Deceptively Simple

Piana manio; sorry, piano mania—Fray, Labeque, Matsuev

A brief round-up of noteworthy piano CDs in this week's Time Out Chicago, with new discs from David Fray, Katia and Marielle Labeque and, from Bryant Manning, of Denis Matsuev. TOC, June 28, 2007.

Newcomer Fray makes a splash pairing Bach and Boulez. The analytical musician highlights the intricacies of both composers, which works better in the Boulez than in the Bach. The pervasive brittleness of his Bach ultimately works against him, despite delineating the counterpoint, since the movements unfold jerkily, inflexibly. This approach pays dividends in the Boulez works, however. There's a YouTube clip showing Fray in full-on Glenn Gould mode here.

Playlist for the second day of summer

Gyorgy Kurtag       Flowers We Are, Mere Flowers (...embracing sounds)

Samuel Barber        Violin Concerto, Op. 14
                             "Sure on This Shining Night"
                             "Daisies"
                             Knoxville, Summer of 1915

Charles Ives           "When Stars Are in the Quiet Skies"

John Adams            Naive and Sentimental Music

Maurice Ravel         Une barque sur l'ocean
                             Menuet Antique
                             Daphnis et Chloe

Claude Debussy       Voiles
                             Feu d'artifice
                             Le vent dans la plaine

Corey Dargel          "Summer of Love" (forthcoming)
                             "Global World View" (from Less Famous Than You)

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Once the whistle blows this evening, I'm going on vacation and will return in July. Feel free to listen to music, read, and run on the beach in my absence. Read debut novels that let you down after 325 pages if you really, really want to, but I can think of better summer reading easily.

Showing the classical love in Chicago

(Posted originally at the Time Out Chicago blog.) There was a big surprise in Billboard’s classical chart this week: an album that had been out for almost two years made its way back onto the list, and another from 2006 also got back up there. (hat tip to Playbill.) Even more surprising was that they were contemporary classical discs, which are usually lucky to sell a couple copies on first release and hope they stay in print.

The discs in question were both by Osvaldo Golijov, one of the Chicago Symphony’s composers-in-residence, and featured soprano Dawn Upshaw. Ayre made it to 21, and Ainadamar, Golijov’s opera on the life of Federico Garcia Lorca, was 22. An astonishing 84 per cent of the Ayre discs were sold in Chicago, and the number was 63 per cent for the Ainadamar ones, according to a spokeswoman for the record-label Deutsche Grammophon. That doesn’t happen every day, so what happened? We wrote about Upshaw and Golijov that week, but don’t have that kind of clout. It takes a bit of explaining.

Upshaw continues to recover from breast cancer, and only recently returned to performing. She gave a recital in New York in May that got a strong review, with the Times‘ chief classical critic Anthony Tommasini writing that “[h]er voice sounded warm, full and lovely.” She then went on to Los Angeles to sing Golijov’s Three Songs with the LA Philharmonic, and that concert left the LA Times’s Mark Swed writing that the work is “too profound to describe in words.” (”Give it a shot,” suggested a friend of mine.) Swed also noted that her voice sounded even more powerful than it had previously.

Then, on June 4, she came to Chicago to sing Ayre at the Harris Theater with musicians from the Chicago Symphony on the CSO’s MusicNOW series. The concert’s 1,500 seats were sold out. Ayre blends Sephardic, Arabic and Spanish texts and juxtaposes klezmer and, broadly speaking, Middle Eastern music, all put together with a keen sense of compositional craft. This is Golijov’s signature, to blend cultures in such a way that they coexist without losing their individuality.

Upshaw sang with fierce determination through the 40-minute work, marshaling her strength for the final songs. Golijov asks for the singer and musicians to be amplified, along with having a laptop artist there to provide electronica-sounding noises, but Upshaw gave it a star turn. She raged against an invading army in “Tancas Serradas a Muru,” (”Walls Are Encircling the Land”) and that song was used as an encore when the exuberant, overwhelmed, audience demanded one. After the concert, the audience was buzzing at the reception.

The next week, the Ayre recording appeared back on the charts, along with Ainadamar, with those great sales figures coming out of Chicago.

Golijov’s Three Songs will be released on July 10 on a recording called Oceana, with Upshaw singing with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Robert Spano conducting, the same team that recorded Ainadamar. Critics flipped out when Ayre was released, and after listening to the haunting songs, I predict we’ll do the same with Oceana. Like Ayre, it sounds like nothing else any other composer is writing, and features some of the most committed performances you’re likely to hear. Upshaw’s wordless singing at the beginning of the second song Lua Descolorida comes from a haunted place that few are willing to enter. The disc also features vocalist Luciano Souza singing the title work, the Kronos Quartet on the heartbreaking Tenebrae, and, again, Upshaw. Pre-order it now.

Couperin, Brahms, Americans, and Elgar

New discs from Alexandre Tharaud, the Emerson Quartet, Common Sense Composers Collective and the London Symphony Orchestra. Time Out Chicago, June 21, 2007. I wrote the Tharaud and LSO reviews, and TOC welcomed two new freelance contributors to the Classical & Opera section this week, Bryant Manning of the Chicago Sun-Times and Mysteries Abysmal (Emerson Quartet) and composer/singer Corey Dargel (CSCC). We plan on seeing their names in the magazine often.

Good onya

In keeping with the recent spate of lighthearted posts, here's another. Matthew Guerrieri of Soho the Dog writes of classical musicians and the tattoos affixed to them. Personally, the only tattoo I've considered was a small "Fine" on my wrist. Did it mean that I was feeling fine, or did it refer to the Italian word for "the end," I imagined others forever attempting to decide. We all have dreams.

Also, Michael Hovnanian of the CSO Bass Blog thought he had an enemy, and a rather literal-minded one at that. The name of the getting-even blog? MichaelHovnaniansFingeringsAreWrong. False alarm, it turned out.

Ringing endorsement

"[Leonard Slatkin's] Till Eulenspiegel on tour was excellent," said [Pittsburgh Symphony percussionist John] Soroka. Slatkin has been named the PSO's principal guest conductor, effective September, 2008. Sources also say his interpretations of Strauss's early tone poem Aus Italien "is tops," his performances of Jacques Ibert's Escales "couldn't be bettered," and his Meditation from Thais "broke my heart into little pieces."

Shimatsu Matsuka? Conductor?

I realize I'm a little late to this party, but will plow ahead, anyway. I caught up with the new TV commercial for Vitamin Water featuring 50 Cent, which you can watch here, a couple days ago. In case you missed it, or don't click the link, 50 Cent conducts the "National Symphony Orchestra" in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, before they segue into his song "In Da Club." As commercials go, I'm sure it's effective and will sell loads of bottles filled with vitamin-enriched water, which will, of course, contribute to filling our landfills faster. But check out the overflowing cultural stereotypes on display here!

Most obviously, 50 Cent doesn't speak a word. His thoughts on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are telegraphed to us by the elderly, white male announcers. He doesn't say anything about what Vitamin Water does for him, only takes a manly swig from the bottle situated next to the podium. His lack of speech puts him a couple rungs below Jack Benny's butler Rochester, and even makes him less sophisticated than minstrels, who, at least, had the ability to express themselves in speech and song.

Second, check out his clothes. He doesn't don the outfit of a conductor, but sticks to the uniform of a jersey and silver chain. He's not going to be corrupted by this white man's world, indeed, we'll see, he will transform it.

He starts conducting, and before long the orchestra is playing his song "In Da Club." Apparently, despite 50 Cent's late entrance into the program to replace the indisposed "Shimatsu Matsuka" (more on that bit of casual racism later), he dropped his song into Beethoven's Ninth. The announcers profess surprise, how could he "integrate" 50 Cent into the Ninth Symphony? The stereotype of the cultural upstart comes roaring into view at this point, as we see that 50 Cent, by dint of his overall street cred and lack of training, can upset the course of the one symphony most listeners know and probably thought was inviolable. 50 Cent overturns music history not because of any great artistic statement, but because he's too uncultured to know that you don't mess with Beethoven.

This sort of routine was central to minstrel acts at the turn of the century. A blackface actor, usually referred to as the interlocutor, would speak in a high-minded tone of voice and diction, and end up comically misunderstood by the other, simpleminded characters. Analogously, 50 Cent, in the commercial, is only understood, only becomes truly himself, when he upends the great symphonic tradition, and inserts his voice. The genius of the Vitamin Water commercial is to take away 50 Cent's usual mode of speech and turn the announcers into the high-minded interlocutor role, the voice of civility. Furthering the comparison and transforming it, they take up hip-hop's argot, and mangle it the way minstrel characters would mangle the Queen's English.

By turning 50 Cent and the announcers into a minstrel cartoon, they are mocked, which probably wasn't the producers' intention. What was their intention, it seems pretty clear, is to mock the orchestra world, with its tuxedos, its gilded auditoria, and its formality. (Not to mention people who use words like 'auditoria.') The producers didn't take two seconds to ask an orchestra about this world, but went on assumptions. Had they exhibited the slightest bit of curiosity, they might have shown an orchestra with at least a couple Asian musicians, and wouldn't have written in the bogus Japanese name Shimatsu Matsuka. All the inclusion of the Japanese name does is place classical music further from the mainstream, and make it seem even more foreign. Having the Greatest Generation announcers say, "The Nip conductor Shimatsu Matsuka" must have seemed a line too far, however appealing it must have been to the writers.

I can understand using an orchestra and mock-PBS production values to sell your beverage. That world is closed to many people, its rituals oddly divorced from quote-unquote real life. Subconsciously leaning on minstrel-show crutches and Yellow Peril cliches—yes, I know the Yellow Peril refers to the Chinese, but I bet Vitamin Water doesn't—is lazy and disrespectful, though, and since this commercial will probably be seen by scores of people who will never go to a classical concert, it seems appropriate to point out its numerous, insulting flaws.

Who listens?

Entrance exam. Time Out Chicago, June 14, 2007. A bit of numbers crunching turns up some surprising facts about student attendance of classical concerts in Chicago.

This story started when I was at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in 2005 and 2006, and noticed what seemed to be small armies of college-age audience members. If I find myself with an extra press ticket, I try to give it to one of them, usually gaunt and eager to attend for free, and therefore able to afford pizza and subway fare after the show. I've never had a problem locating one of them in a ticket line at New York, but have often scanned lines in Chicago, vainly looking for an interested student.

With three large universities (DePaul, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago) each with well-attended music schools, it would appear that those schools could combine to fill a concert hall entirely on their own. Music students need to hear live performances by professional players, and with upwards of 50 concerts a week to choose from, I would think they would be everywhere. (I limited my focus to music students, since they tend to be the most dedicated attenders, and therefore have the most to say about their attendance habits.)

The reality is somewhat different, with a scattering of students at such venues as the Lyon & Healy Hall and the Merit School of Music's Gottlieb Hall. Both have quality concerts, but both are difficult to get to by public transportation. That turned out to be the biggest impediment to student attendance: simply having the time to deal with the El and buses. One student said he would only go to Orchestra Hall if he knew he had an hour on either side of the concert.

An easy conclusion would be that kids (here) today need to stiffen their spines: I once gave away a ticket to an aspiring pianist who was excited to hear the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Her commute took her at least an hour and a half, because, as a student at the Curtis Institute, she had come up from Philadelphia. At the same time, an hour on the El can be a soul-crushing experience, so I will grade on a curve here.

Fac

The Chicago Chamber Musicians acts as the anchor ensemble for the city's chamber-music world, drawing musicians from the Chicago Symphony and university faculties who wish to stretch their chamber-music muscles, and keep those from atrophying. I think, and if someone knows better, please correct me, that their persona here is equivalent to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: centrally located, fairly high-profile, and reliably middle-of-the-road.

CCM finished their 20th anniversary season last night with the last of their Freshly Scored concerts in a program of Peter Lieberson, Stephen Hartke, Kurtag, Mark-Anthony Turnage and CCM member, cellist, and composer Clancy Newman. Freshly Scored is CCM's three-concert contemporary-music series, following a seven-concert subscription series of more mainstream works.

The concert laid out the group's strengths and weaknesses  for all to see. Being comprised of many orchestral musicians, their performances are often heavy-handed and dictatorial, as if there's an unseen conductor calling the shots, and lacking the flexibility and spontaneous communication (or at least, spontaneous-seeming) chamber music requires. Other times, they play as if they aren't listening to one another at all, which, we all know, also takes place in orchestras.

Intonation issues dogged the players from the beginning, with flutist Karen Ursin struggling to stay on pitch through Peter Lieberson's Raising the Gaze. Percussionist Vadim Karpinos, of the CSO, banged and throttled a large array of pitched and unpitched percussion throughout the exotic work, and violinist Jasmine Lin matched his aggressive outbursts. Lin approaches every loud passage as if she's just rounded the final turn of the Brahms concerto and is home free. CSO trombonist Michael Mulcahy conducted this one piece.

The Messiaen-inspired third movement of Hartke's King of the Sun, titled Dancer listening to the organ in a Gothic cathedral, featured violinist Joseph Genualdi in some other region of intonation than Kuang-Hao Huang's piano, and violist Rami Solomonow and cellist Clancy Newman were likewise somewhere else.

In Kurtag's Hommage a R. Sch., the movement titled Eusebius: The Delimited Circle... fades out over sustained pitches from the viola, clarinet, and piano. Larry Combs, the CSO's principal clarinet, issued a cut-off, strangling the tones before they died away. Chamber musicians, or those more well-versed in new music, approach it differently, as can be heard on the ECM recording, as well as at the live performance at MusicNOW earlier this season. They both let the music float away to silence. Combs was joined by violist Solomonow and pianist Huang.

Newman's String Quartet closed the program, marking the first time he played the cello part. Newman wrote the half-hour work soon after he graduated college, and it shows. Like many young composers, he falls in love with his melodies, and manipulates them far beyond what they can handle, or deserve.

It is difficult to imagine two violinists more poorly suited to play in the same quartet than Lin and Genualdi. (Lin played the top part.) Her big sound dwarfs his scratchy rustling, and her accurate bowing is the opposite of his approximations.

In the end, hearing the concert was like looking at a set of paintings in a textbook. All the details were there, but on a smaller scale, and with the enlivening textures of the originals flattened out. It's good to have textbooks when the original is absent, but when authenticity is not hard to find—and these days in Chicago, it's not—I end up wondering why I'm looking at a facsimile.

Pause for dance

As a dude, it is my right not to dance. As an arts journalist, it is my right to read dance criticism, and I've been remarkably impressed by the New York Times' new chief dance critic Alastair Macaulay, who got the job in February. His extended Sunday article about four retiring ballerinas—Darcey Bussell (above), Kyra Nichols, Alessandra Ferri, and Patricia Barker—brought each performer to life and put their unique characteristics front and center, as well as providing a deft portrait of women through ballet history.

Macaulay also has a good ear for music, and actually enjoys it on its own terms, which is rare among dance critics. In his review of American Ballet Theater's new Sleeping Beauty dated June 4, he explains how an oboe solo perfectly mirrors the story, and how the choreographers contradict Tchaikovsky. He can also take the scalpel to a musician, which I hope leads to stronger pit performances everywhere. Reviewing the May 14 gala of the New York City Ballet, he wrote of Lang Lang's performance of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, following a choreographed Chopin waltz, "[he] remained onstage to dispel whatever tender atmosphere the Chopin had established by playing an account of Liszt’s best-known Hungarian Rhapsody with a vulgarity to engender long-term Lisztophobia." It's not just the music critics who come down on Lang Lang, folks.

Several years ago, I answered an editor's cry for someone to review that season's Nutcracker and learned first-hand how hard it is to write about dance. I knew many dancers in college who explained the finer points (rim-shot) to me, went to a lot of performances (Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, Royal Winnipeg Ballet, heck, even Pilobolus and the Trockaderos), picked up a few books, including some Arlene Croce collections, and it remains a challenge to explain what's going on onstage. (I think my Nutcracker review set the American record for the number of uses of "beautiful" in a single review.) Bravo to Macaulay for making dance speak so clearly.

In should be said, I guess, that his appointment wasn't received well by the New York dance press. (See ArtsJournal blogger and Newsday dance critic Apollinaire Scherr for that controversy.) That the Times would hire a British man over several American women was seen as an insult, probably inevitably. Macaulay's style and sensibility agree with me, at least, and I'm glad to read him.

Photo archive of Bussell here. Photo above from the Guardian.