20th Century Operas in the 21st Century (part 1)
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 (part 1)’
20th Century Operas in the 21st Century (part 2)
[Continued from part 1.]
by Leonard J. Lehrman
About 300 operas with consciously Jewish themes are among the listings in Kenneth Jaffe’s 437-page Solo Vocal Works on Jewish Themes: A Bibliography of Jewish Composers, published this year by Scarecrow Press. A 13-year labor of love, it is highly recommended to anyone interested in vocal music by Jews, especially for the Yiddish theater, but also living composers like (to list those most prolific) Miron, Kingsley, Adler, Davidson, Steinberg, Kaufman, Sargon, Schidlowsky, and this writer. The 2006 Merkin Hall premiere is listed of the “video opera” Mosheh by the Israeli-born Yoav Gal (1966- ), presented 8 times in the performance space Here in Jan.-Feb. 2011, and billed as “the world premiere of the original opera.” Danced and sung in Hebrew with English supertitles, the work starred Nathan Guisinger in the nearly nude mostly mimed title role with Heather Green, Beth Anne Hatton, Judith Barnes, and Hai-Ting Chinn as the women in his life, the latter also joining Wesley Chinn in duet as The Voice of God, together with 8 instrumentalists and 8 performers on video, directed by Kameron Steel, conducted from the piano by Yegor Shevtsov. The often high, taxing music generated power, but not much hope, especially in its conclusion concentrating on the Ten Plagues. Continue reading ‘20th Century Operas in the 21st Century (part 2)’
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.
Continue reading ‘The Nose’
Fighting the Power and Sounding Good Doing It
by Daniel Felsenfeld
Louis Andriessen: De Staat
Ensemble ACJW, Carnegie Hall, May 10, 2010
Is there an uglier or more vulgar piece of music than Louis Andriessen’s De Staat? Is there a piece of musical agitprop more relentlessly aestheto-political, more astutely tuned to all that is “wrong” in Plato? Is there a work that says more about itself—and, about music qua music—with such turgid grit, occupying such a relentlessly untamed space. Is there another work written in the last five decades that makes an audience member question their relationship to music? Is there another work in the canon written in the recent past that so clearly says, to all listening: ladies and gentlemen of the Western World, take up your instruments and fight!
Continue reading ‘Fighting the Power and Sounding Good Doing It’
Pauline Oliveros Receives the Schuman Prize
by Nancy Garniez
All the vibes were good for the celebration of Pauline Oliveros’ life and works on the occasion of her receiving the William Schuman prize of Columbia University’s School of the Arts at the Miller Theatre, Saturday March 27, 2010. There could not be a more fitting recipient of a prize named for a composer who felt that the humanity of music and the musician were endangered by the closed door approach to much of the training and practice of music in America.
Continue reading ‘Pauline Oliveros Receives the Schuman Prize’
Orfeo in Idaho
By Barry O’Neal
The New York Virtuoso Singers, Harold Rosenbaum, conductor: Two Modern Settings of Orpheus and Eurydice with Richard Stoltzman, clarinet, the Artemis Chamber Ensemble, David Arnold, baritone, Wendy Baker, soprano and Nathan, Bahny, narrator; Peter Norton Symphony Space, February 13, 2010
Continue reading ‘Orfeo in Idaho’
Adventures in Words and Music
by Leonard Lehrman
What is music? Music by itself cannot answer. But the question is not addressed to music. Indeed music cannot listen. We who listen can answer; we must, we do answer, by words–and by our various ways of combining words and music. Unlike the birds and crickets who make in every generation the wordless music encoded in their genes, we are responsible for music, for the meaning of music, and for the constant renewal of meaningful music. Endowed with freedom to explore all sound, we make some sound into words and music. When we are lucky, we make some music out of our words, out of our freedom, out of our very perplexities….
These words by the musicologist William Austin, concluding an essay opening a volume on “Words and Music,” published in 1971 by Harvard in honor of the popular music appreciation professor G. Wallace Woodworth, are worth pondering, as we search for meaning, and responsibility, in music. Continue reading ‘Adventures in Words and Music’
Orchestral Underground: conversations
by Anne Eisenberg
Roger Zare, Time Lapse; Sebastian Currier, Next Atlantis; Paquito D’Rivera, Conversations with Cachao; Anne Manson, conductor; Zankel Hall, January 29, 2010
The young American composer Roger Zare was inspired by photography when he wrote Time Lapse, an inventive and lovely orchestral piece that had its world premiere on January 29 at Zankel Hall in a concert of the American Composers Orchestra.
Zare seeks to create a musical counterpart to time-lapse photography, where weeks-long processes like plants growing and budding are speeded up and shown in seconds. He is also interested in the opposite technique: high-speed photography, when the path of, for instance, a speeding bullet is slowed down and made visible in a series of exposures.
Zare’s piece (an ACO/Underwood commission) is a musical version of these visual expansions and contractions, but it’s heard instead of seen in vibrant, unusual music ingeniously orchestrated for strings, winds, brass and percussion to play with our sense of time.
Continue reading ‘Orchestral Underground: conversations’
Robert and Hal, Opera by Richard Brooks
by Eugene W. McBride © 2009
Richard Brooks: Robert And Hal, Opera in Three Acts, Golden Fleece Ltd., Lou Rodgers, producing artistic director, Thomas Carlo Bo, music director. Sanford Meisner Theatre, New York, NY, June 2008 Continue reading ‘Robert and Hal, Opera by Richard Brooks’
Dotted Notes…
[This is only one excerpt from the complete Dotted Notes found in our magazine.]
From Leonard Lehrman:
The New York premiere Feb. 23, 2008 of Dark Heaven Angel by Garth Edwin Sunderland, Music Editor of the Leonard Bernstein Office and Artistic Director of the Lost Dog New Music Ensemble, was performed by solo cellist Eric Jacobsen, occasionally using two bows, and inadvertently assisted by car horns from outside Judson Memorial Church. The major work presented by said Ensemble also featured Mr. Jacobsen, and five players, conducted by Silas Huff, with solo dancer Dora Arreola, in Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Vesalii Icones,” a sensitive 14-part instrumental passion narrative from Gethsemane to the Resurrection, as inspired by 16th century drawings, De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Andreas Vesalius. Continue reading ‘Dotted Notes…’
The 8th “Europe-Asia” Contemporary Music Festival in Kazan. Part 2
Reviewed by Anton Rovner
The Eighth International Contemporary Music Festival “Europe-Asia” took place October 19-21, 2007 in Kazan, in the Republic of Tatarstan, in the western Russian Federation. Continue reading ‘The 8th “Europe-Asia” Contemporary Music Festival in Kazan. Part 2′
The 8th “Europe-Asia” Contemporary Music Festival in Kazan
Reviewed by Anton Rovner
The Eighth International Contemporary Music Festival “Europe-Asia” took place October 19-21, 2007 in Kazan, in the Republic of Tatarstan, in the western Russian Federation. This festival has been held in Kazan approximately every other year since 1993, attracting numerous outstanding musicians, composers and performers from Kazan and other cities in Russia and other countries–in Europe, Asia and America.
Part 1 of 2. Continue reading ‘The 8th “Europe-Asia” Contemporary Music Festival in Kazan’
Critic-at-Large: New Life for Old Subjects
by Leonard Lehrman ©2008
It’s an old truism that if you want to bring something new to an audience, you’ve a leg up if you start with something at least partially familiar, whether it’s a classic poem, a play, or historical figure. Most of the items seen in New York this season fall into that category.
Continue reading ‘Critic-at-Large: New Life for Old Subjects’
The 2008 ACA Festival
by B.L.C.
The 2008 ACA Festival, once again held in New York, ran from Wednesday, June 4th through Saturday, June 7th. Continue reading ‘The 2008 ACA Festival’
Meet Noizepunk and Das Krooner
by BLC ©2008
When you tune into this online music station, you first hear the lovely strains of Vivaldi’s “Summer” from his Four Seasons. Ah, they don’t write music like that anymore, is your first reaction, until seconds later the sudden burst of Dolby bass jolts you back to reality. It is 2008, so fear not. This is followed by the greetings of two characters who serve as the show’s hoax—er, uh, I mean hosts.
Continue reading ‘Meet Noizepunk and Das Krooner’
Yes, More!
by BLC ©2008
Richard Danielpour: Margaret Garner. Libretto by Toni Morrison. With Tracie Luck (Margaret), Timothy Mix (Edward), Lisa Daltrius (Cilla), Gregg Baker (Robert), Maureen McKay (Caroline). New York City Opera, George Manahan, conductor. Directed by Tazewell Thompson. State Theater, Lincoln Center, September 18 & 22. (NY premiere) Continue reading ‘Yes, More!’
Pumpin’ Somethin’
by John de Clef Piñeiro ©2008
John Eaton: Pumped Fiction: A Pocket Opera (2006). Presented by the American Composers Alliance on Wednesday, at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, NY, NY. June 20
Continue reading ‘Pumpin’ Somethin’’ « Previous Entries