze, Lachenmann and Sciarrino: your votes are needed.

Meanwhile, far from the eruption

Who would have thought that an Icelandic volcano would have such an impact on the classical music world?  In the last few days several concerts have been canceled, and the New York Philharmonic has made a program change in its Stravinsky festival with Valery Gergiev, to accommodate the delayed arrival of the Mariinsky Theatre Chorus.  On April 21 and 22, Les Noces will be replaced by Jeu de cartes.

But in a busy week, other concerts continue as scheduled.  Always an intriguing barometer of what's current, the MATA Festival is underway at Le Poisson Rouge, with the Calder Quartet (tonight), Ensemble Pamplemousse and pianist Lisa Moore (Wednesday), and the Argento Chamber Ensemble and Italy's L'Arsenale closing down the festival on Thursday. [UPDATE: the members of L'Arsenale are also marooned, but with the help of some added New York musicians, Argento will present works by L'Arsenale composers Fillippo Perocco and Lorenzo Tomio, plus two more pieces, by James Falconi and Brahim Kerkour.]

Also on Thursday, flutist Claire Chase, Executive Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, will give a recital at Weill Recital Hall, in a program of J.S. Bach, Salvatore Sciarrino, Franco Donatoni, Pierre Boulez, Toru Takemitsu and Kaija Saariaho.  And on Sunday, the Talea Ensemble returns to the Roger Smith Hotel with Brian Ferneyhough's Unsichtbare Farben (1999) and Jason Eckardt's 16 (2003).

[Photo: aerial view of Eyjafjallajökull, via The Icelandic Coast Guard]

Rarities from another who died too young

This Thursday at Roulette, the Talea Ensemble will present the first United States performances of four works by the late Fausto Romitelli (1963-2004), whose aesthetic drew from influences as diverse as psychedelic rock and spectralism.  Also on the program: works by Mauro Lanza and Pierre Boulez, two of Romitelli's colleagues at IRCAM.

Listeners might consider this a preview of the upcoming Bang on a Can Marathon (June 27), where Talea will present the United States premiere of Romitelli's Professor Bad Trip (1998-2000), inspired by Henri Michaux's hallucinatory writings.

[Photo: Fausto Romitelli by Mirjam Devriendt]

Focus under duress

Mark Berry, author of the wonderfully erudite blog, boulezian, reports on a highly unusual concert at Wigmore Hall by the Jerusalem Quartet, in which the music making was repeatedly interrupted by protesters.  Distractions like coughing seem tame in comparison.

The New York Philharmonic throws a party

Sondheim—The Birthday Concert.  MusicWeb International, April 2, 2010

Dragonetti and Bartók (not a sitcom)

Unearthing a (Mostly) Forgotten Composer / Violin Duos, With Grit and Cream.  The Juilliard Journal, April 2010