Camerata Zurich Reinvent a Haunting Czech Classical Suite
The piece de resistance on Camerata Zurich‘s latest album of string orchesta pieces – streaming at Spotify – is Daniel Rumler’s arrangement of Janacek’s troubled, death-obsessed suite On an Overgrown Path. It’s gorgeously lush yet uncluttered music. Rumler subsumes much of the turbulence of the original piano version, switching out embellishments for emphatic melody. Group leader Igor Karsko opts for elegance and dynamics throughout the suite’s many picturesque interludes, broken down into 25 short segments here.
There’s also a spoken-word component. In her original French, poet Maia Brami reads the broodingly evocative text the orchestra had commissioned in 2017, imagining the composer reflecting on his life in a rather haunted woodland setting. There’s an English translation (but surprisingly, no original) in the album liner notes.
Wistfully lilting strolls rise to a sudden anguish, moody resonance alternating with gently animated phrasing to set the stage. The composer was haunted by the death of his daughter, who succumbed to illness at twenty, and the sense of loss is palpable throughout many twists and turns. Fond memories flicker into and then fade out of the mist. The carefully modulated echo phrasing in the brief ninth segment is especially striking.
The opening work, Josef Suk’s Meditation on St. Wenceslas sounds absolutely nothing like the Christmas carol that’s been repurposed for a million playground rhymes over the years. This piece rises with a steady pulse to a troubled intensity: when Karsko gets the ensemble to dig in just thisclose to a shriek, a little after the midway point, the effect is viscerally breathtaking, especially considering the lushness on the way there. Suk wrote it as a thinly veiled freedom fighter anthem for Czech independence from the Habsburgs; its solemnity and defiance are just as relevant now, in a considerably more global context.
The group bring the album full circle with Dvorak’s Nocturne in B major, giving it a similarly insistent, even anxious pulse in places. Karsko raises the distinctness of the interweave of voices into strikingly sharp focus, a sonic layer cake.
An Entertaining, Energetic Mix of Rarities by Black Composers From Over the Years
Violinist Randall Goosby’s new album Roots, streaming at Spotify, is a fascinating, revealing and entertaining collection of music by black composers plus a couple of ringers whose most famous works were enriched by the influence of 19th and early 20th century black American music. Goosby and his inspired collaborators shift energetically through a wide expanse of styles, from rustic oldtime string band sounds, to thorny 20th century composition and a wealth of edgy blues.
He opens with Xavier Foley‘s Shelter Island, a new duo work where he’s joined by the bassist-composer in a leaping feast of minor-key blues and gospel riffage. It validates the argument that guys on the low end of the four strings are ideally suited to write for their fellow players further up the scale.
Next on the bill is Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s bracing triptych Blues Forms For Solo Violin. It’s a Schoenbergian series of short variations on blues phrases, with a lingering, aching close-harmonied midsection and a coda that reaches toward oldtime gospel jubilation. The composer was an interesting guy, a jazz musician who toward the end of his career paid the bills by writing far more pedestrian charts for 1960s top 40 hitmakers.
On the better-known side, Gershwin – one of the original white bluesmen – is represented by four short numbers from Porgy and Bess. Pianist Zhu Wang joins Goosby in an elegantly ornamented, more than distantly troubled new arrangement of Summertime. Likewise, the two infuse A Woman Is a Sometime Thing with a stark ragtime energy.
Their incisive, tango-like strut and bluesy ornamentation in It Ain’t Necessarily So add a playfully devious edge. And they raise Bess You Is My Woman Now to a confidently restrained triumph.
Goosby brings Wang back for William Grant Still’s three-part Suite for Violin and Piano, beginning with the African Dance, whose shifting blues riffage and deliciously hard-charging conclusion make it a mini-suite in itself. Part two, Mother and Child rises fascinatingly from a lingering somberness to an assertive, Asian-tinged pentatonic theme and then a similarly triumphant ending. The two shuffle and flurry through Garmin, the jaunty conclusion.
The duo continue with three pieces by Florence Price. Adoration is a spare, rapt love ballad. Goosby gets to revel in the sharp-fanged cadenzas and resonant gospel lulls in her Fantasie No. 1 in G minor as Wang mashes up the blues with High Romantic phantasmagoria. The Fantasie No. 2 in F# minor starts as a more starkly pensive take on the same blend – blues melody, big Romantic chords and flourishes – and grows more lively.
Goosby and Wang play Maud Powell’s arrangement of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Deep River, leaping from gospel reverence to one of the composer’s signature sizzling crescendos. In many ways, the black British composer – who was a star conductor during his late 19th century heyday – was Dvorak in reverse. Where Dvorak brought Eastern Europe to the blues, Coleridge-Taylor did the opposite, with considerably wilder results.
The choice of Dvorak’s Sonatina in G major as a conclusion subtly brings the album full circle. It’s closer to courtly late Habsburg Empire music than 19th century spirituals, but the connection is still vivid, especially in the plaintive, wistful cadences and contrasting camp-meeting liveliness of the second movement. The two musicians bring an anthemic, occasionally coyly romping sensibility to the opening allegro, linger in the occasional moment of hazy unease in the scherzo and build folksy flair in the coda.
Much as it’s a great thing that music by neglected black composers is making a huge comeback, we need to make sure that this movement doesn’t get hijacked by the fascists who devised critical race theory as a smokescreen for the New Abnormal. One suspects that Goosby would heartily endorse that dedication to the cause.
Intimate Electricity From Joshua Bell
Isn’t it funny how some of the world’s most exciting sounds get lumped into a category with the most boring name? And who would have thought there would be such a mighty upsurge in chamber music in 2020? With established concert venues padlocked and imperiled – outside of places like Sweden, Moscow and Nicagagua anyway – intimate performances largely by and for family and friends have become the new paradigm in classical music, at least until the lockdown is over.
And in keeping with the zeitgeist, some of the biggest names in the field are making intimate recordings. None other than Joshua Bell has made a diverse and often electrifying new live album, At Home with Music, streaming at Spotify. Although virtually all of it is arrangements of standard repertoire, the violinist seems especially amped to play it.
He opens with the famous first movement from Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 5 in F Major, Op. 24, jauntily trading riffs with pianist Jeremy Denk. The two play it fast: in their most animated moments, the lack of digital separation between the instruments enhances the carefree energy.
Peter Dugan takes over the piano, joining Bell for a much more rubato, Romantic take of Dvořák’s Slavonic Fantasy in B minor. Bell’s rise from silken vibrato to raw, Romany intensity is unselfconsciously electrifying, a real crowd-pleaser.
Next, he teams up with soprano Larisa Martínez and pianist Kamal Khan for a somewhat understatedly lyrical take of Mendelssohn’s “Ah, ritorna, età dell’oro” from the opera Infelice. They return to tackle a Puccini aria later on.
The rare treat here is Wieniawski’s Polonaise de Concert in D Major, Op. 4, with Dugan back on piano, both musicians digging in hard for its anthemic leaps, slashes and devious dips. Their remarkably steady, unvarnished take of Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2 makes a good segue, quiet as it generally is. And hearing Bell revel in the virtuoso ornamentation of the Jascha Heifetz arrangement of Gershwin’s Summertime is an expected thrill.
Martínez and Khan return for the closer, an alternately bracing and warmly familiar medley from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. with a triumphant coda.
It’s Been a Typically Eclectic Year at Upper Manhattan’s Home for Adventurous New Classical Sounds
If new classical music is your thing, don’t let any possible twee, gentrifier associations scare you away from the Miller Theatre‘s series of so-called “pop-up” concerts. For almost a decade now, Columbia’s comfortable auditorium at the top of the stairs at the 116th St. stop on the 1 train has been home to an often spectacularly good series of free, early evening performances of 21st century works along with the occasional blast from the past. The name actually reflects how impromptu these shows were during the series’ first year, and while the schedule now extends several months ahead, new events still do pop up unexpectedly. Sometimes there’s free beer and wine, sometimes not, but that’s not the main attraction, testament to how consistently solid the programming here has become.
This past fall’s first concert was a revelatory world premiere of John Zorn’s new JMW Turner-inspired suite for solo piano, played with virtuosic verve by Steven Gosling; that one got a rave review here. The October episode, with indie classical chamber ensemble Counterinduction playing an acerbic, kinetic series of works by their charismatic violist Jessica Meyer, was also fantastic. Various permutations of the quintet, Meyer joined by violinist Miranda Cuckson, cellist Caleb van der Swaagh, clarinetist and bass clarinetist Benjamin Fingland and pianist Ning Yu began with the dappled shades of I Only Speak of the Sun, then brought to life the composer’s many colorful perspectives on Guadi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral in a dynamic, high-voltage partita. The most bracing number of the evening, Meyer explained, drew on a David Foster Wallace quote regarding how “ the truth will set you free, but not until it lets you go,”
There were many other memorable moments here throughout the past year. In February, Third Sound played an assured but deliciously restless take of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 along with a mixed bag of material from south of the border. A month later, pianist Marilyn Nonken parsed uneasily lingering works by Messiaen and Tristan Murail.
Then in April, Rebecca Fischer delivered a fascinating program of solo violin pieces along with some new solo arrangements. The highlight was a solo reinvention of Missy Mazzoli‘s incisively circling Death Valley Junction. Fischer also ran through an increasingly thorny, captivating Paola Prestini piece, along with brief, often striking works by Lisa Bielawa, Gabriela Lena Frank and Suzanne Farrin.
Last month, Tak Ensemble tackled elegantly minimalist chamber material by Tyshawn Sorey and Taylor Brook. And December’s concert featured firebrand harpist Bridget Kibbey, who played the Bach Toccata in D faster than any organist possibly could, then slowed down for simmering, relatively short pieces by Albeniz and Dvorak among others.
The next Miller Theatre “pop-up” concert on the calendar is next January 21 at 6 PM with violinist Lauren Cauley.
Riveting New Sounds and Old Crowd-Pleasers From the Claremont Trio
If the Claremont Trio’s forthcoming album is anything like their concert last week to open this year’s Music Mondays series on the Upper West Side, it’s going to be amazing.
The program was typical of this venue, a mix of rapturously interesting 21st century works along with a couple of old warhorses. The three musicians – violinist Emily Bruskin, cellist Julia Bruskin and pianist Andea Lam – offered some gleefully phantastmagorical Halloween foreshadowing with four folk song variations by Gabriela Lena Frank. Careful, wary long-tone overlays between the musicians quickly gave way to a devious, ghostly game of peek-a-boo, carnivalesque pirouettes and wary, lingering, Messiaenic chords.
Helen Grime‘s Three Whistler Miniatures – inspired by an exhibit at the Gardner Museum in Boston – were more austere and ominously resonant: rich washes of cello, mordantly assertive piano and slithery violin all figured into the mini-suite’s striking dynamic shifts and desolate reflecting-pool chill at the end.
The two warhorses were Dvorak’s Dumky Trio and Brahms’ final trio, No. 3 in C Minor. The former was a Slavic soul party, fueled as much by the violin’s elegantly leaping Romany-flavored cadenzas as much as by Lam’s alternately romping and unexpectedly muted attack. The three women played up the music’s pensive side, leaving a lot of headroom for the composer’s series of triumphant codas.
Where they pulled back on the Dvorak for the sake of emotional attunement and contrast, they did the opposite with the Brahms, Lam in particular adding extra vigor, which paid off particularly well in the andante third movement as she added a degree of gravitas. Otherwise, there wasn’t much the Trio could enhance: the music was lovely, and predictable, party music for the thieving dukes and abbots and the gentry of 19th century Germany. As proto-ELO, it wasn’t up to Jeff Lynne level.
Music Mondays continues on October 7 at 7:30 PM at Avent Church at the corner of 93rd St. and Broadway with the Aizuri String Quarte playing works by Haydn, Hildegard von Bingen, Brahms and Caroline Shaw. Admission is free, but you’ll have to get there at least least fifteen minutes early if you really want a seat at what has become one of Manhattan’s favorite classical spots.
A Starkly Relevant New Album and a Governors Island Show by the Very Serious Sirius Quartet
The album cover illustration for the Sirius Quartet‘s latest release, New World – streaming at Spotify – has the Statue of Liberty front and center, against a backdrop that could be a sunset with stormclouds overhead…or smoke from a conflagration. She’s wearing a veil. The record’s centerpiece, New World, Nov. 9, 2016 won the Grand Prize in the the New York Philharmonic’s New World Initiative composition competition a couple of years ago. The message could not be more clear. It’s no wonder why the group are so troubled by the events since then: both of their violinists are immigrants.
They’re playing a free concert featuring their own materal plus original arrangements of Radiohead and the Beatles this Sept 7 at the park in the middle of Governors Island, with sets at 1 and 3 PM. You can catch the ferry from either the old Staten Island Ferry terminal at the Battery – to the east of the new one – or from the Brooklyn landing where Bergen Street meets the river.
Violinist Fung Chern Hwei’s Beside the Point opens the album. In between a wistful, trip hop-flavored theme, the group chop their way through a staccato thicket capped off by a big cadenza where the violin finally breaks free, in a depiction of the struggle against discrimination.
Currents, a tone poem by cellist Jeremy Harman has stark, resonant echoes of Irish music and the blues: it could be a shout out to two communities who’ve had to battle bigotry here. The epic title track sarcastically juxtaposes contrasting references to Dvorak’s New World Symphony and Shostakovich’s harrowing String Quartet No. 8: look how far we haven’t come, violinist/composer Gregor Huebner seems to say.
Still, another Huebner composition, is based on Strange Fruit, the grisly chronicle of a lynching and a big Billie Holiday hit. Ron Lawrence’s viola chops at the air along with the cello over an uneasily crescendoing violin haze, the group coalescing somberly up to a horrified, insistent coda. Their version of Eleanor Rigby has a bittersweet, baroque introductory paraphrase and some bluesy soloing, finally hitting the original melody over a propulsive, funky beat. As covers of the song go, it’s one of the few actually listenable ones.
The album’s second epic, More Than We Are rises slowly through allusions to Indian music to a persistently wary, chromatic pulse fueled by Harman’s bassline: you could call parts of it Messiaenic cello metal. To a New Day is even more somber, flickering pizzicato passages alternating with a brooding sway grounded by a hypnotically precise, stabbing rhythm.
The Chinese-inflected 30th Night has a dramatic vocal interlude amid quavering cadenzas as well as phrasing that mimics the warpy tones of a pipa. The album’s second cover, Radiohead’s Knives Out is louder and more jagged than Sybarite5‘s lush take on the Thom Yorke catalog. The group return to the neo-baroque with the album’s rather sentimental closing cut, simply titled Cavatina. Contemporary classical protest music doesn’t get more interesting or hauntingly diverse than this.
The Chelsea Symphony Celebrate Audacity in the Face of Terror
The New York Philharmonic’s newfound dedication to socially aware programming is a welcome development, but among New York orchestras, the Chelsea Symphony got there first. This year their entire season has been devoted to music celebrating freedom fighters and the struggle against fascism. The coda of Saturday night’s program, Shostakovich’s audaciously transgressive Symphony No. 5, was arguably the most deliciously redemptive piece they’ve played in the last several months, at least from this perspective.
It was a loud yet remarkably distinct performance. It often makes perfect sense for an orchestra to play the lulls close to the vest, in order to max out the dynamics, but conductor Reuben Blundell did the opposite, right from the somber opening riffs, a paraphrase nicked from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The effect was the same: gloom and doom, in your face, and the rest of the symphony was as impossible to turn away from.
One by one, the ensemble absolutely nailed many of the composer’s future signature tropes: a creepy, satirical danse macabre, buffoonish phony pageantry, cynically strutting militarism and the terror and soul-depletion all those things create. In moments of guarded hope, the brass section, in particular, distinguished thesmelves with their lustrous clarity. Solos throughout the performance – notably from Michael Dwinell’s oboe, Sarah Abrams’ flute, Hannah Murphy’s harp and Tyler Hefferon’s timpani – had guided-missile precision.
The piece was an enormous gamble for the composer. In 1937, Stalin’s secret police were rounding up and murdering his friends; meanwhile, he was under fire from the censors for drifting too close to the Second Viennese School, i.e. ‘western” sounds, notwithstanding that so many of the leading figures in that movement were also Slavic. Shostakovich’s response was this wickedly catchy, emotionally panoramic, occasionally harrowing masterpiece.
Notwithstanding all its drama and hope against hope, the one section that might have been the group’s greatest triumph could have been the surreal, atmospheric interlude in the third movement, one which often gets away from other orchestras. Blundell seemed to offer contrasting hope with the robustness of the conclusion, which others often leave much more unsettled.
One thing that did get away from the orchestra was beyond anyone’s control. The DiMenna Center’s air conditioning kicked in hard and sent the string sections’ tuning awry as Nell Flanders led the ensemble matter-of-factly through Dvorak’s Violin Concerto in A Minor. Soloist Bryn Digney played it from memory. She knew what she was doing, but stringed instruments tend not to adjust well to unexpectedly cold air on a warm night.
Fortunately, that wasn’t a factor in the beginning and end of the concert, which the group kicked off with minute attention to sudden stylistic shifts throughout Courtney Bryan‘s Sanctum. A portrait of the attempt to stake out solid ground amid relentless police brutality and attacks on black Americans, it requires split-second timing to sync up with a backing track including field recordings from the Fereguson, Missouri protests. But the Symphony were up to the task of elevating stark bluesiness out of the murk – and vice versa.
The Chelsea Symphony conclude their season on June 29 at 8 PM, repeating on the 30th at 2 at the DiMenna Center with a performance of Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 plus the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in D Minor with soloist Adam von Housen. For Sunday’s performance, they switch out Mendelssohn for Beethoven’s violin cnncerto in that same key.. Suggested donation of $20 is about half what the Philharmonic is charging for the Corigliano ealier next month. It will be interesting to compare the two.
Slavic Surrealism, Somber Strauss and Bittersweet Beethoven at Lincoln Center
This past evening the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center staged a program on themes of endings and goodbyes. In various configurations, eight musicians contributed to a final work in a specific genre, an elegy, and what could have been a fervent wave goodbye to a composer’s beloved home turf. Each was performed in unusually high-definition, sometimes revelatory detail. What appeared to be a sold-out crowd agreed that braving late-winter bluster for a show like this was infinitely more rewarding than snuggling with a handful of favorite records (or with youtube).
Pianist Gilbert Kalish and violinist Bella Hristova opened the night with a remarkably straightforward take of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 10. It seemed just a hair slow. That turned out to be a wise choice, considering that other musicians often romp through the whole thing since the piano part does not require typical Beethovenesque virtuosity (the duke who commissioned it also played the premiere). Likewise, Hristova held back on the vibrato until the hymnal second movement was underway: the effect turned what could have been sentimentality into genuine bittersweetness. Constant exchanges between piano lefthand and violin were coyly amusing, in contrast to the first hint of an ending in the third movement, which Kalish imbued with a distantly desperate quality, raising the ante with sudden extra vigor.
The centerpiece was an absolutely shattering performance of Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen, arguably the saddest tone poem ever written. Violinist Arnaud Sussmann, violists Mark Holloway and Richard O’Neil, cellists Dmitri Atapine and David Requiro, and bassist Xavier Foley joined Hristova to build a relentless, aching, meticulous interweave that finally came full circle, fueled by the cellos’ plaintive angst. Here as elsewhere, the septet’s attention to minutiae was such that Strauss’ cell-like permutations echoed Bach as much as they foreshadowed Philip Glass. At the end, the audience sat in stunned silence for what felt like a full thirty seconds before breaking into applause.
Dynamics bristled and sparkled throughout the night’s coda, Dvorak’s Trio in E Minor for Piano, Violin and Cello, best known as the Dumky. Joined by Sussmann and Requiro, Kalish seemed to revel in the suite’s almost gleeful phantasmagoria. The savagery in how the composer takes an initial, cloying dance theme and then twists it through a funhouse mirror had a magnetic effect on the trio, especially when Kalish decided to pick up the pace. The numerous contrasts, particularly a silken ending to the adagio second movement, were striking and unselfconsciously poignant…or just plain funny. Sussmann and Requiro approached their solo spots with a straightforwardness that matched the Beethoven. It wouldn’t be fair to call the ending diabolical, but it was close, a devilishly good time. Glistening with Slavic chromatics, if this was a goodbye, it could have been a salute to everything Dvorak loved about his home country…and also quite possibly a snide dismissal of everything he didn’t.
Student Orchestras Rule!
Among the ever-shrinking, rarefied elites who sometimes actually get paid to go to concerts and then share their experiences, there’s a feeling that student orchestras often do a better job than the pros. There are many logical reasons for this. Conservatory kids get more rehearsals, more guidance (which could cut both ways), they’re playing for a grade, and they’re not yet jaded to the point where they feel like phoning it in.
Yesterday’s Juilliard performance of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony at Alice Tully Hall validated all of those arguments. There was no backing off: everybody dug in, and went as deeply as possible into the composer’s stubborn dedication to being counterintuitive. This is a mighty tough piece to play, with its constantly shifting web of counterpoint, sudden blustery exchanges of short riffs between instruments, and tantalizing fragments of melody that, just when you start to hum along, disappear into thin air.
It was a friendly and animated guided tour of eerie close harmonies, petulant defiance of any genuine resolution, and Schoenberg’s sometimes outrageous sense of humor. There’s a point about two thirds of the way through where he basically stops the music to make sure that the cello and bass are both in tune – and then makes a theme and variations out of it. The group nailed it with deadpan aplomb: it was shocking that the audience, at least the string players in the crowd, weren’t completely cracking up.
And has anybody noticed what a great string section the Columbia University Orchestra has this year? It’s Boston Symphony quality: lush, rich, epic and tight as a drum. Dynamics weren’t at the top of the list, it would seem, at their mighty performance of Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite at Symphony Space last month, but their forceful presence gave the music a stunning freshness. This piece is proto heavy metal, and that’s exactly how the ensemble played it, going in hard for every bit of clever humor and grand guignol that the composer weaves for the strings.
They did the same thing with Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Anybody who’s gone to any of the classical halls over the past few years has probably been exposed to more New World than they probably could ever want. Yet, having heard maybe a half dozen different versions live since the New York Philharmonic made it their theme for a season, this ranked with the best of them. The rest of the orchestra wasn’t up to the level of the strings, but the rest of those other orchestras weren’t up to that level, either. What an undeniable, emphatic attack! It validated any bellicose interpretation of the symphony, and was every bit as fresh and new as the Grieg.
The Columbia University Orchestra’s next performance is a program TBA on April 6 at 8 PM at Lerner Hall on the Columbia Campus. And next month at Juilliard is the Focus Festival, featuring several public concerts of music originally commissioned for radio airplay, many of which are free. The first one is on Feb 1 at 7:30 PM at Alice Tully Hall, with orchestral works by Ligeti, Betty Olivero and Michael Tippett; tix are available at the hall’s box office.
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