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.

[The Met was tackling Boris in Russian for only the second time. (I well remember my own debut there, conducting the chorus backstage on a 16-foot ladder, as part of August Everding’s production in 1977.) René Pape was almost as impressive as the late Martti Talvela in the title role, but the staging was a lot cruder and crueler this time around. Instead of emphasizing the Russian people’s desire for liberation, Wadsworth had them wallowing in Cossack pogrom-like torture. The definitive Boris remains Feodor Chaliapin, whose recordings are worth studying, as they make a strong case for Rimsky-Korsakov’s once-popular and now unjustly scorned version. In the Act II Monolog, for example, the upward scalar motif is a perfect 4th higher (in C-flat, rather than G-flat major), and the climactic high G-flat is saved – by Chaliapin, not Rimsky – for the very end of the aria, rendering it the heartbreaking expression of soul it deserves to be, but usually isn’t.]

The phrase “a quiet place” may have its origins in Morris Rosenfeld’s “Mayn Ruhe Platz,” a favorite Yiddish song used extensively by Howard Zinn in Emma, his play about Emma Goldman. “Quiet,” however, was a perennial theme in Bernstein’s oeuvre, from the trio of that name in Candide, to his song for Phyllis Newman “Walk Right In” - which defines “friends” as “people who can give each other quiet”– and especially in his one-act masterpiece Trouble in Tahiti, which he had dedicated to his friend and mentor Marc Blitzstein, shortly before his own marriage to Felicia Montealegre. Credit Wadsworth with having sketched and then co-written the libretto for a sequel to it, which was then (on John Mauceri’s suggestion) expanded to three acts, with the original one-acter divided into two flashbacks in the middle.

As the late Jack Gottlieb (Oct. 12, 1930-Feb. 20, 2011) [see the excellent obituary of him by George Robinson in Jewish Week] pointed out: There is a quasi-Wagnerian motif that permeates Tahiti: a seven-note theme, of which the first three come directly from the Prize Song in Meistersinger, melting, however, into a very American blues mode. That fourth note, the augmented fourth, and its upward resolution would play an even greater role in West Side Story. (Bernstein called the unresolved augmented fourth added to the major triad “the Tahiti chord,” which Gottlieb identifies as “a cousin of” Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka chord.”) The jazz riff that introduces the commercial quasi-Greek chorus trio is in fact a 12-tone row. All these seeds were developed at great length in the new work, perhaps too great; Humphrey Burton pointed out in a pre-conference lecture that much of the unity was lost when Bernstein found it desirable to make considerable cuts. This had been true of Marc Blitzstein’s Regina also, which Mauceri restored, with Bernstein’s blessing. In both cases, however, less really was more: most of Blitzstein’s cuts were not worth rescuing, and neither were Bernstein’s.

The plot of A Quiet Place was close to Bernstein’s heart, and is a plea for love and understanding of love in all its – and his – heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual expressions and manifestations. The rebellious character of Junior (descended at least as much from Junior Mister in Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock as from Bernstein’s own son Alexander) takes up with a French-Canadian bisexual named François, who later marries his sister Dede. The self-hatred and hostility that permeate this dysfunctional family is seen as pre-existent in the marital strife of their parents Sam and Dinah. (Sam was the name of both Bernstein’s father and Blitzstein’s, Dinah having been the name of Bernstein’s grandmother. There’s also a scat-singing reference in Tahiti to Blitzstein’s mother-in-law Lina Abarbanel.) Wadsworth’s own autobiography also entered in, as his sister Nina was killed in a car crash, as is Dinah, shortly before Quiet Place opens.

Alden’s busy staging had her silently haunting her own funeral as a ghost, and utilized the 9 new characters of the larger work, along with the chorus, to populate – or overpopulate – the intimate indoor and outdoor scenes of Tahiti. Most obtrusive, to this viewer, was the pantomimed blow-job given Sam (Christopher Feigum) in his office by his secretary, after he has, according to the libretto, just told her to leave. But ingenious was the re-use of the three singers playing Junior, Dede and François (Joshua Hopkins, Sara Jakubiak, and Dominic Armstrong) as the commenting Jazz Trio. The most affecting music is still Dinah’s, from the original one-act, sung movingly by Patricia Risley. The tempi were slow enough (conducted ably by Jayce Ogren) to impart at least a modicum of grandeur to her, as Bernstein wanted (he told me, after I conducted the show in his presence, a little too fast for his taste, at Harvard in December 1970).

Another classic American opera on the theme of unappreciated love is the 1971 Summer and Smoke by Lee Hoiby (Feb. 17, 1926-Mar. 28, 2011) with libretto by Lanford Wilson after the play by Tennessee Williams. Steven Osgood conducted and Dona D. Vaughn directed a moving student production at the Manhattan School of Music in December, 2010, with the composer in attendance, just a few months before his death. The work had originally been staged at NY City Opera by Frank Corsaro, who then obtained the musicalization rights to perhaps Williams’ greatest play, The Glass Menagerie, for which he watned to write the libretto, and asked Hoiby to write the music for what could have been his best work of all. Hoiby refused, however, to work without his companion and librettist (for such pieces as The Tempest and many others, including his last opera, yet to be performed, Romeo and Juliet) Mark Shulgasser. So the collaboration unfortunately never happened. Once again this viewer was startled by a bit of staging not in the original: the hot-blooded Latina Rosa (Maria Leticia Hernández) simulated fellatio on the hero (Nickoli Strommer) at the close of Act I. (As MSM president Robert Sirota quipped at intermission: “The curtain goes down and she goes down.”) Other than that, the staging was exemplary, with Anna Viemeister a standout as the female lead.

Symphony Space, which had hosted several Hoiby operas in the past, played host to several new operas early this year. Richard Wilson wrote his own witty, prose libretto for Aethelred the Unready, cleverly staged by Drew Minter and conducted by the composer in January. A paean to monarchical failure, it featured a cast of seven in seven scenes and an orchestra of fourteen. Nathan Carlisle as The Publicist nearly stole the show with his yo-yo, while Curtis Streetman was miscast in a role too low for him as The Hypnotist. Robert Osborne sang the strenuous title role and was strongest in the furious sections: his voice is really at its best depicting evil characters like Captain Bristlepunkt in I’ve Got the Tune (on Original Cast Records) and Prosecutor Katzmann in Sacco and Vanzetti (on YouTube).

In March, the venue presented a double-bill of Peter Winkler’s Fox Fables (libretto and staging by Rhoda Levine) and Sheila Silver’s The Wooden Sword, both in conjunction with SUNY-Stony Brook, which also presented two performances of each. Of these, the Winkler was the more successful, as the librettist/director persuaded the composer to pare and cut to exactly the right size and shape. The Silver opera was notable for the lovely singing of Risa Renee Harmon whose soprano soared above the sometimes heavy orchestration that covered most of the other singers. Like the Wilson, Fox Fables’ primary theme seemed to be the foolishness of those who trust in authority, but an ominous reference to the presence of tracks leading into the lion’s den but not out could not help but cause at least this listener to think of Auschwitz.

[Continued in part 2.]

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.

Another more hopeful and optimistic musico-dramatic work on a Jewish theme was Korach, a play for and produced at The Living Theatre by Judith Malina with a cast of 26 and music by Steve Taylor, Carlo Altomare, and Sheila Dabney, who also music-directed, Dec. 8, 2010-Feb. 28, 2011. The work begins with a video of Malina herself playing Emma Goldman, extolling anarchism as a great tradition, and Korach as the first Biblical exponent of it. This is appropriate, since Emma’s last portrayal in NY was in fact at The Living Theatre. (See Linda Pehrson’s review.) Solidarity and resistance were the themes throughout, as the cast chanted, among other things, the great Jewish partisan melody by Vilna ghetto songwriter Hirsh Glik, “Shtil, di Nakht iz oysgesterent” – without, apparently, knowing what they were singing! The cast irresistibly inspired the audience to dance with it onstage at the end, much in the spirit of the troupe’s great epic of the 1960s, Paradise Now, though without the nudity of that era.

Nudity, of a sort, featured in the Transport Group’s revivals of Michael John LaChiusa’s Hello Again, his 1994 musical adaptation of Artur Schnitzler’s 10-character 10-scene play Reigen, aka La Ronde. That is, if bare male assholes turn you on, as they seemed to, for about 3/4 of the audience. Schnitzler’s original 10 heterosexual overlapping couplings have been re-cast here, with 6 men and 4 women, and the most affecting music sung by two gay men in bed, transitioned to and from by bisexual individuals sandwiched by straight couples. No lesbians, though you’d think they’d be there, for symmetry. In Jack Cummings III’s direction, the action all takes place between and on ten tables at which the audience is seated, thus giving a literal in-your-face feeling to the sex acts being performed (the most amusing of which was yet another blowjob—this one embellished by popcorn). Except of course they’re not being performed, but simulated, with breasts, genitals, and in fact all but the male anuses quite covered. Programs were not handed out until the end, so it was hard to follow who was who, which was I suppose part of the point: sexual partnering as impersonally interchangeable. Not very satisfying, however.

A more satisfying performance, even though the work is still unfinished, was experienced at Turtle Bay Music School Dec. 17, 2010, in Judith Sainte Croix’s Visionary Dance performed by the Sonora Trio, Mark Degamo, projections and dancers. Students became part of the performance, and an ecstatic mood prevailed. More when the work-in-progress is complete!

Also satisfying were the eloquent performances by Amanda Crider and (on short notice) baritone Michael Kelly of songs by David Sisco and Elie Siegmeister, sensitively accompanied by Liza Stepanova, Feb. 17, 2011 at the Lincoln Center Library (postponed from Jan. 27 due to the snowstorm). Two of the 3 Lorca Elegies by Siegmeister were transposed up, slightly disturbing the tonal unity of the set, but the singing of both soloists was nearly flawless and so much in the spirit of MC Paul Sperry’s “Joy of Singing.”

Meanwhile, Howard Pollack, definitive biographer of Piston, Copland, and Gershwin, now at work on a book on Blitzstein, came out with a lengthy review in MLA Notes reviewing the Siegmeister bio-bibliography which I co-authored with Kenneth Boulton, published in 2010 by Scarecrow Press. Pollack called the work “a landmark in American music scholarship that deserves to be a part of any serious music library’s collection”. The inaugural issue of North American Opera Journal also includes a lengthy article on Siegmeister. Subscription details (and the opening pages of the articles from the first issue) can be found here. Access is free for subscribers (including libraries) to the magazine Opera America.

Other song recitals of note included the NYFOS series at Merkin Hall, Beth Anderson’s Women’s Work series at Greenwich House, and LICA’s “Love of the Art Song: Art of the Love Song” at the Steinway Gallery in Melville.

The first of these was the most accomplished, introduced by Steven Blier, alternating with Michael Barrett accompanying Sari Gruber, Liza Forrester, James Martin and (briefly) Christopher Tiesi on Feb. 15 & 17, 2011 in a collage of American songs by Bernstein, Ives, Weill, Bolcom, Rorem, Hoiby, Cole Porter, Paul Fujimoto, Michael Sahl, Hugh Martin, Hall Johnson, Leiber & Stoller, and Steven Marzullo. Ms. Gruber progressed from a growly chest voice to a lovely high soprano, while Ms. Forrester impressed with a wide vocal and dramatic range throughout. The texts were especially well chosen, to reflect a kind of cycle of NY life from morning ’til night. “Love, Lust and Longing in Poetry and Song” was the title of soprano Eileen Strempel’s Greenwich House recital, accompanied by pianist Gilya Hodos Mar. 24, 2011. The promising program opened with Pauline Viardot-Garcia’s Pushkin settings (in German) and continued with settings by women composers of texts by Margaret Atwood and E.E. Cummings, all composed for Ms. Strempel over the last 6 years. Judith Cloud (1954- ), who had a song in each group, was there to talk about her music. So did Libby Larsen, along with Lori Laitman, Elisenda Fábregas and Amanda Harberg in the Atwood; Christine Donkin, Regina Harris Baiocchi and Jocelyn Hagen in the Cummings. Applause from the small audience was scant, as many of the songs ended buttonlessly, fading out on a dominant chord, or otherwise unresolved. The program is to be streamed and available for viewing, and certainly worth watching, at least in segments.

It seems almost unfair to critique the Feb. 11, 2011 LICA concert honoring Valentine’s Day this year, since one of the performers tapped at the last minute is still an undergraduate. But a full house responded well, especially to soprano Michele Eaton’s performances of songs by Jane Leslie, Patricia King, Joel Mandelbaum, Herbert Deutsch, this writer, and impresario Laurence Dresner, accompanied variously by Stephanie Watt, Paul Hefner, and Ms. Leslie. Even more unfair would it be to come down harshly on the ambitious Airheart, a musical (really a play with music) about Amelia Earhart by Roslyn High School vocal music teacher Brad Frey, sumptuously produced at that school in a production to rival the technical proficiency of his first musical on Tiananmen Square, 15 years ago. Only this time the dialogue and lyrics were written by a student. When they didn’t rhyme, they sounded as though they should; when they did rhyme, tritely, one wished they didn’t. An original cast recording is available for the curious.

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.

First on the long program was a fourteen-minute piece by English composer Philip Cashian. Skein, composed in 2005, was given its first performance in the Western Hemisphere. Scored for flute (doubling bass flute), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), bassoon (doubling contrabassoon), horn, trumpet, percussion and single strings, Skein showed Cashian’s sure command of instrumental writing. The work is generated from a ruminative viola solo that gradually draws the other members of the ensemble into a restless, rhythmically charged exploration of various textures in which the viola and marimba play particularly significant roles. There was a wispy but mercurial character to this music with much feeding of ideas from player to player at a sotto voce dynamic level. Near the end, the original viola idea was audible in the midst of the urgent, virtuosic instrumental exchanges. It was a fine opening to the program and an exciting discovery.

Poul Ruders’ twenty-two minute Kafkapriccio (2007-2008) is described by the Danish composer as “…a distillation for fourteen instruments from the massive forces of my opera, Kafka’s Trial. ” It was written for the Athelas Sinfonietta, Copenhagen and the five movements had many vivid moments of instrumental writing. Each of the first four movements was sort of a character sketch. The opening section, “Franz,” has a noisy carnival-like atmosphere colored by a touch of the klezmer style. “Felice” is a quiet, intense slow movement that begins in a fragmented way but becomes more sustained, ending with an angular Shostakovich-inflected violin solo. The music for “Leni,” a character described in the composer’s program notes as an “uncommonly horny and sluttish female factotum,” is insouciant, flippant, mercurial and reminiscent of Kurt Weill. The scoring features a siren and a slide whistle. The fourth part, “Joseph,” a portrait of the protagonist of the Kafka novel, after his arrest, is appropriately grotesque but the final movement, “The Execution,” is the most startling and affecting, with a beautiful English horn solo and the trumpet player blowing his instrument into the piano, creating a lovely, hazy overtone effect. Overall, Kafkapriccio betrayed its theatrical origins and made one anxious to hear the original opera from which the material derives. The work was brilliantly performed by the group, under Mr. Sachs’ able leadership.

After the intermission the audience was treated to an unusually witty recent work by Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, L’Archeologia del Telefono (2005). Scored for solo winds, horn, piano, 2 percussionists, and single strings, L’Archeologia del Telefono explores, in a very charming way, the sounds produced by the devices available to us in a society dominated by technology. The music was full of bleeps, honks (a particularly overblown sound produced by the bassoonist is the Ur-busy signal), whispers and chirps. On the verge of silence much of the time, the piece provokes a smile from the listener, and the audience clearly enjoyed the “onomatopoetic” character of the music. At ten minutes it was just the right length for a piece primarily dependent on ear-teasing sounds. Harold Meltzer’s Virginal (2002-2010), which followed, is a recent revision of a work originally written in 2002. It was inspired by the keyboard works of John Bull and William Byrd and the way in which their sequential sectional charater is defined by differing styles of keyboard figuration. Scored for single winds, horn, trumpet, harp, guitar, harpsichord, 2 percussionists and single strings, Virginal begins with a grazioso harpsichord solo. The harpsichord, played by Aya Hamada, is soon joined by guitar and harp, and the instrument is used more as a part of the ensemble than as a prominent soloist. It was a fascinating and continually engrossing work that had a Stravinskian feeling to it with the ensemble frequently employing overlapping rhythmic ostinati. A stopping and starting repeated-note passage shared alternately by winds and strings was especially beguiling, as was a trio for harpsichord, guitar and harp, with subtle percussion commentary, to which the strings were gradually added. One remarkable feature of the scoring was the care Mr. Meltzer took to make sure the un-amplified harpsichord and guitar were always audible. Ms. Hamada, Mr. Sachs and the Juilliard musicians are certainly to be commended for their clear and ravishing account of this delightful piece.

The concert ended with the New York Premiere of Chamber Concerto III: Another View (2006-7) by Elliott Schwartz, performed in celebration of the composer’s 75th birthday year. A mini-concerto for piano, Chamber Concerto III was dazzlingly played by soloist Hui Wu and an ensemble of single winds, horn, trumpet, trombone, 2 percussionists (including timpani), and single strings. The work begins with a lively, but ruminative piano solo that gradually draws in the rest of the ensemble. The writing becomes increasingly vigorous, with much feeding of motivic fragments from instrument to instrument. A warmly melodic middle section makes much use of a hymn-like fragment and the main climax of the work for the full ensemble was richly sonorous and a made a fine finish for this excellent concert.

Joel Sachs has always been one of the most adventurous programmers around, both with the groups he directs and the festivals he presents at Juilliard and with his professional ensemble, Continuum. This concert by the New Juilliard Ensemble was substantive, entertaining and beautifully performed. One looks forward eagerly to their next appearance.

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.

Ms. Milosavjevic, originally from Serbia, has lived in New York City for more than a decade, and she is becoming a regular presence in New York’s new music scene. She plays both amplified acoustic violin and electric violin, and uses her laptop computer to create live electronics and to trigger pre-recorded samples. Ms. Milosavjevic is one of a growing number of young performers who program their own compositions alongside the works of other composers.

Ms. Milosavjevic began the program with Aleksandra Vrebalov’s The Spell III, an austere, spooky piece for amplified violin and computer. Vrebalov’s work combines pre-recorded voices and digital looping to create an otherworldly background texture, over which the violinist layers mournful glissandi and arpeggiated tremoli. The result is closer to a soundscape than a concert piece: rather than following the development of musical material over the course of a recognizable structure, the listener is immersed in a sonic atmosphere that changes slowly over time.

Ms. Milosavjevic followed this with her own composition, Reflections (the title track of her CD), a lyrical, heartfelt set of variations for violin and piano inspired by the Serbian folksong, Djurdjevdan. Kathleen Supové contributed a subtle and sensitive piano accompaniment.

In another of her own compositions entitled Zajdi, Zajdi, Ms. Milosavjevic was joined by Kristen Arnold and Kile Hotchkiss, two dancers from the TAKE Dance company, who performed choreography of Takehiro Ueyama. Ms. Milosavjevic used a solid-body electric violin for this piece, on which she produced persuasive distortion and delay effects.

Eve Beglarian’s I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long, for amplified violin, electric bass, and electronics, was unfortunately obscured by a loose cable connection that caused repeated glitches in the sound production. Technical problems such as this are a well-known risk of technology – heavy concerts. Ms. Beglarian (who performed the bass part) and Ms. Milosavjevic fielded the situation with poise and professionalism, and the strength of Ms. Beglarian’s music was evident despite the pops and crunches.

Ms. Milosavjevic seemed beautifully in her element during Svjetlana Bukvich-Nichols’s composition, Before and After the Tekke. Scored for amplified violin, keyboard, electronics and voice (Ms. Bukvich-Nichols provided the keyboard, electronics, and vocals), the work fuses driving rhythms and non-western microtonal tunings with a groove – filled background track that at times crosses into the genre of ambient electronica. The result is a pleasing blend of Eastern European flavors and vibrant urban energy. Ms. Milosavjevic and Ms. Bukvich-Nichols delivered a compelling performance, bringing out the sensuality, exoticism, and vitality of the music.

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.

But that’s about all that was standard in the auditorium as people filled the hall in preparation for the concert. Scattered through the audience was a welcome novelty to the usual chamber music concert: dozens of youngsters, some teen-aged students of the Manhattan-based quartet, others children of the musicians. The young people talked, jumped up and down, exchanged toys, and created an excited, laughing din in the hall.

But when the five performers took the stage at 7:30 p.m., silence fell, just as it should (punctuated by the occasional parental “shh”) – and an imaginative program opened.

All four of the evening’s pieces were quintets, and all four were executed with the precise, angular playing of the Cassatt strings and the dashing piano passagework of Ms. Oppens. The first half of the program offered three contemporary pieces; the second half, the familiar Johannes Brahms piano quintet in f minor, op. 34.

The opening quintet, Ghosts in the Dream Machine, composed in 2005, is a two-movement work by Gabriela Lena Frank, inspired, she says in the program notes, by the artwork of Simon Dinnerstein and his “themes of mystery, night, and wonder.” The piano opened and closed the piece, leading with dreamy, fractured arpeggios in long, syncopated sequences and ending with fading, single notes from the keyboard. The composer effectively juxtaposed the percussive power of the piano with the
smooth strokes of the strings throughout the haunting piece.

The misty mood of Ghosts in the Dream Machine was instantly dispelled when the second piece, Images of Lake Erie by Fang Man, opened with a burst of pounding, propulsive piano. Commissioned by Symphony Space for the Cassatt Quartet and Ursula Oppens, Lake Erie had its premiere at the concert.

Ms. Fang, known as Mandy to her friends, but more formally in the program notes as Man, said that Lake Erie is the first of five movements of a proposed quintet. “The idea is for each movement to represent one instrument,” she said. The first movement focuses on the piano. “Ursula is a fantastic pianist,” she said of Ms. Oppens, “and so I composed the movement with her in mind.”

Ms. Oppens had her hands full with the virtuosic piano passages in the piece, but she had other musical roles, too, during the concert. To evoke the sounds of winter, she shook a set of sleigh bells that lay ready nearby on the piano. And she was not alone as percussionist. The violinist Muneko Otani occasionally laid down her violin and took on the triangle or the water phone, an acoustic instrument with a circle of
crown-like, upright metal rods that she struck with a drumstick.

Ms. Fan, an admirer of Sergei Prokofiev and Bela Bartok, said that both composers were inspirations for the propulsive Lake Erie. Ms. Fan is also the composer of Resurrection, commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra in 2008.

The first half of the program closed with the somber Dumbarton Quintet, composed in 2008 by Joan Tower. The piece, which has a more traditional melodic base than the earlier pieces in the program, featured lyrical solos for the violin. Ms. Tower, like Ms. Fan before her, was present for the concert and took a bow with the musicians.

After the intermission, during which the cellist, Nicole Johnson, talked with some members of the audience – and explained that some of the young people at the concert were students of hers – the program ended with a spirited rendition of the Brahms quintet, delivered with strong, precise playing from the Cassatt ensemble.

The concert was recorded, and can be heard at the website www.symphonyspacelive.org, the program notes say, in its entirety – except for the bursts of youthful cheer from the audience, which probably can’t be captured there.

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

In this Issue

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Contributors, 4

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LIVE PERFORMANCE REVIEWS
Cassatt String Quartet, Ursula Oppens, 6
Ana Milosavjevic at Le Poisson Rouge, 7
New Chamber Music in Paradise, 8
A Dream Fulfilled, 9
Fantastical Sounds From Near and Far, 11
20th Century Operas in the 21st Century, 12 (Complete web version in 2 parts.) [part 1] [part 2]
Let There Be Light Et Al, 15

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FEATURE
nmc talks with Tobias Picker, 16

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CD REVIEWS
Oldies But Goodies, 18
In Brief, 19

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BOOK REVIEWS
Kenneth Silverman / Kyle Gann, 22
The Hollywood Film Music Reader, 28

Previous Issues, 31

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.

In C is an ensemble piece for an unspecified number of instruments of unspecified type. The composer recommends a group of about 35 players, but smaller or larger groups are acceptable. (The first performances, at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in November, 1964, involved 13 players.) The tempo is also unspecified, but the performers are directed to use the same one throughout. To keep everyone together, an ensemble can use a piano or a mallet percussion instrument as an eighth note metronome on high C’s. There are few other constraints. Each ensemble member plays through the entire sequence of modules in order, but may start the next module at any time and repeat each modulead libitum, making an effort to interlock with modules played by others while being careful not to get too far behind or ahead. Once everyone has reached the final module, the ensemble crescendos and diminuendos a few times before members drop out, one at a time.

There are no dynamic markings, articulations, or phrase marks. These are determined during performance, through the interaction of the players. None of the modules demands any virtuosity, but an effective performance requires the kind of musical sensitivity you’d expect at a good jam session. Since In C envisions a limitless set of performances -– indeed, it’s extremely unlikely any performance is repeatable, except with a recording -– its performance practice is as important as its score.

Although a rendition at a moderate tempo of all 53 modules played end to end without repetitions lasts under 5 minutes, a typical In C performance lasts about 45 minutes to an hour or more. Changes occur very slowly – almost imperceptibly – producing an effect admirers find unpretentiously hypnotic and detractors find simplistically mind-numbing.

In C has become immensely popular all over the world and, as the herald of a new musical genre, has had a profound influence on composers and music critics. But does it belong in the same company with musical monuments like Beethoven’s Op. 109 Piano Sonata, “Appassionata” Sonata, and Diabelli Variations? Or with Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Debussy’s Ibéria, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, and Strauss’s Elektra? Should it and Vaughn Williams’s Ninth Symphony together represent the significant music from the second half of the Twentieth Century? Malcom Gillies, editor of The Oxford University Press series Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation, believes so, with composer Robert Carl’s ambitious, elegantly written book in the series, Terry Riley’s In C, making the case.

Its blurred boundary between structure and interpretation makes In C an intriguing addition to such a series. Given the nature of the music and the sparse public record of its first realizations, any serious attempt to fulfill the series mission would involve extending the frontiers of conventional scholarship and musical analysis. Blazing such a trail requires courage, dedication, and no small amount of work. For the most part, Carl rises to the challenge. His treatise is a labor of love: the result of prodigious effort and wholehearted veneration.

To build a history of Terry Riley’s development and process, and to reconstruct the circumstances of In C’s public introduction, Carl interviewed not only Riley, but also a number of his friends and acquaintances, including many of the participants in the 1964 premiere performances and in the first recording, released on Columbia Records in 1968. He studied and analyzed the pieces Riley composed leading up to In C. He analyzed by ear 15 recordings of In C, including an in-depth analysis of the 1968 premiere recording.

There is a great deal to admire in the outcome. The bulk of the book focuses on Riley’s development as a composer and on In C itself, and this is where the book is strongest.

The chapter on Terry Riley’s Life and Art before In C succinctly explores Riley’s musical biography, tracing the development of Riley’s musical thinking and process and identifying influential people and circumstances. The narrative is illustrated frequently with reminiscences by Riley and his friends. We get a picture of Riley’s musical personality – a gifted natural musician with ability on a number of instruments and eagerness to learn from and collaborate with teachers and colleagues whom he respected, regardless of their point of view. One of these mentors/collaborators was La Monte Young, whom Riley met while pursuing a master’s degree at UC Berkeley and whose influence on Riley was pervasive: from exposing him to modern jazz (particularly John Coltrane), Asian music, and Young’s own musical aesthetic to introducing him to marijuana and peyote. Riley went to France in 1962, earning his living playing ragtime and jazz piano. Although he spent most of his time in Paris – where he became absorbed in the expatriate Beat culture – his gigs took him all over Western Europe and northern Africa, where he encountered music from non-Western cultures.

Interspersed through the narrative are brief analyses of Riley’s music from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s that map his progress as a composer and identify common elements of his practice. There is a fascination with pedal tones, a gradual reliance on diatonic modes, and a refining of some “modernist” practices. There are conventionally-notated pieces, improvisatory pieces, and pieces using magnetic tape technology: sound-on-sound and loopback.

Thus Carl effectively sets the stage for the In C world premiere, to which he devotes a chapter. In a flash of inspiration almost Mozartian in character, Riley composed In C over a 24-hour period after returning to San Francisco in early 1964 when his source of income dried up in Europe. The premiere in November was the second half of a program devoted to Riley’s music. The group Riley assembled to perform In C included close friends and collaborators, many of whom went on to significant careers as composers and performers. Riley was also a pianist in the ensemble, and although he supervised the preparation and performance, there were contributions from the other players. Perhaps the greatest of these, attributed to composer Steve Reich (coincidentally, Riley’s neighbor), was the metronomic pulse – often cited as a basic feature of minimalist music – which was added during rehearsal as a practical means of keeping everyone together. Carl relates a number of colorful anecdotes surrounding the rehearsals and the performances, and quotes the entire glowing review from the San Francisco Chronicle.

The historical narrative is resumed in a later chapter on the 1968 Columbia Records recording, which brought In C to national prominence. In the interim, Riley had moved to New York City and had taken up the saxophone. At the time, Columbia Records was looking for new and unusual music for its catalog, and, serendipitously, a young composer on leave from his day job as a producer for Columbia came across Riley and his music and so made the match. Columbia Records was major league: it provided experienced, professional, sympathetic musicians; almost six months’ rehearsal; and state-of-the-art eight-track recording technology, allowing Riley to overdub recording sessions. Columbia also provided eye-catching cover art and sophisticated marketing. Riley supervised the recording and played soprano saxophone in the ensemble. The release was an instant success, remained in print for the life span of LP records, and remains in print after being reissued on CD.

The real meat and potatoes of the book are in the analyses of In C: the Analysis chapter, which contains an abstract analysis, and the Analysis section in the chapter on the Columbia recording. Carl borrows terms from microbiology in calling these “endogenous” and “exogenous,” respectively; i.e., “from within” and “from outside.”In Carl’s usage, the endogenous analysis deals with the structural elements contributed exclusively by the composer, while exogenous analyses incorporate interpretive and improvisational choices by the performers. Ideally, we keep the endogenous analysis in mind as we experience a performance or recording – that is, as we perform an exogenous analysis in real time.

It’s a brave dichotomy as applied to this kind of music, calling for a mixture of innovative analytic criteria and creative yet (hopefully) careful use of traditional concepts and terminology. The purpose of any musical analysis should be to provide a plausible, if not convincing, accounting that encourages paying closer attention. In this, Carl achieves a qualified success.

The endogenous analysis introduces structural elements of In C in a progression requiring increased degrees of discrimination and attention. Each of these elements is in a layer that can be experienced independently, but becomes more vivid if added with the other layers in the order presented. “Pacing” is explored in two layers – “harmonic density” and “rhythmic materials” – each depicted in a chart of the modules’ relative information content with a description of the musical shapes it illustrates. “Motivic transformation”is a valuable discussion of how the modules interrelate that overheats – more to burnish In C than to illuminate it – by asserting a profound connection to well-formed notions of motivic development in Beethoven and Brahms (sort of like claiming In C and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are alike in their being “in C”).“The significance of Module 35”draws special attention to by far the longest and most melodic module – one that emerges in performance, even in the midst of competing modules, because of its character and because it contains the highest notes in the piece – as a way of recognizing large-scale symmetries in In C’s structure. “Harmonic analysis” primarily discusses the succession of diatonic modes indicated by the score and perceivable in performance, even with module overlap. Except for its single overreach, the endogenous analysis is remarkably illuminating and generally reasonable, even accommodating the kind of variation that can occur in performance.

The exogenous analysis in the chapter on the premiere recording required a considerable amount of effort – it charts the first entrance and last exit of every module – but isn’t as illuminating as the endogenous analysis. Its important conclusions are that the performers lingered over harmonic ambiguities at transition points and that Riley (who supervised the recording) “shows a taste for gradual, carefully controlled pacing, which causes the work to morph almost imperceptibly from one state to another (p. 93).” The balance of the chapter consists of quotes from and comments on three reviews of the recording, including one from Glamour – an indication of the success of Columbia’s marketing. An analytical discography of 14 other recordings of In C is in the Appendix.

The final chapter discusses In C’s legacy, with remarks by the participants in the premiere performances and recording, comments by composers and musicians from the generation following Riley’s, and a summary of the performance/recording practice following the premieres. It ends with a section of Carl’s own musings on In C, a prerogative well-earned by the hefty work leading up to it. However, he concludes with a bizarre speculation reminiscent of Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s apocalyptic science fiction novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz. The imagined situation is the aftermath of the collapse of civilization as we know it, with humanity returning to a primitive state – but, strangely, retaining the ability to read music. In Carl’s words (p.109):

But if the score to In C survived, … it is perhaps the one piece of “art music” that any group could gather to play. Standard instruments are not even necessary… In short it would be a seed from which a new creative tradition could grow. It’s hard to think of any other work that could serve this purpose so neatly, fully, inclusively.

It’s tempting to forgive this rhetorical excess, in view of the importance of the book and the effortspent writing it. This is not, after all, the claim made by some advocates that minimalism has revived musical culture from the apocalypse of modernism. But it does place In C on a pedestal of such a height that it may distort the view below.

This could explain problems in the first chapter, which purports to define In C’s historical context. Carl posits four characteristics one or more of which “new music” in the 1960’s “was assumed” to share: research, formalism, experiment, and information density. Leaving aside that, in Carl’s estimation, George Crumb and Milton Babbitt share the first characteristic – possibly the first and only time these two composers have been considered in any way similar – and that it misconstrues what both Crumb and Babbitt are about. None of these categories sounds very appealing musically; we might well wonder why anyone aspired to be a composer in those days. This view posits a group of “assumers” who had the power to determine what music was properly “new,” a genteel version of the wearisome revisionist trope, run out all too often by minimalist and neoromantic partisans alike, that “modernism” exercised hegemony during this period to their heroes’ detriment. Here, it comes off as a straw man set up to enhance the revolutionary stature of In C.

The truth, however prosaic, is far more interesting and more revealing of In C’s relation to the musical world of the time. The 1960’s were years of great musical diversity (in the pre-politically correct sense). Witness the wide-ranging catalog of nearly 150 pieces recorded in the decade before In C’s premiere by the Louisville Symphony Orchestra, perhaps the greatest performance outlet ever for American music: everything from Elliott Carter to Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco to Carlos Chavez to Chou Wen-chung to Aaron Copland to Henry Cowell to Paul Creston – to name just the composers in the C’s. The avant-garde during this period was particularly varied, with composers much closer to Riley than modernists in approach and aesthetic, like Earle Brown and Morton Feldman. It would be interesting to see an investigation of how In C compared to these, and to, say, Conlon Nancarrow.

This diversity was spurred by advances in technology, as significant in their day as the cell phone and Internet are today in increasing the ability to capture and preserve ephemera, enlarging the number of creators and consumers of music, and expanding access among consumers and creators. The expanding availability of reel-to-reel magnetic tape equipment made it possible to share recordings and provided a new means to make music. Performances could now more easily be preserved, pressed onto phonograph records, and played over the radio. The commercial introduction in 1948 of long-playing (LP) records, the improvements in audio technology to meet the demand for “high fidelity” in the 1950’s, the introduction of commercial stereophonic recordings in 1957, and the development of inexpensive, high-quality, portable audio equipment using transistors starting in the late 1950’s resulted in an explosion of, and hunger for, all kinds of music – classical, jazz, folk, rock, and genres never heard before and some never heard since – from mainstream to exotic. Popular interest was particularly attracted to music at the edges that blurred boundaries. The Swingle Singers’ jazz-inspired Bach’s Greatest Hitswon a Grammy in 1963; Wendy Carlos’ Moog Synthesizer realization, Switched-On Bach, released by Columbia Records in 1968, was a huge hit.

All this had a profound effect on the complexion of classical music and especially on who became a classical composer. The increased presence of popular music genres and the expansion of college and university music departments enabled and encouraged a widening of what was studied as “music” and attracted a more varied group of music students. This led to crossover, as musicians from jazz, rock, and world music joined the ranks of concert music composers.

However revolutionary its content and impact,In Cwas a product of its time, squarely in the midst of the artistic, social, and practical effects of the contemporary advances in technology. University-trained, jazz-performing Terry Riley was influenced by exotic recorded music, and his experience with magnetic tape directly informed his composition of In C. Most important, though, was the slipstream of LP production and marketing in the late 1960’s that put In C on phonograph turntables in living rooms, bedrooms, and dorm rooms around the world. Perhaps In C would have caught on without the 1968 Columbia recording, but its good timing makes that speculation unnecessary. As with so many musical success stories, In C’s triumph took both genius and luck.

The crossover effect worked in both directions. Most of the early minimalists – Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, in particular – played their own work with ensembles of loyal musicians well versed in the music. This bears a closer resemblance to rock bands, who adopted the singer/songwriter model from folk music, than to classical music ensembles.

But all this may work better as topics for other books, ones that would build upon the ground-breaking foundation laid in Robert Carl’s Terry Riley’s In C. We should hope for this book’s success and for others like it to follow, perhaps even as additions to the Oxford Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation that fill some obvious voids in its catalog of music from the past century.

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.

Meanwhile, the local barber has found Kovalyov’s nose in a loaf of bread baked by his wife; he hastily gets rid of it by throwing it in the Neva. Soon after, the nose is seen parading around town “in the guise of a State Councillor”—a higher rank than Kovalyov’s, which enables it, or him (the two pronouns are the same in Russian) to cut Kovalyov contemptuously when they meet in a cathedral. Eventually the nose is captured attempting to leave town on someone else’s passport, and is returned by the police to its rightful owner, but even a doctor cannot help Kovalyov stick in back on. Finally, however, it reappears on his face all by itself, and everything is as it was before.

One can see why the young Shostakovich (he was only twenty-two when he finished writing this opera in 1928) would have been attracted to this tale of absurdity and bad behavior. Nonsensical as it is, it is also extremely pointed, and the social pretensions and fears it mocked in 1836 would ony have come to seem more pertinent by the late 1920s, when the brave new experiment of socialist revolution was starting to harden into the overwhelming stratifications of the Communist state. The libretto, which Shostakovich wrote himself—apparently with the assistance of a few co-writers—consists largely of dialogue lifted directly from the story. One misses the voice of the quietly confidential Gogolian narrator, but that is partly made up for by the searing intensity of the music, which changes from satiric to tender so rapidly that it sometimes seem to combine both moods at once.

Shostakovich’s score occupies and exploits the strange borderline on which he found himself located in the Russia of 1928: between the wildly experimental and the frighteningly trapped, between chaos and rigidity, between a popular stage on which anything could be presented and one on which censorship kept a firm and troubling hand. The score for The Nose is still, over eighty years later, somewhat shocking in its disregard for normal operatic conventions: the main character, for example, first appears onstage emitting vulgar grunts and groans rather than a fetching aria; the cathedral music is a strange, wordless mimicry (some might say a mockery) of religious singing; and the overall texture is so jazzy that there is barely a scene that doesn’t rely heavily on percussion. Shostakovich must have been well aware of the potential for offending more staid sensibilities, for he didn’t want to risk a concert performance of the work, which he thought would only provoke bewilderment in its listeners—as proved to be the case when Leningrad’s Maly Theater nonetheless put on such a concert in 1929. Yet on some level he must have felt free to do pretty much as he liked.

The following year, when the full theatrical production premiered, the reviews from the so-called proletarian critics were largely negative. But that didn’t prevent The Nose from having a respectable run of sixteen performances over the course of the next two seasons. And Shostakovich remained undaunted, apparently, for by 1934 he had produced a second and even more ambitious opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which garnered enormous popular acclaim. Only then did the composer come in for the full brunt of officialdom’s wrath: in 1936, after Lady Macbeth had received over two hundred performances in Moscow, Leningrad, and abroad, a vicious review in Pravda, famously titled “Muddle Instead of Music,” not only closed the show but destroyed forever the youthful composer’s career in opera. Though he went on to complete fifteen occasionally remarkable symphonies, fifteen string quartets of almost uniformly high quality, and numerous song cycles, chamber works, movie scores, and patriotic anthems, Shostakovich never again finished a work in the genre in which, at twenty-two, he had seemed potentially more promising than even Mozart or Rossini had been at that age.

That is our loss. But some losses, at least in music, can be redeemed eventually, and William Kentridge has now given this youthfully exuberant opera—forsaken in 1930 and only revived in 1974, when Shostakovich himself was near death—a restoration that is also a new view. Kentridge has approached The Nose from the perspective of a middle-aged man at the turn of the twenty-first century, and in doing so he has lent it a gravitas and a pathos, though also a kind of visual playfulness and excitement, that were not necessarily there in the original. A South African artist with deep roots in the anti-apartheid movement as well as a theatrical affinity for forms like mime, dance, film, and puppet-theater, Kentridge is the perfect person to appreciate both Shostakovich’s dour sense of humor and his frenetic sadness. As a director, he is clearly drawn to the showmanship of Shostakovich’s music—the virtuosic three-minute percussion interlude, for instance, which separates the second scene from the third, or the zany, noise-making instruments and bellowing trombones that lend a circuslike atmosphere to some of the proceedings—but he is equally attracted to what Grigory Kozintsev (a movie director who worked with Shostakovich over the course of both their lives) called his “feeling for tragedy” and his “virulent hatred of all that degrades man.” By using his own personal obsessions to bring out the darker side of Shostakovich, Kentridge also takes us closer to Gogol, as if each artist’s vision became multiplied and enlarged, the more refractions it went through.

Kentridge is obsessed, first and foremost, with rhythm: with how a drawn line stops and starts, or how a curve twirls around itself; with the way a dancer’s movement echoes but also seems to give rise to the music behind it, and the way stillness in dance corresponds to silence; with the fact that our bodies love speed and motion, twirling and leaping, but our minds need intermittent repose. And this preoccupation with rhythm, it turns out, is also at the heart of Shostakovich’s opera (not to mention Gogol’s story, where, even in translation, the deceptively flat prose style depends on rhythmic fluctuations and feints to convey its true import). In just about all the sections of the score that are choral or heavily instrumental, a driving, forward-moving impulse infuses the music and thereby infuses us, so that we may find ourselves invisibly bouncing in our seats with a combination of nervousness and excitement (a combination that Valery Gergiev’s skillful conducting of the Met orchestra enhances to its fullest). And then, in the recitative sections of the opera, we are made to pause, and rest, and feel, and think; our forward movement is held up for a time, so that we can fully sense the pleasure of its resumption. Kentridge follows every one of these minute shifts of pace in his visual accompaniments to the music—that profuse swirl of film images and hand-drawn cartoons and constructivist shapes and Russian or English words which he projects onto the backdrop (only in this case it is more like a foredrop) that surrounds the human singers in this performance.

Inexplicable mysteries are a given in this plot, so the occasionally obscure or confusing elements introduced by Kentridge’s visual images don’t necessarily distort the opera. In fact, Shostakovich had already added in a few extra mysteries of his own—one of them in the interpolated stage-coach scene where the nose is captured by the police. (In the Gogol story, this happens offstage.) Here, among other things, Shostakovich shows us the officers’ brutal treatment of a comely bagel-selling wench; and there is also a strange old lady who, surrounded and contradicted by her female servants, lugubriously predicts her own death. I understand what the brutal officers are doing here (Shostakovich had a lifelong terror of anyone in uniform—not an unreasonable attitude, in the Soviet Union), but I can’t for the life of me figure out what that old woman represents. What did this episode mean to him, and why did he think it had anything to do with Gogol’s plot? Never mind, though; Kentridge has skillfully costumed the woman in a long, doleful mask that links her to other masked characters in the crowd, and this makes her seem a natural part of the overall carnivaleque, chaotic atmosphere. The chaos is charming—I especially loved the twirling of the fan-shaped red inserts in the officers’ gray coats—but it can also be potentially intimidating and even frightening, and that doubleness perfectly suits the opera’s mood.

What makes The Nose a comic opera, finally, is that Kovalyov gets his lost nose back again in the end. What are the chances of that? What is the likelihood that everything should come right as easily and as inexplicably as it goes wrong? “Improbable,” to say the least—or at any rate that’s the word Gogol himself uses. “Only now, on thinking it all over, we can see that there is a great deal that is improbable in it…,” this deadpan narrator says of his own tale as it is drawing to a close:

Quite apart from the really strange fact of the supernatural disappearance of the nose and its appearance in various parts of town in the guise of a State Councillor, how did Kovalyov fail to realise that he could not advertise about his nose in a newspaper?… But what is even stranger and more incomprehensible than anything is that authors should choose such subjects… In the first place it’s of no benefit whatever to our country, and in the second place—but even in the second place there’s no benefit whatsoever… All the same, on second thoughts, there really is something in it. Say what you like, but such things do happen—not often, but they do happen.

And on this characteristically suspended, utterly irreducible note, somewhere between assertion and doubt, mockery and seriousness, the Gogol story ends.

When I first read the Shostakovich libretto (which I did while listening to the excellent Mariinsky recording of The Nose, also conducted by Gergiev), I was disappointed to see that he had left this ending out of his opera. Mainly, I suppose, this was because his libretto borrowed only from the story’s dialogue and not from the narrative voice; but perhaps another cause was that even Shostakovich, reckless as he was in his youth, might have hesitated to sound such a skeptical note in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In any case, because I had noticed the omission, I was particularly delighted to see these sentences reappear toward the end of Kentridge’s production.

I had thought this was yet another example of Kentridge’s special genius at work, but Laurel Fay (who, as Shostakovich’s most thorough and rigorous biographer, knows more about him than anyone else) told me that Kentridge did not introduce the Gogolian narration into the opera; that had been done earlier, in the 1974 Moscow Chamber Opera Theater production by Boris Pokrovsky. What a bittersweet pleasure it must have brought to the composer when, at the very end of his life, after years of silence and suppression, he was finally able to see his great opera restored to the stage, with a small but important addition that made the whole work even stronger and more virulently Gogolian.

Contributor’s Note: Wendy Lesser’s Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets will be published in 2011 by Yale University Press. The author of eight previous books (including one novel), Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. She divides her year between Berkeley and New York.

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!

It seems strange that Carnegie Hall asked Louis Andreissen to occupy the Eugene V. Debs Composer Chair. After all, didn’t this composer make his way being deeply anti-establishment, that placing him in an endowed chair at one of the most “establishment” institutions might seem a little like making Che Guevara the chairman of the Ways and Means committee? Maybe not: rebels can age gracefully, and sometimes even win their battles; the props from Carnegie Hall certainly proves that what was once pie-in-the-sky cultural dreaming is now, impressively, an “established” part of our musical landscape, a school of thought. Andriessen and his way of thinking is no longer relegated to the fringe. The backward-looking snobbery against which this composer railed is now, if not vanished, at least not the only strand of concert music taken seriously.

As the closing salvo of Andreissen’s several-months-long residence, composer and conductor John Adams led the youthful Ensemble ACJW—a crack student “training” group jointly sponsored by Juilliard and Carnegie—in Andriessen’s 1976 De Staat. This ensemble is the perfect group for it because they’re young—it takes a combination of technique, ferocity, stamina and grit to get through Andriessen’s score. For one, the score is fiendishly difficult, with Stravinskian meter changes and Mahlerian on-a-dime mood shifts, dense counterpoint (including hockets where stark, driving melodies are a mere fraction of a second off from one another) rolled into one jazz-soaked roar—though with musical material as organized and clearly presented as The Rite of Spring, a similarly scoped (if by comparison quiet and tame) work of ordered chaos. Those players whose instruments allowed them to stood the whole time, giving the appearance less of a young orchestra than a charivari—and everyone was amplified and it was loud. This is a piece about screaming in unison (and into microphones, and in ancient Greek), a work originally composed for a group that played communist party meetings—by a composer who’d taken an ensemble outside the main concert hall in Amsterdam and protested the playing of yet another Mozart symphony by playing music so loud it could be heard inside. In the New York Times review of this concert, Anthony Tommasini says of this piece: “For whatever reasons, it does not turn up often in concert,” but those reasons—right or wrong—seemed perfectly clear: it is hard to imagine the “average subscription concert audience” cottoning, which is Andriessen’s point.

Ensemble ACJW played brilliantly (joined by four singers, all of whom were simply incredible), and while John Adams’ performance might have run on the tame side for some enthusiasts (or rather, the slightly less raw side) it was to an outstanding curatorial end—he was not trying to shock this crowd (who were there not to hear Haydn and therefore were not in need of the strong medicine this piece affords) but to put Andriessen into his deserved context. Adams’ own Son of Chamber Symphony (a work co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall) is admittedly a slightly tongue-in-cheek riff on his own prior Chamber Symphony (which was inspired by Schoenberg by way of Looney Tunes) is groove-based and dashing, a kaleidoscopic wheel of a work that details—and even seems to mock—it’s own propulsive-ness. Adams is clearly no stranger to the work of Andriessen, and the link is palpable, especially when the two scions of minimalism are placed side by side. But Adams is younger, and his struggles—or rather the struggles of his generation—are not Andriessen’s, and so by needing to accomplish less (on the back of battles won by the Dutchman’s generation) his work is freer to roam. Adams, lacking an axe to grind, revels in the joy of being a composer. Where so much avant-garde work is full of understandable rage, Son of Chamber Symphony is by-comparison sleight—good, even brilliant, but with a smaller hill to climb— and plays beautifully.

The quiet highlight of the evening (which is saying a lot, because both Mr. Adams’ piece and De Staat are tough acts to “follow”) was Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, a piece that, though lacking the open-throttle style of De Staat or the relentless sleekness of Son of Chamber Symphony, is as intentionally subversive as either work, if not more so, and relishes equally in it. From the opening chorale—which, after three chords has a “wrong note” as telling as the plangent, dissonant oboes that kick off De Staat, to the wild fugato ride of the closing movement—this is a piece that not only aims to look at the tradition and turn it sideways, but also takes a similar kind of shot at the audience who made the tradition so stilted. Stravinsky lures you in not with a lush melody or lilting harmonic turn, but rather by promising them, making your ears want them, and then not delivering, sometimes retreating into dissonance, other times threatening to break into musics wholly different: a rag, a fugue spinning rapidly out of control or, in the gorgeously cloying second movement, a jazz standard. This is a kind of music that keeps you guessing and pokes fun at you for doing it, the product of a complex mind with a wicked sense of humor.

Mr. Adams, joined by pianist Jeremy Denk (who gave a polished, effortless reading of this daunting piece) brought out the “minimalism” in the work (again, with curatorial design), allowing the repetitive passages to be just that. In lieu of the work’s built in caustic wit, Adams and Denk paid homage to a wholly other tradition: the need for musical rebellion. It could not have been a more apt choice to make this point: Andriessen is an avowed Stravinskyphile, and Mr. Adams an avowed Andriessenophile, so the Great Russian Composer’s presence on this program was illustrative of the unbroken line. Three visionaries who sought to take on the establishment who were then, to the advantage of posterity, subsequently embraced and canonized. Three composers who began as collosal pains in the ass and found their way to profundity, acceptance, and and influence,. One could easily imagine, out on Seventh Avenue before the evening’s, a young composer plotting his or her own takeover, finding in the music of these three composers (not to mention those of us listening and enjoying) the things against which they could themselves rebel, disappearing into the New York night with a head full of music and plans. And somewhere in Holland, somewhere in San Francisco, somewhere in the Great Beyond, three composers no doubt smile at the thought.

Is there, consequently, a piece more beautiful than De Staat?

On the Cover:
Cage Variations (Noise), digitally-altered (prepared) photograph, by David Alexander

In this Issue

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Contributors, 2
Obituaries, 3

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Live Performance Reviews
Fighting the Power and Sounding Good Doing It, 4
High Modernism on the Great Stages of New York, 6
Cutting Edge Concerts, 8
Louis and the Young Americans, 9
The Nose, 10
Contact with New Music, 12
Currier’s Bodymusic, 13
Life in Reverse, 14
Sudden Music, 15
Orchestra of the League of Composers, 20
Festival of the New Republics, 20

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CD Reviews
In C Remixed, 22
Sacred Works, 24
In Brief, 25
Visions de L’Amen, 26

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Book Reviews
In C, 28

Dotted Notes, 32
Advertiser Index, Inside Back Cover