Night After Night

New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, March 12, 2014

Alan Gilbert, by Karsten Moran for The New York Times

New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, March 12, 2014
The New York Times, March 14, 2014

In which I describe Carl Nielsen's Symphony No. 4, "The Inextinguishable," like so: "A seamless sequence of vivid episodes, the piece is a craggy MacGuffin that shouldn’t work but does, stapled together with a hiccupping three-note motto and capped with a raging duel between two timpanists."

Yeah, that still makes me smile. No photos snapped on this night, so I grabbed an image from a previous concert review.

Classical Playlist: John Adams, Prokofiev, Harrison Birtwistle and More

BBC Singers, by John Wood

Classical Playlist: John Adams, Prokofiev, Harrison Birtwistle and More
The New York Times ArtsBeat, March 12, 2014

My contributions:

MORTON FELDMAN: ‘For Philip Guston’
John Tilbury, pianist; Carla Rees, flutist; Simon Allen, percussionist
(Atopos)

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE: ‘The Moth Requiem’
Roderick Williams, baritone; BBC Singers, Nash Ensemble, conducted by Nicholas Kok
(Signum)

Agenda.

Frustrating to be posting an ostensibly timely feature a day late, but life and work sometimes collude to prevent free time. On the other hand, curiously enough, I hadn't made note of any particular events for Monday or Tuesday — go figure. My agenda for The New York Times this week is lively and diverse, including two visits to the Ecstatic Music Festival and a first date with a familiar ensemble recently reconfigured.

Wednesday, March 19: Timo Andres, Gabriel Kahane, Ted Hearne, Becca Stevens & Nathan Koci
Merkin Concert Hall; 7:30pm; $25

Polymath pianist and composer Timo Andres gathers a small group of similarly multifarious artists for the world premiere of a new song cycle, Work Songs, based on texts by authors and poets who've written about their working processes. Further selections by Kahane, Hearne and Stevens round out the program, which repeats in St. Paul, MN, on Friday and Saturday.

Saturday, March 22: Colin Stetson and Brooklyn Youth Chorus
Merkin Concert Hall; 7:30pm; $25

Multi-instrumentalist Colin Stetson is widely celebrated for his rigorous yet songful unaccompanied saxophone pieces, but he's also proved adept at integrating his conception with those of song-based bands like Bon Iver and Arcade Fire. Here, he's presenting a new piece with the unfailingly bold Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and also leading an all-star avant-rock band in a rendition of Gorecki's Symphony No. 3. "What's it got to do with classical music?" one colleague demanded. Let's find out.

Sunday, March 23: Emerson String Quartet
Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center; 5pm; $45–$100

I've been privileged to hear the Emerson Quartet many times before, but never with cellist Paul Watkins, who joined the band last year. That alone would make this concert worthwhile, but hearing Shostakovich's Quartets Nos. 11 and 12 (with a Mendelssohn intermission) is a major plus.

Elsewhere and -when

Wednesday, March 19: Matt Ingalls at the Old Stone House of Brooklyn (more)

Wednesday, March 19: John Zorn: Masada, Book 3 at the Town Hall (more)

Thursday, March 20: Thomas Buckner with Bradyworks at Roulette (more)

Thursday, March 20: Mellissa Hughes at the Kaplan Penthouse, Lincoln Center (more)

Thursday, March 20: Object Collection at Trans-Pecos (more)

Thursday, March 20: thingNY plays Jonathan Zorn and Dave Ruder at the Firehouse Space (more)

Thursday, March 20: Jude Traxler, Joey Van Hassel, Sayun Chang and Stuart Sanders Smith play Sanders Smith at the Gershwin Hotel (more; repeats on Saturday at Spectrum)

Friday, March 21: Coppice and Anne Guthrie & Richard Kamerman at Issue Project Room (more)

Friday, March 21 and Saturday, March 22: Okkyung Lee at the Kitchen (more)

Friday, March 21: Gregory Oakes and Amir Khosrowpour play Louis Andriessen, Giacinto Scelsi, Andy Akiho, Reiko Füting and others at the Firehouse Space (more)

Saturday, March 22: Bruka Band plays Milica Paranosic at Gallery MC (more)

Saturday, March 22: Eco-Music Big Band plays Jay Rodriguez, Fred Ho, Cal Massey and Marie Incontrera at IBeam Brooklyn (more)

Saturday, March 22: Trevor Saint and Bill Solomon play Matt Sargent at the Firehouse Space (more)

Saturday, March 22: Jude Traxler, Joey Van Hassel, Sayun Chang and Stuart Sanders Smith play Sanders Smith at Spectrum (more)

I solemnly swear to post Agenda on time next Monday, since two of the week's most important, inviting events — this one and this one — both happen that night.

Wandelwatching: The New Silence, O Tannenbaum Unplugged

The New Silence aims to further specify and articulate the site of an event by manually adjusting the background noise during a performance situation, redefining the threshold of silence, thus revealing the new silence. Sounds from everyday life in the urban surroundings as well as from the building itself are examined and re-contextualized; one hears in a new way amplified refrigerators and air conditioning units, pre-recorded mechanical devices, music leaking from next door and all kinds of urban background sounds.—Johnny Chang

Right, so it's just barely still Friday here in New York City – the day simply got away. But rather than blowing off this new blog series I recklessly declared weekly, I'm sharing a recent SoundCloud post by Johnny Chang, Wandelweiser composer and violinist.

Chang's 2013 recording of Stefan Thut's composition for zithers and other objects, Two Strings and Boxes, is highly recommended. He's also on a newer Edition Wandelweiser CD of Thut's drei, 1-21, playing alongside Sam Sfirri and Jürg Frey. Chang posts on SoundCloud reasonably frequently and quite generously; over the last few months he's put up recordings of his own music, as well as pieces by Peter Ablinger and Antoine Beuger. If you're not following him already, you should be.

The post I've linked above is a good introduction to The New Silence: a trio featuring Chang, bassist Koen Nutters – also Chang's partner in the ensemble Konzert Minimal – and percussionist Morten J. Olsen. If I've deduced correctly, the performance was recorded live on March 12 at Berlin nightclub (?) O Tannenbaum.

Be careful about how high you turn up the volume in order to hear the gentle strings, that's all I'm saying. Next week, concert listings. I promise.

Trinity Choir at Trinity Wall Street, March 9, 2014

Trinity Choir, by Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Trinity Choir at Trinity Wall Street, March 9, 2014
The New York Times, Mar. 12, 2014

A very impressive new concert series is underway at historic Trinity Church: six concerts (not five, as I erroneously reported at first) running each Sunday afternoon through April 13. You can see details and buy tickets here, and you can watch the entire concert I wrote about here.

Agenda.

A week of big orchestral concerts ahead for coverage in The New York Times, and, as ever, plenty that I'd like to see were sleeplessness (well, additional sleeplessness) or cloning available options.

Wednesday, March 12: New York Philharmonic
Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center; 7:30pm; $39–$59

Alan Gilbert and the Phil continue the outstanding cycle of Carl Nielsen's orchestral music undertaken in collaboration with the Danish record label Dacapo, which has already produced a dynamic CD of the Symphonies Nos. 2 ("Sinfonia espansiva") and 3 ("The Four Temperaments"). This week's program includes the Symphonies Nos. 1 and 4 (no nicknames) and Helios Overture, and it repeats on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Saturday, March 15, and Sunday, March 16: Vienna Philharmonic (1, 2)
Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall; Sat at 8pm, Sun at 7pm; $34–$225

The Vienna Philharmonic returns to Carnegie for two more concerts under the Vienna: City of Dreams festival banner. On Saturday, Christoph Eschenbach fills in for an injured Daniele Gatti, conducting Schubert's Symphony No. 8 ("Unfinished") and Mahler's Symphony No. 4, the latter with Juliane Banse as soloist. And on Sunday, Zubin Mehta steers a celebration of all things Viennese, from waltzes to Webern with a juicy centerpiece in Korngold's Violin Concerto (featuring Gil Shaham). Diana Damrau and the New York Choral Artists are also pitching in.

Elsewhere and -when

Monday, March 10: Jay Campbell plays David Fulmer, Simon Steen-Andersen, Matthias Pintscher and more at Weill Recital Hall (more)

Monday, March 10: Benjamin Hochman plays Luciano Berio, Oliver Knussen, Frederic Rzewski and Tamar Muskal at SubCulture (more)

Tuesday, March 11: Aventa Ensemble plays Rolf Wallin and Michael Osterle for Ear Heart Music at Roulette (more)

Wednesday, March 12: Imperial Topaz and Hex Breaker Quartet at Death by Audio (more)

Wednesday, March 12, and Thursday, March 13: Elliott Sharp's SysOrk at Roulette (more)

Thursday, March 13: Bang on a Can Peoples' Commissioning Fund concert at Merkin Concert Hall (more)

Thursday, March 13: Ensemble Signal plays Unsuk Chin at Miller Theatre (more)

Thursday, March 13: Rachel Golub and Nick Didkovsky at Spectrum (more)

Friday, March 14: David Del Tredici and Marc Peloquin play Del Tredici at Bargemusic (more)

Sunday, March 16: counter)induction plays Salvatore Sciarrino, Robert Suderburg, Ryan Streber, Douglas Boyce and Kyle Bartlett at Greenwich House Music School (more)

Sunday, March 16: String Noise and Friends at the Firehouse Space (more)

Video: Ornette Coleman Trio in Paris, 1966

Shared on Facebook by Larry Appelbaum, here's a video I've never seen before: a documentary about Ornette Coleman's 1966 Parisian trek to record the soundtrack for Who's Crazy? with bassist David Izenson and drummer Charles Moffett.

Happy 84th birthday, Ornette, with profound thanks for the music and its message.

Wandelwatching: Michael Pisaro/Miguel Prado, White Metal

We had already agreed in principle that the entire structure of the piece would be derived from Mozart’s 40th Symphony, and that obviously, “White Metal” should carry a variation of the concept “Black Metal” and the term “white noise”.—Miguel Prado

Having declared last week in my initial Wandelwatching post that this series of essays is meant to keep track of upcoming concerts featuring pieces by Wandelweiser Group composers and their fellow travelers, I'm veering onto a parallel track already to share news of a record that's soon to arrive.

Lacking detailed notes, I can't fully explain the nature of the collaboration between Wandelweiser composer Michael Pisaro and Spanish composer/performer/provocateur Miguel Prado on White Metal, a new vinyl LP from the Italian label Senufo Editions. But what I've heard in the Soundcloud preview track embedded above is enough to assure me it will make for fascinating listening when it arrives.

I don't regret having ordered a copy from Giuseppe Ielasi via Discogs last week, since there are only 300 copies available and Erstwhile, my go-to source, doesn't tend to stock vinyl. That said, I'm always happy to recommend Experimedia, source of the Soundcloud excerpt that promptly hijacked today's posting.

I promise, especially to those composers and impresarios who obliged my request for concert listings last week, that I'll turn my attention to those promptly. But since I'm already on the subject of recordings, I'll finish with one more nod to the Classical Playlist that ran on The New York Times ArtsBeat blog on Wednesday, which included a pithy little capsule about a beautiful solo-piano disc by Eva-Maria Houben (as composer and performer).

It's the second time I've included a Houben disc in that still young Classical Playlist series, and it's unlikely to be the last since I've spent much of the past week spinning the four most recent CD-R releases from her own label, Diafani. People will talk…

Talea Ensemble at the Austrian Cultural Forum, March 4, 2014

Talea Ensemble at the Austrian Cultural Forum, March 4, 2014
The New York Times, March 6, 2014

My report on a Talea Ensemble performance at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, one of many fruitful intersections between those two important institutions. Since there was no Times photographer on hand, I've chosen an older video of Talea's Alex Lipowski playing Pierluigi Billone's Mani.Matta, a feat repeated in the concert at hand.

If you, like me, initially thought that tonight's Talea concert at the Bohemian National Hall on the Upper East Side is a repeat of the Tuesday program, look again: The same three composers — Billone, Bernhard Gander and Olga Neuwirth – are involved, but the pieces are newer ones, written for considerably larger forces. It's free of charge at 8pm, and you can still make reservations online.

For the record, I regret that I was unable to work in a mention of the Suffocation T-shirt Gander was wearing under his sport coat on Tuesday night.

Classical Playlist: Stephanie Blythe, Eva-Maria Houben, Nicholas Phillips and More

Nicholas Phillips

Classical Playlist: Stephanie Blythe, Eva-Maria Houben, Nicholas Phillips and More
New York Times ArtsBeat, March 5, 2014

My contributions:

HOUBEN: ‘Lost in Dreams — Works for Piano’
Eva-Maria Houben, pianist
(Edition Wandelweiser)

‘AMERICAN VERNACULAR — NEW MUSIC FOR SOLO PIANO’
Nicholas Phillips
(New Focus Recordings)

CAMPBELL: ‘Things You Already Know’
Christopher Campbell and ensemble
(Innova)