Ear Heart Music Gets Off to a Flying Start at Roulette

A lot of musicians end up becoming impresarios, at least part-time. Violinist Gil Morgenstern’s Reflections Series is one of the most obviously successful; pianist Alexandra Joan’s eclectic Kaleidoscope Series at WMP Concert Hall is also on the rise. Amelia Lukas, whose axe is the flute, started her series, Ear Heart Music, at the Tank. She’s moved it to Roulettte this year, with a formidable schedule of some of the creme de la creme of the indie classical world including Flexible Music and Cadillac Moon Ensemble. Last week’s opening party was a party in every sense of the word, with Build headlining.

Bandleader/violinist Matthew McBane is a gifted tunesmith. Much of the time he puts those hooks front and center and builds them cinematically (NPR uses the ensemble’s music a lot). Other times, he caches them in more complex architecture. This particular show higlighted both, alternating a brisk, biting early spring ambience with droll, deadpan humor. Bassist Ben Campbell and Universal Thump drummer Adam D. Gold – one of this era’s masters of dynamics – provided a deftly jaunty swing for the evening’s opening number, followed by a subtly orchestrated, slowly crescendoing piece with McBane and cellist Andrea Lee swooping against Mike Cassedy’s terse piano. McBane explained that the next composition would be more “mathematical,” and it was, with a richly snaky, intertwined counterpoint, once again rising to an insistent pulse.

McBane kicked off the next one with a wry pizzicato motif which quickly turned into a tongue-in-cheek chamber-rock parody of glitch-hop, or chillwave, or whatever the effete, trendoid flavor du jour is. From there Cassedy led them into the night’s darkest and most grpping piece, shifting from a moody, minimalist Satie-esque atmosphere to a more and more aggressively pounding crescendo where Gold backed off a little. He’d been feeling the room all night: did he think he might be playing too loud for the big auditorium? No – his kick drum was scooching across the stage. So Campbell calmly put down his bass, went over to the kit, adjusted it and then held it until the series of wallops was over. The group ended with a long, hypnotic piece that moved from warmly hypnotic to astringently atonal, All Tomorrow’s Parties as Julia Wolfe might have done it.

To open the evening, Dither Quartet guitarist James Moore played resonator alongside Redshift violinist Andie Springer for a brief series of relatively short works including a grippingly hypnotic, slowly sirening Paula Matthusen tone poem and a dancing, Appalachian-tinged Lainie Fefferman composition that eventually landed in more pensive terrain. As they played, artist Kevork Mourad drew a jagged, somewhat menacing series of tableaux that were projected behind the stage.

And it wasn’t all just music, either. There was a raffle, an afterparty, some pretty good New York State wine, and free food courtesy of a handful of boutique manufacturers of candy, syrups, jelly and pickles. The pickle people, in particular, provided a decent half-sour and some first-class, smoky pickled okra. But the stars of the show, foodwise, turned out to be best known for their music. Yarn/Wire – who’re playing here on Dec 18 – brought some homemade tomatilllo salsa that delivered an irresistibly lingering jalapeno/garlic burn. The next Ear Heart Music extravaganza at Roulette is on Oct 9 at 8 PM with Red Light Ensemble pairing off works by Satie, Cage and Grisey, among others, to accompany Melies silent films.

Gil Morgenstern Doesn’t Blink in the Lights

It’s worth remembering that the true test of a live performer is how well they hold up under duress. Maybe because of this latest spell of global warming, it was visibly hot onstage during violinist Gil Morgenstern’s latest edition of his Reflections Series concerts at WMP Concert Hall last night. To say that he didn’t break a sweat wouldn’t be close to true – instead, he and New York Philharmonic pianist Jonathan Feldman went with the heat and delivered a program that even when it wasn’t searing, was characteristically captivating. Morgenstern’s technique is such that he’s able to play anything he wants, which typically means challenging and exhilarating material. He also likes themes – this one was, as he put it, “exile and unfinished journeys,” inspired by a recent Isaac Julien exhibit in Miami, where Morgenstern also performs this ongoing series.

Morgenstern opened solo with Bruce Saylor’s Dante Suite, originally written as a theatre work, but as the violinist noted, he commissioned it to be workable as a concert piece as well. To call it a trip through hell and then out would be accurate in a general sense, although this particular tour has unexpected nuance. As Saylor (who was in attendance) wrote it, the Gates of Hell offer an understated drama, while the unconsummated adulterers Paolo and Francesca – destined to spend eternity with their backs to each other – receive a vividly plaintive, sad theme. Brunetto Latini gets to experience if not enjoy a fiery, gypsyish passage in the remarkably interesting Circle of Sodomites; the Woods of the Suicides, a powerfully evocative, brooding segment, became a showcase for Morgenstern’s judiciously vibrato-laden dynamics. The suite closed with a finale that ran from a repetitive circular theme to a crescendo packed with sizzling riffs that played against open strings.

Feldman joined in on Janacek’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, a suite about life under an enemy occupation (in this case, Austria’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in World War I) and finally the joy of overthrowing the oppressors. Feldman’s rippling precision gave Morgenstern the perfect backdrop for his apprehensive cadenzas and wounded, lyrical sustained lines. The piece ends somewhat unexpectedly on a theme of bitter remembrance rather than exuberance, and the duo brought it down, hushed, for a quietly potent impact. Morgenstern then tackled Erwin Schulhoff’s 1927 Sonata for Solo Violin, a gripping four-part suite that runs from an almost Celtic dance, through a bracingly intense overture, an off-center, Bartok-esque scherzo and finally an aptly titled Allegro Risoluto which was nothing short of hypnotic.

Morgenstern is also something of a raconteur, and as he cautioned the audience, his explanation of the intrigue behind Ernest Chausson’s Poeme, Op. 25 might take longer than the piece itself. It didn’t, but it was worth hearing Morgenstern relate how the piece related to an Ivan Turgenev short story, a couple of mistresses, a May-December marriage and a possible case of mistaken paternity: such things were common in the artistic classes in the Nineteenth Century. The piece itself seems to be an elegy for a failed or broken romance: it takes awhile to get going, but when it does it sounds suspiciously like Erik Satie stole a secondary theme for his Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear. Morgenstern and Feldman ended it with a bright melancholy, as Ravel might have done it. They closed the program with methodical renditions of a couple of late-career Smetana pieces which were pleasantly if generically consonant, in an early Romantic vein; the duo could have finished with the Chausson and taken a well-deserved breather and the show wouldn’t have suffered. Morgenstern’s Reflections Series returns to WMP Concert Hall on April 14, followed by stops in Italy in May and Boone, North Carolina in June.

Gil Morgenstern Recreates the Ambience of a Fin-de-Siecle Paris Salon

For the past few years, violinist Gil Morgenstern‘s Reflections Series has imaginatively and fascinatingly blended both classical and new music with drama, literature and history. Thursday night at WMP Concert Hall, he offered a revealing look back at the musical life of the long-running Paris salon run by Winnaretta Singer, an heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune who commissioned works by many major composers including Stravinsky, Debussy and Satie. The program, featuring Morgenstern along with pianist Hiromi Fukuda and soprano Deborah Selig, was especially interesting in that it included both major and less important works. Because that’s what the programs were like at these salons – as Morgenstern explained, composers would use the events as a focus group or open mic of sorts to work up new material, gauge the audience’s reaction and explore collaborations with other musicians. These gatherings also served as an important way of connecting ambitious (or impoverished) composers with patrons of the arts. These days, you send off a grant proposal and cross your fingers: in 1896, you schmoozed someone like Singer. Morgenstern related an anecdote of how Maurice Ravel brazenly dedicated a piece to her before he’d even met her, a faux pas if there ever was one – and yet, as the work began to make waves and Singer’s following began congratulating her for having such cutting-edge taste, she had no choice but to play along as if she’d actually commissioned it.

Ravel’s Tzigane was the last piece on the bill, and one of the highlights. It’s a showstopper, Morgenstern gritting his teeth and blazing through its strenuously challenging gypsy-inflected passages with equal parts passion and skill, firing off lightning pizzicato passages, plucking his strings mandolin-style or launching a series of airy overtones requiring a touch completely the opposite of the pyrotechnics of the rest of the piece. The most gypsyish passages belonged to Fukuda, who dug into them with similar verve when she joined in about halfway through.

Debussy’s Sonata No. 3 in G Minor, the last work the composer finished prior to his death in 1918, was only slightly less intense and equally gripping. Lively but ridden with unease, it undoubtedly reflects a wartime ambience. Morgenstern and Fukuda brought a warily conversational feel to the fugal pizzicato of its “fantasque et leger” middle section and wound out with a brisk ominousness through the distantly gypsy-tinged concluding dance. Manuel de Falla’s Suite Populaire Espagnole, a series of 1925 miniatures written for a puppet show, were delightfully evocative, shifting from the Spanish ragtime, to hypnotic counterpoint, to a blustery, brief fight song, to a genial, laid-back “good guy theme” of sorts. And Stravinsky’s Duo Concertante and Divertimento was a fascinating look at the composer in full-blown Romantic mode, or at least as immersed in the tropes of the era – a dramatic overture, a playful gypsy dance and a rather blissed-out coda – as he ever was.

And as much of as Singer’s salon, and others like it, were fertile incubators for talent, they were also the pops concerts of their day. Most of the vocal numbers on the bill were a reminder that top 40 has been with us long before there was such a thing as the top 40. A series of Ravel settings of French poetry were early examples of the power ballad, foreshadowing Freddie Mercury; several similar works by Faure featured some demanding, insistent staccato passages that Fukuda managed to glide through with impressive ease – or what looked like it, anyway. This was a tough gig for Selig – these were hard songs to sell. Her approach was to deliver them with a full, round intonation, more in the style of a chorister, a clever and very effective strategy: words took a backseat to color and dynamics. A trio of Schubert songs at the end of the program became a canvas for her to vividly draw a playful butterfly – “keep your hands off my flower!” – a lovelorn riverside tableau, and then ecstasy, or at least a version thereof.

The next Reflections Series concert, here at 7:30 PM on February 17 of next year, explores the effect of location, dislocation and diaspora on composers and their works, featuring pianist Jonathan Feldman, music of Chopin, Schulhoff and Smetana, and a not-yet-announced literary component.

Concert Review: Gil Morgenstern’s Reflections Series at the Rubin Museum of Art, NYC 1/24/10

Violinist Gil Morgenstern‘s imaginative multimedia Reflections Series is one of the most original and interesting cultural events bubbling around the surface of the radar here in New York. Beginning at the Rubin Museum of Art a couple of years ago – with this season’s series continuing there through April 25 – Morgenstern’s vision was to create programs that semi-thematically blend chamber music with theatre, visual art and/or literature. Since the Rubin Museum is currently hosting the first-ever public exhibit of Carl Jung’s legendary Red Book, it only made sense to put together a bill that linked to Jung, even if tangentially through the work of Sylvia Plath – who as it turns out was a rather enthusiastic advocate of the archetypal archetypist.

As memorably as Morgenstern and pianist Donald Berman played their dream-themed mix of Schubert, Sibelius, Cage and Enesco, it was Elizabeth Marvel who held the crowd rapt with a powerful, vivid and strikingly nuanced evocation of Plath. Reading from a diverse selection of prose, sometimes solo, sometimes over the music, Marvel’s portrayal gave the doomed writer an energy that bordered on manic-depressive, a brightness and unselfconscious joie de vivre that made her darker moments and the foreshadowing thereof all the more ominous. From rapt, early morning connect-the-dots dream interpretation, to divaesque yet genuine alienation brought on by the nightmare to end all nightmares, to a delectably deadpan reading of a Plath story about a woman jousting with her husband’s overactive imagination and its brutally ironic consequences, Marvel was…well, you guess the word. She’s no stranger to theatre devotees – she’s won Obies and done everything from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to tv, so it’s hardly a stretch to imagine how easily she could springboard this role into a one-woman show. It would bring down the house.

The musicians were no less inspired in what was essentially a dusk-to-dawn sequence. Both Morgenstern and Berman are best known as advocates of new music, yet they sank their teeth just as avidly into the pre-Romantic material on the bill. Morgenstern’s incisive staccato right before the coda of Schubert’s Fantasie Suite beautifully reprised the understated portent of Berman’s chords opening the first movement, and his subtle vibrato added glimmer and warmth to the composer’s nocturne Night and Dreams. Georges Enesco’s Impressions of Childhood got an appropriately varied treatment: an uneasy country dance; a nervous lullaby; the brooding beauty of Wind in the Chimney, and a couple of pastoral miniatures. The most nightmarish moment was John Cage’s Dream, Berman’s piano casually colliding with Morgenstern’s effectively acidic textures.

Fortuitously, the Reflections Series has expanded across the United States and beyond, with performances from Florida to Italy – the next one here is April 25 featuring music of Poulenc with readings from Dante’s Inferno. And the Red Book continues to be on display at the Rubin Museum through February 15. The other current exhibits are also worth a look, notably the Indian, Nepalese and Tibetan religious and mystical paintings, mandalas, sculptures and miniatures. Free day is Friday starting at 7 PM.