Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

The longtime Los Angeles outpost of 20th-century art music downtown, Monday Evening Concerts concluded its current season this week with a show dedicated to percussion performance. Percussionists have had their artistic field expand more dramatically than that of any other musical specialist in the last decade with an overwhelming array of instruments and techniques placed at their disposal by just about every major composer you can name during the last half-Century. But this program, which focused on performances led by Bang on a Can All-Star alumnus Steven Schick and the music of composer Aldo Clementi was not what you might expect. Thunder and high drama are stock-in-trade for percussionists, but this show was devoted to works that intentionally played against type with quieter blooming subtitles of gentle oscillating rhythms and slowly unfolding patterns.

The night started off with an early work from Helmut Lachenmann, Intérieur I. Lachenmann is best known for his works for piano and string ensembles so this piece for solo percussionist may be an outlier in terms of instrumentation, yet it speaks clearly from the composer's sound world. Schick gently struck, swiped and tapped the collection of gongs, drums and other instruments for a collage of muted, almost meditative, rhythmic sound. It was this meditative sense that would infuse the rest of the evening, growing increasingly important in each of the works. Schick’s most arresting performance of the night followed with an adaptation of Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonata from the 1930s. Schwitter’s original performance work calls the performer to repeatedly utter various sounds familiar in German speech patterns, but never actually forming words thereby emphasizing the natural musicality of speech while divorcing it from linguistic meaning. Of course, no separation is ever that easy and words will tend to congeal from the flow of sound or at least words emulating those of non-English languages. Schick, along with video artist Ross Karre and electronic processing from Shahrokh Yadegari, created a massive wall of sound and images making those human beatbox tricksters seem like little more than rote amateurs. The visual elements of the performance could overwhelm the sound at times. But Schwitters himself was a mutli-media artist of his day, so such a collaboration certainly made artistic sense and was engrossing to watch.

And then things got mysterious. Aldo Clementi died almost exactly one year ago and MEC paid tribute with two percussion works - Madrigale for a prepared piano four hands and L’orologio di Arcevia for a small ensemble including pairs of piano, celestas, glockenspiel, vibraphone, and chimes. Clementi’s works have a simplicity and particular preoccupation with musical symmetry. They avoid the emphatic in favor of the sustained and modulating over a period of time. Both pieces were hypnotic, an unusual thing for the particular instrument combination with ringing patterns fading in and out of focus all under the guidance of Schick and his slowly pulsing gong. It produced one of the sensations in music that I most love, the feeling of something natural that is following a predetermined path of development and eventual decay via its own set of predetermined rules. They were the kind of works that feel like they contain whole worlds just underneath the surface, busily moving along talking about one thing while harboring something else just below the surface. The performance from the percussion ensemble red fish blue fish tapped into the unexpected mysteries of Clementi’s work making for a fascinating if subtle evening. Those mysteries and their memories will have to last a long time, however, while the series goes on hiatus for the rest of the year.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Chamber-sized ensembles of young musicians interested in new music can be found just about anywhere you look these days. There are thriving communities of composers and musicians everywhere doing things their own way and questioning the old modes of the classical music business. And while places like Brooklyn and Los Angeles may leap to mind right away, you should probably also consider Norway. At least that was the project of the Monday Evening Concert series this week who invited the Norwegian collective asamisimasa to town for one of the most engaging shows of their season thus far. The six member group formed in 2001 with particular interest in new works and contemporary European composers, especially Helmut Lachenmann and Brian Ferneyhough. Given these guiding lights, the wild ride of Monday’s program with its use of electronic elements, unusual instruments, and the most extended of extended techniques went without saying. What was remarkable was how much puckish fun and surprise the players packed into the works, most of which were written specifically for them.

The evening started out with the only piece not being heard in this country for the first time, 3 songs from Alberto Savinio’s Album 1914. These surrealist miniatures were performed by Ellen Ugelvik on piano and soprano Silje Marie Aker Johnsen whose vocal lines were accompanied by her equally ferocious bass drum wailing. While this was easily the oldest work on the program and unrelated in many ways, it set the tone of surprise and aggressive energy. Norwegian composer Øyvind Torvund’s Neon Forest Spaces followed. A quartet for cello, clarinet, electric guitar and percussion, the seven brief moments of the work were all imbued with pre-recorded elements and amplified instrumentation. The percussion part was filled with the woosh of aerosol cans and the bubbling of air blown into a water bottle. Despite the seeming whimsy of these gestures, though, it was surprisingly effective in bringing the sense of endless forest noises to life.

The first half ended with one of asamisimasa’s signature repertoire works, Simon Steen-Andersen’s on and off and to and fro. The Danish composer revels in being a bit of an enfant terrible, and his trio for clarinet, cello, and vibes travels from unusual to bizzare as its sound world is predominated by the feedback and noise created by three electrical megaphones that are initially used to amplify the sounds of the other instruments, but then move on to create comical and sometimes ear-splitting feedback and siren noises. At the climax of the piece, the feedback from one megaphone is fed into the receiver of another in an unusual chain of processing. Yet there was something relaxed and sly about the piece. Instead of being ponderous and pretentious, the idea is given room to breathe and develop making it more playful than deadly serious. Steen-Andersen’s music has been recorded by the ensemble including this work, so feel free to check it out yourself. You can also hear clips of mos of the music mentioned here on their website.

After the break the players returned for Laurence Crane’s sharply contrasting John White in Berlin a quiet microtonal meditation that glowed and grew outward in a Feldman-like fashion. But the spirit that ruled the finale of the show was that of John Cage, who was just one of the many composers mentioned by name in Trond Reinholdtsen’s Unsichtbare Musik. Reinholdtsen joined the ensemble for the performance lending his vocals to the highly theatrical performance. The work begins with Reinholdtsen repeating a series of musical terms and phrases interrupted by single chords from the players. Soon the structure breaks down in both the text, which moves on to include the names of famous late 20th-century philosophers and composers as well as ideas and other items. The music, too, goes awry in multiple directions at once. Unusual accompaniment from deflating balloons and toys contrast against flights from both cello and clarinet. At times passages are recorded, processed, and played back providing the only “music” at any given moment as the live musicians look on following a transition so seamless it almost goes without notice. Reinholdtsen comes to the front of the stage and mimics an epileptic fit which is then followed by clarinet and soprano equivalents of piano 10 hands with all the other members of the ensemble coming forward to touch and alter the sound of the solo performer in each of these segments. Finally, the piece resolves in a series of faked asides or commentary from Reinholdtsen directed toward the audience. He tells the audience of his doctoral thesis and difficulty deciding on endings. He plays a snippet of “classical music” and asks, “Do you know this?” in a friendly conversational way. There’s a pre-recorded parody of a Grieg song performed in a chipmunk voice and a partially faked recording of Cage performing in Europe in 1958 just for good measure.

What all this means, I can’t tell you. But it was immensely fun to watch and was smarter and far denser than it seemed on its off-hand tongue-in-cheek manner. The enthusiasm was admirable, but it was made even better by a sense of polish from the asamisimasa players. This was serious business, but one that still managed to seem spontaneous and off-handed even when it wasn’t. It was also exciting to see a glimpse of what’s going on farther from these shores among another community of young artists interested on building new things in the world of music. Hurray for Monday Evening Concerts for bringing them to these shores and here’s hoping we don’t have to wait long to hear from them again.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Monday and the Los Angeles-based concert series that bares its name, Monday Evening Concerts, brought Austrian composer Klaus Lang to town this week for an evening of the most thoughtful music. Lang figured prominently not only as the composer of the major work on the bill, einfalt. stille., but also as organist for the three short works that preceded it. Lang has written extensively on music history and theory in addition to his work as a composer and he’s got a lot on his mind as suggested by the lengthy abstract program notes he provided. But these were not your average program notes in other ways. Some contemporary art music carries an unfair stigma of being overly intellectualized – more about the concept or theory behind its creation than the end product itself. Worse than this is the reactionary tendency of some living composers to strive for unvarnished and sentimental emotion in their music. But Lang, though certainly thoughtful, lies somewhere else with an approach I’d describe more as philosophical than simply theoretical. He argues for a Zen-inspired concept of pure music free from a tether of meaning. A music that “is not a form of language, it stands on its own as a thing without a purpose, justification and meaning outside of itself. Music neither depicts the structure of the cosmos, nor is it the language of feelings.” He sees his music neither as evidence of mastery of structural tricks or a way to connect with an audience. His hour-long work for voice, viola, flute and percussion, einfalt. stille., instead is firmly rooted in this ideology and is offered as a a text or object to focus concentration towards “a state of the highest inner clarity or inner silence.”

This sort of meditative take on music is not a new one as Lang himself acknowledges. It has roots in early music as much as in the 20th Century and may explain his choice to start the evening with a series of three short early 17th-century Italian organ toccatas. He played works by Girolamo Frescobaldi and Ercole Pasquini on a meantone temperament organ isolated on the Zipper Hall stage. The music theory behind meantone temperament is bit rich for my blood here, but lets just say its not the way instruments have been tuned since Bach’s time and it invites all of these works to have a certain dissonant and dark undertone. They evoked a kind of meditative state, as did Lang’s piece, which followed, and whose title translates as “simplicity. quiet.”

The ghosts of John Cage and Morton Feldman could be heard in Lang’s work, not only for its particular vein of philosophical grounding, but also in the deliberate but slow moving texture of it. The four players were stationed in the upper level of Zipper Hall around and mostly out of sight of the audience for the whole performance enhancing the bodyless sense of sound. The short constrained range of tones was repeated often at similar short intervals over and over often with only slight variations from one part to the next. There was a clarity and separation that gave each tone its own space with minimal overlap. The wordless vocal part consisted of a few frequently repeated sounds performed by soprano Natalia Pschenitschnikova. It was one of those abstract sensory experiences that as Lang suggests, doesn’t “transport” you anywhere other than perhaps inward. And while I didn’t find the conceptualization entirely original, that’s really part of the point. I admired Lang’s comprehensive and thought-out approach to the work that builds on a specific musical history showing how much, and how little things have changed in four hundred years. It was definitely the kind of music that doesn’t tell you how to feel and leaves things open to a more individual experience. That in itself is a major achievement and another reason to keep your Monday evenings open.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

The longstanding outpost for late 20th century and newer music in Los Angeles, Monday Evening Concerts, returned for its latest season on Monday at its most recent home, the Zipper Concert Hall, on Monday. It was a quietly intense evening filled with music inspired by the work of Samuel Beckett either in spirit or word. Beckett’s work, and particularly that of his later career, is undeniably musical in its sparse yet forceful language. This economy, and its related abstraction, make it ideal for composers who were interested in similar types of musical structures and language. Monday’s program went about this in two ways. The first half included pieces more related in terms of structure and style than actual content. Heinz Holiger, who will enjoy a major retrospective of his musical output at next year’s Salzburg Festival, has set a number of Beckett’s plays, but Monday’s concert began with his viola solo, Trema. The work rapidly shifts back and forth between two different sets of material mimicking a sort of restrained frenzy that certainly had parallels to the kind of psychology found throughout Beckett’s world. Holliger’s piece led immediately into a later work from John Cage, Seven. Here the viola is joined by six other players including piano and percussion. For most of them, only a handful of notes or chords are indicated over a period of twenty minutes with only general guidelines suggested for the precise entry or length of any of them. The resulting music can be highly variable, or even largely silent depending on the decisions the players make. On Monday, the excellent ensemble of MEC regulars performed a version that fit into the Beckett theme easily with its halting almost isolated islands of sound and subtle shifting percussion.

The second half of the show took on Beckett in a more direct way with Kurtág’s …pas á pas – nulle part…, a setting of the author’s poetry. Like much of Kurtág’s output, …pas á pas.. is a collection of miniatures – twenty-nine to be exact each clocking in at less than a minute or two. Beckett’s terse, dark, and sometimes morbidly humorous poetry almost precisely paralleled the notes of the three string players, percussionist, and baritone. Often the voice and instrumental parts traveled in tight unison. This is dramatic, and very literary material with Kurtág’s typical elaborate titling of each miniature in a manner almost more elaborate than the poetry itself, with different segments being dedicated to everyone from Holliger and Boulez, to Helmut Lachenmann and Erik Satie. One could spend a day just sorting out the elusive connections between Kurtág’s words and Beckett’s. But the dedication that may have most pointedly shaped the performance was that of baritone Nicholas Isherwood who announced from the stage that his mother had died earlier that very day and that his performance was given in tribute to her. Performing in the wake of such an immensely painful and nearly universal event was admirable and I would certainly offer my prayers and condolences to Isherwood and his family. But it also made for a ferocious and exacting performance, perhaps even the performance of a lifetime for an artist. Beckett’s mordant tone, and his ironic sense of living in the face of our certain mortality may never have sounded so poignant as it was then. Isherwood highlighted two of Beckett's short texts before the performance that caught the spirit of the moment best for him. And it certainly made a great and unique start for the MEC season.

sleep till death
healeth
come ease
this life disease

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Michel Galante and the musicians for MEC on 4/25/11 Photo: mine 2011

Even here in Los Angeles. Or at least it did in a way at the final Monday Evening Concerts program of the season, which presented a single musical piece, Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee, or Snow. And while it isn’t clear to me that this just over an hour-long work has much to do with the weather, it certainly is related to the passage and marking of time. In particular, Abrahamsen uses the piece to explore musical canons. But before this got under way, there was a short video piece from artist Rick Bahto entitled Cave Creek. Winter canon. 2011. Bahto has worked extensively with 8mm film and Cave Creek consisted of three film loops exhibited side-by-side simultaneously. All three were shot in Cave Creek, Arizona, during the winter and capture elements of the beautiful landscape as Bahto follows a series of physical actions while filming resulting in broad circular sweeps and other movement of the typically static landscape. He filmed the same sequence three times resulting in the three separate loops thus creating a sort of visual canon when played back at the same time. The vague black and white images reminded me of the kind of graphic design 23 Envelope did for the 4AD label in the 1980s. Sadly, the work didn't come off completely well when one of the projectors failed to work on Monday leaving the audience with only two of the three images.


Still, the point about the movement of time and canons meshed well with Abrahamsen's Schnee. The work grew out of the composer's arrangement of canons from J.S. Bach for another project that inspired him to create pairs of his own canons following an invitation for a new work from ensemble recherche. Schnee is divided into five pairs of canons that mirror one another with each pair becoming progressively shorter over the course of the work. The effect is to mimic the passage of time over a life span with things moving more quickly as one goes further on in years. The sections are divided by three Intermezzi during which the players systematically tune down some of their instruments by fractional steps to create microtonal effects. There are two separate teams of musicians separated by a percussionist on stage with each team anchored by a piano and consisting either of strings or wind instruments. The canons are passed back and forth between these groups enhancing the mirrored images of the sections. The sound can be delicate with halting rhythms or more involved with flurries inspired by the work of Mozart. At times it does give a wintry feel and as the work continues, time does seem to both expand and telescope, a phenomenon familiar to those who have lived through a snow-filled winter. (You can get a feel for this with the video above.) Michel Galante, the director of the Argento Chamber Ensemble, served as conductor for the evening. He's well known to MEC audiences and he proved as insightful with these local players as with his own New York-based ensemble. It was a lovely, often quiet piece and perhaps an odd choice to conclude a season for Monday Evening Concerts. But with playing this good for a piece not heard on the West Coast before, it's hard to argue. Here's looking forward to the return of the MEC series later this fall.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

The members of the JACK Quartet
Photo: mine 2011

What better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day than taking apart one of the central ensembles of the chamber music repertory piece by piece. OK, these two things have nothing to do with each other, but Monday Evening Concerts still managed to come up with a strong and interesting program for arguably the most commodified of holidays by inviting the JACK String Quartet back to Los Angeles on Monday night. The ensemble had performed for the series last year with Georg Friedrich Haas’ String Quartet No. 3, which they played in complete darkness in Pasadena in one of the classical music highlights of all last year. Given the success of their last program here and the JACK Quartet’s increasingly high profile in the new(er) music realm, this visit was highly anticipated, and as it turns out worth the wait.

The evening’s theme dealt with re-imagining the string quartet in a contemporary context and was cast under the title, “The Explorers.” Of course, any program promising this much deconstruction would naturally start with the music of John Cage, and his 1950 String Quartet in Four Parts perfectly set the stage. Cage’s work was an early call to question both the content as well as the process of performance. The work draws inspiration from the four seasons which end up sounding more similar than different except perhaps for the final movement of the work, which invokes Spring as a contrasting short folk tune in defiance of the more discordant material preceding it. The groundwork having been laid, the evening took off from there with two string quartets from the young composer Aaron Cassidy, both of which questioned the basic principles that guide the very production of sound by the musicians using their instruments. Cassidy’s String Quartet from 2002 takes the music of the traditional single staff and cleaves it in two as if written for the piano. Performers are given separate sets of instructions for each hand resulting in something that is both unexpected sounding and physically involved. The aptly named Second String Quartet, which Cassidy wrote specifically for the JACK ensemble in 2010, builds further on this notion. Cassidy uses a color-coded notational system that guides the physical movements of players producing sound in favor of prescribing resultant pitches or tones. Both pieces were intriguing to watch as the players responded to the music in terms of their physical demands. Sandwiched between the two Cassidy string quartets was Webern’s Six Bagatelles, which sounded like Wagner when set up against these far more deconstructed works.

The second half of the program was devoted to the fifth string quartet of Horatiu Radulescu subtitled “Before the Universe was Born.” Radulescu’s work had made a previous appearance on the MEC stage in 2007 prior to the composer’s untimely death in 2008. This quartet from the early 1990s was making its U.S. Premiere and used non-standard tunings of most of the strings on all four instruments to produce its spectral sounds. The microtonal shifts between the players created a wash of sound through the piece’s 30-minute single movement that was surprisingly organic for so technically sophisticated a work. The JACK Quartet players were as impressive in their musical communication skills here in the light as they had previously been in the dark last year. Their mastery of such difficult music and interest in pushing the boundaries raises hopes that they will have a long and active career. And even if it wasn’t wine and red roses, it was a wonderful treat for this Valentine’s Day audience.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Michel Galante and the Argento Chamber Ensemble

Michel Galante and the very fine Argento Chamber Ensemble returned Tuesday to Los Angeles and their home away from home, Monday Evening Concerts, hosted at Zipper Concert Hall downtown. As usual Galante and MEC Artistic Director Justin Urcis had put together a fascinating program of music less than thirty years old. The joys of MEC are many but being exposed and, perhaps, surprised by the unknown is chief among them. This first program of 2011 was built around the West Coast Premiere of Fausto Romitelli’s Professor Bad Trip. Romitelli was an Italian composer who died prematurely in 2004 at age 41 but left behind a significant body of work that grew out of his studies with the likes of Grisey and Donatoni both in his native Italy and in Paris at IRCAM. He was influenced not only by spectralist techniques but also by the likes of Giacinto Scelsi, and Professor Bad Trip is marked by waves of sound that are closer to drones than not. Romitelli was also interested in the boundaries, or lack of them, between musical genres; and the 40 minute, three-movement Professor Bad Trip plunges right to the heart of this by juxtaposing familiar classical music instruments against wailing electric guitars.

The work forages in the fields of psychedelic rock for its contrasts and the music often speaks to states of altered consciousness. The professor in this “Bad Trip” may well be Henri Michaux whose words from his own drug-influenced writings adorn Romitelli’s score. The three movements, or “Lessons” as Romitelli calls them, were composed between 1998 and 2000 and were introduced separately by a voice-over. Interestingly, with all of the electronic wailing in the piece, the biggest licks of the evening went not to the electric guitars but to an electric cello. Argento’s Jay Campbell flew at the instrument for an extended solo in “Lesson 2” that rivaled anything I’ve heard on a rock concert stage. The work was filled with other oddities including kazoos and harmonicas all amplified in a way that highlighted the other-worldliness of the sound. Interestingly, none of this overwhelmed the more traditional elements of the ensemble including violin, viola, piano, clarinet, trumpet, flute and percussion. This was far from a battle of the bands but more like two distant relatives sharing one strange but fascinating trip.

Before the psychedelics were a number of smaller works, often cut from similar, but far more subtle cloth. Brian Ferneyhough’s La Chute d’Icare contrasts a methodical small ensemble against a dizzying flurry of notes from the clarinet played with remarkable dexterity here by Carol McGonnell. She returned later in the first half with perhaps the most contrasting eight minutes of solo music imaginable with Salvatore Sciarrino’s Let me die before I wake. McGonnell explained after the show that Sciarrino was inspired by the subject of euthanasia for this short solo that involved extremely quiet notes that were only partially sounded, each tone both originating and expiring with little more than breath sounds. The near silence held the unbelievably still audience completely transfixed throughout. The evening was filled out with three miniatures from Gérard Pesson including La Lumière n’a pas de bras pour nous porter. This solo work for piano was played by Joanna Chao and, like the Sciarrino, called for keys that were only partially sounded in a random pattern with most of the sound generated from the striking of fingernails against the keys, which was then amplified.

At the end of the program, conductor Galante, McGonnell and guitarist Oren Fader stayed on stage for a brief discussion in an effort to connect more with the Zipper Hall audience. They talked about their struggles to find opportunities to develop richer, longer-lasting experiences with particular individual works, given the amount of rehearsal time the ensemble spends on them. This has been a challenge for Argento, which do not have the economic and political advantages that most of their European counterparts enjoy. The group, however, talked about an exciting experiment of weekly concerts they performed last year in New York, playing the same pieces weekly over a period of a month to audiences that would often return repeatedly. And while their appearance at MEC may have been a one-off here in Los Angeles, the chance to take this particular “bad” trip was worth all the effort. Here’s looking forward to their next visit.

BTW, Argento will reprise their performance of Georg Friedrich Haas' in vain in New York on Feb 18 at the Park Avenue Armory as part of the Tune-In Music Festival and it should not be missed if you're in town.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Alexei Lubimov at MEC Photo: mine 2010

On Monday, Los Angeles’ home for contemporary classical music, Monday Evening Concerts, returned to Zipper Concert Hall downtown for its new season. The occasion was marked with a piano recital from Alexei Lubimov and was dedicated to the recently-passed legendary promoter of all things musical in L.A. (including MEC), Ernest Fleischmann. Lubimov, who made his name bucking authority in the former Soviet Union by playing frowned upon Western contemporaries like Cage and Ligeti, was the ideal choice for a show honoring a man who certainly went his own way advocating for the future of music here in L.A. The program was a thoughtful and intelligent one entitled “The Messenger” that Lubimov had also performed in New York last week as part of the Lincoln Center’s “White Light Festival.” The nine short solo works on the bill covered three centuries of music from C.P.E. Bach and Chopin to Cage, Galina Ustvolskaya, and Valentin Silvestrov. Lubimov has made wonderful recordings of these 20th-century composers as well as the likes of Arvo Pärt on the ECM label, and are all worthy of a listen.

Lubimov’s playing is crisp and clean and above all else quite meditative in this context. But what I admired most about the program was his intention to go beyond simply pointing out musical similarities between the works from different centuries. Instead, as he noted in his own translated program notes, he was looking for something different that unfurled or played out across the 9 pieces, played without an intermission. Central to this was the concept that all of the selections were written in the most personal way, solely for the satisfaction of the composer him or herself. He invited the audience to think of them as “a diary not meant for publication, in which you note down only what is most personal.” The point, however, is not to learn something about each composer’s inner psychology, but instead to examine the process of self-exploration itself.

Some of the short works like C.P.E. Bach’s Fantasia in F-sharp minor sound as if they could have been written sometime in the last two decades, while others, such as Georgs Pelecis’ Suite No. 3 from 1985 could sound particularly Classical in manner. But there was always another layer in the works and their performance that addressed the idea of communication with the past. This could be quite literal at times as with the intensely beautiful Nostalgia of Tigan Mansurian from 1976. Not all of the personal musical reflections were wistful, though. Galina Ustvolskaya’s Sonata No. 6 consists primarily of chords and notes played with forearms and open hands pounding on the keyboard at ffff. This rageful cry was broken by the veritable church bells of Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina. The cycle ended with Valentin Sivestrov’s The Messenger, a set of Mozart-inspired vignettes played on a completely closed piano like some mammoth, sad music box. The music is both familiar but distant at the same time and represents what Lubimov argues in his notes a refutation of oblivion stating “it is enough to fling a window open, to strike a match, to look at a cloud, to hear a triad, for memories…to start working a miracle.” Hearing Lubimov play these works was a kind of miracle, one that reinforced how even the most jarring and discordant of contemporary sounds, ones that are often ascribed to modern malaise and dysphoria, have just as much to say to us about hope and the possible. And it was a wonderful start to another season of Monday Evening Concerts.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

You get the idea
Photo: mine 2010

Or, Further Adventures in Concert Going. Here’s a new one. I arrive at the season-closing performance of the Monday Evening Concerts series on time and enter the hall handing over my ticket and my signed waiver form. Yes, in order to attend Monday’s program I was required to sign a waver releasing probably everyone from essentially anything that could possibly happen to me during a performance of Georg Friedrich Haas’ String Quartet No. 3, subtitled In Iij. Noct.. The unique, and arguably risky, part of this venture is that the piece is performed in complete darkness. And by that I do not mean that the hall lights are turned off leaving only cracks of light from around door frames and the like. I mean sealed-off-in-a-coffin, can’t-tell-whether-your-eyes-are-open-or-closed total darkness for a playing time of around a hour and ten minutes.

The venturesome audience had gathered at the Neighborhood Church of the Unitarians in Pasadena. (Insert Garrison Keillor-inspired joke here.) Special permission was granted by the local fire department for all of the emergency exit light to be extinguished for the show, and a local fireman was on hand to oversee the proceedings. We were given a one minute tester of the darkness prior to the actual performance as a last warning for anyone who wanted to bail and were told that if we did want to leave during the performance, to raise our hand high in the air where it would be spotted by one of four infra-red goggle wearing volunteers who would grab us by the arm and escort us from the hall through a maze like pitch black entry passage. No, I’m not making this up.

At this point in the evening we were joined by the JACK Quartet, a rapidly rising ensemble best known for a superior recording of the Xenakis string quartets in 2009 as well as other forays into new music. The members stationed themselves in the four corners of the hall surrounding the audience, and then the lights went out. The idea, according to Haas, was to meditate on the less Romantic qualities of darkness, those associated with hopelessness and isolation. He directly references in the work’s title tenebrae masses, which are services that take place on Good Friday and Maundy Thursday of Holy Week where minimal candlelight is extinguished one step at a time until the congregation is left in darkness to represent the devastating loss with the death of Christ prior to his resurrection.

Haas’ music is indebted to the spectralists and has a floating otherworldly feel to it. My only other exposure to his work was at the world premiere of his second opera, Melancholia at the Opera National de Paris in 2008. That tale of an artist’s slip into madness had much in common with the themes of In Iij. Noct. including a lot of spiritual and physical darkness. Perhaps the most amazing quality of the string quartet though, is how powerfully it can bring about the lost art of listening. Haas’ score is divided into several sections of indeterminate length that can be repeated, elongated, or shortened by the performers. Since the players cannot see one another, or a score, to communicate, they must rely on their own sounds to cue one another. Haas notes that he intends there to be some struggle as different members suggest different directions to move in between the repeating segments of the piece. A musical discussion ensues that forms the work itself. Now, I realize that ideally listening to one another is the hallmark of any great musical ensemble of any size. But playing in the dark brings the experience to a whole new level.

Of course, this creates a new atmosphere for the audience too, as many of us not accustomed to blindness or vision impairment were challenged with really listening to the music independent of any distractions or visual cues. And despite the sadness in the music, it was also very beautiful in its own way. The JACK Quartet played splendidly and MEC once again rises to the occasion with something unique and off the beaten path.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Making music the old fashioned way on the streets of L.A.
Photo: Jeff 2010

I love contemporary classical music because you never know exactly what you’re going to find. Sure, there are artistic trends and common methodologies than can be identified and explained, but the sense of discovery in hearing something that is relatively new is always different from the discovery in something well known that has arguably been “made new” again in terms of a specific performance or reiteration. Take the Monday Evening Concert series, which this week presented a program of works by Mauricio Kagel. MEC is no stranger to composers who prefer theatrical approaches to music. This season alone has brought us semi-staged chamber pieces invoking the sands of the desert and piano compositions played with the assistance of stuffed animals.

But Monday was a new one for me. Standing outside in the dark along Grand Avenue downtown awaiting just over 100 bicyclists to whiz by. Entitled Eine Brise, this 90-second work consists of just about that - a large cadre of bicyclists peddling past the audience as the riders shushed and whooshed like the wind. But as odd as it sounds, I have to admit it was a rather thrilling minute. At first there was nothing other than the typical city noise. Then off in the distance one could hear the faintest ringing of bells as some of the cyclists nighttime lights flickered on the horizon. Then they were there, the metaphorical breeze of Kagel’s title passing just as quickly. And much like a breeze, it left you standing there wondering if the experience had taken place at all. The nighttime setting turned out to be perfect for the experience enhancing the mystery around the piece.

The rest of the show was very fine, though more predictably indoors. Prior to the outdoor excursion was Kagel’s Dressur, German for animal training. Kagel employs three percussionists who use a remarkable variety of almost entirely wooden instruments from a marimba to coconut husks to wooden straight back chairs. The best moment was undoubtedly the nutcracker accompaniment. The piece featured the second time this month that I’ve seen a percussionist bare his chest in order to play it. Dressur has as much stage direction in it as it does actual music with the players threatening each other with furniture and at one point even enacting a spirited flamenco-style dance on a wooden floor in Dutch wooden shoes topped off with an “Olé”. The work pointedly addresses issues about how audiences think about performance and the work involved in them. It was also a lot of fun.

The evening ended with the comparatively straight-forward Trio in Three Movements for piano, cello and violin. Although the work is filled with recognizable melodies common in much less rarefied settings like the circus or carnival, Kagel adds his own layers of depth. He sets the individual parts askew to one another, at times encouraging the players to take their own independent tempos. There was plenty of interesting music in the thirty minutes and proved a nice contrast to the far more staged works in the first half. All in all, another winning evening from the MEC folks.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Luciano Chessa and friend at this week's Monday Evening Concert
Photo: mine 2010

The Monday Evening Concert series kicked off the new year Monday with a program entitled “Mostly Californian” that was filled with a number of surprises. True to its billing, the program included works from three living composers all of whom currently live and work in the Golden State with a dash of Webern and Milton Babbitt thrown in for good measure. And while everything in the program was marked with a 20th-century preoccupation with process over outcome, the strongest bits bookended the show and rose above the thrill of an academic analysis to deliver a little more. First off was Clint McCallum’s In a Hall of Mirrors Waiting to Die for saxophone and piano. At the tender age of 29, McCallum gives off a vibe that one might get from crossing Nico Muhly with Rob Zombie. Currently studying and working in San Diego, he expresses an interest in the physical limits of musicians in the production of sound. Waiting follows this trend by featuring a saxophone part consisting mostly of very high and very loud tones held to a point of near exhaustion. Against this, a piano tempered with chains and books across the strings pounds away ending only with a definitive slamming shut of the keyboard lid. And while it might seem like an academic stunt, I must admit I was rather taken with the jarring, urban, jazz-inflected sound. It came off as a 21st-century Rhapsody in Blue in the lively dialog between the players.

The program built on this saxophone and jazz influence with solid performances of Webern’s Quartet Op. 22 and Milton Babbitt’s All Set which made sense in this context even if they weren’t as immediately compelling here. After the break was a subtle work for a large ensemble by Michael Pisaro called The Collection. Consisting of a number of miniature segments played between different sets of one or two instruments in the ensemble, this passive and quiet piece almost got lost in a program about the theatrical.

And as if to underscore this point, the evening closed with two solo piano works performed by the composer Luciano Chessa. To be fair Chessa is cheating a little bit in that the works presented here thrived on elaborate theatricality that bordered on performance art. First up was Variazioni su un ogetto di scena a collection of three variations on Italian folksongs from his own childhood performed in the most unadorned and basic fashion. When Chessa entered the stage with a large stuffed cow to begin the performance, you knew something was about to happen. What did transpire is that all three songs are actually played by stuffed animals with the composer's assistance. After the large ponderous hooves of the cow, Chessa returned with a teddy bear, and then finally a baby doll. In the finale, Chessa played sequences of notes in a call and response model with the doll as if teaching it this simple melody. Not only did the performance catch some of the childlike glee of the folk songs themselves, but it also showed them as multifaceted. The performance was often just as creepy as it was funny.

Following this was Chessa’s Louganis inspired by the famous diver who Chessa states he remembered from the Seoul Olympics he watched on TV as an adolescent. The work makes reference to both the sounds of wind and water, but is also meant to capture a sort of nostalgia for childhood. Next to the piano was a small living room set with chair, side table and television. The television was intended to play a video created by Terry Berlier, but was plagued by some technical difficulties, so Chessa let the television play on with a snow pattern as he proceeded with the musical part of the performance. Here he worked inside the piano with a number of electric toothbrushes vibrating against the strings creating a rushing sound akin to aerated water. This was periodically punctuated with his playing a simple melody on the keyboard while wearing bracelets of sleigh bells around his wrists. Oddly and unexpectedly the piece worked for me, creating a sense of the past with a kind of physicality. It may be equal parts theater, but the music of Luciano Chessa presented here left me wanting much more.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Mario Caroli and Alice Teyssier
Photo: mine 2009

Monday Evening Concerts returned for its new season this week in a very rewarding show at Zipper Concert Hall downtown. And in case you were wondering, European modernism is alive and well and living in Los Angeles. Which is good news when you consider that there is less and less competition with the MEC programming from anyone across the street these days. But I digress. Monday's program featured three works, Tempio di fumo by Donia Rotaru, Territories de l’Ouble by Tristan Murail, and Salvatore Sciarrino’s La Perfezione di uno Spirito Sottile. And despite any differences between these composers' techniques or training, all three chamber pieces were closely related in their exploration of the most basic sound elements reproduced in a context where silence often has as big an importance. This was music much less about notes, and much more about sound. Instruments were pushed in ways to produce noises that aren't typically the goal in their use from subtle clicks to ringing overtones.

First up was Rotaru’s “Temple of Smoke” for solo flute played here by Mario Caroli, a musician who has built a reputation for his performance of contemporary compositions. Rotaru is a Romanian composer without much of an international reputation. The ethereal structure of her smoke-filled temple consists of as much subtle clicking of keys as beading notes and vocalized chords. It had a lovely and mysterious quality for a solo flute work. Closely following was Murail’s solo piano work performed by Marilyn Nonken. True to Marail’s "spectralist" label, Territories exploited the resonance of chords played one atop another at the expense of any individual notes or line. Much of the sound is generated at the far ends of the keyboard with broad soft-edged attacks that produced a wash of sound. It was remarkable considering that the piano almost sounded as if it had been "prepared" in a way similar to many other contemporary compositions. But as far as I can tell, this was all old-fashioned technique mustered by the remarkable Nonken.

Then came the main course. Sciarrino’s 40-minute work for solo flute, soprano, and percussion involved more players, but little more in the way of complexity. The flautist, Caroli and soprano Alice Teyssier entered the stage with Teyssier seating herself on the floor facing away from the audience. Behind them hung a white sheet lit with what appeared to be a low hanging yellow sun. Caroli then embarked on a lengthy flute solo punctuated with regular bursts of silence and repeated flurries of single notes. The effect was as if watching a woman seated on sand dunes with the whistling wind flying all around her. Suddenly she sings in similarly repeated syllables as if talking to the wind. After about another 10 minutes or so this combination is joined by soft and subtle chimes emanating from various locations around the hall. The chiming steadily grows to where it is more clearly audible but never loud as the flute and vocals fade away and the room is filled with dusk. Although the sound surrounded the audience, the minimal staging had a way of making you feel as if you were intruding, watching a scene happening that you weren't a direct part of. It was really involving despite the simplicity of it all.

It's exciting to see Monday Evening Concerts back and off to such a strong start this season. They continue to stand out in providing Los Angeles with music that no one else has done before. (The Sciarrino piece was a U.S. premiere.) There's not much else quite like them in town and we're definitely the better for it. Check out their schedule for the rest of the year, which is sure to contain further surprises.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Marino Formenti, Christian Dierstein, and all those bassists
Photo: mine 2009

The Monday Evening Concert Series wrapped up for the season this week at Zipper Concert Hall with another near capacity crowd. It looks like the city’s go-to folks for contemporary music are going to have to find some bigger quarters sometime soon or tickets may get a little bit harder to come by. The show featured MEC’s patented combination of fare new to Los Angeles and the world played by leading stars of 20th century and newer music. The program, entitled “For Galina Ustvolskaya” was just that and featured a return performance from Italian keyboard great Marino Formenti who last dazzled local audiences with an unforgettable performance of Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux étoiles in January 2008. Well-regarded percussionist Christian Dierstein joined him for performances of Ustvolskaya’s dark and sometimes dirge-like works that can make Messiaen sound like Mozart, but simultaneously lend credence to her own claim that “there is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead.”

Maybe not, but this is unusual stuff particularly considering that it was written for the most part in the mid-to-late 20th century. Ustvolskaya lived a bit of a double life as a composer. Having studied under Shostakovich, she embarked upon a career of conventional and digestible works for a number of public forums all the while composing very different works that remained unheard until much later in her life. In fact much of her work didn’t surface at all outside of the USSR until the 1990s even after it was given public performances in her home country in the 70s and 80s. Monday’s program featured this more "personal" work and it is indeed bracing stuff. Formenti performed two Piano Sonatas, Nos. 4 and 6, which were followed later by Ustvolskaya’s Symphony No 5 “Amen” and Composition No 2, “Dies Irae” for piano, percussion and eight double basses. Ustvolskaya holds all notes in esteem and often dwells on them individually as if giving each and every one its due. The music is often played loudly at full bore and the piano parts can devolve into what seems like little more than banging large sets of keys with forearms and fists in regular and very repetitive sequences. The “symphony” involved tuba, trumpet, oboe, violin, percussion and a speaker who read the Lord’s Prayer in plaintive and dramatic Russian. Both this piece and the “Dies Irae” also call for a large wooden box that is rhythmically struck with various mallets, again often loudly. It’s interesting stuff if for no other reason than the level of intensity called for on the part of the players who all rose to the challenge here. Formenti in particular took no prisoners and made a great case for the relevance of the works if by not rendering them into something that was readily recognizable and immediately pleasurable.

It wasn’t all about the program’s namesake, however. There were two world premieres on the schedule as well. First up was Klaus Lang’s "The Whitebread Man. The Six Frogs" for piano and percussion. It was well set in these environs in that while it is persistently soft and fading, it embraces the same halting respect for its individual tones as Ustvolskaya's works. Later, Dierstein performed Pierluigi Billone’s Mani. Matta for solo percussion. This piece, one in a series referencing visual artists, is largely centered on a marimba the performer plays in non-standard ways that allow him to attenuate the sound either by direct dampening with the hands or using atypical mallets for the job. And while it did seem to stretch on a bit longer than I might have liked, I must admit I was taken by a bit of darkened wistfulness among its charms.

In any event, the show was another example of how MEC continues to stay ahead of the game. And in a city that is about to lose its most visible proponent for new music when Esa-Pekka Salonen wraps up his tenure with the L.A. Philharmonic later this week, Monday may become an even more important day in the near future for those of us who love and follow this music.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Dame Gillian Weir
Photo: mine 2009

I won’t pretend to be able to tell you a great deal about organ music. I will say that the physical surroundings of a specific instrument do seem to have an enormous impact on the way I feel about a performance. It is also especially unusual that I would see two organ recitals in as many days here in Los Angeles, but there you have it. And the two performances couldn’t have been farther removed from one another if they had planned it that way. On Sunday, Dame Gillian Weir appeared at the Walt Disney Concert Hall performing on their state-of-the-art instrument in its pleasing modern home. It was a widely varying program of Baroque works, selections from Messiaen, and some Russians thrown in for good measure. Weir has made a specialty out of Messiaen's organ works, and these selections from Les Corps Glorieux, and La nativité du Seigneur were a highlight of the evening. More remarkable though was her sheer sense of musicality throughout the whole program. Often I felt as if I weren't actually listening to organ music, but something orchestral in nature. Her playing had a precision and clarity that I've found missing sometimes in other organists. At times, the performance turned quite charming as in the final Sonata from Domenico Scarlatti which involved the sound of chimes throughout the piece. But Weir never sold the audience short, taking the show seriously and delivering something very impressive.

On Monday, I was catapulted to the other end of the organ spectrum with something more wild, challenging and decidedly different. The Monday Evening Concerts series welcomed icon of the 70s avant-garde music scene Charlemagne Palestine out to L.A. for a rare solo performance of Schlingen-Blängen, his wry marathon work for solo organ. The setting was the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles near Lafayette Park, which features what is billed as the largest church organ in the world. With 18 separate divisions and work proceeding on a nineteenth, it's a massive machine that completely surrounds the audience in the church, completed in 1932 and modeled after a more Gothic European style. The music itself is minimal, consisting of little more than a handful of tones that rarely change throughout the performance. However, despite the drone, there is plenty going on. Palestine started simple and slow, and, as the piece wore on, he would progressively pull out more and more stops in different combinations, recruiting new divisions to the cacophony with a more and more shattering intensity. You knew you were in for something unusual when they hand out earplugs at the door. They were put to good use in this maximal evening. Another harbinger of what was to come occurred with the evening's opening disclaimer - in rehearsals, Palestine had blown out a number of fuses on the organ requiring their replacement. We were warned the performance might be interrupted again for further repairs if need be.

This is music all about the overtones and fractional elements of sound. Audience members were encouraged to walk around during the show to appreciate the tone from different parts of the building. Palestine himself, in his wild day-glo outfit and Panama hat would leave the organ in full-blast to wander around the church and appreciate the sound himself at times. Soon the wall of vibration receded and the organist stood and did a little dance and waved, bringing the evening to an end and the crowd to its feet. I can't necessarily say I enjoyed the performance, but I did find it fascinating. It's easy to take the breathing quality of virtually all music for granted. Palestine's Schlingen-Blängen uses the organ precisely to call this into question. What is sound when you don't even have to take a breath to make it? It's not Messiaen, but Charlemagne Palestine has plenty to say about music too, and this was one unique evening of sound.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Michel Galante with the Argento Chamber Ensemble
Photo: mine 2009

It’s raining and relatively cold on this President’s Day in L.A., but despite these inclement conditions a SOLD OUT crowd showed up at the Zipper Concert Hall downtown for one incredible program from the Monday Evening Concerts Series. The occasion was appearances from two local favorite ensembles, red fish blue fish and the Argento Chamber Ensemble in an evening of works by Gérard Grisey. Argento was also involved in last year's fantastic Helmut Lachenmann prgram, so perhaps it's no wonder that there would be such a crowd. Say what you will about Angelenos, but we love our spectralist composers. I mean really, who knew? But there the organizers were, holding up the start of the show trying to put every last person they could in a seat before turning people away. This delay proved to be the only negative moment in the show as it forced me to continue to hear the inane grad-student conversation about theory (non-musical) and such from the well-meaning but ultimately unemployable pack behind me.

Luckily with the arrival of red fish blue fish, the evening glowed to a start with Grisey’s Tempus ex Machina for six percussionists. Grisey, like his fellow spectralists, is interested less in specific notes than in sound phenomena as a whole and the cacophony of noise that oscillates and spins out when any kind of specific sound is produced to begin with. Thus bass drums, snares and gongs echoed one another in an often loud dialog that shimmered and rattled, creating a sort of warm language one usually doesn’t associate with these instruments. The six performers were stationed in various locations around the audience in the auditorium enhancing the effect. It was frankly quite remarkable.

Afterwards, the Argento Chamber Ensemble under Michel Galante offered up the first part of Les Espaces Acoustiques, a piece structured in three sections that grows out of a 15 minute viola solo to progressively encompass ever larger numbers of performers until it reaches a chamber ensemble. (The second part continues to grow into a full orchestra.) In this hour long part, Grisey employs a similar strategy to that already described along with a handful of more humorous elements, including a riff on the sequence of notes most string players use to tune their instruments, a climax of rattled paper, a threatened (but never completed) cymbal crash and musicians noisily packing up their instruments. The beauty of Grisey’s writing comes from its recognition of the music inherent in all sounds. There’s something expected and rhythmic about all of this—like breathing. Or, better yet, like snowflakes with each phrase or passage remarkably similar to the last, but at the same time its own individual, distinct from all its forerunners. Leave it to the MEC organizers to put together yet another show of such high quality. Next up is a not-to-be missed organ recital from Charlemagne Palestine in March.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Members of Xtet
Photo: mine 2008

I have been neglecting my duty to mention the very fine program earlier this week from Monday Evening Concerts, which was held, as is their wont, at the Zipper Concert Hall downtown. A great show is standard operating procedure for the MEC folks and this was no exception with a program focused on three American composers born in the 20s and 30s. The players this evening were drawn from yet another remarkable local group committed to 20th and 21st century music, Xtet, which was led by conductor Donald Crockett throughout.

Things started off with Morton Feldman’s The Viola in my Life II which featured soloist Kazi Pitelka. It’s hard not to think of this as a sort-of viola concerto. It's actually about as far from a concerto as you can imagine, but it is very much a work of Feldman’s with quiet shifting tones throughout. This is definitely music that , in the words of the late, great Betty Freeman, doesn't tell you how you should feel. Following this was a puckish and impudent work from Alvin Curran, Schtyx from 1992. A response to concerns about the lack of melody in his music, Curran fills Schtyx with all kinds of conventional tunes. The catch is that none of this ever gets very far in a system filled with percussive and disturbing interruptions. A trio of piano, violin, and percussion are assailed by bass drums and cymbals often played by pianist Vicki Ray or violinist Sarah Thornblade. Each of them was armed with their own percussion instrument to alternate with their other primary duties. So what’s a percussionist like David Johnson to do with all the competition? How about scrape a stool across the floor, toss cymbals to the stage floor and drop box fulls of pots and pans in a crashing ramble. I know it sounds noisy, and it can be, but this farcical piece was the highlight of the show and quite witty.

After the break, there were two pieces from Frederic Rzewski: 96, an homage to Elliott Carter, and Pocket Symphony, a longer work originally commissioned by eighth blackbird. Both were played quite well, but the more substantial piece, Pocket Symphony, was the more intricate and involving. Played by a small ensemble, the piece is interrupted by six separate solo riffs from various instruments in a fashion not unlike a jazz ensemble. And while these cadenzas never quite reach the level of all-out improvisation, they do allow for the ensemble members to show off their own take on an interesting work.

The MEC has a number of strong programs left this year including a solo organ performance from Charlemagne Palestine in March, and they come highly recommended.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Teodoro Anzellotti
Photo: mine 2008

Monday marked the return and 70th anniversary of one of the pillars of the Los Angeles contemporary music scene, the Monday Evening Concerts Series, entering its third year at the Zipper Concert Hall downtown. Director Justin Urcis’ very unassuming introduction failed to acknowledge what appeared to be yet another near capacity crowd for this series that seems to grow and grow in popularity after being declared all but dead after it’s infamous eviction from the grounds of LACMA. It was another show that exemplified the organization’s commitment to a wide gamut of performers and composers and its willingness to bring new and unfamiliar works to local audiences.

The theme was “The Avant-Garde Through the Ages” which was described as an examination of techniques and strategies in avant-garde musical practice over different centuries. While I’m not sure how well this concept actually held together, it did provide an opportunity to hear some very exciting performances. In the first half of the program, soprano Phoebe Jevtovic Aleander was accompanied by Shira Kammen and Susan Feldman on vielles for a number of 14th and 15th century French songs. Considered radical in approach at the time, the songs continue to have a rather surreal quality. A number of the works make repeated reference to people “smoking” despite the fact that tobacco had yet to be introduced to this part of the world at the time.

There were several contemporary pieces on the program that may have been similar in tactics but with far less melodic results. Michael Maierhof’s Sugar 1, an exploded piano trio, was expertly played by California EAR Unit players Amy Knoles, Eric km Clark, and Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick. Later, Kuniko Kato and Movses Pogossian performed Keiko Harada’s Bone # which features an amplified and retuned kalimba in a variety of ethereal effects.

However, the centerpiece and real star of the show was guest artist Teodoro Anzellotti who has championed the accordion as a player in contemporary music by commissioning several works for his instrument by various major contemporary composers. Two of those works he is most known for were featured here including Berio’s Sequenza XII and Globokar’s Dialog Über Luft. The latter piece in particular was exciting for its playfulness and experimentation with the very idea of the accordion itself. By calling attention to the working of the accordion and playing with the notion of a mechanical “lung”, Globokar’s score calls for a variety of breathing maneuvers from the performer occurring both in and out of sync with the instrument. Anzellotti’s virtuosity eclipses standard perceptions of the accordion and I myself was struck with how little I had imagined was capable from this instrument. And for good measure, Anzellotti threw in a 17th-century work by Froberger recounting a fatal fall by an amateur lutist acquaintance. I'll leave the rest to your imagination.

The MEC series has three more shows in the early part of next year and I would encourage you to check them out on their site and in person downtown.

Labels: Monday Evening Concerts

Lachenmann and the Argento Chamber Ensemble under Michel Galante
Photo : mine 2008

One of the first “classical” music CDs I ever bought featured a recording of a Bach flute concerto and I was convinced there was something wrong with it. From the first listen I could detect this prominent and irritating clicking noise throughout the piece. At first I thought the disc was damaged, but then realized this was actually part of the recording. I then couldn’t believe that someone would have left this awful extraneous noise in the recording until I realized that the clicking was actually the sound of the flautist hitting and releasing the keys on her flute. Here was music supposedly marred, in my mind at the time, by the very sound of it's own production. It is exactly this tension between the sound that is "intended" and the sound that is ostensibly not that lies at the heart of the work of Helmut Lachenmann.

Tonight the composer appeared with two different contemporary music ensembles in a magnificent concert tonight as part of the Monday Evening Concerts series at Zipper Hall that will likely end up being one of the best things I see this year. At 73, Lachenmann is nothing if not an unique composer with an idiosyncratic take on music. He has spent his life creating a sound world as apart from the familiar as imaginable using various sounds, or parts of sounds that lie at the periphery of what most listeners are trained to pay attention to. His works are quiet, dynamic and filled with instruments used in unconventional ways to explore the broad range of sound they can make from stimuli not usually employed with them. Lachenmann’s works are as likely to rely on the sound of a piano foot pedal being released as it is to feature notes played on the keys. The matter of a bow’s angle becomes an issue of great concern as bridges and the tops of music stands are stroked back and forth. Wind instruments rustle as air passes through without the benefit of reed or mouthpiece. Think this is silly or unimportant? The entire career of popular artists such as Bjork could be traced to the ideas and techniques Lachenmann has advocated for decades.

Helmut Lachenmann
Photo : mine 2008

This evening's performance is alluring stuff, and the nearly sold out audience tonight was held rapt for two hours with music as high in drama as it is sparse. The evening began with Lachenmann himself playing his solo piano piece Ein Kinderspiel that set the tone for the very musical games some of his techniques seem to suggest. This was followed by much weightier matters including Mouvement (von der Erstarrung) played by the Argento Chamber Ensemble under the leadership of Michel Galante. This work was a wonder and expertly played by this very talented group of young musicians who made every rushing breath count. After the break came Allegro Sostenuto played by Frieburg's own illustrious Ensemble Recherche. Again, the piano in this trio, which included clarinet and cello, functioned in more than it’s typical way acting both as several different percussion instruments and a sounding board for the clarinet. Simply put, it was stunning and each piece received a standing ovation from the enthusiastic crowd.

This is not “easy” music and it eschews melody and traditional forms. And while it is inventive, there is much more to it than a gimmick of using instruments in non-traditional ways. It may be as Betty Freeman said during her cameo in Bettina Ehrhardt’s Lachenmann documentary MEC presented on Sunday morning – this is music that doesn’t tell you how to feel. Instead it challenges you to make up your own mind and form a response on your own without being told what the correct one is in advance. That is no small task and it is a testament to any composer who can pull it off. Lachenmann has spent his career, as he describes it, trying to discover something new without having a preconceived notion of what "new" actually means in advance. It was a great show and here's the good news - if you missed the show check out the MEC site, which may include video excerpts from the program in the coming days.

Labels: Lachenmann, Monday Evening Concerts