After the Library of Congress’ recent parade of the rather bland contemporary American music, the premiere of a new work by Kurtág performed by the composer and his wife and long-time duet partner Márta was like a breath of fresh air.  Exquisite comes to mind, as does vital.  It was an honor to share in this celebration of a national treasure of another nation.

The programs describes György Kurtág as one of the world’s foremost composers, which is certainly true in certain circles.  He has served as Professor of Piano and Chamber Music at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest,  as composer-in-residence at the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna Konzerthausgesellschaft, and has a list of awards, honors and recordings too lengthy to even describe here.  In America, Kurtág’s name is better known than his music still, I think, and the music is better known through recordings than through live performances.  The experience of performances of works almost always exceeds the experience of hearing recordings of those works, but in Kurtág’s case, the contrast is particularly striking.

Much work has been done in the press and printed program to connect this concert to a Library of Congress concert of Kurtág’s countryman Béla Bartók.  Bartók’s storied performance with violinist Joseph Szigeti, performed the at the Library of Congress in 1940 marked the premiere of Bartók Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano.  (In a spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that the recording of that recital was a staple of my undergraduate listening regime.) 

‘2007.10.16-65′ courtesy of ‘RShinozaki’

Kurtág’s new piece, commissioned by the Library’s Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, pays homage to Bartók throughout, though that parallels between the two composers only goes so far.  In the concert mentioned above, a new work of Bartók was paired with his own work but also with works of Debussy and Beethoven, situation Bartók as a fulfillment and continuation of the common practice tradition.  The Fifth String Quartet, also performed on Saturday, is designated ‘in Bb.’  The  references, rhetorical and perceived, are certainly present in Kurtág’s music, but in a far more aphoristic and fragmentary nature.

The first half of the concert was performed by György and Márta Kurtág, playing with their back to the audience as an upright piano,  setting the audience, as the program described to be eavesdroppers “on a married couple’s piano practice. . . made most charming by their interaction and intimacy, both with themselves and the music.”  Such a gesture runs the risk of seeming like empty stagecraft, a precious little pirouette, but in the event, the impact was on the edge of miraculous.  In part form their unimpeachable musicality and the weathering of virtuosity, but mostly from the smallness of the gestures and the materials of the sounding music.  The stage setting was in a very real sense the program note, an elucidation of a way of listening modeled for the audience by the composer and his partner in life and music.

Játékok (Games) is a series of small works for piano hands derived in affect if not pedagogical function from Bartók’s <i>Mikrokosmos</i> were played interleaved with works from the <i>Mikrokosmos</i> and arrangements of works by Bach.  The commissioned work, ‘Hommage à Bartók’ (for 4 and 2 hand piano) was remarkable in how unremarkable it was, in this context.  Kurtág’s synthesis of Bartók’s work is so long standing and thorough going that one had less the sense of an unveiling of a new work than of the turning of a page in a book.  These connections to traditions were turned oblique in the <i>6 Moments Musicaux</i>, an astounding kaleidoscopic assemblage of gestures and passages played with a confidence and focus of sound that was remarkable.  The quicksilver counterpoint in string harmonics in the fifth movement was particularly remarkable, as was the hyper-romantic intensity of the opening movement.

The work was performed by the Keller Quartet, a Hungarian quartet whose recordings of Kurtág’s works have done much to broaden knowledge of his music.  Saturday’s performance demonstrated the command of color that one would expect, based on the delicacy and control of their recordings, but also a dynamism which surprised.  The combined to give the Fifth Quartet a more wiry character than is typical in performance, while loosing none of the ferocity of its rhythmic play.  An elasticity of meter and pulse made the work even more dance like than I’ve often heard, especially in the third movement, <i>Scherzo alla bulgarese</i>.  This elegance at the center helped amplify the intensity and machinic character of the outer movements though contrast, providing this listener with the most satisfying performance of the work he has ever heard.

The Kurtág performance, and his visit, are part of a New York and Washington, D.C. tour organized by the Hungarian Cultural Center of New York in conjunction with Extremely Hungary, a yearlong festival of performances and exhibitions celebrating the country’s contemporary arts and its impact on American culture.   The work will be broadcast  on the Concerts from the Library of Concert series on NPR and XM radio.

Let us hope for more concerts of this quality at the the Library’s Sprauge Auditorium, not merely in the caliber of the performers, but of in the seriousness and elegance of the dialogue between the works– the Kurtág’s understand that all works are in dialogue with the other works on the program, a lesson from which many of us, concert goers and concert makers alike,  could learn.

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This past Tuesday, Sept 23rd at 6p in the Terrace Theater of the Kennedy Center, the National Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players presented the first of two concerts featuring works commissioned as part of the NSO’s ‘American Residency’ program.  Works by four composers from four states gave us musical portraits of those states.  Having now heard some 8% (by item and roughly by time) of the result of this project, some assessment as to its artistic success, or at least its agenda is possible.  Considering the programs as a whole will need to wait a while.

The partnership between the NSO and state art agencies for concerts and outreach programs, and establishes a statewide competition for the commissioning of a new work with the expressed goal of ‘directly representing’ their state.  Eight winners of this mimesis sweepstakes are having their music performed this week and next.  This week’s concert featured the world premieres of Virko Baley’s Centos (Nevada), Stephen Yarbrough’s Dakota Diary (South Dakota), Katherine Ann Murdock’s Unquiet Night (Kansas), and Currents by Robert G. Patterson (Tennessee); on Tuesday the 30th, Philip Carlsen’s Maine Traveler’s Advisory (Maine), David Maslanka’s Blue Mountain Meadow, Missoula, MT (Montana), Jay Vosk’s Canyons (Arizona), and Michael Wittgraf’s The Nature of a Circle: The Cycle of Lewis and Clark (North Dakota) will be featured.

Presented in conjunction with the Performing Arts for Everyone program, this event was transported (thank God!) from the usual venue of the Kennedy Centers Millennium Dome to the Terrace Theater, a far more acoustically appropriate and aesthetically pleasing environment.  There are numerous frames for considering and discussing this concert; it is at once a collecting of individual pieces which can be considered in their own terms, a concert presentation in which brings diverse works into conversation, a cross-section of American contemporary chamber music, and an annual report on the state of the American Residency program. We’ll hold on some of these larger issues until next weeks concert, so let’s consider the works qua works for a moment:
Virko Bailey’s Centos is essentially elegiac and thanatological, a memoriam of a deceased college and a contemplation of death in general. A spiky and thorny post tonal rhetoric dominates, with occasional sharp attacks and rises in energy, lending an air of late Romantic expressionism.  The patchwork structure is quite compelling in the moment, and provides great variety over the works 15 or so minutes.  The large scale structure, however, remained a bit obscure to this listener; collage works tend to provide formal challenges to listeners and performers alike, and one (i.e. me) suspects that this lack of clarity stems from the performance rather than the work itself, but more on that later.

Stephen Yarbrough’s Dakota Diary seemed to take the command to ‘directly represent’ his home state to heart, and then some. With imagistic movement titles evoking the open plains and their seemingly inevitable windy-ness, the work has a force hoe-down sensibility incessantly offering you lemonade and apple pie with an aw-shucks smile while chewing a blade of grass.  The result is a tedious amalgam of facile Copland lifts, interminably four-square phrasing, and an adherence to a banal neo-tonal idea of harmony, which is a desanguinated mockery of the actual richness and variety of tonal practice.

Katherine Ann Murdock’s Unquiet Night is described by the composer as ‘reflecting’ but not ‘being about’ the May 2007 tornado in Greensburg, Kansas.  With such a departure point, one might have expect a work of more violent affect, but as with the Bailey, a generally elegiac and pensive mood prevails.  The works instrumental forbear, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is referenced directly and evoked obliquely, but the ‘frozen music’ of Varése also comes to mind, with single notes intensified through re-articulations and dynamic swells, all the while serving as focal point for the shifting masses and voids of the other instruments.  This is a rich work, well deserving of additional performances.

Robert G. Patterson’s Currents was for my money the strongest work of the evening. Compact, varied, and with carefully considered textures, this was true chamber music, not an attempt to coax a symphonic sound and language out of an altogether different ensemble.  Most notably, Currents had a form which pulled a listener along with significance accruing across the entire time-span of the piece. Playfully percussive use of the piano and the propulsive use of rhythmic motives coupled with an intense harmonic language and soaring melodic lines produced a piece in parts casual, in parts profound and beautiful throughout.

The performances were strong, though all suffered from the perennial new music Dress Rehearsal Syndrome (DRS).  The performers of the NSO Chamber Players, particularly Lisa Emenheiser (piano) and Ed Cabarga (clarinet), played with expertise and energy, but the overall performances lacked polish and clear projection of the works’ large scale organization. DRS is the result of conventional calculus of rehearsal scheduling– these musicians are superb artists making good faith efforts to present this music in the best manner possible, but the perennial challenge of performing new works is to have interrogated their musical possibilities fully, and come to strongly held conclusions about how to play them.  This takes skill and commitment but it also takes time.  It would be nice to hear these works again, after time for consideration, evaluation and re-rehearsal; it would be wonderful to hear these musicians move past concerns of accuracy and into the realm of interpretation.
Accuracy in portraiture is not, in the end the goal, certainly with something as abstract as the state of contemporary chamber Music in America.  A better framing of the question is to consider the mode of this portraiture— is this the state portrait, idealized, safe and a bit dull, or is this the photojournalistic snapshot, full of detail and energy and slightly messy.  A full consideration will have to wait until next week (or till all 50 works resulting from the program are performed) but even from this small sample, some patterns can be seen as emerging.

The long standing American fixation with bartokesque metrical play was present in spades, though (typically) never as intense (or hard to perform as well).  There was, however, no exploration of the free time of the post-Lutoslawskian Europeans, or the suspended time of the Die neue Einfachheit, or the metric and temporal impositions that the post-minimal, genre crossing youngsters these days seem to love so much. Beats were beats and bars were bars.

There was a strong commitment to the forms and rhetorics of ‘art-music;’ in reading the composers’ notes, the biggest technical issue informing the construction of these works have been whether the work would be multiple or single movements, issues one expects to hear in discussions of the Sonatas of Beethoven and Liszt.  Interesting, to be sure, but not incredibly current, it seems.
Most striking to me was the lack of an engagement with the ‘new sound resources’ which Partch, Cowell and Crumb established as a veritable definition of American new music.  Apart from a few reaches inside the piano in the Patterson, the concept of instrumentality seemed more rooted in the 19th than the 21st century.

We will wait and see and hear how these strands of American musical thought are represented or not represented on Tuesday.  One hopes, though, that the Kennedy Center will actually bother to include biographies of the composers; oversights like that calls into doubt the sincerity of the entire project, and lends the event the air of contractual obligation.

The next concert of the NSO Chamber Players American Residency Commissions will be presented at the Terrace Theater of the Kennedy Center at 6pm on September 30th.

If you have any suggestions for upcoming concerts for review or preview, drop us the info by using the “Suggest a Story” button at the top of the page.

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Cellist Amy Leung and pianist Naoko Takao gave a recital this 18 August, but they also gave us an object lesson in the challenges of presenting music in the wrong setting, here a venue which robs the music of precisely the features that make it worthy of performance– once again, the Millennium Stage distracts from and undermines the artistry it seeks to present. The repertoire demonstrated what is best about chamber music: the intimacy of collaboration between performers, the proximity (literal and emotional) to the audience. Ms. Leung and Ms. Takao strove hard to achieve these goals and sometime succeeded, despite a venue with all the intimacy and elegance of an aircraft hangar.

Ms. Leung, currently hailing from Utah is a former DCer, having been a Guarneri Fellow at the University of Maryland, and in residence at GWU with the (sadly) now dissolved Coolidge Quartet. Takao is similarly a UMD-CP alum, and teaches at the Levine School, in addition to her geographically diverse career as a soloist and collaborative artist. They have several performances in town this week (here and here), and one hopes to see and hear more of them locally and soon. Monday’s program featured Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and ‘cello, Op. 102, No. 1, Elegy for cello and piano of Maryland composer Masatoshi Mitsumoto, and Mendelssohn’s Sonata for Cello and Piano #2, Op. 58.

It is a cliché to speak of Beethoven’s sonatas as duets, dances between equal partners, but sometimes clichés exist for a reason; here in the Op. 102, the rhetoric of a duet is taken en passé on the way to the dialogic; the ground v. figure duality often disappears altogether in this work, as the performers enact a conversation of exemplary Beethovenian motivic development. As with all great performances, this dialogue is not merely enacted or inhabited— Ms. Leung and Ms. Takao created it anew, as if for the first time. The gameplay of tempi and of caesurae kept the listener in suspense, even when the formal and generic obligations are largely predictable. This is of course a wonder of Beethoven, the infinitesimal but ineludible tension not so much between what is and what must be, but between what just was and what is about to be. It was a joy to hear and see to collaborators exploring together as partners, discovering this nano-realm of time and reciprocity without loosing site of the large-scale shaping of the work.

After such a strong opening work, the Elegy was a great disappointment. A rhapsodic work recalling the harmonic language of Fauré, it was only a shallow reproduction of the elegance of the master. There is none of the delicate weaving together of textures which pull Fauré’s music forward; here the piano fills time rather then unfolds it for the listener. Occasional harmonic inventions have no impact on the four-square phrase and formal structure, and as such are merely decorative, an effort at variety that serves rather to highlight sameness. The players tried to make the work “work,” as it were, and perhaps a little too hard, placing too much expressive umph on a rather frail skeleton. Programmatically, one has the sense here of an opportunity missed, a chance to present a work which expanded on the temporal arguments of the Beethoven, or explored the textural and coloristic possibilities of the ensemble as a presage of the following Mendelssohn.

Mendelssohn, it must be said, is far from a favorite of mine, but the Op. 58 Sonata No. 2 showed the players off to best effect; they met the work where it was at, and took it farther than I thought one could. This is not profound musical material, but the musicians’ carefully considered choices of color and touch surpassed expectations; in particular Ms. Leung’s sense of timbre and superb bow work brought to the piece an energy and multidimensionality in the work. Even they couldn’t salvage the adagio, however, little more than a composing out of a Heinichen thoroughbass exercise. Luckily, their delightful playfulness returned in the final movement (Molto Allegro e vivace) and brought, through precision and deftness, life to music which is, by and large, rather more schematic rather than nuanced, and so all too easy to play ‘by the numbers.’

The only real issue I have here is the Millennium Stage itself— the notion of a small concert happening every day is a noble and lofty goal, and the selection of performers is (often) excellent. Unfortunately the space itself turns this quest quixotic. Instead of constructing, literally and metaphorically, a space for recitals and smaller events to succeed in, the Kennedy Center has relied on sloppy repurposing of lobby space and amateurish amplification to present simulacra of chamber music. The microphones here caught every transient noise and page turn while robbing the instruments of much of their color, and slap-dash leveling flattened out the dynamic ranges the performers developed. The success of these musicians was despite the substantial hurdles this venue afforded them, and they should be praised all the more for it. But the fundamental truth here is that they deserved better from the Kennedy Center. DC deserves better.

If you have any suggestions for upcoming concerts for review or preview, drop us the info by using the “Suggest a Story” button at the top of the page.

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I want to like the Great Noise Ensemble. I really do. They are a plucky bunch of kids, fighting the good fight of aesthetic diversity, they play that post-minimalist, rock/chamber fusion that’s all the rage with the kids, they’ve won WAMMIES two years in a row, and they have a creation story that a Marvel hero could envy. Even more so, this town needs some new blood in its New (Concert) Music Scene, and an outfit that tries to play varied, forward-looking repertoire would be a great addition to the community.

GNE performed Wednesday evening at the Harmon Center for the arts, the ensemble’s second performance in as many years at the Capital Fringe festival, another young, forward-looking organization that is growing in leaps and bounds. The concert, entitled ‘Carnal Node: Sex Noise and Lies in the Internet Age’ showed off the good and the bad about this group: Rhetoric surpassing event, ambition surpassing execution, but all with a promise of better things to come.

The program title sets up a rather specific theme for the show, but only one of the pieces seems to bear much relation to it— rather than telling us anything new about relationships, or technology, or lying, the program as was rather more interested in placing GNE firmly in the rock-derived, post-minimal camp exemplified by the many-tentacled corporate entity known as Bang on a Can; indeed one work had been commissioned and first performed by BOAC through the ‘People’s Commissioning Fund.’ The instrumentation varied from electric bass, guitar, drums and brass to soprano and an ‘extended pierrot,‘ but all the work played with rhythm and phrasing in a manner more akin to Talking Heads than to Mozart, searching for that sweet spot between ‘concert music’ and ‘popular music.’

The first work, Thick Skin by Ryan Brown, a San Francisco composer, opens with a thumping, Larry-Graham baseline supported by a strong back beat and Fripp-y patternings on the guitar all of which are later (oh, so much later) joined by bassoon, trumpets and trombones. From its outset the work establishes strong and inexorable connections to rock forms and style, through the repetition of short ostinati and riffs. Even the lyrical second movement is constructed from little metrical cells, providing limited variety or new vantages on the title and subject of the work; an attractive bar and a half in the bassoon, the only real moment of melos in the work is abandoned just as it promises to open into something more. This surfeit of self-similarity and the general blandness of the harmonic language was not helped by intonation issues, especially in the lower strings, and and poor blend of the acoustic and amplified instruments left the group sounding rather in need of a sound check, surprising since this was the second performance of the concert.

The second work, D.J. Sparr’s Carnal Node is a one woman mini-oratorio, telling a tale of star-crossed, internet-fueled love. The text is (overly) wrapped up in the emotional life of an isolated law student, and was developed by the composer from actual emails received from an actual friend. (!) Unfortunately the narrow expressive range of the music afforded the performers few chances to do much that could be engaging either as an expression of this narrative conceit, or to build musical interest apart from the narrative. For a work so overtly tied to the emotional life of a character/caricature, the rhetoric was quite formal, a Stravinsky setting of a Ferlinghetti poem (if Ferlinghetti were a huge nerd). In these compositional situations, when the composer is seeking emotional resonance and doesn’t provide the means, it is always the singers that suffer the most. The soprano (Kamala Sankaram, oddly the only performer named in the program) labored mightily to bring some life to the work, and occasionally succeeded; most effective were the intermittent spoken passages, though the rhythmic dynamism of her delivery served mostly to highlight the stilted text setting of the sung passages.

The third work of the 45-minute program, Marc Mellits‘ Five Machines provided the best experience for the evening and for the players. The composer has produced a Nymanesque suite of layered ostinati, but, unlike the proceeding two works, here an attention to texture and instrumental color allows the work to do more than simply indicate the conventions of the heritage it is claiming for itself— it actually provides a time and a space for some music to happen. Though rhythmically a bit rugged at points, and with a few more intonation problems from the strings, the band here acquitted itself much more convincingly, perhaps because they had more to play with.

In Europe, this post-minimal music is often referred to as American Repetitive Music, and rightly so-these composers are American (or so the Internets tell me), and the works (surely) are repetitive. In the best cases, the repetition of musical material and ideas accrues meaning over the course of a piece, providing a kaleidoscopic view of the material, a summa of all the ways these musemes might be heard. Thus the impact is not one of stasis, but a continuous shifting of perception and continual reconsideration of a piece in its parts and its whole. In other cases, the repetition can be a trap— remember that in Italian ostinato means obstinate. The desire to connect with or draw from rock music styles can, ironically, rob those materials of their power to move us. The appropriation of harmonically static and discursive and musematic repetition can actually serve to highly all the elements missing from concert hall environment. This risk runs even higher when so much of a program engages in similar approaches to composition; sins that could be forgiven a more varied environment move from venal to mortal, and successes that would stand out from contrast are lost in a canvas of more-of-the-same.

Let’s hope that this promising band gets a bit more picky in its programming, and a bit more focused in its rehearsal process, because when working with good material, they sound great, and this town and this music deserve more diversity and more thoughtful commitment than it usually gets.

Two performances of the program are still to come at the Forum at the new Harman Center for the Arts (the new home of the Shakespeare Theater company):
Saturday, July 26, 2008: 9 PM
Sunday, July 27, 2008: 3 PM

Tickets: $15 on TheaterMania.com or at the door (cash only, remember your Fringe button).

If you have any suggestions for upcoming concerts for review or preview, drop us the info by using the “Suggest a Story” button at the top of the page.

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