Monotonous Forest

Quote for the day

As friends and readers probably know, your blogger is not much for promoting the holidays (last Friday night's superb concert by The Crossing notwithstanding).  So I call your attention to this excellent quotation by Amin Maalouf, excavated by Marc Geelhoed on Christmas Day and very much worth pondering.

Christmas music you haven't heard

Once again it's time for an evening by The Crossing, Donald Nally's 20-voice choir in Philadelphia.  The brilliantly eclectic program includes Thomas Adès ("The Fayrfax Carol" from 1997), Judith Bingham ("The clouded heaven," 1998), two versions of "What child is this" (one arranged by R. Brant Ruggles from 1971, and another by Andrew Gant from 1995), and of course, James MacMillan (Tremunt videntes angeli, 2002) with whom the group has a singular history.  From 2006 come works by Don Michael Dicie and Kerry Andrew, and the world premiere of Et incarnatus est (2007) by David Shapiro.  Anyone who appreciates unusual repertoire immaculately sung by one of the country's most accomplished new choral groups should check it out.  (Friday, Dec. 21 at 8:00 P.M., at The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill.)

[Photo by Mark Tassoni: Donald Nally in rehearsal with The Crossing]

Nothing against 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 14 and 15, but 4 is pretty great

Seven years ago Valery Gergiev and the MET Orchestra did a scorching Shostakovich Fourth Symphony at Carnegie Hall (along with Scriabin's Prometheus with pianist Alexander Toradze).  Tonight I'm eager to hear what Gerard McBurney will have to say about the work, followed by the New York Philharmonic's performance of the symphony led by Andrey Boreyko.

From the birthday boy

Tonight I'll be at the final performance of What Next?, the opera by Elliott Carter, who turns 99 today.  I went last Friday (noting Pierre-Laurent Aimard in the audience) and it's well worth a repeat visit, along with the five chamber works that make up the first half.  Here's an excerpt from John Tusa's interview with the composer in 2000 on BBC Radio 3:

"So when I survived my pneumonia [Oliver Knussen] said, well, what's the subject and so I said well, again sort of humorously, well, I'll set The Bald Soprano of Ionesco--then I began to think about it and I didn't want to set the bald one. It's about language. It's an interesting play but it's not for an opera because it's about how you speak languages and I thought that would be dull.  And so I just thought about it and saw that movie of Jaques Tati called Traffic--Traffique--which has a comic automobile accident and I thought, that is where we're going to begin an opera."

[Still photo from "Traffic" (1971) © Les Films de Mon Oncle, France, via PSA Peugeot Citroën]

Big heap o' Stockhausen

Look and be amazed at the number of Stockhausen tributes on ANAblog, here and here. 

Licht extinguished

It's hard to believe that Karlheinz Stockhausen has died.  Somehow, he seemed not of this earth, and immune to death.

Around age 16, I bought an RCA Victrola LP called The New Music, with Bruno Maderna conducting the Rome Symphony Orchestra, and the very first track was Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953), along with works by Earle Brown (Available forms 1) and Henri Pousseur (Rimes pour differentes sources sonores).  At the time I didn’t quite know what to make of the Stockhausen, and kept returning to my favorite on the disc, Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

A couple of years later I heard a striking vocal work on the radio, which turned out to be the original recording of Stimmung (still available on Stockhausen’s website), for six voices, which people either find maddening or mesmerizing.  I vote for the latter. 

In New York I have been lucky to hear some fantastic live performances, such as the towering Klavierstuck IX championed by Maurizio Pollini, and Ensemble 21's memorable Kontakte in 2001.  And who could forget Kathinkas Gesang als Luzifers Requiem, a fragment of Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche, by flutist Pat Spencer, whom Paul Griffiths described as “part underworld divinity, part nightclub hostess.”

Really, there was no one else like him, eccentricities included, and the true extent of his influence may not be realized for decades.  Meanwhile, he leaves an enormous body of work for us to puzzle over, and to admire, for the ways it teases our brains into thinking about music in strange ways.  Many tributes are already up: Alex Ross has many here, and Obscene Jester's sharkskin girl has an interesting post here, via Darcy James Argue, on Stockhausen's infamous 9/11 remarks.  But at the moment I'm chuckling over Gregory Sandow's, for the way he describes the composer's occasional--oh all right, more than occasional--weirdness.  Sandow urges the New York Philharmonic to mount a Stockhausen festival.  Speaking strictly personally, I'd cancel all other plans to be able to attend.

[Illustration: page from "Electronic Study No. 2" (1954) by Karlheinz Stockhausen, via Brittanica.com]

Paul Simon meets Devo

Speaking of Grammys, my youngest brother, John, works for the South Texas Project Electric Generating Station (STPEGS), which has apparently given him license to try out his own reach for stardom.  This is a training film designed to warn employees of excessive radiation exposure (i.e., millirems).  I couldn’t be prouder.

Brava, "Zaka"

If you can't get on to the official Grammy website, Steve Smith posted the classical nominees for the 50th Annual Grammy Awards, and here are comments from Anastasia Tsioulcas (Cafe Aman) on those and some of the other categories. 

I'm most delighted that eighth blackbird was cited a number of times for their superb CD, strange imaginary animals, that I commented on back in January, and that Jennifer Higdon's Zaka is nominated for "Best Contemporary Classical Composition."  (Side note: am I the only one who still winces slightly at the phrase, "contemporary classical"?)  Since "more is more" in this case, Higdon's ferocious sextet is up against Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs, and I doubt anyone would complain if he won, especially after hearing them sung by the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

And as someone else pointed out, when was the last time you saw Stockhausen's name mentioned in these parts?  (His Stimmung with Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices got a nod for the producer, Robina G. Young.)

...and new music by a 91-year-old

If last night's New York premiere of Le Temps l'Horloge (Time and the Clock) by Henri Dutilleux (b. 1916) seemed an ideal match for Renée Fleming's vocal colors, it's because he wrote it for her.  Dutilleux combines shimmering, sometimes unexpected sonorities (e.g., the sudden bloom of an accordion) with three poems: two by Jean Tardieu and the last by Robert Desnos.  James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra sounded ravishing, and since the work is scarcely nine minutes long, I wish they had done the entire thing again.  It was the highlight of the night, made even more moving by the composer in attendance, who ambled up to the stage to receive cheers from the audience.

Gergiev, again

A few years ago Valery Gergiev brought the Mariinsky Theatre's stunning production of Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko to New York, and I found it revelatory, one of the composer's best works.  (The imaginative George Tsypin production didn't hurt, either.)  I still can't quite grasp that it is so rarely staged.  Yesterday afternoon I had a similar epiphany at Carnegie Hall, when Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra did a concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegurochka (The Snow Maiden, from 1881), a veritable musical goldmine, from which I'd only heard the infectious "Dance of the Tumblers."  (And PS, I've never heard anyone do that excerpt as super-charged as Gergiev did it on Saturday night, as the orchestra's final encore.)

The last time the Met presented this opera was in 1923.  Again, I can't quite grasp it.

[Photo: Russian soprano Antonina Nezhdanova (1873-1950), as the Snow Maiden, c. 1920s, via Andrea Suhm-Binder.]