a fool in the forest

Neighborhood Bully

Photo and rudimentary processing by the blogger.

Year of the Dragon

Dragon from Ai Wei Wei's Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads at LACMA; photograph and rudimentary processing by the blogger.

Rough Swedding

 

I am beginning to worry about Mark Swed.

The Los Angeles Times is today a mere walking shadow of the paper it once was, but its arts and culture coverage has somehow survived the cutbacks and defections of recent years with most of its strengths intact. Those strengths include the two Christophers, Knight (art/museums) and Hawthorne (architecture/urbanism), and historically I would also have tended to include Mark Swed, who assumed the position of chief classical music critic for the Times in 1996 upon the departure of the redoubtable (and certifiably world-class) Martin Bernheimer. The cracks, however, have begun to show. And this weekend they are showing in perhaps the most baffling paragraph I have seen in a 21st century music review.

For most of his tenure, I have found Swed to be knowledgeable, with a smart and agreeable writing style and a laudable inclination to support new or challenging music. In that latter respect, however, he has recently entered a disappointing "get off my lawn" phase, symptoms of which include his abundantly strange column last summer striking out against the"technological fascism" of electronic devices and social media, and his recurring outbursts of passive-aggression toward new music and composers originating around New York or, particularly, Brooklyn. This is just . . . odd.

But the particular oddity to which I am headed concerns Gustav Mahler and Gustavo Dudamel. Since Dudamel's arrival as music director and principal conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Swed has been a tireless, seemingly blinkered supporter, bringing to his Dudamel-related pieces a sort of "hometown" fervor more commonly seen in sports writers. That impulse is on full display in his writing on the Philharmonic's current Mahler Project, in which Dudamel will conduct all 9-plus Mahler symphonies—and more!—twice!—over five weeks!—on two continents!—with two orchestras!

The second program in the series premiered on Thursday evening, with Dudamel leading the Philharmonic in performances of the Adagio from Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony and of Mahler's First Symphony. Swed's review is predictably laudatory, and where it finds even a shadow of fault it quickly brushes it aside. ("The triumph of the First perhaps forced Dudamel into too much grandeur [in the Tenth] to avoid a feeling of anti-climax.") More irritating is Swed's couching of the review as a "compare and contrast" between this performance and Dudamel's leadership of the First Symphony in his 2009 premiere as the Philharmonic's new leader. There is an air boastfulness—"I was there for both of these very cool events and you poor saps were not"—that does not set well. This most recent performance is praised to the heavens and beyond, and when his enthusiasm is at its height Swed pulls this out of his quiver:

The bizarre third movement was the most changed from two seasons ago. An eccentric funeral march based on 'Frére Jacques' is interrupted by an outlandish klezmer band. At the gala Dudamel was understated; Thursday, he was not. I’ve never before heard a non-Jewish conductor get the effect the way Dudamel now does. Eastern European brass and Latin brass have closer ties than you might think.

The layering of ethnic and cultural presumption and stereotyping concentrated in those sentences is a perverse marvel to behold. Mahler, of course, was a Jewish conductor and composer, recurrently targeted by Viennese antisemitism and ultimately driven from Europe to New York by the rise of Nazism. His most vocal proponent over the past half-century, Leonard Bernstein, was also a Jewish conductor and composer. Mahler's Jewish identity was and is important, but the implication that the dichotomy of "Jewish/non-Jewish conductors" is meaningful, or that there is something innate in Mahler's music that a non-Jew will be unlikely ever to "get" is just . . . again, odd.  It is difficult to imagine a similar remark being made in relation to Wagner ("I've never heard a non-German conductor get the effect—") or Verdi ("I've never heard a non-Italian conductor get the effect—") or Philip Glass ("I've never heard a non-Buddhist conductor get the effect—") or Benjamin Britten ("I've never heard a non-gay conductor get the effect—"). Slide down that slope far enough, you're bound to run into "natural rhythm," or worse. Swed inverts, but in a sense inadvertently legitimates, the sort of misbegotten logic by which Mahler's enemies could suggest that a Jew should not be trusted as a custodian of the treasured music of Christian Europe. 

The tossed-off mention of "Latin" brass in the concluding sentence is also troublesome in context. Since his arrival, the Philharmonic has made much of Dudamel's rootedness, as a Venezuelan, in Hispanic America. Some of that has taken the form of outreach to the region's large Spanish-speaking population, but much of it has been tacitly targeted at the "traditional" Anglo symphony audience, lending to Dudamel a "passionate" "Latin lover" aura, a hint of "el Maestro loco" mystery, danger, exoticism. Swed's attempt to bridge the perceived gap between two cultural worlds comes off as more than a touch patronizing. (Not to mention that a happy melange of Eastern European and Latin American brass impulses has been the stock in trade of Zach Condon's band Beirut for the past several years....)

To be clear, I am not accusing Mark Swed of actual or even subliminal bad faith or ill will here. I accuse him only of tone deafness or a lack of self-awareness, most likely a result of letting his current enthusiasms run away with him. So yes, I have begun to worry about Mark Swed, but in this instance I should perhaps be more worried for the LATimes and the editors who let that passage slip by unquestioned.

~~~

Illustration: Still from the opening sequence of Ken Russell's Mahler (1974), emblematic of my brain's attempt to absorb the paragraph under discussion in this post.

~~~

A Storm of Wings [Wild Up, "Ornithology" in Pasadena]

...came a roar and a thunder men had never heard,
Like the scream and the sound of a big war bird....

— The Royal Guardsmen, "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron"

wild Up, the young self-styled "24-member experimental classical/contemporary ensemble committed to creating visceral, thought-provoking happenings", came to Pasadena on Saturday and settled itself in to a two-story studio space in the Armory Center for the Arts, in the company of a sell-out crowd that filled in all of the available sitting, standing, leaning, lounging surfaces and then some. Visceral, thought-provoking performance happened, the musical equivalent of a precision chainsaw juggling circle. And it was good. So, so good.

"Ornithology" was the theme of the evening, and all of the pieces had some connection to things with feathers, albeit not as ever imagined by Emily Dickinson.

For an appetizer or palate cleanser, the evening opened with "Hen Soup," a revision of Haydn's Symphony No. 83, "The Hen" by conductor/music director Christopher Rountree. As Rountree explained, his rearrangement compressed the symphony in to a single movement, "turning the chicken up to 11 and the classical music down to about 5." Some period-inauthentic electric bassoon was involved. It was a sharp, brainy hoot.

The action shifted swiftly from the ridiculous to the ridiculously difficult in the form of Brian Ferneyhough's "La Chute d'Icare" [The Fall of Icarus]. Ferneyhough is a king of "the new complexity" and his music is rhythmically and structurally fiendish: not literally unplayable, but dancing as close to that edge as possible. ("Our first rehearsal consisted of two hours of note taking," said Rountree.) While every player on the piece is challenged, particular cruelties are visited upon the clarinet soloist, in this case Brian Walsh. The clarinet plays essentially non-stop through the 10 minute piece, culminating in an ear-tweaking acid washed solo. Walsh and his companions handled it all with a focus and fire that was entirely riveting, the likely highlight of the night. (A video here allows you to follow the score alongside a performance by the Nieuw Ensemble.)

The first portion of the evening concluded with a pair of pieces, one new and one an established masterwork, for nearly identical configurations of instruments. The premiere was "Double Tui" by Mark Menzies, the masterwork Messiaen's "Oiseaux Exotiques" [Furrin' Boids]. The Messiaen was a boisterous and intense hommage to winged life in bursts of wind and percussion. Expatriate New Zealander Menzies paid tribute to the tui, a bird of his native land, evoking its woodland world with rain sticks, detached reeds, and even a pair of wandering boom boxes. A splendid and atmospheric piece that one hopes will be heard again somewhere. 

After intermission, during which one could observe firsthand the inexplicable popularity of Pabst Blue Ribbon among the Bright Young People of today (optimally whilst quaffing a Fat Tire of one's own), most of the second portion of the evening was devoted to arrangements of or fantasias on themes from music by Charlie "Yardbird" Parker and Andrew Bird. The contrasting Parker pieces were particularly winning. Archie Carey's "Bird of Paradise (in Paradise)" embedded the compact theme from Parker's original in a sea of drones, while Rountree's "Stand Still Like the Hummingbird' neatly cross-faded the speed humans perceive in the hummingbird with the bird's own imagined perception of a slower world. The midpoint of the second segment featured a premiere by Chris Kallmyer, "this nest, swift passerine," in which the ensemble interacted with birdsong emitted by speaker-implanted birdhouses around the room. 

This was my first encounter with wild Up, and looking over this post I sense that I am not conveying effectively just what a fine time this performance was. The commitment, energy, skill and, above all, devotion to the cause of Getting This Music Across of these musicians is tremendous, and the resulting audience excitement over a repertoire that is either challenging or entirely new was a thing to behold. wild Up is a great, good thing, and should be supported. It will be a thrill to watch it as it continues to grow into the larger world.

~~~

Here, from an awkward vantage in standing room, a video of one of Michael Gordon Shapiro's pair of Morricone-infused Andrew Bird arrangements.

My own location was on the main floor, just out of frame at left. The lamp at the center of the video shot was featured in a tweet I sent out just before show time:

Music illuminates the world. A floor lamp illuminates the music. @wildUp twitter.com/foolinthefores…

— George Wallace (@foolintheforest) January 15, 2012

Valuable tip: showing up early for wild Up shows is apparently a must.

~~~

Top illustration: "Die Zwitscher Maschine" [The Twittering Machine] by Paul Klee, via Wikimedia Commons. Additional photos by the blogger.

~~~

Welcome 2012: The Road Goes Ever On

Farewell 2011 Celebrate. Good Times. C'mon.

Listening Listfully 2011: The List [This Blogger's 40 Favorite Albums of 2011]

Year-End Music List season is here, and with it the traditional Agonizing Self-Appraisals and Disclaimers by list-makers that "When I say these albums are 'Best' I don't mean, like, 'Best' as in better than whatever you liked, or in any World Historical sense, or whatever," or whatever. This is a great and time honored Internet Tradition with which we are long familiar, as warm and toasty as a crackling chestnut.

Ted Gioa, who produced a list of "100 Best Albums of 2011" ranging widely, but not all-encompassingly, across genres, noted the simultaneous feast and famine of the age:

I am impressed by how much outstanding music is recorded nowadays, but I am equally struck by how well hidden it is. More than at any time in my life, the best music is hard to find. You will almost never hear it on the radio, and increasingly it is not even on the radar screens of the major labels. The record stores, where fans once learned about important new releases, have mostly gone out of business. Even as music becomes more omnipresent and accessible, new barriers prevent listeners from hearing the most talented and creative artists. 

Seth Colter Walls opted for a list of 50 albums and 100 individual songs/tracks and touched on the traditional seasonal agita:

No, don’t even start, as I’ve seen every single one of you beefing on Twitter about a subjective list. You weren’t wrong to do so! Lists are always wrong. It’s a part of their power, this axiomatic guarantee of failure. A list might “start a discussion” or draw clicks (not the same thing), but it’s always gonna anger. Even should it focus narrowly on a single genre, the better to claim total knowledge, it’ll fail, because yup: a judicious myopia rankles, too.

On Twitter, Steve Smith adopted an eminently practical definition of the project at hand:

I would substitute "Likely" for "Possibly," but that definition is a sound fit to the project that I set myself this time each year.

All right, then. Let's talk methodology. It's navel gazing time:

Yada-yada: purely personal, totally subjective, necessarily omitting all sorts of worthy choices that I simply haven't heard or that I was not inclined to seek out or that did not penetrate my thick aesthetic skull for whatever reason. The List itself displays all of the biases that went into its making. No doubt some of my judgments are flatly wrong. I am at peace with that.

As I went to work on this 2011 compilation, I was pleasantly surprised to discover just how long my initial "Long List" was—it seems 2011 was a pretty good year, musically-speakingwise—and how reluctant I was to snub any of the music that I found there. I also found that even as I grew increasingly comfortable with my rough rankings, I was troubled that some of the music down the list was much better than its numerical rank might suggest. I am satisfied that the upper end of the list fairly reflects my personal top choices, but the quality differential between topmost and bottommost listees is not all that great. All have won; all by rights should have prizes. Hence, my Twitter cri de coeur: 

Surveying the nominees, I was again confronted by a certain bicameral quality in my tastes. Roughly half of my choices come from the realm of Popular Music, though hardly from popular music. The other half are drawn from so-called Classical and the Genre With No Name that is typically referred to as [insert prefix of choice]-Classical: new music for orchestra or for smaller ensembles of mostly orchestra-type instruments, largely but not exclusively composed and played by artists a generation or two younger than this blogger, often but not always associated with one or more of the five Boroughs, generally not understood or appreciated by certain West Coast music Authorities who shall remain nameless, etc. Some items "do go both ways," and could fit with near equal ease or unease in either of the main collections.

At first, I tried to rank the entire List item by item, but that proved frustrating and ultimately unsatisfactory, especially given that a list of 40 or so selections inevitably exacerbated my worry over short-shrifting "lower ranking" music: did I really want to tar some Very Deserving Record with a lowly "35" ranking, giving the impression that it is perhaps not so Deserving? So I compromised with myself: I divided my picks sheep-and-goatwise in to two lists of 20 based on the bicameral system heretofore outlined, ranked each sublist from 1 through 20, then recombined them so as to produce a list with two picks in each of twenty spots. In the resulting list, the choices from the Classicalorwhatever group are listed first in each position, but that is merely a gratuitous result of the cutting and pasting process by which my absurd edifice of song was finally constructed. I am not looking to privilege either artificial subset over the other: I like all of it, thank you very much.

So, here the thing is. The List comes with links to each artist's website, and with links to each album's page at Amazon.com—from whence this fool would receive a small gratuity if you were to make a purchase of some kind after clicking on through. Between now and the New Year, I will eventually produce a series of more detailed posts focusing on the particular merits of at least a majority of these selections, replete with embedded media and other choice frills and gewgaws. Some of this music has already received attention on the blog; links to those earlier posts are included via handy, clickable asterisks [*].

My watch well wound and throat well cleared, and with much ado having been made, behold! The List:

The List—
a fool in the forest's Hybridized Catalog
of 40 Favorite Albums of 2011

1. Chiara String Quartet [& Matmos] - Jefferson Friedman: Quartets
   P J Harvey - Let England Shake


2. Gregory Spears - Requiem [*]
   John Vanderslice [w/ Magik*Magik Orchestra] - White Wilderness
   


3. Aurora Orchestra - Muhly: Seeing Is Believing
   Megafaun - Megafaun


4. yMusic - Beautiful Mechanical [*]
   Gabriel Kahane - Where Are the Arms?


5. So Percussion, Lisa Moore - Bresnick: Caprichos Enfaticos [*]
   My Brightest Diamond - All Things Will Unwind


6. NOW Ensemble - Awake
   David Thomas Broughton - Outbreeding


7. Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony - From Here On Out
   [music by Muhly, Greenwood, Parry]
   Beirut - The Rip Tide


8. Graham Reynolds - The Difference Engine
   Bodies of Water - Twist Again


9. Donnacha Dennehy/Crash Ensemble/Upshaw/Ó Lionáird - Grá agus Bás
   Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost


10. itsnotyoutisme - everybody's pain is magnificent
    Twin Sister - In Heaven


11. Florent Ghys - Baroque Tardif
    Smoke Fairies - Through Low Light and Trees


12. the smith quartet - dance
    Me’shell Ndegeocello - Weather


13. Build - Place
    The Singleman Affair - Silhouettes At Dawn


14. Kronos Quarter/Kimmo Pohjonen/Samuli Kosminen - Uniko [*]
    Son Lux - We Are Rising


15. Jody Redhage - of minutiae and memory [*]
    Steve Adey - These Resurrections EP


16. Ralph van Raat - Bryars: Piano Concerto (The Solway Canal) [*]
    Still Corners - Creatures of an Hour


17. Harold Budd - In the Mist
    the part five - The Tightening


18. Dale Trumbore/Gillian Hollis - Snow White Turns Sixty - Hollis Sings Trumbore [*]
    All Tiny Creatures - Harbors


19. Todd Reynolds - Outerborough
    Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow


20. Anti-Social Music - Is The Future Of Everything
    Brian Eno - Drums Between the Bells

~~~

Photo: Sled Dog and Gramophone, Terra Nova Expedition (1910-1913), via Wikimedia Commons.

~~~

Can't See the Strata for the Trees

Rock or oak? Oak or rock?

Photos: An oak at Demetria Estate winery; a rock at the Getty Center. Or perhaps the other way around. Photos by the blogger.

~~~

By the Prickling of My Pears

A happy, if thorny, Thanksgiving to all.

~~~

Those Carefree Days That Fly

Twitter handed me a shock yesterday afternoon, and from an unexpected source. The Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive [@BAMPFA] posted this item:

"Haste/Telegraph" rang a bell, so I launched a quick search and turned up this story from the Daily Californian:

As of 2:45 p.m. Saturday, the fire was still technically burning, according to Gil Dong, deputy fire chief for the Berkeley Fire Department. Dong said this is the largest fire — which has now gutted the building and burned for nearly 17 hours — he can remember in the Berkeley area since the East Bay Hills fire in 1991. Dong and city spokesperson Mary-Kay Clunies-Ross both said the building is structurally unsound and could collapse. Clunies-Ross said the intersection at Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street will be closed for at least a week.

    ***

Flames engulfed a building at the corner of Telegraph and Haste — which is home to Cafe Intermezzo, Raleigh’s Bar and Grill and Thai Noodle II on the ground level — late Friday evening and early Saturday morning during a fire that took firefighters more than six hours to contain. The roof of the building has collapsed and firefighters will stay on the scene all weekend to knock out any hot spots that may occur, according to Dong.

    ***

The fire broke out at the apartment building at 2441 Haste St. just before 9 p.m. Friday....

Also, a gallery of photos of the blaze, and this video:

I dwell on this for only one reason. During my senior year at the University of California (1977-78), that apartment building—the Sequoia Apartments, to give it its proper name, built circa 1935—was Home.

The photo at the top of this post, slightly processed and filtered for an added air of nostalgia, is of the front door of the building. I took it about seven weeks ago, on October 1, on a visit to Berkeley with my still-best pal from those college days, Rick Coencas. It was only the second time that I have been back since I graduated in 1978. To circle back to the Twitter item that began this, we were in Berkeley to see the Kurt Schwitters exhibition then running at the Berkeley Art Museum. Rick took this photo of me, standing in that doorway, squinting a bit into the overcast glare of an East Bay autumn morning:

Moments before that picture was taken, a then-current resident of the building arrived and entered. We spoke with him briefly as I stepped out of his way. He noticed we were about to take a photo and I identified myself as a former tenant of the place. He marveled that the building had been an apartment as far back as the late '70s and that such aged beings as we could exist, and we parted. I do not know his name or anything else about him, other than that he has surely lost his own place there, and perhaps has lost whatever amounted to everything he owned.

I have lost only the physical site of memories and snippets of the past by this fire, hardly comparable to the losses of the most recent occupants of the Sequoia, but the destruction of that building has been lingering with me overnight far more persistently than I would have expected. Why, I wonder, should I be so affected by the destruction of a place that I lived in for fewer than nine months, and that more than three decades ago? 

I think that the answer lies largely in this fact: That apartment at 2441 Haste is essentially the only place that I have ever lived alone.

I lived at home until I went off to college. My first two college years were spent in the Cal dormitories, the third in an apartment shared with three fellows I had met in the dorms. Within days of graduation, I had entered into my first marriage, and I have shared a home with my current beloved/spouse (and our sons) for the last 25 years. For those final terms at Berkeley, I was truly on my own in a sense that I have never been before or since, living in an upper floor studio apartment that featured an actual Murphy bed on a pivoting section of wall that also served as a closet door. 

Paradise. Lost.

This is a "personal" blog, not a "confessional" one. It would be boring, and occasionally creepy I suspect, if I recounted the intimate details of my life in that apartment. There is nothing particularly scandalous or unusual to report, as these things go, but it was a concentrated course in what conventionally falls under the rubric of Growing Up. Looking back under the influence of this past weekend's fire, it seems to me that I did a good deal more Growing Up while living on Haste Street than I had ever done before, and more than I have done in the much longer period from then to now. I may have gained all manner of experience and technical knowledge and such in later years, but I often feel that my emotional maturity advanced mightily in those nine months and has rather plateaued ever since.

I am not generally one to swan about, mooning over the past, but the sudden loss of that place has sent me off in that direction in a way that revisiting the place itself, while it was still standing, never did or could. What once was home is now a sort of fiery madeleine, carrying me back unto the irretrievable days of yore.

You really do not, it seems, know what you have got until it is gone.

In that studio apartment, there was a former walk-in closet, with a window and desk built in, that served me as principal workspace. Much of my best work was done in that little room, in the hours between midnight and five in the morning on the day an assignment was due. Poetry of dubious quality was written in there, impetuous youthful schemes were hatched, delusions of grandeur were entertained, and occasional [sic] glasses [sic] of wine or sherry were drunk. Among the clippings and such taped to the wall was a William Hamilton New Yorker cartoon of two earnest and preppy young people, obviously English majors akin to myself, with one saying to the other: "I can never remember whether Robinson Crusoe is seminal or pivotal." 

As Thanksgiving (US) approaches, some portion of my thoughts will be with those who lost much last Saturday night, but another portion will linger over what seems more than ever to have been, whether seminal or pivotal, a central and critical period in my life. I am plentifully grateful for my current lot, but a part of me will always miss those bright college days and that very particular, now extinguished place. Hail, and farewell.

To close, a good if only tangentially relevant song: "What we lost in the fire we gained in the flood," whatever that may mean. 

The Mynabirds - What We Gained In The Fire

~~~

Ignorant Armies Go Bump in the Night [Bresnick: Caprichos Enfaticos]

All right, then: time for a snap quiz. Ready?

Name a piece of "classical" music explicitly inspired by the visual arts that is not either Pictures at an Exhibition or Rothko Chapel.

Yes? Mathis der Maler? Cheeky: get out.

Right: there are surprisingly few of them. Really surprisingly few. As in: so many fewer than one would expect, that it is surprising. I am surprised, even if you are not. 

However short the list of VizArt-inspired music may be, it has now grown, impressively, by one.

Martin Bresnick's Caprichos Enfaticos—recently released through Bang on a Can's Cantaloupe label in a recording with pianist Lisa Moore and percussion quartet Sō Percussion—is a direct musical offshoot of Goya's Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra), the suite of 80 etchings derived from the experience of the Napoleonic wars in Spain. Shot through with horror and despair, for Spain and for humankind generally, individual segments of the Disasters can also surprise with their mordant humor or Goya's penchant for supernatural grotesquery. Simultaneously bleak and bumptious, Caprichos Enfaticos is a fitting descendant of those harrowing, brilliant pictures.

The composer describes his Caprichos as a piano concerto, with the role of the orchestra played by the dizzying battery of percussion, tuned and otherwise, at the command of Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting. In eight movements and running just a shade over thirty brisk minutes, the structure of the piece derives from references to specific etchings from Los desastres and to phrases or ideas used by Goya, and from the farándula, or farandole, "a chain dance [says Bresnick's program note] popular in Provence, . . . often in 6/8 time, with a moderate to fast tempo. In modern Spanish, a farándula is a company of actors." There is an antic air of the commedia dell'arte around this piece, though it may more appropriately be thought of as commedia della morte.

It all begins innocently enough, almost childishly, with a "Farándula simple" played on marimba, xylophone and the like. Simple it may be, but it soon lurches with increasing urgency toward the macabre. The piano enters in the second movement, "Farándula de charlatanes –  No saben el camino (Farandole of charlatans – They don’t know the way)", strutting its self-importance as the percussion continues to caper skeletally about. The military arrives in "Estragos de la guerra (Ravages of war)", as the piano's attempts to play a sombre Satiesque theme are repeatedly crushed beneath the martial discipline of large drums.

Next on the scene: the worthless politicians, boisterously hopping and chattering, pointlessly pointing every which way in their "Farándula de políticos – Contra el bien general (Farandole of politicians – Against the common good)." The large drums return for "Farándula de populacho (Farandole of the rabble)," sounding now less like well-drilled marchers and more like cascades of cannon fire. Appropriately, given how little the surrounding forces are concerned for them, the general population's movement is the shortest in the piece. 

Goya's most eery qualities come to the fore in the final three movements. "¡Extraña Devoción! (Strange devotion!)" (illustrated above) is fitted out with the trappings of 19th century Gothic romance: muttering voices, bells, the clanking of chains down seemingly empty corridors, the piano wandering lost in the sepulchral haze. The approach to the tomb seems complete with the "Farándula de creyentes – Nada. Ello dirá (Farandole of believers – Nothing. It will say)," the pictorial namesake of which adorns the CD jacket: the listener is left in a cavernous dark, water dripping from the ceiling, a harmonium musing mournfully. When it seems there can be no further descent, and with a suddenness reminiscent of the last-moment rescue in Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum," the concluding "Farándula doble (Farandole double)" bursts in, as the entire ensemble reprises the skewed dance tune with which the piece began, its false bonhomie recognizable now as a sort of Iberian totentanz.

From hopelessness and misery, Goya was able to derive great and frightful art. From Goya, Martin Bresnick has derived a pocket concerto that honors its source while resonating in our own more mechanized but no less brutalized age. 

Bresnick: Caprichos Enfaticos - Estraga de la guerra (Ravages of war) by So Percussion

~~~

Disclosure: Generally, when I write about music, I have paid my own way, i.e., bought the tickets or the CD or the download, or whatever. This is a case in which, I received an advance review copy. The provenance of the CD had no bearing on my opinions of it. This being my personal blog, if I didn't actually hold the views of the piece that I have expressed above, I wouldn't have bothered to write or to post them. Fair enough, FTC?

~~~

A Patriot in Pasadena

Dead Bride Story [Roméo et Juliette, Los Angeles Opera]

John Adams was not the first to compose an opera based on news reports and current events. Charles Gounod, to take an earlier example, is generally believed to have drawn inspiration for his Roméo et Juliette from an article he read in a discarded copy of La Cronaca di Verona newspaper that the wind blew beneath his café table on a Parisian spring afternoon in 1865. Here is a translated excerpt:

Teen Tomb Twosome Spark Calls for Reform

Demands for action are growing as activists, experts and ordinary citizens cite ready access to poisons and daggers as a major contributor to last night's double suicide of Juliet Capulet-Montague, 16, and Romeo Montague, 16, in the family mausoleum of the Capulets.

"Poisons and daggers are not toys," says Professore Fabrizzio Sforza del Destino, spokesperson for the Citizens League for the Public Safety of the Public. "There can only be trouble when at-risk youth can find poisons and daggers discarded and laying about on any given piece of furniture around the house. Parents need to consider the messages they are sending, and to clean up after themselves more regularly."

The Professore called again for the immediate adoption of emergency regulatory and registration provisions that have been proposed by the League repeatedly over the past four years. The draft legislation includes a new provision—"Juliet's Law"—imposing fines or imprisonment for failure to report the presence of either poisons or daggers within 100 feet of an unaccompanied minor.

Authorities continue to seek answers to the many questions raised by this latest tragedy. Investigators indicate that Ms. Capulet and Mr. Montague had recently met at a so-called "ball," in an upper echelon neighborhood of the city. Having nothing better to do on a Saturday night, and finding poisons and daggers readily to hand, the couple embarked on a whirlwind 24 hours of spumante-fueled cuddling, traditional marriage, random violence, and eventual death. The Coroner's preliminary report indicates the presence of poisons and daggers at the death scene. 

In a potentially related development, Church officials have acknowledged that popular local youth counselor Friar Lawrence has been placed on paid administrative leave. The Capulet-Montague tragedy is the third such incident in the past six months. All of the dead teens are believed have frequented Friar Lawrence's popular "Second Story" mentoring program.

Sources close to the investigation have suggested that Lawrence is a person of interest in connection with a suspected dagger and poisons distribution ring. The Church has declined comment on those suggestions, citing the existence of an "ongoing investigation."

~~~

Roméo et Juliette (1867) is just the sort of opera that I generally shun. It may be sung in French, but for all intents and purposes it is an old-fashioned Italian bel canto piece, blithely ignoring the musical and dramatic advances that had already been achieved by the like of Wagner and Verdi. Its plot is no more than an excuse for a bit of spectacle and a series of showy arias, all surface and sentiment. (West Side Story, which good as it is is still just a Broadway musical, is a vastly more sophisticated take on this material than Gounod cared to attempt.) The characters are paper thin, no more than names and stock types. The music is there to be pretty and to push the expected emotional buttons. It is the operatic stuff that actually sells tickets, rather than the stuff of depth, thought and drama. And much though it chafes at my pretentious core to say it, at what it tries to do it largely succeeds. 

Los Angeles Opera is currently reviving its 2005 production, directed by Ian Judge. That premiere run featured Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon as the lovers, and they were received as a hubba-hubba sensation. Here, Vittorio Grigolo and Nino Machaidze assume the title roles.

Ms. Machaidze is lovely to look at, possessed of abundant charm, and sings Juliet's high-flying arias as well as one could ask, but she has an innate quality of sultry sophistication that is almost too adult for the part. The quality that is an obstacle here was used to far greater advantage in last season's Turk in Italy, in which she was an entire delight.

Vittorio Grigolo, on the other hand, has no difficulty whatever with the unbound adolescent swagger of Romeo. This is his show, in the end. He, too, has every vocal skill the part requires in abundance, his tenor enveloping some real power in a tone smooth as butter. For those to whom such things are important, he gets his shirt off on several occasions and looks great doing it, which is to say that he looks like the Teen Adonis that Romeo should ought to be. He is a big, dangerous puppy of a Romeo, meaning well but unable to contain his more irresponsible urges.

Director Judge keeps the story moving briskly. He has probably directed more productions at Los Angeles Opera than anyone else over the past two decades, and one of his hallmarks is to keep things as interesting around the edges as in the foreground. Something is always going on, or some telling detail or attractive aesthetic touch is being rolled out. The fight sequences have real speed and snap, and a sense of actual danger unusual in an opera house. Judge's fondness for gratuitous nudity is not, in this case, on display.

The production is immeasurably helped by John Gunter's set design. The action is set in Gounod's era, rather than the Renaissance, and the city of Verona has been recreated as in effect a giant 3-dimensional blueprint: lines, uprights, arches, towers, innumerable staircases, but no walls. The pieces are immense, but easily moved into new configurations, speeding the transition from scene to scene. It is even nicer to look at than the principals, which is saying something.

There is strength in the supporting cast as well. I don't often single out the Chorus at LA Opera, because I tend to take for granted that they will be reliable when called on. (Also, my little sister is a long time chorus member.) I do not recall when they have sounded better than they do in this production: rich, supple, with admirable clarity over the full range of volumes.

Standout individual supporting players include Museop Kim as Mercutio, particularly in the paean to Queen Mab; Vitalij Kowaljow, formerly LA Opera's Wotan, as Friar Lawrence (from Freyer to friar!); and Vladimir Chernov as old Capulet, a spritely fellow who would really prefer to forget family rivalries for the sake of a good party.

Three performances remain through November 26.

 

Photos by Robert Millard, used by kind permission of Los Angeles Opera.

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Wings of Desire - Las Vegas Division

Swans Down [Gregory Spears - Requiem]

The elves of Rivendell and Lórien had no need of a Requiem mass. This circumstance arose in part because they were well-nigh immortal and in part because they were, well, elves. But if the need had arisen, their Requiem would likely have sounded very like Gregory Spears' Requiem.

No, no, no. That is a silly conceit. Let it go, and begin again—

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Ezra Pound's famous edict to the artists of modernity was "Make It New." His own approach to that edict was to dig in to vastly old work, such as that of the medieval Provençal troveurs, and to bring it to light in a way that might speak to a contemporary head and heart.

Gregory Spears' Requiem, releasing next week on New Amsterdam, Makes It New. 

Spears takes old, old elements—stories of bird-girls, the woody sound of the recorder, the sharp ping of the unpedaled Celtic/troubador harp, the Latin Requiem Mass—and by dint of focus and attention, brings them to speak to us and compels us to listen to them. It is a riveting, unexpected and unearthly piece that creeps under the skin and occupies the inner space where mystery dwells. It lingers well beyond its relatively brief 36 minute length. At its end, one is certain of having been somewhere, but the returning traveler would be hard pressed to explain the place to those who haven't gone themselves. 

Requiem was not composed for any religious occasion, but to accompany a dance performance: a piece entitled "Hen's Teeth" created by choreographer Christopher Williams and premiered by Dance New Amsterdam in 2010. "Hen's Teeth" in its turn was based in part upon an old Breton tale, "Pipi Menou and the Flying Women."

In the tale, the shepherd Pipi Menou discovers three swans that, when they alight, become beautiful young women. He tricks them, first, into taking him to the stronghold of their father, a magician, then persuades them to smuggle him into the house in a basket, in which he lies hidden during the day. The basket is conveniently located next to the room of the youngest and most appealing daughter, whose favors Pipi enjoys by night. When the jealous older sisters threaten to reveal all, Pipi and his beloved supply themselves with jewels and escape, Pipi clinging to her back as, reswanned, she flies away. In some versions, the swan-damsel converts to Christianity and they live happily ever after; in some, their children are eventually stolen back from them by the vengeful forces of magic.

Not, we can agree, the conventional material of a Requiem.

The seven sections of Spears' Requiem interweave segments from the traditional Requiem mass with excerpts from a Breton telling of the Pipi Menou tale as collected in the 19th century. We are in a realm where magic and faith shade into one another, as further exemplified in Spears' third textual source: a neatly ambiguous 16th century poem—is the love of which it sings carnal, spiritual or both?—by Jean-Antoine de Baif whose speaker compares her(?) self to a "swan of purity," singing most beautifully as it languishes and dies.

And the music? Six singers—two sopranos, three tenors, a bass—are accompanied by a spartan ensemble of recorder, two harps (one ancient, one modern), electric organ, and viola, though long stretches are a capella. Several centuries' worth of harmonic practice are on display; the leaps from one to another have a remarkable organic quality. Requiem feels balanced and suspended within itself in much the same way as Feldman's "Rothko Chapel," but with somewhat more melody and incident joined to the rigor and austerity of its meditations. 

Beautifully recorded in the reverberant space of New York's Corpus Christi Church, Requiem is attuned to some deep, immersive sense of time and spaciousness that transports the listener well beyond the ordinary. Utterly unexpected and highly recommended by this Fool.

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Value-Added Content: A Flickr set of performance photos from "Hen's Teeth"—caution, some of those birds are topless—can be found here.

I recommend acquiring Requiem the old-fashioned way, as a physical CD. Not only will that provide you with access to the texts, its packaging will allow you to admire the reliably elegant design and typography skills of DM Stith.

Requiem can be streamed in its entirety via the player below. The eerily gorgeous final section, "Postlude," is available as a free download here.

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Disclosure: Generally, when I write about music, I have paid my own way, i.e., bought the tickets or the CD or the download, or whatever. In this case, I received an advance review copy. The provenance of the CD had no bearing on my opinions of it. This being my personal blog, if I didn't actually hold the views of the piece that I have expressed above, I wouldn't have bothered to write or to post them. Fair enough, FTC?

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