Month: April 21, 2010

Berkeley’s New Music portion of their Noon Concert Series kicked off today with a work by Dan VanHassel called Lush Intrinsic. Hopefully it wasn’t that great as I didn’t make it to the show in time for this piece. Rain and my poor judgment of how long it really takes to get to Berkeley from San Francisco both served to create a personal obstacle course between myself and aural bliss. Persistence paid off in that I didn’t miss the next two bits of music.

Babylon was composed by Liza White for trumpet and percussion. At first, with only Scott Macomber on stage, playing very drawn out descending pitches, it appeared that the music was going nowhere. At one point he even stopped to clear his spit valve and I assumed he was either warming up still or this was going to be one of those heavy-on-the-theory-weak-on-the-implementation sort of pieces. Either way, it was a bit awkward, especially as someone else walked on stage to, seemingly, move parts of a drum kit around. It wasn’t until drummer Jordan Glenn started to actually play said drum kit that I realized this was all part of the piece. Well, possibly not the spit valve part, although there was more “play acting” of sorts later in the performance as Macomber and Glenn both stopped and pointed back and forth at each other as if confused about who’s supposed to go next. According to White, the piece is about “personal restlessness” and “struggling to assert oneself in an honest way”. That being the case, I could see how these little bits of stagecraft would fit into the theme. The actually music was quite nice once it got going. The drums managed to echo White’s hip-hop influence without injecting hip-hop into the classical backdrop in a gimmicky way. The trumpet lines didn’t do as much to grab my attention and, in a way, seemed almost arbitrary. That being said, the piece worked quite well.

Matt Schumaker’s Tintinnabula for soprano and two pianos was last on the program. The title of this piece immediately made me think this was going to be some sort of tribute to Arvo Part until I remembered that the word is also Latin for “bell”. Come to think of it though, it was very clear that the work had anything to do with bells either. Apparently, Schumaker had funeral bells of sort in mind, possibly as a metaphor for the voice of a dead loved one, but even the program notes were a bit confusing on what exactly the intention was. So, I ignored the programmed notes and listened to the music as that’s probably the most important part of the whole experience. David Milnes conducted the work but I’m not too sure why. He didn’t do much to offset the balance issues between the pianos and soprano Julia Hathaway and pianists Ann Yi and Keisuke Nakagoshi were so focused on what was clearly a very complicated score that they rarely looked up to see the tempo that Milnes was calling for. It seemed they had it together anyway, which was amazing. The work had some clear rhythmic cues in the piano playing but there were so many chaotic flourishes throughout the piece that it’s hard to believe that anyone could keep a regular pace going in their head while playing them. The interplay between these two chaotic forces, the pianos that is, created some lovely textures and, after a while, started to sound solidly structured in some vague way. The piano playing also served to all but completely mask Hathaway’s singing. Possibly, assuming that the voice in the work is that of the deceased, this was the point. I’m hoping this is the case as the only alternatives would be poor writing or an inability to properly project on the part of the soprano. I did, overall, enjoy Mr. Shumaker’s music even if I did find myself wishing that he had written for two pianos by themselves.

Let’s hope that Berkeley continues to give the spotlight to people like these more often. Afterall, the sun was out by the end of the concert. I’m not a superstitious man, just saying..

Not knowing any music of Maurice Durufle, I didn’t know what to expect out of his Requiem. A quick look showed that he was a French contemporary of Francis Poulenc and appeared to be a fairly conservative type, judging by the descriptions of his work. I assumed I would be hearing music of a fairly generic Romantic variety but, while it wasn’t very disconnected from Romanticism, it certainly wasn’t a humdrum reactionary debacle either.

The piece was performed by the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco, conducted by Zana Fiala in its solo organ accompaniment incarnation. Interestingly enough, Durufle arranged the work in three ways which I can only guess is a tip of the hat to Catholicism. Organ duties were handled by Stephen Lind with excellent attention to timbre. Lind’s handling of the ranks provided the strongest sense of drama to a performance with a bit too much balance. Certainly a Requiem shouldn’t be evoking feelings of existential passion but talking about death shouldn’t be a neutral affair either. Kudos to Fiala for handling the music with grace at least.

Megan Stetson and Pawel Walerowski took up the solo mezzo-soprano and cello parts respectively during the Pie Jesu section. They blended beautifully with the organ and seemed to add just the right amount of flash, which was fairly little flash. That’s far from a complaint as the nature of the writing seems to suggest that this is the desired effect. I know it worked for me, as did the majority of the concert.

The Hot Air Music Festival is a student run program put together by Carrie Smith, Andrew Meyerson, and Matthew Cmiel. The focus of the event is new music which, in classical connotation, means music written within the last 60 years by mostly living composers. That being said, the lineup did run the gamut of old new music as well as very new new music. Compared to average classical concerts, this one certainly takes a huge step towards letting go of the past. The fact that it’s put together by young people is either a sign of naivety about the reality of putting together successful music festivals if you’re a pessimist or a sign of good things to come from the future music directors of the world if you’re an optimist. Personally, I like to imagine it’s the latter.

I hate to start off describing the strongest performance of a show but I also love doing things chronologically. By the time I arrived at the festival a group of high school students were coming out to perform a piece called Lies You Can Believe In for string trio by a composer listed on the bill as Missy “Misdemeanor” Mazzoli. My expectations were very low due to this bit of cringe-worthy humor. This performance was nothing short of stunning though. The music itself was beautifully crafted. It had the rhythmic intensity of early Stravinsky and hints of Janacek’s harmonic language. This was music you could get excited to. The energy may have also had a lot to do with the performance of this young group. Each player seemed intensely involved in what was going on, especially Alexi Kenney on Violin. Not knowing the piece, it’s hard to say how accurately it was played, and I have the feeling that there were plenty of flubs and balance imperfections, but it really didn’t matter. The enthusiasm brought to the work was intoxicating.

Immediately following was Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5. Maybe it was just the shift from such an emotionally tense piece but this one, as well as the performance, seemed to take a while to find its stride. I wasn’t immediately sucked into what I was hearing but once it got good, it was real good. This wasn’t a flawless performance as the violins, played by Anna Washburn and Kevin Rogers, seemed to have trouble staying together during the quick flashy lines that were interspersed throughout the piece but it was fun nonetheless. By the end you could find audience members nodding along as if this was a hip-hop concert and the players just seemed so happy, especially during the false stops closer to the end of the piece which totally faked me out at first.

While one could draw a line between the Glass and Mazzoli pieces, it was very difficult to figure out how Xenakis’s Okho for a djembe trio fit in. I have to put a disclaimer here in saying that I’ve never been able to find a Xenakis work that I truly enjoyed. That said, this one became pretty tiresome. The composer’s obsession with math never turns into something moving or touching or even interesting. Certainly there were some intense mathematical concepts being applied here but you can’t hear them and so they don’t make you curious. The performance didn’t help the state of things either. The players were almost completely expressionless the whole time. I had the feeling that Asako Okamoto was simply bored after a while. For being a piece about rhythm, this was an incredibly static performance. Only after the applause kicked in did some smiles appear but by that time it seemed more like relief at the completion of what is probably terribly difficult music to keep together. Kudos to them for that accomplishment at least.

Next up was Arvo Part’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, a beautiful piece that should need no introduction. Matthew Cmiel conducted this as well as the following two works. The playing throughout Part’s music was as tight as it should be for such a simple, on the surface, piece. Where things didn’t seem to come together was the interpretation. There are so many textural possibilities to music of this sort and they weren’t brought out at all. It seemed that it was just played instead of played with a sense of purpose.

Schnittke’s Concerto Gross No. 1 or, as I like to call it, Schnittke-does-Penderecki-and-some-generic-baroque-and-romantic-composers, followed. For a work that has so many fruitful ideas popping up all over the place, Schnittke sure did a good job of squashing them. I suppose that’s a fault of the polystylistic thing, or a success if you have a short attention span. This work sounded very difficult to play in every sense yet it was handled with great care. The soloists were particularly on point and the balance was handled much better than in the previous work. It almost doesn’t matter how well you perform if what you’re performing isn’t all that great unfortunately.

John Adams’ Shaker Loops was the point at which everything finally came together. Now we had a brilliant composition as well as an inspired performance. The music of Adams being a sort of endurance test, it’s understandable that poor execution of a harmonic here and there or of a ritardando will happen but it didn’t subtract from the overall feel of what was being played. This was certainly a fitting finale to an all around great program. Hopefully the next go round will smooth out the hiccups and turn into something even more lovely.