South Florida Classical Review

The experimental music scene in Miami is fairly circumscribed, compared to larger music centers like New York, Chicago or San Francisco. Yet, amazingly for a contentious enclave like Miami, there’s less infighting and more joint planning and cooperation, which helps makes up for the lack of scale.

Two events this past weekend featured very different takes on electronic music, giving some idea of the interesting nuggets to be uncovered within Miami’s burgeoning contemporary music scene.

Lukas Ligeti appeared Saturday evening at the Harold Golen Gallery in Miami’s Wynwood district (above), as part of the 12 Nights Festival, a monthly concert series organized by Slovakian composer-performer Juraj Kojs. http://www.kojs.net/12Nights.html

As with most electronic composers, Ligeti “performed” largely by manipulating pre-recorded music from his Apple laptop. Unlike, most, Ligeti---son of the celebrated composer Gyorgy Ligeti---also utilized the Marimba Lumina, which he wryly referred to as “the traditional instrument of Silicon Valley.”

Developed by synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla, the contraption is a MIDI controller with built-in synthesizer, but resembles a plugged-in version of the traditional marimba, with color-coded mallets used to control and trigger the live and taped music.

Most of Ligeti’s program came from his new CD, Afrikan Machinery (Tzadik). The music manages to be complex yet accessible, with a welter of pile-driving textures and competing syncopations, imbued with the pronounced influence of African rhythms. The opener, Great Circle’s Tune I, is characteristic, building from a laid-back opening to a riot of electronic pulses and colliding rhythms.

At times there was a visual disconnect with Ligeti’s wielding of the color-coded mallets mostly controlling the sounds rather than actually playing---and somtimes when he appeared to be performing, his own percussion line was inaudible due to the mix. Yet in the final selection, Entering: Perceiving Masks; Exiting: Perceiving Faces, Ligeti finally cut loose with a breakout solo, showing that the drummer-composer is a worthy musician as well. Not everyone’s electronic cup of tea, but Ligeti’s music is consistently intriguing and often delightful. http://www.myspace.com/lukasligeti

On Sunday afternoon, Jason Freeman unveiled and discussed his work Sound Microscope at the Light Box Theater in downtown Miami, as a benefit for the South Florida Composers’ Alliance to raise money for the Subtropics Festival, to be held Feb. 26-March 15.

The Miami-born composer, now teaching at Georgia Technical University in Atlanta, said he was inspired by Google Maps to create this online interactive work. Freeman was intrigued by the ability to zoom in on a particular street on Google, and, rather than exploring geographical spaces, Sound Microsope is designed to allow auditors to zero in and “discover the hidden detail” of an individual sound, its timbre especially, which is then illustrated with sonograms.

Log on and check out Freeman’s Sound Microscope at the Interdisciplinary Sound Arts Workshop (iSaw) website: http://isaw.info/.

SAN FRANCISCO: The course of opera history is nearly biblical in its received wisdom and fixed chronological lineage: Monteverdi and Rameau begat Purcell who begat Handel who begat Mozart, etc.

But in China a different, very distinct operatic style was developing, one that predates Dido and Aeneas by centuries. Those two worlds are currently colliding on stage at the War Memorial Opera House where San Francisco Opera is presenting the world premiere performances of Stewart Wallace's opera, The Bonesetter's Daughter.

The opera, with a libretto by Amy Tan based on her 2001 novel, was commissioned by San Francisco Opera, and underwritten in part by John A. Gunn and Cynthia Fry Gunn. The generous couple earlier this month gave a whopping $40 million gift to the company, which will help commission more new works and expand the company’s nascent theater simulcasts.

Wallace has some experience with themes that resonate with the city by the bay’s cultural jambalaya. His previous opera for the company, Harvey Milk, was based on the pioneering gay San Francisco politician, and Bonesetter’s Daughter is clearly designed in part as homage to the city’s large Chinese populace.

The opera, set in late 1990s San Francisco and pre- and post-World War II China, tells of the conflicts and tangled history of three generations of Chinese women, based in part on Tan’s experiences with her mother. The author’s alter ego, Ruth Young Kamen, is celebrating a festive Chinese restaurant dinner in San Francisco in the late 1990s with Ruth's gauche American in-laws. The evening is interrupted when her strict yet now, declining, mother LuLing Liu bizarrely claims to have been present during the murders of O. J. Simpson's wife and her friend.

SAN FRANCISCO: Of Verdi’s greatest works, Simon Boccanegra remains the least performed. After an unsuccessful 1857 premiere, the composer, much like his protagonist, continued to brood upon its failure, and 24 years later substantially revised the opera, garnering a more positive reception.

San Francisco Opera's production, seen Wednesday night, boasted Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the title role and eloquently demonstrated the richness and distinctive qualities of this work. Indeed with a faultless cast and meticulous music direction by Donald Runnicles, the performance was so perfectly realized on every level, it made criticism virtually irrelevant.

It's somewhat understandable why Boccanegra has remained on the periphery of the repertoire. The opera boasts no celebrated “hit” arias or set pieces---Fiesco’s Il lacerato spirito comes closest---and the preponderance of low male voices bestows a grim, brooding quality. Finally, the complex, baffling scenario makes Il Trovatore seem linear.

Yet it's easy to see why Verdi retained such great affection for the opera. There's a concentration and paring away of non-essentials in Boccanegra. The music has an airy pastoral grace as well as taut explosive power, with the ensembles—that closing Act 1 in particular,---among the finest Verdi ever produced. Further, for the very politically minded Verdi, the opera is a cautionary tale, exploring the Realpolitik dangers of ruling justly in a world of ancient hatreds, mindless violence, and cunning manipulation, as well as the threat of factionalism that threatened to tear his country apart.

In 14th-century Genoa, a man of humble origins, Simon Boccanegra has been elevated to the position of Doge, yet is besieged by enemies: his traitorous former advocate Paolo; the nobleman Fiesco, with whose daughter Maria, he has fathered a child, Amelia; and his now-grown daughter’s lover, Gabriele Adorno whose father Boccanegra had executed. Despite the calumnies and undercover attempts to destroy him, Boccanegra’s continues to rule wisely and benevolently, yet is ultimately overcome and poisoned, though not before forgiving Adorno and elevating him to succeed him.

In the title role, Dmitri Hvorostovsky led a trio of prepossessing singers with the vocal goods to match. Retaining his trademark, perfectly coiffed white mane as the older Doge seemed a bit self-conscious, but otherwise the Siberian baritone appears born to play the role. His Boccanegra is commanding and authoritative, often using a sly charm to persuade his detractors, yet loving and protective of his daughter. Hvorostovsky can sometimes coast on his burnished tone and ease of technique but here he etches an incisive portrait of a well-meaning ruler undone by the relentless motivation of his enemies. Hvorostovsky’s singing was consistently detailed and vividly characterized, the singer often exploiting a wide range of dynamics and coloring.

Adding to the trio of singers with cover-magazine looks, Barbara Frittoli likewise offered a sensitive portrayal of Boccanegra’s secret daughter, Amelia. The Italian soprano sounded wobbly early in the evening, but soon got on track, bringing idiomatic Italianate vocalism and expressive subtlety to the role. The fast-rising tenor Marcus Haddock completed the gene-pool casting as Amelia’s lover, Adorno, singing with dramatic power in his Act 2 aria, and investing a somewhat thankless role with vitality and depth of characterization.

As Boccanegra’s conspirators, Patrick Carfizzi as Paolo displayed a darkly Italianate bass-baritone making the spiteful character’s oily malevolence starkly manifest. Vitalij Kowaljow embodied the dignified and prideful patrician Fiesco, singing with a refined and commodious bass.

Scrupulously attentive to Verdi’s detailed markings, Donald Runnicles brought out the ingenuity of the score and its contrasts, from a pastoral lyricism of almost Mozartian delicacy to the explosive chords and thoughtful pauses of as the characters ponder their next moves.

The revival of the Elijah Moshinsky production offered elegant simplicity, with the clean lines of Michael Yeargan's sets touched off majestically by Peter J. Hall’s period costumes. With Christopher Maravich’s evocative lighting, the various tableaux resembled Breugel and Canaletto canvasses come to life. Director David Edwards provided a seminar in understated stage direction, avoiding histrionics and having the artists move simply and naturally, speaking and singing in an almost conversational style.

[Photos by Terrence McCarthy]

SAN FRANCISCO---"The guy needs a psychiatrist," said one woman in the audience of Paul, the obsessed protagonist of Die tote Stadt. Erich Wolfgang Korngold's once-celebrated, uber-Romantic opera opened Tuesday night at the War Memorial Opera House for its belated San Francisco Opera debut.

The Korngold revival over the last two decades has rekindled interest in many of the Viennese composer’s concert works. His Violin Concerto has edged its way into the repertoire, and Korngold is posthumously getting his due as a greatly gifted composer whose posterity should be based on more than his sumptuous Warner Brothers film scores, magnificent as they are.

Korngold’s stage works have not yet come in from the cold, though his most acclaimed opera, Die tote Stadt is receiving increasing attention in Europe. Kudos to San Francisco Opera for bringing this Willy Decker production, first mounted at the Salzburg Festival, stateside for a three-week run.

Premiered simultaneously in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) was a mega-hit of Lloyd Webber proportions in its era. The opera’s name has been kept alive by the first act’s drop-dead-beautiful Gluck, das mir verblieb, still a favorite recital item of sopranos everywhere.

Based on Georges Rodenbach’s expressionist novel Bruges la morte, the opera is set in the monastic gloom of Bruges where the grieving Paul cannot rouse himself from mourning over his recently departed wife, Marie. He meets a young slatternly dancer, Marietta, who happens to be her exact likeness. The conflicted Paul is torn between his sexual attraction to the earthy Marietta and his devotion to the pure Marie, with the action unfolding in a series of fantastical scenes that ultimately lead to murder.

Korngold’s remarkable score is brilliantly, even audaciously orchestrated (including two harps, piano, organ, celesta, harmonium and five percussionists) cast in a style of Straussian opulence that sounds majestic even to jaded 21st-centiury ears.

As a narrative, tote Stadt is a Freudian’s dream with its quasi-necrophilic obsessions, cathedral spires and assorted repressions and unspoken desires. Too often modern productions focus on the weirdness of the long second act---here logically incorporated into Act 1 without a break--- and neglect the genuine humanity at the opera’s core. At the coda when the damaged but wiser Paul rises to leave Bruges and sings a final farewell to Marie reprising that aching Act 1 aria, the effect is utterly heart-breaking.

Tote Stadt remains little known, apparently even in a sophisticated opera city like San Francisco, and there were scores of empty seats opening night with more electing to depart at intermission. Significantly, the opera and performers were warmly applauded by all who stayed.

San Francisco Opera had its share of opening-night glitches Tuesday, including Emily Magee as Marietta losing her wig moments after her entrance. Yet with a first-rate cast, Decker’s imaginative staging, and inspired advocacy by Donald Runnicles and the orchestra of this tortuously difficult score, Korngold’s forgotten masterpiece lives again, proving this is a work fully deserving inclusion in the regular repertoire.

Decker's staging, helmed in this production by Meisje Hummel, doesn't follow the composer’s meticulous stage directions but for the most part is faithful to its spirit, while investing the fantasy sequences with a whirling succession of images that conjure up the unsettling dream-like landscape of Paul’s disordered thoughts.

I could have done without the bald Marietta, and making Paul too much of a cringing twitchy neurotic from the start. But most of Decker’s conceits worked effectively, aided by Wolfgang Gussmann’s minimalist set for Paul’s den, the ceiling and walls moving to precarious angles as his nightmare unfolds. Decker’s double images for the touching conversation between Paul and the apparition of Marie was clever and atmospheric. Most striking was his varied and copious utilization of John Singer Sargent’s 1890 painting of Elsie Palmer to represent Marie. The painting in many guises serves as the opera’s visual leitmotiv, and well chosen too, as the young Miss Palmer’s visage has an innocence and haunting otherworldly sadness wholly apt for Paul’s departed wife.

The leading roles are punishing for both singers but the two principals overcame the myriad hurdles to make impressive company debuts. Torsten Kerl has made the role of Paul almost a signature piece, and he brought considerable vocal power and dramatic heft to the role. The German tenor has an ample, vibrant instrument and assayed the big moments while bringing a touching delicacy to Paul’s final scene. Perhaps his Paul is too unhinged at the start, but Kerl certainly made Paul’s anguish and conflicted emotions vividly manifest.

It’s a rare experience to encounter the music of Ligeti in South Florida but one will have that chance Saturday night when the composer comes to Miami to perform his music.

No, not that Ligeti. Gyorgy Ligeti, the Transylvanian-born modernist whose extraordinary, densely concentrated music gave us one of the most original voices of the last century, died in 2006.

His son, composer Lukas Ligeti, is continuing the family tradition of creating envelope-pushing sonic art with a distinctive fusion of electronica and African music. Ligeti will perform his plugged-in creations at the Harold Golen Gallery in Miami’s Wynwood district 8 p. m. Saturday.

Lukas Ligeti’s style is a wind-blasting mix of classical, electronica, and indie rock, with a pronounced influence of African polyrhythms. “I feel a part of that [classical] tradition,” says Ligeti, speaking from his apartment in New York less than 24 hours after returning from Ghana. “But I’m trying to do something new. There are completely different ways of thinking about music in Africa. I thought, if I use these ways of thinking with my own musical background—European and American---that might lead to some interesting results.”

Since 2005 Ligeti has performed on the Marimba Lumina, a MIDI-controlled electronic instrument built by synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla. who worked closely with the famous Bob Moog. “It’s a very sophisticated and strange instrument,” explains Ligeti. “I‘ve got four color-coded mallets. The instrument can differentiate which of the mallets is hitting it, so I can program it differently depending on that. The software is very complex and allows a lot of possibilities.”

The Marimba Lumina has a built in synthesizer, yet Ligeti---like Bartok, Vaughan Williams and other composers of the last century---obtains most of his source material from his own field recordings, stored on his laptop computer. “I’ve traveled a lot in Africa and other places, and I just record things,” he says. “Environmental sounds, traditional instruments, voices, whatever.”

Most electronic composers’ public performances consist of them sitting on stage manipulating an Apple laptop, which is about as visually stimulating as watching me type this sentence. “I don’t really enjoy performing on the laptop very much,” says Ligeti. “I’m not a typewriter-keyboard player. Also I don’t enjoy people playing laptops because you can’t really see what they’re doing.” Reflecting his drumming background, Ligeti prefers performing on the Marimba Lumina, avoding the usual electronic visual ennui. “The Marimba Lumina is more interesting to watch. And for me as a drummer, playing a percussion instrument makes a lot more sense technically.”

Growing up in Vienna, Ligeti had no desire to follow in his father’s acclaimed footsteps. "My father was a really great composer. And I thought, he’s already good enough. I don’t need to do the same thing.” However, at 18, when he finished the equivalent of high school in Vienna, Ligeti realized his future course was inevitable. “I was always hearing music in my head,” he says. Ligeti decided on drums as his instrument because he had nothing invested since he never paid much attention to percussion previously. “I figured if I fuck up, it’s not going to be a problem.”

In hindsight, Ligeti said he wished he knew what he was getting into. “Not only are the drums a very difficult and physically demanding instrument to play,” he says, “but you have to schlep them around all the time. And you can’t practice at home because of the neighbors. Had I known more, I wouldn’t have chosen it.”

Growing up in Austria, Ligeti studied composition and became immersed in all genres; jazz, classical, rock and world music. His fascination with African music was sparked by Gerhard Kubik, his professor in Vienna and one of the world’s leading experts on African music. After initial exposure, Ligeti began to immerse himself in African music and theory. “In my search for my own voice as a composer, that was the first and the most important ingredient.” Gyorgy Ligeti’s late works also show some of African elements, most famously in his piano work, African Rhythms. “We swapped a lot of tapes,” says Lukas.

While Ligeti the younger is pursuing a very different musical path, there are similarities in their musics: sonic density, a prominent, often mechanistic pulse, and an unorthodox approach to tuning. “I’m interested in breaking free from tempered tuning,” he says. “Using just intonation and microtonalities. I don’t really use any system, I just use my electronics to tune stuff. I do it by ear and I try to find new–sounding melodies and harmonies.”

In his early forties—Ligeti said he stopped counting birthdays after he turned 35---his success is growing, with commissions from the Kronos Quartet, the Bang On a Can Festival, and Ensemble Modern. He has collaborated with such musicians as John Zorn and Gary Lucas, and performs in Burkina Electric, an electronica band based in Burkina Faso.

While Ligeti has great respect for the Western classical tradition, growing up in Vienna in the household of one of the century's most innovative musical minds, the avant garde “seemed quite normal.” It also makes him listen more critically to contemporary classical music, particularly that being produced in Europe.“I had a harder time with composed music because in many cases I can see the emperor is wearing no clothes,” says Ligeti. “My colleagues often become fascinated by complexity and issues like that, which for me are already old hat.

“For me it’s all conservative. The tonal post-Romantic music and Darmstadt and serial music are all conservative to me. It’s music my father and my grandfather’s generation would have been more concerned with.

"I’m more interested in world music and electronica and indie rock than most classical music being composed today. I love using the sounds of traditional African instruments because there’s a lot of noise and buzzing that gets incorporated. You go from village to village and find completely different tuning systems, different instruments and different styles of playing.”

Lukas Ligeti performs music from his new CD, Afrikan Machinery, 8 p.m. Saturday at the Harold Golen Gallery, 2921 NW 6th Ave. in Miami. 434-284-2965; http://www.haroldgolengallery.com.
[Photo by Chris Woltmann]

For the first time in history, you can attend the Metropolitan Opera’s opening night without having to travel to Manhattan. Monday night’s gala event with Renee Fleming will be broadcast live to movie theaters across the country as part of The Met: Live in HD series. The celebrated soprano will perform scenes from Verdi’s La Traviata, Massenet’s Manon and Strauss’s Capriccio starting at 6 p.m. For information on the 21 Florida theaters and venues across the country, call 800-638-6737 or go to www.metopera.org/hdlive.

The Met’s HD broadcast lineup this season includes:

Oct. 11: Strauss’ Salome with Karita Mattila
Nov. 8: John Adams’ Doctor Atomic
Nov. 22: Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust with Marcello Giordani and Susan Graham
Dec. 20: Massenet’s Thais with Fleming and Thomas Hampson
Jan. 10: Puccini’s La Rondine with Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna
Jan. 24: Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice with Stephanie Blythe and Danielle de Niese
Feb. 7: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor with Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon
March 7: Puccini’s Madama Butterfly with Cristina Gallardo-Domas
March 21: Bellini’s La Sonnambula with Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flores
May 9: Rossini’s La Cenerentola with Elina Garanca

The present offbeat Naxos disc of four American string quartets reflects the tenuous place the genre has had domestically, yet provides a worthy and well played program with one notable discovery.

It took Ralph Evans, first violinist of the Fine Arts Quartet, more than three decades to complete his String Quartet No. 1 (ambitiously numbered, considering the long gestation). The opening Moderato has an easy-going Delius-like English feel, turning more angular in the middle, though an overall amiability reigns. The Andante is an impassioned chromatic outpouring and the third movement offers a lightweight gamboling scherzo. Even with the emphatic closing chord, Evans’ quartet seems to need another movement, a finale with some ballast.

Philip Glass has completed five mature quartets, as well as his atmospheric quartet soundtrack for Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. The concise String Quartet No. 2 is adapted from music for a stage version of Beckett’s Company and the four movements run less than nine minutes with a characteristic mix of yearning lyric phrases against pulsing minimalist rhythms.

Most substantial are the other two works. George Antheil’s String Quartet No. 3, written in 1948, dates from the composer’s conservative late years when he had put aside the anarchic outrages of his “bad boy of music” youth. Still, it’s hard to believe this retro-conservative work came from the same pen that produced Ballet mecanique. There’s a strong flavor of 19th-century American folksong in the opening Allegretto, which grows more tense and agitated. The ensuing Largo offers a gently rocking melody, naïve and rustic in its Dvorak-in-America nostalgia. A more pointed scherzo leads to a fast-paced finale that retains the cheerful folk elements even with an edgy driving counterpoint.

Bernard Herrmann is best known for writing some of the finest film scores of the last century, spanning from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver with several Hitchcock classics in between. Completed in 1965, Echoes was Herrmann’s first concert work in 25 years, cast in a single 20-minute movement of ten sections.

Echoes was staged by the Royal Ballet, but is virtually unknown today, which is hard to account for. This is a terrific, consummately well-crafted and haunting work, with the tension and musical argument fluently sustained over the long span. Though the sections are subtly varied, the quartet centers on Herrmann’s characteristic bleak unease, the brooding introspection and dark romantic longing reflective of his film work; indeed, some parts sound very close to sections of Vertigo and Psycho. Echoes is rounded off with a nerve-wracked scherzo and frenzied finale before a quiet elegiac coda.

Vigorous and committed playing by the Fine Arts Quartet, though the forwardly balanced recording is on the loud side. It would be wonderful if Naxos could find their way to adding new performance of other neglected American works into the American Classics series, not least David Diamond’s ten string quartets, a significant body of work inexplicably ignored. For now, the present disc offers an offbeat program and a real discovery with Bernard Herrmann’s Echoes.