Daniel has vanished. In early July he moved into the small gray and green house across the lane, which had belonged to the poet Amy Clampitt. In her memory, her late husband established a fund, in the mid 1990s, to sponsor a nominated poet to work in it for six months or a year.
Daniel is middle-aged, with dark hair and a short white beard. He's from South Carolina, he may have said near Myrtle Beach. I don't remember anything much, including his last name, because I thought I'd have all summer to get to know him. It's not Danielpour or Hasselhoff, but one of those types. Hollenbeck maybe. He was nominated for this residency by the previous poet.
His plan was to first read The Brothers Karamazov. His front door was always halfway open, and there was a lamp near it. I imagined him reading, and promised myself to get back to that book someday. I looked forward to hearing what he thought. I considered dropping a favorite poem at his door, but decided it was pushy.
Our most substantive interaction was on garbage day during a power outtage, when I couldn't get the garage door open and asked him if we could dump our garbage in his cans. He was very nice about it. His car was always in front of his garage, with a sun paper on it.
Friday he was gone. No car and the door was closed. I thought he'd taken a little trip, or perhaps gone home to see his family briefly. He looked like a family man.
The giveaway was when two cleaners showed up the next day. Since then, the house has been still. Where'd he go? Did he need help? I would have helped. Like, what a great thing to live near a poet. Did he finish the book? Decide he couldn't write poetry?
I have to stop doing this and look him up. Hope I don't find him because I'll be tempted to call, and that won't do.
I wanted to start by saying that I hadn't pilfered anything since the time I walked off with a pumpkin because the cashiers were too busy to take my money.
But thinking closely, I say, shamefacedly, that on occasion I do a little of this, a little of that. It may be anger-driven.
In this surreal time, in the beautiful breezy twilight, I was out for a stroll, shortly before the curfew, imposed on my city to quiet potentially riotous mobs. My head reeled with news of looting, throwing, cops, shouting, riot gear, bottles, horses, fights, arrests, lies.
The setup: first grocery store I stopped at was already closed and darkened, plastic covers in place, last of the staff slipping out. Quick, to the other store. It was lighted, shoppers visible, but the keepaway guy wouldn't let anyone in because they were trying to close, and really, who could blame them. He was uninterested in my claim to be a wandering ancient.
Outside was an array of fruits, but also fresh flowers. (I know what's fresh and can see when the flower man has been there.) I walked over to the buckets and lifted out three pink peonies, just opening, and a sumptuous bunch of lilacs. Really, if by tomorrow they weren't wilted from lying there ignored all night, they'd be bought up before I could get back to the store. I scurried to the entrance waving the two bunches and shouting for the keepaway, who had disappeared inside.
The rest happened in the blink of an eye: "Looting, looting," I hollered. No one came. I turned and headed home, a spring in my determined step. Now my (MY) lilacs and peonies are trimmed, fed, in water, gratefully fragrant in a fat vase, and in this strange world where rules are crumbling, I am no more than sheepish. I turned on the news.
But in fact, I did snip the price tags off the flowers and go back with them the next day. As I explained what they were the cashier stared incredulously at them and me. She conferred with other cashiers (maybe in Haitian) and the manager before swiping them. They turned to stare at me, laughing. Guess this was a first, but now I am free to purloin again one day.
Ellen Reid, right, accepts applause after the world premiere of her new work by the New York Philharmonic. (Photos by Chris Lee)
By Leslie Kandell
NEW YORK – The New York Philharmonic concert on Feb. 20 was, if not upside-down, contemporary in more ways than one. A world premiere by Ellen Reid was followed by Renée Fleming performing songs by the Swedish composer Anders Hillborg and by the Icelandic entertainer Björk. The unlikely second half was Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, known as the Romantic. This odd mix made quite the showcase for music director Jaap van Zweden.
Judging from the empty seats in Geffen Hall after intermission, listeners came for the new work, or for the renowned soprano trying out Björk. Then they took a pass on the symphony, which in former days was what they would have come out to hear.
Spoken introductions forced the Reid and the Björk into a context of current reality. Reid’s 10-minute When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist is one of 19 Philharmonic commissions from women for Project 19, a nod to the centenary of the 19th amendment, which gave women the vote. Reid was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for p r i s m, an opera for two singers and four dancers, and has been visible ever since, in chamber music, art, and film.
Before the performance, she described “tracing a new, dizzying feeling, good and bad,” and suggested that recent world events have given the audience similar feelings of being unmoored. (There was a ripple of assent.) And Fleming, before singing Björk’s “Virus” (“I feast inside you”), took a microphone and reminded listeners that this selection had been planned long before the frightening coronavirus outbreak.
Renée Fleming performing with the Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden.
When the World… is a sympathetic piece, reaching out for understanding rather than making an off-putting statement. It begins with high percussion, closely woven and jingling, before becoming string-heavy and clinky. Off to one side, Eliza Bagg, Martha Cluver, and Esteli Gomez moan in harmony. (These sopranos come from Roomful of Teeth, the choral octet that brought forth Caroline Shaw, who has also been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and a Project 19 commission, to be heard later.)
The orchestra, building, pounds and gallops on, with bass drum, to wordless wailing; clots of brass shoot out. An isolated flute takes over, joined by cymbals and other instruments. The piece calms down, all play lyrically and dwindle off. So we’ll be okay, maybe.
Fleming’s Björk songs were preceded by two Hillborg Strand Settings, composed for her. They are from the Canadian-American poet Mark Strand’s 45-poem cycle, and had their premiere in 2013 with the Philharmonic under Alan Gilbert. So they were familiar sledding to Fleming. (Words appeared on a surtitle screen, though Fleming’s diction is chiseled and fabulous.)
“Dark Harbor XXXV” evokes the words, “Kisses are the subject” in rushing sounds, plucked and swizzling strings, and cymbals. The vaguely lyrical voice line has huge intervals – a couple of them, like “the mascara of Eden,” too high for her, but so what? “Dark Harbor XI” is in a Samuel Barber mode – Knoxville: Summer of 1915 or “Sure On This Shining Night” – brought out in phrases like “overflowing of mildness” and “Of our freedom while still the captives of dark.” The poem’s last verse calls up “terrible omens of the end,” which Reid also worries about.
Van Zweden ended the program with Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony.
Björk, the Icelandic singer/songwriter, ranges over musical borders in her eclectic style, drawing on influences and genres from – in part – electronic, pop, classical, and avant-garde. Fleming’s two choices are art song, original and pleasurable: “my host is you…My sweet adversary, oooh oooh” is easy to hum after the concert. Fleming has been dipping into jazz since her Potsdam college days hanging out in Alger’s Pub. It’s probably harder than it looks to get the “I’ll have what she’s having” effect, but Fleming is a stylish champion. Björk’s version is on YouTube.
About face to the 67-minute Bruckner on the concert’s plump second half. A famous Wagner acolyte, Bruckner knew a thing or two about brass. The symphony has plenty of tunes loud enough to impress, and ample fat-bottom passages. (The orchestra’s principal horn position hasn’t been filled yet, and a couple of brass mishaps were surely attended to in the two repeat concerts.) Van Zweden, to quote Scripture, showed strength with his arm, and in the second movement drew smooth, rich, delicious sound. This is, of course, one of the great orchestras.
Leslie Kandell has contributed to The New York Times, Musical America, Musical America Directory, and The Berkshire Eagle.
This article doesn't have New York Times font, because I don't know how to scan the original in, but this is the text.
A remembrance:
Articles about Peter Serkin often mention his satisfying present life, now that he is acknowledged as a pianist unsurpassed in the wide-ranging repertory he embraces, and is happily married with a houseful of children.
His search for serenity, and the need to search, date to his boyhood. His father, the revered pianist Rudolf Serkin, was a legendary interpreter of the traditional literature. Serkin naturally wanted to guide his prodigiously gifted son, who made his concert debut at age 12, to practice this way, not that way, and to listen to this music, not that.
But the precocious youngster was curious about new works, and drawn to sounds of Asian and American music. For him, knowing how to play piano was a way into that world where the answers were, or the questions. It is easy to see him feeling torn and criticized, especially as a teenager at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where his father was among his eminent teachers.
Small wonder that in the dashiki-and-beads hippie culture of the 60's, he would turn on and drop out, till he understood he was too good to run away from himself any more, and that he had better come back from Mexico and be the superb pianist he already was.
The curiosity never left him, though he shies away from discussing it. Now a renowned, idiosyncratic artist of 51, Mr. Serkin can now look back as well as forward in study and performance. He pulls neglected concertos out of the closet, and is a persuasive proponent of new and difficult music.
Responsibly commissioning and championing contemporary works, he is also devoted to the heart of darkness--standard German works--and even picks up a few passage notes in Brahms that his father might have dropped. He has recorded the Bach Inventions and the enigmatic Duets, (for BMG) and going Glenn Gould one better, recorded the Goldberg Variations three times.
Mr. Serkin’s recitals compel a focused quiet that is almost Asian. His best interpretations are strikingly pristine, as if an immense intellect were illuminating notes from the bottom. With his hands, he creates a visible, quixotic vibrato, which he says continues the tone. To say he is lost in his playing does not give the right image. He is found in it.
He once put together an entire concert of commissioned works, which he now drops one by one, like depth charges, into his programs of traditional music. And some of the concertos he totes around are like large species found only in the Galapagos: Reger, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Stravinsky. He approaches them as meaty chamber works, rather than with external Teutonic force.
The span of his journey is reflected in this afternoon’s solo recital, to inaugurate a Classical-Music-In-The-Schools program in Greenport, where his brother and sister have homes. The recital, virtually sold out at press time, includes Mozart and Beethoven, (Classical masters) Chopin and Debussy and Messiaen (tracing French pianism) Schoenberg, from the Second Viennese School, and two of his musical descendents, György Kurtág and George Benjamin.
Though he is friendly or perhaps has family history with many composers whose work he performs, Mr. Serkin has not met Mr. Kurtag, an eccentric Hungarian who composes small, even fragmented pieces that are sometimes grouped together by his colleagues. From his “Games,” Mr. Serkin chose two he describes as extremely short and playful, about a minute long.
Mr. Benjamin’s short “Meditation on the Name of Haydn” is built on connections between notes and letters of Haydn’s name. Mr. Serkin has met the composer and sympathizes with his burden of having been a favorite pupil of Messiaen, whose stunning works Mr. Serkin performs with some frequency, considering how complex and difficult they are.
One composer visiting Tanglewood, where Mr. Serkin teaches in the summer, directed that her string quartet be performed the way Beethoven is played. “That’s not necessarily conceited, as long as one’s Beethoven is bold enough,” Mr. Serkin said in an interview there last year. “Schoenberg for some of us is like Beethoven, and he asked for his music to be played like Schubert. It’s the sense of treating it with the same respect and care.”
Some years ago, an eminent composer said that if audiences “won’t listen to Bartok, they have no right to listen to Beethoven.” “I’m not quite as doctrinaire as that,” Mr. Serkin said. “It’s only natural to be interested in music of our own time, music written now. But I’d never insist on a quota--it implies that it’s something unpleasant to be somehow swallowed. It’s a natural continuity from the boldness of older music. Beethoven was shunned as being crazy, and Bach was threatened for his wild improvisations. One can still be in touch with it. Conversely, the music of today requires a relatively spontaneous, open mind.”
Mr. Serkin’s biggest concern about performing new commissions is that he won’t see the music in time to learn it for the concert. Aside from that, he said, “I can’t account for players who avoid new music. I think people are hungry for it. I suspect that the public has a more open mind than it is generally credited with. All one can do is follow one’s own path.”
Marmee here is Laura Dern, to her right is Jo, Saoirsce (or something) Ronan
Most women born before 1950 have read "Little Women," and seen at least one movie version. Now out comes a new one, and a bunch of guys write reviews saying it's wonderful. I should have been more suspicious. (Saw one review by a woman, but its first sentence was so long that quoting it here might lead to plagiarism charges. Maybe if they fired the copy editor...)
It's a wonderful, heartening story that doesn't have to be retold here to any woman. And when you think of when it was written, and how extraordinary that feat would be for a female, who had to beat back a culture we're still pushing at. The guys, who are just finding it, have nothing to compare it to, and don't relate to the norms ("a woman in fiction must end up married or dead") so they score it high.
And it does deserve high marks for color, costumes, decor, sweet acting, lovely scenery, and making it again. I hope it gets nominated for some of these.
But, boys and girls: what they did to the plot was, they threw the book at the ceiling, it fell down splat, and they picked up the pages and put them in any old order. Oh, you can figure it out, ladies, because you know the story, but you have this extra job of identifying whether it's the middle (where it begins) or the ending, or the early days. Or for heaven's sake, book two, which Alcott didn't even want to write.
It switches around ceaselessly, doesn't make enough of Meryl Streep as the fearsome Aunt March, turns the Professor into some kind of youthful attractive Arab, and instead of the love scene with Jo that the publisher wanted, under the umbrella, all the sisters tell Jo that they've noticed she loves him, so they all chase him down to the train station.
And the end is somewhere in "Jo's Boys," where the school is already under way, and in the middle of joyous chaos, Jo cooks a birthday cake for Marmee.
OK, I did this, now I feel somewhat better. Managed to get the photo up, now will try to get link online.
Arrived at bus stop just as bus was leaving: doors were closed. I knocked, but she didn't open them. She saw me, my yellow jacket and white hair. The light turned red. She was stuck. I continued to knock and implore her to let me on. (At that hour--evening--and that place-midtown--5's come rarely.) She resolutely refused to open the door.
But mercifully, a #7 crawled up behind her. "Aha," thought I, "I'll take the 7 to 66th and change for the subway or the 104, since the 5 will have already passed that stop."
I stopped knocking on the 5 and ran for the 7. Its driver, who had seen what happened, let me on without paying. Another old woman got on too and we sat together. She commented on the nasty 5 driver.
We got out at 66th and she said, "The 5 hasn't come yet." She knew this, she said, because she had asked the 7 driver to pass the 5 if he could, because she needed to catch it, and he had done so.
When the 5 shambled up, I told my new friend, whom I would never see again, that I was not going to pay the fare, and to watch out, clear the decks for trouble. We got on, I made no effort to pay, and the driver said nothing. She figured I'd either paid my small senior fare to the 7 driver and all she'd get was a free transfer, or else, she figured she bett' not mess with the old bat in the yellow jacket, because from that you could lose 20 minutes.
My lady and I sat together, and she was impressed with my strategy, and I was impressed with hers.
So I made the whole trip home without paying a fare and felt obscenely good.
New York is a city of drama. If you look at it right, every day is full of tiny adventures and celebrations.
It’s not fair to say that the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were peeking at each other’s season-opening plans, but for sure there were strange and wonderful program similarities.
Both orchestras have moved beyond the days when slightly tipsy donors—mostly non-musicians—dozed though excerpts from “Fledermaus” and maybe “West Side Story.” The Philharmonic, Sept. 19, and the BSO the following evening, both led by their music directors, performed bold and risky programs, with a world premiere plus works from the 20th century.
As opposed to being a one-off—effectively preceding the season—these concerts were repeated the following nights, as part of the regular programming. Jaap van Zweden at the Phil in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, and Andris Nelsons at the BSO in Symphony Hall, led with firm control, and one sensed their commitment to the material.
The classy Phil program had two Shakespeare settings, from “King Lear” and “Romeo and Juliet.” Introduced at this event, and opening it, which is to say, following a stirring version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was a Philip Glass overture to “King Lear”—not related to his score for the recent Broadway show, but part of an opera in the nether regions of the 82-year-old Glass’s vision.
The ten-minute piece was not about Lear, of course, but about Glass, with all his percussive trademarks: timpani, triangle, woodblock, castanets, anvil, shaker, suspended cymbal, tambourine, tom-toms, snare drum, tenor drum, bass drum, orchestra bells, xylophone and vibraphone.
Scales in this work were essentially in minor key, with steely, steady or calypso bass beat. Along with rich keyboard-and-string arpeggios were loud, sour moments, and maddeningly pedestrian phrases. You either love Glass or hate him: chances are you’re not vacillating. I am at a loss to explain my attraction to all this, but heaven knows I’m not alone. Steve Reich and Julia Wolfe, founders of the Bang on a Can contemporary ensemble, were among luminary Glass colleagues in the large audience, which sprang to its feet cheering as Glass was brought on stage for a bow. photo: Chris Lee Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” had nice touches. One was coincidental: the 1948 premiere had been performed by Koussevitzky and the BSO. The poignant setting is of a haunting, nostalgic prose poem by James Agee. To please the wider crowd, they brought in the lovely soprano Kelli O’Hara, loved for leading roles in top Broadway musicals. Sweet to look at, she has fine technique, and thanks to words on a big screen, was easy to understand. But as the critic David Wright trenchantly observed: “In an effort to sound ‘classical,’ she seemed to abandon her theatrical strengths for a singing style in which she had less to offer.” Her singing was a little thin, and high notes were not uniformly on key. Well, it’s good to hear this piece again, and hard to resist smiling gently.
Van Zweden’s selections from Prokofiev’s two “Romeo and Juliet” ballet suites were the orchestra’s chance to shine—or not so much, as it happened. A few brass clams and a number of ragged entrances marred his solid, experienced reading. It’s a good bet that the three ensuing performances went better.
In Boston, Nelsons has the inestimable advantage of working with Artistic Administrator Anthony Fogg, who is developing the earmarks of National Treasure. Nelsons has come along so well—his beat size, strength, brass sympathies, repertory choices—that a minority view (adherents of the Devil, no doubt) is that Fogg had a hand in creating him. Fogg loved working with James Levine too, but nobody else could create Levine, ever. The concert opened with Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and before intermission moved to Beethoven’s Fantasia for Piano, chorus and orchestra. The musical reason for this apparent non-sequitur is that after intermission, the new Concerto for Orchestra by Eric Nathan was followed by the Poulenc “Gloria,” a matching choral work. Most of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which sang smooth if not exciting interpretations of both, sat on stage for the entire concert.
Generally, Boston’s opening night looked different from New York’s, which treated it as something of a gala: pre-concert receptions, and dressing, if not to the nines, to at least the sixes. In Boston, concertmaster Malcolm Lowe, has retired and the first associate was not even present. It was weeknight crowd and dress, little festive re-uning, and no anticipation on the order of the Charles Ives song, “We’re sitting in the opera house.” No fear of premature shouts or applause.
The Poulenc concerto was performed with suave skill and exquisite togetherness by the young Dutch brothers Lucas and Arthur Jussen, in their BSO debut. Arthur then played the Beethoven in similar style, and solos were sung by recent alumni of the orchestra’s Tanglewood Music Center. It received the evening’s largest ovation. Eric Nathan, who has had a previous BSO commission (“Timbered Bells,” for brass) is a Tanglewood alumnus too, as well as a winner of the Rome Prize. His 18-minute Concerto for Orchestra, in three connected movements, is a perhaps-hopeful nod to Bartok’s famous piece of the same title, also commissioned and introduced by the BSO. It’s loud, tonal, and not hard to take, sporting—as the title suggests—showy writing for different instrumental sections. A couple of flubs in a first hearing are not worth mentioning. There were two more chances.
photo: Winslow Townson
Concluding the concert was the Poulenc “Gloria,” with soprano Nicole Cabell, who gave a sober, focused performance—and the attentive chorus. The BSO had given the world premiere of this also, under Charles Munch. It is veritable Poulenc, with seconds in the chords, nasal point, and smelly scales. Appropriate and balanced but not wild or heart-tugging, it spans a range of moods. The joyous “Laudamus Te” is not at the end, but it bounced around in the memory after the satisfying program had ended.
After Conrad Tao played the Ravel piano concerto at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he stripped off his shirt, and in his black t-shirt, played Elliott Carter's 2006 "Catenaires," yelling to the audience that Carter had composed it when he was 98.
This link is to Pierre-Laurent Aimard, but Tao's edgy runthrough showed the progression from Ravel's wild virtuosity. It was short and smart, and the audience loved it.
Tanglewood’s five-day Festival of Contemporary Music had an added physical dimension this year. Talks and some chamber music took place in the newly-opened, elegant little Linde Center across the lawn from Seiji Ozawa Hall—where chamber and orchestral concerts have been performed since it opened in 1994. William Rawn, architect of both, has feeling for wood, glass and clean lines, and how they fit in the landscape.
Contemporary selections, stretching back to the second half of the 20th century, were performed with skill and heart―ask anyone―by fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center. They had little to do with the standard repertory played in the Koussevitzky Music Shed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose members, in the Berkshires for the summer, coach the fellows. (Sunday’s BSO shed program managed Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England before reverting to a Beethoven concerto and a symphony.)
But Sunday’s BSO conductor, the triple-threat British composer and pianist Thomas Adès, in his third year as BSO Artistic Partner, and second as director of the Festival of Contemporary Music, seemed to be everywhere.
Probably because Adès is British, we heard numerous pieces by British composers he is familiar with, and saw young British conductors he has seen, and British accents were heard on the lawn outside Ozawa Hall during intermissions.
FCM opened August 8th in Ozawa Hall, on the Highwood section of the property. The concert’s single work was the American premiere of The Cricket Recovers, a 75-minute chamber opera from 2005 by Richard Ayres, a Netherlands-based Englishman. Coached by Dawn Upshaw and Alan Smith, who head Tanglewood’s vocal activities program, and led with comfortable assurance by Adès, it was minimally but cleverly staged, and the voices were dazzling.
Players sat in the center of the stage, and singers stood behind music stands across the front, holding up cards (which they changed) with a one-word ID―their character’s name, the weather, the season. They wore ears or hair to suggest what animal they were.
Eric Carey Nathaniel Sullivan Walter Aldrich (Hilary Scott photo)
Ensemble instruments played the cheery, buggy, diatonic score. Cricket (Robin Steitz) is sweet but feeling sad and gloomy. She wears a gray shawl to represent her depression. Each insect and forest buddy tries to cheer her up―with first-class voices. The elephant, a lithe baritone, Nathaniel Sullivan, with big ears and a trunk, is also disconsolate, because he wants to climb a tree. The baritone gallworm, Walter Aldrich, is gloomy, but loud and nasty, with a paper megaphone.
Eventually the spring sun comes out, which makes Cricket feel better and cast off her shawl. (And the elephant happily gets up a very small tree.) They all give Cricket a party, wriggling in dance behind their stage-front music stands. Do we assume Cricket has had seasonal affective disorder?
At a certain point, an intrusive thought wedged into a listener’s mind: Who is this composed for? Not for children―at least there were none in the audience. Not for grownups, because the reason for Cricket’s misery is never articulated.
So we have cute pleasing music which might work well without voices, marvelous singing with spot-on intonation and coloratura, clever staging doing the most with practically nothing, and still, there’s a big hole in the premise. Oliver Knussen did this better, Ravel, Adès has―though not Lukas Foss, whose Griffelkin flopped here in 1956. These student fellows will always remember how hard they worked. What else will they take from the experience?
Weekend concerts and talks were, in large part, in Studio E of the Linde Center. This room has wondrously enhanced natural light, views of the outside―people squint into the room and then stroll toward the pleasant cafe―and a good seating rake. It’s more institutional than Ozawa Hall, but it will likely blend in as time passes.
It was filled for Sunday afternoon’s showing of old silent film clips, scored by this summer’s composing fellows. We’re talking Buster Keaton excerpts, Fritz Lang’s harrowing “Metropolis” and more. Instrumentalists with various conductors played beneath the screen. What a great idea, head of composition Michael Gandolfi! And what talented composers, to look at these old clips and set them to new music. (Little joke: Keaton escapes foes in a dress, to the score of “Pretty Woman.”)
For every year’s final FCM concert, a huge orchestra traditionally stuffs onto the Ozawa Hall stage. Everyone’s in for this. Monday’s program had four fat pieces.
In Gerald Barry’s 2017 Canada for tenor and orchestra, Troy native and Bach specialist Charles Blandy was the guest tenor. Opening with a gay Irish dance, it proceeds to general wildness, featuring the text of the Prisoner’s Chorus from Beethoven’s Fidelio, in Barry’s translation into English and French. (It didn’t matter: the only word you could make out was “Canada!” repeatedly shouted by the orchestra.)
The Danish composer Poul Ruders got sidelined last year when Knussen died, but this year, fresh from the Santa Fe premiere of his opera, The Thirteenth Child, Ruders arrived for an earnest reading of his 2013 Symphony No. 5. Its big industrial chords were augmented with brass inflections and screaming whistle, while rumbling drums interrupted strong string lines. It was noisy but not moving.
Thomas Adès conduct the TMC Orchestra (Hilary Scott photo)
Knussen, a beloved and hovering presence, died last year just before the festival. While a couple of his short works were sandwiched in then, in memoriam (shoving aside previously programmed works by Ruders), this year’s planners got to Knussen more fully.
In addition to a tribute recital of his piano works and those of his close colleagues, Monday’s finale included his 1991 Whitman Settings, in which Elizabeth Polese and Margaret Tigue, Tanglewood Music Center sopranos coached by Tony Arnold, and an orchestra led by TMC fellow Killian Farrell, split the four passionate or gentle songs. What glorious voices. And thankfully, Whitman’s words, which probably made the piece, were printed in the program.
The final giant piece, Asyla by Adès, from 1997, pretty strong, was conducted Monday by the composer. It received the 2000 Grawemeyer Award, one of the biggest. The title is the plural of “asylum” ―safe places, if you’re crossing a border, or are mentally unbalanced. Contemplative melodic lines are spread by their harmony, and high woodwinds. The tambourine etches crisp syncopations sharply in the long string line. Non-dissonant movements vary from long and slow to the degenerate pounding wildness that recalls his early, successful opera, Powder Her Face.
Adès seems to do everything: he gives a good beat and has strength and virtuosic control of sound. The work’s “motion, contact, lights, confusion” are mentioned in the excellent note by Robert Kirzinger, who oversees the program book.
We have neither covered all nor finished with this extraordinary annual event. Next year’s program planning is already in progress.
Leslie Kandell has written for The New York Times, Musical America, CVNA, Opera News, the Berkshire Eagle, and numerous magazines, gazettes and journals.
photo: Chris Lee
photo: Winslow Townson
