Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

With all of the hoopla surrounding the opening of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 100th Season this past week, it might have been easy to miss word of the first show of the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2018/2019 season last Sunday. That would be a shame because there was much to love about these sold-out performances, which came at the front end of the LAMC’s world tour of Orlando Di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro in a Peter Sellars staging  currently visiting locations in Australia and Latin America. Even though these are very exciting times for the LAMC, the season opener was entirely different material featuring a new version of Shawn Kirchner’s 2015 Songs of Ascent and Mozart’s incomplete Requiem in D Minor. The Kirchner piece (not to be confused with Meredith Monk’s 2011 Songs of Ascension) draws on text from Psalms 120-134. Kirchner felt the original version wasn’t quite as fleshed out as he’d hoped, and the version here was expanded. It is a pretty work with an admirable theme of love overcoming conflict. However, it can also seem superficial at times, missing a certain weight or drama. Soloists Adbiel Gonzalez and Robert Norman were well-suited to their parts though the evening’s drama would need to wait until after the intermission.

And that drama did arrive with a wonderful performance of Mozart’s Requiem. The LAMC brought in an excellent team of soloists including J’Nai Bridges, Liv Redpath, David Portillo and Rod Gilfry. Gershon dug in with his vocalists and orchestra, feeling comfortable and well-rehearsed with the material. The easy certainty gave the proceedings a real sense of awe of the unknown in the face of the biggest human certainty – death. By turns dark and weighty and at others soaring and light, it was a top-tier Mozart performance. The crowd responded with great enthusiasm, which must have been a heartening send off for the group on their tour.

Labels: LA Master Chorale 18/19, LA Music Reviews

I love a prepared piano. So does German artist Volker Bertelmann who goes by the stage name Hauschka. The instrument has been the cornerstone of his musical output over the last several years. It’s not a new sound, of course, the term being coined by John Cage in the mid-20th Century to describe the various objects and techniques used to physically alter the sounding of strings in a standard piano. And while there were certainly precedents to these techniques long before Cage came on the scene, the tinkling, plunking, shattered resonance of the prepared piano has continued to resonate in a post-WWII mentality over the last half-century. The sound is still associated with Cage and a musical avant-garde. But composers have found ways to incorporate the instrumentation into a variety of music decidedly closer to the familiar or mainstream world of both concert and popular music. I first got hooked on the sound through Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa: music that is indelibly linked in my head with the upside down exploding piano in Rebecca Horn’s Concert for Anarchy (1990) the sculpture in the collection of London’s Tate Modern.

But Hauschka takes all of this post-war angst of decades ago and re-integrates it into something associated more closely with contemporary popular music genres. His piano tinkles and rumbles along melodic and rhythmic lines that would be familiar to any listener of contemporary art rock. The instrumental songs slide along with a beauty that make them highly listenable and fairly addictive. In spring of 2011, Hauschka got a chance to collaborate with another musical figure known for her virtuosity, violinist Hilary Hahn. The pair, who have just seen the fruits of their work, Silfra, released on Deutsche Grammophon, intuitively seem like perfect collaborators. Hahn is known on concert stages throughout the world and not only has been a force in commissioning new music but has a public wit and intellect that sets her apart from others in her field. She’s the kind of solo performer whose self-expression rides more on music than a funny haircut and unusual concert attire. (And you know who you are.)

Hahn and Hauschka created a recording based largely on improvisation and spontaneous musical interaction during their studio time in Iceland. (The recording is named after an area in Iceland where tectonic plates nearly meet by a lake.) Long-time Björk producer, Valgeir Sigurosson, helped shape these collaborations into something unusual, but not unrelated to contemporary pop music. (See the example "Bounce Bounce" below if you can sit through the annoying commercial attached to the front of it.) And in the last few weeks the two musicians have brought the improvisational interaction to live audiences, which happened for the first time in the U.S. at the El Rey theater in Los Angeles on Monday night. The pair, by their own admission, had only played live together on a very few prior outings in Europe and would move on to Seattle and Japan before returning to the East Coast later this summer. And while things could feel a bit unrehearsed in the stage banter department, the musical collaboration flowed easily. The songs were based on elements contained on Silfra, but were still improvised and didn’t follow any rigid pre-planned format. Although each player had a brief solo number, the show was entirely based on their work together.


It was beautiful music, but clearly was an experience that pushed on some of the contemporary social traditions around musical performance. The show took place in a standing room hall more often used for rock concerts. Chairs had been set up for the general admission audiences that was far from capacity in the room. By necessity for balance, both Hahn and Hauschka were amplified. The crowd clearly enjoyed the performance, but many were uncertain of what to expect. At one point an enthusiastic fan took advantage during piano preparation time to directly issue a request to Hahn to break into Bach or Paginini. She politely refused indicating this is not what this show was about. Her rebuke was met with applause, but clearly there were others in the audience drawn to the performance on her reputation that may have gone away disappointed in not getting what they were expecting. Which was a shame, considering the strength of the collaboration.

Instead these two musicians offered unexpected music created from their own mutual exploration. It may not have been revolutionary or changing the direction of art music as we know it but it was sincere and as fiercely independent as anything you could wish for. You can listen to Silfra now, but even better, keep your ears open if you’re lucky enough to have them come your way.

Labels: Hilary Hahn, LA Music Reviews

So what happened while I was away? Next we hear from OWA's editor and musical consultant Jeffrey Langham on Gabriel Kahane's return to the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra stage on Saturday night.

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra was at the Alex Theater in Glendale Saturday night, April 21, for a program, as musical director Jeffrey Kahane announced from the stage, devoted to music composed to evoke a "sense of place." Indeed, all three pieces mention places in their titles, but two pieces in particular, Ive's Three Places in New England and Gabriel Kahane's Crane Palimpsest stood out as stunning exemplars whereas Haydn's Symphony No. 104, the "London," was apparently the carrot dangled at the other end of the intermission to lure the regulars back to their seats. It would have suited me better to have my vegetables first and finish the evening with the real treats.

The first half of the program was dedicated to the two American pieces. From the stage, Jeffrey Kahane offered some insight by comparing the Ives with Gabriel Kahane's project, noting that Three Places could also be considered a palimpsest* in light of its layering of musical textures.  It is broken up into three sections, each focusing on a particular place in New England. The first section, "The 'Saint-Gaudens' in Boston Common," recalls the monument dedicated to Colonel Shaw and his all black regiment who fought for the Union in the Civil War. The Chamber Orchestra's playing was stirringly plaintive, still lingering into the second section, "Putnam's Camp, Reading, Connecticut." It is perhaps this section most of all that that may have led Jeffrey Kahane to consider Three Places a palimpsest. It is a multilayered slice of American musical idioms, at times martial, recalling the bands on a warm Fourth of July in the park, all playing over and through each other, in a convincing American turn at the Bakhtinian carnivalesque: the awesome heteroglossia that Ives hears and shares of his own New England. The final section, "The Housatonic at Stockbridge," pulls us away from the town and into the musical landscape of the countryside, the ethereal sounds of the river underscoring the other musical offerings from a lovers walk that Ives successfully captures. The orchestra under Kahane was hardly at a handicap with this material and played the Ives with great warmth without losing their attention to detail.

Gabriel Kahane gave an enchanting solo performance in his own composition, Crane Palimpsest, with his father leading the orchestra. The work which was receiving its West Coast premiere, is a love letter to the Brooklyn Bridge, drawing from Hart Crane's poem as the primary text upon which Kahane layers his own textual response both to Crane and to the borough itself. Here, Kahane as performer plays both guitar and piano while singing with orchestral accompaniment. He is a consummate performer, and his heady confusion of vocal styles worked perfectly to reinforce the thematic project of his piece. Again, the orchestra proved themselves well above the task of handling such challenging material. They appeared to flourish outside of their comfort zone and seemed to enjoy the opportunity to prove they are not just about the chamber music canon. The audience was enthusiastic at the conclusion, so much so that Gabriel Kahane returned to the stage for an encore, playing the title track from his latest album "Where are the Arms."

Coming back from the intermission for the Haydn seemed like a superfluous exercise. Yes, the orchestra played wonderfully under Jeffrey Kahane's assured hand. It was not a dry affair. The second and third movements, especially, came to life, reminding us why Haydn was the toast of the town when it was first performed in 1795 in London's Haymarket. Yet, despite the beautiful execution, the final piece on the program was a real thematic stretch. Both the Ives and the Kahane were personal meditations, engagements with the places that fed them musically. The London Symphony, on the other hand, only references the place where it was performed. Rather, it is supposed to recall for a late 18th-century London audience the land where Haydn came from, not where he was visiting. If the Croatian folk motif in the final movement is any indication, a land as far away from London as possible.

*Google it.

Labels: LA Music Reviews, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

All this week the Los Angeles Philharmonic is presenting programs in a mini-festival under the moniker “Sublime Schubert.” And while the powers that be in our beloved local orchestra have a penchant for some hyperbolic and outright non-sensical marketing slogans (Schubert doesn’t require unbinding apparently), this is one instance where the series title couldn’t be more fitting. But that isn’t necessarily just due to Schubert. Oh, it’s profoundly beautiful music, but the sublime part really rests in the hand of two artists who’ve left jaws gaping at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Monday and Wednesday this past week – pianist Christoph Eschenbach and bass-baritone Matthias Goerne. Now Goerne is world-renowned and he’s appeared here in Los Angeles before. In fact he’s even sung some of the same Schubert pieces here before including the song cycle Winterreise with Alfred Brendel in 2004, which surfaced again on Wednesday’s program. And yet none of that prepared me for just how intensely unmooring these two shows, which also included Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin on Monday were.

Goerne has unearthly beautiful phrasing, meticulous control, masterful dynamics and power to burn. This goes without saying. He’s also known as a vocalist who doesn’t so much sing with accompanists as perform with other top tier pianists in collaborative projects. A number of these have been recorded over his career, and Goerne and his current collaborator, Eschenbach are currently in the midst of a major recording of Schubert’s songs for Harmonia Mundi. This well regarded series recently increased by one with the release of Goerne’s second go at Schwanengesang last week. They are all wonderful recordings that highlight what the live audiences discovered here: Goerne is a modern master of Lieder, but the combined artistry of these two performers raise the stakes to something much, much greater.


Take Monday’s performance of Die schöne Müllerin. This pastoral series about a young man who falls in and out of love with the miller’s daughter is undoubtedly beautiful but can bear a reputation as being quaintly youthful and oafish. Not so on Monday when Goerne and Eschenbach not only transcended any negative stereotype of the work, they produced a song cycle that was nothing short of operatic in its proportions. A friend of mine described the experience as akin to listening to Wozzeck. The motifs that recur and change over the course of the cycle took life as grand leitmotifs in their own right. The non-stop emotional drama of the work demanded the kind of rapt attention that musical theater does at its grandest and very best. I’d give you specific highlights, but it would be pointless. Each and every song was filled with such perfect shape, such pristine, focused emotion that any moment could bring tears to your eyes.

Of course, Winterreise, which sort of picks up where Müllerin leaves off, is much darker fare. The already spurned lover slowly descends into madness until he is haunted in the almost chant-like closing “Der Leiermann” by a spectral organ grinder calling the protagonist into a world he will never return from. Show flew with Goerne and Eschenbach working together, sometimes almost at the total exclusion of the audience, as they carved out that dark wintery space of the soul. All of this drove home on of the things I most love about classical music. It has nothing to do with relaxing, or escape, or even being transported from somewhere to somewhere else. It’s about artists’ ability to take something familiar, and with often relatively few changes to the source material, create something unfamiliar and new. When that new product is something as surprising and shocking as these recital were it suddenly makes the whole endeavor of listening into something more mysterious and precious. Goerne and Eschenbach delivered just and will hopefully continue to do so into the weekend when they’ll appear alongside the full L.A. Phil for more Schubert songs this time arranged for a full orchestra starting today. Don’t miss this one.

Labels: LA Music Reviews, LA Philharmonic 11/12

Astute readers may have noticed a few guest writers showing up recently here at Out West Arts. It's been a bit of an experiment for me, since this place has always been primarily a site for my own thoughts and views about performance that I've experienced first hand. But Out West Arts has also been very much about all the great and varied music and theater in Los Angeles and the West Coast as well and frankly, try as I might, I'm only one man. So starting with this post I'm going to be welcoming a variety of new contributors to Out West Arts in addition to myself who are going to be my eyes and ears, and perhaps yours as well. So let me start by welcoming another new contributor - chorus master, man-about-town, and all around great guy Dan Keller to the OWA family with this post. I hope you enjoy reading him and other OWA contributors that will be joining me as much as I do.

Stile Antico, winner of the 2009 Gramophone award for early music for their Harmonia Mundi recording Song of Songs, performed last Wednesday April 18 to a full house at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Los Angeles. The concert, entitled “Treasures of the Renaissance,” featured sacred polyphonic music from the Renaissance, plus one recently commissioned work by John McCabe.

The conductor-less twelve-voiced ensemble stood in a semicircle reading from hand held scores. This approach, though straying from the Renaissance practice of singers gathering around a single music stand to read from part books (a technique recently revived by early music groups such as Capella Praetensis), resulted in a remarkably nuanced interpretation of the music as a result of the visual energy between singers. They sang with impeccable tuning throughout, and an impressive attention to detail, particularly when unifying the articulation of the texts. The gems of the concert were Clemens non Papa’s “Ego flos campi” and an encore performance of Campion’s “Never weather-beaten sail” featured on the group’s latest Harmonia Mundi recording Tune thy Musicke to thy Hart. Contrasting dynamics and delicately tapered phrase endings highlighted changes in mood in both pieces. Most striking was the way in which the group proceeded from collective breath points—allowing the tempo to pause briefly so that the reverberation could more fully decay in the vast acoustical environment of the Cathedral.


Several of the pieces performed featured as many as twelve parts, among them Tomkins’s “O praise the Lord” (also featured on their newest recording), and Praetorius’s polychoral “Tota pulchra es.” In the case of the Tomkins, the individual voices were allowed to stand out as a vehicle for expressing the complex counterpoint. In the Praetorius they took further advantage of this variety by grouping voices by timbre into three quartets standing at a distance apart on stage. The contrast in tone between each quartet enhanced the antiphonal setting of the text. Despite this cohesion, or perhaps because of it, parts of their performance suffered from a lack of forward motion. In the case of “Magnificat primi toni” by Gombert, whose style is notorious for its uniform texture, one might forgive the occasional stasis. But in “Veni dilecte mi” by Lassus, whose music is full of tonal ebb and flow, the lack of distinction between phrases left the performance a bit flat.

The group sang from a variety of editions, both scholarly and otherwise (apparently including some from the online choral public domain library), which meant that several pieces might have been transposed to a higher pitch level than originally scored in order to accommodate female sopranos and altos. (Boy sopranos and adult male countertenors would have been standard during the Renaissance.) The added power of the women’s voices in the higher range resulted in occasional treble-dominated passages that were incongruous with the otherwise flawlessly balanced sound.

While the chosen repertoire was fitting given the program’s title, it likewise suffered from a lack of stylistic diversity. A bit of relief was provided by John McCabe’s “Woefully arrayed,” a 2009 setting of a sixteenth century text attributed to John Skelton. This work, reminiscent of Pärt and Tavener, is an ingenious nod to Renaissance polyphony within a modern harmonic framework. Here the talents of the group were fully exploited. They provided the widest range in dynamics and articulation of the evening. They also took full advantage of the textual imagery by emphasizing dissonances and changes in rhythmic density.

Overall, the group provided a solid performance. They interacted musically as a chamber ensemble, allowing for a degree of spontaneity. Rather than presenting the repertoire exactly as it occurs in their recordings, they reacted to the performance environment—a refreshing change from the too often over-rehearsed approach to choral music. Furthermore, the members of Stile Antico engaged with the audience in a way that displayed their fondness for the music. This in turn elicited an equally enthusiastic reception.

Labels: All Things Choral, LA Music Reviews

After deciding I couldn’t take another Mahler symphony with the Bolivar players under Dudamel this week, I headed over to UCLA instead for a solo piano recital from Denis Matsuev who is currently on a three-city tour of the U.S. that will end in New York on Friday the 27th. Matsuev shot to fame after winning the 1998 International Tchaikovsky Competition and he has continued to perform around the world since then. His name is everywhere lately with a new recording of Liszt's Piano Concerti on RCA and an upcoming performance of the two Shostakovich Piano Conerti with Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra. He’s also scheduled to make an appearance playing Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto 1 under Krzysztof Urbański this coming summer at the Hollywood Bowl in what is easily the most exciting program all summer in terms of scheduled performers and repertoire. (Note to Bowl programmers, big classical music stars are most interesting when they are performing something interesting.)

But before all that was this solo recital that had a lot more in common artistically with the kind of approach Dudamel takes to music than you might expect. The show was primarily very familiar piano sonatas: Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23 in F minor, and Grieg’s Sonata in E minor. The show concluded with Stravinsky's Three Movements from the Ballet Petrushka arranged for piano, a work he’ll also perform at the Bowl. Matsuev bounded onto the stage Tuesday and was clearly all business from the get go. He tore into the Schubert making it clear from bar 1 that timidity would not be the order of the day in this performance. The Schubert sounded incredibly broad and magisterial like some sort of music for a regal ceremony. Even in more quiet moments the sound could be on the severe side though never unpleasant. Matsuev was not trying to recast these works as something else, à la Marino Formenti’s take on the Diabelli Variations earlier this year, but was definitely pressing them into a service which called for high drama and big bold sound. The Beethoven gave off a flesh-bound burning passion in this version and the Grieg was no less intense or flashy.

The technique was a thing to behold, and Matsuev is surprisingly fleet given the level of energy and sound he puts out. But perhaps this approach worked best in the arrangement of Stravinsky's Petrushka. Matsuev amazingly made the piano sound like the entire orchestra in this work. It was an entire ballet from a single keyboard, but it worked brilliantly with propulsive motion throughout. Matsuev was swimming in floral bouquets from his many adoring fans in the predominantly Russian-speaking crowd. And while he didn’t make chit-chat or waste time lounging around, he did deliver a number of encores, most notable an unhinged version of Take the "A" Train. Matsuev is known as a jazz aficionado, and the encore was a chance to offer the audience something along the line of his other major performance area. It was an intriguing run through if no less intense than anything else on the evening's bill.

Labels: Denis Matsuev, LA Music Reviews

Pavement at the Hollywood Bowl Photo: mine 2010

It was the 1990s all over again on Thursday for a show that officially closed out the L.A. Philharmonic-sponsored summer season at the Hollywood Bowl. And what better way to go than a triple art-rock bill featuring the bands No Age, Sonic Youth, and California’ own legendary Pavement. This was at the tail end of a string of reunion shows for Pavement after nearly a decade away from any joint projects. The show, which front man Stephen Malkmus announced from the stage as their last in America, was a potent, concise reminder of how great and how fragmented the band could be, always coming together and falling apart in different ways simultaneously.

Sonic Youth at the Hollywood Bowl Photo: mine 2010

Long before they took the stage, however, were two other notable sets. The duo No Age kicked things off with a group of pulsing, guitar and electronic driven songs reminiscent of any number of 1990s acts. For a moment it was as if Clinton was still in office, and all was right with the world. Following them was the oddly placed Sonic Youth. The band has outlived and out-influenced everyone around them, including Pavement and their willingness to open for one of their arguably more conventional artistic offspring only reinforces how they got to be the legends they are. In keeping with the musical theme of the evening, the band focused heavily on material from 1988’s Daydream Nation, arguably the source for all important rock music for the next decade and a clear precursor to Pavement’s own work. They are still as tight as ever and delivered intense versions of “Hey Joni”, “The Sprawl”, and “Candle”. They closed the all-to-brief set with a blistering “White Cross”.

There was still more show to go, however, and Pavement arrived to a wildly enthusiastic if not capacity audience at the Bowl. The set drew from all of the band’s studio albums and unsurprisingly focused on their most fertile period spanning both Slanted and Enchanted and the subsequent Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. There was exuberance and the material sounded assured and easy-going. But this is Pavement and a bit of disorganization and the freewheeling nature of things was apparent at the margins. The Hollywood Bowl has strict set time limits being an outdoor venue in a residential neighborhood and, like many popular music performers there, the band felt pressure to keep moving. On a few occasions Malkmus visibly rejoined the other band members to stop dawdling and keep moving in between songs as the stage countdown clock kept ticking away. (In classic Sonic Youth style, that outfit had turned the giant red LED clock located near the foot of the stage around for all the audience to see for the last fifteen minutes or so of their set giving things and apocalyptic air.) But not unlike its home state, Pavement managed to persevere through the convoluted and contradictory impulses of its component parts to remind us why we loved them so much in the first place.

Labels: LA Music Reviews