Night After Night

New beginnings.

Kent Tritle at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
The New York Times, November 25, 2011

Much as I genuinely enjoy the pipe organ and aspire to expertise regarding its mechanics and repertoire, I freely confess that, no, I did not pick out and identify unaided the specific registration Kent Tritle used as a lead voice in Bach's "An Wasserflüssen Babylon" (BWV 653). It was a fantastic sound that I'd never heard before, and I needed to know what it was… so I asked Tritle's page-turner after the concert. The Vox Baryton stop, I was told, was an uncommon registration, and specific to Skinner instruments like the one at St. John the Divine.

Every time I'm at St. John the Divine I imagine what it might have been like to hear Diamanda Galás perform her Plague Mass there in 1990. The New York Times does not seem to have had a reviewer at that event — or if one was there, Galás does not have that review in her online archive. Still, it was fascinating to read what some of my colleagues had to say about her work. Allan Kozinn reviewed an earlier version of the Plague Mass at Alice Tully Hall in 1989 and previewed the St. John the Divine performance; Bernard Holland covered a subsequent performance at the Kitchen. This rare bit of video footage comes from the latter engagement.

The outer limits.

Robert Ashley's That Morning Thing at the Kitchen
The New York Times, November 24, 2011

Immersed as I've been in Robert Ashley's music just lately, coming to That Morning Thing was still a matter of some considerable mystery; there's not a lot of historical detail out there about the piece, arguably Ashley's first opera and certainly the earliest work bearing that genre designation on Ashley's site and in the Grove Dictionary. Two sections of the work are among Ashley's most familiar creations — but how the unavoidable discomfort of "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon" and the pleasureable disorientation of "She Was a Visitor" would fit into anything called an "opera" was beyond my capacity to imagine.

How unexpected and wonderful, then, that Archive.org, a site I've mostly used to stream Grateful Dead audience tapes, also happened to have not just a complete recording of one of the few early performances of That Morning Thing, from 1969, but also a fascinating contemporaneous recorded commentary by Charles Shere. Both are part of the Other Minds Archive, a spectacular trove of music and conversation.

You can read more about the ideas that went into the new production of That Morning Thing, as well as thoughts and reflections from its participants, on the blog maintained by the show's cast — which included all the members of Varispeed, the collective that played Ashley's Perfect Lives all over the Village — and crew.

Old wine, new bottles.

Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra at Zankel Hall
The New York Times, November 22, 2011

Old masters.

The New York Philharmonic with Bernard Haitink at Avery Fisher Hall
The New York Times, November 19, 2011

Throwing the horns.

Detail of WQXR-FM "OBEY THOVEN" campaign poster image; design by Eyeball

Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique at Carnegie Hall
The New York Times, November 18, 2011

Sometimes finding the right hook for an overnight review is a challenge, even a lengthy struggle. And sometimes the right hook simply sits down beside you. This was an example of the latter, obviously. Can't say that I ever expected to cite Quorthon, the late founder of Swedish black-metal band Bathory, in an orchestral review from Carnegie Hall. But you'll notice I'm not complaining.

Endless shout.

Steven Schick playing "North Star Boogaloo." Photograph: Erin Baiano/The New York Times

International Contemporary Ensemble: George Lewis Composer Portrait at Miller Theatre
The New York Times, November 14, 2011

Happy as I am with most of this review, I'm still kind of amazed that I managed to write an entire piece on George Lewis without once mentioning Chicago, where he came from and where his aesthetic was shaped early on by his activities in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or A.A.C.M. Lewis's history of the organization, A Power Stronger Than Itself, is sprawling, detailed and authoritative.

Still, I'm pleased to have smuggled a link to an audio track from the great Anthony Braxton live album Quartet (Dortmund) 1976 into the first paragraph (thanks, YouTube!). It was also fortuitous that a Zora Neale Hurston essay cited in the final graf was available in its entirety online. And, finally, with absolute respect to all the great photographers who share my beat for The New York Times, I'm unfailingly deighted with the images that Erin Baiano provides.

Into the mystic.

Olivier Latry at Alice Tully Hall
The New York Times, November 14, 2011

As noted in this review, a small but steady trickle of patrons departed from this concert from about the 10-minute mark forward. You have to wonder just what it was they thought they were getting into with a 75-minute continuous program of Messiaen's organ music…

Defying gravity.

Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace at Zankel Hall
The New York Times, November 11, 2011

Legacy tour.

Varispeed performing in the Essex Street Market. Photograph: Michael Nagle/The New York Times

"A Fresh Stamp on a Veteran Composer's Work"
The New York Times, November 9, 2011

Originally this was going to be two separate, straightforward reviews of concerts in which new performers, mostly young, took up works by the veteran composer Robert Ashley. Instead, it turned into a single notebook that performed essentially the same function, but gave me the opportunity to really think about the two events in context and to really get at the fundamental difference between the two events.

The first, presented by the Incubator Arts Project, was a concert of chamber music badly in desperate need of champions and new performances. To say that I was shaken was an understatement; I literally could not comprehend how it was possible that I'd never previously encountered a performance of a work as refined and beautiful as Ashley's string quartet in memoriam … Esteban Gomez, nor could I imagine anyone using the idiosyncratic and touching specifics of Thomas Buckner's voice more effectively than Ashley did in Tract. After the latter work, I made a beeline over to Tom Hamilton, Ashley's longtime sound-design partner and a fine composer-performer in his own right, to find out just how the piece was made.

Tom Hamilton and your intrepid reporter. Photograph by Bonnie Wright.

In the other event, members of the collective Varispeed honored Ashley, while also expressing plenty about their own musical personalities and showing an exuberant camaraderie, by staging scenes from his video opera Perfect Lives at two-hour intervals in locations around the East Village and SoHo. This event, presented under the auspices of Performa 11, was a gas to follow from start to finish; look for your diligent reporter in two of the images in the slideshow of Michael Nagle's photos included as a sidebar to the main article.

The next event of Ashley's extraordinary month arrives this Saturday, November 19, when The Kitchen hosts another Performa 11 presentation: the New York premiere of That Morning Thing, Ashley's first opera and the source of two of his most famous pieces, She Was a Visitor and Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon. Directed by the steel-pan player, composer and multimedia artist Fast Forward, who studied with Ashley at Ann Arbor during the ’70s, the cast includes longtime Ashley cohorts like Hamilton and "Blue" Gene Tyranny alongside younger performers, including all five members of Varispeed.

And thus are legacies maintained and extended. Hallelujah.

Alive at 25.

Bang on a Can All-Stars at Zankel Hall
The New York Times, November 7, 2011

I'm happy with the shape and pace of this piece of writing, but wish I'd have finessed the details a bit more elegantly. For example, I'm very pleased with the sense of David Lang's character that comes through in the opening paragraphs. But on the other hand, I didn't find space to name the players — happily, several are IDed in the photo — nor did I mention that the guitarist, Derek Johnson, is a recurring substitute for Mark Stewart, who's still an All-Star but currently touring with Paul Simon. With a little more space I'd have tried to describe the Andriessen piece a bit more precisely, although I did in fact think the wonderful video work overpowered what was, for Andriessen, unsually understated writing.

What I'm saying, I suppose, is that there's not much I'd change here, but several things on which I'd have elaborated a bit more, space allowing.