South Florida Classical Review

Chamber Music opener a memorable night

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:24:00 +0000

Chamber music is often defined as music among friends, which generally refers to the performers. That description took on a different, larger context with the season-opening concert of Friends of Chamber Music of Miami, which presented the piano quintets of Schumann and Brahms.

Schumann was a close and influential mentor to the young Brahms who also enjoyed a lifelong friendship with Schumann’s widow Clara, which profoundly influenced his life and music.
FOCM president Julian Kreeger corralled an impressive all-star lineup of musical firepower for this program: violinists Cho Liang Lin and Adele Anthony, violist Roberto Diaz, cellist William De Rosa and pianist Joseph Kalichstein. The event, held Monday night at Gusman Concert Hall, was a co-presentation with Festival Miami.

Schumann's Piano Quintet was written in 1842, his annus mirabilis chamber-music year, in which he completed three string quartets, the Piano Quartet, and Piano Quintet. The rush of inspiration and confident vitality are evident throughout in Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat Major, the first in the genre to achieve success and still one of the finest. The writing is deftly deployed among all five players, with key expressive contrasts and extraordinary lyrical richness. A hearty, vigorous expression predominates, and even the second movement’s funeral march never quite veers into tragedy, with a first trio that is one of Schumann’s most indelible inspirations.

Even though these five musicians had not played together before as an ensemble, there was clear musical empathy and a sense of fully engaged partnership, which contributing to an idiomatic, impassioned performance in touch with Schumann’s vitality and flowing lyricism. In addition to providing brief, charming verbal notes, Kalishstein took the pivotal role in the proceedings with fiery keyboard work, well balanced by Lin’s purity of tone and seamless articulation, and Roberto Diaz’s elegance.

Unlike the Schumann work, Brahms' Piano Quintet went through a characteristically tortuous gestation from string quintet to sonata for two pianos, and finally, with Clara Schumann’s urging, its final form. Brahms’ Piano Quintet is an expansive work, spanning three-quarters of an hour, and sprawling in its breadth and thematic richness, with a Schumann-esque Andante, biting scherzo, and large-scale finale that moves from brooding gloom to frenzied exultation.

Gleaming and responsive as the Schumann performance was, the Brahms was finer still. Perhaps Anthony seemed a bit reticent compared to her high-powered colleagues, and Kalichstein’s unbridled attacks sometimes sacrificed accuracy.

But these are minor quibbles and this galvanic performance---weighty in texture and grand in scale---was tackled with full-tilt commitment by the entire ensemble. Led by Lin, the delicacy of the string playing conveyed the plaintive folk-like expression of the slow movement. With Kalichstein primus inter pares, all five musicians were at their finest in the scherzo, putting across the march theme’s forceful swagger, and bringing explosive bravura to the finale, culminating in a thrilling coda.

Friends of Chamber Music’s next performance isn’t until January but the glow from this memorable evening should keep audience members satisfied till then.

Ivan Davis says farewell with Schumann

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 03:27:00 +0000

Shelly Berg was the most prominent musician on the stage of Gusman Concert Hall Saturday night, as the third evening of Festival Miami showcased the energetic Frost School of Music dean collaborating with several faculty musicians.

As expected however the spotlight was stolen by the final artist to perform, pianist Ivan Davis, who is retiring after a remarkable 42 years of teaching at the University of Miami.

In a brief speech, Davis mentioned how much he had learned from all his students, those who had gone on to piano careers as well as those who had not. His greatest accomplishment, he hoped, was instilling in his students, “a sense of adventure and appreciation.”

Davis, 76, is retiring at the end of this school year but an even greater loss for the music world is that Saturday marked his farewell public appearance as pianist. Vision problems and arthritis have made it increasingly difficult for him to perform.

Davis’s rendering of Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) may not have been technically pristine but with the level of insight, subtle poetry and understanding Davis brought to these Schumann miniatures, no one could cavil. The relaxed fantasy, gentle musing and introspection were rendered with natural expression and simple eloquence, truly the art that conceals art. His refined encore of the favorite Scarlatti sonata with which he liked to begin his recitals, closed the circle neatly.

The rest of the concert followed the genre-crossing path established at last year’s inaugural Dean’s Concert with Berg teaming up with a variety of Frost faculty musicians in jazz and classical works. Incoming flute professor Trudy Kane joined Berg for a graceful reading of the Sonatine by Walter Gieseking, an artist known more as pianist than composer. The Miami Saxophone Quartet kicked up plenty of energy with their short but exuberant jazz set.

Berg and members of the Bergonzi String Quartet served up a lively if rough-and–ready performance of the Rondo finale of Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor. But the most impressive performance was Debussy’s Premiere Rhapsodie in which clarinetist Margaret Donaghue showed herself fully in synch with the music’s lyrical poise and relaxed virtuosity.

Firebird Orchestra makes its first flight

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:10:00 +0000

It’s safe to say that few chamber orchestras are born in an opera rehearsal studio that has been converted into a nightclub cabaret with cash bar. But the Firebird Chamber Orchestra is not just any ensemble. Patrick Dupre Quigley has achieved great success with his choir Seraphic Fire by doing smart, adventurous programs that consistently defy expectations.

The same qualities would appear to apply to the young conductor’s new venture, the Firebird Chamber Orchestra. Backed by a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, the ensemble is making its debut this weekend with three performances at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

Friday night’s concert at the Peacock Rehearsal Hall in the Ziff Ballet Opera House offered a comfortable, informal atmosphere with the charismatic Quigley offering concise yet informative verbal program notes. Any fear that the club atmosphere would produce visual and aural distractions turned out to be unfounded. In fact, Friday night’s audience proved so perfectly attentive and respectful, the hall was quieter than some of Seraphic Fire’s church performances.

The in-the-round seating certainly offers an intimate concert experience with tables so close to the stage, one could tap Quigley on the shoulder. The mirrored wall adds a neat double perspective, offering a front view of the conductor from the musicians’ vantage point.

But while the space worked well enough practically, acoustically it proved problematic. The Peacock space may be fine for rehearsing voices but it is a bone-dry room with no ambient warmth, throwing a merciless glare on every note played by the 13-member string ensemble. Quigley’s players are skillful enough to withstand such exposure, but there’s no denying that the arid acoustic provided little bloom to a corporate string tone that at times emerged thin and wiry.

The premiere program of Baroque and 20th- century American works for strings was characteristically enterprising. Quigley once again showed that he is just as inspirational a conductor with orchestra as with singers, directing with precise economy, cuing entrances and transitions clearly, and keeping a consistent rhythmic pulse.

The opening Vivaldi concerto from L’Estro Armonico (No. 10, RV 580) offered a sampler of Quigley’s historically minded Baroque approach with sparing vibrato and light bowing. Co-concertmaster Michael Albert led his fellow violinists effectively, displaying admirable articulation in the virtuosic solo passages.

Like Richard Strauss, Georg Philipp Telemann composed a programmatic work on Don Quixote. Telemann can be the dull uncle of the Baroque, yet his Burlesque de Don Quixotte in French style shows surprising wit and ingenuity. A sprightly overture is followed by six movements painting various episodes from Cervantes’ novel, such as the upward string figures for Sancho Panza being tossed about in a blanket and the swooning strings representing the knight errant’s love for Dulcinea.

The music could have smiled more and the wry instrumental effects punched across more vividly at times. Yet for the most part Quigley led an attentive well-played rendering mindful of period style, that made a worthy case for Telemann’s rarely heard suite.

Performing Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in an ensemble arrangement was a fine idea, as the restless agitation and pensive unease of the outer movements provides context and a layered tragic depth to the celebrated Adagio centerpiece. Quigley directed this deeply felt music with clear-eyed sensitivity, taking the Adagio at a flowing, unsentimental pace that made it more moving for shearing off the schmaltz. Though well played by the Firebird members, one wanted more body of tone and presence from the violins.

The continuing neglect of so many leading 20th-century American composers who are not lucky enough to be Elliott Carter borders on scandal. Kudos to Quigley for programming music of David Diamond, one of our most inexplicably overlooked masters.

Diamond’s Rounds for String Orchestra from 1944 is lighter in expression than much of his wartime music, but one could hardly wish for a more engaging introduction to the composer’s art. In three short movements, Rounds presents a down-home country-fiddling expression, cast in the contours of folk music even though no actual melodies are quoted. The music displays Diamond’s sophisticated hand with string writing and an urbane touch without sacrificing affection for the populist style.

The brilliant Allegro vigoroso finale should go like the wind, but felt a bit cautious and reined in Friday night. Otherwise, Quigley and his players gave Rounds superb advocacy, playing with rhythmic bite, keeping the intricate counterpoint and shifting rhythms clearly defined and bringing just the right sense of stoic Midwestern melancholy to the central Adagio.

Patrick Dupre Quigley conducts the Firebird Chamber Orchestra 7 p.m. Sunday at the Arsht Center’s Ziff Ballet Opera House in the Peacock Rehearsal Studio. $40. 305-949-6722; www.arshtcenter.org.

Festival Miami puts on the Ritz

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:36:00 +0000

by Alan Becker

The Ritz Chamber Players, founded in 2002, is a group of African-American musicians dedicated to the exploration of the black heritage in classical music. Beyond the obvious jazz influences, few are familiar with the many composers who studied classical composition and contributed to the growth of an art form almost entirely identified with white creativity.

Friday’s Festival Miami program at Gusman Concert Hall on the University of Miami campus started us down this path of discovery. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in England in 1875 to an African father and an English mother. His father soon returned to Africa, leaving the raising of his son to his wife, though it is doubtful whether his father even knew of his son’s existence. Young Samuel’s love for music led him to studies at the Royal College of Music and to considerable success as a composer. He died of pneumonia at the absurdly early age of 37.

Coleridge-Taylor’s Variations for Cello and Piano, from 1907, is a gorgeous piece of heartbreaking lyricism, typical of the late flowering of Romanticism in music. Cellist Kenneth Law has a beautiful, well-sustained tone and is capable of handling difficult virtuoso passages with unassuming ease. He was well matched by Terrence Wilson’s ardent pianism.

Named for the earlier composer, Coleridge Taylor-Perkinson was composer-in-residence for the Jacksonville based Ritz players, but passed away in 2004 before he could complete a commissioned work for violin, viola and cello. What is left, simply called Movement, is a short fragment of lyrical expression not unlike Barber’s famed Adagio, but leavened with a layer of polytonal harmonic grit. While it ended all too soon, it was a fine tribute to the late composer.

Bernhard Crusell’s Clarinet Quartet, Op. 2, no. 1, moved back into the sphere of Caucasian composers in fine style. The composer was born in Finland in 1775 and died in 1838, thus spanning the lifetimes of many of the era’s greats. If you start with Beethoven and add some Mozart to the mix one gets a pretty good idea of Crusell’s musical world.

The four-movement quartet is an absolute delight, and Patterson, clarinetist and artistic director of the Ritz, spun pure liquid gold from his instrument. From almost imperceptible attacks to fully capturing the joy of the writing, this was artistry of the highest attainment. Crusell’s writing for the instrument reflected his renown as a clarinetist and his sure hand in exploring all facets of his instrument. Since there are three more Crusell clarinet quartets, a world of discovery awaits.

Dvorak’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat is a favorite and has seen many outings in the Miami area. Infused with the Czech spirit, the work’s passions have rarely been revealed with such force and dynamism as here. While there have been more performances with playing of more refinement and charm, none have surpassed the Ritz for sheer verve and sweep, with special note of the superlative artistry of violinist Tai Murray and the resonant viola of Amadi Hummings. May the Ritz return---and soon.

Corigliano premiere opens Festival Miami with brassy power

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:16:00 +0000

By age 25, most young people are moving out of the house, striking out on their own, and starting new futures. So too has Festival Miami, which opened its 25th season Thursday evening with a salute to composer John Corigliano at the Knight Concert Hall of the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center.

While this is not the first time the festival has ventured off the University of Miami campus---in 2002 it presented the ballet, Cecelia Valdes at Miami-Dade County Auditorium---it is clearly a new day for Festival Miami under Shelly Berg. The dean has revamped the lineup to form thematic weeks of different genres, opening the five-day classical “Great Performances” series with this tribute to Corigliano, one of our finest composers. It’s too bad that with such a worthy event and the composer in attendance, the turnout was so disappointing with the house less than 25 percent of capacity. Holding the concert on Yom Kippur clearly didn’t help.

Of the three Corigliano works performed by Frost School of Music forces, the most significant was the Florida premiere of his Circus Maximus. Inspired by using the spatial resources of a large modern concert hall, Corigliano’s uninhibited third symphony is set in eight connected movements and calls for large wind ensemble, including marching band, saxophone quartet and eleven trumpets spread out across the balconies.

As its name implies, Circus Maximus draws a sharp parallel between the massive entertainment spectacles of ancient Rome and contemporary America with our own plugged in, downloaded, iPhone-equipped lives. The composer implies that, instead of focusing on the world’s survival, our preoccupation with electronic bread and circuses may lead to the same end as that of the Roman Empire.

Circus Maximus is an extraordinary work, the moments of theatricality like the marching band and shotgun blast at the coda used not as gimmicks but to reflect the excesses and real dangers of frenetic modern society.

It’s safe to say that the Knight Concert Hall hasn’t had a test drive like this since the Chicago Symphony performed Richard Strauss two season ago. The spatial effects worked magnificently, from the antiphonal trumpet fanfares of the opening Introitus to the sultry insinuating seductions of Screen/Siren, with the saxophone quartet and double-bass placed in the second-tier balcony.

The symphony has its deafening moments and cacophony but also passages of great beauty as with the Prayer movement, a fragile searching solace that rises to a rich lyrical outpouring. Corigliano’s inventive use of instruments is on full display in Night Music I with evocative nocturnal sounds and uncannily lifelike lupine wails. Only the Channel Surfing third movement didn’t quite come off Thursday, the contrasts too ironed out and the mercurial remote-control clicking unclearly presented.

Otherwise Gary Green led a powerful, well prepared performance with the gifted musicians of the Frost Wind Ensemble excelling in their varied and challenging assignments. It’s too bad a female audience member had to shout a premature “Bravo!” which unleashed the applause and spoiled the stark coda and silence after pianist Liana Purcell fired the climactic shotgun blast high up in the choral seating.

Corigliano’s Red Violin Concerto has seen more manifestations than the title instrument of the 1998 movie has had owners: from film score to Caprices and concertante Suite, Chaconne, and now a full-fledged four-movement concerto.

The Red Violin Concerto adds three movements to the existing Chaconne, mining the movie’s varied themes. While the concerto is full of Corigliano’s frenetic drive, percussive rhythmic bite and creative instrumental writing, particularly in the final movement, the expression is largely lyrical, wistful and rhapsodic, offering myriad technical challenges and expressive opportunities for the violin soloist.

Corigliano could not have wanted for a more compelling performance that that served up by soloist Jennifer Koh, who made a very impressive local debut. The violinist tackled the score's complexities with a crackling intensity that gave terrific bite to the driving passages while her even, tight vibrato added tartness to the openly lyrical pages.

The Frost Symphony Orchestra lacks the sonority and gleam of a professional ensemble though the student musicians performed solidly and with conviction, some wayward intonation apart. More problematic was the conducting of Yongyan Hu. The Chinese maestro’s stolid direction and poky tempos consistently undermined Koh and sacrificed forward momentum. It would have made more sense to have the Frost School’s Thom Sleeper on the podium, since he's worked closely with the orchestra for the past month and has a proven record of getting excellent results from student forces.

The evening led off with Corigliano’s choral setting of Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage. Corigiano’s skill at word-setting, aided by Richard Wilbur’s precise yet sensual English translation--- is striking, almost conversational in its attentive word painting. A cappella choral events have not been plentiful in the Knight Concert Hall,which is unfortunate, for the sound of the Frost Chorale’s massed voices was stunning, radiant with glowing tone.

In his local debut, Joshua Habermann, the Frost School’s new director of choral studies, showed himself a very fine conductor indeed. Habermann sensitively balanced choral sections and elicited a wide array of coloring and dynamic details with feather-soft pianissimos, which bodes well for his UM post and imminent leadership of the Master Chorale of South Florida.

Fast-rising pianist to open New World season in style

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:20:00 +0000

The New World Symphony opens its 21st season next Friday night with Michael Tilson Thomas leading the Miami Beach orchestra in music of Ravel and Stravinsky, two MTT specialties.

Yet in addition to the celebrated conductor and orchestra, this season's curtain-raiser also will provide audiences with the opportunity to catch a young, alarmingly gifted musician who appears to be on the brink of stardom. Pianist Yuja Wang will team up with Tilson Thomas and the New World in two works, Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand and Stravinsky's Capriccio.

It's a neat bit of symmetry that Wang, just 21, is the same age as the New World Symphony. She has already demonstrated to local audiences her astounding technique and fearless virtuosity in a recital for Friends of Chamber Music of Miami two seasons ago. Add a vivacious personality and charismatic stage presence and it would seem that there's no stopping the Beijing-born musician. For an example of Wang's flame-throwing bona fides, one can hardly do better than her romp through the tortuously complex Volodos arrangement of Mozart's Rondo alla Turca.

Since her Miami recital, Wang has graced the stages of the leading American orchestras, performing with the Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra and New York Philharmonic. And this season she will make debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony, National Symphony and Pittsburgh Symphony.

"I think she's an amazing artist," says Tilson Thomas, who has been an advocate and mentor of sorts, performing with Wang in San Francisco and London. "She represents the new wave of Asian artists. The level of creativity, her feeling for harmony and the level of musical understanding are extraordinary."

"To hear her perform a concerto, you hear her reacting to every coloristic possibility of the orchestra. And she's at a stage now when she's learning so many concertos."

Thirteen concertos to be exact, which is a daunting number to play in a single season, where many soloists restrict themselves to just a handful of works.

"It is a huge repertoire," says Wang, with a laugh from New York, where she just moved the previous week. "But I think it's more fun to play concertos because I can collaborate with other people. When you have a whole orchestra behind you, it's more exciting and actually easier for me. With a recital, I have to control everything. There's more freedom but I also have to work harder."

Hard work is clearly something Wang is not afraid of. Nearly half of her concertos in 2008-2009 are new to her repertoire including the Ravel and Stravinsky works, which she will be performing for the first time on Lincoln Road next weekend.

Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand has most often been a staple of pianists with right-hand afflictions, like Leon Fleisher or Wang's mentor at the Curtis Institute, Gary Graffman. But for Wang, it's a favored work, one she was determined to play after hearing Graffman perform it two years ago.

"I just fell in love with it," she says with characteristic enthusiasm. "I think it's an awesome piece, even better than the Ravel G major. It's so dark and the harmonies are so beautiful. The rhythmic vitality is very cool. And the orchestra has so much more color than the G major. It's more sensual, more like Ravel."

Stravinsky's Capriccio is less often heard, dating from 1929, the same year Ravel began work on his Left Hand Concerto. The Russian composer wrote the flashy Capriccio for personal solo display and, more practically, as a tund-raising device he could perform to improve his shaky finances after fleeing Russia.

"The thing with Stravinsky is everything he wrote is so different," says Wang. "I've played the piano part in Petrushka, and this is completely different, more from his neo-Classical period. There's a lot of very jazzy moments and counterpoint in the orchestra. It's a lot of fun."

Wang learned the Capriccio at the request of Tilson Thomas, a conductor for whom, she says, every collaboration is educational and enjoyable. "He's probably the most knowledgeable person I know," says Wang. "He has so much imagination and creativity. And he's so quick at absorbing information. He's like this sponge that has everything in there."

Born in Beijing in 1987, Yuja Wang began studying at age 6, performing in China, Australia and Germany as a child before attending the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. She moved to North America, first attening the summer program of the Mount Royal College in Calgary and then the Mount Royal Conservatory. At 15, Wang won the Aspen Music Festival's concerto competition and moved to Philadelphia to study with Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music.

Wang is exhilarated by her recent move to New York from Philadelphia even though her current living situation is decidedly Spartan. "I just have a rug, a piano and a bed," she says. "It's a huge change from Philadelphia. But I'm just two blocks from Carnegie Hall. I'm very interested to discover the city. I want to explore every corner of New York."

Unlike many a young musician, she doesn't travel with an entourage of family, teachers and assorted hangers-on, a testament to her youthful maturity and independence. "I always travel alone," says Wang. "I always bring a book and my laptop. I enjoy studying music on the plane too, like a conductor. It gives me time to think."

In addition to a voracious appetite for music, the depth of Wang's taste in reading is impressive in an age when The Da Vinci Code is considered classic literature. "Right now I'm reading The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. And I read Nietzsche's Thus Sprach Zarathustra and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. And I love Victor Hugo. I read no trash," she laughs.

As with her literary choices, Wang makes no concession to the middle-brow in music and is planning to explore more contemporary works, including music of Messiaen, Ligeti, Xenakis and George Crumb, "Being Chinese, I think Tan Dun is very interesting too," she says. "There are so many treasures to discover. Every day I discover something new."

Like many young women, she enjoys shopping, as well as exploring YouTube and is a dedicated movie fan, particularly older films, including Woody Allen's Manhattan, which served as her video introduction to New York. She also enjoyed Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut for its use of Ligeti's music. Asked if she was old enough to see the director's erotic thriller when it was released, she laughs. "I'm legal now!"

Wang says her intellectual curiosity and intense desire for new experiences sometimes make her so restless that she becomes impatient and finds it hard to practice for extended periods. "I can only practice twenty minutes because I get bored. I'm trying to get a longer attention span. It's a good thing all the pieces I play are under a half-hour!"

Yet, even at such a young age, Wang has the searching temperament and perfectionist attitude of a seasoned artist, finding herself constantly questioning and reexamining her approach to even the most familiar piece of music. "Sometimes, even subconsciously, I just change it a little," she says. "You know, the hall is always different, different piano or orchestra, different conductor.

"I like to play it differently each time. That way it's always fresh."

Pianist Yuja Wang performs Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand and Stravinsky's Capriccio with Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 17 and Saturday Oct. 18 and 3 p.m. Sunday Oct. 19 at the Lincoln Theatre, 541 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. The program also includes Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole and Stravinsky's Suite from The Firebird (1919 version). $28-$84. www.nws.edu; 305-673-3331. 800-597-3331.

Festival Miami opens music season tonight

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:54:00 +0000

This weekend marks the start of South Florida’s music season proper, with two competing events Thursday night: the debut of the Firebird Chamber Orchestra and the opening of Festival Miami. Patrick Dupre Quigley leads his new chamber ensemble in string music of Vivaldi, Telemann, Barber and David Diamond Thursday Friday and Sunday evenings at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. For more info and ticket details, scroll down.

Across Biscayne Boulevard at the same time, Festival Miami kicks off at the Knight Concert Hall with a salute to American composer John Corigliano, including the local premiere of his third symphony, Circus Maximus, and the Red Violin Concerto with soloist Jennifer Koh.
http://classicalsouthflorida.blogspot.com/2008/10/corigliano-to-maximus-opens-festival.html

Thursday’s Corigliano event will open the festival’s “Great Performances” week, which will continue at Gusman Concert Hall on the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus. On Friday night the African-American Ritz Chamber Players will perform music of Dvorak and George Walker; pianist and outgoing Frost School teacher Ivan Davis will be saluted Saturday evening; Sunday afternoon will offer a Faculty Composers Concert, and pianist Ning An performs Chopin Sunday evening.

Most striking is Monday night’s concert, copresented with Friends of Chamber Music of Miami. The Brahms and Schumann piano quintets will be performed by an all-star lineup featuring violinists Cho-Liang Lin and Adele Anthony, violist Roberto Diaz, cellist William De Rosa and pianist Joseph Kalichstein. Call 305-284-4940 or log on to http://www.festivalmiami.com/

Firebird Chamber Orchestra takes wing

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:03:00 +0000

Last month Patrick Dupre Quigley and Seraphic Fire opened their seventh season with a creative Latin program breezily segueing from the Cuban Baroque composer Esteban Salas to modern works by two young Miami-area composers.

The chamber choir’s concerts are characteristically eclectic in 2008-09, taking in a program of populist New Orleans music later this month, Russian Orthodox works and another exploration of Christian and Jewish liturgical music.

Yet it is not the critically acclaimed choir, but Quigley’s new enterprise that most people will be keeping a close watch on this season. On Thursday night, Quigley will launch the Firebird Chamber Orchestra, which will perform four programs at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in its inaugural season. The program will be repeated Friday and Sunday.

Backed by a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, a home at the Arsht Center, and Quigley’s ability to draw audiences with smart, discerning repertoire presented in an approachable, user-friendly way, it would seem that his new project would be a surefire (sorry) success.

But will it succeed in the face of a devastating economy of historic scale and a circumscribed classical audience base in Miami? Even with the stellar artistic reputation that Quigley and Seraphic Fire have forged over six seasons, establishing a unique identity for a new chamber orchestra may prove difficult in a regional landscape that has not been fertile ground for new ensembles since the failure of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Boca Raton Symphonia has managed to carve out an audience base in southern Palm Beach County. But in Miami-Dade and Broward counties consistent success has been hard to come by: the Miami Chamber Symphony went bust and, after some initial success a few years back, the Renaissance Chamber Orchestra folded due to overambitious expansion and mismanagement. Other groups like Orchestra Miami, which has yet to announce a 2008-2009 season, have found it difficult to present more than a few concerts a season. And, even the charismatic Quigley could not draw audiences to a solo vocal recital series that Seraphic Fire launched in fall of 2006 and had to withdraw due to lack of attendance.

The 30-year-old conductor is characteristically confident, however, about the success of the Firebird Chamber Orchestra. Indeed, he sees little in the way of competition for what in his authentically minded view will be a slenderized chamber “orchestra” of Baroque dimensions with fewer than two-dozen players. "We actually don't have any real chamber orchestras that are chamber size,” Quigley says. “Once you get five violins in there, it's no longer a chamber orchestra---not in terms of what Bach and Mozart had. At that point, you're a Romantic medium-size orchestra.”

“My personal feeling is that chamber music should be able to fit into a salon. Less people, better players."

Towards that end, he has gone about recruiting the best musicians, maintaining a small core and cherry-picking other local and national players as needed, based on repertoire. For instance, in this week’s premiere program for strings, the co-concertmasters will swap places, with Baroque specialist Michael Albert as leader for the Vivaldi and Telemann works and Adda Kridler, a member of the Charleston Symphony, in the first chair for the Barber and Diamond. "We're trying to make it as authentic as possible for both styles when we mix it up," says Quigley. "It's sort of the same thing we do with Seraphic Fire with certain Romantic voices for Romantic stuff and more Baroque voices for Baroque stuff. I like thinkers in my ensemble and they're all very good thinkers as well as good players."

One way, Quigley sees the Firebird Chamber Orchestra establishing an identity, is, like Seraphic Fire, by offering more offbeat and adventurous repertoire than anyone else. “If there is a chamber orchestra in town I guarantee you that in the past 36 months they've played the Tchaik Serenade, probably the Siegfried Idyll and gone through the standard string orchestra rep. We try to stay outside the standard rep---certainly outside the rep for Florida."

This week's opener, spanning three centuries of music, is typical of what Quigley hopes to offer, featuring a Vivaldi concerto, Barber’s String Quartet, the central movement of which comprises the celebrated Adagio for Strings, and two rarities in Telemann’s Don Quixotte and David Diamond’s Rounds for String Orchestra. Doing the complete Barber String Quartet, Quigley says, exemplifies the ensemble's mission to present works from varied musical eras that give the music context and provide a frame of reference for audiences. "When was the last time the full Barber String Quartet was played in town? We've certainly heard the Adagio but we haven't heard it in context."

”I don't think programming a Tchaik symphony has any merit in terms of its relation to programming. Great, you're doing the status quo. But how does that relate to the rest of the program? An overture, a concerto and a symphony---who cares?! We're trying to take people to a different part of the chamber orchestra rep."

Towards that end the Firebird will perform arrangements of works for string quartet such as the Barber this week and Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet in November on a thematic program on loss and last things, which also includes Bach’s cantata Ich habe genug "The fact is that string quartets, sadly, don't really pull in this town. However chamber orchestras do. If we can introduce them to different and interesting parts of the rep, I think that's important."

Another way the Firebird will offer a difference is by featuring more vocal music on their programs, like the Bach cantata, in a region where classical vocal music is largely limited to mainstage opera productions. “I think doing Ich habe genug three nights in a row is something this town need to hear. For me it's one of the top three pieces of music of all time. And having the Schubert Death and the Maiden next to it provides context. The Schubert of course doesn't use any words, but it all comes back to the universal theme of death through music.”

Unlike Seraphic Fire, which performs in area churches, this week’s debut concerts will move from the sacred to the semi-profane. The original idea was to perform all concerts at the Arsht Center’s Knight Concert Hall in its yet-to-be-utilized chamber configuration. Instead, this week’s concerts have been shifted to the Peacock Rehearsal Hall in the Ziff Ballet Opera Houses, which will be converted into a nightclub setting with tables, full bar and drinks being served during the performance.

It seems an unorthodox setting for the debut of a new classical chamber orchestra but one that Quigley welcomes and says is in line with Seraphic Fire's quest for nontraditional concerts in nontraditional spaces. "I don't mind sounds of glasses or wine bottles being dropped,” he says. “It's part of the live experience. We have hearing aids go off and other disturbances when we play in churches. We don't need absolute silence."

For the popular conductor, the addition of a chamber orchestra fulfills his original vision of Seraphic Fire as a holistic European-style ensemble composed of voices and instrumentalists, and drawing musicians as needed for repertory, much like France’s Les Arts Florissants or Les Musiciens du Louvre.

“We started out that way but over three years ago when we went to just being the choir we had to cut back on the orchestra,” due to economics, Quigely says. “It's getting back to what we have always wanted to be, which is like the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir. In the end, it's about the music and about hearing the music.”

Patrick Quigley will conduct the Firebird Chamber Orchestra 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday and 7 p.m. Sunday at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts' Ziff Ballet Opera House in the Peacock Studio, Miami. Tickets are $40. Call the Arsht Center at 305-949-6722 or go to www.arshtcenter.org.

Corigliano to the Maximus

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:44:00 +0000

Festival Miami ushers in a new era this Thursday when the Frost School of Music’s concert series opens its 25th season with a celebration of John Corigliano’s music at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

Violinist Jennifer Koh will be the soloist in Corigliano’s Red Violin Concerto, and the American composer’s L’invitation au voyage will also be heard. But most significant is the Florida premiere of Corigliano’s Circus Maximus for wind ensemble.

This is the first time the University of Miami’s fall festival has moved off campus, part of a revamped structure overseen by Frost School dean Shelly Berg. Berg has grouped the festival into four thematic weeks by musical genre, with Thursday’s event kicking off the classical music lineup and succeeding weeks devoted to jazz, pop and Latin music through Nov. 3.

There has been some grumbling from inside and outside UM about the festival retooling. But it’s hard to fault the classical programming, particularly the opening-night tribute to Corigliano, who, at a remarkably youthful 70, stands as one of our finest and most original composers. His Symphony No. 1, a powerful and deeply felt homage to friends the composer lost to AIDS. remains the great symphony of the modern era. The Symphony No. 2 for strings, a retooling of his String Quartet, is less outwardly flashy, but an equally rich and probing work.

Circus Maximus, Corigliano’s third symphony, is reflective of the composer’s style with its audacious scoring, pointed social commentary and extreme and unorthodox challenges for musicians as well as conductor. Still, it's a singular work in Corigliano's canon, originating with his desire of "revitalizing the concert hall."

"In Beethoven's day the only way you could hear his music was in a concert hall,” says Corgliano from the home he shares in upstate New York with long-time partner, composer Mark Adamo. “Now you can jog while you're listening and look at the sunset. It's a very different world.

"So I wanted to take that particular space and think what could happen here with 2,800 people that can't happen in your living room? And the answer, is I can be spatial for the whole piece.”

Utilizing the concert venue in an offbeat way is not entirely new to Corigliano's art. His Clarinet Concerto arranges instrumentalists about the hall and the Pied Piper Fantasy is scored for children to play toy instruments in the audience and for the flute soloist to make a theatrical entrance and exit.

Circus Maximus takes this to another level with a 75-member wind ensemble, including 11 trumpets spread out through all levels of the Knight Concert Hall, with the distancing and varied sonic perspectives a key element of the performance. The work also calls for marching band and is capped by some of the most deafening passages one is ever likely to encounter in a classical venue, including a two-minute sustained chord that makes Shostakovich’s climaxes seem like a Haydn string trio.

Apart from the spatial element, the other inspiration came from Corigliano’s love of ancient Roman history, particularly the vast entertainment hippodromes like the Roman Coliseum and the Circus Maximus. He sees firm parallels between the gladiator battles and Christian sacrifices of Rome and the electronic bread and circuses served up by our own plasma TVs, iTune downloads, and unsavory popular culture like The Jerry Springer Show.

"I walked through it and around it," he said of the ancient Circus Maximus site. "Now it's just a field. It's enormous. But for a thousand years it was daily entertainment for Rome for 400,000 people a day. The government wanted to keep the people amused between the Coliseum and Circus Maximus And they didn't realize things were crumbling until they finally fell. We don't have arenas of 400.000. But we do have television, and the internet and the blogosphere and all these things are ways of getting our entertainment.

"We are besieged by entertainment. We're just saturated with information, if you look at a news broadcast you've got the crawl on the bottom, you have the newscaster talking and in the right-hand corner you have a picture of something else. So many different activities have to happen at the same time today. And there's a shorter attention span because we're multitasking like crazy. We're able to do five different things without doing anything neatly. "

Corigliano says he’s just as guilty as anyone else but sees personal and political dangers in the fact that the plugged-in accoutrements that make contemporary life rewarding also make it more tense and unsettled. “I can't say I don't like my iPhone because I love it,” says the composer. “I don't want to give it up. I love the technology: my plasma flat screen TV and my computer.

“But the same technology that brought us our iPhone is also the technology that can bring about our destruction. With one bomb our world will be over. If New York City goes up, everything's over, kiddo. So Circus Maximus is a piece that celebrates all of this wildness and craziness and yet is terrified of it."

That influence is clearly felt in the third movement, appropriately called Channel Surfing. Different groups of instruments are spread throughout the hall each with their own music to play. With a remote-control click, we switch from dance music to pathos to cartoons in an instant. “Nothing lasts more than a minute because you get bored,” says Corigliano. “The interruptions become faster and faster."

Most challenging for the players is the Circus Maximus movement, which concludes with a massive single chord, a "super-saturation" that, Corigliano says, is likely “the loudest noise ever heard at Carnegie Hall.” A “Prayer” follows that tries to make sense of all the cacophony, but the music again grows louder, wilder and more frenzied. Finally, the work ends with a violent shock, a shotgun blast that symbolizes for Corigliano what the stakes are of the current world situation. “That's the only way I could think of ending a piece like that,” he says.

The man in charge of conducting this daunting work is the Frost School of Music’s Gary Green, leader of the Frost Wind Ensemble. Green heard the Carnegie Hall premiere but confesses he was not initially that taken with the music. "I was moved by what John is trying to say in this symphony. I was deeply affected but not musically."

Indeed his first reaction was that it was “very loud.” Initially I thought it was sensory overload,” says Green. “There was so much, I couldn't tell where the craft was.” A second hearing in Washington with Leonard Slatkin leading the U.S. Marine Band, and further study of the score led Green to find its musical depth and political significance. “I tried to approach it with the composer's view and I’m really finding the craft in the piece now,” says Green. “It's been a learning experience for me and teaching this piece to students has been exhilarating.”

Green’s favorite sections are the more interior sections of this wildly theatrical work: the penultimate Prayer movement, which he believes offers “five minutes of John’s most beautiful music.” and the nocturnal, evocative Night Music I. "In not one place is there a time signature,” says Green of that movement. “It’s all based on feel and flow of sounds, There are wolf sounds here, nature sounds. It’s so quiet and unearthly, it’s surreal.”

That startling coda with the shotgun blast is problematic since even in these days of diverse course offerings, few music schools offer double majors in instrumental performance and marksmanship. Fortunately, for Green, he had an enthusiastic volunteer in Liana Purcell, the Wind Ensemble’s pianist, who will be firing the full-load blast at the coda.

The 25-year-old musician grew up in Georgia, when the nation was breaking away from the Soviet Union amid much violent civil strife. “We had a sniper on our roof for a while,” she says. “I grew up in a war and guns were a very common thing. I like shooting. It calms me down."

Purcell also recognizes that the shotgun blast is not just to provide a theatrical effect but to conclude the symphony on a powerful and pessimistic note. “The shotgun is a sign like it's the end of the world. It’s telling people to wake up, and saying you missed a chance to make things better."

Corigliano confesses that it was a relief to be finished with all the celebrations, performances and occasions of his 70th birthday season last year. "I'm not pressured terribly like last year, when it was like chaos. I had two days at home and five days away every week. When you realize you're 70, you do feel old. Not in terms of moving around but psychologically it does sound differently than 69."

He continues to be one of the most performed and recorded of living composers, with his Bob Dylan tribute Mr. Tambourine Man, just released on Naxos and a CD of Circus Maximus will be out on the same label in December. He’s also one of the few living composers to have a performing string quartet named after him. “I’m touched and amazed that they asked me,” he says. “I’m very honored."

Corigliano hasn’t yet begun work on his fourth symphony but he already knows exactly what form it will take and has set himself a challenge: a work written entirely for large chorus singing souunds but no words.

“It will be more than vocalise,” he explains. ”The voice can do more than just sing. So if you can orchestrate what the human voice and body can do and you have a hundred people it can be a very interesting piece. But I have a lot to learn about the chorus before I can write that."

Festival Miami opens with John Corigliano's Circus Maximus, L'Invitation au voyage and the Red Violin Concerto with soloist Jennifer Koh, the Frost Wind Ensemble, the Frost Symphony Orchestra and Frost Chorale. 8 p.m. Thursday at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, Miami. Tickets are $15-$75. www.festivalmiami.com; 305-284-4940.

Plain Dealer's silencing of music critic shows it's plain gutless

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:28:00 +0000

Last week it was revealed that Cleveland's leading newspaper, The Plain Dealer, had banned its music critic, Donald Rosenberg, from covering the Cleveland Orchestra due to what his editors viewed as excessively negative reviews of music director Franz Welser-Most. A younger colleague, Zachary Lewis, has been appointed music critic and will now cover all Cleveland Orchestra events.

Though he has lost his title as music critic, Rosenberg, above, will be allowed to review other classical music and dance organizations in Cleveland as he did previously ----just not the Cleveland Orchestra, which, of course, is the leading artistic organization in the region and one of the finest orchestras in the world. Daniel J. Wakin's story in The New York Times lays out the astounding details. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/arts/music/25crit.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

This is a dismal era for the newspaper industry, with many media companies foundering due to plummeting advertising and subscriptions, and therefore profits. Several leading media companies think the route to survival is to make massive staff cuts, gutting arts coverage, metro news and investigative reporting, usually in that order.

Uninspiring as that ongoing spectacle is, a case can be made that companies that are hemorrhaging money need to take drastic actions to survive. One can still debate the wisdom of what remains, with too many dailies sacrificing hard news, edge and testosterone in favor of suburban-mom “issues,” celebrity fluff and inane youth-oriented, where-to-have-a-cool-drink piffle.

Yet, even the desperation of the accelerated dumbing-down of content pales besides The Plain Dealer’s action last week. Profiles in courage are few and far between these days, but never has any newspaper in the U.S. or abroad ever demonstrated such complete capitulation to outside pressure or abject spinelessness as the Plain Dealer by silencing its own music critic's voice.

Don is a friend, but he's also a fine writer and superb and dedicated critic. No living music journalist knows the Cleveland Orchestra better or has covered them longer---for 28 years, the last 16 at The Plain Dealer--- and Don has written the orchestra’s official history as well.

His editors should be proud and honored to have such a scrupulous professional on staff—instead they throw Rosenberg under the train and kow-tow to an outside organization that has every reason in the world not to want honest independent coverage.

Rosenberg has been critical, at times scathing, about the limitations of the orchestra's music director Franz Welser-Most. Yet, like all honest critics, he's also given the Austrian conductor credit when his performances have earned it.

If Welser-Most's conducting were lionized elsewhere and Rosenberg were the only naysayer, perhaps the orchestra management and its supporters would have a point. But the fact is Welser-Most receives mixed to negative reviews by critics everywhere he is heard regularly---whether it be Rosenberg in Cleveland, me in Miami, or Tony Tommasini in New York. He still is branded with the nickname bestowed by a skeptical London orchestra player, “Frankly Worse than Most.”

In their Miami residency concerts, I've felt that Welser-Most's appearances have been largely disappointing, often lacking intensity and energy, the orchestra performing with customary polish but a kind of dutiful, airless quality. (The performance of Dvorak’s New World symphony at the Arsht Center last January is a prime example.) Perhaps its significant that in 2009, for the first time in its Miami residency, Welser-Most is only conducting one week of concerts rather than two as in previous seasons.

The orchestra’s executive director, Gary Hanson, has been upfront and straightforward in his dealings with me. But in the Times and other articles, he has given careful, lawyerly answers denying that there has been pressure brought to bear by him or board officials to have Rosenberg removed. Nonetheless, everyone in the music business is well aware that the orchestra has been overtly and covertly lobbying against Rosenberg with his editors for years. (Hanson was not available to comment this week, said a Cleveland Orchestra spokeswoman.)

The real question that should be asked---in the light of uninspiring performances, critical reviews and, even Cleveland Orchestra musicians speaking out against their conductor at the risk of endangering their own careers---why in God’s name would Cleveland Orchestra management extend Welser-Most’s contract to 2018? Nothing succeeds like mediocrity.

Honest and passionate reviews are always the enemy of entrenched cultural stagnation and untalented or overrated musicians. When an arts organization is criticized, they first go into denial mode and then attack the critic. This is nothing unusual and classic shoot-the-messenger tactics.

In a more courageous era, when newspapers were less economically threatened, independence and integrity were held up as guiding principles. Now the very people who should be in charge of upholding those principles are the first to trash them---notably The Plain Dealer’s dingbat editor Susan Goldberg, who is responsible for Rosenberg’s reassignment. It’s also become increasingly apparent in the blogosphere that Goldberg wrought similar havoc at the San Jose Mercury News during her tenure there.

With this single move, editor Goldberg—who has been on the job all of 18 months--- has done more to damage the reputation of the once-respected Plain Dealer than anything else in the paper’s century-plus history. For a related depressing example of ethical equivocation, check out the column last Sunday by the Plain Dealer’s ombudsman in which he twists himself into a pretzel trying to reconcile an earlier column defending Rosenberg’s integrity and professionalism with his current snap-to support of Goldberg’s decision. http://www.cleveland.com/readers/index.ssf?/base/opinion-0/1222590617279050.xml&coll=2

For Cleveland Orchestra’s management this is a Pyrrhic victory and a classic case of be careful what you wish for. Because of the heavy-handed tactics of the orchestra's leaders, board and supporters, the collateral backlash is now damaging the reputation of one of the nation's top orchestras and its innocent musicians are suffering for it.

When many institutions age and become irrelevant, they grow weaker and ever more corrupt before they die. As craven managers like the editors of The Plain Dealer make themselves ethical eunuchs by whoring themselves to the highest outside bidder of influence for advertising dollars, their actions will only accelerate the rapid flight from old-media outlets.

Arts journalism will survive online but most newspapers will not. Sadly, The Plain Dealer’s actions are a harbinger of similar events to come. The good news is that all previous existing monopolies on public debate that have grown corrupt and antiquated—regional, national and global--- are being dealt a death blow by the internet and blogosphere and the electronic democratization of the public square.

African rhythms and musical sonograms

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:07:00 +0000

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/.

[Photo by Ginga Asakura]

"Bonesetter" cuts to the marrow of Chinese experience

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:32:00 +0000

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.

Precious Auntie (Qian Yi) , the ghost of her dead grandmother, escorts Ruth on a mystical journey into her mother's past: she takes her to Immortal Heart, a village outside of Beijing in the 1930s, and to wartime Hong Kong, where the young LuLing (also sung by Cao) survived by writing letters home for the illiterate fishermen’s wives. Through the retrospective episodes, the hardships of LuLing’s life become apparent to Ruth, not least being menaced by the raffish villain Chang the Coffin Maker (the strong-voiced bass, Hao Jiang Tian), a kind of Szechuan Sportin' Life.

Ultimately, Ruth’s spiritual pilgrimage bridges the generations and the opera’s coda returns to the present. The dying LuLing asks her daughter for forgiveness for her harsh treatment of Ruth as a child, and at the moment of her passing, the grandmother's apparition returns to gently lead LuLing through the mist into the afterlife.

In pre-performance remarks Thursday night, the composer related the discussions and extensive field research in China he undertook over four years with Li Zhonghau, principal percussionist of the Chinese National Peking Opera Company.

For the most part, Wallace succeeds in his stated goal of creating a Western opera with prominent elements of traditional Chinese opera. Wallace has skillfully integrated Chinese instruments into his score, with a battery of exotic percussion and the opening fanfare-like balcony summons of two suonas, a double-reed instrument with a whiny trumpet-like timbre.

The most prominent Eastern element is embodied in the performer Qian Yi, as the mystical spirit, Precious Auntie. Yi’s seamless, fleet-footed movements and unearthly scalic wails reflect the strange (to Western ears) febrile Sprechstimme of the ancient kunju opera tradition.

Yet for all the deft interweaving of Eastern and Western musical traditions, the visual trappings —as with the Sino-Cirque du Soleil of the Dragon Dance opening sequence, and the large ensemble scene opening Act 2 in Hong Kong Harbor---overwhelm the opera’s intimate family drama. Eye-popping and musically fascinating as they are, the colorful costumes, fine choral singing and spectacle of the set pieces seem like stand-alone tableaux that interrupt the narrative. There is an attempt to insert so much ethnographic lore and local musical color —like the baffling dragon bone symbolism---that the opera ends up feeling a bit like a Chinese banquet where everything is exotic and tasty but one ends up feeling overfed.

The Bonesetter’s Daughter is an uneasy mix, a kind of Rough Guide to Chinese opera set alongside a traditional family narrative, with naturalistic and mystical elements that never quite cohere. The music is most successful in the direct comfrontations between Ruth and LuLing when Wallace leads with his tonal straightforward style, as with the sensitive string writing in the final scene.

It must be enormously gratifying for the Chinese and Chinese-American cast to finally be able to portray genuine Chinese characters on a major opera stage. The vocalism and acting of mezzo-sopranos Zheng Cao as Ruth and, especially, Ning Liang as the mature LuLing (above) were sensitively rendered, with Liang bringing great pathos to the affecting finale. Though rather youthful to be credible as Precious Auntie, Qian Yi's fluid grace and traditional vocalism were striking---and you have to love that hair. The singers were discreetly amplified, a necessity for the artists attuned to the intimate scale of Chinese opera, which. however, led to some indiscreet electronic feedback at the end of Act 1.

Steven Sloane conducted with focus and authority, ensuing that the brash and piquant timbres of the Chinese instruments made vivid impact. Ian Robertson elicited impassioned ensemble work from the SFO Chorus, Chen Shi-Zheng provided fluent stage direction and Leigh Haas’s production, with sets by Walt Spangler and colorful costumes by Han Feng, was a feast for the eyes.

[Photos by Terrence McCarthy]

The Bonesetter's Daughter runs through Oct. 3. Tickets are $15-$290. 415-864-3330; http://www.sfopera.com.

Back on the Beach Beat

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:32:00 +0000

The music season is heating up this weekend with several worthy events, unfortunately, many competing at the same times.

7:30 p.m. Saturday: The New World Symphony will serve up its final free preseason concert, this time with Alasdair Neale leading the entire contingent of musicians in works of Rachmaninoff, Ginastera and Roberto Sierra. Lincoln Theater, 541 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. www.nws.edu.

7:30 p.m. Saturday. Pianist Ilya Itin will tackle music of Haydn, Beethoven and Prokofiev (two of the War Sonatas) in a benefit for Patrons of Exceptional Artists, the fund-raising arm of the Miami International Piano Festival. $40 includes post-concert reception at the Steinway Piano Gallery, 4104 Ponce De Leon, Coral Gables. http://miamipianofest.com/calendar/special_9_27_08.html 305-935-5115.

8 p.m. Saturday. Lukas Ligeti performs his offbeat electronic music at the Harold Golen Gallery in Miami’s Wynwood District. (Scroll down for profile of Ligeti and concert details.)

8 p.m. Saturday. Thomas Sleeper leads the Frost Symphony Orchestra in a free event at UM’s Gusman Concert Hall, 1314 Miller Drive, Coral Gables featuring music of Chobaz, Verdi and Tchaikovsly

2-4 p.m. Sunday. Presented by iSaw, Sunday Jason Freeman’s new installation, Sound Microscope, will be unveiled at the Light Box Theater, 3000 Biscayne Blvd., Miami. www.isaw.info.

4 p.m. Sunday, the UM’s “jazz dean,” pianist Shelly Berg will join the Bergonzi Quartet in Brahms’ Piano Quintet and selections to be announced. The Bergonzi will also perform Ravel’s String Quartet. Gusman Concert Hall. $40. www.sundaymusicals.org.

Seraphic Fire opens with Cuban Baroque

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:17:00 +0000

By Greg Stepanich

The world's popular songbooks of the 20th and 21st centuries have been notably enriched by the music of Spanish America, but that's far less true for its orchestral and sacred music libraries, in particular with pieces from earlier centuries.

Seraphic Fire, the Miami-based chamber choir, opened its seventh season this week with a small but enlightening taste of what we've been missing. The 13-person singing group, backed by a three-piece continuo ensemble, returned to Palm Beach County Thursday afternoon after a two-year absence with a program of music primarily from the Latin American Baroque.

The house was modest -- no more than 50 people at the Harriet Himmel Theater in West Palm Beach's CityPlace -- but it was an appreciative house that listened intently and appeared to enjoy the concert. The group's next appearance at the Himmel in late October will feature the music of New Orleans, and likely will bring a larger crowd.

Artistic Director Patrick Dupre Quigley is one of the most interesting programmers in the area 's classical music community, and this concert was no exception. Titled El Fuego Serafico, the program featured five sacred works by the Cuban composer and priest Esteban Salas (1725-1803). Salas's music is much more Baroque in style than his dates would indicate, and one wonders whether his relative isolation in the far-off islands of the Spanish Empire had something to do with that.

Salas also was only a modest talent, a writer of attractive melodic lines and pleasing contrapuntal textures, as the first two pieces, O admirable sacramento and Ecce panis angelorum, indicated. The third piece, Pange lingua, was more complex, but still basically sunny music of praise.

Quigley's focus here was on smooth sound, and he got plenty of it from his ensemble. Entrances for the first bars of several of these pieces tended to be ragged, perhaps because the pacing of one piece to the next was so swift, as is this director's habit.

The opening set of Salas works -- meant to recreate "a scene from Corpus Christi Sunday at the Havana cathedral in the year 1785" -- was contrasted with a mini-Requiem mass of four pieces from two Mass of the Dead settings, one by Salas and the other by the Spanish Renaissance master Tomas Luis de Victoria. The Victoria works (Taedet animam meam and the Offertorium) were far darker and more vivid than the two Salas pieces (an Introit and Kyrie) they framed, but putting them all together did present very different ways of looking at the fact of death: Trembling before judgment, and solace in the face of loss.

Here again, because Quigley conceived the four pieces as part of a Requiem set, the joins between movements were meant to be seamless, though instead they were a little hasty. It would have been easier for the audience to digest the music given just a bit more time to prepare their ears for the contrast between the late 18th century of Salas and the early 17th century of Victoria. The singing was quite good overall, and the choir made inventive use of the Himmel's space, sending three of the men to a high stage above the floor to sing the chant for the Te decet hymnus section of the Salas Introit.

Four other 17th- and 18th-century composers from New Spain were represented by madrigral-style song settings full of rhythm and lively melody. Perhaps the most charming was the Christmas-themed Los coflades de la estleya of the Peruvian composer Juan de Araujo (1646-1712), with its vigorous call-and-response and its contagious feeling of headlong joy. The Seraphic Fire singers clearly had a good time singing this, and brought it off with gusto.

There was also some strong solo singing by soprano Gabrielle Tinto at the opening of the Marian song A la fuente de vienes, by the Colombian composer Juan de Herrera (1670-1730).

Today's concert also was notable for its inclusion of two contemporary pieces, one an encore performance of an Ave Maria by Homestead's Miguel Nieves, who wrote it several years ago while recuperating from head injuries suffered at Fort Sill. It's a very slight, short piece, and was sung with the appropriate respectful simplicity.

The other new work is literally fresh out of the workshop, and got its world premiere Wednesday night. Mi amado para mi, a setting by Seraphic Fire guitarist Alvaro Bermudez of words by St. Teresa of Avila, is a fine piece of contemporary choral music, tonal but not bland, and well-suited to its obsessive text and conversant with the language of jazz. Bermudez knows how to structure a piece for good narrative line: The opening motif, a murmur of a rising, then falling, half-step, at first broods over a static chord, but in the middle turns into a pulse, then returns at the very end to close down the argument.

The work also has a fugue, of all things, with a spiky subject, as the saint sings of being wounded with an arrow. Quigley said in remarks to the audience that this one of several pieces he's asked Bermudez to write for the choir, and I for one am looking forward to hearing more work from this young composer.

Seraphic Fire closed the concert with two pieces by the legendary Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernandez: Cachita and El Cumbanchero. These were a lot of fun, though the dryness of the Himmel was something of a drawback; the fat-chord arrangements the choir was using could have used a little resonance to make a richer impact.

The program will be repeated 7:30 p.m. Friday at First United Methodist Church in Coral Gables; 8 p.m. Saturday at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale; and 4 p.m. Sunday at Miami Beach Community Church. http://www.seraphicfire.org/.

Greg Stepanich has covered classical music, theater and dance for 25 years at newspapers in Illinois, West Virginia and Florida. He worked for ten years at The Palm Beach Post, where he was an assistant business editor and pilot of Classical Musings, a classical music blog. He now blogs at classicalgreg.wordpress.com, and works as a freelance writer and composer.

Realpolitik circa 14th-century Genoa

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:26:00 +0000

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 Opera’s Simon Boccanegra has one more performance 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $15-$290. 415-864-3330; http://www.sfopera.com/.

Korngold's haunting opera revived in style

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:48:00 +0000

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.

In the dual role of Marie/Marietta, Emily Magee overcame the wig disaster to provide a fiery and passionate tour de force debut. The American soprano has the dramatic power and lyric sensitivity for the role, and her rendition of Gluck das mir verblieb was beautifully sung, invested with just the right ache of nostalgic longing. Magee made Marietta’s own sadness and unwholesome history palpable and brought vehemence and daunting intensity to her climactic confrontation with Paul. She was also wholly credible as a dancer, displaying a light-footed grace, and brought ethereal purity to the passages in which she doubles as Marie’s apparition.

Lucas Meachem, here cast as both Paul’s friend Frank and the Harlequin Fritz, made much of his comprimario double-duty. The baritone proved an unusually forceful and imposing Frank, and a graceful Harlequin, though his rendering of Fritz’s Viennese waltz sounded tight opening night. As Paul’s loyal housekeeper Brigitta, Katharine Tier was too young for the role and failed to project in her brief, soaring Act 1 arietta.

Taking some minor trims, Donald Runnicles drew out the lyric set pieces too lovingly at times. But the company’s music director, who conducted this production at Salzburg and other venues, is clearly in synch with this opera, and led a sensitive, scrupulously balanced account of Korngold’s rich, opulent score, eliciting polished and responsive playing by the SFO orchestra.

Die tote Stadt has five more performances through Oct. 12. Tickets are $15-$290. 415-864-3330; http://www.sfopera.com.

[Photos by Terrence McCarthy]

Met opener an opaque experience

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:27:00 +0000

The Metropolitan Opera opened its 125th season Monday night with a glitzy, relentlessly promoted evening as Renee Fleming tackled a trio of favored roles in separate staged acts, with tenor Ramon Vargas and baritone Thomas Hampson providing backup firepower.

The added novelty was that the gala was transmitted live throughout North America at movie theaters as part of The Met: Live in HD series. I caught the La Traviata and Manon excerpts at the South Beach Stadium on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. Fleming looked radiant--- though alarmingly thin, a soprano friend thought---and for the most part sang with gorgeous tone, security, dramatic depth and emotional commitment, The popular soprano was at her finest in Act 2 of Traviata, bringing a world-weary sadness and desperate sensuality to the doomed Violetta, with excellent support from Vargas and Hampson, as Alfredo and Germont.

The Massenet fared less well with awkward stage direction and a bland designer gown, Fleming as Manon indulging in the odd pauses and italicized emphases she sometimes falls prey to. Vargas was terrific, however, fiery and intense with big vibrant tone in Ah, fuyez.

I left before the Capriccio finale, partly due to an early morning flight and partly due to the mounting frustration of watching the poor quality image on the big screen. This is the second Live in HD performance I attended at this theater and also the second time I’ve experienced inferior video. After I reported the dark, muddy image for Romeo et Juliette in the Miami Herald last season, I was assured by top Met officials that this was a fluke, and that the matter was investigated and the issue rectified.

Apparently not, because the image was once again washed out, lacking color and sharpness with a muted gray-green hue predominating. The Manon in particular was so opaque and devoid of color it looked like a 1950s black-and-white TV relay. The event was live from the Met as promised, but the image on the South Beach screen was incontrovertibly not high-definition quality. Again.

For the next broadcast, Strauss’s Salome with Karita Mattila on Oct. 11, I’ll try a different theater and report back. Meanwhile I’m interested in hearing about the experiences of others who attended Monday's Met transmission. Feel free to post a comment and please be specific about the location and theater where you attended.

Plugged into African music

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 23:30:00 +0000

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.”

Afrikan Machinery (Tzadik), certainly qualifies. The opening track, Balafon Dance System is a wild ride with its cacophony of crashing rhythms and shifting tonality. The insistent sampled sound of the balafon, the West African xylophone, serves as the album’s instrumental leitmotiv. In Entering: Perceiving Masks; Exiting: Perceiving Faces irregular electronic metres build up to a spectacular array of multilayed textures and counterpoint inspired by African pop and Ligeti’s memories of nights spent playing drums in open-air African bars. The massive, pulsing mechanistic wall of sound in Chimaeric Procession is a not-too-distant cousin of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, contrasted with the reggaeton and easy-going California feel (written in Palo Alto) of Great Circle’s Tune I. There’s even something like Walter/Wendy Carlos’s Switched-on Bach in the stately opening bass line of Great Circle’s Tune II.

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]

El Fuego Serafico

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 18:43:00 +0000

Seraphic Fire opens its seventh season this week, one that should prove significant for Patrick Dupre Quigley (left) and his gifted singers. In addition to the chamber choir offering its standard jambalaya of the traditional and diverse, Quigley will launch the new Firebird Chamber Orchestra Oct. 9 at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami.

But this week it’s Seraphic Fire’s turn, leading off its season with five performances of Latin choral music, centered on the Cuban Baroque composer Esteban Salas. The program will also cover music from Spain, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico and New World villancicos, going beyond the 18th-century to include works by two local composers. Alvaro Bermudez’s Mi Para Mi will be premiered and the choir will also reprise the Ave Maria by Miguel Nieves, a strikingly beautiful work debuted by Seraphic Fire in 2005. Tickets are $35 ($87 for a season subscription). 305-476-0260; http://www.seraphicfire.org/

Seraphic Fire performs:

8 p.m. Wednesday at Corpus Christi Catholic Church, 3220 NW 7th Ave., Miami 33137

1 p.m. Thursday at the Harriet Himmel Theater, 700 S. Rosemary Ave., West Palm Beach 33401

7:30 p.m. Friday at First United Methodist Church, 536 Coral Way, Coral Gables 33134

8 p.m. Saturday at All Saints Episcopal Church, 333 Tarpon Drive, Fort Lauderdale 33301

4 p.m. Saturday at Miami Beach Community Church, 1620 Drexel (on Lincoln Road), Miami Beach 33139

Renee Fleming live from New York

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:27:00 +0000

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

Brave (and free) New World preview

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:58:00 +0000

With Festival Miami starting in October this season, September is more musically barren than usual, but there are still some isolated events.

The New World Symphony does not open its season until next month, but one can scope out this year’s roster (a third of the orchestra is new each fall) at two free preview concerts. Friday night’s program for woodwinds and brass is especially venturesome, offering Stravinsky’s Octet, Varese’s Deserts, Emil Hartmann’s Serenade and Musicians Wrestle Everywhere by Judith Weir.

On Saturday the New World strings will be in the spotlight for two of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (Autumn and Winter), George Walker’s Lyric for Strings, and Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

Due to reserved seating, both free events are “sold out” on paper but there are usually ample no-shows, so go to the Lincoln Theater at 541 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach and take a chance. Note that the New World’s evening performances now start at 7:30 this season. http://www.nws.edu/.

Season Preview 2008-2009

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:40:00 +0000

The only constant in life is change and that surely applies to South Florida---the epicenter of transience---more than most places. Across three counties, the volatile, ceaselessly mutating music scene is marked by new beginnings, novel challenges and evolution this season, as well as some stagnation and retrenchment.

The New World Symphony (http://www.nws.edu/) remains the brightest light in the local classical firmament. This is the Miami Beach orchestra's last full season at the Lincoln Theatre before moving into its new Frank Gehry-designed, high-tech edifice, and the New World will once again serve up the most discerning repertoire and starriest soloists and guest conductors led by artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas. MTT will lead off the New World's season not with the usual one-off gala but instead leap right into subscription concerts with the opening weekend of Ravel and Stravinsky featuring fast-rising young pianist Yuja Wang (Oct. 17-19).

Other New World events to mark on your calendar are Tilson Thomas' program of Beethoven and Richard Strauss at the Arsht Center (Oct. 25), the brilliant young English composer Thomas Ades conducting his music and others (Nov. 22), Emanuel Ax making a belated NWS bow in Beethoven (Dec. 12-14), conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy and violinist Joshua Bell in joint NWS debuts with music of Mahler and Saint-Saens (Jan. 24), a Charles Ives festival with pianist Jeremy Denk (Feb. 20-22), and Marin Alsop's return in music of Dvorak, Liszt and Golijov with cellist Alisa Weilerstein.

More questions surround the Concert Association of Florida this season than any other in memory, from its recent (and apparently unrequited) bid for the Arsht Center to take the presenting organization over, to the on-again-off-again Florida Symphony initiative, and eyebrow-raising move into booking non-classical artists like Pink Martini last spring and Jose Feliciano and Mariza this season.

The Concert Association of Florida (http://www.concertfla.org/) still offers plenty of first-class orchestras---largely booked by founder Judy Drucker before her exit last summer---- including Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra (Nov. 3 at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale, Nov. 6 at the Arsht Center in Miami), the Budapest Festival Orchestra (Jan. 28, Arsht) and Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic (Feb. 29, Arsht). All of the above orchestras will also appear at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach (http://www.kravis.org/.)

The Cleveland Orchestra will come to town for its annual three weeks of residency, this time with guest conductors Kurt Masur and Pinchas Steinberg leading populist fare of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky (March 6 and 7 and April 2 and 4). Franz Welser-Most's sole week (Jan. 30-31) in 2009 has the most interesting lineup with Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony (No. 7) and soprano Measha Brueggergosman in Wagner's Wesendonck Songs (http://www.artshtcenter.org/).

This season will see the debut of the Firebird Chamber Orchestra. Patrick Quigley's new ensemble, which premieres Oct. 9-11 at the Arsht Center in music of Vivaldi, Telemann, and David Diamond, and will perform three other intriguing programs in its first season. Quigley's choir, Seraphic Fire, will serve up a season-opener of Cuban Baroque music (Sept. 25-28) a program of New Orleans jazz (Oct. 30-Nov. 2), Russian Orthodox works (Feb 12-15) and the now-traditional Handel's Messiah (Dec. 19). (http://www.seraphicfire.org/.)

The biggest opera stars this season will be heard not on the opera stage, but at the Knight Concert Hall as part of Florida Grand Opera's demurely titled Superstar Concert Series, featuring Dmitri Hvorostovsky (Jan. 10), Marcello Giordani (March 9) and Bryn Terfel, left (April 6).

Neither Florida Grand nor Palm Beach Opera is exactly breaking new ground with adventurous repertoire or blockbuster singers in its staged productions. FGO has the most interesting curio with Leo Delibes' once-popular Lakme starring Leah Partridge (opening Feb. 21), and local favorite Eglise Gutierrez will make her FGO debut in the season-opening new production of Verdi's La Traviata (Nov. 15). Rossini's La Cenerentola, Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Puccini's Madama Butterfly make up the balance of the FGO season. For the first time, this year all productions will be double cast, so if you want to catch a particular singer, check your dates carefully. http://www.fgo.org/.

What Palm Beach Opera lacks in programming daring, it makes up for with consistent casting and a charismatic music director in Bruno Aprea. The dynamic Aprea is at his finest in core Italian rep, so figure on Verdi's Rigoletto (Dec. 12-15) and Bellini's Norma (Jan. 23-26) as best bets. La Boheme and Le nozze di Figaro are also slated this season.(http://www.pbopera.org/.)

For more offbeat repertoire, one can venture across the bog to Sarasota Opera for its spring festival, which this year (Feb 7 -March 29) offers Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz and Verdi's Don Carlos along with Tosca and L'elisir d'amore (http://www.sarasotaopera.org/.). And if you don't mind hearing worthy voices in rough-around-the-edges productions, the fledgling Miami Lyric Opera has Bellini's I Puritani on tap (March 26 and 28) (http://www.miamilyricopera.org/).

Festival Miami (http://www.festivalmiami.com/) opens with a tribute to John Corigliano Oct. 9 at the Arsht Center featuring the premiere of his Circus Maximus for wind ensemble and Red Violin Concerto with soloist Jenifer Koh. Also worth checking out are an all-star chamber concert with the Brahms and Schumann piano quintets Oct. 13 and the closing two-night salute to Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera (Nov. 2 and 3).

Sunday Afternoons of Music (http://www.sundaymusicals.org/) offers a worthy lineup including violinist Elmar Oliviera, (Jan. 11, rescheduled due to Hurricane Ike), the Miami debut of cellist Steven Isserlis (March 14) and Eglise Gutierrez, left, in recital (Jan. 4). The Master Chorale of South Florida enters a new era with artistic director Joshua Habermann, and will open its season with Mendelssohn's Elijah (Nov. 14-16). (http://www.masterchoraleofsouthflorida.org/).

The Boca Raton Symphonia opens its second season with music director Alexander Platt Dec. 7. There's also the Miami Bach Society, the Boca Festival of the Arts spotlighting Itzhak Perlman, the Miami International Piano Festival, Miami Symphony Orchestra and season schedules yet to be announced by Friends of Chamber Music, Project Copernicus and other organizations. Watch this space for weekly best bets on upcoming musical events throughout the season.

American string quartets, lost and found

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:16:00 +0000

The string quartet has occupied a strange place in the American musical landscape. While it was the medium of choice for the deepest and most profound thoughts of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Shostakovich, it has served more as a one-off venture for many American composers. Samuel Barber’s single work in the genre, produced the Adagio for Strings, a mainstay of the concert hall. Elliott Carter’s five quartets are more respected than loved but receive regular performances. There have been a handful of modern masterworks in the genre by John Corigliano and Aaron Jay Kernis and other quartets that deserve to be revived by Walter Piston, George Rochberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and, especially, David Diamond.

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.

A rare foray into Mexican classical music

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:47:00 +0000

Even in a Latin cultural milieu like Miami, rarely does one encounter the classical music of Mexico. Once in a great while, Silvestre Revueltas’ Sensemaya is aired but even the celebrated Carlos Chavez is infrequently performed, let alone works by contemporary Mexican composers.

Props then to pianist Mia Vassilev (left) and cellist Javier Arias, aka the Orpheus Duo, for their concert of Mexican music for cello and piano presented Tuesday night at Gusman Concert Hall. The program, to be repeated Friday night at Florida International University, also served as Vassilev’s doctoral recital (in accompanying and chamber music), and offered a varied and bracing conspectus of Mexican classical works.

There is likely more going on in contemporary Mexican music circles than most people realize, since the two most intriguing works on the program were by living composers. Federico Ibarra (born 1946) has written in every genre including symphonies, ballets, chamber music, songs and opera. His Musica para Teatro III is a suite cast in five movements that are concise to the point of being epigrammatic. Ibarra’s style is angular and ironic, alternating jocular and sardonic elements and off-center dance rhythms---a south-of the-border Prokofiev---and his music was given a taut, biting performance by the Orpheus Duo.

Leonardo Coral, 46, was represented by his Cello Sonata. Coral’s lucid, highly focused music is spare yet atmospheric. In the opening section, Espejos s de Luna y Viento (reflection of the moon and the wind), an unsettled fragile lyricism is set against hard-edged percussive writing. The Lamento offers a nostalgic cello solo that grows more impassioned backed by a spectral piano accompaniment. The finale has the strongest native element, a kind of folk dance on mescaline, jagged and driven with fleeting rememberance of the lyric elements. Both musicians were clearly inspired by Coral’s sonata, which receive the finest advocacy of the evening.

There's nothing particularly nationalistic about the Cello Sonata of Manuel M. Ponce (1882-1945), written in a traditional European style. Few would guess the first three movements came from Mexican origins, though the sonata displays the well-crafted professionalism for which Ponce was known, with a rhapsodic opening movement, scherzo-like section, and lovely, introspective Arietta. The brilliant final Allegro burlesco has more recognizably Latin vitality, but the long opening movement tends to sprawl.

The celebrate Chavez, Aaron Copland’s friend and closest colleague, was represented with his songful Madrigal, the cello line given ample yearning by Arias. The Mexican-born cellist’s father Emmanuel Arias y Luna was represented with his Dos Piezas, in which the brilliance and rhythmic energy of the cancion and jarabe offered the most direct populist folk flavor.

Arias’ intonation could have been more consistently focused, but the Mexican-born cellist of the Amernet Quartet showed clear affection and an idiomatic feel for the music. Vassilev sounded a bit cautious in sections that required more unbridled dynamism, but her playing was consistently vital and polished, with a nuanced expressive palette.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Friday at Florida International University’s Wertheim Performing Arts Center, 11200 SW 8th St. in Miami. Admission is free.

Mexican Orpheus

noreply@blogger.com (Lawrence A. Johnson) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:38:00 +0000

Late notice but the talented Orpheus Duo is presenting an intriguing (and free) program of Mexican chamber music this week. Cellist Javier Arias and pianist Mia Vassilev will team up for cello sonatas by Manuel Ponce and Leonardo Coral, Federico Ibarra's Musica para Teatro III, Carlos Chavez's Madrigal, and Dos Piezas by Emmanuel Arias y Luna. The program will be performed 8 p.m. Tuesday at the University of Miami's Gusman Concert Hall, 1314 Miller Drive, Coral Gables and 8 p.m. Friday at Florida International University's Wertheim Performing Arts Center, SW 8th St and 107th Ave., Miami.