Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

So what happened while I was away? First we hear from OWA's man-about-town and bon vivant Ben Vanaman on the scene at Jacaranda Music in Santa Monica

Saturday’s penultimate concert of Jacaranda’s 2011-2012 season, performed at the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Monica, was a feast for the senses: Messiaen, Gubaidulina, Dutilleux. Simultaneously an observation of the 20th anniversary of Oliver Messiaen’s death, the 80th anniversary of Sofia Gubaidulina’s birth, and a nod of gratitude that Henri Dutilleux is still alive today at age 96, the program was titled “Rosary Mantra,” a conflation of terms that acknowledges the multi-pronged spiritualism reflected in Messiaen’s transcendental compositions.

The program in fact began with Messiaen, Meditations II and V from Meditations sur le mystere du Sainte Trinite, from 1969. At the organ console was Mark Alan Hilt, whose nimble dexterity was all the more remarkable given the fiendish difficulty of these pieces. Meditation II, a contemplation of “sacred purity, distinct and inviolable in the person of Christ through the grace of union” –a paraphrase of the composer’s words from the evening’s program notes- begins with a declamatory “alleluia” that soon gives way to alternating passages of bird song and haunting, chromatic chord clusters that, as in the somewhat more dramatic Meditation V, are at once massed and clotted, otherworldly and transfigurative. The heralding of Christ’s birth is the subject of Messaien’s 9-movement La Nativite du Seigneur. On this occasion, Mr. Hilt performed the final movement, titled “Dieu Parmi Nous” (God Among Us),” a toccata of increasingly feverish atonal chord progressions that enveloped the sanctuary in waves of frenzied exaltation before tapering off to a conclusion of ineffable poignancy as befits the divine mystery embedded in the composition’s subject. The organ at First Presbyterian is a luscious instrument, clarion without sounding overly reverberant, and Mr. Hilt played it masterfully, creating an aural tapestry of remarkable color and dynamic range.

Mr. Hilt returned for the program’s second half in two compositions by Sofia Gubaidulina: a short work from 1976 titled Light and Darkness that is the only piece she’s composed for solo organ; and the West Coast premiere of 2001’s Risonanza (or “Resonance”) for organ and a small but mighty ensemble of brass and strings. Resonance indeed. Beginning with the shrieks of a piccolo trumpet that are a demented echo of Messaien’s paradigmatic bird sounds -thus bringing the concert full circle- Resonance is a dense mash-up of nervous syncopation, antiphonal restlessness, and jittery ostinato, the organ often resonating at the lowest end of its sonic range. The piece builds at times to a convulsive wall of sound that shook the rafters and travelled from the floor up through one’s central nervous system. This was palpably felt music, literally as well as emotionally. Although not on as grand a scale, Light and Darkness, a short piece of dexterous virtuosity, gave Mr. Hilt another workout, earning him a well-deserved ovation for his traversal of the work’s zippy compositional progressions and its shifting, oppositional textures as thematically delineated by its title.

Dutilleux’s Trois Strophes sure le nom de Sacher for solo cello, commissioned by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich to commemorate the 70th birthday of noted conductor and arts patron Paul Sacher, and composed from the letters of his surname, provided both a contrast to, and a respite from, the two Gubaidulina works surrounding it. Its three short pieces, creating numerous technical challenges for the cellist, are by turns plaintive, agitated, whimsical, tremulous, even gossamer-like, and dare one say almost sacred in keeping with the program’s occasional theme. Soloist Timothy Loo gave a fine reading of the score on par with the excellent work from the other instrumentalists, a tribute to Jacaranda’s estimable ongoing role in bringing serious contemporary music to Southern California.

Labels: Jacaranda, LA new music

I forgot my coat. It’s something you don’t think you’ll need often in L.A., even in January, but it was a particularly cold Monday. Of course in L.A. you also don’t expect you’ll be watching a string quartet in the expanded picture window of an Alvarado storefront just north of Sunset Blvd open to the street with midday traffic rushing by. But we’re Angelenos, and we roll with it. Where I had rolled earlier this week was the heart of Los Angeles’ latest, greatest blossoming modern, art music scene. In the last few years, an expanding network of artists and musicians with ties not only through CalArts but through the ethereal world of Twitter and other social media have been making increasingly important music, and doing it their own way, on their own terms. And on this particularly cold January day, they were making it that way in Echo Park.


The occasion was the launch of the first release from L.A.’s newest record label, populist records. (A superbly ironic name for a contemporary art music outfit.) The label is the brain child of internet-savvy violinist Andrew Tholl and violist Andrew McIntosh who explained that they had created the label as an outlet for Southern California composers to get their work recorded by a home-grown label while providing local artists a chance to perform music they wanted to play. The first recording Nicholas Deyoe – with throbbing eyes provides a survey of Deyoe's work for small ensembles including songs written for soprano Stephanie Aston and two string quartets played by the formalist quartet - Tholl and McIntosh’s quartet alongside violinist Mark Menzies and cellist Ashley Walters. In March, populist will release McIntosh’s recording of solo works from American minimalist composer Tom Johnson. (The sample below features the formalists playing Deyoe's Images from a sleepless night from the new release.)

And while self-publishing music isn’t new, populist records represent a further step in the development of a musical and artistic community in Los Angeles that is beginning to command attention for its breadth, excitement, and sheer energy of production and performance. The launch event was held at Machine Project, a Los Angeles arts collective in Echo Park that hosts and promotes a wide variety of events. Machine Project has worked closely for several years with sound artist/composer/trumpeter Chris Kallmyer who in turn, along with McIntosh, Tholl, and others, performs as part of L.A.’s new music chamber orchestra, wild Up. Kallmyer, whose own work has been seen at the Getty Museum and other major art institutions, helped arrange the event at Machine Project where cupcakes and beer were paired with performances from the formalists as well as Deyoe’s solo pieces for cello. Deyoe himself played electric guitar augmented with an empty aluminum can, a favorite implement in recent guitar-based compositions. The crowd gathered at the front of the space and on the street looking into the store like displaced shoppers in an arctic L.A. mall.


The sense of possibility was palpable as Tholl and McIntosh spoke of future plans for recordings from wild Up and other outfits in the area while the crowd filled with other familiar faces from the local art music scene, knit more closely together through an active online community. Composer Isaac Schankler, whose People Inside Electronics will produce their latest show on Feb 11 funded in part from an indiegogo campaign, was in attendance. Schankler is curating another evening at Machine Project on Jan 29, "Bandwagon! (a combine)", with all sorts of machines, musical and otherwise. All of this, of course, took place just two days after the last wild Up performance in Pasadena last weekend where artistic director Christopher Rountree helped put the final touches on wild Up's Kickstarter project to fund and press vinyl copies of their performance of the Shostakovich Chamber Symphony. The group has already surpassed its fundraising goal and is discussing plans to make a recording of last weekend’s concert available. To boot, Rountree will make an appearance on APM's Performance Today on the 19th to talk about the project. And the performance schedule of both wild Up and the formalist quartet is filled with appearances over the next several months, which, if their track record to date is any indication, will be superlative events.

Increasingly, and egged on by an active online community that has created connections in ways that may not have existed before, there is a new and expanding community of young musicians and composers across the city making exciting music they want to hear and play. The folks I've discussed here aren't the only ones, but they are creating a music scene in a way and with technology that hadn't existed before. They are intent on producing their own sounds in collaboration with one another without waiting for someone to come and discover them. And that is a great day for new music in L.A. Even if it happens in the most unusual spaces, on the most unusually cold days in our typically sunny, warm city.

Labels: LA new music, wildup