Last night I finally had a chance to hear David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion. The piece is a Carnegie Hall commission that had its world premiere in 2007 with Paul Hillier’s four-member Theatre of Voice.
If you were lucky enough to catch The Little Match Girl Passion premiere at Carnegie or have listened to it on the recent recording, you may agree with the judges who awarded the 35-minute work the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It masterfully blends the simple tragedy of the Hans Christian Andersen story about a girl going door-to-door, barefoot, selling matches on the coldest night of the year, with a Bach-style passion structure of alternating narrated story passages and vocal commentary.
Lang has now rescored the work for chorus, and that is the version that about 100 of us heard last night, at WNYC’s Greene Space down on Varick Street, with the New York Virtuoso Singers led by Harold Rosenbaum. read more
This morning I received a personal note from clarinetist José Franch-Ballester to let me know about his October 13 recital at Poisson Rouge with pianist/composer Adam Neiman. I first met José during the summer of 2008; you can read the text of our conversation for SundayArts here.
The Poisson Rouge concert mixes new and old music, but it’s of particular interest to me because it will feature two movements from Cookbook, a suite for clarinet and piano by the Brooklyn-based composer Kenji Bunch, who is also a violist. Both Neiman and Bunch are very active in the new-music scene, so if you’re free, this concert is worth checking out.
José, originally from Spain but now based in Philadelphia, sounded jazzed-up about the Poisson Rouge event—which includes works by Brahms, Poulenc, Chopin, Arturo Marquez, Neiman, and Bunch—and he e-chatted with me briefly about the music. read more
On Saturday night, I headed to Carnegie Hall to see Trey Anastasio, lead singer and guitarist of Phish, perform with the New York Philharmonic. But that—more on that later—was a sort of a tangent to the orchestra’s main event, which occurs four nights later. The Philharmonic’s opening-night gala will be on September 16, when they play for the first time with Alan Gilbert officially at the helm as music director—a starry affair with Renee Fleming, who will sing Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mì. on a concert that also includes a EXPO, a premiere by composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg, and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.
It’s customary for orchestras to welcome new music directors with a fair amount of hoopla. Gilbert is no exception, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s young and doesn’t mind digging into the full spectrum of duties required by the modern-day music director of a symphony orchestra. Gilbert also has an especially strong connection to the Philharmonic; he grew up in the city, and his parents have both been violinists in the orchestra (his father retired in 2001, and his mother, Yoko Takebe, still plays in the Phil). The orchestra’s first international tour under Gilbert will be to Asia this October—a nice connection for Gilbert, since his mother is Japanese.
Wednesday night at the Philharmonic will be the kind of event that’s impossible to avoid if you have even the slightest interest in the arts. A certain number of exalted New Yorkers will attend the concert in person, of course, but you’ll also be able to watch it on TV on Live from Lincoln Center, and which will be simulcast on the soon-to-be-late-lamented WXQR radio (whose programming will move to WNYC at FM 105.9 on October 8, the same day the Philharmonic departs for Asia). For those that miss the Wednesday the 16th broadcast, this concert will also air for SundayArts September 20th at noon. read more
There is such an wealth of culture in New York, particularly in the fall season, that it’s often difficult for presenters to make their offerings stand out. French Institute (FIAF), however, with its Crossing the Line festival (video here), has managed to both expand its genres and refine its mission to create a sort of core sample of contemporary French culture. This year, that includes culinary arts—so integral to France—in addition to many other events, most of which elude genre pigeon-holing. They blend varying strands of dance, art, film, and performance with one certain element—French essence. The festival is curated by Lili Chopra, FIAF’s artistic director, and Simon Dove, director, School of Dance at Arizona State University.
Festivities kick off in Central Park on Saturday, Sep 12 with Le Bal NYC, a mash-up of choreography, audience participation, and picnic outing. French choreographers (“established and emerging”) will teach short dances to the public, which gets a first-hand look at the dance performing process. Meanwhile, chefs—including NY’s David Chang and Wylie Dufresne, reportedly—will be prepping bento boxes of edible treats. read more
The hot ticket this past weekend was John Adams’ latest opera, A Flowering Tree. Walking into the lobby on Sunday afternoon there was a queue of at least 50 people hoping for cancellations. Inside the theater was a starry crowd gathered for the Mostly Mozart event—in the seats just around me were opera singers (Renée Fleming) ballet dancers (Wendy Whelan) rock stars (David Byrne) movie stars (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and even a Nobel Laureate (Toni Morrison).
All of us at Rose Hall were treated to some of John Adams’ best vocal writing to date—and one his finest collaborations with the indefatigable Peter Sellars. A Flowering Tree (which debuted in Vienna back in 2006) was written to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth by paying homage to the composer’s final opera, The Magic Flute. The two operas share exotic settings and plots that involve magic, marriage and a little mayhem (though this is the case with many musical dramas). Regardless of its inspiration, A Flowering Tree works on its own merits. read more
Cleveland? We don’t need no stinkin’ Cleveland! At least when it comes to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, because Soho now boasts its own Annex of said Hall of Fame, and it’s a pretty decent (if necessarily curtailed) overview of this genre’s history.
The Annex takes advantage of technological advances inexorably making their way into museums. Visitors enter the foyer-like Hall of Fame, lined with brushed metal plaques bearing the signatures of inductees. As a soundtrack plays, the featured artist’s name glows in neon colors, so you can kind of ‘follow the bouncing ball’ around the room. The hall leads to a screening room where visitors watch a short history of the honored artists, supplemented by slides and footage of each subject—concert posters, photographs, even live footage of us in the audience, superimposed on the main projection—which add to the speakeasy-like experience. read more
I’ve been kicking myself for having missed a number of music events in New York this spring featuring ETHEL, the New York-based amplified string quartet. They don’t do a huge number of gigs—like all working musicians they have packed schedules filled with other musical things, and don’t exclusively devote themselves to ETHEL-ing. So as it turns out, the only performance I actually caught was their world premiere performance—with laptop composer Jay Flower and hyper-accordionist Michael Ward Bergeman—of a new work by Osvaldo Golijov at the April opening of WNYC’s Greene Performance Space.
The latest self-kick came after hearing a stunning new CD called John the Revelator, Phil Kline’s eerie and strangely uplifting modern-day mass, on which ETHEL performs with the all-male a cappella group Lionheart (hear the third movement from John the Revelator after the jump). read more
This week I’ve been re-reading sections of Oliver Sacks’s 2007 book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain in which the neuroscientist delves into the science behind his long-term interest in music. As Sacks said last October at Frederick P. Rose Hall, where Musicophilia was awarded an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award, since he was about 5 years old he has had two loves: Bach and smoked salmon. Sacks, now 75, reports that both of these preferences have been remarkably consistent over time.
Finding out why we have the musical preferences we do is just one of the investigations of Nova: Musical Minds, which airs this month and was inspired by that book. read more
A modest stack of new Bach CDs has been piling up on my desk over the last several months—when you’re a Bach-lover it’s hard for this not to happen periodically. There are keyboard sonatas (David Fray), violin sonatas (David Grimal), The Art of Fugue (Pierre-Laurent Aimard), two- and three-part Inventions (Till Fellner), and even a version of the Goldberg Variations played on harp (Catrin Finch). There are lots of cantatas—BWV numbers 6, 12, 21, 41, 60, 68, 99, 117, 172, 182, 197, sung by people like soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, Emma Kirkby, Michael Chance, Barbara Schlick, Andreas Scholl, and Christoph Prégardien.
And there are three recordings of the cantata “Ich habe genug” (BWV 82), whose subject is the wish for death, sung in shades from mournful and wistful to resigned and frenzied. Over time, this has been one of the most popular cantatas performed or recorded—it probably won’t ever approach the reportedly 200+ covers of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” but it’s impressive nonetheless. Especially in the context of a business—the record industry—that has shrunk to just a sliver of its former self. read more
Why do we hear music the way we do? Why do human beings make music in the first place? Are its various components things that can even be explained by science? These were topics covered in just one of the events, “Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus,” at this year’s five-day World Science Festival from June 10 to 14. The festival was packing them in at events on topics like fMRI brain research, dark energy, quantum mechanics, microbiology, and behavioral science. Many of the presentations were affairs bringing together experts from diverse fields to bring their joint creative focus to commuter traffic, the earth’s atmospheric levels of CO2, and the question of nothingness.
So judging from the sellout response, New Yorkers are pretty interested in science—as entertainment, anyway, with renowned scientists mixing it up with Hollywood actors and poets and journalists and Juilliard-trained musicians in a sort of cross-cultural musico-scientific extravaganza. read more
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