The vaunted acoustics of the EMPAC concert hall were even spiffed up for the occasion. A computer-aided loudspeaker system, designed by Jonas Braasch and a team of students, recreated the sound of a two million gallon cistern in Washington State where Oliveros made a landmark recording almost 25 years ago. The lush reverb, lasting about 45 seconds according to the program, makes an ideal compliment to Oliveros’ musical aesthetic.

Not everything on the program was actually written by Oliveros though. For that matter none of the pieces really functioned from a traditional score. But Oliveros’ system of “Deep Listening” was apparent throughout the night. All of the pieces were meditative and organic, which isn’t to say that they were always hushed or fragile. Rather they were thoughtful and collaborative, attuned in the space and the moment.

The opening, “Land of Snows,” did have a particularly reverent feel. Oliveros and Stuart Dempster launched it with a few finger cymbals, then blew various sized conch shells. Brian Perti played the dung chen, a brass horn at least 10 feet in length that’s common to Tibetan Buddhist ceremony. Three additional wind players sounded on didjeridus quietly in the back of the house.

In the next selection Oliveros, Dempster and Perti became an improvisational vocal trio. Their pacing was based in breath, their pitches seemingly random. It seemed to illustrate that all sense of dissonance fades away given enough time.

Amidst such soulfulness, the speeches paying honor to Oliveros felt rather intrusive and high minded. But Michael Century struck pay dirt in contrasting how a century of iconoclast composers – Ives, Cowell, Cage, and others (mostly men) – shattered traditions, while Oliveros’ work has been one of integration. He even went so far as to coin a term to describe her: “sona-accordionist.”

Besides being a composer, Oliveros is also an accordionist and she played an electrified version of the instrument at one point. More than a dozen percussionists from RPI, SUNY Albany and the Empire State Youth Orchestra took to the balconies around the hall for another piece. The evening ended with a trio of trombonists who moved about the hall before leading the way to the festive reception in the cafe.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

Previously on MyBigGayEars:

Oliveros wins Columbia U’s Schuman Prize

Pauline Oliveros: Making Conscious Connections

Pauline Oliveros: A Musical adventurer begins by listening

Singers never have it easy.  The volatile human body is their instrument and the change of seasons, allergies and drafty concert halls are not their friends.

But some special pity — and praise — must go to the sopranos who slave over the demanding works of living composers.

Over the last 10 years, soprano Hila Plitmann has become the go-to diva for composers with their grand visions.  She’ll be performing a piece of John Corigliano with the Albany Symphony on Saturday night at EMPAC, in a program that’s part of the orchestra’s annual American Music Festival.

“There’s the combination of looking at something that’s very demanding and also the fear of the unknown,” says Plitmann of her now familiar routine of reading through a brand new score. “Your stomach falls down 500 floors and I’ll say did I really sign the contract to do this? Holy crap!”

Even when a piece is familiar, it can be a trial.  Plitmann cites as an example her performance two weeks ago with the Pittsburgh Symphony and conductor Leonard Slatkin of David Del Tredici’s “Final Alice.”  Plitmann has become the soprano of choice for Del Tredici, who helped re-established a romantic style in American music, but who also seems to think sopranos are superhumans with voices that can hang out in a stratospheric range for minutes on end.

“It’s like running a fricking marathon on stage,” says Plitmann of “Final Alice,” just one of many Del Tredici works she’s sung and recorded.   “But I don’t care if he wants me to stand on my head naked. If it makes sense in the piece, then fine.  The structure and the inner connectivity of the music and the relationship to the dramatic idea behind the piece is so unified that it’s a masterpiece.”

Focusing on the vision and genius behind a score gets Plitmann through a lot.  Another recent example is her work with composer/conductor Thomas Ades.  In March they joined forces with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for excepts of his opera “The Tempest” and last month they were with the Los Angeles Symphony for the premiere of his setting of “The Importance of Being Ernest.”

“I sang the part of Ariel (in “The Tempest”) and most of the vocal music writing is just insane,” she says. “But there’s so much sense to the writing that it feels right.  It still doesn’t make it easy. It’s physically demanding but I find that very fulfilling.”

“The writing can be simple,” adds Plitmann, “but if it’s a bad piece, then it’s hard to sing because it doesn’t make sense or connect.”

Obviously this soprano knows the minds of composers.  Not only does she collaborate with them regularly, she’s married to one.  Her husband is Eric Whitacre, whose choral music has become hugely popular in recent years.

Add John Corigliano to the list of star composers who’ve come to count on Hila Plitmann.  The two first had a passing acquaintance when Plitmann was a student at Juilliard, where Corigliano teaches. (Whitacre and Plitmann also met at the famed Manhattan conservatory.)

A few years ago when Corigliano orchestrated his song cycle “Mr. Tambourine Man” (Sylvia McNair debuted the original version with piano) he turned to her for the recording.  The 2008 Naxos disc with the Buffalo Philharmonic won Plitmann a Grammy Award for best classical vocal performance.

As part of his residency with the Albany Symphony, Corigliano will be on hand Saturday when Plitmann sings his “Vocalise.” (The concert is also being recorded for future release on disc.) The piece was written for the New York Philharmonic and debuted in 1999 as part of a set of new works by various composers titled “Messages for the Millennium.”

Plitmann doesn’t seem to rank the wordless “Vocalise” in the category of her most difficult repertoire.  But it has its challenges, namely technology.  Corigliano calls on the soprano to sing both with and without amplification, his message for the millennium being that the palette of the orchestra should expand to include electronics.

“He decided to do this crazy surround sound,” explains Plitmann. “There’s just one microphone on the soprano but the amplification incorporates all these sounds and techniques which surround the audience. There’s the sense that he uses technology as another expressive tool and that reflects the time we live in.”

Conductor Leonard Slatkin, soprano Hila Plitmann, and composer David Del Tredici after the recent performance in Pittsburgh of Del Tredici's "Final Alice." (photo courtesy Doug Bauman)

Originally appeared in the Times Union, Albany, NY

Previously on My Big Gay Ears:

John Corigliano: Searching for a Tune

The beautiful, terrifying music of John Corigliano

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Thursday April 28, 2011
Troy Savings Bank Music Hall

There was magic to be heard, but little slight of hand to watch on Thursday night at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.  The occasion was a concert of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, in a return presentation by the Troy Chromatics.

With up to 33 players onstage but no official leader, one expected to see more demonstrative gestures — nods of the head, swaying bodies, jiggly eyebrows — than there actually was.  The group is now in its 39th season of tackling large and small works without an overlord conductor to keep everybody together.

Orpheus has a democratic system of decision making, but in the midst the music there’s no time for a vote and someone has to give cues that say things like “Now!”   Somehow the varied program of works kept happening, often beautifully, though the players’ inner workings were usually subtle to imperceptible.

Violinist Arabella Steinbacher was the guest soloist in three pieces.

Hartmann’s Concerto Funebre dates from 1939 and commemorates the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia.  The emotional affects of war are present in practically every bar, especially the austere opening passages, which brought to mind Schoenberg’s haunting “Survivor from Warsaw.”  And yet the actual writing was not particularly jagged or angular at all. It was the orchestration and the sentiment, as well as the restrained but searing performance, that gave it such an edge.  The ironic and slashing Allegro evoked many similar movements by Shostakovich.

Steinbacher’s tone blossomed over the course of the evening, from a cool clear line in the opening of the Hartmann to a shade brighter by its end.  Then after intermission, she was full of color and warmth in the rippling strains of Mozart.

The evening began with 13 wind players in Richard Strauss’ Serenade, Op. 7.  An early work, it was tuneful, uncharacteristically light, and well played.  Maybe the four horns did take some advance in the first crescendo.

Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 in D Major ended the program with a full stage and a full sound. The first chair violinist raised his bow extra high to launch key moments. But Haydn’s playful scoring became darned fun to follow as the rhythms and tunes jumped unexpectedly between sections. Since there were no obvious visuals to track, it was now the audience working without the aid of a conductor.

Two quick movements from Handel’s Water Music were offered as an encore.

Albany Symphony Orchestra
David Alan Miller, conductor
with Nathan De’shon Myers, baritone
Friday, April 29, 2011
Troy Savings Bank Music Hall

Friday’s concert of the Albany Symphony Orchestra at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall was no mere local try out, but a thoughtful program handsomely played.  Nevertheless a repeat performance on May 10 was on the minds and tongues of many.  That’s when the ASO will make its Carnegie Hall debut.

It’s worth being explicit:  almost anybody with the dough can rent Carnegie and then boast forever after that they played there. The ASO was selected by the hall to be part of the first Spring For Music, a festival of innovative American orchestras.

After nine years of covering the orchestra, no other particular evening of works comes to mind as a better snapshot of what David Alan Miller has forged over his 19-year tenure. The opener was a 1994 piece by George Tsontakis, a local composer of international renown. Next were eight selections from “The Spirituals Project,” a brilliant two-year commissioning effort. After intermission came a beloved American classic, Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.”

An all-American night certainly isn’t a rarity with the ASO, but more typically the wrap-up to a concert is some European masterpiece, large or small.  Miller expends most of his time in the outback of American repertoire, commissioning new works from younger composers and, less frequently, reviving things from the mid-20th century.  Hearing the Copland felt like the ASO was rightfully claiming prime real estate.

Playing the full ballet score, rather than the familiar suite, kept the ears alert for lesser known passages and changes in orchestration.  Just as the ASO usually ends a night wringing every bit of life from a symphony, this performance often bordered on the raucous, with meaty brass, heavy percussion and full-bodied strings.

Baritone Nathan De’shon Myers has a more mature sound and greater interpretative depth than when he premiered the spirituals in 2004-2005. The pieces themselves remain compelling.  Far more than arrangements, most are mini-dramas and several evoked the era of the Iraq War.

Tsontakis’ “Let the River Be Unbroken” is a delightful weaving together of Appalachian folk songs with hazy instrumental effects reminiscent of Ives.  It begins with a fiddler in the back out the house who plays as he walks down the aisle.  I’m looking forward to hearing and reporting how this and the rest of the program sounds in Carnegie Hall.

When a composer and soloist, conductor and orchestra are all at the top of their game, the only result is that audiences rise to their feet. That’s just what happened during Saturday night’s concert of the Albany Symphony Orchestra at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.

An immediate standing ovation and five solid minutes of applause followed the performance of John Corigliano’s “Conjurer” a concerto for percussionist Evelyn Glennie led by David Alan Miller.

With his typical flair for drama, Corigliano gave a particular mood to each of the three movements and restricted the soloist to three families of percussion instruments — wood, metal and skins. Nevertheless, the wide apron of the stage was crammed full of hardware (as well as two dozen microphones for a recording).  A natural showman, Glennie made the most of it.

But Corigliano’s objective was to write music, not make choreography and he succeeded beautifully.  For most of the 35-minute piece, the orchestra is just strings.  In the opening, they had a slippery sense of pitch in contrast to the hard, defined sounds of marimba and wood blocks.

The strings cast an angelic aura around the haunting and elusive melody of the second movement, which recalled both Bernstein and Barber (no better Americans to steal from).  During the theme’s final iteration, as Glenie was both striking and bowing the vibraphone, the succession of up and down motions resembled the interaction of a sewing machine’s needle and bobbin.

The finale was all drums, though not as loud as expected or feared, and even somehow felt personal to the soloist.  That was one of the composer’s objectives, to keep the piece closer to the tradition of violin concertos than one more long episode of anonymous banging.

Corigliano — a remarkably youthful 73-year old — will be back for a full week in May, when Miller and the ASO will perform another work by him to complete a disc for Naxos.

Having a debut after something by Corigliano seems as unenviable as taking the podium after Bill Clinton.  But after intermission came the premiere of “Travel Lightly,” by Juilliard student Conrad Winslow. It was a scenic, boisterous and bumpy ride with little sense of having a preset itinerary.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 “Prague” ended the night. Usually after the ASO has spent most of the night immersed in new works, the classics arrive with unusual heft and vigor. But this time there was accuracy and flair as well.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

Previously on MyBigGayEars:

John Corigliano: searching for a tune

That’s the Norwegian multi-disciplinary artist Lisbeth J. Bodd’s attempt to describe “And All the Question Marks Started to Sing.” During our long-distance interview it probably didn’t occur to her that the theater piece would actually be appearing at an engineering school.

“All the Question Marks…” will be performed tonight and Friday (2/17-18) at EMPAC, on the RPI campus.  It’s the second appearance at the venue by Bodd and her experimental company, Verdensteatret, which was founded in 1986 in Oslo. They participated in EMPAC’s opening festival two years ago with a piece bearing the intimidating name “Louder,” that featured not just amplified sound but a varied battery of other new and old media.

Typical of the hybrid events on the EMPAC stages, Verdensteatret’s latest work is another mixture of genres.  This time, it’s a blend of theater and sculpture.  A dozen performers and technicians will create an hour-long work and then the stage will be opened for audience members to wander around and get a closer look at the combination of junkyard objects and electronic gadgets that form the set.

“We like to mix older materials with new technology,” explains company member Asle Nilsen. “We don’t like just the sleek and high tech.  On stage you have several bicycle wheels, which are connected to switches that we map onto sound and video.  So the stage itself is a functional instrument.”

The work’s title is borrowed from the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

“In the poem, there’s a guy who has been up in a hotel room with his secret lover,” says Nilsen. “When he goes out into the winter streets he thinks about all these big questions that we always think about in our lives.  We never do find the answers.  But he’s content and he imagines that all the question marks are singing.”

“We found that quote to fit the feeling in our creative process,” continues Nilsen. “In fact, that’s almost our definition of art.”

Nilsen and Bodd explained that the genesis of a Verdensteatret piece is long and laborious. “All the Question Marks…” was two years in the making.

“When we start, we don’t know where we’re headed,” says Nilsen. “We work with material until it gets warm and interesting.”

Typically the collaborators do everything from programming the computers and to welding together the elements of the set. “Everything is made from the very bottom up,” says Nilsen.

During its history, Verdensteatret has toured the world and its creations have been featured not just in theatrical venues but also in art galleries and museums.  After their appearance in Troy, they’ll bring “All the Question Marks…” to the Dance Theatre Workshop in New York for four performances. The run will inaugurate a new series titled “FuturePerfect,” intended to highlight works that bring together art and technology — a mission strikingly similar to that of EMPAC.

Whether they’re performing for the culture elite of Manhattan or some engineering students in Troy, the Verdensteatret team just wants to be offered the same open-mindedness that they put into the building of their pieces.

“We hope that we have made something that people can relate to,” says Bodd. “Audiences should just stay open, as if they were going to a concert or seeing a painting.”

Verdensteatret
“And All the Question Marks Started to Sing”
EMPAC, RPI campus, Troy NY
February 17, 2011

As a kid, did you used to turn your bicycle upside down and balance it on its handlebars and seat? And then spin the wheels and think they were magic?  Have you ever wished the steering wheel of your car controlled the music on the stereo, and could make it play forward or backward, or faster or slower?

You know that cute gooseneck desk lamp that sort of turns its head and smiles at you just before the start of a Pixar film?  How would you like to meet its extended family of luminous technological life forms, watch them dance and mate in near darkness?

Ever wondered about the secret life of light bulbs? Would you like to spend a while inside the mind of Thomas Alva Edison?

Can you picture a giant metal sculpture with half a dozen poles reaching up 10 or 15 feet high, each capped by round discs tilted at various angles as if to catch rays of sun? What if they are set against a dreary junkyard landscape and yet the whole imagine was somehow cheerful and made you think of flowers?

Does it usually annoy you when folks behind you during a performance are whispering incessantly? And yet, has it happened that you’re not really bothered by it because the gentle minutia of sounds they’re making kind of fits in with the bizarreness of the show you’re experiencing?

Have you read artsy jargon, terms like “object theater,” and wondered what in the world these people are talking about?  And then go to a show and saw frail little metal constructions that seem to act of their own accord and you say to yourself, “Oh, is that what they meant?”

Would you like to be a chic European performance artist in a company called Verdensteatret? How about making lots of noise and get grant funding and international travel for your efforts?  And maybe go onstage and do a flirtatious dance with another artist, while the two of you also create a sonic collage out of old jazz recordings?

Have you been to EMPAC yet?  Have you sat through something and alternated between loving it and being a bit bored by it and still wished it kept going just a bit longer?  Have you been glad to realize that you’re not the only one who actually likes something that’s almost impossible to describe?

Do you now maybe understand the title, “And All the Question Marks Started to Sing”?

Originally published in the Times Union.

Most of the titles down the list of works read “Sonata.” But that hardly indicated the broad range of styles, colors and flavors that come from the fine violinist Jennifer Koh on Saturday night. Her recital with pianist Shai Wosner was presented by the Friends of Chamber Music at Emma Willard School.

The radical, ethnic-infused side of Debussy showed up early in his Sonata, the program opener.  It wasn’t exactly primitive because there was still a refined elegance. But with Koh’s attention to minutia of touch and effect, it was as if she’d just returned from her own journey to the Orient.  Only in the final movement did the more lush and familiar Debussy of “La Mer” appear in huge cascading lines in both piano and violin.

With Schumann’s Sonata No. 2 in D Minor Op. 121, it was back to old Europe.  Koh’s intimate fondness for Schumann stands in sharp contrast to her taste for some of today’s most quirky composers, from Carter to Zorn.  Likewise, her deep immersion in the long and heavy textures of the Sonata speaks to her diversity.  Koh and Shai kept it mostly interesting. Toward the end of each movement, when enough was almost enough, either the violin or piano would bring out some unexpected flourish of fresh material.

The token new work on the program was “Tocar,” written just last year by Finish composer Kaija Saariaho.  At only about six minutes long, it felt a bit like an interlude or prelude to something still to come.  To hear the lifeblood of the work, one had to tune in deeper than the rather repetitious surface contours, and instead attend to details of certain notes, such as tiny sags of pitch or scratching textures.  This kind of focus was probably a result Saariaho’s background in electronic music.

More Schumann followed, with the Three Romances, Op. 94, which had a more airy, folk song character than the Sonata.  Koh’s smooth long lines brought to mind a drawing class and that exercise of completing one image without ever lifting the pen from paper.

After all this, the Ravel Sonata felt kind of cheap.  That’s not saying Koh cheated in delivering it as best she could but Ravel’s middling take on blues is almost humorous.  The final movement, though, became an intense and beautiful race.

Academy of St. Martin in the Fields
presented by the Troy Chromatics
Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
Sunday February 6, 2011

It was billed as a chamber ensemble.  Yet the Sunday afternoon program of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields was something more than the traditional notion of chamber music and also long way from full orchestra.  Onstage was a string octet performing works of Svendsen, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn that are seldom heard live.  For inveterate classical music goers, it’s the kind of usual program that makes the presenters — the Troy Chromatics — such a value local enterprise.

Beyond the common instrumentation, another unifying factor to the program is that each of the works dates from early in the composers’ output.  Johan Svendsen, a Norwegian who died in 1911 (four years after the better known Grieg), threw everything but the kitchen sink into his String Octet in A Major, Op. 3. Besides being rather hyperactive, it was earnestly smart and cheerful.

Shostakovich’s Prelude and Scherzo, Op. 11, on the other hand, showed that his consummate craft and characteristic sarcasm were probably always with him.  He wrote the piece at the tender age of 19. So much for the stultifying effects of the Soviet regime.

After intermission came the more familiar Mendelssohn Octet. Another take on youthful vigor, it’s full of imaginative scoring and a questing sense of wonder.

All tolled, a fine line up for a dreary winter afternoon.  If only the performances had been as consistent and unified.

Despite their long history and storied name — founded in 1959 and internationally famous from various Baroque and soundtrack recordings — the Academy of St. Martins in the Fields functions like a pickup group with a rotating membership.

On this outing, there were two styles of performers opposing each other onstage.  The cellos and violas played with a sturdy tone and rock solid pitch.  The violins were fragile of voice and divergent with intonation.

First violinist Andrew Watkinson, billed as the guest leader, may not have the authority of a conductor but he could have taken the time to bring the players onto an agreeable middle ground. They had enough rehearsal time that ensembles matters were tip-top. Even when the composers sent every instrument off onto stray tangents, the players always coalesced back together with ease.

Another famous but leaderless band, the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble, will complete the Chromatics 114th season on April 28, also at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

Creator Sean Griffin chose the title as a reference to the studies in human potential conducted in Cold Spring Harbor, Suffolk County, during the early part of the 20th century. The research, which he found published online, unexpectedly supported the Nazi’s efforts to build a master race.

Another examination of humanity’s strengths and weaknesses — by aliens from outer space — also plays a prominent part in the show, through the re-enactment of the famous alleged UFO abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961.

But the question that most comes to mind in considering “Cold Spring” isn’t about the genetics and breeding of humans as much as the cross-pollination of art forms that goes into the show itself. According to Griffin, the piece is a new kind of hybrid structure that weaves together the DNA of opera, theater, dance and performance art.

“I’m a composer, and this is a composition for actors and musicians and dancers” says Griffin. “It converts the theater into a big kind of organ. There are traditional notes, but also all these characters become notes who present the material in different modalities.”

Griffin spent the last two years working on the piece, and plotted its flow through the use of a spread sheet.

“There was a developmental process that we went through as a group, yet this is not improvised but highly structured. All of the performers are given the same structure and they all have to count the score as if they were playing an instrument,” explains Griffin. “It ‘instrumentalizes’ a lot of the interesting, unique qualities of the people who are performing.”

The cast of approximately 30 includes a half-dozen musicians and a few of Griffin’sregular collaborators, plus a number of local performers who auditioned at EMPAC earlier this year. Portions of recent theatrical productions — Curtain Call Theater’s staging of Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy,” and local playwright John Birchler’s “Good Fences,” as recently produced by Colonial Little Theatre in Johnstown — are performed in fragments in the balcony of the theater.

“The people who are in this represent (the Capital Region), and it’s a distillation of the area’s cultural behaviors,” says Griffin. “It’s a different kind of orchestration. Instead of writing for the flute, I have ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ up in the balcony, as if American community theatre were a sound.

“I organized the scripts with the idea that the characters and actors can travel back and forth and break the time-space barrier,” continues Griffin. “This is what I call narrative relocations. You have different time periods, regional things, things from far away, narrative and archival, all merged and forged together. It forces a kind of hybrid, or even a monster.”

Griffin cites the experimental period of the 1960s and ’70s and works of Robert Wilson and John Cage as precedent for his new forms. “Now people are a little more interested in this interdisciplinary large-scale works again,” he says. “I do films and other conventional things, but this is where I see myself as happiest.”

Among the local participants in “Cold Spring” are members of the female roller derby team Albany All Stars. According to Katie Dollard, the All Stars do appear on skates, but they don’t necessarily re-enact roller derby.

“We’re involved in a couple of different aspects, and it’s fantastic,” she says. “We’re meant to be the psyche of one character, repeating what she’s saying very sarcastically and mocking her. We do an homage to the suffragettes, and we also enact the alien semaphore. This character remembers an alphabet from the aliens and we do this interpretive movement to it.”

It’s a long journey from roller derby to the avant-garde, but even for the veteran local actor Michael Steese, “Cold Spring” is something new.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” says Steese, 76, who has performed regularly at the New York State Theatre Institute and many other regional companies over the last four decades. “Those of us of the local scene don’t have the national exposure and experience with this sort of thing that many of the other participants do, so we’re just trying to keep up.

“The whole concept does work from my point of view,” adds Steese. “But my part is a little drop in a big bucket. Still, anybody interested in a spectacular theater experience should come see this.”

_____________________________________________________________

COLD SPRING
Saturday, December 4, 2010
EMPAC, RPI Campus, Troy, NY

It takes daring to have so many words mean so little, as they did in Sean Griffin’s unusual theater piece “Cold Spring,” which was commissioned by EMPAC, where it premiered over two performances this weekend.

Reams of pre-existing texts — from archives, plays, movies and seemingly countless other sundry sources — are fractured and recombined, jumbled up and layered upon each other, and at times even wadded up and thrown away by the performers onstage.  The principal themes were about eugenics and memory, but there was one lengthy section about rabbits, those enthusiastic breeders.

While texts may be a dominate component, the experience of “Cold Spring” is primarily musical.  Yet Griffin’s actual musical score, performed by a half dozen players in the pit, while effective, was almost negligible, mostly just atmosphere and gentle punctuations here and there.

Instead, it was the layering of those many texts that took on a symphonic sweep. At least that’s what can be experienced when one lets go of the need for an intelligible narrative.

Griffin is no pioneer in this realm of sonic collage.  John Cage made similar schematics and the radio documentaries of Glenn Gould also come to mind.  But Griffin’s sensitivity to texture, rhythm and density was often masterful, and was aided hugely by the alert and trusting performers and by EMPAC’s excellent mix and amplification.

There was plenty to look at as well.  The basic stage setup featured a tower of art and artifacts, loaned from the Schenectady Museum, on stage right and a huge grey shelving unit opposite.  At the start, most of the cast emerged from the shelves as if their bodies were some kind of inventory.

The stage blocking often felt as jumbled as all those words, but in the same grander sense it seemed to work. A trio of modern dancers in beige long johns was the only component that never rose above the banal.  It always helped when a performer took flight. The best was operatic soprano Juliana Snapper, who ended the first act perched above the stage like a snow owl.

Rowan Ian Seamus Magee was omnipresent as a kind of master of ceremonies.  Democco Atcher and Carolyn Shoemaker played Barney and Betty Hill, alien abductees from the 1960s.  Members of Curtain Call Theatre and Johnstown Little Theatre performed scenes in the side balconies and seven members of the Albany All Stars roller derby team were a kind of corps de ballet in long dowdy dresses. They opened the lively second act to disco music.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

Parker Quartet
Presented by the Friends of Chamber Music

A world of style, color and sentiment came from the Parker Quartet during their Saturday concert presented by the Friends of Chamber Music at the Emma Willard School.

That’s really not so unusual an occurrence.  It seems like dynamic fresh-faced quartets are a dime a dozen these days and the Parker, which easily fits that category, already made a fine local debut at Union College back in 2006.  What made Saturday’s program surprising and special is that the breadth of expression was wrought from music by just one composer, and that it was Haydn at that.

Though he completed 67 quartets and 104 symphonies, it’s easy to think of Haydn’s music, with its neat classical strains, as all the same. That’s partly due to how it’s doled out in single servings, usually as concert openers, warm-ups really, before musicians move onto meatier material of the romantic and modern eras.

By delivering a succession of three Haydn quartets and keeping it all rather fresh, the Parker showed both thoughtfulness and imagination.  Add in the fact that they played everything from memory and this concert was a stunning accomplishment.  It’s a good thing they’re recording the program later this week in Boston.

The opener was the best, the Quartet in C Major, Op. 20, No. 2.  In the first movement, the violins had a glassy smoothness and the cello added a warmth depth.  The many unison passages of the Adagio sounded as if one big instrument was playing.  And then came the Menuetto. Played in a sotto voce hush and at quite a clip, it brought to mind an old tape deck set on fast forward. The notes were all there but fast and shadowy.

Next up was the Quartet in G Major, Op. 74 No. 3 “The Rider.”  Though first violinist Daniel Chong had a few pitch problems early on, but so much was happening all the time one hardly had space to ponder the small errors. A cool detail came in the spinning texture all the players put on the opening note of the bouncing main them in that same opening Allegro. It was like a baseball pitcher throwing a fast curve ball with a fancy wind up.  The finale galloped right along and explained the piece’s subtitle.

There were no moments in the final Quartet in F Major, Op. 77 No. 2 to match what came before intermission. But the same warm loving embrace of the music was still there.  A lively scherzo from Op. 77, No. 1 brought the evening to a close.

______________________________________________________________________

Megan Weston

Glens Falls Symphony
Charles Peltz, conductor
Martina Tiljak, piano soloist
Sunday November 21, 2010

Some composer anniversaries are easy to celebrate and this year’s centennial of the birth of Samuel Barber is one of them.  He lived in the modern era yet his music harkens back to a more romantic and communicative time. While he was deeply American there’s little in his writing that smacks of Americana.

The Glens Falls Symphony is dedicating a fair portion of its 25th season to Barber.  Coming in March is the famous Adagio for Strings and Sunday afternoon’s program at the Glens Falls High School had two of Barber’s lesser known works making up the concert’s first half.  Music director Charles Peltz conducted.

“Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” Op. 24, is a lush setting of a nostalgic James Agee poem about “nothing at all in particular,” to quote the text.

Soprano Megan Weston did a fine job managing the broad tessitura yet keeping the inflections simple and almost childlike. There were hints here and there of a very adult vibrato but clarity and restraint were the rule.  A good match came from the winds with their undulating textures and Peltz’s gentle pacing.

The start of Barber’s Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 suggested a continuation of that same feeling — simplicity and hints of song. But the heroic brass and a stormy orchestral drama come to dominate the single-movement piece.  The violins had some trouble getting their pitches out during a fast passage early on, but otherwise it was a remarkably secure performance for some unfamiliar and turbulent material.  Timpanist Cynthia Lee had lots of crisp exposed moments and a long floating solo by principal oboe Bethany Ann Slater was lovely.

Martina Filjak

The Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 Op. 18 came after intermission — the third local performance in four months.  There’s no anniversary to explain that, just the fact that it’s a beloved piece, or a warhorse if you prefer.

Soloist Martina Filjak was great.  She had the necessary speed and force to keep up with the orchestra, yet played with a tone all her own. It wasn’t knock you over the head muscular, nor overly seductive either, but kind of tart and pungent and very attractive.

As for the orchestra, the strings came into their own but the brass and winds seemed a bit fatigued. One particular passage for the horns was just not up to snuff at all.  One of Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations was the first encore followed by Filjak’s exquisite performance of a Prelude for the Left Hand by Scriabin.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

]]> http://mybiggayears.com/archives/weekend-concert-reviews-haydnparker-barber-in-glens-falls/feed/ 1 http://mybiggayears.com/archives/orchestra-manuevers-in-the-dar/ http://mybiggayears.com/archives/orchestra-manuevers-in-the-dar/#comments Sat, 13 Nov 2010 05:00:57 +0000 jody http://mybiggayears.com/?p=2275 If you’ve ever felt in the dark while listening to contemporary music, Friday night at EMPAC you won’t be alone. For a portion of the concert the orchestra will also be performing — literally — in the dark, without the aid of lights on their music stands or even a spotlight on the conductor.

“In Vain” is the name of the single piece on the program. It’s about 75 minutes long and was written about 10 years ago by the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas.  It will be performed by the Argento Ensemble from Manhattan, conducted by its founder Michel Galante.

Along with an array of instrumental effects and some unusual tuning systems, the score also has lighting cues.  According to Galante, there are passages where flashing lights add an additional rhythmic layer to the piece.  And then there are two extended sections of the piece — one of them almost 15 minutes in duration — where all of the lights in the hall go out and the 24 players on stage must perform from memory and without site cues to synchronize their efforts.

“The darkness makes for a very intense experience and changes the mode of communication,” says Galante. “The musicians have to communicate aurally and they become an orchestra whose antenna are hyper-alert. This affects the audience as well because you are in the same dark space, the same predicament.”

Galante’s conducting duties cease during those dark passages, but he’s found the over arching experience of the piece fatiguing, to say the least.

“I remember walking off the stage and saying ‘what the hell happened?’” he recalls. That was after a performance in 2009 at Columbia University’s Miller Theater. The event was named by critics in The New York Times and Time Out New York as highlights of the entire season.

The ten-year old Argento Ensemble is dedicated exclusively to contemporary music and Galante is something of an expert in the experimental composers of Europe.  He says that Haas’ title “In Vain” has several meanings, though it’s not a reference to the futile challenge of playing in the dark. Instead, it’s about the juxtaposition of different tuning systems (equal temperament and just intonation) and also a comment on the political climate in Austria when the piece was coming composed.

Haas is known as an exponent of a composition technique known as spectral, a primarily French practice which is based on exploiting the colors of the overtone series.  With the integration of light and dark with this and other pieces, Haas has expanded the sensual reach of concert music.

“There’s a musical discourse in the piece that’s separate from the lighting,” adds Galante.  “There are these huge raw gestures in the music. It’s a very psychedelic and intoxicating sound.  It can remind one of orchestra works of Bruckner and Debussy with big columns of sound.  There’s also a level of sensitivity in the way he uses the harp and string harmonics that corresponds to French impressionism.”

Geoge Friedrich Haas: “In Vain”
The Argento Ensemble, Michel Galante, conductor
November 12, 2010,  EMPAC, RPI Campus, Troy

The contemporary music programming at EMPAC continues to tilt toward the European.  Friday night’s concert featured a 26-six piece orchestra in a single, hour-long work, “In Vain” by Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas.  The Argento Ensemble from New York performed under its founder Michel Galante.

Paul Griffith’s program notes describe the 2000 composition as “one of the great pieces of the last decade.”  A couple of Manhattan critics went pretty nuts for it when the same forces offered it there a couple of years back.

All this, plus the composer’s unusual inclusion of lighting cues in the score, led one to expect a stronger statement, but the piece burbled along more than anything.  Though highly detailed in articulations, tunings and all manner of other affects, it often felt aimless.  The mass scale of it all — and there were tons of rising and falling scales, by the way — made it insistent, and yet it was elusive at the same time.

Like a heavy mist or a stream of passing clouds, the music never held still.  While there may have been no set chords or clearly articulated rhythms to grab a hold of, some associations still came to mind. These include the earthy side of Mahler and the hazy mysticism of Ives in his “Central Park in the Dark.”

Haas is associated with the spectral school of composition, which is primarily a French thing.  It’s based on highlighting effects from the overtone series.  Haas goes a step further in this and other pieces by adding lighting effects.

Twice during “In Vain,” the hall went dark — mostly.  Exit lights and the little lamps on the aisles stayed illuminated, so the darkest part of the room was the stage, where the musicians kept playing.  This robbed the eyes of the diversions of looking hither and thither at the different musicians and instruments.  What it provided instead was a greater sense of the unified, single effect the players produced.

During the second darkened passage, gentle flashes of golden light eventually began to appear at intervals of roughly 20 seconds.  This was while the music built to it’s grandest with thunder sheets, roaring brass and a harsh rhythmic strumming of the harp.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

Middle age may be encroaching but a disarming spontaneity and playful sense of humor came through in our recent conversation.

“I do look weirdly young and I still get carded for god’s sake,” says St. John. “And since I don’t drive I just have a passport and bartenders have to stare at it to verify my age.”

That passport has gotten plenty of use outside of bars and nightclubs.  A native of London, Ontario, St. John entered the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia at age 13 and transferred to the Moscow Conservatory three years later.  Continued studies followed in London, Boston and New York.

Currently St. John spends about half of the year on the road.  When she’s home in Manhattan, she takes comfort in being with her pet iguana, collaborates with a wide array of musicians — she’s a founding member of a polka band — and manages the record label Ancalagon, which she founded in 2000.

“I named the label after my dear departed iguana, who died a few weeks before I started it,” she explains.  “I now have a brand new iguana, he’s about a year and a half old. I’ve been on tour for about a month and just brought him home from the sitter and so I’m a happy girl. I got him a year and two months ago and after 21 years of chain smoking I stopped at that same time.  I credit him with the fact that I’m clean from nicotine.”

Asked how a native of Canada could develop a soft spot for tropical reptiles, St. John brings up her enthusiasm for dragons and fondness for the fantasy writers J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula La Guin. She then shifts gears and recalls her earliest days as a violinist.

“When I was a kid, my mom would bribe me to practice, and we’d go to these little competitions and if I earned a prize, I got one more plastic dinosaur,” she says. “I started violin at age two and this obsession began around four. But that’s why I practiced between ages of 6 and 12. I credit reptilian beings with quiet a bit!”

Besides having salamanders crawling on the logo of her recordings, St. John’s recorded repertoire has also been decidedly non-traditional, at least by classical standards.

A recent recording of Mozart violin concertos has been on the Billboard charts for 15 weeks and counting, and there are also a couple of Bach titles.  But the Ancalagon label, which is devoted exclusively to St. John’s own projects, also features a gypsy disc and a polka collection, titled “Polkastra: Apolkalypse Now.”

“Our band’s next project is a wedding album with wedding tunes from all over the world,” says St. John. “Kids loved our first disc and weddings are the last place people actually dance.”

Amidst talk about pets, travel and polkas, St. John did manage to address her upcoming recital, which places works of George Gershwin and Stephen Foster alongside Beethoven and Debussy and others.  While saying how eager she is to finally play in the famed Troy Savings Bank Music Hall — friends on Facebook have been gushing to her about its acoustics — she explains that the program is meant to be upbeat and enjoyable. One might expect nothing less from such a vivacious conversationalist, but St. John counters that notion.

“During the last year or two, I did a bunch of recitals that were so heavy, with Bartok and Schoenberg and some really scary Beethoven,” she explains. “I want people to smile this time. It’s still substantial but nothing will make you cry your heart out.”

Lara St John with transexual porn star Buck Angel