A Lively Tribute to Bargemusic Founder Olga Bloom
“We do more shows than anybody else,” bragged violinist and Bargemusic honcho Mark Peskanov, and that was no overstatement. New York orchestras and classical ensembles typically take at least the end of the summer off, but Bargemusic goes year-round. “First it was two nights. Then we said, could we do three?” He gave a quizzical look. “Now here we are, on a Monday!”
He was there on the converted 1899 coffee barge like he is most every day, this time to celebrate the birthday of Olga Bloom, who founded Bargemusic (and lived there for quite some time in the late 70s), whose vision of a noncommercial, non-corporate creative space for classical musicians and chamber music devotees has mushroomed beyond anyone’s expectations. Vital and active in music until almost the end of her life, she would have been turning 93. “We usually don’t talk much here,” Peskanov admitted, and he’s right. With the space’s Manhattan harbor view and the quality of the music here (“It has to go through me, so you know it has to be on the highest level,” Peskanov asserted), there’s no need to gild the lily: Bargemusic remains unsurpassed as a date spot, year after year.
There was music, too. Peskanov, a pyrotechnically skilled player, began with soaring yet precise solo Bach on violin in tribute to Bloom, who would typically begin the day by doing the same, “completely one with the music,” as Peskanov remembered her in the morning when he’d hear her playing from outside. He recalled how Leopold Stokowski would chide her for playing too loud: defiantly, she refused to tone down her act. For Bloom, Peskanov said, the string quartet was the highest expression of human creativity, so this particular night made a good excuse for him to join forces with violinist Laura Goldberg, violist Ah Ling Neu and cellist Guy Fishman for a romp through quartets by two of Bloom’s favorite composers, Beethoven and Haydn. The former’s String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 18, No. 4 began as it seemed how Bloom might have played it herself, irrepressibly jaunty on the opening allegro before contrasting powerfully, wary and wounded, with the andante scherzoso second movement. From there they worked their way up again to end on the vibrant note they began with. They picked up the pace even further with Haydn’s String Quartet in C, Op. 54, No. 2, throwing all caution to the wind and giving new meaning to the presto dynamic as it wound up joyously. Definitely not the sort of thing for people who consider string quartets to be good background music, but as an example of how passionate and exciting the genre can be, it was a thrill to be on the boat that night.
This quartet is back on the barge on May 12 at 8 PM and then on May 13 at 3 PM, doing the Beethoven and Haydn plus Borodin’s String Quartet No. 2 in D; tickets are $35 and early arrival is highly advised. It’s also worth mentioning Bargemusic’s free, weekly Saturday 3 PM concerts: promoted as “family” shows, squalling infants don’t seem to be an issue, and as Peskanov can attest, the performers are first-rate.
April 4, 2012 Posted by delarue | classical music, concert, Live Events, Music, music, concert, New York City, review, Reviews | ah ling neu, bach, bargemusic, beethoven, chamber music, classical music, concert, concert review, guy fishman cello, haydn, laura goldberg violin, mark peskanov, Music, music review, olga bloom, string quartet | 1 Comment
Concert Review: Miori Sugiyama Plays Chopin at Bargemusic, Brooklyn NY 2/6/10
A fresh, vigorous, potently counterintuitive interpretation of iconic Chopin works for solo piano. Miori Sugiyama’s formidable technique is matched by an equally fine-tuned emotional intelligence- she gets this music – and a hair-trigger detector for devices that might cross the line into cliche. Those she wanted nothing to do with. No disrespect to Chopin, but Romantic piano music can be just as stylized as any other genre and there are places where it’s hardly difficult to figure out what he wrote to pay the bills, and what came straight from the heart. Sugiyama wasted no time in going for authenticity of emotion. From a contemporary perspective, it wouldn’t be completely accurate to describe how she tackled the program as radical – no electronics or rock band were involved – but sixty years ago it would have been. When a familiar trope loomed, she’d get a running start and go sailing over it, sidestep it with a jump or a quick turn or simply trample it in a stampede to get to the good stuff. It was as effective a performance as it was personal and individual.
The Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23 benefited vastly from a strikingly rubato approach: Sugiyama didn’t let the courtly waltziness of much of it fake her out a bit, uncovering every raw, resonant tonality she could find. A pair of nocturnes (F Sharp Minor, Op. 15, No. 2 and C Sharp, Op. 27, No. 2) gave her less of an opportunity to mine for that kind of treasure: in her hands, they glimmered comfortably but not complacently. By contrast, the Scherzo No. 1 in B Minor, Op. 20 was a breathtaking showcase for a lightning sostenuto attack, rushing rapids punctuated by pregnant pauses, if ever so brief before the torrents returned. Ironically, the one piece that might have benefited from a straight-up reading instead of an attempt to find its inner menschkeit was the Scherzo No. 2 in B Flat Minor, Op. 31, a staple of classical radio for decades whose martial theme stops just short of bombast (with that one, the temptation is to ham it up Victor Borge style). Sugiyama wound up the program with an inspired, fluid precision that defied another kind of serious rocking as river waves got the barge swaying, definitely not in time with the music. The Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise in E Flat, Op. 22, more of a real nocturne than anything else on the bill, was given the chance to build gracefully. Sugiyama then blasted through a minuet passage, got it out of the way and brought the intensity to redline with molten-metal glissandos leading inexorably to a fiery conclusion.
Miori Sugiyama is also playing the big upcoming Chopin marathon at the World Financial Center, March 1-5: watch this space.
February 7, 2010 Posted by delarue | classical music, Live Events, Music, music, concert, New York City, review, Reviews | bargemusic, chamber music, chopin, classical music, concert, concert review, Miori Sugiyama, miori sugiyama bargemusic, miori sugiyama brooklyn, miyori sugiyama chopin, piano music, piano recital, recital, romantic music, romantic piano | 1 Comment
Concert Review: The American String Quartet Plays Robert Sirota, Irving Fine and Others at Bargemusic, Brooklyn NY 4/26/09
The American String Quartet had played the Brooklyn debut of Manhattan School of Music President Robert Sirota’s 9/11-themed Triptych suite the previous night. Looking across the river at Manhattan from inside the barge the following afternoon, the Twin Towers’ absence became more and more striking as the first movement built to a frantic, chaotic, horror-stricken crescendo of tritones and dissonance. From an audience perspective (particularly as witnessed by someone who was three blocks away when Tower Two blew up), the music was viscerally harrowing. Lucid Culture puts up a year-end “best New York concerts” list, and while being far from definitive, you can bet this performance will be on it.
Sirota was in New York on 9/11 and over the following months, writing the suite in tandem with Deborah Patterson’s painting of the same name – the artists’ intent was for the music to reinforce the painting and vice versa. To say that both are impactful would be a ridiculous understatement. The suite’s first movement, Desecration began with a shock, immediately followed by frenetic anguish that eventually fell apart, leading to a mournful solo by violinist Peter Winograd and eventually an evocation of car alarms (Sirota imagined that the destruction of the towers would have set off every one of them in Manhattan, an insult added to injury that thankfully didn’t occur) followed by a brief, single siren played on violin, fading into the distance.
The second movement, Lamentation began stark and modernist, growing more insistent, anguish finally turning to outrage, the impossibility of being able to fathom the enormity of the event intensely and vividly captured by a tentative cello line eventually passed to the other instruments, ending with a simple, defeated fade to solo violin. It’s not known how deeply the composer was able to investigate the mystery surrounding the tragedy, or whether this is simply a rendering of the city’s collective emotional state.
At last, some consonance appeared in the final movement, Prayer, reaching for solace and not finding it, interestingly with less of a feeling of communion and inclusiveness than there was at the time. While the months afterward brought out in many respects a beautiful and unforgettable period of camaraderie and compassion among New Yorkers, the conclusion of Sirota’s work rightfully maintains a persistent and unavoidable sense of loss. As riveting and heartbreaking as the piece is to witness in concert, one can only imagine how difficult it must be to play, especially for a New York group such as this, but the musicians didn’t let on.
The rest of the bill was a thicket of knotty cerebrality, but the Quartet accentuated its emotion and also its frequent good humor. They’d opened with Irving Fine’s 1952 String Quartet, an astonishing and powerfully Stravinskian work delivering many of the tropes of Romanticism in a completely different language, jeweled with suspense, horror-movie cadences and complete defiance in places. Winograd related an amusing anecdote about how his father, also a noted musician, knew Fine, who was notoriously prickly. After hearing the piece, the story made perfect sense. The ensemble also tackled Henry Cowell’s strange and often boisterously witty, improvisationally-driven String Quartet No. 3, the “Mosaic,” named for its interwoven, deceptively simple themes designed to be repeated as the performers see fit. They closed with Walter Piston’s String Quartet No. 1, another work which cast numerous codas and cadenzas straight out of Brahms or Beethoven straight into the drink where they landed dazed. Did Mingus know Piston’s work? One would think so from hearing this piece.
Shock of shocks, the barge wasn’t sold out, either. Fault of the depression? Maybe. The challenging nature of the program? That would be strange – Ives and his ilk don’t usually scare the crowds off. From the looks of it these days, Bargemusic could be something you could decide on at the spur of the moment, a wonderfully romantic idea.
April 28, 2009 Posted by delarue | Live Events, Music, music, concert, New York City, review, Reviews | 9/11, 9/11 music, american string quartet, bargemusic, chamber music, classical music, deborah patterson triptych, henry cowell, irving fine, Manhattan School of Music, modern music, new music, review, robert sirota, september 11, sirota triptych, string quartet, walter piston | Leave a comment
Concert Review: Karine Poghosyan at the Piano at Bargemusic, Brooklyn NY 4/11/09
The barge, tethered at the old Brooklyn Heights Fulton Ferry landing had pretty much stopped swaying by the time Karine Poghosyan settled in at the keys: for awhile, it looked like it was going to be a rocky ride. Instead, it was as if the waves parted and gave the Armenian-American virtuoso clear passage through a brutally challenging, frequently exhilarating performance. She warmed up with Haydn’s warmly consonant Piano Sonata No. 38 in F Major, Hob XVI: 23 and then tackled Chopin’s Four Mazurkas, Op. 67, beginning with a remarkably understated take on the famous first one in G. Other pianists schmaltz this up: she didn’t. The haunting G Minor Mazurka – as well as the more upbeat, gypsy-inflected C Minor and A Minor Mazurkas – were extraordinary, Poghosyan pushing to the absolute limits of rubato, bringing out every microtone of longing and drama.
Then she launched into Liszt’s knotty, spectacular Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in C Sharp Minor, the first of two show-stoppers. She took its hammering staccato chords, spectacular lefthand leaps from the lowest to highest registers and scurrying sixteenth-note runs down the scale in the right and while she didn’t make them look effortless, she had such command that she was able to pull out all the stops and blast her way through them without ever losing her footing. That she was able to shift gears after that, with a poignant, impeccably sensitive rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Elegie in E Flat Minor, Op. 3, No. 1 was perhaps just as impressive. Then she ratcheted the intensity up to redline again and stayed there for the entirety of Stravinsky’s 1921 piano arrangement of three movements from Petrouchka: the gypsyish Danse Russse, evoking the Chopin earlier in the program; an utterly macabre, resoundingly successful romp through Chez Petrouchka and ending with La Semaine Grasse, a revelation, vastly more powerful than the ballet’s original orchestral score. Anyone with the desire to get to the root of the composer’s paradigm-shifting, deathly tonalities would do well to discover this version.
Poghosyan’s next recital is a trio performance on April 17 at 7 PM with Bela Horvath, violin and John Popham, cello at the Yamaha Piano Salon, 689 Fifth Avenue (at 54th Street), followed by a solo show on April 27 at 7 PM at Steinway Hall, 109 West 57th Street featuring works by Mozart, Chopin, De Falla, Sirota, and Stravinsky.
April 12, 2009 Posted by delarue | Live Events, Music, music, concert, New York City, review, Reviews | bargemusic, chopin, classical music, concert, haydn, Karine Poghosyan, liszt, mazurka, petrouchka, piano music, recital, review, stravinsky | Leave a comment
About
Welcome to Lucid Culture, a New York-based music blog active since 2007. You can scroll down for a brief history and explanation of what we do here. To help you get around this site, here are some links which will take you quickly to our most popular features:
If you’re wondering where all the rock music coverage here went, it’s moved to our sister blog New York Music Daily.
Click here for our front page, where you’ll find the ten most recent writeups.
Our exhaustive, constantly updated guide to over 200 New York City music venues
Our most popular music reviews since 2007
Our 1000 Best Albums of All Time countdown
A big hit in 2008-2009, the 666 Best Songs of All Time page
This link will take you directly to the most recently updated NYC Live Music Calendar, which has also migrated to New York Music Daily.
Our archives since day one
How to get your music reviewed here
Links to our favorite blogs
Our music index and subcategory indices
Our FAQs and Marginalia page
ABOUT LUCID CULTURE
April, 2007 – Lucid Culture debuts as the online version of a somewhat notorious New York music and politics e-zine. After a brief flirtation with blogging about global politics, we begin covering the dark fringes of the New York rock scene that the indie rock blogosphere and the corporate media find too frightening, too smart or too unfashionable. “Great music that’s not trendy” becomes our mantra.
2008-2009 – jazz, classical and world music become an integral part of coverage here. Our 666 Best Songs of All Time list becomes a hit, as do our year-end lists for best songs, best albums and best New York area concerts.
2010 – Lucid Culture steps up coverage of jazz and classical while rock lingers behind.
2011 – one of Lucid Culture’s founding members creates New York Music Daily, a blog dedicated primarily to rock music coverage from a transgressive, oldschool New York point of view, with Lucid Culture continuing to cover music that’s typically more lucid and cultured.
2012-13 – Lucid Culture eases into its current role as New York Music Daily’s jazz and classical annex.
2014-21 – still going strong…thanks for stopping by!
Recent Comments
- Follow Lucid Culture on WordPress.com
Archives
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- May 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- Follow Lucid Culture on WordPress.com