Night After Night

Metal machine music.

Per Alex Ross (who heard about it from Lev Zhurbin), I urge you to take a moment to see and hear the new Honda Civic commercial that's soon to be storming up the charts in the UK. Composer Steve Sidwell was given the task of creating the sounds of -- and, presumably, expressing the excitement of -- driving the new Civic, using only a choir. This he does, by pulling Ligeti and Oliveros from his toolbelt. Kyle Gann provides a link to this site, which has all the pertinent details. But while you're on the Honda site, be sure to check out the behind-the-scenes footage of the choir casting, rehearsals and recording sessions. You can even download the commercial and rehearsal via podcast -- how meta is that? Dunno whether it'll sell any cars, but were I in the market for one, I'd practically sign on the dotted line for this effort alone.

The Met Orchestra pumped nouvelle cuisine of an earlier vintage this afternoon at Carnegie Hall: "Monsters of Modernism," circa the 19-teens. Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin Suite made for a whale of an opener. First, allow me an aside: Justin Davidson's take on conductorial micromanagement touches on one of two reasons why I passed on the Berlin Philharmonic's latest Carnegie residency -- especially Rattle's odd view of the Mahler 4, which Tony Tommasini admired in performance rather more than I did the conductor's CBSO recording. (The other reason was that, despite this orchestra's excellence, the repertoire they brought to town this time just didn't call out to me -- Thomas Adès's Asyla aside.)

The reason I bring this up is because I found myself constantly noticing details in Levine's performance that don't normally call attention to themselves -- the dark warmth of the violas, for instance. The mysterious harp figure looming behind the double reeds during the second seduction attempt. The penetrating tartness of the trombones as the titular Mandarin pursues the seductress. Even so, picking up on those details didn't distract unduly from the narrative flow of Bartok's score. The orchestra purred sexily and roared bestially; the plot was served, and you practically didn't need a scorecard.

Inevitably, a handful of concertgoers fled at the mere notion of hearing Schoenberg. Their loss. The ageless Anja Silja gave as penetrating a performance of that composer's daunting psychodrama Erwartung as one could ever wish to hear, by turns shrinking and raging. Admittedly, on occasion Silja was drowned by an orchestra at full roar. But for the most part, the ensemble was on its best behavior. (As in the last time I caught the Met players outside the pit, English horn player Pedro Diaz once again caught my attention, as he wrapped his plangent tone around Silja's plaintive "Wie lieb, wie lieb ich dich gehabt hab'..." in the fourth scene.)

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring closed the concert. If I thought Levine might have taken too lax a tempo in this scene or that, he proved me wrong each time, ratcheting up the intensity in a subsequent passage. Everything was kept in balance; the end result was once again as fine a performance as one might hope for. The bass drummer's theatrical lunge at the end of Part One was a nice touch -- and demonstrated visibly the verve these musicians brought to bear throughout the afternoon. This was orchestral playing to die for, and the audience exploded accordingly.

The late shift found string quartet Ethel presenting three pieces by John King at the Lower East Side nightclub Tonic. This was my first taste of Ethel since Cornelius Dufallo replaced departed violinist Todd Reynolds, and I was curious as to how the group's chemistry might have changed. (I'm tempted to ponder an Arditti trying to find a place in the Kronos, but Dufallo's transition isn't quite that extreme.)

Dufallo, a remarkable player formerly of the Flux Quartet, definitely holds his own musically. But Ethel is a charismatic bunch, and Dufallo doesn't yet project himself physically onstage the way his bandmates do. In time, he likely will, to judge by his playing tonight. King's music is deeply rooted in the blues, and requires players who can sound as if they're making it up as they go along; Dufallo held his own alongside violinist Mary Rowell's boozy slurs, violist Ralph Farris's succulent refrains and cellist Dorothy Lawson's earthy walking-bass lines.

Lightning Slide was written for the Kronos Quartet and sounded like it, all furioso bowing, bleary slides and solo spotlights. The rich Round Sunrise opened with Lawson's riffing cello underpinning glossy sustained chords; the second section had each musician play out in turn over a riff built of jumpy syncopation and rapid sextuplets. Ethel closed with four sections of King's AllSteel -- those the composer sketched, portentiously or not, on September 10, 2001. Lawson's boisterous lead in section three (the second played), supported by muted chords and pizzicato shouts, for some reason reminded me of "Jack the Bear," Duke Ellington's feature for bassist Jimmy Blanton; section seven (the fourth played) romped on a backbeat that sounded a bit like Beethoven's Grosse Fuge with the needle stuck in the groove.

Missing, however, were some of the qualities that originally defined Ethel. Promised improvisations with King on laptop didn't happen; what's more, the multimedia theatricality that so charged the atmosphere at this quartet's Kitchen concerts a few years back was absent. And honestly, King's attractive compositions for string quartet are of a piece stylistically; a concert of nothing but, no matter how finely executed, was bound to sound samey in the end. (You could say the same of a concert featuring nothing but Mozart quartets, so don't read that as criticism.) On the other hand, it augurs well for the all-King CD in the making; consider tonight an open rehearsal, then, and assume that when Ethel inaugurates this year's "Free for All at Town Hall" season on May 14, she'll be dressed to kill.

Playlist:

Hazmat Modine - Bahamut (Geckophonic)

Los Horoscopos de Durango - Antes Muertas que Sencillas (Disa)

Bela Bartók - Duke Bluebeard's Castle - Christa Ludwig, Walter Berry, London Symphony Orchestra/István Kertész (Decca)

Grateful Dead - Soldier Field, Chicago, IL, July 9, 1995 (Archive.org stream)

Various and sundry.

January 27, as you are inescapably aware, was the Big Day for the Mozart year. But after hearing two concerts by John Eliot Gardiner, a knockout Così and a handful of good-to-great new Mozart CDs this week, I didn't feel especially compelled to hear more. I wasn't the only one, but while Alex Ross's abstention was prompted by a noble aim, and Vilaine Fille celebrated Verdi instead, I simply needed to pace my second-most intense work day of the week with an appropriate soundtrack. I selected a fresh stack of mostly recent metallic objects, easing off the pedal at day's end with a fine, vintage Dead show; the details are in the playlist below, if anyone's interested. (My heathen roots are definitely showing.)

This weekend is a curious reprise of last: Saturday consumed by more writing-for-hire, with live music resuming on Sunday afternoon -- this time with a Met Orchestra orgy of Bartók (Miraculous Mandarin Suite), Schoenberg (Erwartung, with Anja Silja) and Stravinsky (The Rite of Spring). That evening, I'll be at Tonic for my first taste of the new-look Ethel with violinist Cornelius Dufallo; they'll be rocking a stack of John King scores, with the composer minding the gaps on laptop. Monday night brings a return to Julie Taymor's Magic Flute, which one of my most esteemed TONY colleagues saw this week and deemed a hopeless muddle; I'm wondering how I'll feel about it now that the novelty has worn off. Tuesday, Frederica von Stade and Joyce DiDonato sing selections from Jake Heggie's opera Dead Man Walking way downtown at Trinity Church, with the composer at the piano and Owen Burdick leading the excellent Trinity Choir; Sister Helen Prejean herself will be on hand to provide commentary. (Sometimes I think I'm the only writer I know who admires this piece -- and there, I've said so.) On Wednesday I'm hopeful that both Rolando Villazón and I will be at the Met for Rigoletto.

Casting about the blogosphere, allow me to be the latest to welcome St. Botolph's Town, a smart new blog documenting the Boston music scene. I'd been feeling a wee bit remorseful about the tone of my Pinchas Zukerman-prompted rant of a few days ago (and even went back to tone down one bit I deemed disrespectful), but yesterday's entry on SBT provided some valuable perspective on the situation in Ottawa.

Another welcome essay was pianist Ethan Iverson's paean to The Art Ensemble 1967/68, a truly magnificent box set of early recordings by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, issued in 1993 by Chuck Nessa on the noble homegrown label that bears his surname. Ethan does a terrific job not only of describing the music contained in this invaluable 5-CD set (with a handful of MP3s to demonstrate), but also of setting it within the context of what was going on in the jazz world at the time -- which underscores the wild originality and strangeness of the sounds emanating from the windy city while others elsewhere were blowing free or funky. He also notes that his set was marked "number 2413 of a limited edition of 2500," which suggests that if you don't act soon, you'll have no one but yourself to blame. Me, I'm surprised it's lasted this long, given the utter life-affirming vitality of the music contained herein. I remember the urgency with which I compelled my parents to make this my Christmas present back in '93. (Mine is number 59.)

I'm grateful to Ethan not only for tipping me off to this post, but also for kindly providing a link that drew a great many visitors to my essay on the passing of Derek Bailey -- a scribble that meant a lot to me. Many people who might never have stumbled upon it otherwise were drawn here by a link on Do the Math, the lively blog maintained by Ethan and his bandmates in the Bad Plus.

I remember being confused when I first played the recently released fourth CD by the Bad Plus, Suspicious Activity? -- confused, that is, because I was absolutely positive that I knew the stately opening track, "Prehensile Dream," from somewhere. But where? Was it a pre-baroque chorale? Some half-remembered church hymn? Neither, I finally realized: I knew it from one of my very favorite jazz CDs of this young century, Reid Anderson's The Vastness of Space. The borrowing was certainly appropriate, given that Anderson is also bassist for the Bad Plus. (I guess it goes without saying that I remembered the tune more readily than its rather distinctive title...)

I confess that I didn't give the Bad Plus its due when it first appeared, most likely because media shorthand for this massively successful band reduced it to a quirky piano trio that covered Blondie and Nirvana. (My reaction is fairly indefensible given my enthusiasm for Brad Mehldau's takes on Nick Drake and Radiohead.) It was the Anderson CD that finally made me pay some genuine attention. When I did, I was fairly blown away a band that dances across the fault lines between jazz, classical music and pop with enviable ease. You hear a lot about jazz combos carrying on conversations on the bandstand; here was a trio that you had to suspect probably chatted (and maybe even argued) rather a lot offstage.

Listening to Suspicious Activity?, you hear loads of intimations; tonight, certain passages reminded me of Brahms, Monk, Angelo Badalamenti and Devo's "The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprise." Perhaps none of these actually occured to the participants as they made this music, or maybe they all did. Anyway, it's easily my favorite of the band's records, not least because it's dominated by original compositions by its members. (What's more, you'll barely recognize a once über-popular Vangelis theme, so thoroughly is it messed with). And as much as I loved Anderson's original take on "Prehensile Dream" -- especially the pairing of Andrew d'Angelo's crying alto and Bill McHenry's standoffish tenor -- I think the new version may actually trump it in terms of pious glory. Finally, Tchad Blake continues to dispose with the usual audio vérité approach to recording jazz, instead employing his pop savvy to heighten mood and thicken drama as the music suggests.

Ultimately, the Bad Plus is a band in which three individuals mesh disparate influences and inclinations into a singular voice, one that amalgamates progressive strands from various idioms in such a way that rhapsodic piano, chatty bass and motoric drumming -- and, for that matter, jazz, classical and pop -- can coexist in perfect harmony. It sounds like then-and-now-and-next, all at once.

Playlist:

Krisiun - AssassiNation (Century Media, out 2/21)

Decapitated - The Negation (Earache)

Cathedral - The Garden of Unearthly Delights (Nuclear Blast)

Napalm Death - The Code Is Red...Long Live the Code (Nuclear Blast)

Grateful Dead - Swing Auditorium, San Bernardino, CA, Feb. 26, 1977 (Archive.org stream)

The Bad Plus - Suspicious Activity? (Columbia)

Reid Anderson - The Vastness of Space (Fresh Sound New Talent)

Prince - Lovesexy (Paisley Park/Warner Bros.)

Complex.

Everyone remember Anne Midgette's nifty December 4, 2005 Times article about Met cover artists? I sure do... and even if I didn't, I was reminded of it this afternoon, when a publicist sent me a press release that pertained to one of the artists Anne profiled.

From Anne's piece:

Jeff Mattsey, a baritone, has had cover contracts with the Met for the last 10 seasons. Yet in all that time, he said, "I have never, ever gone on as a cover at the Met." The closest he came was when Mariusz Kwiecien was sick during two performances of the recent "Così Fan Tutte." ... But Mr. Kwiecien soldiered through.

Not tonight, Kwiecien wouldn't, which was what the press release was sent to tell me. It trumpeted Anne's piece prominently, in fact. I started to wonder: Is it me? Mine, after all, were the Roméo with Maureen O'Flynn, the Rigoletto with Raúl Melo. (That's all this season, mind you; my overall track record is far better.)

But as opposed to the mixed results of those particular nights, this one was a remarkable success. Regarding the overall contours of the Met's current Così, I have little to add to Maury D'annato's original post from late last year; it was his comments there and elsewhere, more than anything, that urged me to catch tonight's performance.

As Maury indicated, the foremost attraction of this production is the ensemble work. Still, individual highlights were many: Hearing Thomas Allen is always a privilege; the same has held true each time I've caught Magdalena Kožená so far, and did tonight. I apparently have a far greater tolerance of Nuccia Focile's cuteness than Maury did; for me, she was utterly charming and very much in sync with the general air of mugging that pervaded this cast's performance (Allen aside).

Regarding cast not covered in Maury's review: Alexandra Deshorties didn't boast Barbara Frittoli's sheer magnetism, but delivered a solid performance that drew some of the loudest applause at the curtain. Paul Groves was a tremendously sweet-sounding Ferrando. And as Guglielmo, Mattsey was right on the money. There was nothing remotely tentative about his performance: his presence, both physical and vocal, was everything one could want in the role, and he bounded about the stage as if the gig had been his all along. I'd gladly welcome more prominent casting, were it to come his way. (Meanwhile, apparently he'll next be covering Stéphane Degout's Mercutio in the Met's Roméo in February and March.)

One final note regarding the seeming correlation of my presence to last-minute cancellations: I'm not going to be at the Met's Cyrano tomorrow night, so if this comes to pass, don't blame me.

By the way, for those who remember my December post about the free-of-charge "Movado Hour" concert series at New York City's 37 Arts complex, another e-mail I received today revealed that the next program will be an intimate recital by the abovementioned Paul Groves. The concert is a few weeks away; I didn't have the presence of mind to bring the details home with me tonight, but I'll add them tomorrow.

(Update: Groves's recital with pianist Pedja Muzijevic is Thursday, February 16, at 7pm. He'll be singing Schubert, Liszt and Richard Strauss. The concert is free, but space is limited and reservations are required; you can make one by calling 212-218-7540.)

Playlist:

Charles Gounod - Faust - Victoria de los Angeles, Richard Tucker, Nicola Moscona; New Orleans Symphony Orchestra/Walter Herbert (Parterre Box podcast)

Johannes Brahms - Cello Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2; Klavierstücke, Op. 118 - David Finckel and Wu Han (ArtistLed)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Arie & Duetti - Isabel Bayrakdarian, Michael Schade, Russell Braun, Canadian Opera Company Orchestra/Richard Bradshaw (CBC Records)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Piano Concertos Nos. 20 & 27 - Clifford Curzon, English Chamber Orchestra/Benjamin Britten (Decca)

A new hope.

Being Osvaldo Golijov probably isn't as easy or fun as we might think. To be annointed as some kind of savior of contemporary composition is bound to be a thankless task: You've got to live up to seemingly impossible standards, while also dodging skepticism of various slants. In conversation, Golijov is unfailingly humble -- and maybe just a bit bewildered, in that you definitely get a sense he doesn't quite know what to make of his precipitous ascension. But he's certainly grateful for the opportunities it affords -- and make no mistake, a chance to work at major institutions with artists such as David Henry Hwang, Dawn Upshaw and Peter Sellars is not taken lightly.

Ainadamar, the chamber opera that Golijov wrote for Tanglewood in 2003 and revised (in collaboration with Sellars) for Santa Fe last year, belatedly arrived in New York this week as the opening shot in a remarkably extensive celebration mounted by Lincoln Center. The 80-minute piece reflects on the death of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, and the resonances of his art, via the final memories of actress Margarita Xirgu, a García Lorca intimate.

Tony Tommasini was right on the money when he wrote that Upshaw, as Xirgu, portrays the character with "an emotional vulnerability so real that during her moment of private agony you almost want to avert your eyes." Her powerful performance grew ever richer as the evening progressed. Nuria, the student with whom Xirgu shares her final -- moments? hour? -- was sung by soprano Jessica Rivera, whose tonal purity and earnest delivery brought to mind no one so much as the slightly younger Upshaw herself. As García Lorca, mezzo Kelley O'Conner combined a rich, loamy instrument with arresting stage presence; hers is a name you'll certainly be seeing again, and soon.

Among the supporting players, bass Ricardo Lugo stood out as José Tripaldi, the officer who elicits García Lorca's final confession prior to his execution. The fervent, muezzin-like incantations of Spanish flamenco vocalist Jesus Montoya gave pause; it was troubling to reconcile the animal grace of his sound with the poisonous words he was obliged to sing. Miguel Harth-Bedoya did an admirable job of keeping the Orchestra of St. Luke's in synch with the plethora of recorded and improvised effects Golijov's score requires.

As for said score, it offered what Golijov does best, which is to see past demarcations of genre, ethnicity and high/low culture clash to find a common ground in which the most stirring noises people have created can coexist. In this case, flamenco provided the root from which most of the rest grew, including both poignant love song and complex machine-gun fugue. Still, to suggest that Golijov's scores are nothing but a savvy web of borrowings misses the point that not just anyone could recognize and reconcile the fundamental conjoinings of disparate cultures. Composers have snatched riffs from ethnic modes forever; more importantly -- and contrary to the body politic -- we seem to be collectively remembering lately that the distance between Jewish and Moorish musical fundamentals is less a leap than a nod.

In that light, Golijov emerges as one of the first critically approved high-art creators to successfully bridge not only that small gap, but the larger chasm that comfortably affords him a blatantly (Richard) Straussian trio towards the end, as well as the sampledelic textures that saturate the piece. To my mind and ear, virtually no composer more universalist in scope and intent has yet appeared: Golijov combines all of these things not because it's novel and catchy, but because they all belong to him. Perhaps we react as we do because we recognize all of these things to be in some way our property as well -- a welcome byproduct of the Information Superhighway.

Billed as an opera, Ainadamar ultimately came off more like some kind of passion play, albeit one shot through with a palpable eroticism between two individuals -- García Lorca and Xirgu -- whose intercourse was not sexual, but rather the conjoining of kindred creative souls. The piece felt less like a stage show than a ritual; it can and will readily survive without the window dressing of Guernica graffiti, enlisted naifs and drill-team choreography. And ultimately, that's a good thing. Balances between acoustic and electric elements of the score and the performance tonight were far from ideal; the modest chorus was frequently obscured by instrumental uproar, and occasionally, so were the principals. For that reason, I'm glad to know that a presumably well-judged recording for Deutsche Grammophon is already in the can.

Playlist:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - The Symphonies - English Concert/Trevor Pinnock (Archiv)

Paul Hindemith - Symphonic Variations on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber; Concert Music for Strings and Brass; Bela Bartók - The Miraculous Mandarin - Suite - Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy (EMI Classics)

Arnold Schoenberg - Verklärte Nacht; Chamber Symphony; Variations for Orchestra - Los Angeles Philharmonic/Zubin Mehta; Five Pieces for Orchestra - Cleveland Orchestra/Christoph von Dohnányi; Six Songs; Erwartung - Anja Silja, Vienna Philharmonic/Christoph von Dohnányi (London)

Darius Milhaud - Études sur des thèmes liturgiques - Juilliard String Quartet; Abraham Wolf Binder - Two Hassidic Moods - Bochmann String Quartet; Ruth Schonthal - String Quartet No. 3, "In Memoriam Holocaust" - Bingham String Quartet; John Zorn - Kol Nidre - Ilya Kaler, Perrin Yang, George Taylor and Steven Doane; Sholom Secunda - String Quartet in C minor - Bochmann String Quartet (Naxos)

Peter Maxwell Davies - Symphony No. 8, "Antarctic" - Bremen Symphony Orchestra/Peter Maxwell Davies (MaxOpus download)

Brian Eno - Music for Airports - Bang on a Can All-Stars (Point Music)

Visiting scholar.

Good grief, don't know how exactly I forgot to mention it, but Justin Davidson, guest hosting The Rest Is Noise for a spell, wittily describes the mighty, throbbing incursion of noise during John Eliot Gardiner's performance of the Mozart C-minor Mass on Sunday afternoon. It was a major nuisance, to be sure. But there was even a certain magic to it, in that when Mozart's music suddenly shifted into a stilled hush, the noise mysteriously vanished -- happily, never to return.

Welcome, Justin. Hope you'll decide to pitch a tent once Alex reclaims his sandbox.

(Update: One of Justin's correspondents, Tom Ziegler, details an up-close encounter with the mysterious howling object. The description of the way the gadget's tone resonated with the overtone of the music is absolutely spot on.)

Mozart. Period.

According to Pinchas Zukerman, I wasted my time tonight, and yesterday afternoon as well. In a fairly rabid interview that appeared in the Orange County Register last week, Zukerman unloaded both barrels at the period-instruments movement... or "historically informed performance" (HIP), in the current nomenclature. "I disagree with everything they do," Zukerman said. "From the minute I heard that in 1972 until today (I said), 'What the (expletive) is that? These are professional musicians?'"

Dude, who dosed Mr. Zukerman's water bottle?

As far as I'm concerned, the historically informed movement breathed new life into 18th- and 19th-century music. That's not the same thing as saying that Böhm's Mozart and Furtwängler's Beethoven have been invalidated; that could never happen. But I see little point in denying the service that artists such as Harnoncourt, Hogwood, Pinnock and, yes, even the much reviled Norrington provided in stripping away decades of kappelmeisterish routine -- or worse, conductorial distortion -- from the core works of the baroque and classical repertoire.

I found Norrington's Beethoven cycle positively revelatory in its day, even if I don't actually listen to it all that often these days and have little use for his modern-instruments sequel on the Hänssler label. I fall far short of zealots who proclaim that there can be no other way to play this body of work; Osmo Vänskä's Beethoven, Louis Langrée's Mozart and most recently Janine Jansen's Vivaldi have demonstrated that lessons learned from the HIP movement can readily be applied to performances on modern implements. But Zukerman's comments about the inability of HIP conductors and musicians to perform at any kind of professional standard do nothing more than make me think that he probably hasn't checked out a concert during the last decade -- especially given that he's still harping on Hogwood and Norrington.

"If you hear them in public -- which I have -- one is amazed at how bad it sounds and out of tune," Zukerman says, suggesting that recorded performances by such groups serve to perpetuate a myth. Well, in just the last few years, I've heard public performances by Andrea Marcon's Venice Baroque Orchestra, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and Emmanuelle Haïm's incredibly sexy Le Concert d'Astrée that positively screamed to the contrary. So, too, did the two concerts given at Lincoln Center by John Eliot Gardiner's Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.

About tonight's performance of Mozart's Symphonies Nos. 39, 40 and 41, I have little to add to Marc Geelhoed's report of the same program in Chicago, except to say that there was nothing at all unfiery about the "Jupiter" we heard in Alice Tully Hall. The venue's parched acoustics revealed Gardiner's canny dynamic gradations superbly -- admittedly, at the cost of tonal bloom. Tully is a room that doesn't afford poor tuning; Gardiner's players met its challenge, with natural trumpets and horns that sounded more secure than in many modern-instrument performances I've witnessed.

The Andante con moto movement of the Symphony No. 39 was delivered with ineffable sweetness; the Finale revealed some slight insecurities among the principal winds, but served up succulent timbres nonetheless. Standing out amidst the dark drama of No. 40, the strings were particularly sumptuous in the Andante. Throughout the concert, the flutist and first bassoonist stood out especially. But really, the entire ensemble deserves credit for a thoroughly engaging performance. As an encore, Gardiner led the ensemble in the Andante from Mozart's Symphony No. 1, prefacing the performance -- with perfectly believable incredulity -- by noting the similarity between the horn theme in Mozart's first known symphony (composed at age 8) and the "Jupiter," his last.

On Sunday afternoon, Gardiner and orchestra, plus the conductor's Monteverdi Choir, played Mozart's C-minor Mass and Requiem at Avery Fisher Hall, to still greater returns. This conductor recorded lasting versions of both pieces a decade ago with this same chorus and his previous band, the English Baroque Soloists. (That Gardiner's Requiem remains my benchmark recording despite the strictures of more recent scholarship suggests to me that there can be far more to a HIP-oriented performance than obsessive adherence to doctrine.)

In those earlier recordings, the conductor fielded a starry team of vocal soloists that included Barbara Bonney and Anne Sofie von Otter. Here, he relied upon members of his choir, and they did not fail him; in specific, Miriam Allan (in the Mass) sang with a bright, focused tone worthy of The Magic Flute, while Claudia Huckle (in the Requiem) offered a sumptuously chocolately mezzo of the sort in which one could positively bathe. Even so, Sunday afternoon's highlight was Gardiner's choir en masse, which delivered two of Mozart's most extraordinary works in a manner human enough to convince any listener of their eternal relevance.

So I put it to you respectfully, Mr. Zukerman: Where, exactly, does my dementia reside?

Two concerts from late last week deserve mention. Miller Theatre's Composer Portrait of young South African artist Bongani Ndodana revealed a creator capable of blending the timbral refinement of Debussy and Ravel with rhythms derived from African mbira music and call-and-response drumming traditions. An ad hoc ensemble did an admirable job of deputizing for the previously announced Ensemble Noir. Lalehani and Sons of the Great Tree, the pieces that closed the hour-long concert, proved the most involving works of the evening. Still, ultimately I felt as if I'd gone to a formal dinner and was met with a platter of hors d'oeuvres.

Unsated, I headed downtown for the 10pm 11pm set by Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. The concert more than proved that Argue is a stunningly skilled bandleader who steers an ensemble stocked fat with exceptional players -- Will Vinson, Erica vonKleist and Jon Wikan, especially. Argue's charts serve notice of a sophisticated composer, one who knows his Stravinsky and Ligeti as well as his Bob Graettinger and Thad Jones. I look forward to hearing more from this band... but I have to admit that during the performance, I despaired of hearing anything ever again. (And this from someone who feels that most metal gigs aren't cranked nearly enough lately.) The Bowery Poetry Club is a smallish space; why, then, should an 18-piece band be amplified as if it were Maynard Ferguson playing the Astrodome? Not Argue's fault by any means; just saying, is all.

The day job.

I don't normally spend all that much time here trumpeting the efforts of the magazine for which I work, but there are a handful of fun things in this week's issue that I'd like to bring to your attention. First, in a cover story about 25 up-and-coming New York creative types, there's a brief shout-out to your friend and mine, composer-vocalist Corey Dargel. (You can find it by scrolling a little ways down this page.)

Just as cool, my esteemed colleague Adam Feldman wrote a fine little profile of Deborah Voigt, on the occasion of her Lincoln Center cabaret debut. You won't find this piece in my classical department, however; kudos to my pop-music counterpart, Mike Wolf, for splashing this piece on the front page of the big music section. Look closely at the magazine cover and you'll note that Voigt even gets a cover line: "What Deborah Voigt won't do at the Met." Technically, that's a reference to the cabaret repertoire, but in the course of chatting her up, Feldman also reveals that Voigt has apparently cancelled her 2009 Brünnhilde -- possibly a consequence of her recent, much publicized gastric bypass surgery. ("...maybe the middle part of my voice is not quite as hefty as it was," she observes.) Read the entire piece here.

While you're in the neighborhood, you'll find my review of composer Randall Woolf's fizzy new collection, Modern Primitive, right here. I talk up Ingrid Jensen's At Sea here. And opera maven David Shengold has good things to say about Delirio, Natalie Dessay's fab new Handel set, right here.

I might not trumpet TONY so often here, but when it comes to an issue so packed with goodies, it's hard to keep quiet.

Administrivia.

A quiet night, in which I rejected the call to keep working after hours (on my "official" daytime work, anyway) and instead finally got around to updating the blogroll here. Any blog is a work in progress, but by this point it was verging on obscene that I hadn't yet provided handy links to such engrossing regular points of call as Sounds & Fury, Iron Tongue, The Standing Room, Think Denk, Ionarts and especially Sequenza 21. Those sites, and a few more, are now proudly tattooed on my virtual right bicep.

While I'm making amends, I'd like to point out that way back on December 29, Amsterdam-based American composer Vanessa Lann provided some very useful information in a comment tacked to my blog entry on violinist Janine Jansen. In that post, I claimed that Jansen had been responsible for commissioning and recording 24 new caprices for solo violin by living Dutch composers. Turns out I overstated Jansen's role: The project was actually headed by the Rotterdamse Kunststichting in 1998. The oldest composer commissioned, Marius Flothuis (better known for his role in the artistic administration of the Concertgebouw Orchestra), was born in 1914 and passed away in 2001; the youngest, Joey Roukens, was born in 1982. Lann, whose composition The Key to the Fourteenth Vision was one of those caprices, gently led me to discover that while Jansen plays a number of the pieces in that set, she shares duties with two other fiddlers, Joris van Rijn and Benjamin Schmid (the latter of whom plays Lann's piece).

The entire opus was issued by Dutch label NM Classics. Lann's page includes links to a pair of sites at which the 2-CD recording can be purchased, here and here. (Still, when I bought a copy tonight, I cut corners and snagged it here.)

Playlist:

Värtinnä - Miero (Real World)

Julius Eastman - Unjust Malaise (New World)

Burst - Origo (Relapse)

Nicholas Maw - Violin Concerto - Joshua Bell; London Philharmonic Orchestra/Roger Norrington (Sony Classical)

Johann Strauss, Jr. - Waltzes - Vienna Philharmonic/Willi Boskovsky (Eloquence)

In the red.

I have to admit, the question crossed my mind pretty much immediately when I heard that Peter Gelb was to be the next chief of the Metropolitan Opera. I'd actually pondered it as recently as this afternoon, for no particular reason. And apparently, I'm not the only one who's been wondering, because it was the first question posed by an audience member during the Q&A session that followed a unusual presentation by the New York Philharmonic tonight. More surprisingly, an answer was forthcoming.

The Ghosts of Versailles is returning to the Met.

Composer John Corigliano, to whom the question was addressed, was clearly overjoyed to spill the beans. He refused to reveal the season in which the revival would take place, but stated that "a fine Marie Antoinette" has already been engaged.

Tonight's occasion was the debut of "Hear & Now," the New York Philharmonic's latest attempt not just to engage new music, but to engage its audience in that music. The program opened with composer Steven Stucky interviewing Corigliano about his work in film music and the genesis of his recent violin concerto, "The Red Violin," which was the sole piece announced for tonight's presentation. More than once, Stucky gently commented on the incongruity of a west coast artist playing host to Corigliano at a presentation by the orchestra with which the latter artist had literally grown up -- initially as son of the longtime concertmaster, and later as a favored composer.

The Philharmonic had already offered the concerto on two regular bills, paired rather appropriately with Richard Strauss. Tonight's program, on the other hand, was intended to dig more deeply into a work new to local audiences. During the pre-concert discussion, Stucky prompted Corigliano to discuss his first experience with scoring a film, Ken Russell's Altered States. A pair of brief clips, shown without music, elicited laughter. The excellent guest conductor Jonathan Nott was brought out to lead the orchestra in music Russell had used in his working soundtrack: a suitably barbaric dance from Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin. Then Nott led a performance of the "Third Hallucination" from Corigliano's brilliantly phantasmagorical original score, as the same film sequences seen before played again on the screen overhead. The effect was electrifying... and an apt reminder that this is a score well worth airing out from time to time.

Setting up a discussion of Corigliano's work on The Red Violin, soloist Joshua Bell came out to play the simple chaconne around which the entire score for that film was constructed. Nott led the orchestra in a passage derived from that chaconne, then a scene from the film was played complete with the recorded soundtrack, illuminating the juxtaposition of melodies and images.

Stucky and Corigliano discussed the circumstances that had led to a popular concert piece, the Red Violin Chaconne, appearing prior to the film's opening, as well as Corigliano's subsequent decision to expand that 17-minute work into a full-blown concerto by adding three more movements, only one of which -- the finale -- develops further material derived from his film score. Much was made of the audacious special effects Corigliano demands of the soloist, including a haunting, flutelike timbre achieving by bowing at the base of the instrument's neck and an ugly, atonal croak that the composer dubbed a "crunch." ("I resisted it at first," Bell admitted. "But now, I'm Captain Crunch.")

In truth, the claim of originality with regard to that latter effect was a bit of a stretch; anyone conversant with John Zorn's music would have recognized what that composer memorably dubbed "napalm clusters." Still, there's no denying that Corigliano is an orchestrator virtually without peer -- a point driven home by the complete performance of his concerto that followed. The piece is an extravaganza ideally suited to Bell's technical brilliance. He tossed off the composer's most daunting challenges -- the second movement's combination of breakneck pace and hushed dynamics, the finale's clash of soloist and ensemble accelerating at different speeds -- seemingly effortlessly. Short on rhetoric but long on effect, the work was an unapologetic tour de force, and the performers did it proud. The audience greeted each movement with robust applause, and brought the house down at the conclusion.

The question-and-answer session that followed the performance was in some ways more revealing than the initial conversation had been -- and not just for the errant operatic tidbit. Most valuable was Corigliano's explanation of the way in which he conceives his scores: Melodies are plotted easily enough on piano, but for his more outre timbral textures, he explained, he covers his head with a pillow to block out external sound, so as to let his imagination run free, and sometimes graphs his desired results in colored pencils. Above all, Corigliano said, he maps the underlying architecture of a work before undertaking its details.

All told, it would be easy enough to paint tonight's "Hear & Now" launch as a children's concert for grown-ups. But in fact, the content provided both before and after the performance added rather a lot to comprehension and appreciation of Corigliano's concerto. Still, I was left with the desire to judge the work's effect in the context of a normal program... which, y'know, I'd had the option to do, so it's not like I can claim the Philharmonic was making excuses for playing new music.

Regarding the selection of a sure-fire crowd pleaser like Corigliano -- and I label him thus with the utmost respect -- to inaugurate a series like this provokes two different reponses: You can wag a finger at the orchestra for playing it safe, or you can suspect that the Philharmonic wants to establish trust early on. The two remaining subjects of the series for this season are John Harbison and Peter Lieberson, neither likely to provoke objection (and each with a fringe benefit in the form of, respectively, Dawn Upshaw and -- barring misfortune -- Lorraine Hunt Lieberson). Would Gathering Paradise, last season's toothy premiere by Augusta Read Thomas, have been so warmly greeted in such a setting? I'm not sure.

Still, for an orchestra tagged with a perception of reluctance to engage contemporary music (and a core audience that seemingly fosters that condition), this was certainly a start.

Playlist:

Nasum - Grind Finale (Relapse)

Steve Reich - You Are (Variations) - Los Angeles Master Chorus/Grant Gershon; Cello Counterpoint - Maya Beiser (Nonesuch)

Gutbucket - Sludge Test (Cantaloupe)

Igor Stravinsky - Petrouchka; Le Chant du rossignol; Quatre études - Orchestre symphonique du Montréal/Charles Dutoit (London)

George Russell - All About Rosie; Harold Shapero - On Green Mountain (Chaconne after Monteverdi); Jimmy Guiffre - Suspensions; Charles Mingus - Revelations (First Movement); Milton Babbitt - All Set; Gunther Schuller - Transformation - orchestra conducted by Gunther Schuller and George Russell (Columbia)

Calling it a night.

It's a gloomy, wet, steel-gray evening in Manhattan. For some reason, that made it a perfect day to listen to La Cieca's wonderful Birgit Nilsson podcasts, as well as the searing renditions of Hindemith, Mendelssohn, Dvorak and Shostakovich violin concerti found in a Brilliant Classics box set of radio recordings by David Oistrakh. (I picked this up last night at the Virgin Megastore for the princely sum of $42.99 for 10 discs; the link above takes you to ArkivMusic.com, where the price is slightly higher but still a screaming deal.)

I'd originally planned to catch the first night of an impressive, three-concert Ligeti series presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, tonight at Alice Tully Hall. But honestly, I'm feeling under the weather. And since I'm appearing on 9am panels at the Chamber Music America national conference both tomorrow and Sunday, I think I'll take a powder. I'll catch up with Ligeti on Sunday evening, instead.

Still, here are a few things I'd like to mention before I burrow into my warren for the night:

+ Happy 38th birthday (yesterday) to Alex Ross, whose erudition, curiosity and good humor are a continual source of refreshment and inspiration.

+ Album, the young Mexican band whose praises I sang here (scroll to near the bottom), will be releasing its second album, Microbricolages, some time in February. On Monday, January 16, the band will be streaming the new record all day long from its website.

+ Besides maintaining a fine blog, jazz composer-bandleader Darcy James Argue also steers a crack ensemble, the Secret Society, which includes many of New York City's finest improvisers (including two of my friendly neighbors, Ingrid Jensen and Jon Wikan). Argue will lead that band on Friday, January 20, at the Bowery Poetry Club. The show starts at 10pm; if I think I can get down there in time following the Bongani Ndodana concert at Miller Theatre (which is at 8pm), I plan to be there. Regardless, I'm digging the copious MP3s on Argue's site, and you will, too.

+ One night earlier, Ingrid, Jon and their posse will be playing the 55 Bar on Thursday, January 19 at 10pm. They're celebrating an excellent new CD, At Sea, on the innovative ArtistShare label. (I'll have more to say on this disc in the next issue of TONY, but wanted to give you lots of time to put the date in your calendar.)

+ Finally, thanks to Derek Taylor of the remarkable new-music/improv webzine Bagatellen for the too-kind words in his latest post.