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Hey Now Baby, Get Into My Big Black Car [The Industry: Hopscotch]

Do children still play hopscotch? When I was a child in the suburbs of Detroit the game was still a common one, but I never learned the rules, either formally or by observation, and its workings remain a mystery to me to this day.

The workings of Hopscotch: A Mobile Opera for 24 Cars are only slightly less enigmatic. Hopscotch is the newest offering from Los Angeles' exploratory opera company The Industry, now in performance in daylight on weekends only through November 22. The run is essentially sold out, though viewing via the Central Hub (see the explanation of the mechanics of things below) is available to all for free at all remaining performances. I experienced one portion of Hopscotch—the Red Route—at the first performance of the day on Saturday, November 7, as a paying customer.

The first rule of Hopscotch is that I must attempt to explain how Hopscotch works:

Hopscotch is an opera, devised by The Industry's Artistic Director Yuval Sharon with six composers (Veronika Krausas, Marc Lowenstein, Andrew McIntosh, Andrew Norman, Ellen Reid, and David Rosenboom) combinatorially collaborating with as many librettists (Tom Jacobson, Mandy Kahn, Sarah LaBrie, Jane Stephens Rosenthal, Janine Salinas Schoenberg, and Erin Young). The story is constructed in 34 Chapters. Of the 34 Chapters, 10 exist as animations online, with scores improvised by the ensemble gnarwhallaby. The remaining 24 Chapters have been shuffled and dealt out for performance across three Routes: Red, Yellow and Green, eight Chapters per route. Each Route includes one or more Chapters from each of the six composers, and each Route includes Chapters from all parts of the longer narrative. Routes may cross one another, but they do not share any Chapters. At each of the three daily performances, all three Routes are running simultaneously. On each Route, eight vehicles (limousines for the most part) transport four audience members apiece from Chapter to Chapter, with some Chapters taking place wholly or partially inside the car, some witnessed through the windows, and others involving getting out, entering, following, exploring whatever action may be playing out. On each Route, there are four starting points; from each starting point, two vehicles depart simultaneously, each headed to a different initial Chapter, one traveling the Route clockwise, the other otherwise. In the course of each Chapter, the audience exits the vehicle in which it came, and eventually enters another for the next Chapter.

Simplicity itself, really.

The story of Hopscotch, no more ridiculous than that of most any other opera, centers on the life of Lucha, and the two men most central to it, Jameson and Orlando. Lucha and Jameson "meet cute" when her auto meets with his motorcycle in a collision. At the time, Lucha is working with Orlando and his wife Sarita on an avant-garde, puppet-based theatre piece. Lucha and Jameson fall in love. When Sarita dies, Orlando professes his own love for Lucha and, upon being rejected, leaves for Paris. Jameson pursues mysterious research into the mind and/or parallel realities and, midway through the opera, vanishes inexplicably, never to return. Lucha receives phone calls that prove, eventually, to have been from her future self. There is a descent into Hades. Orlando eventually returns from Paris, and is this time accepted by Lucha. From a rooftop, Lucha looks back and marvels at it all.

The characters are recognizable by their color schemes: Jameson is always in black; Lucha's bright yellow dresses are a constant; Sarita, in life and death, is in red; Orlando sports a brown jacket with a distinctive hat. In any given Chapter there may be multiple versions of a character, from any point in their lives. Some are singers, some actors, some instrumentalists. the audience gets none of it in order, and each vehicle-group gets what it gets in a different sequence from the other vehicles rolling the route at that moment. To see it all requires taking all three separately ticketed Routes, which can be done but cannot be done in a day.

There is also The Central Hub. The Hub is a construction in the downtown Arts District, open for free to all comers. During the performances, live video and sound feeds are received in the Central Hub from all three of the ongoing Routes. (Some of the Chapters and their vehicles have fixed smartphone cameras inside or outside the vehicle; in others, an audience member is handed a phone in order to shoot whatever they wish of the proceedings.) At the conclusion of the final performance of each day, all 24 Hopscotch vehicles converge on the Central Hub for a once-daily finale composed by Andrew Norman.

Simplicity itself, really.

Through its gestation and rollout, I was something of a Hopscotch skeptic. While I knew firsthand that The Industry has a genuine flair for site-specific and immersive productions—demonstrated by the nigh-miraculous 2013 premiere of Christopher Cerrone's Invisible Cities in and around Union Station—Hopscotch in its hyperambitious proliferation of moving parts had about it the aura of a stunt, a novelty for novelty's sake. I thought that I might be obliged to echo Dr. Johnson (albeit without his leaven of misogyny) in response to being told of a woman preaching: that it would be "like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." In the end, I gave in, purchasing what may have been the last available November 7 ticket.

The Red Route, which I traveled, for the most part keeps to the east of downtown, in and around Boyle Heights, apart from one dramatic venture to Lucha's parting rooftop above the Arts District. (The Yellow Route centers on Downtown proper, while the Green Route fares more to the north toward Elysian Park.)

At the assigned starting point beside the Casa Del Mexicano, my fellow travelers and I entered our first vehicle to find an Orlando in place at the front; we were joined as the door closed by a violinist and violist and by Sarita in red, already dead, her face painted as a Dia de los Muertos skull. It was Chapter 17, Orlando's departure for Paris. The car pulled out, the music began, Orlando sang his thoughts and Sarita provided wordless counterpoint. In short order, we eased into the gates of the historic Evergreen Cemetery, driving past multilingual early 20th century headstones and groups of real people visiting with the real dead. The car stopped briefly, Sarita exited. We drove on, circling into another part of the cemetery where, through the window, Sarita reappeared, pacing and muttering, her voice broadcast to us inside.

Out of the cemetery then and, a few blocks further on, out of the first car and into the next. Here we found already in place Phillip King, a harpist with a concurrent talent for beatboxing. (Photography inside Hopscotch vehicles is discouraged so as not to interfere with the performers in the tight space; Mr. King has inspired a number of violations of this policy.) We had leapt back to the beginning of the story, with the immediate aftermath of Lucha's collision with Jamison playing out at the center of a large vacant lot. As the live score was harped and vocopercussed inside, the limousine circled and circled the two singers, a long tracking shot in our vehicular pelicula. The singers, wired and mic'd, performed the scene in the open air, their voices transmitted to us through the car's sound system.

And on: in the next car, to a recorded accompaniment, Lucha at mid-story received the first mysterious phone call (which will prove to be from herself, as witnessed by travelers on a Route other than ours). And out of the car. And into the sky: it's an ascent by elevator and stairs in the company of two Luchas (old Lucha sings, young Lucha violings) and two French horn-wielding Orlandos to the roof of an Arts District loft building where the Views Go On For Days and two distant brass players—can it be/of course it is Jameson, perhaps from beyond—carom fanfares off the cityscape in Chapter 33.

And down. And into the dark. Literally: Chapter 24, involving hellish visions derived from Lucha's encounter with a red notebook containing notes from the vanished Jameson, occurs in sound and motion only, the limousine equipped with blackout curtains depriving the traveler of any knowledge of where or how the route is continuing.

And into the light: We have come some miles, back to Boyle Heights and back into the past, to Hollenbeck Park, where accordion and some convenient players in a lakeside gazebo contribute to the magic moment of Lucha and Jameson's first kiss. When the next vehicle arrives, it contains the most vast and encompassing of all those yellow Lucha dresses, which in turn contains the youngest of Luchas: an emanation of the mid-life Lucha recalling her quinceanara. This Lucha is accompanied by three gentlemen with a menagerie of Mexican guitar variants. When this Chapter ends, we find ourselves glancing in and out the windows, between the musicians of the opera and the real-life itinerant music makers waiting to be hired at Mariachi Plaza.

And aay into the final stretch: a stroll across the Plaza—past the statue of Lucha Reyes, whose namesake the fictional Lucha is, and past a hopscotch layout chalked on the concrete—to witness a recalled encounter in a bookstore between Lucha and the young Orlando, devoted to art and poetry. The young man wanders out, and we follow to enter the final limousine. While his reads aloud, his opera-ending older self comments, through an in-vehicle cellist and a recorded voiceover, on how well it has all worked out for this young fellow.

And we are done. Deposited back to the original parking lot at Casa del Mexicano, beneath the sky of piercing and extravagant blue that is a particular Los Angeles speciality at this time of the year.

Was it a stunt? Surely. Does Hopscotch rise above mere stunthood? Yes, I would have to say it does. But how and in what sense? That's a harder question.

Hopscotch is a thing I am very pleased to have done. It was a marvelous time, in the most literal sense: I marveled again and again at what was attempted and what was achieved. As an experience, and as a series of striking and unexpected effects, it is without question a success. The performers are uniformly fine. It is a consuming force while it is happening. It makes me happy that it was made, and particularly that it was made under conditions that allowed me exposure to a piece of it.

What is less clear to me is what Hopscotch means, or where it leads, in the larger world.

The number of people who will be able to take even one Route during the run is relatively small: capacity is roughly 300 per day. The number who will run through two, or all three, is far smaller. Some unknown number, very possibly a larger one, will be able to access a version of Hopscotch via the Central Hub. The most generous total, though, still would not exhaust the nosebleed seats at Staples Center [capacity ca. 18000]. Once it is gone, it is reasonable to expect that Hopscotch is gone forever. Remounting it here, while hardly impossible, is simply not likely. Adapting it to some other city, or to a more conventional theatrical setting, fundamentally undermines its reason for being in the first place. 

Will Hopscotch prove to be an inspiration or catalyst to other, perhaps stranger and more ambitious, new opera or theater ventures? Will it be an exotic sport of nature, viewed in retrospect with stark amaze, but not a path to anything else? I find that I am not prepared to venture even an uninformed prediction on those lines. Certainly, I suspect that The Industry will take its essential success as a sign that the company should fare further forward, toward whatever still-unimagined thing comes next. That should be fun.

~~~

Photos by the blogger.

Cross-posted to a fool in the forest.

wildUp: American Composers Forum Concert REDCAT, Los Angeles, 11 September 2015

 

'Conducting' is when you draw 'designs' in the nowhere -- with a stick, or with your hands -- which are interpreted as 'instructional messages' by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing.

Frank Zappa

 

Neither bow ties nor a desire to be elsewhere were much in evidence on Friday evening as a 10-member contingent of wildUp, plus conductor Christopher Rountree, took to the stage at REDCAT to premiere pieces commissioned from the three winners of the 2015 edition of the American Composers Forum National Composition Contest.

For most contemporary composers, the challenge lies not so much in getting a new work a first performance as it does in ever getting it a second. These three ACF composers—Nina C. Young, Alex Temple, and William Gardiner—can now settle in to worrying about their works' third performances, as wildUp performed each of them twice in the course of the evening. The initial rotation was Young/Temple/Gardiner. A discussion with the composers followed. Young, currently in Rome as a recipient of the aptly-named Rome Prize, appeared via a taped Skype conversation. After the interval, the pieces were performed reordered: Gardiner/Young/Temple.

For a listener, hearing any piece of music for the first time poses the challenge of "finding the way in" on the fly. Popular music is popular, in part, precisely because its structures, rhythms, hooks and other devices offer immediate ease of entry. Much the same is true of pre-20th Century Classical/Romantic repertoire: familiarity with the modes and methods typical of that repertoire allows listeners to orient themselves as those tools are used in expected or unexpected ways in a previously unheard example. On first approaching a 20th Century or contemporary "new music" work, a listener's efforts to hear it in a meaningful way may be thwarted by the fact that its makers have a grant of essentially unlimited discretion to adopt or reject the conventions and techniques of their forebears. Even a recondite, abstruse piece becomes more fathomable when heard with the benefit of the memory of having heard it at least once before. A good recording of a piece can allow for the sort of recurring exploration that eventually allows a listener "to know it for the first time." In the case of Friday's premieres, a second hearing in live performance provided much the same service.

Of the three works on offer, Nina C. Young's "When Eyes Meet" likely gained the most by being played twice, simply because its methods call so little attention to themselves and are accordingly difficult to grasp at as they waft past for the first time. It especially gained by the addition of the composer's comments on her conception of the piece, which draws on the simultaneous potency and discomfort that grows from direct contact, particularly eye contact, with another human. On second hearing, it began to share its secrets, as a Dutch still life might do. A third hearing would be a welcome opportunity.

William Gardiner's "Chiaroscuro" possesses subtleties of its own, but they work around the periphery of a feature that cannot be ignored: a chthonic, viscerally resonant MIDI-controlled bass tone that looms and withdraws, attacks and releases, the deep dark ground against which the other players flash out in contrast. It made an immediate impression on first encounter, and rewarded a second descent to hang suspended in its cavernous center.

REDCAT was a nearly full house, and each performance was enthusiastically applauded. The most boisterous response was reserved for Alex Temple's "The Man Who Hated Everything," a tribute to and critique of the late Frank Zappa, chock full of sly humor, frenetic improvisation, and guilty pleasure. In a piece that ended with a sung litany of the things, innumerable, that Zappa hated, the first two thirds exemplified much that he undeniably loved: doo-wop harmonies, rapid fire wildly melodic tuned percussion, post-Coltrane free jazz, the rigorous modernism of Varèse, all thrown together as if without care or without caring, yet with precision and a desire that each bit be heard, through and through. Zappa hated stupidity and ignorance, as he saw them. more than anything, and this piece is anything but stupid or ignorant. It is also a total blazing hoot. Two times through was, in this instance, just enough to whet the aural palate for many more.

It is in the nature of wildUp that the group rarely plays music that does not, in some way, genuinely excite its members. That excitement and the commitment to giving the best possible account in the moment poured through in each performance of each piece. The composers in the room were likely well pleased. A proper fine night for new music, this was.

~~~

Photo by the blogger; taken in summer 2014 on Ventura Boulevard, directly across the street from the Sherman Oaks Galleria, a shopping mall hated but nevertheless immortalized by FZ (and daughter Moon) in "Valley Girl".

The blogger citizen music journalist attended this performance via a complimentary press ticket, but would definitely have attended as a paying customer had that opportunity not come his way.

A Boy's Own Gothic Sarah Kirkland Snider's Unremembered

It needs a name, this creative space Sarah Kirkland Snider and others have been defining for themselves as composers over much of the past decade. "Alt-Classical" seemed to serve the purpose briefly, but no one is satisfied with that one anymore, and its claimed reach was too broad in any case. "Contemporary Classical" casts the net even wider, capturing even less. For purposes of this post, and with a very particular focus on SKS, her close collaborators, and other creators whose sensibilities hew relatively close to hers, let us propose

Magical Classicism.

An imagined musical equivalent to literary Magic Realism, Magical Classicism (if it existed) would describe music that deploys the forces of orchestral/symphonic or traditional chamber music, but is not limited to them. Electric guitars, synthesizers, jazz or rock or hip-hop derived percussion assemblages, would all be fair game if they are applied to the purpose of producing music of thoughtful inquiry and humane emotion, willing to embrace a modicum (or more) of overt beauty but suspicious toward too-easy sentiment or the merely pretty and ornamental. Magical Classicism would draw as well on the three rules Wallace Stevens articulated for poetry in his "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction": that it must be abstract, that it must change, and that while being and doing so, perhaps most of all, it must give pleasure.

Magical Classicism provides a fair description of the long-form song oriented work Sarah Kirkland Snider has produced in 2010's momentous Penelope and in her newest, Unremembered, releasing today via New Amsterdam. This blogger's deep-dyed and abiding fondness for Penelope—one of the best musical things since the turn of this still-young century—is no secret. Today, however, the subject is Unremembered.

Unremembered grew from a commission to write for the vocalists of Roomful of Teeth, for whom Snider originally composed five pieces setting verses written for the project by the poet Nathaniel Bellows. One of those, "The Orchard", appeared on the group's Grammy-winning self-titled debut in 2012. Bellows kept writing, and illustrating, more poems, and Snider kept setting them, and the whole evolved into what now presents itself as Unremembered, a cycle of 13 songs all drawn from or inspired by some version of Bellows' childhood and early youth in rural Massachusetts.

Together, the poems revisit a haunted boyhood, as recalled or reshaped some years later. While they are shared by three quite different singers, the poems' point of view is unified, all speaking in the voice of "the poet" (not literally Bellows, one assumes, but a persona resembling him) excavating that past.

There is a town, but it is only glimpsed once, when a sleepwalking girl passes through to the other side of it to meet the uncertain end to her dream ("The Guest"). Apart from the poet, individualized people are rare in these poems, which spend more time with animals and, particularly, with the places of the past. Those places comprise an aged New England of woodlands, hills, forest, farmsteads and old estates (many abandoned), creek sides: zones in which human and natural and possibly supernatural worlds mingle or rub uneasily together, where the past is never quite past. These sorts of landscapes are somewhat familiar, in their strangeness, from Hawthorne (another Nathaniel), from the small-town Midwest of Ray Bradbury, from the nostalgic-pastoral side of Stephen King [e.g., "The Body"/Stand By Me], and others.

There are ghosts, there is at least one witch out in the woods, there are glades rumored to have been the site of suicides. A drowned man lies on the riverbank. Human or animal, past or present, death is rarely far beneath a sylvan afternoon or a seemingly untroubled field. The most harrowingly specific description in Unremembered is of "The Swan," randomly destroyed, crushed in an extended instant as a truck backs over the place where she had been nesting. Indeed, Unremembered begins and ends with the poet sensing "the vapor of the dead" in the porches of his ear, sparking the rueful reflection that he has "never learned to love someone/The way I did that place."

As a title, "Unremembered" contains its own mysteries: the poet is seemingly engaged in remembering and in sharing his memories with the listener, so what is it that is unremembered? Are these narratives true memories at all? Are they known only to the poet, thus unrecollected by anyone else? Is the poet unburdening himself, unwinding the strands of his own memory, sharing these vignettes for the sake of consigning them hereafter to the realm of the forgotten?

In its current, album version Unremembered is performed by "the Unremembered Orchestra," drawn from numerous contemporary music ensembles such as ACME, ICE, Victoire, and Alarm Will Sound, and including several composer-performers (Timo Andres and Caleb Burhans among them). Edwin Outwater, of Ontario's Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony, conducts. The recording is co-produced by the composer with Lawson White, and the multitracking and processing tools of the studio serve as another player.

Sarah Kirkland Snider's score builds on, without repeating, the musical language of Penelope, and shares with its predecessor a heady blend of thoughtful intricacy with forthright emotional appeal. Nearly all of the poems set for Unremembered are constructed using short-lined rhyming quatrains, but they do not succumb to sameness: the setting composed for each is rhythmically and tonally distinct, a sequence of craftily detailed tableaux, rich with surprise and nuance.

The singers are Padma Newsome (on "The Estate," to which he brings a Yeatsian bardic quality), DM Stith and, continuing seamless collaboration with Snider that began with Penelope, Shara Worden. DM Stith's scrubby tenor, which he recently compared in a note on Twitter to that of Robert Wyatt, is an apt match for the wondering boy that was. Shara Worden fills that role as well, while also standing in for the larger natural and unnatural forces of the world. Her wordless voice is an element of the air these pieces breathe, suspended as dust motes, adrift as seeds from a milkweed pod. Engaging the texts, she deploys a seemingly faultless dramatic sense of tone and inflection. Her progression in "The Swan", arching and aching through the middle verses only to land upon "a splayed and shattered/Thing", is lethally sad. Her way with a single word (such as "fixedly" in "The Witch") can be a song in itself.

With no continuous plot as such, Unremembered works by an accumulation of incidents and effect across its duration. It provides the listener a sojourn in the poet's recollection or reconstruction, or perhaps reinvention, of a past that may have been a prelude to the backward-glancing present, or may have been a refuge out of which we have been cast, with the poet, into a colder and less welcoming world. Unremembered's abstractions and changes linger, as do the pleasures of its remembered company.

~~~

Incidentally: Some of the musical material from Unremembered has also found its way into "Pale as Centuries", a short piece written for NOW Ensemble and included on that group's latest release, Dreamfall. 

~~~

[The blogger has had the benefit of an advance review copy of Unremembered, on which this post was based. He also preordered Unremembered the moment it went on sale and is looking forward to receiving that second copy. Procuring a physical copy is definitely recommended, for the sake of the attractive album booklet containing the texts as well as illustrations by Nathaniel Bellows for each of the poems.]

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the End Times

Modernity in art has been with us for 150 years now, since Baudelaire coined the term on the boulevards of Paris, and over that time one of its hallmarks has been to compel its audience to look at what is right before our unillusioned eyes. Making it real is as important to the Modern as making it new. Baudelaire, for his part, infamously lavished a surface layer of lyrical poetry on the description of a maggot-ridden corpse stumbled upon during a bucolic afternoon stroll, concluding  his description by reminding his companion, in essence, "That'll be you someday, sugar." As the poet and his companion observe the carcass, a dog lingers nearby, grumpily awaiting their departure and the opportunity to return to its interrupted meal.

That Modern impulse is shudderingly in play in Dog Days, the opera composed by David T. Little on a libretto by Royce Vavrek (adapting a story by Judy Budnitz), which received its West Coast premiere on Thursday evening at REDCAT as the first of Los Angeles Opera's "Off Grand" presentations in conjunction with New York-based Beth Morrison Projects. Also in the mix: pity and terror, those mainstays of classical/Aristotelean tragedy, and some post-Modern subversion of some of the central tropes of mainstream Opera. In combination with highly skilled of-the-moment vocal writing and precise, frightfully committed performances from its core cast, Dog Days is music drama of cathartic, assaultive potency.  

The events of Dog Days take place in middle America, in a time just over the horizon. Things have fallen apart. There is a War on. The nature of the enemy is never stated, and it is entirely possible that its origins are sectarian and domestic. Martial law and strict curfews have been imposed. Famine has taken hold. While many have moved out and headed East to possibly better circumstances, a family of five—parents, with two sons in their late teens or very early twenties, and a 13-year old daughter, Lisa—continues on in their home, surviving initially on air-dropped Army rations and such other food as the father, Howard, is able to hunt or forage. The action moves from sweltering summer, with food and societal support already scarce, through autumn and into bleak winter, by which time the rations have stopped coming (the military seems to regard the family as a nuisance at best), and all the potentially edible animals, even insects, have vanished. The family's trajectory is relentlessly downbound from the start, and everything ultimately shivers to fragments. 

There is also a man in a dog suit. This is all that is ever known of him. He is a man in a dog suit, behaving in every way as a dog. He appears in the yard in the prologue, the Mother taking him for a real dog while Lisa insists he is a man in a costume. Lisa eventually befriends him, as one would a dog, and begins slipping small portions of food in his direction. She names him Prince. He is central to one (or perhaps both?) of the opera's paired, dreadful endings. [Spoilers omitted.]

Royce Vavrek's libretto presents the characters coldly, but without disdain. The women's parts are particularly well formed. Lisa is fully imagined, whether discussing the nature of the dog-man, ruminating on "what is normal", writing unsendable letters to her friend Marjorie in the East, or imagining/pretending that her starving frame in the mirror resembles that of a supermodel. The Mother (whose given name we never learn) maintains a surface of calm and domestic habit, broken by outbursts of terror, as when her legs simply refuse to take her to bed.  The men's roles—profanity drenched, as might be expected of characters under such dire stresses—are not quite so rounded. The sons' parts in particular float close to caricatures of the worst sort basement-dwelling slackers. Howard, self-identifying as an ineffectual patriarch, resembles Willie Loman reimagined with a strain of hair-trigger manliness out of Sam Shepard.

David T. Little's score ends in an extended thundering miasma of noise, electrical hum and pounding percussion. Before it blasts itself apart, however, it features slithering strings, jittery winds, some lovely retro-choral writing for scenes around the dinner table, and a canny way with a vocal line that is particularly effective (again) in the case of Lisa and her Mother. The set piece arias are, if not exactly hummable, also not unacquainted with attractive and melancholy melody. The score is performed with grit, focus and commitment by an extended version of the composer's Newspeak ensemble, under the direction of Alan Pierson.

It would be difficult to imagine a more fully invested or persuasive performance of the role of Lisa than is provided by Lauren Worsham. The wordless, near silent role of the man in the dog suit is inhabited—there is no other word for it—by performance artist John Kelly, who moves, reacts and likely thinks exactly as a good natured, hungry, man-sized dog would do. The most pristine singing, among the grime and collapse, comes from Marnie Breckenridge, whose Mother brings a reservoir of untapped nobility to insufferable circumstances. James Bobick bellows manfully as Howard. The unpleasant young men in the basement are Peter Tantsits and Michael Marcotte. Cherry Duke appears briefly, well armed and menacingly officious, as a passing Army captain, returning the sons from a ramble through the neighboring homes of the dead. The entire cast has been with the production since its 2012 New Jersey premiere.

Dog Days is, after a fashion, a brutal IMAX version of the picturesque Death that is at the core of so much of the beloved Standard Opera Repertoire. It is an anti-Bohème, stripping off all of the gauzy soft focus romance with which Mimi's passing is suffused, or a counter-Tristan. (Lisa is ultimately allowed a sort of kitchen-table liebestod, albeit one without words or transcendence.) It is an infernal Modern contraption, three seasons in Hell if you will, from which we nevertheless should not turn away our eyes or ears.

~~~

Photos: Greg Grudt/Matthew Imaging, courtesy Los Angeles Opera.

Dog Days continues with performances through next Monday, June 15, at REDCAT, beneath the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The blogger attended the opening night performance as a paying member of the opera-going public, as the blogger is wont to do.

Mnemonic Tricks and Devices

The Los Angeles Philharmonic's Next on Grand series continued Friday evening with three  ensembles—the Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, Ensemble Signal led by Brad Lubman, and members of wildUp with conductor Christopher Rountree—performing, respectively, a world premiere from Steven Mackey, a revival of a turn of [this] century collaborative piece by Steve Reich and video artist Beryl Korot, and a previously unannounced al fresco percussion intervention. 

Steven Mackey's "Mnemosyne's Pool" is a five part, 45-minute whats-it (something of symphony? a touch of tone poem?) for the full orchestra, and brims with cunning musical goodness. It is not literally about the Titan Mnemosyne—a goddess of memory, lover of Zeus, mother of the Muses—nor is it about a pool, but its processes toy about with the pliable, labile, multivalent twitch and flicker of memory, and much of its musical material can be heard as waterborne and maritime. The composer's detailed program notes notwithstanding, the intricacies of the structural innards of the piece were not instantly fathomable by the ear on first listen, but the larger arcs and complementary variety of the components delivered satisfactions aplenty.

In five sections, "Pool" begins with a tolling chime and funereal chords, even a whiff of dies irae, but soon spreads into the first of its more liquid segments, turbid and glinting under threatening skies. The second section was vaguely Russian or Baltic, spiky and sprightly in the vein of early Stravinsky (think Petrushka, perhaps filtered through a mesh of Carl Nielsen strings and winds). The third and fourth segments are played without break, the former harking to American urbanism, the latter transiting from stately elegy to spartan threnody. The fifth and final section returns to watery thoughts, breeze driven under a cloudless heaven, before terracing upward to an extended boom and burst of an ending.    

The physical arrangements for the two halves of the concert were radically different—the full orchestral setup for the Philharmonic needed to be broken down and carted off, to be replaced by Signal's string quartet at the front, double pianos and extensive percussion at the rear, separated by a U-shaped platform for five roving singers—compelling an extra-long intermission. Enter wildUp. With the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, the ever-enterprising ensemble took to the broad empty space in front of Walt Disney Concert Hall (as well as positions across the street) to perform William Albright's 1972 "Take That" for Philharmonic attendees and passersby.

As written, "Take That" calls for four drummers managing sixteen drums. wildUp and company doubled the players and expanded the percussion battery to forty drums of all sizes, including a full dozen bass drums. With the musicians scattered over four stations around the plaza and intersection at 1st Street and Grand Avenue and a shortage of reflective surfaces, much of the sound escaped unheard up into the evening air. Still, a fine rolling and thundering was made before concertgoers returned to their places.

Steve Reich's "Three Tales" is a 2001 collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot, and falls into the category of Reich's works that are driven by the pitches and rhythms of human speech. When that technique works for Reich, as in "Different Trains," it produces profound and compelling music. When it does not work, however, the music loses its savor and interest under the dead weight of the words it tries to carry. "Three Tales," unfortunately, although performed rigorously and well by Ensemble Signal, ultimately outstayed its welcome by a fair margin, descending in its last two-thirds into a dulling and ponderous didacticism.

"Three Tales" draws on history and science, and meditates on humans, their technology, and how the two change or are changed by one another. The three events on offer are the 1937 explosion and crash of the German airship Hindenburg, the U.S. military's nuclear test detonations at Bikini Atoll in 1946, and the 1996 advent of Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned adult mammal. The Hindenburg segment is actually successful for the most part, and Beryl Korot's video constructions are particularly well-tuned as they cross-reference the vastness of the made object and the comparative smallness of its makers.

The other two "tales" succumb to self-seriousness, particularly once passages from the creation narrative in the book of Genesis begin to be interpolated, flashing on screen in follow-the-bouncing-ball sing-along fashion. Dolly appears only briefly in her concluding segment, which is more interested in trotting out interviews with now-familiar Deep Thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and Marvin Minsky, and a disturbing baby robot named Kismet, to opine on the cybernetic, code-based nature of all earthly life. While the live singers and players were clear and well-balanced, the recorded voices of the interviewees tended to fly straight into the Disney Hall's notorious hostility to over-amplification. By that point, the video accompaniment had become little more than what Alfred Hitchcock famously disdained as "photographs of people talking." Better they should have left it at one tale.

Ensemble Signal, by the way, recently released a new recording of Steve Reich's Music for Eighteen Musicians, a piece that stands as a permanent and unequivocal success. The Signal version is at least as worthy of a listener's time as Reich's own original recording of the piece. Recommended, both.

Next on Grand continues tonight and Sunday afternoon; "Mnemosyne's Pool" repeats on the Sunday program, on which Ensemble Signal will return to perform David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe's 2005 "Shelter".

Photos by the blogger.

Cross-posted to a fool in the forest.

John Adams and the New Power Generation

Before debarking each summer to the poptoned jumbotronic precincts of the Hollywood Bowl, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has become partial to ending its downtown Walt Disney Concert Hall seasons with a themed festival of some kind, typically focusing on music of the post-war Twentieth Century or the endless-war Twenty-First. Last year at this time, it was a deep deep plunge in to the Minimalist Jukebox; the previous year honed in on the music of [mostly] contemporary Brooklyn and environs. Now, to conclude its 2014-2015 season, the Phil offers up "Next on Grand: Contemporary Americans." Over the course of this week, the Phil is rolling out no fewer than seven world premieres, several West Coast premieres, and a handful of other still-new, and all-American, compositions. The programming still skews East, and it still skews male—more so than one would expect: the Phil is better than most at commissioning new works by women—but it is new, new, new and, based on the opening night, promises much.

The launch of Next on Grand fell officially to the orchestra's Green Umbrella series on Tuesday evening, with the subset of musicians within the orchestra who are committed to doing the contemporary repertoire, and to doing it well: the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group. Under the direction of composer-conductor John Adams, Tuesday's concert featured three brand new works, and one nearly new piece, all  from composers at or under 35. It was a rich and satisfying evening. This blogger ate it up, and it has left him thinking about ... many things, which he hopes to take up in another post shortly. For the moment, though, a report on the Tuesday evening groaning board of musical excellences:

First up, Dylan Mattingly's "Seasickness and Being (in love)". Berkeley-born in 1991, Mattingly has made his early reputation through his work at Bard College, particularly with the ensemble Contemporaneous, which has recorded a collection of his prior work, Stream of Stars. His emerging voice as a composer grows out of the elaborately accelerating verve of John Adams, but is rapidly asserting itself in its own directions If we apply the test of wanting to hear it again, "S&B(il)" is a plain success. It builds on something of a trick—a second piano in the ensemble, detuned a quarter tone lower than standard—and then makes that trick itself disappear almost immediately into the weft and weave of the piece, anchoring its patterns. It subdivides, in retrospect, into three distinct segments: an opening driven by kinetic momentum, a middle marked by chordal washes moving about from player to player, and a final extended pointillist settling down to silence. I am hopeful that someone will record it, because the piece is worth wandering about and getting lost in.

The setting of text is a difficult matter. Christopher Cerrone has demonstrated a particular talent for it, with his opera Invisible Cities, well received here in Los Angeles—not least by this blogger—in 2013. "The Things That Fall to Earth" is a song cycle for sopran0—Hila Plitmann, last seen here altogether unrestrained and commanding in Zappa's "'200 Motels'"—drawn from seven poems by Kay Ryan, sung through as an uninterrupted series. Rich, fluid, always clear of line and supportive of the plain expression of the verse while maintaining surprise, Cerrone's music alludes in passing to the likes of Copland and Ravel, and to Debussy in its vaporous support of the text, but the tenor and flow of it is ultimately his own. It passes the lean-forward test: one presses in, wanting to hear each new sound plainly so as not to miss its import. A beautiful bit of work beautifully played and sung, first among equals for the night in my estimation.

Jacob Cooper's "Alla stagione dei fior" opened the second half and stood out as completely different from the works around it. For one thing, no live orchestra was involved. "Alla stagione dei fior" is a video piece and its sights and sounds all derive from preexisting material. The title phrase comes from La bohème: with the certain knowledge that Mimi is dying, she and Rodolfo nevertheless resolve to stay together through the winter, "until the season of flowers." Cooper combines two brief snippets from an existing video of the opera, slowed and extended almost to the point of immobility. The principal image is the tableau at Mimi's bedside at the moment of her death, the focus moving closer and closer by the tiniest of increments until not the lovers' faces but the space between those faces fills the screen. In that space, Cooper sub-imposes the moment of the title phrase from the previous act, complete with flickering subtitle, broken into sections microseconds long and jerkily reblended. The soundtrack is taken from the existing video, but is digitally stretched to a long, resonant drone. The concentration and visual near-stasis, coming to a point in Mimi's expiration, recalls Bill Viola; the drone score reinforces that concentrated attention, extending it toward endlessness. (Jacob Cooper's song cycle, Silver Threads, with Mellissa Hughes is also based in drones, albeit far warmer and more changeable. Released by Nonesuch last year, it did not receive nearly the attention it deserves, in my view. It was my second-favorite recording of 2014, and I unequivocally recommend it.)

Sean Friar's "Finding Time", with which the evening ended, could as well have been titled "now ... this", as it bounded from musical idea to idea to idea without obvious connection or transition betwixt them, like a flipbook with its images disarranged. Each fleeting thought had something to recommend it, but each tended to leave the scene before the first-time listener had an opportunity to grip it. Beginning with bursts of jazz-inflected fragments, it ranged every which way, before stopping with a sort of hiccup. I was particularly taken with a passage toward the center, in which the players settled into what emerged as a Tristan-like mystic chord as though sinking into a beanbag chair, before bounding tangentially away. Again, a piece that would be worth a repeat listen, or several, if only to begin to sort its sparkly shards. 

Next on Grand continues through the weekend with, among other things, world premieres from Steven Mackey, Philip Glass, Bryce Dessner, and Andrew Norman. 

Photos: by the blogger.

Cross-posted to a fool in the forest.

Starlets and Bible Black [Gavin Bryars: Marilyn Forever, Long Beach Opera]

Marilyn Forever, composed by Gavin Bryars on a libretto by Marilyn Bowering, received its U.S. premiere last Saturday evening via Long Beach Opera. Whether the world in fact needed another artful meditation on the life and death of Marilyn Monroe is open to debate. It has in any case been given one. Marilyn Forever must be judged a success on its own terms, and the production that has been devised by LBO artistic director Andreas Mitisek shows it to greatest advantage, with richness and detail to burn. 

Bowering has based her libretto on her 1987 poetry collection, Anyone Can See I Love You, so its methods are those of a free-form song cycle more so than of dramatic narrative. The poems frame a multiplane view of the figure of Marilyn Monroe as she contemplates or re-dreams her life at the time of her death. The well-known beats are revisited: her lonesome childhood as Norma Jean Mortenson, stardom and sex appeal, the marriages to Joe DiMaggio and (particularly) Arthur Miller, singing "Happy Birthday" to the President, her fatal embrace of drugs and alcohol, and so on. Through those reflections, Bowering searches for the woman within the archetype, and reintroduces us to her as one (to paraphrase The Smiths) who was human and who needed to be loved, just as anybody else does.

Bryars' score is for two small groups: an onstage trio of piano, saxophone and bass, and an eight-piece pit ensemble of low strings, winds and percussion. The composer himself played the bass part at Saturday's performance. The primary musical line slips with agility between the two groups of players, the trio deploying a 1950s-styled mix of jazz (saxophone solo included) and popular song styles and the pit orchestra swimming in broad and darksome minor harmonies, riverine and unresolved, melodic by allusion rather than by declaration. It is not difficult to imagine that only modest retooling would be needed to remove the singers—although Bryars has established himself as a gifted writer for human voices—and to reveal an evocative and intriguing instrumental piece.

Marilyn Forever premiered in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2013, and has since been performed in Australia as part of a recent Bryars survey/tribute at the Adelaide Festival. The Long Beach production for this U.S. premiere is entirely new.

As written the opera calls for a cast of four: Marilyn Monroe herself and the "Rehearsal Director," who also serves to represent some of the men (and the role of men generally) in her life, plus a two-man chorus referred to as The Tritones. Director Mitisek's innovation is to divide the role of Marilyn between two singers, one for the brightly hued public star and one for the vexed and troubled private woman. 

Mitisek splits the stage as well. A lighted makeup table serves as divider, the public life playing out largely stage right (in front of the jazz trio) while stage left alludes to the guest house bedroom in which Monroe's body was found. Public Marilyn begins the opera in her bedroom, before quickly passing over into the world. Private Marilyn emerges, rather unexpectedly, from beneath the rumpled bedclothes, and never leaves her room with its scattering of old photos and the company of a motley assortment of  flasks and bottles. At the opera's end, the two personae rejoin, seated on the bed, still alone but alone together.

Set walls and scrims serve as well as projection screens, bearing posed and candid photos of incidents from Monroe's life as well as live video from the stage. The video originates with several fixed positions, plus handheld cameras operated by the two Tritones. The video overlay is immersive and potent, especially when capturing small details from the stage and juxtaposing them to add point to a larger line or gesture.

Jamie Chamberlin and Danielle Marcelle Bond are, between them, Marilyn Monroe. The division of the part between two singers works so well in this production that it came as a surprise to many in the audience that the role is not in fact written that way. Both performers initially learned the entire role, working out the final apportionment of lines and sequences through exploration in rehearsal. Chamberlin's public star sings in a high register, evoking an enriched and variegated version of Monroe's own singing voice. Portions, at least, of the vocal line assigned to Bond's private Marilyn seem to have been transposed slightly downward toward a darker mezzo range. Each of the singers fully commits to her assigned facets of the character, and each can be said to be First Marilyn Among Equals.

[Update: I have it on excellent authority - Facebook comments from the singers - that in fact nothing was transposed or altered in the score. The role of Marilyn is written such as to encompass both soprano and mezzo: the way in which the part was divided for dramatic purposes served, by happy coincidence, to play to the strengths of the two performers.]

Lee Gregory (the Captain in last season's Death of Klinghoffer) brings admirable clarity to distinguish among the half-dozen (or more) men he is called upon to symbolize, including the gruff but supportive Rehearsal Director, bespectacled and beloved Arthur Miller, and the occasional unsavory Hollywood casting couch type. The Tritones (Robert Norman, Adrian Rosales) ably provide such choral support as the score requires, and they are indispensable to the seamless workings of the video schema. 

Opera often concerns itself with retelling old stories and Marilyn Forever—an unfortunate title, really, that makes a serious minded and affecting chamber opera sound like a feel-good jukebox musical—does not hold itself out as offering any new and shattering insight into its subject. That may be for the best: even before her death, and certainly in the fifty-three years since, Marilyn Monroe has been appropriated, claimed, and retooled by so many hands with so many agendas of their own that offering her up as no more than a human woman alone with herself is less a reduction than it is a show of respect. 

Marilyn Forever receives a final performance at the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro (albeit without the composer as a player) on Sunday, March 29, 2015, at 2:30 p.m. Tickets available here.

Photos above by Keith Ian Polakoff, used by kind permission of Long Beach Opera.

[As ever with Long Beach Opera, the blogger attended this performance as a subscriber, at his own expense.]  

Cross-posted to a fool in the forest.

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A bonus photo: the actual Marilyn, in a smoky nightclub situation in the company of Donald O'Connor and Cole Porter, at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel, January 1953.

 

Gavin Bryars Revisited

[Long Beach Opera will give the U.S. premiere of Gavin Bryars' opera Marilyn Forever  on Saturday, March 21, with the composer among the musicians. For the occasion, I am re-posting my earlier thoughts on Bryars and his music. This post originally appeared on March 19, 2011, at a fool in the forest under the title "A Ramble on Gavin Bryars".]

On any given day over the past five years or so, if asked to name my favorite living composer, there is every likelihood that my answer would be: Gavin Bryars.  That being the case, it is a surprise to me that I have never written about him here before, apart from a single reference in connection with the late Merce Cunningham.  Time to remedy that omission, says I.

• This post can also be taken as a long-delayed response to the question posed by A.C. Douglas back in late 2009: "OK, Who the Hell is Gavin Bryars?"  I've known the answer for a good long while, but never written it down.

The impetus or excuse for my finally posting on Bryars is a newly released collection built around the premiere of his Piano Concerto -The Solway Canal in the company of two other pieces that turn out to be the entirety of Bryars' work for solo piano.  Released through Naxos, the recording features Ralph van Raat at the piano with, for the concerto, the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic and Capella Amsterdam under the direction of Otto Tausk.  I will return to Mr. van Raat in due time below.

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Gavin Bryars emerged in the early 1970's, with avant-garde credentials to burn.  His preferred personal instrument is the double bass, and for a time he moved in the heady jazz circles around guitarist Derek Bailey.  On the more classical side of the musical ledger, he put in time working with John Cage in New York before connecting with Cornelius Cardew back in London.  In his own right as a composer, Bryars drew notice when the initial release on Brian Eno's (short-lived but important) Obscure label consisted of what remain (largely via later versions) two of his best known works: The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.  In retrospect, Bryars' involvement in the ten Obscure discs is arguably second only to Eno's own: Bryars' compositions appear on four of them, and he conducts or plays on at least two more.  He is credited as co-arranger, with Eno, of the three deconstructed versions of Pachelbel's Canon in D that form Side 2 of Discreet Music, the first recording by Eno in the now-inescapable "ambient" music style.

As the Obscure work suggests, 1970s-era Gavin Bryars was a composer working in the non-linear, frequently non-tonal, systems-driven or minimalist style of the day.  The Sinking of the Titanic, in its original form, was more of a sound environment than a "composition" in the traditional sense: ship's bells, engine noises and recorded interviews with Titanic survivors fade in and out as a chamber ensemble plays distorted versions of the hymn tune ("Autumn") reportedly played by the ship's orchestra as the vessel went down.  From those indeterminate, abstracted elements, Titanic emerges as a surprisingly emotional, elegiac work.  Bryars has revisited and retooled it on several occasions for differing sorts of ensembles: the ship itself having been located and explored since the original version, he has characterized the piece now in part as the sound of the orchestra reemerging from its resting place below.  The Sinking of the Titanic can run an hour or more in length, but my personal favorite is the compact 15 minute version Bryars devised in 1985 for the Smith Quartet.  Via the rather over-large player below, you can listen to a live recording of a 2008 Titanic performance by the Wordless Music Orchestra, under the direction of Brad Lubman: 

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Gavin Bryars' post-1970s music abandons most of the trappings of the stereotypical avant-garde and has moved into a more solidly neotraditional/postromantic realm, embracing tonality and even melody, albeit with a sufficient quantity of edgy bits and "wrong" notes to mark the work as contemporary.  One of the standard tropes of speculative fiction is the existence of infinite parallel universes, some of which are exactly the same as our own in every way but one: for example, a universe in which redheaded people have blue eyes and only blue eyes, or in which dogs purr and cats chirp, but which in every other way is the same as what we know. Gavin Bryars' music comes from one of those nearby parallel worlds, sounding perhaps like something we have heard before until, on closer inspection, it is revealed as something slightly removed from our experience.

There is a pervasive slightly melancholy tone throughout Bryars' music.  Album covers for collections of his work seem to favor cold weather and misty Hebridean distances.  His is a northern muse, at home in the chill and the damp.

When Ezra Pound dictated to the Moderns that they should "make it new," he did not have in mind only the creation of "new" work in modes never seen or heard before.  He also encouraged, particularly in his own work, a sort of aesthetic archaeology by which older forms, such as the songs of the troveurs, were brought into the contemporary light and seen as if for the first time.  The project of Gavin Bryars is on those same lines: he very consciously engages in an ongoing dialog with music history and traditions, whether by picking the lint of ages from potentially outworn materials and placing them before the listener afresh—as in his ongoing exploration of madrigals and medieval laude songs or his In Nomine (after Purcell), in which Purcell's gorgeous 6-Part In Nomine is folded origami-like in upon itself—or by cross-referencing seemingly unrelated streams of musical thought—By the Vaar, an "extended adagio" for double bass and orchestra, includes a segment of improvisation and was written for jazz bassist Charlie Haden, and the object of homage in the double piano piece My First Homage is Bill Evans.  

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Although his music tends to the relentlessly serious, there is a place in it for humor and the absurdity of odd juxtapositions, as in his deliciously odd collaboration with the late Spanish artist Juan Muñoz on A Man in a Room, Gambling .  The piece consists of ten five-minute segments, originally intended to be broadcast on the radio at odd hours of the night.  In each segment Muñoz, as our host, teaches a new skill in the handling of playing cards, specifically how to manipulate the cards to the "gambler's" advantage by dealing from the bottom, secreting extra cards for himself, and so on; how to cheat, to put it bluntly.  Each lesson is accompanied by music for a five-piece string ensemble.  The music is earnest, even somber, seemingly unrelated to the sordid little tips being offered up by the host. Listening to the "broadcasts" is disorienting, as attention shifts back and forth between the two parallel performances, not wanting to miss the "good parts" of either and trying, largely in vain, to reconcile the two.  In 2008, the Tate Modern presented a Juan Muñoz retrospective including performances of A Man in a Room by the composer and members of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, and included this video preview of the piece: 

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Now, then: To return to the ostensible catalyst of this post, let's consider the new Ralph van Raat piano disk.  As mentioned above, this disc collects the entirety of Bryars' compositions for solo pianist.  He has written for piano previously, but those works have generally called for more than one piano or more than one pianist, or both.  (Two pianos, eight hands?  Try Out of Zaleski's Gazebo, a very witty piece combining churning minimalist patterns with recurring and unexpected intrusions of a theme drawn from Percy Grainger.  There is video of a performance here, marred somewhat by muddy sound quality.) So, at this writing, the Bryars solo piano works are three in number: a Piano Concerto, subtitled The Solway Canal after one of the two poems whose texts are incorporated in it; a new solo piano piece, Ramble on Cortona, written for van Raat in conjunction with the composition of the concerto; and a piano revision of a 1995 piece originally written for harpsichord, After Handel's Vesper.

The centerpiece here is obviously the concerto, which received its premiere in February, 2010.  The work was commissioned in part by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, which produced this precursor video at the time of the commission in 2006:

Four years later, in an essay following the premiere, van Raat writes:

I think the Piano Concerto by Gavin Bryars takes on a unique place in piano concerto literature.  First of all, because it has a rather uncommon orchestration of piano solo, orchestra and choir.  Second, because the piano takes on a role which is quite radical: virtuosity is not anymore defined by playing as many notes as possible, but by another element which I think is, at times, overlooked by musicians and composers: that of complete 'control' over the instrument.  Control, in my opinion, not only means being able to control technically difficult passages, but also means being able to play just a few notes as one wishes, i.e. with the right colour, tone, intention and dynamics.  I think the concerto is challenging, because one cannot hide himself or herself in technical display.  Here it comes down to playing relatively few notes in such a way, that they start to mean something, and that they move people. Gavin asks for an intrinsic way of music making, which is averse from musical acrobatics. Especially nowadays, in which very flashy television and radio make many people used to needing just very short attention spans, this piece forms an interesting counterpart, which we generally are not used to anymore.

And that sums it up nicely.  The Solway Canal is not a flashy showpiece for the soloist, spattering runs and crescendos round the hall, but an extended collaboration between soloist and ensemble, with long, organic lines of thought twining through and about it.  The piece is not explicitly programmatic, but it has been rightly compared to watching a passing, shifting landscape or perhaps to slowly walking the length of a scenic panorama.  As van Raat notes, the scoring is not only for orchestra and piano, but also for a male chorus.  (Bryars has written frequently for chorus, and similarly incorporates one into his Double Bass Concerto, subtitled "A Farewell to St. Petersburg.")  The chorus, at three junctures in the single-movement work, sings texts drawn from two sonnets—"The Solway Canal" and "A Place of Many Waters"—by the late Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan (d. August, 2010), and it is perhaps those stern and watery vistas that are best evoked by this music.  Throughout its darkly thoughtful progress this is a Piano Concerto that holds attention moment to moment with a sense that we cannot anticipate what will come next, other than to know with confidence that it will charm and satisfy.

• Bryars has posted the texts of Morgan's sonnets on his exemplary website, but that site seems to be undergoing maintenance at this writing, rendering those pages temporarily unavailable except in their cached version.
• Here, with the chorus in play, is a segment from the premiere performance recorded at Muziekgebouw Amsterdam (courtesy Borletti-Buitoni Trust).Ralph van Raat - Bryars Piano Concerto - Premiere (excerpt)
• Those with the skills to do so can examine portions of the score here.

With no orchestra or chorus to flesh them out, the two solo piano pieces included here make room for a bit more ostentation and flourish, but still marked by a laudable degree of restraint.  

As mentioned above, After Handel's Vesper was originally written for harpsichord.  It is "after" Handel in both the temporal sense and the sense of operating under the earlier composer's influence. Intriguingly, Bryars' notes on the piece reveal that the "Vesper" on which it is modeled is a fictional one, referred to in a novel by Raymond Roussel, in which Handel composes it "by a curious set of chance operations involving sprigs of holly and coloured ribbons." Bryars did not use chance operations in the composition of his piece, but consistent with period practice he has left the performer room to improvise ornamentation as he or she is moved to do so.

Percy Grainger coined "ramble" as his term for variations on an existing theme, and Gavin Bryars adopts it for his Ramble on Cortona.  The title refers to the Cortona manuscript [Il Laudario di Cortona], a 13th century collection of laude, a form of unaccompanied song usually on a sacred subject.  Bryars has been setting selections from the manuscript for a variety of vocal and instrumental combinations in recent years, and is apparently bent on eventually setting all of the fifty-odd laude it contains.  For his "Ramble," he selected a handful of themes from earlier vocal settings, transferred them to the piano and set about working variations upon them.  The result is the equivalent of examining a fine gem through a series of lenses, fresh facets emerging with each new refraction.

If I wanted to pick just one Gavin Bryars recording as an entry point for someone not already partial to Bryars' music, it would likely be the CBC Radio Orchestra performances collected on I Have Heard It Said That a Spirit Enters, which—not nearly so portentous as its title suggests—gives a slightly better sense of Bryars' full range and which includes his revelatory meditation on the so-called Porazzi Fragment of Wagner.  That being said, this new Solway Canal collection has much to recommend it as a starting point as well, and will certainly provide ample satisfaction for those of us already converted to the astringently seductive pleasures Gavin Bryars' music has to offer.

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Bonus Video 1: The Greek premiere of the original harpsichord version of After Handel's Vesper.

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Bonus Video 2: The premiere of Bryars' otherwise unrecorded recorder sextet, A Family Likeness.  Bryars is the only major contemporary composer I know of who takes the oft-dismissed recorder seriously as an instrument.  A recorder features as well in Bryars' fascinating little piece Sub Rosa, which has been recorded by the Italian ensemble Sentieri Selvaggi.

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Top Photo: Port Carlisle and Solway Firth, with the entrance to the old canal to Carlisle, © Copyright Nigel Homer and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence, via geograph.org.uk.

Luxe, Calme et Volupté [Michael Vincent Waller:The South Shore]

In the middle of Les Fleurs du Mal, amid the corpses and disease and noise and drink and eroticism of Baudelaire's splenetic chronicle of Modernity, the reader comes upon an oasis of sorts: "L'invitation au voyage." Addressed to "mon enfant, ma soeur" (but in fact being offered on the page to that Reader whom Baudelaire first saluted as "Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!"), "L'invitation..." proposes a journey of escape to a place of languorous beauty and peace, far from the stultifying scenes of the poems around it. The tenor of that longed-for place is encompassed in the poem's famed refrain:

Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

It has been variously translated into English. I am partial to Richard Wilbur's version:

There, there is nothing else but grace and measure
Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

"Luxe, calme et volupté" serves well to characterize The South Shore, a double-CD set collecting recent music composed by Michael Vincent Waller, recently released on Phill Niblock's XI Records: It is pleasing, it calms what lies around and about it, and it is rich in plan and in execution. 

The South Shore comprises more than two hours of solo or small-group pieces, composed between 2011 and 2014.  (In an age of vinyl, it would be a three-disk set.) While each of the compositions is compact in itself—the longest runs slightly over 10 minutes, and most last fewer than 6—they cumulatively amount to a major statement. They nourish and satisfy, offering both familiarity and freshness, and they do not begin to cloy even after repeated listening.

The musical rhetoric of these pieces is discursive, instruments addressing the listener in sentences or at paragraph length, melodic propositions laid into place and balance as in an essay by Montaigne. Ideas bloom out of themselves and into successive ideas, logically and with little repetition. 

A late Romantic atmosphere predominates, with occasional forays into a cooler pre-Baroque sensibility. Dissonance is uncommon, but also not altogether absent. The music bespeaks an old soul, in the sense that it deploys methods and impulses first explored a century, or two, or three or more ago—modal scales, in particular—in the cause of addressing a contemporary hearer. For those (such as this blogger) who are curious about the technicalities, but who lack the training to place them by ear, helpful liner notes by "Blue" Gene Tyranny identify most of the modes and keys in play.

The South Shore begins with cello and piano and ends with clarinet and gong. Each piece between has its own virtues—there's nary a clunker in the lot—and each listener will likely find selections that speak most clearly to that listener's ears, mind and heart. Among the particular highlights (in the order in which they appear):

• "Anthems"— Piano and cello in stately post-Satie dialogue make for a succinct and welcoming introduction.
  
  
• "Nel Nome di Gesù"— For cello and organ, a two-part sacred meditation with something of the clean-swept asceticism of Arvo Pärt.
  
  
• "Ritratto"— Often evocative of Purcell or of slow movements in Vivaldi, but written for a distinctly contemporary sextet of flute, alto saxophone, electric guitar, viola, cello and trombone. Simultaneously refined and mystical, worldly and courtly one moment and cloistered the next.
  
  
• "La Riva Sud"—Appropriately, the piece that lends its [translated] title to the entire collection, and the personal favorite of this blogger. The particular shore the composer has in mind in this duet for viola and piano is the south shore of Staten Island. In the long tradition of liminal pieces, impressions of the outer and inner world inform and mingle one with the other. As Pete Townsend would have it, "A beach is a place where a man can feel/He's the only soul in the world that's real."
  
  
• "Pupazzo de Neve Partitas"—A four-part suite of dance forms (Allemande, gigue, et cetera) for solo cello. Any composer writing such a thing risks comparison to the great Bach cello suites and Waller's, as played by Christine Kim, hold up creditably well under that weighty scrutiny.
  
  
• "Arbitrage"— Bass clarinet and gong, concluding the set on a vaporous, nocturnal ramble.

Listening to The South Shore in the background as I was singling out the pieces just listed, I am struck again by the breadth of pleasures it offers. Vraiment, luxe, calme et volupté. Recommended and restorative.

~~~

Incidental matters:

In 1904, Henri Matisse appropriated "Luxe, calme et volupté" as title for a painting of another southern shore, that of France at Saint-Tropez.

The South Shore cover image via the composer's website.  Matisse image via Musée d'Orsay.

Richard Wilbur's translation of "L'invitation au voyage" was set in 1971 for a cappella choir by John Corigliano, whose The Ghosts of Versailles I wrote about earlier this year.

This post is based upon an unsolicited, but welcome, link from the composer to a review copy of The South Shore, and on a subsequently solicited tangible copy.

Anatomy of Melancho-L.A. [The Ambassador, Gabriel Kahane, UCLA 2/28/15]

 

Gabriel Kahane brought Los Angeles to Los Angeles on the weekend, with two performances at UCLA's Freud Playhouse of the full staged version of his song set, The Ambassador.

That this blogger is a fan of the Ambassador album is no secret. That this blogger was well pleased with the piece in its most fully-realized version will be no surprise. 

By rights, this staged edition was the true form of the piece, so that the CD/album/audio-download versions should perhaps be labeled "Songs From The Ambassador." By equal rights, that recorded version is complete and laudable in itself. And, as it will continue to exist through the myriad future days on which the full version is unavailable, it will continue to "be" The Ambassador for all practical purposes. Which is fine: it is a beautiful thing in its own right, and will remain so.

The relationship between the recorded Ambassador and the staged Ambassador is much like that between an excellent wine and a "reserve" version of the same excellent wine, the Reserve not only adding complexity but also bringing clarity to bear, its workings and structures both more multiform and more plainly limned.

Directed by John Tiffany with a set design by Christine Jones, The Ambassador plays out amid vast stacks of books, emulating the high rises and hills that are the topography of Los Angeles and the catalyst of many of Kahane's songs. Scattered through the towering verticals are the musicians' spaces and smaller creations such as a model of the Bonaventure hotel constructed largely of film canisters, or a version of the Capitol Records building made of old slide carousels. [See Christopher Hawthorne's photos, infra.]

The performance is, in fact, something of a Cavalcade of Vanishing Media, its transitional segments incorporating reel-to-reel tape, a small audio cassette boombox, the aforementioned carousel slide projector, handwritten correspondence, and VHS videotape, among other archaisms.

All save one* of the songs from The Ambassador album are included in the stage version, as are three of the additional Kahane songs from the iTunes Haircuts and Airports EP, Jerome Kern's "People Who Live on the Hill" (also on the EP), and the otherwise unreleased "Pauline Gibling Schindler". "Bonaventure Hotel", from the EP, serves as prelude, with Kahane moving a cutout of himself up and up to the peak of the landmark hostelry, all the while spinning out references to themes that will recur in the later songs. With some variation in the midsection, the essential arc of the album is maintained from the entry point of "Black Garden" through the escape hatch of "Union Station," with sudden death on a sunny day at the "Empire Liquor Mart" at its heart.

In addition to the songwriter on piano, other keyboards and (far an affecting "Ambassador Hotel") acoustic guitar, the musicians include Rob Moose (electric guitars) and Casey Foubert (bass)—both core participants on the album—Alex Sopp (keyboards, flute, and vocals), Ted Poor (drums), and a string trio of Laura Lutzke, Nathan Schram and Andrea Lee. The musicians are also players in the implicit drama of the piece, particularly in an intricate dance of arms, hands and fingers accompanying "Empire Liquor Mart," and slowly laying down their instruments and themselves for the closing tableau of "Union Station". (The memorable final image is of Kahane on his knees among the musicians gazing into a glowing book.)

The Ambassador is personal, not encyclopedic, and it is lovely and it is sad. And having come and gone, this version of it has become another piece of the vanished Los Angeles of which it sings.**

~~~

* The omitted song is the zany post-nuclear picnic rom-com "Griffith Park" which, with its Wilson-via- Nilsson harmonies, is the closest anything in The Ambassador comes to Southern California Pop. As he passed through the post-show discussion, Gabriel Kahane allowed as how architecture and books were far larger influences than prior music in his vision of Los Angeles. To the extent the local music does play in, he observed, émigré Europeans such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky loomed largest.

** With only two performances here (half as many as it received in Brooklyn this past December), too few actual Angelenos saw it. Someone should work to bring it back, if only for a full week or two. In subject and in scale, The Ambassador would be a more or less perfect fit for the Mark Taper Forum downtown at the Music Center. Someone get on that, please.

~~~

Photos above taken, under questionable and ill-illumed conditions, and thereafter fiddled about with, by the blogger. Superior photos below. The blogger attended the performance on Saturday, February 28, as a paying customer. 

~~~

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, who contributed valuable liner notes to the Ambassador album, was on hand for a post-performance chat, and he procured and shared, on Twitter, some fine onstage photos.

So great to see staged version of @gabrielkahane's Ambassador last night--hangs together beautifully as a study of LA pic.twitter.com/hoKWHxwrvy

— ChristopherHawthorne (@HawthorneLAT) March 1, 2015

 

I was also lucky enough during the onstage talk after to get a closeup look at the set, incl its mini Bonaventure pic.twitter.com/ojBBZ3NpiM

— ChristopherHawthorne (@HawthorneLAT) March 1, 2015

 

And Capitol Records: pic.twitter.com/gVBfO7SfJY

— ChristopherHawthorne (@HawthorneLAT) March 1, 2015

 Gabriel Kahane, model citizen:

pic.twitter.com/LLb223PvPf

— ChristopherHawthorne (@HawthorneLAT) March 1, 2015

 ~~~

[UPDATE 030415 10:00 PST] Gabriel Kahane kindly forwarded to me some photos from the North Carolina premiere run of The Ambassador. Here are two of them, both by Ben Cohen:

I could be mistaken, but I believe Mr. Kahane wore shoes on Saturday evening. It was [comparatively] cold and wet in Los Angeles that night.