Simon Leach Plays a Stunningly Modulated Organ Recital at St. Patrick’s Cathedral

It’s good to have the mostly-weekly series of organ concerts at St. Patrick’s Cathedral back again. It took a long time for the church to complete the renovations on the organ there, but in the couple of years leading up to the 2020 lockdown, there were some memorable concerts in that space. Yesterday’s performance, by Simon Leach, was a rewarding continuation of that tradition.

He opened by premiering The Call to Care for Creation, by his wife Helen Leach. It was a shapeshifting, dynamic, sometimes rippling, sometimes strikingly anthemic piece in the Romantic tradition, with a precise, triumphantly spiraling coda

Next he tackled Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue, BWV 572, rising quickly from a lilting, understated introduction to a literally imperceptible build into a resolute, similarly subtle yet powerful forward drive, a march arising from a single casual stroll. Leach continued with an unrelenting power and a sleekly turbulent, impeccably modulated conclusion.

Taken out of context, the Cantabile from Franck’s Trois Pièces pour Grand Orgue was an airy and persistently uneasy change of pace. Where Leach had pursued the preceding piece relentlessly, he pulled back on the reins and let the wistfully wafting, often bittersweet passages in this one speak for themselves.

He closed by launching with a bang into a stampeding take of Dupré’s Prelude & Fugue in B Major, from his Trois Préludes et Fugues, Op. 7. Rapidfire lefthand/righthand fugal moments quickly gave way to concise, brightly translucent chordal riffage, Just as he had done with the Bach, Leach found the piece’s internal swing and rode that with a sine-wave consistency and clarity, at least where the composer’s rhythm was steady. When it wasn’t, he parsed the dynamics for a mutedly cheery chorale before elevating to a clenched-teeth, stabbing intensity.

The next organ concert at St. Patrick’s is April 30 at 3:15 PM, with Clayton Roberts in the console playing works by Bach, Dupre, and David N. Johnson. Admission is free. The sonic sweet spot is in the center pews about three quarters of the way toward the back of the church, where you can watch on one of several video screens.

Jazz on a Spring Afternoon in the Financial District

It may have been lunchtime, but Winard Harper and Jeli Posse conjured up a hot, crowded Jersey City jazz joint atmosphere at St. Paul’s Chapel downtown earlier today. One of the most evocative, erudite, extrovert drummers around for more than a quarter century thought aloud about how to bottle that energy into a single hour, then said the hell with that and went well over time. The crowd was a lot more sizeable than usual and everybody seemed grateful to stick around.

He kicked off the show with a long, mighty press roll, a big regal cymbal splash, and the band suddenly found themselves in a languid, expressive take of Ellington’s In a Sentimental Mood, fueled by Nick Masters’ expansive piano and Anthony Perez’s tersely percolating bass. Harper immediately felt the room and kept a delicate swing going with his brushes. He had extra rhythm this time out: tapdancer AC Lincoln, plus Gabriel Roxbury on djembe, alongside guitarist Charlie Sigler, who built to a tantalizing flurry in tandem with the bandleader.

Next up was a Harper original, possibly titled Sajda, the drummer getting it rolling with a lively, intricate solo on his balafon, dueling with the tap and djembe rhythms that bounced off the walls. Piano and guitar joined in emphatically and then backed away before the horns – Ted Chubb on trumpet and Anthony Ware on tenor sax -ran a steady, stabbing Afrobeat riff. There was restrained joy in Harper’s solo over a majestically rippling piano backdrop and a devious false ending, winding down to a misterious brook at the end.

The band shifted between cloudbursting High Romantic piano and bluesy swing from the horns in the third number, Cedar Walton’s Holy Land, with a gruff, no-nonsense sax solo while Harper shifted the landing zone around. A bubbling trumpet solo, a tap solo with some artful allusions to what a full drumkit would do, and a determinedly clustering guitar solo fueled a big coda. From there the band swung through a similarly purist, blues-infused piano solo, a brisk, incisive bass solo punctuated by some judiciously juicy chords and then Harper doing his own tap imitation up to a big vortex of beats.

He introduced his old boss Dr. Billy Taylor’s Capricious with a misty clave before the horns supplied a balmy cha-cha, and eventually a carefree conversation as the cymbals steamed up the windows – metaphorically speaking, anyway. Abdullah Ibrahim’s Water From an Ancient Well was next, Harper reminiscing about playing a two-week stand with the pianist at the old Sweet Basil. Masters set a glistening mood, Harper introducing a sotto-voce clave for the horns’ fond harmonies and a soulful, low-key, Sonny Rollins-ish solo from Ware.

They stuck with a latin rhythm but picked up the pace significantly with a racewalking take of a Harper original to wind up the show with blazing sax and trumpet solos, and a lustrously chordal solo from Masters, the bandleader spinning but resisting the urge to knock down the walls. They wound up the afternoon out with a swaying, somewhat muted gospel-infused triumph,

The next jazz concert at St. Paul’s Chapel is April 24 at 1 PM with drummer Jerome Jennings and jazz poet Naomi Extra‘s Get Free Collective; admission is free. And Harper has resumed his weekly Friday and Sunday jazz jams at Moore’s Lounge at 189 Monticello Ave in Jersey City.

Organist Kenneth Corneille Plays Fascinating Baroque Rarities and a 20th Century Showstopper

Earlier today organist Kenneth Corneille played an individualistic program of baroque rarities and a 20th century gem on the magnificently versatile organ at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. First on the bill was Bach’s Fantasia & Fugue in A Minor, BWV 561, which he delivered very uptempo with unusually bright registrations, lightning-fast righthand clusters and practically a sprint in places. It was impressive to hear him play it at this velocity and build a cyclotron of cascades. Adrenalizing, to say the least, and the small crowd who’d come out for the recital loved it. What might have been lost in the stampede is open to interpretation.

Next on the bill were five transcriptions of songs by eighteenth century composer and Notre Dame organist Médéric Corneille (a relation, maybe?). A beefy, striding folk ballad, Brillantes fleurs (Shining Flowers) was next. Dure loi du péché (unpoetic translation: The Penalty For Sin Is Harsh) came across as a steady hymn with flourishes as Sweelinck might have given it, bolstered by extra power on the low end. Number three, titled Grand Dieu (Great God) was a processional with the occasional trilling ornament.

The younger Corneille played Si vous avez beaucoup (If you have a lot) over a stern, catchy pedal figure: it was the most Bach-inflected of the songs. He then switched to more subdued colors for Une éternelle inquiétude (Eternal worry), the most sophisticated of the bunch. subtly building to a flicker of a fugue. And then it was over.

Corneille closed with legendary improviser McNeil Robinson’s 1980 composition, Dismas Variations, opening it like a bulkier, less overtly macabre take on what Jehan Alain did with his Trois Danses. A fiery, portentous rise decayed to airy textures that grew more Messiaenic, Corneille establishing a calm, conversational ambience before another attack-and-lull.

His lickety-split, occasionally dissonant exchanges descended once again into hazy resonance. The conclusion was classic, counteriutuitive Robinson, chuffing rhythmic bursts intermingled within an increasingly enveloping, all-stops-out atmosphere that gave way unexpectedly into tremoloing phantasmagoria and ended completely unresolved.

The next organ concert at St. Patrick’s is on April 23 at 3:15 PM with British organist Simon Leach playing works by his wife Helen Leach as well as Bach, Franck and Dupre. Admission is free: these performances start precisely on time and usually don’t go far beyond the half-hour mark.

Brilliant, Distinctively Dark Discoveries and an Old Favorite with the MSM Symphony Orchestra

Last night at Manhattan School of Music, guest conductor Leonard Slatkin returned to lead the MSM Symphony Orchestra through a program with pervasive if sometimes allusively dark and phantasmagorical overtones: without a doubt, music that resounds in the here and now.

They opened with Cindy McTee‘s Timepiece for Percussion, and String Orchestra. The orchestra quickly danced their way into its proto-Bernard Herrmann motives, alternately playful and menacing, interspersed with moments of sleekness. Quickly, the orchestra rose toward a furtive rhythm, to a tensely pulsing clave with portenous answers between inquiring brass and cynical strings, and flourishes that echoed the evening’s centerpiece, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It was a delightfully cinematic, apt curtain-raiser.

Frank Martin’s Concerto for 7 Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion, and String Orchestra made a good segue. Similarly, Slatkin led the orchestra briskly into a balletesque, allusively chromatic swing with a vivid, broodingly inquiring Nicholas Fitch bassoon solo at the center of the allegro opening movement. From there, Hajin Kil’s searching oboe led them down from a moment of suspicious pageantry to more austere territory.

The second movement began as somber ballet, eerie close harmonies in a balletesque tiptoeing rhythm before the brass kicked in, cynically. Strings and brass developed a quasi-flamenco-tinged forward drive, down to a suspensefully tiptoeing Scheherzada lull punctuated by an even more wary Cameron Pollard horn solo.

The third movement gave way to insistent, tense riffing around the central flamenco theme, the horns answering from around the hall with an equal tension. Timpanist Zachary Masri’s coolly striding solo launched a steady, ineluctably marching crescendo spiced with high woodwind flourishes, toward a coda that offered an unexpected triumph. Kudos to the MSM faculty for resurrecting this.

Their take on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring turned out to be more of a controlled demolition than feral folk explosion after a long Russian winter. The initial calls were muted and enigmatic within an ambience that was absolutely pillowy. Likewise, Slatkin kept the orchestra on a tight leash, with meticulously puffing accents in contrast to spritely wind cadenzas. Was he setting the bar on the quiet side for the sake of enhancing future pyrotechnics? Uh, maybe.

The group took an unexpectedly dusty and then light-fingered, swinging rise to a cyclotron swirl, with more blue-flame simmer than fullscale conflagration on all sides. A teasing lull with precisely choreographed flutes drew a heavy duty truck crush from the percusssion and low brass. Yet the call-and-response after that gave way to a strikingly smooth swing – making the gnashing monsterwalk and danse macabre afterward all the more effective for its relative calm.

Slatkin led with a woundedly plush pulse from there to a mere whisper before the spirits began flitting up into the picture on the wings of the flutes again. The iconic unleashed-maidens theme seemed more stage-managed, less pagan than other orchestras have played it in the last few years, maybe due to the demands of training. Or maybe Slatkin had something new to tell us about this piece, from the misterioso slink on the way through a stabbing, stiletto coda.

There are plenty of upcoming public performances at Manhattan School of Music this month. One intriguing program features their choral ensemble singing works by women composers including Meredith Monk, Melissa Dunphy, Ysaÿe Barnwell, and Tammy Huynh on April 19 at 8 PM at the Ades Performance Space at 130 Claremont Ave. The concert is free; take the 1 to 125th St. and walk back uphill.

Cellist Amanda Gookin Plays a Harrowing but Guardedly Triumphant Solo Show at Roulette

Survivors of child abuse are like the unjabbed. They walk among you, unnoticed, steeled in what Catherine Austin Fitts calls the “refiners fire,” but scarred for life. At her solo show this past evening at Roulette, cellist Amanda Gookin channeled equal parts resilience and numbed horror as a child abuse survivor herself.

She asserted that she had few childhood memories, and from those she shared with a near sold-out audience, it’s easy to understand why. The daughter of a troubled woman who could sing Brahms beautifully but was crippled by what appears to have been serious borderline personality disorder, Gookin began the show seated on the stairs to the stage. With a steady calm, she read a revealing letter to an unnamed sister, mentioning their shared depressive tendencies. She would reprise that letter at the end of the concert: its authorship came as no surprise.

From that introduction, she picked up an amplified frame drum with ball bearings inside and took a slow stroll through the audience to the soundboard and back, as hypnotic waves washed over the crowd. Perhaps this attested to the push and pull of abusive relationships from a child’s point of view.

On one hand, Gookin’s parents had the means to send her away to Bible camp in Texas during the summer. But then her mother found her Jesus diary, discovered her daughter’s entreaties for parental healing, and that was the end of that. As Gookin told it, Wilton, Connecticut in the early 90s was a tough place to be a kid from the one home on the block where the ambulance or police cruiser would be a regular presence. The moment where she recounted a friend’s mother trying to get her to open up about her feelings, late one evening on a quiet staircase, was unaffectedly shattering.

And yet, years later, when her mother died of cancer, Gookin was overwhelmed with grief, and was quick to acknowledge how codependency is a double-edged sword. It was rewarding to hear how she was finally able to move on emotionally.

From the music, Gookin clearly conquered those demons, even as they sometimes wafted to the surface, in a tightly wound, rather minimalist electroacoustic performance. With her own spoken-word between-song segues, it wasn’t always clear where one composition ended and another began. The first piece, by Pamela Z, was a blend of spoken word chopped and cuisinarted through a mixer while Gookin layered shivering, muted harmonics and subtle ambient textures.

Often Gookin would begin a piece or an interlude with the hum of singing bowls, or the creepy, music box-like timbres from a set of wind chimes. Gentle rainshower sonics dripped behind her spare, midrange cello washes as she spoke of a “body submerged in the cloud,” rising to a frenetic, chopping peak.

On a Jessie Montgomery composition, she slammed out a steady, hypnotic series of chords before veering into hazy harmonics and then an aching, microtonal cadenza where she finally veered off into a crazed cello-metal coda.

Throughout the rest of the night, stark octaves, fleeting harmonic accents, the occasional anxious wail and a crescendo into a fragmented evocation of madness figured in turn throughout works by Sarah Hennies, Camilia Agosto and Seong Ae Kim. A concluding piece by Inti Figgis-Vizueta included a paraphrase of I’m in the Mood for Love, simple chords and a spare, elegaic, spacious melody that grew more anthemic with glissandos, eerie trills and raga-like riffage.

The next concert at Roulette is quite similar if perhaps not as personally devastating. On April 12 at 8 PM, singer and sound artist Muyassar Kurdi leads an improvisational electroacoustic trio tracing the lineage of the Arab diaspora. You can get in for $25 in advance.

Mark Pacoe Commands the Power of the Organ at St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Among the many reasons for guarded optimism that this city is slowly healing from the traumas inflicted over the past three years is the sudden resurgence of concert traditions that were put on ice in March of 2020. One that was badly missed was the semi-regular series of organ and choral concerts in the magnificent, reverb-heavy sonics at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Mark Pacoe, who was one of the few and the brave to still be playing for audiences as late as the winter of 2020, delivered an eclectically welcome program there on the mighty Kilgen organ on Sunday afternoon

He opened with the Prelude from 20th century composer Paul Creston’s Suite for Organ, a steady, bright, unabashedly Romantic processional with a catchy, anthemic pedal melody amid a torrential swirl, to a matter-of-fact all-stops-out conclusion.

Next on the bill was a 2021 piece, Jason Roberts‘ Prelude & Fugue on the iconic Umm Kulthumm anthem Eta Omri, Pacoe quickly rising from an enigmatic introduction to a pouncing chase sequence punctuated by disquieting lulls. It’s not particularly Middle Eastern-tinged, but it’s an increasingly harried showstopper, quite possibly a reflection on our times.

Ian Farrington‘s variations on Amazing Grace, from 2017, were somewhat quieter but similarly animated, with frequent, jaunty blues riffage. Pacoe closed on a redemptively familiar note with the final two movements from Jean Langlais’ Suite Française. Pacoe played the Voix Céleste with a restless, relentless airiness, enhanced by a pace that seemed on the brisk side. That continued in the finale as he punched in with a redemptive, precise, gusty power.

The next free organ concert at St. Pat’s is on April 16 at 3:15 PM (these shows start right on time) with Ken Corneille playing his own songs plus works by 18th century French composer Médéric Corneille, and contemporary American composer and improviser McNeil Robinson

Novus NY Deliver an Auspicious Performance of New and 20th Century Classical Works

Back in the spring of 2017, there was a fantastic series of concerts of new classical music staged by Trinity Church at their smaller and older sister edifice, St. Paul’s Chapel a couple of blocks to the north. This blog covered several of those performances. Why would events from so far in the past be newsworthy now?

Considering that we lost three years of our lives in the time since, everything in the mirror seems closer than it is. But in keeping with what seems to be a very auspicious trend, there’s a similar and arguably even more ambitious festival going on at the chapel, with lunchtime shows continuing through May 4. At 1 PM, there’s jazz on Mondays, organ music on Tuesdays, Bach choral and instrumental works on Wednesdays and contemporary classical on Thursdays. This past Thursday, a subset of Novus NY treated a tiny audience to a diverse, sometimes spellbinding program that bodes well for what’s in store for the rest of the spring.

Flutist and ensemble leader Melissa Baker explained to the crowd that this year’s theme is empathy, something that the powers that be in this city did their best to crush beginning in March of 2020. It wasn’t clear how this was reflected in the music on the bill, which ranged from wary and harrowing to thoughtfully drifting.

The ensemble opened with the world premiere of Brad Balliett‘s Quintet For Piano and Winds. Gershwinesque swing with dissociative microtones from the lower reeds – the composer himself on bassoon, Benjamin Fingland on clarinet and Stuart Breczinski on oboe – quickly gave way to a tense muddle and then a rise from spacious floating motives to some jaunty pageantry where Baker and horn player Laura Weiner could flurry a little. There was a welcome payoff at the end of a long, anthemically swaying crescendo where pianist Daniel Schlosberg relished the chance to pounce on some icy, glittering, microtonally-tuned upper-register chords and nonchalantly breathtaking downward cascades. From there he continued with an disquieting, emphatic attack, the winds wafting a distant unease.

The quintet marched through persistently troubled trills to a lull punctuated by icepick piano accents and then a rather stern drive out that left no easy answers. What a breathtaking piece of music! As enjoyable as the rest of the program was, it was anticlimactic.

But there were plenty of rewarding moments. Two more contiguous partitas provided opportunities for the group to flex very diverse skillsets. In a small handful of Valerie Coleman‘s Portraits of Langston suite, for flute, clarinet and piano, Baker and Fingland playing dynamically shifting blues-inflected phrases over Schlosberg’s assertive chords and accents. The slow tectonic shifts and gentle Scheherezade whirls of Joan Tower’s Island Prelude made a moody contrast, at least until the wind-and-horn quartet kicked in with a series of animated flights and pulses.

And Louise Farrenc’s expansive, warmly Beethovenesque Sextet in C minor, Op. 40, with Schlosberg’s invitingly consonant melody rippling through nocturnal swells and the winds’ countermelodies, wound up the concert with a cocooning elegance.

Candles, Penlights and a Caroline Shaw Chorale Downtown

This isn’t a blog about religion, but as Paul Wallfisch has said – and he was a diehard atheist the last time anybody here checked – religion has given us a lot of beauty. While a lot of that beauty was snuffed out when houses of worship were summarily shuttered in the 2020 lockdown, a handful of venerable New York institutions have brought live music back to their services. One of many long-running traditions in this city that died that year was at St. Paul’s Chapel downtown, where their house ensemble had been performing Bach chorales and hymns at a lunchtime service and later shifted that to an early evening compline series.

Last night, Stephen Sands conducted the Downtown Voices in a welcome, warmly crepscular setting. Lit only by candles and the penlights of the choir and string section, they delivered a quietly electric, dynamic take of Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands.

Before the lockdown, Shaw’s music was ubiquitous in New York: this piece was especially robust early on, but then the voices held back with a stark, minimalist intensity. The chorale has Shaw’s trademark circular motives, but also a guarded optimism whose distant folksiness is more somber than wistful. The composer wrote it as a response to a Buxtehude piece whose central theme is “What are these wounds in the midst of your hands?” Obviously, the great Dane was referring to Christ; these days, it could be anyone.

That might have been reflected in the abundant use of space and frequent sense of abandonment, the women and then men of the choir opting to sync very closely with the work’s overall wary atmosphere and theme of global displacement. Shaw’s text quickly diverges from the original latin to Emma Lazarus and her huddled masses “yearning to breathe free” – if only she knew what crushing irony that phrase would resonate with now!

The choir’s emergence from a desolate, sparsely populated valley into an insistent march was unexpected but seamless. The strings returned with wispy, flitting harmonics in contrast to the increasing lushness of the voices. A hypnotic, enveloping ambience wafted behind an expressive soprano’s elegantly plaintive solo. Swells contrasted with sober lulls as the choir and instruments made their way into in the unexpectedly surreal and disjointed conclusion, bits and pieces of the baroque mingled within strangely circling violins behind the calm solidity of the voices.

Shaw has graciously made the entire score available for anyone who wants to sing or play it: hit her dropbox for the parts.

The next free concert at St. Paul’s Chapel is March 12 at 8 PM with the Trinity Youth Chorus and Trinity Baroque Orchestra performing Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. This is not one of New York’s larger churches, so early arrival would be a good idea.

Fun With New Pieces From the New York Composers Circle

Anyone who thinks contemporary classical music is stuffy wasn’t at the National Opera Center last night for a slate of new compositions from the far-reaching New York Composers Circle. The program was diverse, and picturesque, and sometimes ridiculously funny. Yet there were sublime moments as well.

Pianist Markus Kaitila opened the evening with David Picton‘s Sonata, which in the beginning threatened to be merely a doctrinaire, abruptly shifting twelve-tone piece punctuated by lots of space – or vice versa. But then, Kaitila hit a memorably icy, glacially paced interlude which grew to an unexpectedly fanged, marching attack and back, an ascending series of quasi-tritones and then an artful approximation of major-on-minor phantasmagoria. Precisely articulated, increasingly menacing cascades followed until Kaitila brought the next-to-last movement full circle with a careful, weighty composure. The final one could have been a total reprise of the first until a series of emphatic, surrealistically leapfrogging figures. It was as deep as it was devious.

Kevin McCarter‘s Responding Variations turned out to be a conversational duo played by Artie Dibble on viola and Lillian Copeland on oboe. It was a fun, puckish piece, sometimes following a baroque-inflected tangent, otherwise a sequence of brief, wry exchanges, pensively airy passages or jaunty harmonies.

Up next was Debra Kaye‘s Submarine Dreams, performed by Mary Barto on bass flute and Troy Rinker, Jr. on bass. Kaye had been unable to find any extant duo piece for these two instruments, so this may have been a world premiere on more than one level. The two followed a swaying 4/4, then diverging as Rinker put down his bow for a minute and beat out a rhythm on the bass body. A subtle interweave followed with more goofy percussion and then an allusively Indian, misterioso flute theme over low-key bass pedalpoint.

Pianist Nataliya Medvedovskaya debuted her lively, idiomatic Ragtime suite, “The most American composition I’ve ever written,” she grinned. The opening movement was a tongue-in-cheek, cartoonish take on a familiar genre; the second was closer to the fondness of a Scott Joplin piece like Solace. The third was more exuberant and Gershwinesque.

Katie Thomas played Ukrainian composer Olga Victorova’s Fung Hoan, the Magical Birds – based on an ancient Chinese mating myth – solo on violin. Although there were vivid, leaping motives and evocative, sometimes acidically expressive evocations of birdsong, there was no distinctive Asian quality. The drama of the courtship grew more optimistic as boy bird (or maybe not boy bird) grew more confident and drew bird #2 into the dance.

Tamara Cashour‘s original intention with her Two Short Pieces was to combine the highest and lowest orchestral instruments. Ultimately, she opted for solo works instead. Barto trilled her way through the first one on piccolo. Harry Searing followed, steady, thoughtful and serious on contrabassoon for the second: to the composer’s credit, she managed to avert the trap where a device like a fanfare or a jovial stroll can get unintentionally droll if you take it far enough down the scale.

Pianist Anthony de Mare seized the moment to max out the laughs, playing and narrating Timothy L. Miller‘s Two Settings of Ogden Nash Poems, the first a vaudevillian satire of early 20th century bankster excess. The night’s lone trio piece was David Mecionis‘ Trio in Two Parts with an Interval Between, for oboe, viola and bassoon. Just where that interval was located was beside the point. The partita may have been written as a commentary on the past thirty-five months of hell in New York, as Mecionis alluded to the audience. Dibble wandered pensively while Copeland and Searing harmonized, sometimes with subtle dopplers. The three diverged, reconvened with a persistent unease, paused and then resumed, tentative accents amid a general melancholy with the oboe gradually moving to the forefront. Searing’s solemn resonance amid shivers from the viola gave way to a disquieted, triangulated stroll; the three musicians ended it on a decidedly unresolved note.

Thomas and Kaitila closed out the concert with another piece by a Ukrainian composer, Andrey Bandura’s Spring Sonata. This particular spring was a plaintive one, the piano eventually rising to a steady, glistening series of brooklike phrases as Thomas sailed warily overhead. Kaitila worked his way upward toward an ice storm and then down to a gritty crescendo, Thomas holding the center resolutely. As the work went on through a couple of seemingly rather cynical, dancing themes, it brought to mind Bartok’s more acerbic Mikrokosmos miniatures. It’s definitely music for our time: maybe not Springtime for Zelensky, but it’s hard to imagine much optimism coming out of that part the world these days.

The New York Composers Circle have been staging performances of new works by their many members just about monthly. Their next one, featuring several electroacoustic works, is on March 27 at 7 PM at the National Opera Center at 330 7th Ave, just south of 29th St.

Leonard Slatkin Leads a Shattering, Careening MSM Symphony Orchestra Shostakovich Performance

Back at Manhattan School of Music last night for their Symphony Orchestra’s performance of George Walker’s Lyric for Strings and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. Student orchestras are like minor league ballclubs: champions one year, basement-dwellers the next as the stars graduate to the majors. From an audience perspective, you take your chances.

Here, guest conductor Leonard Slatkin went for a very precise interpretation of Walker’s brief, melancholy overture. A steady syncopation through circling motives reached a stern coda and then fell away abruptly. You could call it a more vigorous update on the Barber Adagio.

Five minutes in and it was clear that this class was playing for an honors grade.

There was a visceral electricity in the auditorium prior to the performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. This one was his response to the Soviet censors who couldn’t wrap their simple minds around his increasingly sophisticated sound world and wanted to silo him into a style they could make sense of – and, in a primitive 1937 style, surveil. It almost worked.

Classical music in Russia being an enduring pop culture phenomenon, the public’s enthusiastic reaction to the symphony probably saved the composer’s life at a time when Stalin was murdering his colleagues.

Slatkin – who looked none the worse for the physical problems that had sidelined him for a time with the Detroit Symphony – led the ensemble into the first movement tentatively, to a sad, windswept milieu, tiptoeing to sudden swells. Student orchestras seldom negotiate dynamics like this so subtly, with wary winds, harrowingly icy strings and spare brass. It was interesting to watch how even here, Slatkin was restless and wanting to cut loose, but didn’t. at least until his pianist signaled a warning and then they went into battle on a tight leash.

The venomous sarcasm of the march that followed only benefited from the group’s haphazard stumble into it, then the increasing horror as they sealed the counterpoint, through the series of bellicose crescendos that followed. Nikolas Rodriguez’s evocatively searching flute – leitmotif for the millions murdered by the communists – gave way to Naoko Nakajima’s plaintive violin to close out the first movement.

The danse macabre that opened the second had a deliciously understated but withering sarcasm, the orchestra nailing Slatkin’s stark contrasts between lush brass and icepick strings, There was more wounded bitterness than depleted horror as the third movement unwound, from tentative to determined and beaten down but bent on revenge. In 1937, the Russians wanted a reprieve from the Soviet regime; in 2023, the world wants reparations from the oligarchs, the Wall Street geeks and the Silicon Valley velvet mafia who engineered the plandemic.

The level of detail downward from there, flickering and fluttering, was meticulous and cinematic to the nth degree, evoking empty storefronts and desolate graves…and eventually a grim resistance. The reflective, shivery, low string-fueled crescendo brought to mind Ravel, but also Shostakovich’s even more haunted later works. Harpist Isabel Cardenes chose her spots in this grim spotlight with a delicate but weighty intensity.

Before the concert, Slatkin expounded at length at how different conductors had tackled the conclusion, and quickly answered that question with a defiant, brisk pace that pushed the orchestra to a ragged limit. But the effect paid off, driving home Shostakovich’s satire of Stalinesque pageantry. The lull after the opening martial bombast was all the more impactful for the nuanced, grimly dancing interplay between strings, winds and brass. From there, the aching, haunting, rootsy Russian theme and variations rose to something of a compromise, a semi-concealed raised middle finger to authoritarianism. The audience exploded seconds later.

There are a ton of unrestricted public concerts at Manhattan School of Music (the students reciprocate for an appreciative audience). The next are a series of concerto performances on Feb 13 and 14. And for lucky Detroiters, Slatkin is leading the DSO in a performance of Tschaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, the world premiere of Anna Clyne’s Glasslands, and this Shostakovich symphony on Feb 18-19. You can get in for $25.