Last month composer SCOTT PENDER attended a two-week summer music intensive known as the John Duffy Composers Institute, part of

But it may as well be called Opera Camp.

According to Pender, the sessions are for composers of opera and musical theatre to bring alive their works and get feedback from the collaborating artists and senior composers.  The musical staff consisted of founder John Duffy (formerly Mr. Meet the Composer), music director Alan Johnson, stage director Rhoda Levine, and vocal coach Patrick Mason. Also on hand were visiting composers Libby Larsen, Fred Ho, and Ricky Ian Gordon, and librettist/lyricist Mark Campbell.

Pender brought along his latest composition, the one-scene stage piece “Clever Elsie,” It’s based on his own translation and adaptation of a German tale originally collected by the brothers Grimm.

“I chose this story for two reasons: first, I couldn’t find any evidence that it had previously been set to music; and second, the repetitive structure of the story appealed to me,” says Pender.

Here’s a partial synopsis and a couple excerpts from the libretto”

Clever Elsie lives at home with her mother and father and two servants. As so often happens, especially in fiction, the story really takes off when a stranger shows up in town.

My name is Hans, and I’ve come a long, long way to ask for your daughter’s hand, but only if she’s really as clever as they say, clever as they say.

Mother & Father: Oh, she’s no fool: she’s so sharp, she can even see the breeze blowing down the street.

Ensemble: Oh, she’s no fool: she’s so sharp, she can even hear a housefly sneeze.

The central portion of the scene consists of a repeated litany expressing fear over what might happen. Clever Elsie sings alone the first time, other voices add on with each repeat so that a solo becomes a duet becomes a trio becomes a quartet becomes a quintet.

If I get Hans, and we get a kid, and it gets big, and comes down here to draw some beer, maybe this pickaxe might fall on his head and strike him dead, dead.

Now back at home in the Washington DC area, Pender admits to a post-camp let down.  It’s a feeling probably familiar to all who escape for summer intensives, whether boy scouts or composers.

“Most of my colleagues agreed with me that we all suffered from what I called ‘Duffy withdrawal,’” he says. “It left me feeling kind of lost for a week or two. Eventually, as is almost always the case, picking up the pencil and score paper made it better.”

At least that’s the impression given by the subtitle to a 2008 piece.

But the work’s name – “Kidnapping Water: Bottle Operas” – is actually deceptive. Rather than mass-produced take-home music, the piece is more about making audiences go the distance.

Like a musical Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the 39-year old Seattle-based composer created a series of 64 musical miniatures, each for a singer and a percussionist.  They’re mean to each be performed in a different body or pool of water.  It’s never actually been done in one continuous trek, but was debuted in eight installments, taking place in lakes, ponds and streams of the Pacific Northwest during the 2008 Bumbershoot Festival of the Arts. A concert version of excerpts is coming up on May 1 at Seattle’s Town Hall.

Raised on musical theatre and action flicks, I became interested in drama and martial arts. Classical music, avant-garde techniques and sacred ceremonies also inform my mix of lyrical melodies with surprising twists. Living in the Pacific Northwest, where the mountains, trees and water remain powerful, further inspires my approach to writing.

With his current theatrical work in process, Au Yong goes from the expansive outdoors to everyone’s worst nightmare of confinement. “Stuck Elevator” is based on the true story of a Chinese food delivery man in New York City who got trapped in an elevator – for three days!  The piece has been accepted for the Yale Institute for Music Theatre in June, which will culminate in two public performances, June 25-26.

As the son of Chinese immigrants in America, I search for ways music connects people with the places they call home. I listen to stories and sounds to find meaning in a world filled with beauty and terror…

Interested in the interplay between nature, architecture, sound, noise, chaos, and repetition, I find musical gestures in everyday actions. These gestures form the basis of ceremonial works created to honor the ritual of people who gather to listen.

But one classical pianist, Anthony de Mare, has come up with a fresh approach to celebrating Sondheim.  About five years ago, de Mare began talking with composer friends — and he knows lots of composers — about them making short (10 minutes or less) piano arrangements/reworkings/homages to selections from the Sondheim songbook.

There’s plenty of precedent for such a thing, starting with Gershwin songs for the piano by Gershwin himself, by Art Tatum and Earl Wild, among others.  De Mare can also be quiet the showman on stage — he’s talked, sung and even tap danced while playing at the keyboard — so there’s lots of potential for where the project, titled “Liasons,” could go as a concert/theater event.

De Mare first approached Sondheim with a letter in November 2006 and got a quick and positive reply.

“The opening line in his first response was ‘I’m flattered and delighted by your interest in my songs, and your project sounds intriguing indeed,’” says de Mare. “We still have not yet met in person but I have about 15 notes from him regarding his opinion, suggestions and excitement about the project.”

“He’s never put any restrictions on anything,” continues de Mare. “In one of our first exchanges, he said the project sounded enormously ambitious and he found it a bit hard to believe that the list of distinguished composers I was intending to approach would take the time to write variations or settings of someone else’s songs. And he often referred to my list of collaborators as ‘A-list composers.’”

The match-up of composers and songs, though still in development, is included at the end of this story.  At the top of the list is Sondheim’s former teacher, the 93-year old serialist master Milton Babbitt.  His selection? “I’m Still Here.”

Anthony de Mare

According to de Mare, more than a few composers from outside the classical music world were approached, including Elton John, David Byrne, and Elvis Costello among others, but they declined participation because of other commitments.  But the list does include jazzman Fred Hersch, theater/film composer Peter Golub and musical theater composer Eric Rockwell.

“Surprisingly, there were very few cases where two composers chose the same song,” explains de Mare. “There was always some discussion regarding their choice and many would offer personal reasons or insights as to why a particular song resonated with them.  Some actually surprised me with their choices.”

Generally speaking, getting composers on board was the easy part. Raising money for commissions has taken time. De Mare had hoped to have at least part of “Liasons” ready to debut during this birthday year but the economic downturn caused delays. Sondheim, though, has helped with fundraising by suggesting figures in the theater world who might contribute.  Arts centers in the U.S. and Canada, where de Mare will perform “Liasons,” have also pitched in.  Nearly $40,000 has been raised to date.

The first roll out of works will take place in March and April next year at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland in College Park.

Like the old fashioned out-of-town try-out of a musical, de Mare wants to work with the material before bringing it to New York.  He ultimately envisions the songs filling three evenings and plans to engage a director to shape and add to it.  Recordings are also planned.

“And it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long long time,” he says. “And everybody seems to like the whole idea because it’s a different angle for his music.”

Milton Babbitt: I’m Still Here (Follies)

Mason Bates: song TBD

Eve Beglarian: song TBD

Derek Bermel: Sorry-Grateful (Company)

William Bolcom: song TBD

Kenji Bunch: The Ballad of Sweeney Todd

Michael Daugherty: song TBD

Peter Golub: Children and Art (Sunday in the Park)

Ricky Ian Gordon: Every Day a Little Death (A Little Night Music)

Annie Gosfield: A Bowler Hat (Pacific Overtures)

Jake Heggie: A Weekend in the Country (A Little Night Music)

Fred Hersch: No One Is Alone (Into the Woods)

Jerome Kitzke: Sunday, Lesson #8 & Move On (Sunday in the Park)

Ricardo Lorenz: Mrs. Lovett medley (Sweeney Todd)

Paul Moravec: Losing My Mind (Follies)

David Rakowski: The Ladies Who Lunch (Company)

Steve Reich: Finishing the Hat (Sunday in the Park)

Eric Rockwell: You Could Drive a Person Crazy (Company)

Daniel Bernard Roumain: Assassins (selection)

Frederic Rzewski: Assassins (selection) or The Frogs (selection)

Rodney Sharman: Beautiful (Sunday in the Park)

David Shire: Comedy Tonight (Forum)

Bernadette Speach: Liaisons/Send In The Clowns (A Little Night Music)

Nils Vigeland: Merrily We Roll Along (medley)

Gossip of the music world and the state of opera was the main topic over dinner. At one point, Mike hit a familiar refrain, saying something like, “What’s happened to opera, anyway? Such strange things going on in the staging and the requirement that men remove their shirts. When did it become a visual art and stop being an aural one?”

I was too respectful of my former professor to engage, but I chuckled inside since after dinner I would be headed to the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust.” And I hadn’t a clue who was going to be singing. I was going in order to see the incredible staging by Robert Lepage, which blew me away last season when I caught it at the movies.

“Faust” was even better in person.  I missed some of the close-ups — like the evil grin of Mephistopheles and, yes, the hunky male acrobats without shirts — but the grand scope and over-arching ideas of the staging became more clear and rewarding from a seat in the mid-orchestra, instead of at my local multiplex.

For the record, though, the musical performances were good to great. Tenor Ramon Vargas conveyed well Faust’s progression — first an old man, then a young man again, eager and seeking, in love and ardor, and finally caught in hopeless desperation.  I would have liked a bit more sinister bite and general physicality from baritone Ildar Abdrazakov as Mephistopheles. As for soprano Olga Borodina as Marguerite, well, she just didn’t compare with the sumptuous Susan Graham from last year.  Throughout the night, James Conlon had that terrific orchestra and amazing chorus well in hand and kept everything moving with gusto.

Now, on to Lepage’s work.

In “Faust,” he creates a visual language that brings out the libretto’s emphasis on above and below, heaven and hell, and the purgatory of the earthly plane.  (Do you see love’s star in the vault of heaven?)

The stage is a giant grid that can become separate compartments or one giant screen for projections of live and interactive video. Think of the set for the Hollywood Squares and add little window shades on the front and back of each square.

Near the beginning, flocks of dark birds circle and swarm.  Perhaps they’re an omen but they also function to, in effect, wipe the whole slate clean.  There won’t be many circles or spirals thereafter. Everything is rigid right angles.

Soon we’re in a church and stained glass windows are projected from bottom to top.  Then we get our first glimpse of those acrobats.  First one comes out, wearing a loincloth, and climbs onto the intersection of steel posts and takes the pose of Christ on the cross — the cross, the axis mundi of spiritual salvation. But soon, four more Christs come out and, eh gad, we have five crucifixes.

For all the Christian associations of “Faust,” there’s a nice pagan emphasis on the elements of life — earth, air, fire, water — in both the libretto and this cinematic staging. (Spirits of earth and air stir your dreams.)

A greenish water that fills the screens as Mephistopheles takes Faust away in a rowboat. Figures dive into the water and, through the magic of technology, we see them become amorphous blobs floating in the liquidy projections, like sprites, perhaps, or fetus, ready for reincarnation.

Near the beginning of Part III, the set is a huge blue and white country manor and the shadow of a tree can easily be seen against it. And the tree sways in the wind. When have we ever seen (not heard) wind (air) in the theatre? Of course, we’ve all felt it when a hall is drafty and chilly as it was at the Met that night (though presumably that wasn’t part of Lepage’s doing).

Twice the male acrobats seem to turn the axis on its side and move across the surface of the set as if it were a floor.  In Part II they are soldiers marching up and down the stage, and the live video makes the green grass of the earth move buoyantly under their feet.

Then, after intermission, when the female dancers are gallivanting around in the manor house, the men return as some kind of red serpents or gargoyles.  Suspended from above, they seduce and violate the women, like in a mid-air 69-position. It’s not particularly violent, but it is certainly a forced, physical coupling of above and below.

When Faust and Marguerite finally are alone for a love duet, Lepage places them some distance apart singing straight out to the audience. Yet at the same time, he brings out pairs of dancers within each cubicle of the set and they unite in a gentle love-making dance. Behind each of them, a golden flower blooms. (What pleasure calls you into this peacock’s room?) It seems to say that in the union of sex, all barriers and grids are blown away by a radiant unfolding circle of beauty.

During Marguerite’s aria in Part III, fires flicker at all levels of the stage, and her face is broadcast huge onto the screen, itself partially in flames. (Love’s searing flame now consumes each day.)  We know she’s in love but it’s hard to tell if it’s her assumption or her immolation.

In the penultimate scene, when Faust and Mephistopheles are racing to the gates of hell on horseback, the male acrobats are suspended in profile in front of images of galloping horses.  Finally on the right side of the stage, Faust drops off his horse and falls down, down, down. And the male chorus (shirts off) is seen in red light at the bottom of the stage. Devils welcome their newest prize.

Finally, there is there is Marguerite’s journey up to the blue clouds of heaven.  No great technological magic here, only another ladder, which has been a reoccurring image throughout the night.  And rather than resorting to a dancer taking her place, the star soprano herself (with a tether on her back) climbs some 40 or 50 feet into the fly space above the Met’s enormous stage. Angels sing to welcome her.

Her journey began in August at the river’s headwaters in Lake Itasca, Minnesota. With a car, a kayak, and a bike, plus the company of various fellow travelers (friends who sign on for a few days or weeks at a time), Beglarian is following the water’s southern flow and getting to know the sights and sounds of the river and the land, the cities and towns and their people.

“I am interested in how our relationship to the nature, geography, and ecology of the river is manifested in music, literature, and all the arts. Just as the Mississippi River is one of the defining natural features of the North American continent, so it has also been one of the defining features in the development of American culture, and of music in particular,” wrote Beglarian, 51, in a grant proposal last spring.  Some money from a Minnesota foundation came through in July and was the impetus to set sail, so to speak.

Eve at Lover's Leap in Hannibal, Missouri.

Beglarian expects to make it to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico by the end of the year, then spend January through March at an arts colony in California. While there, she’ll decompress and see what her own creative instincts want to say about the experience. She’ll hit the water and the roads again in spring 2010 and retrace her route northward, from Louisiana to Minnesota.

Beglarian is recording sounds along the way, which will be fodder for future musical creations.  And she’s blogging extensively at www.evbvd.com/riverblog.

So far her entries are no sublime paean to nature.  She talks a lot about logistical hassles.  For example, her kayak floated away one night and more than once her bike has nearly been stole.

Another running theme is the relationship between the river and industry, old and new.  Here’s an excerpt about biking past a rock quarry near Davenport, Iowa:

“The road was muddy with accidental cement made from the combination of limestone dust and the morning’s rain. It coated the underside of my bike, my legs, the tires… I get to thinking how everything has its price. You want cement, you have to tear holes in the bluffs to get limestone… You want to use the Mississippi to move goods, you have to constantly dredge a nine-foot channel and build dams and locks… I realize that even my relatively green, relatively low-impact life is unthinkable without cement plants and dams and brutal quarries hidden in out-of-the-way places.”

While she did drop in on a Baptist church one Sunday morning in Fort Madison Iowa, Beglarian mostly encounters people of similar political leanings.

“In nearly two months of traveling, I have yet to meet anyone who even watches TV, let alone supports the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or doesn’t want to reform health care in this country. I’m out here in the heartland of America, but I am fully aware that I’m not in fact meeting an authentic cross-section of Americans. Is that because I’m biking and kayaking, so generally meeting people who exercise, which skews against TV watchers? Is it because I’m so obviously a scary artsy-dykey type that only NPR-listening newspaper-reading locavores will even talk to me?! Or is the country so divided that Red Staters and Blue Staters are simply invisible to one another, living parallel but completely separate lives in the same places? I really wonder about this.”

Another question is where Beglarian’s musical path will lead after her river journey concludes.  As a composer, she’s a prolific but has never been easy to pin down stylistically, though an adept hand with technology shows up regularly in her pieces.

Beglarian’s most recent CD release is a collaborative theater work, “Electric Ordo Virtutum,” which was created and performed with three other women composers at Lincoln Center about ten years ago.  With the collective name Hildegurls, they created a post-modern tribute to Hildegard of Bengin, the medieval abbess and composer.  Beglarian sings throughout the piece but her contribution as a composer is Act III. It’s a kind of dark night of the soul. A woman’s voice struggles to maintain a wondering chant tune as it’s bombarded with a barrage of electronics that bring to mind a sonic representation of the Transformers.

A more wide ranging and pleasant collection of Beglarian’s own music is “Tell the Birds,” released on New World Records three years ago.  It includes a couple of perky chamber works, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and “FlamingO,” and a ravishing and seamless duet for pipe organ and electronics, “Wonder Counselor.”

For many years Beglarian was a producer of audio books and the spoken word plays a part in several pieces on “Tell the Birds.” British actor Roger Rees narrates the ecstatic, microcosmic explosions and mutations in “Creating the World.”  And Beglarian herself narrates “Landscaping for Privacy,” a monologue to one’s lover as they drive out of the city and into the quasi-pastoral settings of suburbia.  The gently drumming music and sense of wonder in the narration combine beautifully and speak well of Beglarian’s capacity for exploration and discovery – traits she’s calling in for sustained periods in her Mississippi voyage.

Some evidence: Almost 50 years after its premiere, “West Side Story” receives an average of 300 productions a year in the United States and Canada, while the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of “Wonderful Town” closes on Jan. 30, after having played more than 500 performances. In concert halls, Bernstein was the most-performed American orchestral composer during the 2003-04 season, according to the American Symphony Orchestra League.

Even the more thoughtful and less sunny aspects of Bernstein’s work seem to be shining lately. A collection of his famed “Young People’s Concerts” has just been reissued as a nine-DVD set, and his most daunting compositions of religious argument and political commentary including the cursing-the-heavens Symphony No. 3 “Kaddish” and the apocalyptic cry for peace “Mass” have been re-recorded and are getting performances on a surprisingly regular basis.

From the dancing to the preaching, virtually all facets of the Bernstein legacy can be seen and heard locally as part of The Egg’s jam-packed festival “Leonard Bernstein’s Living Legacy,” which starts tonight. For two weeks, Albany will be the center of the Bernstein universe.

The lineup includes two orchestral programs, new takes on his music by jazz artists and a modern dance troupe, a theatrical exploration of his writings and ideas (“Score”), a visit from the composer’s daughter Jamie Bernstein Thomas, and more.

“He was a natural choice,” says series producer Peter Lesser of The Egg, explaining that the Bernstein fest is the first in the venue’s new series of “Living Legacy” tributes to great artists from the state.  Lesser adds that it was easy to program a wide-ranging series of events, drawing on both local and national talent, because Bernstein’s influence stretches far beyond music and encompasses theater, dance and film.

“He managed to do a lot of different things well, (and) he didn’t have a lot of snobbery,” says Don Byron, a clarinetist and composer from New York City. “He always just showed that kind of openness to stuff, and then gave it all the same quality of effort.”

Byron will bring his jazz ensemble to Albany for a performance with the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company.  Drawing on his deep knowledge of the Bernstein catalog, Byron selected mostly lesser-known songs and musical passages from shows like “Candide,” “West Side Story” and “Mass.” They will be performed in new arrangements with original choreography by Sinopoli.

Beyond his admiration of the music, Byron identifies with how Bernstein flourished in so many realms: Bernstein was an orchestra conductor who wrote successful Broadway shows; Byron is a black jazz musician who’s recorded klezmer material and writes chamber music.

“It’s about whether a person should be allowed to do this or that, or do this and that,” says Byron. Too often, “people feel betrayed by artists who go from one genre or style to another.”

The master was known to struggle with the kinds of conflicts Byron identifies. Besides his effort to break down the walls between the worlds of high art and popular entertainment, there was his desire to be both a conductor and public figure, and the need to write and compose in solitude. The constraints of time only added to the pressure.

All this plus the profusion of ideas that filled Bernstein’s head will be brought to the stage Friday night in “Score.” The 90-minute one-man show, drawn entirely from Bernstein’s own writings, was conceived by director Ann Bogart of the New York theater group Siti Company, and adapted by playwright Jocelyn Clarke.

“It’s one thing to hear the work of an inspiring giant, it’s another to meet him,” says Tom Nelis, who plays Bernstein. “This is an opportunity to be in the room with him speaking about his ideas.” Portraying the legendary man, Nelis says, “is an amazing, caffeinated experience.”

The inclusion of the Albany Symphony Orchestra in the Bernstein festival was a happy accident: Its program, a “Romeo and Juliet” evening, was scheduled long before The Egg announced its plans. “It just fell into place for us,” says Lesser.

Along with “West Side Story” and Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the ASO will true to form also present the world premiere of a new work by Daron Hagen. The piece is a double concerto for Jeffrey Khaner, principal flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Sara Sant’Ambrogio, cellist of the Eroica Trio. It draws thematic inspiration from Shakespeare, and musical inspiration from Bernstein.

Sing the first two notes of that tune in your head (Ma-ri ). The distance or interval between those notes is known as a tritone something that standard musical instruction commands composers to avoid at all costs. Thus, Bernstein’s profligate use of tritones throughout the song (“Maria, Maria, Maria”) is quite audacious.

Hagen goes a step further by basing his entire concerto on the tritone. “The entire score of `West Side Story’ evolves from a tritone, and that little nuclear reactor fires my whole piece,” says the composer, who received informal composition and conducting lessons with Bernstein in the late 1980s.

“In my life, he just represented the musical equivalent of very, very pure air … a level of excellence and dedication and commitment to which one can aspire as a musician,” says Hagen.

Yet another fresh perspective on Bernstein is in store with “The Bernstein Beat,” a family program featuring excerpts from numerous works. It will be performed by the Empire State Youth Orchestra with narration by Jamie Bernstein Thomas, who is the co-author of the script. (She’s also a songwriter, but keeps her works tightly under wraps.)

“The way we went about writing this concert was to use the subject of rhythm as our theme. That automatically steers you to all the jumpiest Bernstein music,” she says. “I give (the kids) permission at the top of the concert to jump around and squirm in their seats to the music. I am personally incapable of sitting still while my dad’s music is playing.”

Bernstein Thomas regularly narrates “The Bernstein Beat” in concerts across the country, and keeps apprised of the myriad Bernstein recordings, performances and tributes. But his continued ascension into the pantheon of artistic greats has almost made her do a double take.

“I guess I just didn’t see it coming that he was going to be viewed in retrospect as one of the big personas of the 20th century … (but) that’s how they talk about him,” says Bernstein Thomas.  “I knew he was terrific, but it seems to be going to the other level of reverence, and that’s a surprise.”

Originally published in the Times Union, January 13, 2005.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.