Spring 2011 Issue

On the Cover:
Don Giovanni all’inferno, Found objects/mixed media assemblage made from bed springs with other materials and artist pigments by Renzo Oliva
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20th Century Operas in the 21st Century

by Leonard J. Lehrman

Librettist/director/teacher Stephen Wadsworth had two big debuts in NY this past fall, first at the Met, then at City Opera. At the former, he took over the staging of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov when German director Peter Stein refused to subject himself to the indignities US customs imposes on foreign visitors in the name of security. At the latter, his collaboration with the late Leonard Bernstein, A Quiet Place, finally came home, though staged by Christopher Alden. Continue reading ‘20th Century Operas in the 21st Century’

Fantastical Sounds from Near and Far

New Juilliard Ensemble, Joel Sachs Founding Director and Conductor; The Peter Jay Sharp Theater, New York, NY, September 25, 2010

by Barry O’Neal

The pool of fine young musicians at The Juilliard School that Joel Sachs draws upon for his New Juilliard Ensemble is genuinely inspiring. Their first concert of the new season on Saturday night, September 25 drew a large and enthusiastic crowd to a program that included music from three European countries as well the United States. All were worthy and at least two of unusual merit. Continue reading ‘Fantastical Sounds from Near and Far’

Ana Milosavjevic at Le Poisson Rouge

February 16, 2011

By Cornelius Dufallo

Violinist and composer Ana Milosavjevic presented a program of violin music at Le Poisson Rouge on February 16, in celebration of her new CD, Reflections (Innova Recordings). Ms. Milosavjevic performed five recent compositions, the oldest of which dates from 2006. The small, hip venue was packed with enthusiastic listeners. Continue reading ‘Ana Milosavjevic at Le Poisson Rouge’

Cassatt String Quartet, Ursula Oppens

Works by Frank, Fang, Tower, and Brahms;
Symphony Space, May 6, 2011.

by Anne Eisenberg

The stage at Symphony Space, the performing arts center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was just as you might have expected it to be on May 6th, just before the evening performance of the Cassatt String Quartet and pianist Ursula Oppens. There was a gleaming ebony grand piano ready for Ms. Oppens, and four seats near it for the quartet. Continue reading ‘Cassatt String Quartet, Ursula Oppens’

The Nose

an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich based on a story by Nikolai Gogol,
directed by William Kentridge,
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, Spring 2010.

by Wendy Lesser

The whole project started with Gogol, out of whose overcoat, according to Dostoyevsky, all other modern Russian literature emerged. He wrote his story “The Nose “ in the mid-1830s, a period when Russia was firmly under Tsarist rule, when wealthy and even moderately comfortable people owned serfs, and when finely drawn class distinctions between the various levels of the civil service and the army dominated metropolitan life. In his Kafkaesque tale, a “Collegiate Assessor of the eighth rank” named Kovalyov, who pretentiously calls himself a Major, wakes up one morning to discover that he is missing his nose. He is distressed, of course, but mainly because of the effect this marked irregularity will have on his social ascent, so he desperately seeks to get his nose back by trying to place an ad for it in the newspapers, complaining heatedly to the police, and engaging in other useless activities.
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Americans in Rome

Music by Fellows of the American Academy in Rome, Donald Berman, Artistic Director, 4 Discs, Bridge Records 9271A/D 2008.

by Andrew Violette

The first thing that struck me was the homogeneous style. These composers are not the pioneering visionaries you’d expect from an American disc. You’ll find no Conlon Nancarrow, La Monte Young, Kenneth Gaburo, Morton Feldman or Philip Glass. Instead you’ll find what Kyle Gann terms “midtown” composers – those still working within a tradition acceptable to mainstream ticket and CD buyers of classical music. The craftsmen on these discs reap the rewards of a musical system which lauds those who put out well-packaged and highly skilled music appealing enough to woo the average concert-goer who wants “something more” than another rendition of Mahler but is still put off by a premiere of Milton Babbitt. Bridge’s Americans in Rome marks the history and success of this institutional sponsorship (Problem: how to create good music without pandering). I juggled the first eighteen tracks on disc A (vocal music), without reading the copious notes beforehand, to see if I could pick out the composers. I couldn’t. They all sounded alike. But this is understandable. Samuel Barber and his partner, Gian Carlo Menotti, had already worked out the lingua franca of this type of American art song music which would appeal to a middle-brow audience and it stuck – all the way to third generation Robert Beaser.
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Robert Carl: Terry Riley’s In C

Oxford University Press, 2010

by Mark Zuckerman

Terry Riley’s In C (1964) is widely regarded as the seminal work in the minimalist canon. Its score is lean: one page of music and about a page and a half of performance advice. The music is a sequence of 53 modules: numbered linear fragments ranging in scope from a single note to an extended phrase (there’s exactly one of these, Module 35); most are short, oscillating sixteenth note patterns.
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