Monotonous Forest

Suggested July 4 soundtrack

Independence Day is still a few days off, but your blogger is shuttling down to Washington, DC for a few days and may take a short break from posting while there.  So Tuesday night, if you're looking for appropriate music to accompany fireworks, I can think of none better than this one, of Charles Ives' Holidays Symphony.  If you're going to be outside, load it up on your iPod and take a walk.  The Fourth of July (1913) lasts just six minutes, so you'll either want to put it on "repeat" (not a bad notion) or use the rest of the recording.  Almost 100 years later, this extraordinary little squib explodes as if it were written yesterday.

In Amsterdam

Other plans prevented me from getting to Amsterdam for this new production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, an opera with a story about as caustic as it gets, melded with some of Shostakovich's most thrilling music.  Thanks to Charles T. Downey at Ionarts for culling some of the rivers of praise, not only for the staging but for Mariss Jansons and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in the score.  If there is any justice a DVD will surface, since the photos look amazing.  [Photo: De Nederlandse Opera]

This week's gifts

Last Friday night the Institute & Festival for Contemporary Performance (IFCP) featured Frederic Rzewski playing an impressive selection of his own music (with the Amernet Quartet in Snaps, for piano quintet, written in 2005).  The previous night, I was unable to attend the delicious-sounding opening concert, in which pianist and festival director Marc Ponthus attacked Stockhausen's Klavierstücke X (begun 1954, completed 1961, and a beast of a piece).  Ponthus shared the program on Thursday with violinist Rolf Schulte, whom Bernard Holland described in his review as "one of the great gifts to contemporary music in New York City."

The same could be said of tonight's artists: Steve Gosling (piano), Matthew Gold (percussion) and Curtis Macomber (violin), who offer a program of Luciano Berio, Eric Moe, David Froom, Morris Rosenzweig and Allen Anderson.  The festival continues through Friday.

And one more gift: a beautiful and touching account of György Ligeti's funeral and memorial concert in Vienna from singer Barbara Hannigan, courtesy of Sequenza 21. 

Quote for the day

"To shake the tree of life itself and bring down fruits unheard of."

[Diane Nemerov (Arbus) writing in the 1940 Fieldglass, the Fieldston High School yearbook, in Diane Arbus Revelations, now at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.  Photo: "42nd Street movie theatre audience, N.Y.C., 1958" © 1994 The Estate of Diane Arbus]

Experimental choral music sells cars

Rhetorical rant for the day: why can't we (in the U.S., that is) have advertisements like this?

[Video from www.steelcitysfinest.com.  Still photo from www.jalopnik.com]

Time out for nephews (music resumes shortly)

Taped to my door one morning.  (Click to enlarge)

Heartland cool

I'm in Minneapolis for a few days -- a trip scheduled around the final United States appearance of the great Swedish baritone Håkan Hagegård, tomorrow night with VocalEssence in a world premiere by Sven-David Sandström.  More on that later.  But meanwhile, last night we got a good look at the glorious new Guthrie Theater that opens to the public next Sunday.  One of its most notable (and vaguely unnerving) features is a cantilevered "endless bridge" jutting out some 180 feet, like a long spout that might spill pedestrians onto the street below, or perhaps into the Mississippi River. [Photo: Jim Gallop]

Tomorrow, I'll also return to a few favorite architectural haunts: Frank Gehry's iconic Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, the sensuous addition to the Walker Art Center by Herzog & de Meuron, and Michael Graves' new wing at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  [Photo: Walker Art Center from Artkrush]

A wild new "Passion"

Philip Brunelle and his expert VocalEssence Ensemble Singers (based in Minneapolis) have co-commissioned (with the BBC Singers) The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth by British composer Francis Grier (b. 1955) with text by poet Elizabeth Cook, author of Achilles. After hearing a live recording of the premiere last March, I think Grier and Cook have a formidable, sometimes gut-wrenching work on their hands -- at least in Brunelle's searing reading with his virtuoso ensemble.  Scored for chorus, twelve soloists and a relatively modest but imaginatively deployed orchestra, Grier's language seems not too far from what Britten might have investigated in the first part of the 21st century, flickering in a striking tonal/atonal shadowland.  The piece is uneasy and agitated from the start; sequences with the simplicity of a lonely child's wail are followed by explosive fortissimo crowds engulfed in luminous rivers of celesta, harp and percussion.  Cook's characters are primarily Biblical but not exclusively so, speaking in often piercing language, and the Minneapolis performance was eerie, disturbing and intense.  Here's a review of the London performance, conducted by Stephen Cleobury in April.

The Piano Études

It's only been three days, but the outpouring of love and tributes to Ligeti seems endless (in the best sense).  To cite three: Paul Griffiths contributed a gorgeous obituary in The New York Times, Alex Ross recounted a moment of youthful awe when he met Ligeti in person, and Ionarts has posted a thoughtful, cleanly designed overview of recordings deemed "Ligeti Essentials" -- and they are, every last one.

Last night I listened to Aimard's recording of Book 1 (1985) of the Piano Études, and these first six alone are one of the great musical achievements of the 1980s.  With Books 2 and 3, the entire set has often been held up next to the Beethoven sonatas, and repeated hearings prove that's not hyperbole.  Last year I was lucky to hear Christopher Taylor tackle every last one in a single dazzling evening, and in December, Lisa Moore put four of them at the end of an eclectic recital including Rzewski, Lansky and Bresnick.  Moore spoke touchingly of seeing Ligeti in the early 1980s at Yale, where he arrived with a suitcase crammed full of piano pieces by Beethoven, Debussy and others.  He wanted his études to be commensurate – and they are.

Otherworldly thoughts

Late last night I listened to Atmosphères (1961), one of the greatest orchestral works I know, by Ligeti or anyone else.  Near the end, the winds and brass make gentle rustling sounds by blowing air through their instruments, followed by ethereal, murmuring harmonics in the strings.  Given the day, it was hard not to imagine it as a soundtrack to some kind of afterlife. 

[Photo: Werner Benger]