Night After Night

Swell party.

David Del Tredici's 70th Birthday Concert at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music
The New York Times, March 19, 2007

This was a warm, intimate, gratifying event, and there are more on the way. Here are few taking place in and around New York City:

Thursday, March 29 and Friday, March 30: Del Tredici is currently distinguished professor of music at the City College of New York. On Thursday from 11am to 2pm, Musicians' Accord will read compositions by his students, and on Friday, Del Tredici's own music will be played at 3pm. A calendar on the Boosey & Hawkes site indicates that pianist Marc Peloquin, who participated in the Brooklyn concert, will play Gotham Glory, although this concert does not appear on Peloquin's own site. Both concerts are presented free of charge at the school's Shepard Hall.

Wednesday, April 4: Marc Peloquin takes part in another birthday celebration, this one at Sarah Lawrence College's Reisinger Concert Hall in Bronxville, NY. The program, again according to Boosey, includes Gotham Glory, Fantasy Pieces and Miz Inez Sez -- the last a half-hour song cycle featuring Melissa Fogarty, the terrific young soprano who starred in Del Tredici's Dracula in Brooklyn. The concert is presented at 7pm; tickets are $10/seniors and students $8.

Saturday, May 5: Melissa Fogarty is featured in Paul Revere's Ride, a 2005 Telarc recording of which earned Del Tredici a Grammy nomination. She'll perform the work with Harold Rosenbaum's Canticum Novum Singers, accompanied by pianist Cristina L. Valdes, at Cooper Union. The birthday being celebrated here is not Del Tredici's, but that of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; other composers whose music is on the bill include Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir Edward Elgar, Ned Rorem and Stephen Schwartz. The last is billed as a New York premiere, but I don't recall Del Tredici's piece ever being performed here before, either. The concert is at 7pm; tickets are $25.

Sunday, May 6: Soprano Mary Thorne sings Haddock's Eyes, a 1985 Lewis Carroll setting, with the Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Joshua Feltman, in the Elebash Concert Hall at CUNY's Graduate Center on Fifth Avenue at 34th Street. Sad to say, I've completely struck out trying to find details regarding time and price; keep an eye on these two web sites as the date grows near. (If you have those details, please leave a comment.)

Tuesday, May 15: The Riverside Opera Ensemble celebrates Del Tredici's birthday at Merkin Concert Hall. No details regarding the program have been posted on the ensemble's site, but according to Boosey, one particular item of interest will be Brother, a song cycle on texts by poet and performance artist John Kelly. Boosey lists this performance by baritone Chris Pedro Trakas as a world premiere; Del Tredici recorded part of it with Kelly in 1999 for Secret Music, a disc on CRI. The concert is at 8pm; tickets are $30.

Tuesday, June 19: Tenors Dennis Tobenski and Robert Frankenberry will be joined by Del Tredici and Peloquin at the pianos for a new chamber-scale version of the cantata Gay Life. This concert is being presented by the Tobenski-Algera Concerts series; I have no additional information, but I'll be keeping an eye out.

Saturday, September 1: Maverick Concerts, a summer series presented in verdant Woodstock, NY, will present Del Tredici's ginormous Final Alice, among the biggest and boldest of his Lewis Carroll-inspired pieces, in the world premiere of Alexander's Platt's chamber-ensemble reduction. Platt does the conducting honors, leading the Maverick Chamber Players with soprano Patrice Michaels. The performance takes place at 8pm; tickets are $20. Directions to Maverick Concert Hall can be downloaded here.

That's everything announced so far for New York City and the surrounding area. If you want to be rocked by the original version of Final Alice, you'll have to head to Washington, D.C. a little more than a year from now, when longtime Del Tredici champion Leonard Slatkin leads the National Symphony Orchestra in three performances May 8-10, 2008.

But given the impact Del Tredici's music had back in the '80s and the thrill those big, gaudy, voluptuous pieces might still impart, it comes as a major disappointment that none of them are being revived here (to my knowledge, anyway -- I suppose someone could still surprise us). Couldn't someone have left a Strauss tone poem or Mahler symphony in the library and picked up the glorious In Memory of a Summer Day instead? Might not the as-yet unperformed opera Dum Dee Tweedle, completed 15 years ago, have been preferable to the indulgent muddle presented by the Met tonight (about which, more to come)? Or if not there, perhaps elsewhere on the plaza... Gérard Mortier is reportedly committed to maintaining support for American works at New York City Opera; hopefully someone at Boosey is committed to acquiring his phone number.

Playlist:

David Torn - Pretenz (ECM, out Apr. 17)

Black Sabbath - The Dio Years (Warner Bros./Rhino, out Apr. 3)

Giacomo Meyerbeer - Les Huguenots - Rita Shane, Nicolai Gedda, Justino Diáz, Radio Austria Chorus and Orchestra/Ernst Märzendorfer (Opera d'Oro)

Klaus Schulze - Irrlicht (Revisited/SPV)

Tristan Murail - Winter Fragments; Unanswered Questions; Ethers; Feuilles à travers les cloches; Le Lac - Erin Lesser, Argento Chamber Ensemble/Michel Galante (Aeon)

Grateful Dead - Dick's Picks, Vol. 8: Harpur College, Binghamton, NY 05/02/70 (Grateful Dead)

Sebastian Currier - Verge; Static; Night Time; Variations on Time and Time Again - Music from Copland House (Koch International Classics)

Carcass - Heartwork (Earache)

Re: Joyce.

Even if you've already seen and enjoyed the Met's current production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, there's a compelling reason to catch it again -- namely, Joyce DiDonato, who's taken over the role of Rosina. No disrespect to Diana Damrau, the dishy German soprano who launched this production last fall, whose portrayal I thoroughly admired. But I enjoyed the performance on Wednesday night (March 14) even more.

To begin with, it appears that I agree with Rossini's choice to cast Rosina as a mezzo: the richer, darker timbres mix well in ensembles with the light, fluid tenor of Almaviva, the dusky baritone of Figaro and the basso bluster of Dr. Bartolo. DiDonato hit her high notes comfortably, but she's also got a low end to die for, and her technical control throughout her range is remarkable.

Factor in DiDonato's alert, spunky performance -- every bit as lithe as Damrau's but more comfortable and humane in characterization -- and the revival wins hands down over the premiere. Previously, I'd seen DiDonato in pious (Heggie's Dead Man Walking at City Opera and Trinity Church), playful (Gounod's Roméo et Juliette at the Met) and pathetic (Handel's Hercules at BAM) modes. Her comedic instincts caught me by surprise: tonight's boisterous tone suited her well. No two ways about it: DiDonato is a sublime performer and a major star.

As for the rest: Bartlett Sher's spare staging leaves a lot to the imagination; since the element of surprise was absent on a return visit, the singers had far more weight to carry. Thankfully, everyone was up to the task. Juan Diego Flórez, as Almaviva, was physically friskier this time around; vocally, he was a marvel, with only an instance or two of pinching in climactic passages. Peter Mattei's Figaro is truly a star-making role, and he was even funnier and more compelling this time; surprisingly or not, he claimed the evening's lustiest ovation. John Del Carlo's Dr. Bartolo gained nuance and thereby earned greater sympathy. As Don Basilio, John Relyea's performance was technically superior to that of Samuel Ramey in the premiere; even so, there was something to Ramey's comportment that made Basilio a bigger character last November than he was tonight.

Playlist:

Rob Schwimmer - Beyond the Sky (NuNoise)

Album - Debajo de la Avalancha, Vol. 1 (DelHotel download)

Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Letting Go (Drag City)

The Bad Plus - Prog (Do the Math/Heads Up, due May 8)

Giacomo Puccini - Tosca - Zinka Milanov, Franco Corelli, Gian Giacomo Guelfi, Covent Garden Opera Chorus and Orchestra/Alexander Gibson (Royal Opera House)

Dept. of Good and Evil feat. Rachel Z - Dept. of Good and Evil feat. Rachel Z (Savoy Jazz)

Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm (Kill Rock Stars)

Menomena - Friend and Foe (Barsuk)

Marillion - Marbles Live (Impact)

Thomas Tallis - "Why Fum'th in Fight?"; Ralph Vaughan Williams - Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis; Symphony No. 5; Serenade to Music - Atlanta Symphony Chamber Chorus and Orchestra/Robert Spano (Telarc, due April 24)

SlowSix - Private Times in Public Places (IfThenElse)

Chorus lines.

The Oratorio Society of New York at Carnegie Hall
The New York Times, March 15, 2007

Glass menagerie.

I've been waiting patiently for a very, very long time in hopes of catching a live performance of Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach. And, given that this is Glass's birthday year, I've been keeping my eyes and ears peeled for news of a production somewhere, anywhere. No luck so far, but mere moments ago I received a press release that put a smile on my face: The Philip Glass Ensemble will perform excerpts from Einstein in a concert at Carnegie Hall on December 6 at 8pm. The booking is so fresh that the event hasn't been added to the Carnegie Hall website yet. Michael Riesman will conduct the performance, and Timothy Fain is the featured violinist.

The down side? It's a Thursday, the one night of the week on which I'm generally unavailable to attend performances. But just watch me make an exception for this.

In other Glass news, Michael Riesman will conduct the Collegiate Chorale in a semi-staged performance of The Juniper Tree, a chamber opera co-composed by Glass and Robert Moran, next Tuesday (March 20) at Alice Tully Hall. The Lincoln Center Festival recently announced its big Glass offering for the summer: Book of Longing, a new concert piece based on the poetry of Leonard Cohen, will be presented at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater on July 14 and 15.

Factor in Orphée at Glimmerglass, Satyagraha at the Met and Appomattox in San Francisco, and it's looking to be a strong year indeed. For the truly adventurous, there's a complete performance of Music in 12 Parts scheduled for Sunday, October 21 at the Barbican in London, with Book of Longing presented the previous evening.

Finally, while it didn't arrive quite in time to maintain the intended movement-a-month pace, Part Two of Glass's new recording of Music in 12 Parts has just been made available at iTunes.

Playlist:

Marillion - Brave (Sanctuary)

Bryan Ferry - Dylanesque (Capitol, out June 19)

Arthur Honegger - Le Roi David - Ile de France Regional Chorus, Orchestre de la Cité/Michel Piquemal (Naxos)

Philip Glass - Music in 12 Parts, Part Two - Philip Glass Ensemble (Orange Mountain Music iTunes exclusive)

Igor Stravinsky - Mass - RIAS Kammerchor, musikFabrik/Daniel Reuss (Harmonia Mundi)

Post percussion.

The Seventeenth Annual Festival with no fancy name, Part 2 (or B) got underway on Monday night (March 12) at Experimental Intermedia, composer Phill Niblock's homey loft and performance space in Lower Manhattan, with a performance by Jason Kahn (pictured) and Jon Mueller.

I previewed the concert for this week's issue of Time Out New York. You can read that piece here, but I'll summarize for readers in a hurry. Both Kahn and Muller started out as drummers: Kahn played with California punk-jazz outfits Universal Congress Of and Cruel Frederick before relocating to Zürich, while Mueller has been active with Milwaukee postrock bands Pelé and Collections of Colonies of Bees.

In their more recent work, both players have turned to a percussion-oriented version of electroacoustic improvisation, much of which has been documented on their own labels (Kahn's Cut and Mueller's Crouton). In each case, the conventional notion of timekeeping is entirely abandoned in favor of textural exploration, usually augmented by unorthodox amplification and electronics, which led me to coin a new term in my TONY preview: postpercussionist. (Other members of the genus include the phenomenal Swiss musician Günter Müller, as well as New Yorkers Tim Barnes and Sean Meehan).

Kahn and Mueller have recorded together twice. Papercuts, issued on Crouton in 2004, consisted entirely of electronically manipulated sounds made by ruffling, ripping and crumpling paper. The duo's new CD, Supershells (on San Francisco-based label Formed), features recognizable percussion sounds -- gently tapped cymbals, whining gongs, fingertips pattering on drum heads -- augmented by Kahn's analog synthesizer and Mueller's stacked cassette players.

In their hour-long set tonight, Kahn and Mueller stuck close to the techniques and sounds they'd employed on Supershells. Kahn's right hand fluttered on a small cymbal and deep snare drum, while his left alternated between plugging and unplugging patches on his boxy old synthesizer and adjusting knobs on a mixing board. Mueller played soft rolls on a gong suspended close to the floor, and created a din with a piccolo snare drum set on the face of a loudspeaker. Now and then, the performance rose to a roar of feedback and wiry buzz; otherwise, the duo maintained a quietly conversational level. Energy dipped to a near-stasis point midway through, but for the most part the players sustained interest throughout their set.

The Festival with no fancy name continues at Experimental Intermedia through March 29. As is often the case with Niblock's festivals, many of the artists are new to me; among those I know are Larry Austin, who presents six new electroacoustic and electronic compositions this Thursday (March 15), and Robin Hayward, an exceptional British tuba player who presents a solo concert on March 26.

Tonight's gathering also provided an opportunity to catch up with two old friends: Brian Olewnick, who writes about this area of music more precisely and artfully than anyone I know, and Jon Abbey, who singlehandedly operates one of the seminal record labels documenting this music, Erstwhile.

I complained to Jon that concerts by the leading practitioners of electroacoustic improvisation have become exceedingly rare in New York City. The last major event here was the ErstQuake festival he mounted with Tim Barnes and Chris Wolf last fall. In response, Jon rightly noted that much of the audience for the big events he has presented here flew in from elsewhere, and that there was a general lack of appropriate venues.

While I hope that doesn't mean Jon's given up on New York altogether, it was good news to learn that he's currently concocting a major series to be presented September 13-16 in Philadelphia, under the auspices of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe. Artists scheduled to appear include Keith Rowe, Taku Sugimoto, Burkhard Beins, Toshimaru Nakamura, Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann, Giuseppe Ielasi, Thomas Ankersmit, Tim Barnes, Sean Meehan and Howie Stelzer. That's a heavyweight roster if ever I've seen one; keep an eye on the Erstwhile site for further details.

Playlist:

Napalm Death - Utopia Banished (Earache)

Carcass - Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious (Earache)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Le nozze di Figaro - Anna Netrebko, Dorothea Röschmann, Christine Schäfer, Ildebrando D'Arcangelo, Bo Skovhus, Vienna State Opera Chorus, Vienna Philharmonic/Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Deutsche Grammophon DVD)

Machine Head - Through the Ashes of Empires and The Blackening (Roadrunner)

Electric Kompany - Electric Kompany (CD-R demo)

Marillion - This Strange Engine (Eagle Rock)

Keith Rowe and Mark Wastell - Live from the I-and-E Festival 31 March 2006 (Confront)

Youth movement.

"Young Composer Finds His Fuel In Restlessness"
The New York Times, March 11, 2007

An article about buzzworthy young composer Nico Muhly, whose Zankel Hall concert this Friday night (March 16) will alternate between his own original compositions and Tudor choral works by Taverner, Byrd and Weelkes. (The article explains why.) This interview was one of the most enjoyable I've ever conducted -- if "conducted" is even the right word for a sprawling, two-and-a-half hour conversation that started over a fabulous dinner at Fuleen Seafood and ended at a table in Muhly's sixth-floor walk-up apartment in Chinatown.

One note: For whatever reason, the article appears on the Times website shorn of its final paragraph. Since I don't know when that might be fixed, I'll include it here:

If Mr. Muhly has a signature sound, a style, it is not something he is eager to acknowledge or define. "The minute you're like, 'This is the grammar,' it stops being a secret,'" he said. "Inasmuch as I'm in a daily process to uncover the grammar of what it is that I'm doing and use that, I also don't want to know where it ends."

Muhly's website is here, and includes many MP3 files for free downloading. His MySpace page is here. In addition to Muhly's own concert, adventurous music lovers should take note of a concert by Valgeir Sigurdsson, who produced Muhly's album, Speaks Volumes, and issued it on his Bedroom Community label, and Ben Frost, a guitarist also signed to the label, at Tonic on Sunday (March 18).

Sign here.

A public service announcement from our friends at Downtown Music Gallery:

On WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28TH from 5:00 to 6:30pm, legendary musician/composer Anthony Braxton will autograph copies of his forthcoming box set, 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006 (Firehouse 12 Records), at a special signing event at New York's Downtown Music Gallery. This will also be the first chance for fans to purchase this set, which officially hits the streets on April 3rd. Mr. Braxton is in New York to perform eight sets with his 7tet at the Iridium Jazz Club from Thursday March 29th through Sunday April 1st.

9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006 is a 9-CD [+1 DVD] box set documenting what Time Out New York called "last Spring's epochal run" by the Anthony Braxton 12+1tet at Iridium in March 2006.

Described by Braxton as "THE point of definition in my work thus far," these concerts featured the world premieres of Compositions 350 through 358, the final works in his 11 year-old Ghost Trance Music series.

This definitive set, being released in coordination with Braxton's 2007 return engagement at Iridium, also includes a 10th Disc: A DVD DOCUMENTARY interspersed with live concert footage and an extensive collection of essays, commentary and biographical information.

Firehouse 12 Records, by the way, is a new imprint co-directed by cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum. You'll find more information about the set and the signing at the Downtown Music Gallery web site. For the sake of full disclosure, I have no financial interest in this release, but edited versions of three of my three blog posts about these shows are among the many essays printed in the booklet. (To the best of my knowledge, my complimentary copy of the set will not be autographed. Bummer.)

Playlist:

David Del Tredici - In Memory of a Summer Day - Phyllis Bryn-Julson, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Slaktin (Nonesuch)

David Del Tredici - Syzygy; Four Songs on Poems of James Joyce; Two Songs on Poems by James Joyce; Vintage Alice - Lucy Shelton, David Del Tredici, ASKO Ensemble/Oliver Knussen (Deutsche Grammophon)

Michael Torke - Strawberry Fields - Joyce Castle, Margaret Lloyd, Jeffrey Lentz, John Hancock, Albany Symphony Orchestra/David Alan Miller (Ecstatic)

Ben Frost - Theory of Machines (Bedroom Community)

Marillion - Afraid of Sunlight (Sanctuary)

George Benjamin - Sudden Time; Viola, Viola; Three Inventions - Ensemble Modern Orchestra/George Benjamin (Ensemble Modern)

Arthur Honegger - Le Roi David - Ile de France Regional Chorus, Orchestre de la Cité/Michel Piquemal (Naxos)

Carl Nielsen - Clarinet Concerto; Kalevi Aho - Clarinet Concerto; Martin Fröst, Lahti Symphony Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä (Bis)

Napalm Death - Fear, Emptiness, Despair (Earache)

Tribal memory.

Wakonda's Dream by Anthony Davis and Yusef Komunyakaa at Opera Omaha
The New York Times, March 9, 2007

Sample and hold.

CD review: Phillip Bimstein - Larkin Gifford's Harmonica
Stephen Caplan, oboist; Sierra Winds; Equinox Chamber Players; Abramyan String Quartet.
Starkland ST-214; CD.
The New York Times, March 4, 2007
(ArkivMusic, Barnes & Noble)

Squeezing out sparks.

Simone Kermes with the Venice Baroque Orchestra at Weill Recital Hall
The New York Times, March 1, 2007