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Dan Warburton -- fine improvising musician, exceptional writer about musicians who improvise, and editor-in-chief of the outstanding new-music journal Paris Transatlantic -- has gently clarified that while Derek Bailey spent his final years in Barcelona, he actually passed from this life in London.
I can't remember the first time I heard British guitarist Derek Bailey, but I do remember being utterly perplexed at the arid, unsettling chaos his music seemed to present. A pioneer in the European free-improvisation scene of the late '60s and early '70s, Bailey was among the foremost proponents of a... style? genre? Okay, a territory of performance that took its formative leads from a potent mix of American free jazz and the experimental composition of John Cage and his peers.
Bailey combined a workmanlike ethic honed in British dance bands with a cussed revolutionary streak; the music he and early peers such as John Stevens, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker and Gavin Bryars created was the sound of spontaneous creation, unregulated by notions of structure or genre. In its ideal form, European free improvisation was -- and remains -- an instance of deep listening and fleet reaction, a musical conversation that unfolds in real time. Karyobin (Island, 1968; reissue Chronoscope 1993, likely out of print), by Stevens's Spontaneous Music Ensemble, provides a gracious, eminently listenable example of the movement's birth pangs, which would provide momentum for such Bailey collectives as Joseph Holbrooke (a trio with Oxley and Bryars, named for an obscure British composer of Wagnerian leanings) and the Music Improvisation Ensemble (with Parker, instrument-builder Hugh Davies and percussionist Jamie Muir -- the last of whom would shortly defect to King Crimson.)
Throughout his life, Bailey railed against complacency; when regular mates became too familiar, offering the easy path of rote response, Bailey responded with Company, a semi-regular meeting of performers from differing musical backgrounds, most of whom had never encountered one another. A fragmentary list of Company participants extends well beyond Fred Frith and John Zorn to take in Lee Konitz, Ursula Oppens, Don Byron, Diamanda Galas and veteran tap dancer Will Gaines. Practically to the very end of his life, Bailey continued to seek out new encounters: with jazz icon Tony Williams, with free-jazz percussionist Susie Ibarra, with pipa virtuoso Min Xiao-Fen, with Japanese prog-punk duo Ruins and with a steady stream of young drum-and-bass DJs. A substantial portion of Bailey's activity, and that of his peers, was documented by Incus, the hardy little cottage label he founded with Parker and Oxley (of which he later became sole proprietor); many of those aforementioned later encounters, equally important, were captured on John Zorn's labels Avant and Tzadik.
But back to the beginning: While the kinetic excitement of Evan Parker's saxophone playing was immediately affecting, Bailey's crabbed chords, splintery lines, ringing sustained tones and glowering feedback washes took longer to assimilate. I don't remember the point at which it all fell into place for me, but I suspect it might have been a 1993 performance at Roulette with Gregg Bendian, Paul Plimley, Tomas Ulrich and others. It was my first time to actually see Bailey perform live -- and somehow the intensity of the setting, and the ability to connect sound to action and reflex, made the guitarist's work seem transparent, magisterial, inimitable. (Not that there haven't been imitators; in fact, I'd hazard to state that Bailey is probably the most influential guitarist of the late 20th century, after Jimi Hendrix -- at least in avant-garde circles.)
After that event, I became a Bailey fanatic, collecting probably more than 80 percent of his available recordings even as I acknowledged that his was an art best encountered live. Greater familiarity brought on an intense realization of just how much his art changed over the years, despite a similarity of surface contours. Those skittering figures and tolling tones amounted to a language, a distinctive personal utterance, as well defined and recognizable as that of any great musician in history -- whether it be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Louis Armstrong, Anton Webern, Albert Ayler, Tony Iommi or Toshimaru Nakamura.
Bailey's final decade of recording presented evidence of a renewed appreciation of formal structure, certainly in a solo setting -- Drop Me Off at 96th (Scatter, 1995, out of print), for me the greatest of Bailey's solo albums, is as deftly balanced in terms of its weights and valences as any through-composed symphony. One performance on that disc, a funny example of Bailey's droll accompanied chats, included a brief snatch of "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" -- incandescently shocking in context. That moment provided a precursor to Bailey's most controversial late recording, Ballads (Tzadik, 2002), in which John Zorn coaxed the guitarist to etch cubist takes on standard songs such as "Stella by Starlight," "Rockin' Chair" and "Gone with the Wind." It was with this disc that Bailey came full circle, transfiguring the material he might well have been called upon to play during his apprentice years.
Ballads wasn't Bailey's final studio document; at present, that would be Carpal Tunnel (Tzadik, 2005). Following some amount of inexplicable trepidation, I finally picked this up about two months ago. To call it perhaps Bailey's most painful record would be meaningless without some amount of explanation: The guitarist, who had moved to Barcelona for the last few years of his life, explains in a spoken introduction that he'd recently been diagnosed with the condition that lent the disc its title, and as a result could no longer play with a pick. Each of the subsequent selections tracks his convalesence, at two- to three-week intervals. It was a heroic effort, and not a bad record -- although Bailey's speaking voice had never sounded so utterly aged to my ears as in his intro.
Having attended the majority of Bailey's New York City appearances since that original 1993 encounter -- although not the epochal meeting with Cecil Taylor at Tonic in 2000, alas -- I'd been biding my time since May 2002 awaiting his next visit. Like everyone else, I'd long heard rumors of failing health. But after reading Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation (Verso, 2004), Ben Watson's alternatingly admirable and risible biography, I allowed myself the luxury of believing that Bailey would indeed return -- after all, many of the men in his family lived well into their 90s. Zorn apparently agreed with me; I know that he planned to have Bailey curate a month of performances at the Stone in 2006.
As it happened, carpal tunnel syndrome was an early manifestation of the motor neuron disease that claimed Bailey's life on Christmas morning in Barcelona. That long-awaited reunion, I'm forced to admit, will never happen. And I just don't want to. Despite not knowing Bailey personally (though I've enjoyed several conversations with his longtime partner, Karen Brookman), despite having exchanged no more than two sentences with him, despite my hand having been engulfed in his massive paw only once, I miss him deeply, and sharply.
It's hard to know where to direct a newcomer curious about an artist as singular yet multifarious as Bailey -- not to mention one so vastly represented in the recording catalog. Were Drop Me Off at 96th still available, I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to recommend that disc. Another oft-cited solo recital, Aida (Incus, 1980; reissued Dexter's Cigar, 1996), also appears to be out of print. Incus mail order might still have copies of both titles, but probably won't be available for at least a while, I'd have to imagine. LACE (Emanem, 1996) is another fine example of Bailey's solo art, while Fairly Early with Postscripts (Emanem, 1999) offers a valuable overview of early-'70s solo performances as well as a few more recent tracks.
But for my money, the richest recent example of solo Bailey is In Church, the first in a series of home-burned CD-R solo-guitar releases available exclusively from the Incus website. All the hallmarks of Bailey's questing art can be found in these two performances, recorded in resonant chapels in 1994 and 2001. So, too, are a patience, a warmth of feeling, a breadth of utterance and a quiet dignity that are all hallmarks of late Bailey.
Among Bailey's encounters with other musicians, The London Concert (Incus, 1975; reissued Psi 2005) is a crucial document of Bailey's relationship with Evan Parker, before it was sundered by business differences and personal animosity. Yankees (Celluloid/OAO, 1983; several reissues available) offers a spirited encounter with Zorn and trombonist George Lewis. Village Life (Incus, 1992), with drummer Louis Moholo and percussionist Thebe Lipere, is seldom cited as crucial Bailey, but I love its seductive sound world. Soho Suites (Incus, 1997) offers an illuminating pairing of duo concerts with percussionist Tony Oxley from 1977 and 1995, while Joseph Holbrooke '98 (Incus, 2000) is a highly successful latter-day reunion of Bailey's seminal trio with Oxley and Gavin Bryars. Two late intersections with different drummers, BIDS (Incus, 2002) with Susie Ibarra and Sevens (Incus, 2002) with Ingar Zach, are varied and always engaging. Of Bailey's later intersections with unlikely rhythm teams, all are intriguing, but the ones that most reward investigation are Saisoro (Tzadik, 1995), the first encounter with Ruins, and Mirakle (Tzadik, 2000), recorded with the muscular harmolodic-funk team of Jamaaladeen Tacuma and G. Calvin Weston. Finally, controversial or no, an exploration of Bailey's art can't be considered thorough without a dip into the abovementioned Ballads.
Despite my having gone on at length, I still feel that nothing I could write would be sufficient to truly honor Derek Bailey, nor to give voice to the deep and genuine void I feel at his loss. Here, then, is a list of additional resources for information on an unreplaceable artist.
John Fordham's heartfelt, informative obituary in the London Guardian.
The Derek Bailey index on Peter Stubley's comprehensive European Free Improvisation website.
Richard Shapiro's exhaustive Derek Bailey sessionography, housed on Stubley's site and still commanding despite not having been updated since November 2004.
Sorry about the longer-than-usual absence. Chalk it up to a general lack of live performances over the last few weeks, the transit strike, my girlfriend's return from Virginia and the year-end crush at the magazine. Speaking of which, the December 29 issue of TONY -- which went to print three weeks ago -- is hitting newsstands even as I type this, which means I can finally go ahead and post my year-end Top Ten lists. (In the classical list, the "more" links take you to ArkivMusic.com, except in cases where a recording was not available there; in the non-classical list, the links take you to barnesandnoble.com, except in one case where the recording couldn't be found.)
Top Ten Recordings, Classical:
1. Richard Wagner - Tristan und Isolde - Plácido Domingo et al., Antonio Pappano conducting the Royal Opera, Covent Garden (EMI Classics) [more]
2. J.S. Bach - The Sonatas and Partitas - Gidon Kremer (ECM New Series) [more]
3. Osvaldo Golijov - Ayre; Luciano Berio - Folk Songs - Dawn Upshaw and the Andalucian Dogs (Deutsche Grammophon) [more]
4. Joseph Haydn - The Paris Symphonies - Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting Concentus Musicus Wien (DHM) [more]
5. Esa-Pekka Salonen - Wing on Wing; Insomnia; Foreign Bodies - Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon) [more]
6. and 7. Alvin Lucier - Wind Shadows - The Barton Workshop (New World) [more], and Alvin Lucier - Charles Curtis and Anthony Burr (Antiopic) [more]
8. Jordi Savall - Du temps & de l'instant (Alia Vox) [more]
9. Matthew Welch - Dream Tigers - Flux Quartet, Andrew Sterman, Matthew Welch with the CSU Percussion Ensemble (Tzadik) [more]
10. Pierre Boulez - Le marteau sans maître; Dérive 2; Dérive 1 - Pierre Boulez conducting the Ensemble InterContemporain [more]
Among 2005 recordings that didn't make the cut, the ones I most regretted omitting from my TONY list were Richard Hickox's otherworldly Death in Venice (Chandos), with Philip Langridge's feverish Aschenbach; Fabio Biondi's starry Bajazet (EMI Classics); Marc Minkowski's stylish Rameau pastiche Une symphonie imaginaire (Archiv); the Pacifica Quartet's poised Mendelssohn cycle (Cedille); and Rolando Villazón's ardent collection of Massenet and Gounod arias (Virgin). I greatly admired Alan Curtis's vivid Rodelinda (Archiv), although much of that admiration can probably be chalked up to my Simone Kermes fetish. Toss in René Jacobs's bewitching Saul (Harmonia Mundi); the always admirable Maggini Quartet's take on Frank Bridge's Quartets Nos. 2 and 4 (Naxos); the Takács Quartet's magisterial view of Beethoven's late quartets (Decca); and the infinite riches of Gérard Grisey's magnum opus, Les Espaces Acoustiques, as performed by Garth Knox, the Asko Ensemble and the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln under the direction of Stefan Asbury (Kairos), and 2005 looks to have been a very good year, indeed.
Top Ten Recordings, Non-Classical:
1. Antony and the Johnsons - I Am a Bird Now (Secretly Canadian) [more]
2. Nickel Creek - Why Should the Fire Die? (Sugar Hill) [more]
3. Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine (Epic) [more]
4. Made Out of Babies - Trophy (Neurot) [more]
5. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois (Asthmatic Kitty) [more]
6. Ulver - Blood Inside (The End) [more]
7. Napalm Death - The Code Is Red... Long Live the Code! (Century Media) [more]
8. Dave Douglas - Mountain Passages (Greenleaf) [more]
9. Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane - ...at Carnegie Hall (Blue Note) [more]
10. 4g - Cloud (Erstwhile) [more]
The list above should not be read as a ranked survey by the way. Instead, it should be parsed as my five top pop releases, my top-two metal discs, my top-two jazz sets and my single-favorite electroacoustic improv release -- although Made Out of Babies's caterwauling lurch could easily trade places with Ulver's skyscraping blend of vintage prog and Smile-ing vocal arrangements. It's kind of like compiling a single list of the year's best apples, blood oranges, hand grenades and a door knob, but I wanted to be sure that my favorite discs from all of the main "genres" with which I'm regularly consumed were represented.
Albums that didn't make the cut but could have include Shakira's Fijacion Oral, Vol. 1 (Epic), the Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir (Rough Trade), Bell Orchestre's Recording a Tape the Colour of Light (Rough Trade), Kanye West's Late Registration (Roc-a-Fella), the Mars Volta's Frances the Mute (Universal), Arch Enemy's Doomsday Machine (Century Media), Meshuggah's Catch 33 (Nuclear Blast), Marty Ehrlich's News on the Rail (Palmetto), Semi-Formal by John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet (Cuneiform); and ErstLive 005 by Keith Rowe, Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura and Otomo Yoshihide (Erstwhile).
Top Ten Live Events (chronological):
1. Radu Lupu, Franz Welser-Möst conducting the Cleveland Orchestra, Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, February 1-5. Beethoven's piano concertos expertly rendered with no muss or fuss, cutting straight to the heart of the music -- which was boldly paired with Birtwistle, Dutilleux, Roy Harris and more.
2. Don Carlo with Sondra Radvanovsky, Luciana d'Intino, Richard Margison, Dwayne Croft, Feruccio Furnlanetto, Paata Burchuladze; Fabio Luisi conducting; Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, March 7. The very model of ensemble work, in one of Verdi's greatest achievements.
3. Der Rosenkavalier with Angela Denoke, Laura Aikin, Susan Graham, Peter Rose, Håkan Hagegård; Donald Runnicles conducting; Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, March 15. Another superlative cast, highlighted by Denoke's heart-rending Marschallin.
4. Joe Maneri Quartet with Matt Moran, Barbès, April 20. In the first of three final shows with his long-lived quartet, microtonal composer and klezmer-revival forerunner Maneri turned this tiny Park Slope boîte into one big, warm bearhug of sound.
5. Gang of Four, Irving Plaza, May 17. Plenty of younger bands have been making hay with the terse, angular punk-funk sound that Gang of Four perfected (but apparently never patented) back in the ’80s; what made this surprising reunion of the band's four original members so satisfying was the realization that no one has done it better than they did.
6. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, June 3 & 5. Imaginative programming, tellingly played and (in the case of Ives's The Unanswered Question) evocatively staged. Other highlights included the marvelously weird original version of Mussorgsky's St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain, and John Adams's luminous nod to Lou Harrison, The Dharma at Big Sur.
7. Charles Rosen, Rolf Schulte, Stephen Gosling and the IFCP Ensemble led by Marc Ponthus, Mannes College of Music, June 20. The Institute and Festival for Contemporary Performance at Mannes presented a fine series of programs this summer, including this brilliantly realized all-Elliott Carter bill featuring Rosen in the Piano Sonata, Schulte and Gosling in the Duo for Violin and Piano, and a crack teacher-and-pupil band in the Triple Duo.
8. James Finn Quartet, The Stone, September 7. This ecstatic-jazz saxophonist surpassed his normally high levels of incantory abandon in this impassioned set, which he and his bandmates -- bassist Jaribu Shahid, drummers Warren Smith and Newman Taylor Baker -- turned into a holy-rolling fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Subtle moments (such as a percussion duet of chest pats, leg slaps and stomped feet) packed as much power as did raucous exhortations.
9. ErstQuake II, Collective: Unconscious, September 23-25. Uneven, unwieldy and sometimes unbearably loud, a three-evening festival of electroacoustic improvisation mounted by Erstwhile's Jon Abbey and Quakebasket's Tim Barnes reminded hardy listeners that this particular musical frontier continues to resist attempts at demarcation and codification.
10. James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, October 10. A bold bill of American works (Ives, Carter, Foss, Gershwin) lovingly savored by conductor and performers, including standing ovations for Carter and Foss, and a Three Places in New England that I suspect will never be surpassed in my mind's ear.
Most of these events appeared either on my "Best of 2005" list in the classical section of TONY or in the pop staff's aggregate "Top Live Shows" box in that section of the magazine; two, the all-Carter concert and ErstQuake, did not appear on either list. And it should be immediately apparent that the roll is limited to New York-based events only; were that not the case, Doctor Atomic would surely have made this list, as would the Boston Symphony Orchestra's October 29 performance of Mozart's "Posthorn" Serenade and Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time as conducted by Sir Colin Davis.
Normally, I'd tack on lists of favorite books and films for the hell of it, but I can't really do that this year. To begin with, I only read one new book in 2005: I, Wabenzi (Farrar Strauss Giroux), the first book in a woolly, four-volume memoir by reluctant jazz critic-turned-prizewinning novelist Rafi Zabor. Ideally, I would at least have read the latest offerings by Haruki Murakami and Zadie Smith. Instead, I spent January through September obsessively reading the almost-complete New Yorker essays of Andrew Porter -- that is, everything that was ever collected in hardcover form -- chronologically from start to finish. And after I interviewed Zabor for a piece on Wabenzi, I felt compelled to finally read the book he deems the greatest novel in the history of literature: War and Peace. I'm currently on page 1,011...
...and would no doubt be even further along, were I not constantly interrupting myself with the new DC Showcase Presents anthologies: gloriously inexpensive, 500-page black-and-white anthologies of Silver Age Superman, Green Lantern and Metamorpho comic books (with Jonah Hex and Justice League of America waiting in the wings). Unsurprisingly, the Superman and Green Lantern volumes have been fairly formulaic if tremendously enjoyable -- but good grief, the Metamorpho collection is priceless! True, virtually every single story sticks to a basic template, but the wild energy that animates every panel comes straight out of the golden age of newspaper adventure and humor strips. Of the several artists whose work fills these pages, the two creators with whose styles I was already familiar -- Joe Orlando and Mike Sekowsky -- are equalled and often bettered by co-creator Ramona Fradon, whose work combines a vivid streak of fantasy with a serious aptitude for emotional expression, particularly in the case of this most offbeat hero. As far as comics go, this was my overdue discovery of the year.
As for films, I originally thought that I'd only seen three all year: March of the Penguins and Batman Returns, both of which I enjoyed, and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, which was a let-down. Scanning the shelves at Blockbuster the other night reminded me of two more that I was apparently desperate to forget: the mostly laughable, gaffe-filled Fantastic Four and the completely disheartening War of the Worlds.
I aim to do better on the literary front in 2006…and who knows, maybe I'll see a few more films as well. (I'm heading out to catch Syriana with girlfriend Lara and our friend Karissa, just as soon as I file this post.) Until next time, then, here's hoping that your holidays are happy, peaceful and fulfilling. And once again, thanks to Alex, Marion, Sieglinde, Marc, Danny, Anastasia, Molly and everyone else who made my splash into the blogosphere this year so eminently worthwhile and enjoyable.
On the street and the subway this evening, as I left the office and headed to the Met, I listened to Rolando Villazón's recording of arias by Massenet and Gounod -- a fine disc, and one that easily claims a spot on my list of "Top Ten Recordings That Didn't End Up on My TONY Top Ten List."
Little did I know that this was to be the only Villazón I would hear tonight.
Mindful of Anne Midgette's nice recent Times article on operatic covers (which isn't available for free any more, thus no link), it's got to be a hellish gig. So kudos to tenor Raúl Melo for hanging tough tonight in front of a crowd primed for the Second Coming. His opening "Questa o quella" sounded constricted and boxed-in, but he warmed into the role as the evening progressed... mostly. Melo's initial scenes with Gilda were fine, as was his "Ella mi fu rapita" and each reprise of "Questa." On the other hand, that sinusoid tightness returned in the Duke's brief soliloquy following his posse's brag of Gilda's kidnap -- a passage that earned Melo's sole boo, from a single audience member.
Of the rest, all I can think is that my revelatory initial Rigoletto -- the Houston Grand Opera performance I've mentioned in previous posts, with a reckless young Marcello Giordani, an ineffably lovely Maureen O'Flynn and a magisterial Leo Nucci -- might actually have been more accomplished than I reckoned in my utterly benighted newbiedom. I say this because despite Carlo Guelfi's exemplary acting, I felt a lack of vocal oomph at center court. (And then remembered feeling exactly the same way about his Iago, opposite Ben Heppner and Barbara Frittolli last year.)
Moreover, despite Anna Netrebko's obvious beauty and unquestionable agility -- both physical and vocal -- I didn't buy her Gilda until the final act. Bravas rang out at length after "Caro nome," but for me Netrebko didn't hit the mark despite directing her opalescent instrument toward Verdi's targets and striking most of them squarely.
This isn't the first time I've felt ambivalent about Netrebko; it was quite in keeping with my response to her debut CD. As I left the Met, I was disposed to reject the hype altogether. But in my virtually inevitable post-Lincoln Center visit to Tower Records, the canny classical jocks were spinning the new Netrebazón recording of La traviata... and I found myself thinking that there's still almost certainly something there -- just maybe not in the Rigoletto pairing. Even so, I'm positive that I'll tune in for the broadcast this Saturday, and will likely try to catch the show on stage in '06, just to see if this pairing is more than the sum of its parts.
Meanwhile, back in the big house, when's the last time you caught a Rigoletto in which the most gripping performer was the Sparafucile? I add this because it's true, and also mindful of what Maury -- or "Maury," as birthday-celebrating JSU would have it -- said. Eric Halfvarson was the unquestionable center of gravity every time he entered a scene. Nancy Fabiola Herrera's hesitantly slutty Maddalena was another brief but telling highlight, although one more physical than vocal. Asher Fisch steered a solid-enough performance despite a wobble caused by the tenorial rent at center stage, then knocked further askew by the collective gravity of expectation.
Oh, yeah, I also saw An American Tragedy again last night, as promised. And that's about as far as my reliability will extend this evening. No post, because the conflicts raging in my head -- which have less to do with the piece than with my continued, even exacerbated unease with the consensus of my professional caste -- demand more reflection. I get the sense that there may be a serious blurt coming just after TONY closes its doors for the year late next week.
Still, lest my hesitancy cast me among the disapproving crits, let me state for the record that I believe Picker has created a seriously effective piece of music theater, and more surprisingly one in which both operatic neophytes and sophisticates will find much to enjoy.
And one with legs, I'll wager... assuming it isn't strangled in its crib.
Playlist:
Joseph Haydn - Symphonies Nos. 82 and 83 - Concentus Musicus Wien/Nikolaus Harnoncourt (DHM)
Felix Mendelssohn - String Quartet in E-flat (1823); String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 12; String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80 - Pacifica Quartet (Cedille)
Dave Douglas - Keystone (Greenleaf Music)
Rolando Villazón - Massenet/Gounod Arias - Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France / Evelino Pidò (Virgin Classics)
Giuseppe Verdi - Rigoletto - Maria Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano, Tito Gobbi, La Scala / Tullio Serafin (EMI Classics)
I rarely get down to the Knitting Factory these days -- a strange and slightly sad condition, given that the scene that developed around this club in the '80s was my foremost incentive to move to New York in the first place. (By the time I got here in 1993, said scene had already begun to move elsewhere.) For a while, the cause of my absence was the psychic debris that lingered long after my six wonderful, tumultuous months of employment there in 1997 -- a monumental case of "Be careful what you wish for." Still, in its post-Michael Dorf era, the club simply doesn't present very much that interests me greatly.
That baggage out of the way, tonight definitely proved an exception -- and how odd that it should have been under the auspices of a presentation by Yale University's School of Music. For many, the Knitting Factory still evokes a cache of downtown hipness, judging by the comments of acting dean Thomas Duffy in his introductory remarks. Yale, Duffy went on to remind us, once maintained a strong presence in New York City through its Spectrum Concerts series; tonight's event was the beginning of a similar push, and four further events were said to be forthcoming.
The main event this evening was the New York premiere of Feynman, a one-character opera by composer Jack Vees and librettist Paul Schick. Rather than a dramatized elaboration of historical events a la Doctor Atomic, Vees and Schick offered a stylized gloss on aspects of the renowned physicist's life and work -- his work at Los Alamos, where the quirky upstart was apparently the only scientist brazen enough to view the Trinity blast with his naked eyes; his passionate love for his wife, Arline; his well-known passion for drumming; his fascination with Tuva, a tiny Asian country near Mongolia whose oddly shaped postage stamps he'd collected as a child; his decisive role in the investigation of the Challenger disaster.
In a brief but lucid program note, Libby Van Cleve notes that Feynman's "lifelong interest in quantum mechanics led to a belief that on a sub-atomic level, there was a non-linear aspect to time... Feynman postulated that an electron would investigate all possible paths, and that all of these alternate paths are integrated as the actual path taken." Accordingly, Schick's libretto moves backward to events that occured during the physicist's birth year, as well as forward to his death. (Feynman may well be the only operatic hero who dies twice in a single evening.) Rather than dealing in the expected sort of linear character development, then, Feynman offers a chronologically leapfrogging composite portrait of its protagonist's interests, without dwelling much on character development per se.
Baritone Michael Cavalieri gave a winning performance, speaking and singing lines from scientific treatises and a love letter to Feyman's wife, ticking off historical events, wandering the tiny stage and scrawling theorems and doodles on the floor. He was more than accompanied by the Yale-trained quartet So Percussion, who manned a phalanx of keyboards and drums as well as guitar, bass, dulcimer and laptop. Reichian patterns on marimba and vibraphone collided with stuttering drum patterns reminiscent of Captain Beefheart and David von Tieghem in Vees's richly colorful and animated score; the voices of news readers and Tuvan throat singers fluttered through the ether.
Whether speaking or singing, Cavalieri was aggressively amplified; only once during the piece did the words he was delivering -- all of them memorized -- become indistinct. (That suggests an improvement over an earlier performance in Norfolk, Virginia, reviewed by Jim Oestreich in The New York Times.) I mentioned that Cavalieri was "more than accompanied" by So Percussion because in addition to their musical chores, the four players were called upon to act in multiple scenes, miming lines spoken by Cavalieri or scribbling scientific formulae on the walls. Victoria Vaughan's Real Time Opera staged the piece amidst translucent screens, evocative lighting and both prerecorded and live video projections, making far better use of the Knitting Factory's meager stage than I would have imagined possible.
Stylistically, Feynman was not the operatic mode of either John Adams or Tobias Picker, but rather a form of music theater more closely allied to the work of Mikel Rouse, Heiner Goebbels or, particularly given the single-vocalist format, the collaborations of Paul Dresher and Rinde Eckert. It was rich, engrossing stuff, and ideal fodder for the Lincoln Center Festival or BAM's Harvey Theater. (Hint, hint.)
On the first half of the program -- yes, that's how short Feynman was -- So Percussion gave expert performances of Reich's Music for Pieces of Wood, a hypnotic study in shifting perceptions of pulse, and Iannis Xenakis's Ohko, a tribalistic treatise in the plethora of timbres afforded by three humble djembes. Vees himself followed with Surf Music Again, in which the composer elicited resonant tones from an electric bass guitar bowed, struck with a rubber mallet and stroked with a glass ashtray, and further treated by a delay pedal. The physical mechanics might have been Adrian Belew gone academic, but the resulting oceanic wash of rippling radiance reminded me more of Steve Roach's space music, or a slightly more austere take on Robert Fripp's recent electronic soundscapes. Having not heard Vees's similarly constituted CRI recording in some time, I wondered if the pervasive melancholy of tonight's performance was intrinsic to the composition, or whether it might have been colored by the recent, premature passing of composer Stephen Lucky Mosko, to whom it was dedicated tonight.
Saturday night also kept me busy, to the extent that I wasn't able to report with my usual dogged punctuality, since I crawled home some time after 3 AM. The evening presented both bold challenges to orthodoxy and assured performances of timeless classics -- and how peculiar that the former happened at the 92nd Street Y, the latter at the Continental on St. Mark's Place.
At the Y, contemporary-classical sextet eighth blackbird celebrated its tenth anniversary. The group came together at Oberlin a decade ago, and we have been the beneficiaries of this chance meeting ever since. A program titled "lucid, inescapable rhythms" included one world premiere -- Gordon Fitzell's Lucid -- and two local premieres -- Ashley Fure's Inescapable (in Broken Form) and Marcus Maroney's Rhythms. The first of these played to the sextet's strengths in keen improvisation, eliciting the textural mystique of Crumb and the sonic grandeur of Varèse, as well as an order to freely quote from earlier eighth blackbird premieres. (It was the valiant Frank J. Oteri of NewMusicBox who identified a naggingly familar riff played by pianist Lisa Kaplan as Michael Torke's The Yellow Pages, the piece that drew this group together in the first place.) Fure offered a fully assured music of sensation rather than rhetoric or narrative; violent pulsations ceded to a singular tone, then reversed course. Maroney's playful piece pitted chattering snare-drums patterns against melodic quintuplets.
The concert opened with Derek Bermel's Tied Shifts, an animated piece influenced by the composer's encounter with the dauntingly polymetric music native to Bulgaria. The most immediately winning Bermel score I've encountered, this was further enhanced by the group's choreography, which provided through intelligently manuvered confluences and departures in stage positioning far more insight into the music's architecture than did the composer's detailed note.
eighth blackbird's stage choreography may well turn out to be the group's most revolutionary innovation: Both Frederic Rzewski's peppy Les Moutons de Panurge and Fred Lerdahl's sumptuous Fantasy Etudes benefitted from the players moving about on stage -- drawing attention to the score's direction of solo and ensemble play, and thus enhancing comprehension rather than inhibiting it. While I won't suggest that every chamber group should be dancing its programs, it definitely works for this one. Of the remaining pieces, Thierry de May's Musique de Tables -- a work scored for three amplified tabletops pounded, scuffed and swished upon -- was a playful bit of Blue Man Group-style physical theater; Jennifer Higdon's Zango Bandango was, as the group had requested, a snappy bottle rocket of a finale. The pacing of the set list, I'll add, was as entirely right as the well-oiled machinery of a big-league rock concert.
Altogether more shambolic in pacing and presentation was the late-night set presented by legendary Los Angeles punk band the Germs at the Continental -- but that's probably the only thing this show had in common with the group's late-'70s heyday. Given that all manner of statistically impossible reunions have taken place lately -- not just Cream and Dinosaur Jr., where all the key players are still with us, but also Queen and the New York Dolls, where the same certainly can't be said -- this long-delayed New York debut can't be considered unthinkable.
Implausible, more likely, since to most fans, the Germs can't be imagined without singer Darby Crash, one of American rock's more fabled casualties. A precocious, deeply troubled frontman, Crash always promised to die young, then actually followed through with a heroin overdose at age 22. We Got the Neutron Bomb, an excellent book by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen that provides a Studs Terkel-styled oral history of the L.A. punk scene, provides firsthand testimony of the band's brief, livid and lurid existence; Crash, a stylishly rendered mini-comic writer/artist Craig Bostick based on a conversation between the singer and Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go's (whose lead singer, '80s pop queen Belinda Carlisle, was briefly the Germs' original drummer), seems to suggest that the singer's demons might well have been sparked in some part by his inability to deal with homosexuality -- a claim confirmed by some and disregarded by others in the Spitz/Mullen volume.
The Germs' reputation rests upon a precarious balance of an Iggy Pop-inspired penchant for confrontational and violently chaotic live shows, the messianic Crash's deeply cultish following, and a single LP, 1979's Joan Jett-produced GI, which provides evidence that what was once a snotty joke had become an accomplished band, with a singer who provided unusually insightful and reflective lyrics. Currently available in its entirety as part of the Slash/Rhino compilation, MIA: The Complete Anthology, the album is one of the essential documents of L.A. hardcore.
That Crash should provide fodder for a biopic in the making is no surprise; far stranger is the notion that guitarist Pat Smear (who went on to play with Nirvana and Foo Fighters), bassist Lorna Doom (who quit the music business altogether) and drummer Don Bolles (who subsequently played in '90s trash-rock group Celebrity Skin) decided to reunite for a clutch of live dates -- with Shane West, the actor portraying Crash in said film, What We Do Is Secret, as their frontman.
The midnight show at the Continental, the band's second set of the evening, suggested that this was finally a chance for Smear, Doom and Bolles to finally realize the professional dreams they'd dared to wish for after GI was recorded. West looked and sounded like Crash; what's more, he gamefully flung himself into the audience, and shared a series of microphones with fans who crashed the stage. (Final body count: three dead mikes, with a fourth in questionable shape.)
I can't imagine that Smear and Doom ever smiled so much in the Germs's supposed heyday as they did Saturday night at the Continental, a tiny punk club similar to CBGB but far less scuzzy. Those two, along with the gaunt, wacky Bolles, served up a meaty, propulsive set with their animated yet professional virtual Darby. The hedonistic amateurism that once fuelled the band was in short supply even in a set as haltingly delivered and technically buggered as this one occasionally was. (Opening band the Magik Markers delivered that quality in spades; their performance was a noisy, virtually inchoate mix of threat and exorcism.)
On the other hand, the power of the Germs songbook -- previously overshadowed by Crash's antics -- was finally and unquestionably revealed, and the furiously moshing, stage-diving and microphone-stealing audience ate it up. A rumored tour in 2006 seems virtually inevitable; if you view punk solely as a lifestyle, or a means for confrontation and transgression, you'll probably want to steer clear. But if you've happened to notice that despite the chaos, debris and casualties -- R.I.P. Darby Crash -- punk bands have also penned a bounty of worthwhile, often brilliant songs, this show definitely scratches that itch.
The Germs set list, to the best of my ability to reconstruct it: Forming / My Tunnel / Communist Eyes / Circle One / Lexicon Devil / No God / What We Do Is Secret / Manimal / Caught in My Eye / Media Blitz / Sex Boy / Land of Treason / Dragon Lady / Richie Dagger's Crime / Let's Pretend / Strange Notes / We Must Bleed / Shut Down (Annihilation Man).
Playlist:
Germs - MIA: The Complete Anthology (Slash/Rhino)
X - Los Angeles (Slash/Rhino)
Really Red - Teaching You the Fear (Empty)
Butthole Surfers - Butthole Surfers + PCPPEP (Latino Bugger Veil)
Minutemen - Double Nickels on the Dime (SST)
Black Flag - Everything Went Black (SST)
Francesco Maria Veracini - Violin Sonatas - John Holloway, Jaap ter Linden, Lars Ulrik Mortensen (ECM)
Morton Feldman - Patterns on a Chromatic Field - Charles Curtis, Aleck Karis (Tzadik)
Cellist Charles Curtis, a longtime New York fixture and La Monte Young associate now based in San Diego, is back in town this month in a big, big way, presenting a series of concerts under the collective rubric "Waking States." So far, the residency has included a performance of Young's Just Charles and Cello in the Romantic Chord at the Mela Foundation Dream House last week (with two more performances to come on December 10 and 17), the world premiere of Éliane Radigue's Naldjorlak last Monday night at the Tenri Cultural Institute, and tonight's all-Alvin Lucier bill at the Diapason Gallery for Sound. The remaining events in the series are a concert at Tonic featuring the Piece for Cello and Saxophone by forgotten minimalist pioneer Terry Jennings on Sunday, December 11, and a performance of Morton Feldman's enigmatic Patterns in a Chromatic Field with pianist Aleck Karis at the Double Knot Rug Gallery on Wednesday, December 14. (Details regarding all of the concerts can be found here.)
I became aware of Curtis embarassingly late, via the absorbing CD of the aforementioned Feldman composition that he and Karis released on John Zorn's Tzadik label last year. More recently, Curtis and clarinetist Anthony Burr issued an utterly engrossing 2-CD set of Lucier's music on the outstanding Brooklyn-based electroacoustic music label Antiopic. That set followed hot on the heels of another rich lode of Lucier, by the Barton Workshop on New World Records -- which I have to thank Molly Sheridan of NewMusicBox for bringing to my attention, and for reviewing so admirably in TONY.
Alvin Lucier's music offers an intriguing paradox: Based on all manner of daunting scientific theorems and mathematical schemata, his pieces rightly sound like processes of nature. It's as if Wagner had scrapped the entire Ring cycle in order to more fully explore the acoustical implications inherent in the opening chord: An enveloping world of sound and event is revealed in the simplest and subtlest of gestures.
The New World set does an outstanding job of presenting Lucier's music, but the Antiopic release goes a step further, extending the gestalt to include the packaging in which the sounds are presented -- yet without stinting on first-rate annotation. (See for yourself -- the CD booklet and notes are here.) This is a first-rate model of presentation -- and how unsurprising it is that this should have come from a label at the periphery of out-rock, as opposed to avant-classical.
Perhaps ironically, Curtis didn't even touch his cello in my favorite of tonight's pieces. Instead, in the original version of Lucier's 1974 piece Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, he triggered sine waves from his laptop, in the process eliciting sympathetic vibrations from three snare drums positioned at varying distances in the room. The ebb and flow of the computer's simple song set the snares rustling like cicadas on a summer evening; as the wave forms slowly changed, the drums seemed to offer first a chorus, then ghostly pre-echoes, and finally scrabbly little rhythm patterns in response.
Charles Curtis, a Lucier piece dedicated to the cellist, created a complex interdependency between Curtis's instrument and the computer's slowly sweeping tones: sine waves rang; the cellist played a short figure; repeat. Across the work's duration, however, the soloist's position with regard to his accompaniment/antagonist constantly shifted. Many times, it seemed as if cello and computer were generating identical sounds, but when Curtis cut short his present aphorism, the machine was revealed to have moved somewhere else entirely. Mysterious and magical.
The final piece, Music for Cello with One or More Amplified Vases, revealed that the wiry parabolas draped behind Curtis throughout the evening were actually electrical cords, on which dangled microphones plunged into a collection of large ceramic vases. The basic premise of the piece was an exploration of the resonances created when Curtis bowed his instrument in the proximity of these vessels. If only the vases had been turned up in the mix... much of this piece came off as a soliloquy, at least from my patch of floor. (Granted, New York City is a hard place in which to play subtle music; the players contended all night long with sirens and garbage trucks on the street below.) On the occasions that a genuine balance was achieved, the results were utterly mesmerizing.
Playlist:
Felix Mendelssohn - A Midsummer Night's Dream: Overture; Lobgesang - Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra/Riccardo Chailly (Decca)
Hesperion XXI - Altre Follie 1500-1750 (Alia Vox)
Elliott Carter - Dialogues (Nicolas Hodges, London Sinfonietta/Oliver Knussen); Boston Concerto (BBC Symphony Orchestra/Knussen); Cello Concerto (Fred Sherry, BBC Symphony Orchestra/Knussen); ASKO Concerto (ASKO Ensemble/Knussen) (Bridge)
Tom Flaherty - Vorarlberg Resonance (Karl and Margaret Kohn); Timesflies (Peter Yates, Tom Flaherty); Trio for Cello and Digital Processor (Flaherty); Quartet for Viola, Cello and Digital Processor (Cynthia Fogg, Flaherty); Time to Travel (Karl and Margaret Kohn) (Bridge)
Ulver - Blood Inside (The End)
Nine Horses - Snow Borne Sorrow (Samadhi Sound)
Éliane Radigue - Adnos II and III (Table of the Elements)
Tonight, Christoph Eschenbach and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the local premiere of Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto at Carnegie Hall. I'll not mince words: Hidgon is one of my absolute favorite young composers. (I almost wrote "up-and-coming," but her dance card, overstuffed with major commissions like this one, asserts that she's already arrived.) She wrote her piece for versatile British percussionist Colin Currie, whose recordings on Naxos of works by James MacMillan and Michael Torke have been terrifically enjoyable.
Subtlety may not be a long suit in percussion concertos, generally speaking, but that's the tone in which Higdon's piece embarks: low, rolling fifths at the plummy bottom end of the marimba rumble at the edge of audibility. That was an intended effect, whereas the points at which the orchestra drowned out parts of the following vibraphone passage surely weren't. The soloist engaged in playful conversations with the ensemble's percussion section, including a terrifically scored passage for all manner of untuned wooden clicks and clacks. Currie's powerful solo break on bongos, timbales and tom-toms provided the climax of the first section; the piece then shifted, somewhat abruptly, into a pensive slow stretch colored by gently bowed and struck metal sounds. (While the piece was scored continuously, it clearly fell into a conventional fast-slow-fast arc.)
A bright finale opened once again on marimba, followed by an energetic break for soloist and percussion section that recalled African call-and-reponse and Brazilian batucada. Currie's final drum solo -- or cadenza, if you must -- combined all the technicality and sweaty abandon of a Buddy Rich extravaganza; I was stunned still more by po-faced string players sitting stock still as they awaited their cue to resume. Lighten up, y'all! Crack a smile, or something. Eschenbach showed no such restraint; I haven't seen that kind of dancing on a podium since Robert Spano left town. (Spano, of course, is another Higdon advocate. Hmmm.)
It would be silly to plumb such a piece for depths of profundity -- and that's seldom the point of percussion concertos, anyway. (Christopher Rouse's Der Gerettete Alberich comes closer than most, but in the end, even Rouse can't avoid indulging his John Bonham fetish.) What Higdon delivered was an expertly paced, brilliantly scored frolic that challenges the soloist, shows him off at his best and makes exemplary use of a modern orchestra's resources, along the lines of a Rouse or Joseph Schwanter. It will surely go down well with audiences, regardless of age or musical sophistication.
Following the break, Eschenbach delivered a performance of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony that ultimately won me over, even as it made me ponder my own prejudices. I spent a good stretch of formative years in Houston during Eschenbach's tenure as music director of the Houston Symphony, and have long admired his deep musicality even when his interpretations have seemed to run counter to my ingrained preferences. I fondly recall elegant performances of Mozart operas and ravishing renditions of Mahler symphonies, and cherished his championing of at least a handful of contemporary composers, such as Rouse. And, oh yeah, Tobias Picker.
Eschenbach may have apprenticed with Szell and Karajan, but his Beethoven is altogether freer and more willful than that of either mentor. The headlong rush with which he opened the piece led to some muddy textures, but conveyed both power and purpose. Yet Eschenbach lingered gently over certain passages, slowing down to savor them, if only fleetingly. He directs the orchestra with the lithe physicality of a dancer; there's no mistaking the fact that he knows what he wants to convey in a score.
The Funeral March was broad but not ponderous in pace, thick but not plush in sound. The fugue in particular assumed an awesome, almost terrifying majesty: Eschenbach seemed to cast it as connective tissue between Mozart's Requiem and the gnostic sprawl of Bruckner. It was almost more tension than the music could bear, but not quite. The Scherzo flew past as a fizzy blur. Eschenbach practically conjoined that movement to the Finale, in a transition so abrupt as to remind one of his patented "Pathetique pirouette" (the nearly condescending full-body pivot he uses to ward off applause between the third and fourth movements of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony). This movement, too, showed some signs of conductorly retouching -- nothing so gross as rescoring, but definitely a managing of balances that cast a spotlight on the composer's "Prometheus" motive whenever it appeared, in or out of the basic pulse.
If Eschenbach's "Eroica" wasn't exactly my Apollonian ideal (or Beethoven's either, perhaps), it nonetheless struck me as a carefully considered, valid interpretation. This brings me to the pondering of prejudices I mentioned earlier -- namely, if Lorin Maazel's similarly flexible Beethoven disturbs me to the point of avoiding New York Philharmonic performances that include those works, why do I find Eschenbach's distortions more palatable? Are Eschenbach's insights more "correct," more "valid" than Maazel's? Or am I simply a smitten groupie? I don't know the answer. I'm just thinking out loud.
Meanwhile, having mentioned Tobias Picker, I've decided to hold off on talking about An American Tragedy until I've seen it again next week. That's not a luxury available to most critics, which makes me feel kind of lucky just this once not to have a looming deadline... especially since in nearly every review I've read since my own initial thoughts were swallowed by my machine last night, virtually everyone seems to have critiqued not the piece that was actually staged, but the one that he or she wanted to have seen and heard.
I can almost understand that impulse, since I went into the Met Monday night larded with my own expectations. It was only when I managed to set prejudice aside that I began to see An American Tragedy for what it actually was, what Picker actually achieved. It may have been Merchant-Ivory rather than Costa-Gavras, but there's surely room for both on the modern lyric stage. Still, I want a second dose in order to confirm that impression -- which certainly surprised me, and not unpleasantly.
Playlist:
Various Artists - Roadrunner United: The All-Star Sessions (Roadrunner)
Joseph Schwantner - A Sudden Rainbow; Angelfire*; Beyond Autumn**; September Canticle*** - Anne Akiko Meyers*, Gregory Hustis**, James Diaz***, Dallas Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Litton (Hyperion)
Claudio Monteverdi - The Sacred Music - 3 - The King's Consort/Robert King (Hyperion)
Phish - Live at Madison Square Garden, New Year's Eve 1995 (JEMP/Rhino, to be issued 12/20)
Once again, I've learned the folly of typing for hours directly into my blog's text window. Did you know that if you absentmindedly hold down the shift key in Windows for more than eight seconds, it changes your keyboard settings? And that it's nearly impossible to change them back easily? What's more, once the keyboard is changed, control-A and control-C don't seem to do what they're supposed to.
Really, though, this time it's kind of okay with me: Another day of processing my thoughts on An American Tragedy will likely be helpful, especially given that my response is well out of line with the general tenor of my critical caste.
Still, to Sieglinde, who gave me a pinch when I previously failed to respond to Dolora Zajick in a stodgy Met Aida some weeks ago: Mine eyes have seen the glory.
When you're sitting in a concert hall and someone nearby starts snoring, what do you do? More to the point, what can you do?
I'm only asking because my enjoyment of Emanuel Ax's excellent all-ballades recital at Carnegie Hall this afternoon was twice impeded by the sound of an elderly gentleman dozing off in the row behind me. (Sounds, actually, since the snores of the first half were markedly different than the wheezes of the second.)
I wished for interventionist ushers. I wanted some sort of call button like the ones you use to summon the stewardess on an airplane. I wondered why the guy in the seat next to the hapless offender didn't gently nudge his shoulder -- or maybe he did, I don't know. But I was afraid to reach back and tap this man's leg, for fear of a start that might be audible on stage.
Then again, Ax's concentration was so complete that he managed to play through at least three cell phones and all manner of eruptive coughing, so maybe he could have handled this, as well. In contrast -- and I can't verify this -- later, in another hall, I overheard one critic tell another that Garrick Ohlsson manfully halted his concurrent afternoon recital at Avery Fisher Hall a time or two because of cell phone intrusions.
My primary reason for attending Ax's recital was to hear two pieces new to New York, Chen Yi's Ji-Dong-Nuo and Kaija Saariaho's Ballade. One colleague referred to the two pieces, which he'd heard Ax play elsewhere, as "cute" and "incompetent," respectively. Since the latter is not a word I'd ever heard used to describe anything by Saariaho, I was even more determined to hear these pieces for myself.
He wasn't wrong about Chen Yi's piece, in which pleasant little whisps of Chinese folk tune and fluttering bird song traipse merrily up and down the keyboard. As for the Saariaho, I liked the piece, admiring the way little hints of melody optimistically attempted to escape from penumbral clusters and sweeping glissandi. Both pieces were tiny (4-5 minutes), and neither struck me as a "ballade" per se -- certainly not in this context. Chen Yi's piece was more a "Prelude," an impressionistic miniature a la Ravel or Debussy. Saariaho's piece might have been titled "Etude" or "Nocturne," or maybe whatever's French for "Help me push my car out of the mud." Just goes to remind us of the potential perils of sticking square pegs into round holes.
About the remainder of the program, I have little to say. Ax is basically unassailable in Chopin, and his performances of that composer's four Ballades were masterly and ingratiating. Likewise, Ax brought equal authority to the four disparate pieces Brahms patched together as his youthful Four Ballades, Op. 10. The first came on like a folk song subsequently elaborated; the last two were free-floating displays of virtuosity, and the second did a nice job of making the other three seem as if they might belong together. The remaining work on the program proper, not counting an encore I couldn't identify, was Liszt's Ballade No. 2, a flashy, almost garish barnburner that allowed Ax to demonstrate his most athletic moves.
As a critic, I wondered how one could find much of anything else to say about a performance so exactingly constructed and executed. I look forward to reading Allan Kozinn's review when it appears.
A bit later and a few blocks north, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center offered the local premiere of Four Settings by Melinda Wagner, prefaced by a Duruflé rarity and followed by Mozart's imperishable Clarinet Quintet (with David Shifrin on the horn). Duruflé left very few works, and his Prélude, Récitatif et Variations was the first chamber piece I'd encountered. The opening movement fairly called out for some kind of program, or at least an illicit subtext, as tentative viola (Paul Neubauer) and winsome flute (Ransom Wilson) seemed to pitch woo on a luxurious waterbed of a piano part, winningly played by Anna Polonsky. The pianist took the lead in the middle movement, which provided connective tissue leading into the finale, richly spun variations on a theme that might have been a medieval folk song. In the end, the piece was slight, sweet and nicely crafted.
Soprano Christine Brandes was supported by violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, clarinet and piano in the Wagner work; Karla Lemon conducted. In the opening movement, a setting of French poet Robert Desnos's "Last Poem," string and wind figures arose like curlicues of smoke, the vaporous contrail of the singer's outpouring. At other times, spasmodic gestures seemed to reveal more emotional content than the sung lines actually offered. The second setting, of Denise Leverov's "The Wings," was marked by exceptionally able string writing, full of Webernesque glosses and Bartókian thwacks, as well as a hushed, spooky ostinato stretch for piano. Brandes swooped and coasted on the eddying currents the players provided. Wagner compelled the soprano to sing extremely high notes quietly during the third section, Emily Dickinson's "Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers." Brandes handled the challenge securely enough. In a setting as quizzical as the poet's verse itself, violinist Harumi Rhodes stood out in solo passages of remarkable sweetness. The final piece, Dickinson's "Wild Nights," pushed Brandes to the edge of shrillness, as she flung her voice impetuously among feverishly dancing instrumentalists.
In the end, I wanted to have cared more for Wagner's songs than I actually did, but it was through no fault of her instrumental writing, which was consistently ingenious. Rather, my appreciation was perhaps dulled by some sense that the vocal lines didn't always echo or amplify my perception of what this or that verse suggested. For me, that illustrates one of the most treacherous intersections possible between composer and listener ("critic" being a smallish subset of the latter): How can any two individuals reach consensus about anything as pointedly personal as poetry?
That ambivalence left me just a bit uptight; the Mozart quintet, sweetly sung by Shifrin, the Kavafians, Neubauer and Fred Sherry, was precisely the massage my furrowed critical muscles required.
Tomorrow, An American Tragedy. Thereafter, a return to reading fellow bloggers, after a long weekend's abstinence in order to avoid spoilers.
Playlist:
Kate Bush - Aerial (Columbia)
Fish - Bouillabaisse: The Best of Fish (Snapper)
Dimmu Borgir - Stormblåst (Nuclear Blast 2005 rerecording and Cacaphonous 1996 original)
Kayo Dot - Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue (Robotic Empire)
John Harbison - Variations; Four Songs of Solitude; Twilight Music - Spectrum Concerts Berlin (Naxos)
Issac Albéniz - Iberia - Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion)
America has yet to get to know the real Janine Jansen, and I'm not convinced that I helped as much as I'd meant to with the piece I wrote for this week's TONY. (The article is here -- free of charge, but you have to register.) In that story, I mainly dealt with the single phenomenon that is currently making this 27-year-old Dutch violinist a quirky news item -- namely, that her new recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons on Decca is a runaway bestseller, but 91 percent of her sales to date have been via download at iTunes.
In the article, I talk about two factors I surmise to be the cause of this situation. One is that I suspect the iTunes market for classical music is probably driven by non-specialists who might want to satisfy their curiosity about this or that warhorse they've heard of, but don't already have a favorite record or three on their non-virtual shelf. To such consumers, I'd guess, one name is pretty much like another.
The other factor, not unconnected to the first, is that Decca is packaging and marketing Jansen's releases with extremely alluring photographs like the one you see above. Where a more hidebound classical consumer might look at that emphasis on Jansen's physical allure as a blind behind which a lack of talent could be hidden, I suspect that an iTunes user reared on pop-music imagery wouldn't necessarily be so skeptical. A well-placed banner ad like the one Universal Classics unfurled at iTunes could easily provoke curiosity, and sound bites that reveal the performance to be a genuinely exciting one would likely finish the deal.
In case you don't plan to read the article, I'll repeat here that I think Jansen's Four Seasons -- a fiery reading made more transparent by a unique one-on-a-part orchestration -- is as good as any modern-instrument performance I've heard, and better than most. Jansen ordinarily commands a sweet, succulent tone, but she's not at all afraid of digging in and getting dirty when the music calls for it. The opening movement of her "Winter" is among the most bone-chilling I've heard; the initial harpsichord figures -- played by Jansen's father! -- are the aural equivalent of watching ice crystals grow in time-lapse photography.
When I interviewed Jansen for the TONY article, she was bright, funny and well-spoken about the music. And she seemed genuinely flustered, if only for a moment, when I asked her if she worried that her glamorous photos might have a negative impact on a certain sector of the market -- the one that, to judge by Gramophone ads, only appreciates cheesecake in hi-fi advertisements. Her response was straightforward enough: If she spent so much time and effort making a record that sounded good, why wouldn't she want it to look good, as well?
My article covers all of this well enough, I think. But if I'd had more space, I would love to have talked about things like her commitment to contemporary music. Jansen regularly participates in Spectrum Concerts Berlin, a chamber-music series that has performed (and recorded, for Naxos) the likes of John Harbison and Robert Helps. She has commissioned and performed 24 caprices by contemporary Dutch composers, a project I'd love to hear, and she mentioned that the Concertgebouw will be commissioning a new concerto for her, as well.
I'd also love to have further elucidated her relationship with the Britten Violin Concerto, which she played tonight in Newark with Neeme Järvi and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Jansen first learned the concerto when she was asked to play it on one of her earliest orchestral-soloist engagements -- a point at which, she said, she would have been willing to play pretty much anything that was requested of her -- and quickly came to love the piece. Later, when she played it with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, a violinist from that ensemble thanked her for bringing back a work that British orchestra hadn't played in decades -- a fact that both surprised and delighted the Dutch musician.
Jansen's performance tonight left absolutely no doubt that she's a soloist of the first rank. Physically, she's a player of the body-rockin' Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg school, blonde hair flying and horsehair shredding. She pumped her right shoulder when preparing for more rugged entrances, making faces at the maestro as she launched into the music. But Jansen also played with tremendous delicacy when the score called for it, and boasted the most secure command of the instrument's highest notes and harmonics of any violinist I have ever heard in concert. Double- and triple-stops posed no difficulty, and she made the effort of simultaneously bowing and plucking notes on the neck seem like child's play.
If I had limitless funds at my disposal, I'd pack Jansen off to a recording studio with the LSO and someone like Hugh Wolff in a heartbeat, pairing her rendition of this piece with something that struck me as a natural complement, the Barber concerto. Compared to the three recordings of the Britten that I know and admire, Jansen's performance was more lithe than those of Mark Lubotsky and Maxim Vengerov, and tonally sweeter than Daniel Hope's. (Meanwhile, I suspect that Jansen's next recording project, the Mendelssohn concerto with the esteem-commanding Riccardo Chailly and his Gewandhaus band, will finally begin to crack the critical ice over here.)
Järvi's orchestra rose to the occasion both as a whole and in individually spotlighted instances, such as the remarkable passage in which piccolos snatch the fiddler's solo, then toss it up against the tuba player. I would have liked a richer horn-section introduction to the violin cadenza, but otherwise, this was a nicely gauged and wholly convincing reading.
The conductor built a sympathetic program around the Britten. Arvo Pärt's Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten opened the concert. Pärt's music has long been a Järvi specialty; that accounted for the luminous rendition, but rendered curious the fact that the conductor lowered his baton -- thus inviting raucous applause -- well before the final bell had faded. After the break, Järvi led a brisky paced, exactingly balanced and pointedly accented performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7. The New Jersey Symphony boasts an exceedingly warm string sound, at least in this hall, bathing the mysterious Allegretto in tones of mahogany, amber and honey. The Presto was effervescent (although here, the balance was less pristine), the Allegro con brio suitably breathless.
Tonight's concert, I'll add, was appealing on more than purely musical grounds. Prudential Hall at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center has long been one of my favorite local spaces, yet I'd never heard a classical performance there before tonight. (My previous encounters were with Cassandra Wilson and the Chieftains -- thankfully, not at the same time, though I wouldn't put it past Paddy Moloney to consider it.) The hall proved well suited to orchestral sonics, not nearly as dry and thankless as Avery Fisher Hall, although the man shuffling his shoes on the hardwood floor across the aisle drove me to distraction now and then.
Moreover, the tone of the presentation was friendlier, less ostentatious, than most of what we get in Manhattan, certainly at Lincoln Center. Before the concert, NJSO principal bassoonist Robert Wagner came to the front of the stage to warm up the audience. He called Järvi out to talk about the conductor's long relationship with Pärt, during which it was revealed that in Estonian, "part" means "duck" and "järvi" is "lake" -- which seems to explain a lot.
Before the Beethoven, an NJSO board member took the microphone to pay homage to second violinist Thomas Lindsay, who is leaving the orchestra after 35 years of service... and who personally introduced the board to a potential benefactor named Herbert Axelrod. (Which played out well for the orchestra, at least.) Even Järvi got into the act, eliciting passages so hushed as to draw chuckles from the audience during an encore of "Anitra's Dance" from Grieg's Peer Gynt -- and hamming just enough to prove that he was in sync with the moment's quiet humor.
Hard to imagine that kind of conviviality emanating from the stage at Avery Fisher Hall, isn't it?
