Author: Joshua McNeill (Page 15 of 20)

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.

Earplay, a San Francisco based ensemble dedicated to new chamber music, kicked off its 25th season at Herbst Theatre this past Monday with a program entitled Ear and There. Their current season is meant to showcase composers who have a connection to the Bay Area. As such, the bill included works by two local composers who also were available to give a little pre-concert talk.

The evening began with a piece by Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez called and of course Henry the horse, an homage to The Beatles’ Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite. The four movements are meant to depict four contemporary art pieces, presumably making up a sort of modern day circus. Genghis is a reference to a robot built by Rodney Brooks, Mandala Tequila an installation piece by Ivan Puig, Machine with Artichoke the creations of Arthur Ganson, and Things that Go refers to a film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. While the idea behind this work sounds quirky enough to inspire some raucous sonic adventures, the theme just gets lost. The movements don’t feel interconnected nor do they feel like completely fleshed out ideas. The notable exception to the latter problem is Mandala Tequila, its seemingly random assortment of pitches creating an atmosphere of wonder and melancholy.

Sam Nichols work, Unnamed Jr., was performed next with great amounts of skill but little in the way of memorable moments. This piece is meant to be, in the composers words, “a holding pen for all of the melodic, harmonic, textural, gestural and dramatic ideas”, for an opera he has been working on. Unfortunately, that’s sort of what it feels like too, a bunch of thoughts that haven’t been refined into something affecting. Hopefully this will no longer be the case by the time the opera is finished.

Next was Kaija Saariaho’s piece, Je sens un deuxieme coeur (I feel a second heart) which was easily the highlight of the night for me. This felt like a cohesive work from the very first to the very last notes. The ensemble seemed completely in tune with Saariaho’s sense of texture as well as dramatic intent regardless of the fact that it was easy to forget that it was supposed to depict the relationship between a mother and her unborn child. Of particular note was the intensity level of cellist Thalia Moore who appeared to be completely consumed with ferocious purpose. Placing this piece in the middle of the program placed the bar high for the rest of the night.

A, relatively, smaller work by Seymour Shifrin for four-hand piano entitled The Modern Temper eased the mood a bit, even with its heavy use dissonance. Written in 1959, this piece seemed a bit out of place due to its age as well as the fact that the others used a good portion of the ensemble. Shifrin’s music is exactly what one would expect from a modernist piece of the ’50s. Not that it was bad or without merit, it just wasn’t new. It also wasn’t unique enough to stand out amongst its peers of that era. An odd choice for a group whose mission is to focus on new music but ‘focus’ doesn’t necessitate exclusivity and, in the classical world, 50 year old music is generally considered new still.

The night ended with Bruce Christian Bennett’s From the Ashes, commissioned by Earplay. This was a 23 minute romp through the breakdown and creation of harmonies based on frequency modulation synthesis akin to the myth of the Phoenix. While that may sound like an overly scientific method of conjuring a highly poetic image, Bennett manages to not get lost in the theory so much that he loses sight of the point. There were truly some inspired moments during this performance but also some pitfalls. For one, the shifts between different instrument combinations and textural ideas didn’t always feel natural. Once one was brought into a new section, it was easy to forget this fault and become immersed in the moment again though. This piece also used the largest portion of the Earplay ensemble. Guest artist Chris Froh was even brought in to perform percussion which included a solo in the middle of the work, played with technical precision.

Throughout the night, the Earplay ensemble continued to dazzle me with their keen sense of musicianship. They took on some difficult music and managed, presumably, to draw as much emotional force out of it as there was to be found.