By Leslie Kandell
MusicalAmerica.com
August 17, 2009
LENOX, Mass. – Some of its sonorities are far from festive, but Tanglewood's annual Festival of Contemporary Music remains no less of a sumptuous luxury. After intensive rehearsals most orchestras can only dream of affording, promising professionals in their 20s – fellows, as they are called -- perform five-days’ worth of recent and new chamber and orchestral works with stunning assurance.
Stuffed around the Boston Symphony's weekend performance schedule in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, new music concerts -- seven this year -- draw distinguished senior composers, aspiring younger ones, wary critics, the determined faithful with season passes and perplexed tourists who stroll into the wrong hall and soon tiptoe out.
This year's festival director and curator, composer Augusta Read Thomas, was a quiet presence in firm control of the event's musical style and concert proportions. None of the compositions were hers (unusually modest for festival directors) or her husband's (Bernard Rands, who was in attendance). Her choices, four of which were premieres commissioned in partnership with Tanglewood, leaned on traditional performance manner -- no onstage pizza deliveries, late-night movies or horn players vanishing into the woods.
With one exception: the full-orchestra "Inguesu, Symphonic Poem," Enrico Chapela's fun and fiery account of a soccer game in which his native Mexico (assigned to winds, with strings as the fans) beat mighty Brazil (brass flourishes turning to losers' low burps). The lithe Hungarian conducting fellow, Gergely Madaras, as referee with whistle and penalty card, threw the sullen trombonist out of the game and he slunk offstage.
The word "contemporary" had teeth this year: most of the music was from the last decade and all 38 composers are alive, including, and most definitely, Elliott Carter. The centenarian, a festival regular, stood for a bow after the premiere of his typically brainiac nine-song cycle, "Poems of Louis Zukofsky," with faculty soprano Lucy Shelton and Boston Symphony clarinetist Thomas Martin, formidable artists. The poetry was not obvious, the range and vocal angles were large, but the burbling clarinet offered helpful comment, reflection and punctuation.
Other premieres included an appealing string quartet by composition fellow Cynthia Lee Wong -- a reminder of the importance of this festival. Traditionally and tonally cast, it carefully pushes envelopes with its tempos and motifs. More hearings would be welcome. Jacob Bancks's "Rapid Transit," for oboe, trumpet, trombone, bassoon and percussion, promised more than it delivered. First languid, then motoric, it invites comparison with John Adams' "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." At least it was short.
Scottish composer Helen Grime's Clarinet Concerto -- austere, with jumpy figures and held high notes -- is a less easy listen, though keen-eared musicians get it: Oliver Knussen, a former director of this festival, has conducted Grime's work, and Pierre Boulez (who along with Knussen had recent works performed) will do so next spring.
Ghosts habitually hang around the festival's two one thousand-seat halls: the dark old Theater-Concert Hall and the inviting Seiji Ozawa Hall: this year's ghosts were Lukas Foss and George Perle, Tanglewood denizens and teachers who died last winter. Their pieces were not performed by the fellows, but the Boston Symphony bravely absorbed box-office woes (which its spokesmen would not discuss) by opening a Sunday concert with Perle's 1990 "Sinfonietta II."
Perle complained in a 1983 interview that he didn't like musicologists calling his style "accessible." It wasn't then, but in context of today's new music, it sounds elegant. Spare, short-breathed string phrases govern a large orchestra whose instruments, from lightly struck timpani to glittering vibraphones, emerge in solo settings. (The Perle was immediately followed by two pieces with Yo-Yo Ma as cello soloist, in the vain hope that everyone would come to hear Yo-Yo.) Foss's chamber works have been being performed in Prelude concerts throughout the Tanglewood season.
The festival never lacks for memorials or family-inspired pieces. Knussen's well-shaped "Requiem -- Songs for Sue," in memory of his wife, is a softly orchestrated, gently moving cycle for soprano and 15 players, with poetry in three languages. Aaron Jay Kernis, in writing a memorial for his father, realized that he had been "implicitly marked" by his father's jazz and pop favorites.
John Corigliano's "Snapshot: Circa 1909" is a piece d'occasion, filling a request to 15 composers for a miniature string quartet inspired by photos of their choice. His is of his uncle holding a guitar, while his eight-year-old father, who would one day be concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, stares at his violin with total absorption. Corigliano knows how to do what is asked, and this trifle evokes nostalgia through old-fashioned mode and song style. Paula Matthusen's poignant "of memory and minutiae," for soprano, cello and electronics, depicted, by the slow dissolution of a prayer, her religious Norwegian grandmother's descent into Alzheimer's disease.
Tuesday's closing event, which would have been better positioned to precede Monday's rousing orchestral evening, was a recital by the British pianist Nicolas Hodges. That he can master bravura selections of great keyboard range by Boulez and Dutilleux (from the 20th century), Rzewski, Hans Thomalla and Michael Finnissy (more recent) is flat-out amazing, and the gleaming Steinway stoically received it all, even the pounding and knocks of Rzewski's "Nanosonatas."
Hodges will never get rich by performing this repertory, nor will any institution that presents it, but the surprisingly elderly audience was glad for this dazzling, if comparatively anticlimactic, example of what makes this Festival of Contemporary Music such a luxury.
MusicalAmerica.com
August 17, 2009
LENOX, Mass. – Some of its sonorities are far from festive, but Tanglewood's annual Festival of Contemporary Music remains no less of a sumptuous luxury. After intensive rehearsals most orchestras can only dream of affording, promising professionals in their 20s – fellows, as they are called -- perform five-days’ worth of recent and new chamber and orchestral works with stunning assurance.
Stuffed around the Boston Symphony's weekend performance schedule in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, new music concerts -- seven this year -- draw distinguished senior composers, aspiring younger ones, wary critics, the determined faithful with season passes and perplexed tourists who stroll into the wrong hall and soon tiptoe out.
This year's festival director and curator, composer Augusta Read Thomas, was a quiet presence in firm control of the event's musical style and concert proportions. None of the compositions were hers (unusually modest for festival directors) or her husband's (Bernard Rands, who was in attendance). Her choices, four of which were premieres commissioned in partnership with Tanglewood, leaned on traditional performance manner -- no onstage pizza deliveries, late-night movies or horn players vanishing into the woods.
With one exception: the full-orchestra "Inguesu, Symphonic Poem," Enrico Chapela's fun and fiery account of a soccer game in which his native Mexico (assigned to winds, with strings as the fans) beat mighty Brazil (brass flourishes turning to losers' low burps). The lithe Hungarian conducting fellow, Gergely Madaras, as referee with whistle and penalty card, threw the sullen trombonist out of the game and he slunk offstage.
The word "contemporary" had teeth this year: most of the music was from the last decade and all 38 composers are alive, including, and most definitely, Elliott Carter. The centenarian, a festival regular, stood for a bow after the premiere of his typically brainiac nine-song cycle, "Poems of Louis Zukofsky," with faculty soprano Lucy Shelton and Boston Symphony clarinetist Thomas Martin, formidable artists. The poetry was not obvious, the range and vocal angles were large, but the burbling clarinet offered helpful comment, reflection and punctuation.
Other premieres included an appealing string quartet by composition fellow Cynthia Lee Wong -- a reminder of the importance of this festival. Traditionally and tonally cast, it carefully pushes envelopes with its tempos and motifs. More hearings would be welcome. Jacob Bancks's "Rapid Transit," for oboe, trumpet, trombone, bassoon and percussion, promised more than it delivered. First languid, then motoric, it invites comparison with John Adams' "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." At least it was short.
Scottish composer Helen Grime's Clarinet Concerto -- austere, with jumpy figures and held high notes -- is a less easy listen, though keen-eared musicians get it: Oliver Knussen, a former director of this festival, has conducted Grime's work, and Pierre Boulez (who along with Knussen had recent works performed) will do so next spring.
Ghosts habitually hang around the festival's two one thousand-seat halls: the dark old Theater-Concert Hall and the inviting Seiji Ozawa Hall: this year's ghosts were Lukas Foss and George Perle, Tanglewood denizens and teachers who died last winter. Their pieces were not performed by the fellows, but the Boston Symphony bravely absorbed box-office woes (which its spokesmen would not discuss) by opening a Sunday concert with Perle's 1990 "Sinfonietta II."
Perle complained in a 1983 interview that he didn't like musicologists calling his style "accessible." It wasn't then, but in context of today's new music, it sounds elegant. Spare, short-breathed string phrases govern a large orchestra whose instruments, from lightly struck timpani to glittering vibraphones, emerge in solo settings. (The Perle was immediately followed by two pieces with Yo-Yo Ma as cello soloist, in the vain hope that everyone would come to hear Yo-Yo.) Foss's chamber works have been being performed in Prelude concerts throughout the Tanglewood season.
The festival never lacks for memorials or family-inspired pieces. Knussen's well-shaped "Requiem -- Songs for Sue," in memory of his wife, is a softly orchestrated, gently moving cycle for soprano and 15 players, with poetry in three languages. Aaron Jay Kernis, in writing a memorial for his father, realized that he had been "implicitly marked" by his father's jazz and pop favorites.
John Corigliano's "Snapshot: Circa 1909" is a piece d'occasion, filling a request to 15 composers for a miniature string quartet inspired by photos of their choice. His is of his uncle holding a guitar, while his eight-year-old father, who would one day be concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, stares at his violin with total absorption. Corigliano knows how to do what is asked, and this trifle evokes nostalgia through old-fashioned mode and song style. Paula Matthusen's poignant "of memory and minutiae," for soprano, cello and electronics, depicted, by the slow dissolution of a prayer, her religious Norwegian grandmother's descent into Alzheimer's disease.
Tuesday's closing event, which would have been better positioned to precede Monday's rousing orchestral evening, was a recital by the British pianist Nicolas Hodges. That he can master bravura selections of great keyboard range by Boulez and Dutilleux (from the 20th century), Rzewski, Hans Thomalla and Michael Finnissy (more recent) is flat-out amazing, and the gleaming Steinway stoically received it all, even the pounding and knocks of Rzewski's "Nanosonatas."
Hodges will never get rich by performing this repertory, nor will any institution that presents it, but the surprisingly elderly audience was glad for this dazzling, if comparatively anticlimactic, example of what makes this Festival of Contemporary Music such a luxury.
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