Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

One of the hallmarks of Leif Ove Andsnes tenure as music director of this year’s Ojai Music Festival that wrapped up this past Sunday before heading north for a week full of shows in Berkeley as part of Cal Performances Ojai North, was how willing he was to share the spotlight. And by this I mean almost eschewing being center stage all together. This wasn't an act of artistic modesty. Instead, it showed a keen eye to integrated and collaborative programming that Andsnes picked up in his many years leading Norway's Risør Chamber Music Festival. In fact, Andsnes enlisted the services of another world renowned pianist, Marc-André Hamelin, to perform alongside him for much of the festivals’ six main stage programs. Hamelin is well known for his explorations of the more unusual corners of the solo piano repertory. He's just released the third volume of his excellent examination of the Haydn Piano Sonatas on Hyperion. But he also took a more often than not supportive role in the festival's many concerts. Hamelin and Andsnes each performed only one or two solo or starring performances over the weekend, Hamelin took on Ives’ “Concord” sonata on Thursday and Andsnes played Beethoven’s “Waldstein” sonata on Saturday morning with the solo part in Sørensen’s Piano Concerto No. 2 that same evening. Pianists can be some of the most notable lone wolves of the classical music world, but in Ojai either Andsnes or Hamelin were onstage nearly the whole festival typically in supporting roles of one of the many song cycles performed by Christianne Stotijn or as a as members of some trio or quintet.



Yet in the two concluding concerts of this year’s festival, the two came together in some of the most best moments of the whole weekend. Perhaps the highlight of the whole festival for me outside of John Luther Adams’ Inuksuit on Thursday, was a small chamber concert performed for a group of donor’s on Sunday afternoon. The program included 14 of Gyorgy Kurtág's musical miniatures form various collections interspersed with three short pieces from Kurtág's countryman Franz Liszt. Andsnes’ piano solos were set in contrast to other miniatures for viola played with a beautiful tone and touch by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra’s Antoine Tamestit. Intermittently, Hamelin and other players from the orchestra would join in for an unbroken hour that was by turns brooding, playful, or jarring. It was the kind of program that felt like it had the whole world of human emotion tied up in it with the performance bookended with Kurtág’s Ligatura- Message to Frances-Marie (The Answered Unanswered Question). In each of these segments a pair of cellos is answered by offstage violins in yet another of the weekend’s invocations of Ives.

The two pianists were the central focus of the weekend’s final concert that craftily pulled the festival’s many loose ends back together. After Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra gave a moment to the other John Adams, (not to be confused with composer John Luther Adams) whose Shaker Loops was their parting gift to the festival. The work’s embrace of minimalism made my memory of the recent world premiere of his oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary seem like an even more radical invention by contrast. But the final word would belong to Andsnes and Hamelin who returned to John Luther Adams’ music which had also opened the festival. Dark Waves for two pianos and electronics paralleled the slowly arcing movement of both Inuksuit and Red Arc/Blue Veil from Thursday. It also provided a contrast to the showstopping festival closer, the duo’s adaptation of Stravinsky’s two-piano version of Le sacre du printemps. This adaptation is world’s away in some aspects from the familiar full orchestral version. It is by necessity more mechanical sounding with the two pianists acting as one against an external force as opposed to engaging each other in musical sparring. Like Adams’ Dark Waves the energy flowed outward together grabbing the audience and pulling them in. It missed some of the mournfully quiet touches of the bigger version but it brought the two artists out into the spotlight still collaborating but now in a combined starring role.

In the end, Andsnes version of the Ojai Festival was one of the stronger in recent years. True, it was not always packed with the latest and greatest of new music. But it did re-examine important relationships between 19th and 20th Century music and it did provide one of the most integrated and collaborative groups of artists the festival has seen in a while. None of the programs felt isolated or unconnected to the rest, and the logic of the overall festival program could be clearly seen from show to show. There are many reasons to love Ojai, but experiencing the musical festival when it is this well executed rivals most of the place’s other charms. Nearly all of the programs I’ve written about will arrive in Berkeley this week and are worth seeing. And, of course, it’s never too early to start thinking about next year when choreographer Mark Morris will take over leadership of the Ojai Festival with evenings that do promise something a bit different.

Labels: Ojai festival 12

After the Romantic hue of the last few days, Saturday evening’s program at the 2012 Ojai Festival took turns into decidedly more modern territory with living composers occupying the major parts of the program. It also moved the spotlight toward clarinetist Martin Fröst. But just before that transition were two notable and entirely serious concertos. Haflidi Hallgrímsson’s Poemi a single movement violin concerto was played by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra with Artistic Director and soloist Terje Tønnesen. The work references three Chagall paintings, all on Old Testament stories. Tønnesen has done pivotal work all weekend here as “leader” of this frequently conductorless ensemble, and Poemi was his moment to show off his own virtuosic skills. (There was a conductor for this performance, Per Kristian Skalstad.) This served as prelude to the U.S. premiere of Bent Sørensen’s Piano Concerto No. 2 subtitled “La Mattina” (morning). After the teasers of Sørensen’s lullabies on Friday night, it was exciting to hear this equally satisfying large-scale work. Sørensen’s morning isn’t a cheerful or sunny one. It’s fraught with uncertainty and from the opening moments, the orchestral part which ran in tandem with the piano solo reflected a certain decay. Tones drifted and collapsed under Andsnes’s searching solo part. Things get brighter as they go along, and there’s a suggestions that everything may turn out OK despite it all. This was especially true as Andsnes’s technical skills were called upon more and more toward the conclusion. Undoubtedly the piece was one of the highlights of this year’s festival.

Another Nordic composer, Anders Hillborg, provided a very different concerto for clarinetist Martin Fröst, which followed after the break. Peacock Tales has proven popular enough that Hillborg has produced several versions of the piece (one of which you can take a look at in the video at the top of this post) for Fröst. Each version uses different orchestrations, but all maintain the clarinet solo part and the choreography Fröst performs over the course of his solo. Fröst is a fairly mobile performer to begin with often moving like a snake charmer. But this was something entirely different. The 10-minute version for Ojai called for him to don a three-horned mask which he wore for most of the solo. He twirls, poses, and points fingers at his head like some puckish prankster – Till Eulenspiegel with a clarinet solo on top of prerecorded tape. It elicited giggles at times from the audience, but no matter what else it was, Peacock Tales left no one doubting Fröst’s willingness to take some risks.

The rest of the evening, and all of Sunday morning’s program, focused on much lighter fare frequently featuring Fröst. There was Mozart’s Trio in E-flat Saturday evening followed the next day by two works written for Benny Goodman, Bartok’s Contrasts and Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Harp and Piano. All were well played and Fröst’s power as charmer and musician clearly affected the crowd. He sounds comfortable with Copland’s jazzy shadings as well as in the familiar Klezmer encores he repeated in Ojai. There was something rather light-weight about it all, though, on Sunday in particular, and the performers seemed ready to let their hair down. The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra players arrived in sun dresses and shorts for Grieg’s From Holberg’s Time: Suite in Olden Style. In the end, one of the bass players danced with his instrument downstage in a comical turn. Even Christianne Stotijn got in on the fun with a selection of Bolcom’s familiar Cabaret Songs with the support of Marc-André Hamelin. She seemed to be enjoying herself with songs like “Black Max” after so much Mahler and Wagner earlier in the weekend. It was an understandable morning of some levity, but after the previous night’s newer material, Sunday morning did find Fröst marking his time a bit. Stay tuned for a final report on the closing evening of the festival tomorrow.

Labels: Ojai festival 12

As the 2012 Ojai Festival moved into its second day, the order of business was the continued legacy of German Romanticism in the 20th Century and beyond. Granted this is not a revolutionary theme here or elsewhere for music audiences, but if you want to hear whining about some lost idealized free-spirited California hippie community past, read the Los Angeles Times. Those of us not gnashing our teeth have enjoyed three programs so far where the greatest of Lieder have served as a stepping off point for 20th-century and newer work. On Friday night, members of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra were joined by conductor, composer, and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw and soprano Lucy Shelton for that evening’s cornerstone performance, de Leeuw’s Im wundershonen Monat Mai. Yes, that is the same Lied that opens Schumann’s Dichterliebe and this is no off hand subtle reference. Instead, de Leeuw has crafted a large, almost 90 minute, song cycle out of Lieder not only from Schumann, but Schubert as well. But the guiding force here isn’t so much the long history of great Lied recitals as it is Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. The 21 songs in Im wundershonen Monat Mai are expanded and altered with edits both in the text and score. The piece begins in the dark with de Leeuw playing the opening bars of the first song as with any recital, but as Mr. Shelton entered, he was joined by the dozen or so strings and winds of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra whom he’d adapted parts for. This was not a radical reimagining of the music, and throughout the songs were recognizable and familiar with modernist touches here and there. The ordering and sampling of songs not only from Dichterliebe and Schubert’s Wintereisse allowed for some thematic changes with darker toned songs kept together and more sunny ones placed elsewhere often to more ironic effect.

But perhaps the most radical invention in de Leeuw’s new multi-part cycle was the elimination of the actual singing in favor of something closer to the acted Sprechgesang of Pierrot Luanire. Schumann and Schubert first and foremost were setting great poetry and de Leeuw wanted to capture the immediacy of that by enlisting an actress for the works premiere, the legendary Barbara Sukowa. (An early performance of de Leeuw with Sukowa and the Schonbert Ensemble has been filmed and is available on DVD.) Sukowa was originally announced to appear on this program in Ojai, but withdrew at the last minute to be replaced by American soprano Lucy Shelton. Though a professionally trained singer, Shelton is no light-weight at milking the dramatic potential out of texts and she threw herself into this rather last-minute assignment with abandon. However, while I greatly respected the project and performance, I must admit that it wasn’t necessarily all that engaging throughout. At times there was a dark, cabaret feel to the songs, and at others the music seemed to wander in no particular direction. Shelton relied on a score for the performance, understandably, given the circumstances. But I couldn’t help feeling there was something missing from these songs that were more orchestrated than their piano and voice versions but not necessarily more revealing than when they are well sung in their original context.

One of the new initiatives at this year’s festival besides the streaming webcasts of the performances the whole world can listen to, has been the addition of late night mini-concerts with the performers following the evening’s main program. On Friday night, Festival Music Director Leif Ove Andsnes returned with three pairings of quiet lullabies written by Bent Sørensen each played without pause with one of three other pieces- Busoni’s Berceuse élégiaque in the orchestrated version, Schnittke’s Piano Quintet, and Mahler’s Rückert Lieder. Christianne Stotijn returned as vocalist for the Mahler songs which served as the heart of the program. It was a beautiful, contained afterthought on the preceding evening. Each larger piece seemed to grow out of Sørensen’s quiet, child-like enducements to sleep with something decidedly more complicated and adult. Sleep becomes more complicated physically and metaphorically with age and these sly pairings hit nerves at every turn. Stotijn became most convincing at the end of the set with “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” where the overwhelming sense of letting go filled her voice, which displayed the most warmth.

She was just getting started, though, and by Saturday morning she had returned for more of the German Romanticism again paired with more recent works for contrast. Saturday morning’s program was all about the legacy of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. No actual music from that greatest of scores crept into the program, but it haunted everything, frequently in direct if unsustained quotations. The show started with Eivind Buene’s 2003 Langsam und Schmachtend which referenced much more than the musical notation for Tristan’s overture. Buene follows the inevitable and logical decomposition tethered together so precariously in that landmark piece of music and the brief piece had more a sense of inevitability than nostalgia. Stotijn performed Wagner’s Wesendock Lieder with support from the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra - each song intercut with a movement from Alban Berg’s Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano. Andsnes was joined by soloist Martin Fröst for these islands highlighting Berg’s debt to Wagner. Stotijn seemed more comfortable here than in the previous evenings with clearer phrasing and more even tone. She followed the Wagner with Berg’s Four Songs Op.2 accompanied by Marc-André Hamelin and sounded every inch a first rate Marie.

The morning concluded with a respite and a movement away from these later romantics by revisiting Andsnes’ current obsession and the forerunner of all that had gone before, Beethoven. He played the “Waldstein” Piano Sonata, which could not have sounded more polished or appropriate in the midday summer air of Ojai. All the world seemed to sing along with Beethoven, and Andsnes seemed to put a period on the music of the last 24 hours as if to say it’s time to move on. It wasn’t an evening and afternoon of breaking ground, but it was certainly one that revisited well known histories and linkages with lovely world class performances. It might not be scrappy and dangerous like some musical laboratory, but it was excellent playing from collaborative performers that engaged.

Labels: Ojai festival 12

The 2012 edition of the Ojai Music Festival, California’s biggest and most historic summer music gathering, got underway Thursday night with its trademark sense of adventure and community spirit. Ojai has always proved a beautiful setting for this festival dedicated to 20th-century and newer music. But this year, more than previous ones, the location makes all the difference for concerts that were concerned about geography and place. The opening programs on Thursday prominently featured works by the Alaskan-based composer John Luther Adams, an artist who is perhaps as influenced by geography and his natural surroundings as any composer can be. One could cast him as a sort of musical Robert Smithson, turning landscapes into art. And if that albeit insufficient comparison catches your fancy, Inuksuit, Adams’ 80-minute work for percussion ensemble, could well be his own personal Spiral Jetty. The piece, which was designed to be played outdoors, opened the festival on a late sunny California afternoon in its West Coast Premiere where it occupied the expanse of Ojai’s Libbey Park. Inuksuit takes its name from stacked stone structures built by Inuit peoples in the empty expanse of the Alaskan countryside as route markers. Literally translated it means “to act in the capacity of the human” and it is this idea of human interaction with a expansive and overwhelming geography that forms the basis for the piece. All music is about space, but Adams’ music, and Inuksuit in particular, takes on real spaces in a more direct way. This isn’t about examining the sound and silence within a concert hall. It’s about a physical place and the sound that place makes integrating into a larger musical text.

The piece which was directed by Steven Schick, began with 48 musicians, all percussionists with three piccolo players, gathered in a small circle in the park. Slowly, quietly, many began to blow through paper megaphones creating the sound of a gentle wind that barely stood out against the day-to-day sounds of children playing, birds, and other inhabitants of the park including the sizeable audience. Soon, the players began to swing plastic tubes and rattles and slowly disperse, step by step across the expanse of the park. Eventually, they reached widely dispersed stations with all variety of drums, gongs, conch shells, air raid sirens and any number of devices. The crowd, initially clustered around the center of the park, almost jostled against the dispersing players. But soon, the audience was surrounded and left to move, sit, wander, and do whatever else they pleased. The music built at first with the call of blown conch shells and cymbals as if the musicians were crying out to one another on each side of the park. The music then transitioned into a middle section dominated by gongs and drums. No matter where one wandered or which corner of the park one stood in, the majority of the sound was reaching out from elsewhere across the distance. The sounds of the park slowly were drowned out and each percussionist stood as if holding their own court with a sub-audience while communicating at a distance with their fellow musicians. In the climax, sirens were heard and the sound crashed in waves on close and distant shores. Finally, high metal sounds- triangles and xylophones- dominated. Three piccolo players, all stationed in trees above the park called out like birds to the tinkling of some coming night. The sounds of the world slowly rose again to prominence as the percussion faded away like the end of a dream or waking. It was a beautiful mysterious moment and something like a miracle.

Hours later, the festival presented the first of the regular staged concerts of this year’s festival which has been organized by pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. But before Andsnes made his own appearance on stage, an important connection was made with the prior overwhelming musical experience. Schick came to the stage for a duo with the festival’s other major pianist this year, Marc-André Hamelin to perform John Luther Adams’ Red Arc/Blue Veil. This decidedly shorter piece is deeply rooted in musical color as the title suggests and pairs the single arc of the piano and percussion's rise and fall together with processed sound in a wash of multiple, complex layers. As my friend Ben remarked, it’s the kind of thing you could listen to all day, though it feels like it disappears all to quickly. After this, Andsnes appeared with mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotjin for her first appearance of several at the festival for Shostakovich’s Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva. Shostakovich has a way of changing the mood of an evening suddenly and dramatically, and this work from late in the composers life was no exception. The sparsely scored piano part heightens the burning, passionate content of these pieces. Stotjin’s Russian was good and her voice secure and nuanced. But I couldn’t help feel that hearing these songs outdoors under the requisite amplification of the setting didn’t strip something from them.

To close the evening, Hamelin returned with Ives’ “Concord” Piano Sonata No. 2. It’s a piece familiar to Ojai audiences and it was presented (as it usually is) to highlight an independent American spirit composers to this day strive to lay claim to. The best of them, like John Luther Adams, have no trouble doing so, and the particulars of an early 20th-century New England are just as important to Ives here as the Alaskan expanse is to Adams. Hamelin gave a wonderful, richly warm and almost Romantic performance of the work. Ives’ asides into popular music genres in the piece came off as dreams as distant as the wailing conch shells from the other hill in Inuksuit. The performance couldn’t have been more well-suited for the evening and it reinforced Hamelin’s reputation as one of the greatest pianists around, and one I'd argue is still underrated. Best of all, he and all the artists mentioned above are just getting started this beautiful Ojai Valley weekend.

Labels: Ojai festival 12