Night After Night

Jon Gillock at the Church of the Ascension, March 5, 2013

Jon Gillock, by Kenneth Dickerman/The New York Times

Jon Gillock at the Church of the Ascension, March 5, 2013
The New York Times, March 7, 2013

A gripping account of Messiaen's awe-inspiring Méditations sur la Mystère de la Sainte Trinité, played by a Messiaen expert on an instrument made to order as part of an ongoing project to record Messiaen's complete organ works on that instrument, the Manton Memorial Organ. Since no photograph accompanied this review, I've posted a photograph of Jon Gillock playing at the Church of the Ascension taken from Vivien Schweitzer's review of the organ's inaugural concert, on May 5, 2011.

I'll add, somewhat sheepishly, that this review initially disappointed me on reflection; I think I might have included too much background and atmosphere at the cost of musical and performative considerations. But from out of the blue came a welcome email from a good friend, who said that this passage in my review…

In thunderous climaxes the sanctuary shook. Eerie intimations hung tremulous in the air. And Messiaen’s bountiful birds — joyful reminders, to him at least, of God’s omnipresent hand in the mundane — warbled high and clear.

…took her right back to her own earlier experience of hearing Gillock play Messiaen on the Manton instrument. That made me feel better – yet I wonder how much of her response was predicated on being able to fill in details I omitted.

Writing remains a continual challenge.

Francesca da Rimini at the Metropolitan Opera House, March 4, 2013

Marcello Giordani, Eva-Maria Westbroek and Mark Delavan, by Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Francesca da Rimini at the Metropolitan Opera House, March 4, 2013
The New York Times, March 7, 2013

I don't often get much direct response to my Times reviews in the form of email; usually that's reserved for social-media channels and the occasional comment here on the blog. In this case, though, two notes I received after this review came out – one on my home address and one via the Times – left me disappointed that I'd failed to clearly convey the real motivation behind the question with which I closed the review: "Still – why?"

So, to be perfectly clear, I wasn't actually questioning why the Met would devote its considerable resources to an also-ran of the operatic repertoire. Fact is, I think the Met could stand to explore such byways more frequently. A diet of nothing but consensus masterpieces, however well done, could grow deadly dull in time, and the Met does tend to trot out its greatest hits and recent reimaginings rather frequently.

The music in Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini is inventive and ravishing, no two ways about it, and I also meant what I wrote about the clever economy of its dramatic pacing. The production is an old-school eye-popper of the sort we see infrequently now, apart from Zeffirelli revivals, and the directing is basically agreeable, though I absolutely agree with John Yohallem's observation regarding one particular scene, well-stated in his astute review on Parterre Box:

David Kneuss, who restaged the production, has the Malatesta army in Act II stand at attention staring up at Francesca and Paolo as they confess their immoral love to each other, which can’t be the ideal way to keep it secret from Gianciotto. At least turn the soldiers around, hey?

The question at the end had everything to do with the two principal performers, both of them honorable artists. Eva-Maria Westbroek's sound could be impressive, but lacked a certain floating quality that her character warranted; more importantly, her enunciation lacked clarity and incisiveness entirely.

As for Marcello Giordani – who, as I've revealed before, was my ur-tenor ages ago at Houston Grand Opera, where he made an indelible impression as my first-ever Duke of Mantua in a Rigoletto that literally changed my life – I wonder if it was his recent troubles in Les Troyens that made him seem so cautious and troubled here? I have immense respect for Giordani, but this was not a comfortable evening for him.

So, to complete the thought I tried to telegraph in that final, lingering question, why did the Met devote such evident resources to this revival without the proper principal artists to bring out what's best about the opera itself?

 

Jennifer Koh at the 92nd Street Y, March 2, 2013

Jennifer Koh, by Jennifer Taylor/The New York Times

Jennifer Koh at the 92nd Street Y, March 2, 2013
The New York Times, March 5, 2013

I specifically remember thinking, as Jennifer Koh managed to give each voice in Bach's fugues its own sound and personality, that the shadows playing on the wall behind her served as perfect illustrations for the sensation I was experiencing. I thought about mentioning this unique shadowplay in my concert review, but ultimately decided against it. Had I known that this particular gorgeous photo by Jennifer Taylor would accompany the review, I certainly would have chosen differently.

Simply put, Koh, who I profiled for the Times earlier this year, is a supremely gifted, extraordinarily focused and motivated artist, and this was a very special concert. If it doesn't end up on some year-end list I'll be compelled to create, it will have been a remarkable year indeed; right now, it's a lock.

Collegiate Chorale at Carnegie Hall, February 27, 2013

Collegiate Chorale, by Richard Termine/The New York Times

Collegiate Chorale at Carnegie Hall, February 27, 2013
The New York Times, March 2, 2013

Here we are at Night After Night post No. 1,000. Feels auspicious, even if it's just a link to the latest of my New York Times reviews. If this particular report comes off as a bit dismissive toward a pair of today's most prominent composers, it's only because I know a lot of music by Philip Glass and Osvaldo Golijov, and compared the two works at hand strictly to their own stronger pieces.

Curious, given the accusations of plagiarism – or at least inopportune borrowing, inappropriately explained – on Golijov's part in recent years, that more wasn't made of it when Glass responded to a major commission with a symphony one-third recycled from his own film score to Powaqqatsi – and really, in my view, recycled to no great effect. Tim Page's Washington Post advance feature contained no mention of the self-borrowing, nor did Jens F. Laurson's customarily keen Ionarts review. Only the Washington Times reviewer noted the reused music with bewilderment.

(An aside: The Washington Times review has no byline on the paper's website. The online journalism archive HighBeam Research credits the article, rightly or not, to Julia Duin, a veteran religion reporter fired in 2010, purportedly for speaking ill of Times management.)

Presumably reporters and reviewers ignored Glass's recycling because the program note provided, written by Richard Freed, didn't acknowledge it. Neither does the liner note included with the CD recording of the symphony issued by Glass's Orange Mountain Music record label. But Richard Guérin, who edits the Glass Note blog, cited Glass's reuse of the film music openly in a 2011 post, and the point was also noted in the Collegiate Chorale's program notes at Carnegie Hall.

To be perfectly clear, "The Unutterable" is very good Glass music. And I don't personally take any issue with a composer reusing his own music; where would Copland's Symphony No. 3 (1946) be without its incorporation of his Fanfare for the Common Man (1942)? But the lack of transparency about it feels shifty.

More important, in the context of the symphony's two previous, very effective movements, a sudden shift to an earlier, starker style seems jarring. And the music, meant as a film cue, ends without any sense of concluding – saddling a heretofore dramatic symphony with a wan, anticlimactic ending that left the Carnegie Hall audience confused and hesitant to respond.

At the Kennedy Center premiere, the symphony's final movement featured more extensive choral parts and a brief, contrasting coda – which included the work's only instance of the archetypal Glass arpeggio. I've heard the complete original version of the symphony in an uncirculated reference recording. I wonder now if the removal of these elements wasn't a mistake, given my impressions of the revised version in this Carnegie Hall performance. (You can hear the original coda in the Richard Guérin blog post I mentioned above.)

Golijov's Oceana, on the other hand, is a fine piece on its own merits, with some positively thrilling choral writing and exciting episodes for its featured jazz singer. (One of the best moments found the Carnegie Hall soloist, Biella Da Costa, with harp, three flutes and percussion.) It's really only in comparison to Golijov's later, extraordinary Pasión según San Marcos, that Oceana falls short.

You can read a detailed alternate take the Collegiate Chorale concert on Oberon's Grove, and still another perspective on Superconductor. Vive les blogs!

Avant Music Festival at the Wild Project, February 16, 2013

Matoaka Little Eagle, Cleek Schrey, Mary MacKenzie and Jessica Schmitz, by Julieta Cervantes/The New York Times

Avant Music Festival at the Wild Project, February 16, 2013
The New York Times, Feb. 20, 2013

Last month I was lucky enough to get to hear a live performance of John Cage's Apartment House 1776 as part of the Avant Music Festival – and a gorgeous, inspired account it was, too. The concert was a matinee on the festival's second day; the biggest reason that it pains me to have fallen behind on blogging is that I ought to have found time to post this review before the festival ended a week later. (True, the review appeared during my self-imposed hiatus from work, but still…)

As my review says, how far we've come from the New York City premiere of this salute to the American Bicentennial, presented by the New York Philharmonic in November 1976. “Hundreds Walk Out of Premiere of John Cage Work at Fisher Hall,” the New York Times headline blared. Still, Allen Hughes was on the whole quite respectful in his review (alas, only available in the premium archive):

"Renga with Apartment House 1776" may not be great musical art (which is not Cage's aim nowadays) but it would be difficult to imagine a lustier celebration of the musical past of a bustling, brawling, sprawling, melting-pot nation than this uninhibited score.

Andrew Porter, in The New Yorker, found the work "tedious," while Richard Dyer, reviewing the world premiere at the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiere for the Boston Globe, called it "fascinating" and "elusive."

One thing I wished I'd noticed before I wrote my review: Matoaka Little Eagle, who sang and chanted the Native Ameican portions of Apartment House 1776 at the Wild Project, is the daughter of Chief Swift Eagle, who performed the same role in the 1976 performances. Fascinating.

Powder Her Face at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, February 15, 2013

Allison Cook and William Ferguson in Powder Her Face, by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Powder Her Face at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, February 15, 2013
The New York Times, Feb. 18, 2013

New York City Opera opened its latest season with a brash, intelligent and sexy staging of English composer Thomas Adès's notorious debut opera, Powder Her Face, which struck me as a finer, deeper and more nuanced work on stage than it had previously on record.

Having missed City Opera's 2011-12 season entirely due to the company offering so few performances – four of each production seems to be the new norm, certain lackluster celebrity events aside – I was glad to catch up here, and even gladder to see the fine results the company managed to pull off despite its considerable financial woes and other concerns.

The present season's second offering, Britten's The Turn of the Screw, was just as good, maybe better. (My Time Out New York interview with Lauren Worsham, who played Flora, will be in the next post here.) Two more presentations of worthy curiosities – Rossini's Moses in Egypt and Offenbach's La Perichole – arrive in April, both at City Center in midtown Manhattan.

Much has been written about City Opera's travails and wrong moves, a lot of it warranted. But on this kind of evidence – and on a few choice whisperings about future plans – I refuse to give up hope for this diminished but still vital institution.

Brentano String Quartet at Zankel Hall, February 12, 2013

Brentano String Quartet, by Karsten Moran/The New York Times

Brentano String Quartet at Zankel Hall, February 12, 2013
The New York Times, Feb. 15, 2013

The world premiere of Steven Mackey's thoughtful, engaging One Red Rose, a fascinating reflection on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, shared a program with cheery Haydn and grandiloquently interpreted Beethoven. Good stuff.

Juilliard Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, February 9, 2013

Trombonists of the Juilliard Orchestra, by Michael Nagle/The New York Times

Juilliard Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, February 9, 2013
The New York Times, Feb. 11, 2013

Not many people know it, but we live in a golden age for contemporary concert-band music, with both well-established composers and inventive up-and-comers creating new pieces for (mostly) collegiate wind ensembles across the country. Really, it shouldn't be any surprise: what composer wouldn't want to write a new piece that will be assured weeks of rehearsal, rather than hours, and could receive literally dozens of performances within just a few years.

There's an article in this, of course, and I'm already mulling it. Meanwhile, as a music lover and as a former bandsman of many years' experience, what an amazing treat it was to encounter the 900-pound gorilla of contemporary band music, John Corigliano's Symphony No. 3 ("Circus Maximus"), in a superb live performance at Carnegie Hall. And how fortunate that Corigliano was moved to formally designate this piece a "symphony," thus asserting that posterity shouldn't brush it off to the side as a tangent to his "real work."

Admittedly I give short shrift in this review to a superb performance of Corigliano's Symphony No. 2, a regrettable result of a tight word count and much to say about the band piece. Truthfully, I must admit that I gave this symphony less than its due for several years after it earned a Pulitzer Prize, most likely because to me it was one of those Pulitzers seemingly granted as a make-up prize after worthier pieces – the Symphony No. 1 or The Ghosts of Versailles, for instance – failed to win. After all, the Symphony No. 2 is only an orchestral version of Corigliano's String Quartet, right?

Well, not so fast. Yes, the symphony is an arrangement of the quartet. But it is also an exapansion, an elaboration on what the quartet was designed to express, and an instance in which a composer wrung more depth and nuance out of an existing piece by revisiting and revising its materials. If I still feel that the earlier works I mentioned were more appropriate fodder for Pulitzer consideration – a process into which I have greater insight now, having served on the nominating committee in 2012 – I have come to recognize Corigliano's Symphony No. 2 as a strong, worthy piece in its own right… and the Juilliard performers played the heck out of it here.

Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall, February 6, 2013

Soloists and the Orchestra for the Next Century, by Tina Fineberg/The New York Times

Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall, February 6, 2013
The New York Times, Feb. 11, 2013

Given that Penelope, a large-scale song cycle composed by Sarah Kirkland Snider and sung by Shara Worden and recorded for the New Amsterdam record label, was my top classical [sic] recording for 2010, it should come as no surprise that I'd be interested in hearing its successor, Unremembered, an even larger song cycle featuring Worden, Padma Newsome, DM Stith and five supporting vocalists. Based on wistful poetry by Nathaniel Bellows, and augmented with projections of his art and animations, the piece was an involving and moving success on first brush - not as instantly assimilable as Penelope, but with depths that urge repeated listening.

Speaking of which, you can hear Unremembered – a work evidently still in-progress, since Snider has said she plans to add several more songs – streaming in full on the Q2 website, along with the Newsome, Stith and Worden songs that preceded it.

Finally, for those aware of the hardships that New Amsterdam endured after Superstorm Sandy blew through last October, some very welcome good news appeared on Thursday, in a blog post on the organization's website.

A Contemporary Evening for Ralph at Merkin Concert Hall, February 4, 2013

International Contemporary Ensemble, by Karsten Moran/The New York Times

A Contemporary Evening for Ralph at Merkin Concert Hall, February 4, 2013
The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2013

This one's short on anaylsis and long on scene-setting, which seemed appropriate for an event that was more a memorial and celebration than a conventional concert. While I didn't see any need to point it out in The New York Times, it was cool to spot Kaminsky's stepson, Mike D. of the Beastie Boys, in the audience for this special occasion.

For more information about who Ralph Kaminsky was and what he did, see this beautiful essay by Bruce Hodges, which I cited and linked in my review as well. My brief Time Out New York preview is here. And be sure to stay tuned for more news about the Kaminsky Fund, a newly established initiative meant to continue the support Kaminsky provided to the new-music community at home and around the world.