New York Law School

Art Leonard Observations

Posts Tagged ‘Zankel Hall’

Cultural Diary: April 27-May 6 – Ups and Downs…

Posted on: May 7th, 2014 by Art Leonard No Comments

On April 27, I attended a performance by the extraordinary new music band, Alarm Will Sound, directed by Alan Pierson at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall as part of the series “collected stories” curated by composer David Lang. Lang’s series extended over a week of concerts, with this one come towards the end. The idea of this program was to bring together some diverse examples of music intended to illustrate a story of some sort, in some cases impressionistically and in one very directly in the form of a mini-opera. I start from the premise that the program was assembled by Mr. Lang, not by the members of Alarm Will Sound, a discerning group who put together their thematic concerts with great care and select music that they really believe in. I’m not sure how much they believed in some of the music they performed in this concert, although as always they played with a high degree of involvement and polish. But I was not as convinced as I usually am at an Alarm Will Sound concert at the value of everything I heard. Surely, Donnacha Dennehy’s moving “Gra agus Bas,” which I’ve heard before, is a powerful channeling of Irish folk tropes projected through the unusual vocalism of Iarla O Lionaird, a man of such indeterminate vocal range that he is identified in the program as “Voice” rather than assigned a “normal” range such as alto, tenor, baritone or bass. But I found Kate Moore’s “The Art of Levitation” to be an undistinguished mélange of shifting chords that failed to engage my attention. Kaki King’s “Other Education,” a three-movement work for electric guitar and chamber ensemble, seemed at times to be channeling the mid-20th century Americana stylings of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thompson, pretty but not entirely convincing as an extended piece. That said, King herself proved very assured virtuoso in her guitar solos. Finally, the second half was devoted to Richard Ayres’ nonsense opera, “No . 42 In the Alps”, with a particular story being projected above the performers through silent-film-style titles, and Jennifer Zetlan providing an exuberant rendition of a far-ranging vocal part, imitating animal sounds at times, wandering far beyond her designated range of “soprano.” They should make a DVD of this program, since the Ayres piece is enhanced by the visual elements and might seem threadbare without them.

The following night I had accepted the invitation of a friend to attend a recital by pianist Alden Gatt presented by an organization called Project142 at Unity Church, 213 58th Street in Manhattan. I had never heard of Gatt prior to my friend’s invitation, but there turns out to be plenty of information on his website. He played a very ambitious program: Prokofiev’s “The Young Juliet” from his suite of ten pieces from the ballet Romeo & Juliet arranged by the composer for piano solo; Robert Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13; five of the 24 Preludes, Op. 34, by Dmitri Shostakovich, and Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, generally considered to be one of the toughest tests for a virtuoso pianist in live recital. As an encore, he played Earl Wild’s Etude based on Gershwin’s song Embraceable You. I was impressed by Gatt’s technical polish and musical insight, particularly in the second half of the program (Shostakovich & Ravel). His Schumann was a bit precarious in a few spots, especially in the finale, where his finger memory seemed to falter slightly a few times, although he quickly recovered without losing any equanimity. A little woodshedding in order for the Schumann… The Ravel was mightily impressive, by contrast, comparing favorably in my recollection with other performances I’ve heard as well as some excellent recordings, including those of Martha Argerich and Vladimir Ashkenazy, generally considered the gold standard in this work. I hope Gatt has a chance to record these. I picked up his debut recital CD during the intermission and was impressed again when listening at home. I think his interpretive abilities have deepened since he made that recording a few years ago. In particularly, I suspect he would play the Bach Italian Concerto with more nuance and subtlety today, to judge by his work on April 28. I hope I encounter his playing again soon. Project142 is a concert series that began as occasional soirees in the apartment of a retired minister. Attendance expanded through word of mouth and now they are held in various larger venues. Unity Church is actually a relatively small hall, seating comfortably about 40 people in a good acoustical space for a piano recital. The concerts are not scheduled out very far in advance, and they cover an eclectic range of music. Those interested in exploring can check the website, www.Project142.org, to see what is coming up. Ticket prices are moderate and sometimes free, since the performers are provided the venue once approved by the host and are responsible for generating their own audience, as there is no budget for advertising. If the general standard of performance is reflected by Mr. Gatt, then this is a series worth following.

On May 5 I attended the NYC premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall, the opening night of this year’s (final) installment of Carnegie’s “Spring for Music” series, which has brought a diverse group of orchestras from the U.S. and Canada to Carnegie Hall to play programs notable for their unusual repertory choices. It is scandalous that Carnegie couldn’t find sponsorship to continue this series beyond this year. The combination of low ticket prices ($25 for any seat) and unusual programming has drawn a younger audience than usually patronizes classical concerts in this city, and the success of this series in drawing an audience goes to prove that high ticket prices are part of the reason why classical concert audiences at are major halls have such a very high average age. At any rate, this opening concert, presenting Alan Gilbert conducting the Westminster Symphonic Choir, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, baritone soloist Jacques Imbrailo, and the New York Philharmonic, was a major event indeed, the stage full to overflowing and the youth choir parked up in the first tier boxes. With the composer in attendance for what was only the second presentation of a piece first performed in 2007, one had a sense of being present at an important occasion, for Christopher Rouse has emerged as an important composer through numerous important commissions and premieres, not least with the NYP during his period as composer-in-residence. This ambitious piece weaves together poems in English and Italian, hymns in English and German, and the Latin requiem mass (as modified by Hector Berlioz for his own Requiem, one of the inspirations for this piece), and a large orchestra, including an extended percussion section that, in typical Rousian manner, is given its head to make lots of glorious noise. I found the piece a bit uneven and sometimes overextended, but the glorious final minutes made up for any faults. Mr. Imbrailo was terrific in his solos, although I would hope the composer would consider some selective rescoring to address balance problems, especially in the first half of No. 15 in the score, where the soloist was virtually buried under heavy orchestration. In fact, I think it would be worth Mr. Rouse’s time to review Carnegie’s house recording of this performance and think carefully about ways to improve this score, not just in orchestration but also in reducing some of the repetitive parts. What is already a very effective piece could be made more effective, and I bet about 10 minutes could be trimmed from the 90 minute score with profit. Indeed, if I were him I would also eliminate the intermission break. A piece like this — such as the Britten War Requiem or the Berlioz Requiem — works better without an intermission. It may be difficult to do that at 90 minutes, but it is more plausible to do it at 80.

On the other hand, a work that is shorter than an hour can be a real challenge to sit through, as I found to be the case with Thomas Lawrence Toscano’s “The Interview” co-presented by OperaOGGINY and St. Bart’s Episcopal Peace Fellowship at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan. This is a “cause” piece, in which an Army Public Affairs Officer sits down with two women who have lost children during the struggles of the Middle East to try to “understand their intentions” in forming an organization of Jewish and Muslim mothers to agitate for peace. The intensely dramatic events described in the program as prologue give way to an entirely static conception, an opera consisting of three people sitting at a table talking and singing. The music struck me as competent without being anything special, and did not particularly enhance the text when it was sung. Perhaps an orchestral accompaniment, by introducing some sound color, would make it more interesting, as I found a sameness of rhythm and tempo led to boredom. The three singers, Perri Sussman, Lyssandra Stephenson and Ben Spierman, seemed very devoted to the project but were not able to enliven the material much under the composer’s leadership abetted by pianist Alessandro Simone. During a Q&A with the audience afterwards, the composer revealed that this was just the first of a series of 5 one-act operas, each devoted to some particular cause. Cause-based art has a noble tradition, but it is important that the cause not outweigh the artistry with which it is presented. Nobody can contest the horror of children slain in the context of the continuing struggle between Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem, the cause here is admirable, but I don’t think the music and the verses (some of which struck me as awesomely simplistic) really advance it.

NYC Musical Diary – More May Concerts – Detroit SO, Alarm Will Sound, Musicians From Marlboro

Posted on: June 3rd, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments

Being busy with final exams and grading, I haven’t been to as many concerts as usual over the past few weeks, but I wanted to comment about a few:

May 10 in Carnegie Hall I attended one of their “Spring for Music” concerts, a presentation of the four symphonies of Charles Ives by Leonard Slatkin and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.  I’ve been an Ives fan since high school days, when I performed the double bass in a performance of Ives’s Symphony No. 2 by the Oneonta (NY) Symphony Orchestra.  Preparing for that experience I acquired the stereo LP of Leonard Bernstein’s recording with the NY Philharmonic as well as a full score published by Peer International.  I was shocked – shocked! – to discover that Bernstein made cuts in the piece when he recorded.  (Cuts that he retained when he made a new recording with the New York Philharmonic for DG two decades later, I might add.)  Who was he to second-guess the composer in that way?  (I’ve always been upset to discover when conductors have made cuts in a piece.  I once attended a performance of Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Symphony at the NY Philharmonic by a conductor who shall remain nameless where the performance was so heavily cut that I commented to my companion on that occasion that we had just heard a performance of “highlights” from Rach’s 2nd Symphony!)

Anyway, as far as I could tell everything was complete and uncut on May 10, resulting in a very long but gratifying concert.  First I should say that, never having heard this orchestra live before, I was extremely impressed, especially in light of the labor problems they’ve had and the slightly smaller string section than might have been ideal for all but the 3rd Symphony (which was intended by Ives for chamber orchestra).  On the other hand, they managed a big sound that was not inferior to what I’ve heard from larger ensembles playing in that space.  Slatkin has them playing to a very high technical standard, and the orchestra also seemed very engaged with and enthusiastic about the music.

Ives’s 1st Symphony, largely written while he was a Yale undergraduate, owes a heavy debt to Dvorak but still includes touches of harmony and orchestration that foreshadow the mature Ives of the 2nd Symphony to come.  I was particularly impressed in this performance by the gorgeous Adagio molto, where the Dvorak influence is at its heaviest but where the composer has made the most structurally and expressly coherent statement in his symphony.  The piece could even stand along as a tone poem and earn rave reviews.

The 2nd Symphony is usually a new listener’s way into Ives, as the most listener-friendly “Americana” piece he composed, full of allusions to American patriotic songs and hymn tunes, building to a finale dominated by “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” motifs from which permeate the earlier movements, giving an interesting unity to the work.  There are some “romantic” parts where some conductors go “all squishy” and lose the rhythmic profile, but Slatkin did not, providing a performance that rivals the old Bernstein while besting him with completeness (and better playing than the NYP was capable of giving back in the 1960s).

Within the context of the four symphonies, I thought the 3rd came through as the weakest.  Possibly Slatkin doesn’t care for it as much as the others, or perhaps it is just the limitations of the piece, being a rather slender thing between the big Nos. 2 & 4.  I suspect it didn’t get as much rehearsal time as the others, because this was the only one in which I felt ensemble was a bit slack and some of the key lines in the strings were not as precisely articulated as one could want.

This was the third performance I’d heard this season of the 4th Symphony – previously played by Botstein and the American Symphony and Gilbert and the NY Philharmonic – but I thought it was the best.  Slatkin spent some time helping the audience appreciate Ives’s audacity by taking apart some of the challenging 2nd movement and giving us examples of the different lines being combined.  The first time I listened to this piece – the old Stokowski/ASO recording back when I was in high school – I could make heads or tails out of that second movement. The key, I eventually learned, was that it is a huge scherzo, a great jest, and one has to just sit back and let it happen, without trying to find any rhyme or reason in it.  It is Ives taking  laugh at the absurdities of human existence, and heard that way, it is actually quite comical.  The third movement is Ives’s bow to traditionalism, taking a fugue he originally wrote for string quartet and tricking it out with a big, luscious string-dominated sound, but just to make sure you get get the joke, insert a quote toward the end from a religious song.  The finale is a cosmic mash-up, the music of the spheres, the universal sounds….  Slatkin/Detroit hit the target in every movement and gave the best Ives 4th I’ve ever heard live or on record.

It would be great if Naxos would release a complete Ives Symphonies set by these performers, even though it already has three of the symphonies in its catalogue with others.  They have Slatkin remaking his old Rachmaninoff Symphony recordings with Detroit (he already had recorded them as a youngster in St. Louis), but I think there is less need for those recordings than for really good recordings of Ives. 

The next evening, May 11, I attended a Musicians from Marlboro Concert presented by Peoples’ Symphony Concerts at the High School of Fashion Industries auditorium.  Quite a contrast with Carnegie Hall.  The bill of fare was Stravinsky Concertino for String Quartet, Britten String Quartet No. 3, Op. 94, Brahms Piano Quartet, Op. 26.  My favorite piece was the Brahms.  Indeed, in my humble opinion, Brahms was the greatest composer of chamber music in the 19th century, and perhaps for all time (although one must be cautious about predicting the future).  I’ve yet to hear any chamber piece by Brahms that I did not eventually conclude was a great masterpiece.  And I though these performers did it justice: Emilie-Anne Gendron (violin), Hsin-Yun Huang (viola), Gabriel Cabezas (cello), Matan Porat (piano).  The Britten I didn’t care for as much, perhaps because I don’t know it very well and did not find it particularly engaging in this performance, despite strenuous efforts by the performers to convince me.  But the same performers did a fine job with the Stravinsky, which I greatly enjoyed.  The line-up was: Bella Hristova and Adnbi Um (violins, switching off first desk between the two pieces), Hsin-Yun Huang (viola), and Angela Park (cello).

Next on my concert calender was a special event, on May 16 – the Juilliard graduation recital by Lachlan Glen & Friends.  Mr. Glen was co-organizer of the season-long Schubert lieder series together with Jonathan Ware, and I had so enjoyed attending many of those concerts that I jumped at the opportunity when Lachlan invited me to his graduation recital.  He majored in collaborative performance, which means that almost everything on the program involved him performing with other musicians, and it says alot about the esteem in which he is held by his colleagues at Juilliard that he had a stellar bunch of collaborators.  The singers included Rachael Wilson, Kyle Bielfield, Matthew Morris and Emmett O’Hanlon.  Tavi Ungerleider offered some terrific cello playing (especially a movement from the Rachmaninoff Sonata that was quite moving), and Dimitri Dover collaborated on some 4-hand piano music.  Lachlan has grown fantastically as a performer and collaborative artist over the past year, as I witnessed attending the Schubert concerts, starting with good technique and lots of enthusiasm and developing much subtlety of dynamic control and phrasing.  He surely has a great career ahead of him.  He’ll be joining the Metropolitan Opera’s Young Artist Program this summer.

My most recent concert experience involved another friend, Alan Pierson, conducting his Irish group, the Crash Ensemble, in a fantastic evening at Zankel Hall (Carnegie Hall small ensemble venue) on May 17.  Crash Ensemble was actually started by its Musical Director, Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy, in 1997, and Alan Pierson became its conductor several seasons ago.  (He’s best known as artistic director of the contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound and as the musical director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic.)   This concert was a logical development of the recent Nonesuch recording by Pierson and Crash, collaborating with Dawn Upshaw and Iarla O Lionaird (Irish folk vocalist) on recent compositions by Dennehy, “That the Night Come” (Upshaw) and “Gra agus Bas” (O Lionaird).  Fine as that recording is, hearing the pieces performed live was a special treat and gave them additional meaning for me.  They began the program with two exciting songs by Osvaldo Golijov, “Lua Descolorida” and “How Slow the Wind.”   I have Upshaw’s recording of “Lua Descolorida,” where it has a piano accompaniment.  In this performance, the piece was accompanied by string quartet.  Golijov has also used it, with a different orchestration, in his San Marco Passion.  The lovely piece is lovely in any format, but I think Upshaw’s performance with the string accompaniment was more effective than the recording with piano accompaniment.

So, that’s my concert calendar for May concluded.  The NY Philharmonic was away on tour, but I’ll be hearing them a few times in June and looking forward to their Summertime Classics in July.