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I had a bad feeling as I sat in Zankel Hall late this afternoon, waiting for the concert by James Levine and his MET Chamber Ensemble to get started. Frankly, it was impossible not to notice the strikingly large number of empty seats. For a while, it seemed that the event might have been better suited to the smaller Weill Recital Hall.
Levine's penchant for programming works by tough, so-called "academic" composers is well known by now, but this particular bill pushed that passion to the limit (at least, until the Babbitt 90th birthday concert coming up at Weill in May). Not only did it bring the New York premiere of Elliott Carter's Dialogues for piano and chamber orchestra, it also included the first local complete performance of Charles Wuorinen's Dante Trilogy -- chamber-scale versions of the three ballets the composer wrote for Peter Martins and the New York City Ballet. That's a full 66 minutes of Wuorinen (not counting stage resettings) before intermission, with the Carter and Darius Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le Toit to follow.
As it happened, I needn't have worried. Latecomers rushed to take their seats as the lights went down, filling Zankel to somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of its capacity, I'd guesstimate. And the Wuorinen pieces, it turned out, were some of his most crowd-pleasing scores. Not that they pandered in any way -- far from it. But The Mission of Virgil, The Great Procession and The River of Light were all lively, varied and imminently parsable, and the audience awarded each a rousing reception. (Almost unbelievably, I saw only one patron pack up and leave, between the second and third pieces.)
The Mission of Virgil was rescored for two pianos. Howard Watkins and Linda Hall made a feast of the work, dispatching its giddy chases, elegant reveries and stolid marches in a sumptuous feast of ivory sonorities. At times, the piece suggested a combination of Stravinsky's "Infernal Dance of King Katschei," Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse" and a boogie-woogie contest, mingling striding rhythms and bluesy chords with surprising outbursts. The two pianists dug into Wuorinen's seven-section score with gusto, if inadvertently punctuating the performance with emphatic page turns.
Even better was The Great Procession, for violin, cello, flute doubling piccolo, clarinet doubling bass clarinet (although here and in The River of Light, different players handled each instrument), piano and two percussionists. This score, too, followed a seven-part layout, with a boisterous refrain recurring four times. That refrain grew more familar with each pass, quickly becoming a recurring gag. All of the players gave knockout performances, but cellist Kari Jane Docter and flutist Stephanie Mortimore deserve special attention, the latter especially for the way she launched the genial waltz that opens "The Griffin," the big central movement. (I'll also state for the record that I can't think of another composer who writes more effectively and excitingly for percussion than Wuorinen -- every time I hear one of his pieces, it makes me wish I was still playing. Gregory Zuber and Duncan Patton were kept hopping all evening.)
If The River of Light suffered slightly by comparison, it was only because the piece offered less sense of narrative flow (even though it, too, was episodic in design). Still, again and again it offered instances of timbral gorgeousness, in particular a luminous passage for harp, celeste and tubular bells. Gracious melodies flitted from player to player like a butterfly lighting on one blossom after another, and the ending was breathtaking.
Wuorinen's brand of modernism may currently be out of favor in new-music circles, but these three scores were apt reminders of why he is unquestionably one of America's great composers. Carter's Dialogues -- a brief but densely packed conversation between brilliant, exacting pianist Nicolas Hodges and the ensemble -- seemed somewhat dry by comparison. Still, it was music worth playing and hearing, and it remains a signal pleasure of this decade to see Carter greeted again and again with towering ovations in the biggest musical establishments. (English horn player Pedro Diaz deserved an ovation of his own for the intimate exchanges between his instrument and the soloist -- allow me to offer one here.)
Just as Levine ended his much-lauded recent Boston Symphony Orchestra feast of American modernism at Isaac Stern Auditorium with a plush, fizzy performance of Gershwin's hyper-caloric Piano Concerto, this afternoon's heavy meal ended with the mango-and-lemon sorbet of Milhaud's Bouef, sweetly singing melodies and affably swinging rhythms tarted up with pungently tart dissonances.
(Warmest regards to my dear Vilaine Fille for the welcome this afternoon. Happy anniversary, and continued thanks for the gorgeous prose.)
Playlist:
Charles Wuorinen - Percussion Symphony - New Jersey Percussion Ensemble/Charles Wuorinen (Nonesuch)
Charles Wuorinen - Time's Encomium; Lepton; New York Notes; Epithalamium - Group for Contemporary Music (Tzadik)
Charles Wuorinen - On Alligators - Group for Contemporary Music/Charles Wuorinen; Fourth String Quartet - Brentano Quartet; Natural Fantasy - Kevin Bowyer; Third Piano Concerto - Garrick Ohlsson, San Francisco Symphony/Herbert Blomstedt (Tzadik)
"The world turns on its dark side. It is winter."
I wish I could claim that I was reminded of the opening words of A Child of Our Time as I arrived in Boston via the Fung Wah bus by fits and starts on Saturday afternoon, thanks to an unseasonable, slushy snowstorm. But to be honest, I didn't make the connection between the conditions of my trip and its objective until some hours later, when Michael Steinberg brought it up in the lucid, personable pre-concert lecture he delivered before that evening's Boston Symphony Orchestra concert.
2005 is the centenary of British composer Sir Michael Tippett's birth, an occasion that is going almost completely unobserved in New York City. As a deeply passionate admirer of Tippett's work, I complained about that situation in an article I wrote in March, previewing a performance by British choir The Sixteen that included the "Five Negro Spirituals" from A Child of Our Time. (I'd provide a link to that article, for which I interviewed Tippett boosters including Sixteen conductor Harry Christophers, Sir Colin Davis, Peter Cropper of the Lindsay String Quartet, pianist Steven Osborne and composer Steve Martland, but sadly, it hasn't made it into the Time Out New York online archives just yet. That's also true of the sidebar list of recordings recommended by those artists and myself.)
I'm pretty sure those spirituals were also sung by the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus in a midday concert at Trinity Church during the LSO's recent three-concert run at Lincoln Center. And Osborne will be playing Tippett's Piano Sonata No. 2 on his Zankel Hall debut recital -- along with Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata, Debussy's first book of Preludes and three Novelettes by Poulenc -- on December 8. (He was also supposed to have a recording of Tippett's complete sonatas and Piano Concerto on the shelves this year courtesy of the Hyperion label, but begged off for more time to master the works. Let's hope Hyperion is still there when he's ready...)
And that's pretty much it for New York. Rah, rah. Elsewhere, attention has been paid -- and not just in England, where there's been a predictable and welcome gush. Mark Wigglesworth alone conducted the Symphony No. 4 in Cleveland, Detroit, Melbourne, Montreal and Munich. A Child of Our Time has popped up all over the globe. And Tippett's first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, comes to Chicago's Lyric Opera in November -- not coincidentally, my next major musical field trip.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The performance of A Child of Our Time that Sir Colin Davis led on Saturday night at Boston's Symphony Hall was the first time I'd ever heard the work played live, an encounter I'd been hoping for since 1989 -- the year I heard Tippett's fifth and final opera, New Year, in its world-premiere run at Houston Grand Opera, which was where I was bitten with the Tippett bug in the first place. Yes, I know Sir Colin brought Child to the New York Philharmonic in 1999, but at that point I was in the final throes of my rebellious four-year exile from classical music. (Go here for Peter G. Davis's lucid response to the Phil's performances.)
For all of the the idiosyncrasies and challenges that much of Tippett's music presents, A Child of Our Time is surely the composer's greatest hit. I've long cherished recordings by Davis, Previn, Hickox and Tippett himself, the last now available at super-budget price on Naxos. Still, that didn't quite prepare me for the awe inspired by sharing physical space with the piece -- and in particular, this physical space, arguably the finest concert hall in... the United States? North America? The western hemisphere?
Clearly, Sir Colin has full measure of this score's workings -- every plush climax and purposefully bothering dissonance was laid perfectly clear. The orchestra, it might well go without saying during this, the Levine era, played with consummate beauty, precision and commitment. Of the fine quartet of soloists, only Indra Thomas's diction was less than exacting, and with a voice as lovely as hers, you tend to forgive. Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Paul Groves and Alastair Miles were as ideal as you could want, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus did itself proud, the altos especially moving to hear (and watch).
The performance was everything I'd hoped it might be, and at least one moment -- the combination of Thomas's vocalise, a luminous chorus and radiant trumpet accents in the line "The trumpet sounds within-a my soul," in "Steal Away," the first of the five spirituals and the climax of Part One -- registered as one of the finest experiences I've had in any concert hall, ever. (One of the least pleasant followed, as I caught Alastair Miles watching a couple in the right balcony clumsily exiting during the hushed string harmonics that open Part Two, rolling his eyes at the sight. Who wouldn't?) Happily, that kind of behavior was at a minimum; most of the notably less-than-capacity audience hung rapt on the performance.
A fair number of seats occupied during Mozart's "Posthorn" Serenade, elegantly played on the first half of the concert, were vacant after the break. I suspect that wouldn't have been the case had more than a few dozen people attended Michael Steinberg's unusually personal pre-concert lecture. Steinberg, a hero of mine for his exemplary program notes, took the opportunity to reveal why A Child of Our Time has long meant so much to him: During Kristallnacht, the horrific event that prodded Tippett into action, Steinberg was himself a 10-year-old boy in Germany. Talking about the experience, he twice mentioned "the sights, sounds and smells..." he yet recalls of the night when he witnessed the burning of the synagogue at the end of his block.
That last word -- smells -- drove home the point of this oratorio in a way that any amount of analytical jargon might well fail to do. Tippett wasn't inspired to create A Child of Our Time by lofty philosophical concerns. He was compelled, driven, by the needless deaths of his fellow human beings. I'm hard pressed to think of any piece more relevant in the here-and-now. The bigger question is, do symphony concert audiences want to think, to react, to be moved in this manner?
I know it made the desired impact on me. All day long, I'd schlepped around a portable CD player and a handful of Tippett discs for the return trip on the 11:30pm Fung Wah bus. But after this concert, I didn't want to hear anything else for a while. Don't you love it when that happens?
One last comment: Saturday night's concert was dedicated, by way of a program insert and a mention by Steinberg, to the memory of Rosa Parks. There's no question whatsoever in my mind that Tippett would have wholeheartedly approved.
At the urging of Frank J. Oteri -- friend, accomplished composer and chief instigator of the altogether invaluable NewMusicBox (where he, Molly Sheridan and others chart the very lifeblood of contemporary American composed music) -- I started the day with a spin of Rehearsing My Choir (Rough Trade) by the Fiery Furnaces, which Frank recommended in a comment appended to last night's post about Robert Ashley. He's absolutely right: There is both an ambition at play here akin to the hallowed Smile, as well as a time-jumping, chatty sprawl that's quite similar to Ashley's recent work. Definitely worth investigating.
I also spent a pleasant chunk of the afternoon dipping into a brilliant live recording of Die Frau ohne Schatten currently posted in the Unnatural Acts of Opera section of Parterre Box. Not only is the performance (Paris Opera 1980, with Gwyneth Jones, Hildegard Behrens, Rene Kollo, Walter Berry, Mignon Dunn and Franz Grundheber, all steered by the estimable Christoph von Dohnanyi -- salivating yet?) electrifying, but La Cieca's sassy introductions to each act are by themselves worth the effort to tune in.
But I spent the better part of the day -- and even now, in fact -- absorbed in a new box set that, apparently, some folks would prefer you didn't hear.
The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia Legacy), the latest installment in Legacy's ongoing series of super-deluxe Miles Davis box sets, was supposed to come out back in September. The six-CD set was first delayed to October, then November. Now, some are suggesting that the Miles Davis estate is trying to quash the release altogether. Were that to happen, it would be a crime against art, and also a stupendous mistake.
The engagement of December 16-19, 1970, at Washington, D.C.'s Cellar Door marks a pivotal moment in the Davis mythos. Dave Holland, a brilliant bassist and quintessential jazzman, had just packed his bags; Davis replaced him with the 19-year-old bass guitarist Michael Henderson, whose forte was an utterly hypnotic minimalist funk. The rest of the band included saxophonist Gary Bartz, Keith Jarrett on electric piano and organ, drummer Jack DeJohnette, percussionist Airto Moreira and, on the final night, guitarist John McLaughlin.
The Cellar Door box features the band stretching out on a limited number of tunes, set after set, in a genuine working-band stint. Up until now, only a tiny fragment of the music has been available, artfully edited by Teo Macero on the officially sanctioned release, the two-LP Live Evil. Peter Losin's extraordinary Miles Ahead website offers a comprehensive run-down of the sets, as well as a detailed breakdown (scroll to the bottom of the page) of exactly what ended up where on Live Evil.
While this new release isn't intended to repudiate anything Macero achieved on the original album, it does finally provide a more telling view of a previously obscured step in Davis's metamorphosis from post-bop stylist to acid-washed post-jazz visionary. But what's more, the trumpeter simply played his ass off, with and without wah-wah pedal -- with Bartz as a foil and Jarrett conjuring stony rhapsodies, how could he do otherwise? Far more active and responsive than much of what followed during Miles's pioneering fusion phase (and certainly a great deal leaner), the music this band played may well be the truest melding of jazz, rock and funk imperatives the leader ever captained.
I'm not going to review the box in full here. That's already been done, and quite well, in a few different places, such as Will Layman's fine essay at PopMatters, where the writer also explains why this set marks a decisive point in Jarrett's artistic path. (My favorite review so far is the breathless full-pager by gifted improvising guitarist Jason Bivins in the Fall 2005 issue of print mag Signal to Noise.)
Instead, suffice it to say that Cellar Door is the first Davis box since the hallowed The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 that truly justifies Legacy's lavish treatment. Don't get me wrong, it's swell to have a shelf full of gorgeously packaged reissues with outtakes and smart notes. But Plugged Nickel and Cellar Door go further: Each is something of a Rosetta Stone that helps us decypher how Miles Davis made some of his previously more inscrutible artistic leaps.
That covers the "crime against art" angle. The "stupendous mistake" part should be self-explanatory: Generically packaged advance sets like the one I've been spinning today have been in circulation for months now. They're already hitting secondhand stores and flea markets. And while I haven't checked, I'd almost guarantee that this music is circulating via BitTorrent channels.
In other words, the Cellar Door has been kicked wide open. Whoever is responsible for the continued delay in release, for whatever reason, has to bear the burden of pissing away an enormous amount of good will...not to mention, I would imagine, a fairly substantial chunk of profit. And the situation needs to be resolved -- these performances belong in the hands of everyone who cares about Miles Davis, about jazz, about American music in the 20th century.
On Thursdays at the office, I typically spend my entire work day listening to CDs I haven't heard before, by artists I may not know, in the process of assembling the colossal concert-listings section Time Out New York runs every week. (I'm talking about the big rock/jazz/world music/etc. section here; I deal with the classical music and opera listings on Wednesdays.) This is actually one of the best parts of my job, since it compels me to listen to music about which I have no firm opinions or preconceptions. Certainly, this doesn't amount to quality listening -- more often than not it's a quick spin, a snap judgement and a pithy sentence or two about what you might fairly expect to encounter, should you choose to attend the show.
Naturally, there are always plenty of selections that I don't especially care for, but on a regular basis I encounter unexpected gems. Today brought three: Recording a Tape the Colour of Light (Rough Trade), a luminous chamber-rock project by the Bell Orchestre, featuring members of currently hot indie band the Arcade Fire; February (Table of the Elements), a brooding set of monolithic, droning blues-rock instrumentals by former Swans drummer Jonathan Kane; and Abstracts (Yestereve), an airy, elusive chamber-jazz session by local trombonist Jacob Garchik, which somehow reminded me of Jimmy Giuffre's trio with Paul Bley despite the presence of a drummer instead of a bassist. (Jacob Sacks and Dan Weiss were the pianist and drummer, respectively). These are all artists and discs I look forward to spending more time with.
Still, once the work day was done, I immediately plunged into one of my favorite recent releases, and fell in love all over again. The recording in question is Robert Ashley's latest opera, Celestial Excursions (Lovely Music).
Ashley has long enjoyed a proud position among American mavericks for his idiosyncratic vocal works and music dramas, such as She Was a Visitor, Perfect Lives and Atalanta (Acts of God). Recently, however, his work has taken on a deep, rich sort of emotionalism, abstract yet verging on sentimentality, that I find immensely moving. This was certainly the case with Dust, Ashley's 1998 rumination on the marginalization of homeless people. When I first encountered Celestial Excursions, at the Kitchen in April 2003, I initially felt it was a less trenchant work, despite its similar emphasis on emotional displacement, this time among the elderly. A recording made during that run, however, has proven me wrong -- something I'm happy to admit.
Part of the problem I'd had during the performance, I hesitate to confess, was my inability to connect with the visual tableaux that performance artist Joan Jonas enacted onstage. (The show was certainly striking; you can see so for yourself in the stills posted here.) Additionally, one feature of Ashley's musical language in the piece is a layering of multiple lines of narrative; it was hard to know on first encounter just where to focus at any given time. As others have noted, this kind of simultaneity extends all the way back to medieval motets. (Your point is?) On record, this doesn't pose a problem. Each voice can be clearly discerned, and you've got the option of paying attention to different threads in repeated auditions.
It's clear that Ashley must have had a decisive impact on artists such as Laurie Anderson and Mikel Rouse. But honestly, this score -- conversational lines spoken over burbling synthesizer backgrounds, punctuated by pianist "Blue" Gene Tyranny's cocktail tinklings -- wouldn't alienate admirers of the Residents, or even broad-minded Depeche Mode fans. (I'm sure there must be some.)
The speakers -- Ashley and his longtime associates Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, Sam Ashley and Thomas Buckner -- relate anecdotes that cumulatively conjure the sense of the time-loosed directionlessness the composer ascribes to the aged. Some are perplexing, some are funny, some are sad. Taken in total, however, the piece becomes immensely touching, not least because it effectively stops in mid-thought rather than concluding, well, conclusively.
You can't help but think that there's an autobiographical element in play here. And in fact, you'd be correct. In an interview that took place between the Berlin premiere and the Kitchen run, Ashley told me that he'd spent a great deal of time among older people for the last six or seven years. (The composer himself, at the time, was 74.) "I became fascinated with the way they tell stories in a strange form of English, in which a story that happened in the past is told as if it was the present," he explained. Add in the fact that Ashley could himself be considered a marginalized figure in the overall scope of American music, and the poignance mounts.
But you can also ignore that implication and simply revel in the very sound of these wonderfully individual performers. Ashley, often the voice of authority or a curmudgeonly scold, takes on a Capote-esque whine in the first act's "Alcohol." Aloof and warm by turns, La Barbara can be a disinterested receptionist or a hug from your grandmother. Humbert and Sam Ashley, the composer's shaman son, are addled but eager. And the avuncular Buckner, although he doesn't have a heartbreaking showstopper like "One More Time" from Dust, as usual does his finest work in Ashley's music.
Ah, but is it opera, as Ashley likes to call it? I'll let him have the final word, again from our 2003 interview: "When I started working in this tradition in the 1960s, I called it electronic music theater. But that didn't mean anything, even to me. I finally said, 'Well, if I say it's opera, it's opera! Who's running this show, anyway?"
You are, sir. You are.
