A Quiet Knockout from Bruce Levingston
Pianist Brue Levingston’s new Still Sound is a gorgeously conceptual album of nocturnes that follows a concert-like trajectory. It would be simplistic to reduce it to the mechanics of stately lefthand and glimmering upper righthand, although that’s a fairly accurate description of the most traditionally nocturnal pieces here. Intriguingly, Erik Satie is the connecting link, a brave move considering how specifique Satie is. Levingston doesn’t take any chances with the famous Gymnopedie No. 2, but he does with Gnossiennes No. 2 and 3, and there his whispery, lento interpretation is a knockout, a welcome change from how most players shy away from anything more than letting Satie’s creepy, otherworldly angst speak for itself. Augusta Gross’ Dance of the Spirits makes a great segue: derivative yet inspired, it could be the long-lost Gnossienne #7.
The spaciousness of the Satie is aptly foreshadowed in Levington’s choices of openers, Arvo Part’s minimalist Fur Alina and the more rhythmic Variationen zur gesundung von Arinuschka. Gross, who serves as a parallel connecting element here, is first represented by the quietly macabre allusions of a brief diptych, Venturing Forth Anew. The brisk twinkles and ripples of Schubert’s Impromptu Op. 9, No. 4 make another tremendously successful segue; Levingston takes full advantage of the opportunity to hit it harder as it moves along and darkens before bringing back the opening ambience. Chopin’s distantly uneasy Chopin Nocturne in B flat, Op. 9, No. 1 leaves no doubt what Satie’s stepping-off point was. The album’s concluding tracks include William Bolcom’s New York Lights, which gets a wistful reading, Levingston’s lefthand mimicking the sonics of an upright bass feeling for steady ground around a central tone, and then a steadily gleaming take on Gross’ Reflections on Air. Out now on Sono Luminus, it’s a quietly powerful reminder of why Levingston has become the go-to pianist for many of this era’s most intriguing composers.
Bruce Levingston’s Nightbreak: Nocturnes for a Dark Time of Year
Bruce Levingston, one of the go-to pianists in the shadowy world where indie classical meets the Romantics, has an excellent new album of nocturnes just out on Sono Luminus, titled Nightbreak. The new album’s big drawing card is the world premiere of a new piano arrangement of Philip Glass’ Dracula Suite. It’s a characteristically hypnotic, circular theme based on a descending progression, Glass at his catchiest and most accessible: in fact, this version bears a closer resemblance to the dark rock music of artsy 90s bands like Blonde Redhead or DollHouse, than it does to the Indian music that Glass has drawn on for decades. Levingston plays this stripped-down version of what was originally a string quartet plaintively and sensitively: this Dracula is a genuinely tragic character.
There’s more eye-opening (or ear-opening) material here as well. The Liszt homages long since reached overkill point this year, but Levingston has pulled a trio of particularly vivid, impressively dynamic, lesser-known works out of the archives. Levingston takes the crescendoing overture Vallee d’Obermann from Chopinesque pensiveness to a carefully precise crescendo and follows that with warm, contemplative takes on the Nocturne from Les Cloches de Geneve and Les jeux d’eaux. The Brahms pieces which follow: Intermezzo, Op.116, No.4; Ballade in D minor, Op.10, No.1;and the Waltz in D minor, Op.39, No.9 are period pieces, nothing special, even if they’re as warmly melodic as you would expect. And then Wolfgang Rihm’s Brahmsliebewaltzer, just a hair strange enough to be really creepy instead of the Brahms homage that the title hints at, sets the stage. Alone in a darkened room, The Count!
Eric Clark Channels Liszt at Trinity Church
Isn’t it ironic that some of the most technically skilled musicians are sometimes the most soulless? One would think that the higher degree of proficiency a musician has, the greater the ability to communicate the most minute shade of emotion or complex idea. Sadly, that’s often not the case. Franz Liszt still gets pigeonholed as one of those technicians, somebody who wasted notes like a broken hydrant wastes water, and that’s too bad. Pianist Eric Clark’s virtuosic yet minutely nuanced performance of Liszt works today at Trinity Church validated any argument that Liszt’s soul matched his chops.
Much of Liszt may be fiendishly difficult to play, but Clark began counterintuitively with a masterfully spacious, thoughtfully paced take of Spozalizio (Italian for “wedding,” inspired by Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin), setting the tone with its High Romantic warmth and lyricism. This was echoed a bit later in two settings of Petrarch sonnets (nos. 104 and 123), originally written as songs. The former manages to reach back to Bach as well as foreshadow the Electric Light Orchestra, with its swelling, alternating major and minor chords; the latter is a nocturne, Clark returning to the sensitive, judicious pacing of the first work. It’s not often that audiences get to hear the thoughtful side of Liszt: kudos to Clark for delivering it with grace and, if anything, understatement.
The piece de resistance was Apres Une Lecture De Dante (After Reading Dante), a hybrid sonata/fantasia, as the composer described it, that alternates a trip through hell with starlit, glimmering passages offering hope for an entirely different outcome in the afterlife. This was trademark fire-and-brimstone Liszt – literally – and Clark took the crowd along for a long, cinematic, chromatically-charged thrill ride interrupted memorably by the occasional rapt evocation of heavenly bliss.
Clark ended the program with Liszt’s arrangement of themes from Mozart’s Don Juan. That he would tackle it at all was brave; that he would pull it off flawlessly was an astonishing athletic feat. But as music, it was boring. For one, the source material is schlock to the core (one of Liszt’s dayjobs was playing the hits of the day, or the era, to rowdy concert hall audiences). And even the great Liszt would eventually run out of gas. It doesn’t take a close listen to hear how methodically – and after awhile, utterly predictably – he built little breaks in between the incessant pyrotechnics to give his fingers a bit of a rest from the rapidfire staccato octaves up the scale, meticulously pointillistic chromatics runs downward and roaring, torrential crescendos. And every one of those devices is employed to the point of overkill: there should be a drinking game where somebody has to chug whenever one of them appears. But the crowd gave Clark a standing ovation, and he had an encore ready – something he’s had to get used to by now, now doubt. It turned out to be a stormy, distantly Chopinesque prelude that only offered respite for his right hand, not his left. The way he did it, it almost looked easy.
Alexandra Joan Stuns and Surprises at WMP Concert Hall
There are innumerable cookie-cutter classical pianists out there. They do as their teachers tell them and play it safe. Most of the time, they succeed with what’s put before them, since the composers they play knew how to enable just about anyone with sufficient chops to get the job done, more or less. Then at the other extreme there are players who say, “To hell with dynamics, this is MY interpretation, my way or the highway!” Alexandra Joan is neither, and she doesn’t fit the middle ground either. What she does is distinctive, and stunningly intuitive, as her solo program Wednesday night at WMP Concert Hall so vividly reaffirmed. Joan is not only a musician, she’s also a scenemaker. Her ongoing Kaleidoscope Series – this season’s final concert is June 1 – brings together music, and sometimes art, and people, a diverse mix much younger than the typical Lincoln Center crowd. If this is one of classical music’s many possible futures, it’s something to look forward to.
This program’s theme was music by French composers, “Unconventional ways to feel or convey French culture,” Joan explained (she’s Romanian-French; she lives here). Focusing on the auspicious moment where Romanticism was busting out of its cocoon into Modernism, she opened with Faure’s Theme and Variations in C Sharp Minor, Op. 73. It’s a lot harder to play than it sounds, especially as the rather poignant, cantabile theme expands. Joan let its glittering moodiness speak for itself: the theme itself draws a straight line all the way back to Haydn, and she let that history resound, particularly throughout the expansive passage of high/low contrasts about three-quarters of the way in.
Enesco’s Sonata in F Sharp Minor, Op. 24, No. 1 was a showstopper, and an eye-opener. Joan is a leading advocate for the late Romantic composer who shares her heritage, “A visionary,” as she put it. Playing from memory, she took on its tense astringencies and restless unwillingness to resolve as if they were her own. In the repetitive, bruised pulse of the lefthand attack in the opening allegro, the twisted, staccato dance that builds to a galloping intensity in the second, presto movement and the walk through Monet’s back garden in the final andante, she gave it an otherworldly gravitas worthy of Debussy. The crowd was stunned.
The waves of intensity, if not the intellectual rigor, lifted for a minute with a handful of miniatures by Mohammed Fairouz, who was in attendance. Still relatively young (he’s in his twenties) and amazingly prolific, Fairouz is a wide-ranging thinker with several considerably powerful, unselfconsciously deep works to his credit – and he can also be very funny. Joan assembled a set that was both amusing and captivating: an attempt to make an etude interesting, in a very successful, Schumann-esque way; a challenge to write a piece containing no dissonances (it was mostly arpeggios); a joke that began way up the scale and ended way down; an austere twelve-tone piece and a brief, vividly autumnal requiem.
She closed the concert with Ravel’s rippling Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, written as a homage to Schubert, explaining that the wit and diversity of these pieces would make a good segue with Fairouz, and she was right. The suite is emotionally diverse, from balminess to poignancy to turbulence, with a comfortable sense of resolution missing from the rest of the program, a rather triumphant way to wrap up the concert. The audience wouldn’t let her go without an encore, so she treated them to a sparkling, bustling excerpt from Ravel’s Ondine.
Also worth a mention is Raphael Haik’s witty, pun-laden photo exhibit held in tandem with the concert. Toddlers in a fierce wrestle portrayed as “speed dating;” an airhead Eiffel Tower; park chairs arranged in several clever configurations, and an enigmatically bemused traveler who just missed his commuter train delivered quietly provocative questions and plenty of laughs.
Alexandra Joan’s Kaleidoscope Series concludes its 2011 spring season at WMP Concert Hall, 31 W 28th St. on June 1 at 7:30 PM with a diverse program that includes both original works and improvisations, featuring jazz guitar virtuoso Peter Mazza, saxophonist Timothy Hayward and bassist Thomson Kneeland.
Seamlessness and Contrast at Trinity Church
Thursday at Trinity Church clarinetist Maksim Shtrykov and pianist Alina Kiryayeva delivered a terrifically enjoyable show of some lesser-known pieces for the two instruments. Shtrykov has a clarity that’s viscerally breathtaking. His quicksilver legato made the streams and frequent torrents of notes seem absolutely effortless even though much of the program was considerably demanding. The only giveaway that he was working hard was how he swayed along with the music at the edge of the stage. Kiryayeva, by contrast, didn’t hold back. As comfortably fluid as her approach was, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to call it an attack, which brought a welcome energy to the bill. Their seamlessness together undoubtedly stems from having worked together since the middle of the previous decade.
Up first was Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro for Piano, Op. 70. It worked as an opener, perfectly pleasant and far more challenging for the performers than the listeners. The piece de resistance was Saint-Saens’ Sonata in E Flat for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 167, an absolutely delicious four-part suite. It’s got Saint-Saens’ signature humor, but also his signature plaintiveness, and it was here where Kiryayeva dug in and found the intensity in every unexpected dynamic shift, especially in the second, allegro animato movement while Shtrykov mined the poignancy in the pensive, lento third movement as well as the counterintuitively misty end of the final allegro. They closed with Weber’s Grand Duo Concertante, Op. 48 which is sort of the classical equivalent of garage rock: an endless series of call-and-response, you can see the changes and ideas coming a mile away, but playing them is another story! Even in the andante con moto second movement, the cascades come in endless waves and the duo met the challenge head on and walked away victoriously after another seemingly endless series of false endings. These works – and these performers – deserve to be better-known.
Young Concert Artists Take Over Symphony Space
Where the hell was everyone? Symphony Space’s annual “wall to wall” concert marathons vary widely from the transcendent to the absurd, but the last couple of years have been solidly in the former camp, and a view of the afternoon portion of Saturday’s reaffirmed its potential for transcendence. This year’s theme tied into the Young Concert Artists mentoring system, with both graduates of the program, up-and-coming performers and mentors delivering some sensational performances. We missed the hour of Bach that began at the cruel hour of eleven in the morning: due to the demands of his day job, Bach may have become a morning person, but this generation of musicians are not. By half past noon, the shlep up to 96th St. looked like a good choice. And where were the locals? Usually, by noon, these marathons are impossible to get into. Was it the swirling winds, foreshadowing a future tornado along Broadway? It certainly wasn’t a lack of starpower. Among the performers hastily gathered for this marathon: pianists Emanuel Ax and Jeremy Denk, the Borromeo and Jasper String Quartets.
At half past noon, violinist Juliette Kang and cellist Efe Baltacigil were wrapping up a closely attentive, intense version of Kodaly’s Duo for Violin and Cello. Denk was supposed to play Bach but reverted to a piece he said he knew well, enjoyed and played recently, a Gyorgy Ligeti suite, which proved irresistibly powerful, from its uninhibited crashing and banging in the first movement, to hypnotic, circular 20th century ambience to a reversion to fiery atonal staccato. It’s a rigorously intense, richly arrranged and practically impossible work to do as fast as he did it, but Denk made it seem if he’d grown up with it.
A Schubert hour saw Emmanuel Ax deliver a confidently rippling Impromptu followed by the Trout Quintet played with inspired intensity by a succession of pianists along with violinist Benny Kim, violist Barry Shiffman, cellist Robert Martin and bassist DaXun Zhang. Then it was time for a break for the world’s best garlic knots (La Famiglia Pizza, 96th and Amsterdam, serves them with barely cooked, crushed garlic, a healing ritual for anyone who dares ingest them). And after that, was the space sold out? No. Easy come, easy go. Was it the tornado-like gusts outside? The lack of global warming temperatures? What is up with you guys? Oh, did we mention, the show was free?
The 2 PM hour concluded with Tschaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence, by a talented pickup band, and then a hypnotic, lush, otherworldly hour of Chopin played by a succession of Young Concert Artists players: Wendy Chen, Sergei Edelman and others (the program didn’t gibe with the parade of musicians onstage).
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.
Album of the Day 11/12/10
Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Friday’s album is #809:
Cesar Franck – Organ Works – Pierre Cochereau
Belgian composer Cesar Franck is not popular with music snobs, probably because he’s one of the alltime great tunesmiths. Considering how vivid and memorable his compositions are, it’s surprising that he’s not better known. He wrote string quartets, piano music and symphonies, but he supported himself as a Paris church organist and his works for organ are arguably his finest. He was reputedly a gentle soul: his students loved him. Recorded at Notre Dame with an unselfconscious intensity in 1958 by legendary organist and improviser Pierre Cochereau, this six-album set, long out of print, absolutely nails the plaintiveness and drama in Franck’s works. These days, the buzzword that describes Franck best is “transparent,” that is, he didn’t dissemble. He wore his heart on his sleeve and in the process created a body of work that resonates with an intensity that ranges from poignant to triumphant. This one has all the classics: the Grand Piece Symphonique, which may or may not have been the first organ symphony (it probably wasn’t: Franz Liszt arguably beat him to it); the uneasily victorious Piece Heroique, and the Chorales (versions of #1, #2 and #3 by various organists, including the extraordinary Charles Tournemire on #3, have made it to youtube). If there’s any composer from the Romantic era who deserves a revival, it’s Franck. Another estimable Notre Dame organist, Olivier Latry recorded a six-cd box set in 2002; Marcel Dupre’s rumbling, reverb-drenched 1948 mono recordings of the chorales are also worth getting if you can track them down. Here’s a random torrent.
Belgian Organist Treats a Midtown Audience to Brilliant Obscurities
We recently mentioned scenes in New York which encourage and nurture musicians rather than exploiting them as many venues do. Another one of those scenes, slowly and steadily building a following over the past year or so, is the lunchtime concert series at half past noon at Central Synagogue on Lexington Ave. curated by organist Gail Archer (whose deliciously titled American Idyll compilation of works by American composers is a genuine classic). On the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month, she brings in a series of first-rate international performers, established touring artists along with young organists making their first ventures into world-class venues such as this one. Today’s artist was Ignace Michiels, organist at Saint-Saviours Cathedral in Bruges, Belgium.
Like so many performers from overseas, Michiels brought a fascinating mix of unfamiliar material, which actually overshadowed the better-known pieces on the program. He opened with the emphatic, driving triplet volleys of Bach’s Chorale on Valet will ich der Geben (BWV 736), a rousing warmup followed by a warmly cantabile take of the Romanze from Josef Rheinberger’s Sonata No. 9, Op. 142. The pace picked up with the majestic call-and-response resolutions of Alexandre Guilmant’s Allegro con fuoco from his Sixth Sonata.
Then the reallly fascinating part began. In addition to founding the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, which he conducted, Belgian-American keyboardist Camil Van Hulse wrote several symphonic works. Michiels’ flights through the astringently Messiaenesque, upwardly winding branches of the scherzo from Van Hulse’s Symphonia Mystica were a revelation: if the rest of the piece is equally interesting, it’s a masterpiece waiting to be rediscovered. Likewise, Gaston Litaize’s Prelude et Danse Fuguee deserves to be better known, a menacing marionette dance that grows to a clash of titans – or the charge of an orc army, for Lord of the Rings fans. And Joseph Bonnet’s Elves grew from a playful game of hide-and-seek among the low flute stops to a flood of the little things. Michiels closed with Naji Hakim’s rigorously cerebral Ouverture Libanaise (which interestingly didn’t have any overt Middle Eastern tonalities), then a ragtime piece that could have been left off the bill, and finally the showstopper, the Allegro from 20th century Hungarian composer Frigyes Hidas’ Sonata for Organ, yet another too-obscure masterpiece packed with long, stormy full-bore crescendos and torrents that built to an unstoppable, volcanic coda. It was as much a display of speed and power as it was adventurous a choice to include in the program. The series here continues on the 23rd of this month.
Lucid Culture 