Briefly Noted: Slatkin's Copland ballet cycle

A. Copland, Complete Ballet Scores, Vol. 3, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, L. Slatkin (released on March 8, 2019) Naxos 8.559862 | 62'49-"

Aaron Copland composed music for six ballets, although only three have been widely performed and recorded. Conductor Leonard Slatkin has taken a special interest in this side of Copland's oeuvre. After leaving the National Symphony Orchestra, where his tenure had mixed results, Slatkin went on to an institution-rejuvenating stint with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Among several admirable projects was a complete survey of the Copland ballet scores, all in their comprehensive versions, a series of performances captured on disc for the Naxos label. This third and final installment pairs the well-known Billy the Kid, from 1938, with the first ballet Copland composed, the curious, pleasing Grohg.

The composer's three most popular ballets -- Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, and Billy the Kid -- all share the signature Copland sound, somewhat saccharine Americana influenced by folk music and redolent of a mythologizing view of this country's history. The earlier Grohg, on the other hand, is something altogether different. Copland began it in 1922, at the suggestion of Nadia Boulanger, with whom he was studying in France for much of that decade. A chance encounter with Friedrich Murnau's horror film Nosferatu that year led Copland and his friend, the writer Harold Clurman, to create a scenario about a necromancer for the ballet. A monstrous creature, Grohg falls in love with people who have just died -- an adolescent, an opium addict, a prostitute. He revives their corpses with his magic, only to be rejected by them. The mind boggles at what a choreographer like Alexei Ratmansky could do with this ballet.

Vol. 1 Vol. 2

As Copland wrote of the piece's composition, "This ballet became the most ambitious undertaking of my Paris years: I had no choreographer, commission or contact with a major ballet company." It was essentially a massive graduate thesis project, and as such was left unpublished. The music shows Copland soaking up the atmosphere of 1920s Paris, a city that had just heard the premieres of Stravinsky's ground-breaking ballets and Debussy's Jeux. "There was a taste for the bizarre at the time," Copland continued, "and if Grohg sounds morbid and excessive, the music was meant to be fantastic rather than ghastly. Also, the need for gruesome effects gave me an excuse for ‘modern’ rhythms and dissonances. Until Grohg, I had written only short piano pieces using jazz-derived rhythms."

Slatkin's is not the first recording of Grohg, an honor that goes to the Cleveland Orchestra under the late Oliver Knussen. (Knussen also conducted the first recording of another rare Copland ballet, Hear Ye! Hear Ye!, with the London Sinfonietta, offered on the same disc.) Slatkin and the DSO give a technicolor rendition of this unusual score, as well as an elegiac performance of the more familiar Billy the Kid. All three discs are both an affordable way for a collector to acquire all of Copland's ballet scores, as well as a testament to the fine partnership of Slatkin and the DSO, an orchestra that has revived along with its city, now that Slatkin has stepped back to take the position of Music Director Laureate.

New York City Ballet: Balanchine, Ratmansky, Peck

Sterling Hyltin and Joaquin De Luz in Odessa, New York City Ballet (photo by Paul Kolnik)
New York City Ballet is back in town for a week-long run at the Kennedy Center Opera House. Its first program, seen on Tuesday night, represents the best the company has to offer, past and present. It is one of the most beautiful and diverting mixed programs seen in recent memory. With no sets, only glowing colors illuminating the side drops and back wall, this selection of choreography put all its attention, and ours, on the movement of bodies.

The evening began with two choreographies by George Balanchine, NYCB's founding ballet master. In Square Dance Balanchine made a brilliant connection between classical and folk dance styles. Selections of Baroque concertos by Vivaldi and Corelli (Concerto Grosso in B minor, Op. 3 no. 10, by the former, and Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, no. 12, by the latter), where American folk music traces some of its rhythmical, repetitive roots, offered striking contrasts of tempo and spirit. The musical performance, complete with actual harpsichord on the continuo part, was conducted sensitively by Andrews Sill.

In particular the alternation of refrain and solo episodes of different characters in ritornello movements worked beautifully for dancing. Six men and six women, costumed in white and gray dresses or T-shirts and shorts, made paired patterns that recalled the inward-facing format of square dancing. (Originally Balanchine had a caller on stage who yelled out the moves to the dancers, a more explicit reference to square dancing, wisely excised in later years.) Balanchine kept the movements mostly classical in style, with a few simplified steps as a nod toward the square dance. Two principal dancers, Megan Fairchild spirited and elegant paired with a slightly rough Chase Finlay, were an ardent duo in the pas de deux accompanied by lovely violin and other solos in the first plangent slow movement. Fairchild's series of slow pirouettes en pointe in the Vivaldi slow movement were exquisite.

Balanchine's Tarantella was the odd man out in this program, a cutesy but charming bagatelle included to feature two younger, non-principal dancers. Erica Pereira and Spartak Hoxha, in Neapolitan peasant costumes (designed by Karinska), burst onto the scene waving to the audience. The choreography is breathless, an almost constant movement of arms and legs, which the dancers pulled off with a smile. Hoxha was so enthusiastic with the tambourine he played at one point that he knocked two of the metal zills loose from it. The music, Louis Moreau Gottschalk's Grand Tarentelle for Piano and Orchestra, op. 67, is a semi-corny Romantic finger-buster, reconstructed and orchestrated by Broadway orchestrator Hershy Kay, Balanchine's favored arranger, which challenged guest pianist Susan Walters at times.

Other Reviews: Sarah L. Kaufman, New York City Ballet’s knockout punch is delivered at Kennedy Center (Washington Post, June 7) Alastair Macaulay, For the Couples in This Alexei Ratmansky Ballet, Love Is Not Enough (New York Times, May 5) Apollinaire Scherr, Ratmansky premiere, Lincoln Center, New York — tremendous (Financial Times, May 5) Siobhan Burke, No More Gang Rape Scenes in Ballets, Please (New York Times, May 15)

The second half of the program featured new works by NYCB's most talented living choreographers. The company premiered Alexei Ratmansky's Odessa just last month, and it is one of the best new short ballets seen in recent years. Ratmanksy drew his score from the 1990 Soviet film Sunset, a set of tango- and klezmer-infused musical cues by Leonid Desyatnikov. The subject matter came from the same source, Isaac Babel's play about Jewish gangsters in Odessa after the Russian Revolution, in turn based on his collection of short stories The Odessa Tales. The ballet's story does not seem to line up with the play exactly, but the air of jealousy, abuse, and desperation does. Keso Dekker designed the colorful tango costumes, glowing like stained glass under Mark Stanley's lighting.

Ratmanksy follows three couples, who are first to enter the scene. One of them, danced here by Sterling Hyltin and Joaquin de Luz with tender grace, is not happy. Ratmanksy's choreography is generally busy and rife with ideas, and that profusion of ideas here obscures the story line, unclear even after going back on Wednesday night to see this program a second time. That impenetrability does not make the ballet any less powerful, and some of the tableaux are breath-taking in their originality and beauty. The male dancers at one point become like puppeteers, lifting Hyltin and de Luz into the air in their pas de deux (pictured above), which degenerates into a gang attack scene, accompanied to heart-sickening circus music. The score, dotted by charming solos for tuba, accordion, and the space-age sound of the flexatone, provides many delights.

Justin Peck showed a lot of chutzpah in taking on Aaron Copland's music for Rodeo, set originally to an evergreen choreography by Agnes de Mille, even if it was the symphonic version with the "Ranch House Party" movement excised. Rather than a single Cowgirl among a group of boisterous cowboys, Peck's mostly male dancers seem like a bunch of athletes, with costumes recalling gymnasts, racers, or soccer players. They line up at the start line on one side of the stage to open the ballet, running across the bare stage, and when not exercising together, they walk around casually, leaning on each other.

Into this all-male gymnasium setting comes the delightful Tiler Peck (no relation to the choreographer), a gymnast who seems to like physical activity as much as the men. One of them, danced by the choreographer himself, finally notices her, dancing with her to the "Saturday Night Waltz" music. Although touching, this duet somehow did not seem as tender or sincere as the dance for the five men of the blue-costumed "soccer team" in the "Corral Nocturne" that preceded it. Male and female worlds were reconciled in the concluding "Hoe-Down," a whirlwind of athletic activity given its start humorously by Justin Peck, who knelt down at the stage edge and pulled on a cord, like that of a lawnmower, which cued a drum roll.

This program repeats on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon at the Kennedy Center Opera House. We will review the second program offered by NYCB on Friday evening.

Hilary Hahn, Again

No season in Washington seems to go by without an appearance by violinist Hilary Hahn. She is a perennial favorite with area orchestras, and Washington Performing Arts presents her frequently in recital. It was not clear whether the empty parts of the Music Center at Strathmore, where WPA presented her on Tuesday night, were due to audience fatigue with Hahn or to an ongoing trend of declining audiences for the presenter.

There was nothing on the program that could be construed as ear candy for audiences: relatively obscure sonatas by Mozart and Copland, interspersed with half of a set of six new partitas by Spanish composer Antón García Abril (b. 1933). Abril was one of the composers commissioned by Hahn for her ill-fated — but Grammy award-winning — Encores project, and Washington Performing Arts ponied up the money to commission this further set of pieces from him for Hahn to play. (She will play the other three partitas in the set, again presented by WPA, on October 28, 2016.) The title of Partita is somewhat misleading, implying a set of dance movements, as in Bach's set of three. What Abril has created struck me more as fantasias, as each one consists of sections in various moods and characters; perhaps we are meant to understand an earlier meaning of the word partita, before it became associated with dance movements.

Abril emphasized double-stops in all three of the pieces heard in this concert, although he did not use them in the truly polyphonic way Bach did most memorably. For example, the meandering melody of the first partita had occasional double-stops providing a short of homophonic accompaniment, and in another section drones accompanied the tune. After a series of mostly unrelated sections, the first partita just faded away on a passage of repeating sixteenth notes. The second partita was more tart in harmonic flavor, with biting rhythms, and lasted only about half as long as the first one, not adding up to much. The third partita seemed closer in character to the first, with more introspective melodies and not all that polyphonic double-stops, leaving the impression of a set of possibly pretty but rather boring pieces. The less said about the composer's embarrassing, puerile program idea ("H-I-L-A-R-Y is for heart, immensity, love, art, reflexive, you," supposedly describing the six pieces), the better. This is one of those programmatic ideas that the composer, as Mahler did with some of his symphonic programs, should perhaps have kept to himself.

Other Reviews: Simon Chin, A lot riding on Hilary Hahn’s bow at Strathmore (Washington Post, April 21) Jesse Hamlin, Violinist Hilary Hahn to premiere Abril partita at Davies Hall (San Francisco Chronicle, April 20)

The Mozart sonata (G major, K. 379) was a showpiece for Hahn's partner at the keyboard, Cory Smythe, who had the most challenging music of the evening. He went for a super-delicate sound, so delicate that some of the filigree-thin notes did not really sound clearly. It is a fairly mediocre piece, and the response of both performers, to give it a more Romantic swooning sensibility, had mixed success. Copland's elegiac violin sonata, last heard live from James Ehnes, brought out the best of Hahn's tone, as she played it with an airy simplicity. Here at last, in the faster movements, was some of the dance that seemed lacking in the Abril pieces.

'Tender Land' from In Series

Copland, The Tender Land, University of Kentucky Opera Theater, K. Trevor (Albany Records, 2002)

Charles T. Downey, ‘Tender Land,’ the failed Copland opera, shows its worth at Gala Theatre (Washington Post, October 19)

Aaron Copland’s music is so familiar, so iconic in the way it stands for American identity, that we take it for granted. The composer’s embrace of pioneer stories from America’s early history, at a time when the United States was becoming the dominant world superpower, can feel like kitsch now.

A production of his failed opera “The Tender Land” by the In Series, heard Saturday evening at Gala Hispanic Theatre, was an opportunity to appreciate that Copland’s music is more radical than its reputation might seem. Although the libretto, by Copland’s one-time lover Erik Johns, grinds to a dramatic halt trying to reach its conclusion, the music is often of exceptional beauty.

Copland created the work, beginning in 1952, for the NBC Television Opera Workshop, a program that in today’s pop-culture-saturated world seems too improbable to have existed... [Continue reading]

Copland, The Tender Land
In Series
GALA Hispanic Theater

National Orchestral Institute to Record for Naxos

J. Corigliano, Symphony No. 1 ("Of Rage and Remembrance"), National Symphony Orchestra, L. Slatkin (RCA Red Seal, 1996)

Charles T. Downey, National Festival Orchestra’s bright performance is a gift
Washington Post, June 15

The ambitions and hard work of the National Orchestral Institute, the training program for young musicians at the University of Maryland, continue to pay dividends. The concert of American music by this year’s National Festival Orchestra, heard Saturday night at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, was the first to be recorded in a new series for the Naxos label. Richard Freed, who writes the NOI program notes, made the suggestion to the leader of Naxos.

Guest conductor David Alan Miller, who has long championed the music of Michael Torke, opened with that composer’s “Bright Blue Music”... [Continue reading]

National Festival Orchestra
National Orchestral Institute
With David Alan Miller, conductor
Clarice Smith Center

NOI PREVIOUSLY:
2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011

Miró Quartet and Sasha Cooke

If You Love for Beauty, S. Cooke, Colburn Orchestra, Y. Gilad (Yarlung, 2012)

Charles T. Downey, Miró Quartet and Sasha Cooke make for beautiful music
Washington Post, May 1

It’s surprising that concerts featuring a string quartet and a singer are not more common. The combination has considerable appeal, as evident again in Wednesday’s performance by the Miró Quartet and mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke at the Kennedy Center. Ginastera, Othmar Schoeck and Schoenberg have written for such an ensemble, but for this program Cooke sang works by Schubert, Hugo Wolf and Copland in arrangements for string quartet by the Miró Quartet’s violist, John Largess.

Cooke’s voice continues to grow in warmth and beauty... [Continue reading]

Miró Quartet and Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano
Fortas Chamber Music Concerts
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

PREVIOUSLY:
Sasha Cooke at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2008
Sasha Cooke at the Kennedy Center in 2009 with Lera Auerbach

American Ballet Theater, 1940s Ballet Triple-Bill

Xiomara Reyes (Cowgirl) and cast, Rodeo, American Ballet Theater
Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, heard as a concert work, did not really mean much to me until I saw Martha Graham's choreography live. The same is now true of Copland's Rodeo, thanks to a rare performance of Agnes de Mille's original choreography, from 1942, by American Ballet Theater in the latest of the group's periodic visits here, seen last night in the Kennedy Center Opera House in a triple-bill of ballets from the 1940s. It was another reminder that the separation of ballet music from its choreography robs the listener of a large part of its meaning.

De Mille created a vocabulary of movements for her cowboy characters: they ride horses and are thrown from them, they square dance, they mosey around bow-legged. With its bright colors -- not sure how many cowboys favor this palette from pink to salmon to peach (costumes by Santo Loquasto) -- and glowing sunset backgrounds (scenery by Oliver Smith, lighting by Thomas R. Skelton), it has the feel of an idealistic Hollywood blockbuster. There is no hint of grit or lawlessness in this version of the American West. As the Cowgirl, which de Mille herself created, Xiomara Reyes was a spunky bundle of tomboy cuteness, slapping the men like a pal, thumbing her nose, pulling up her britches. (Reyes will reportedly retire from the company later this year, so it was a special delight to see her in this role before she does.) The Cowgirl falls for the Head Wrangler (a sturdy Roman Zhurbin), whose head is instead turned by the more conventional Ranch Owner's Daughter of Lauren Post, demure in her pretty dress. Down in the dumps at the Head Wrangler's obliviousness, the Cowgirl is cheered up by the handsome, slightly dopey Champion Roper of James Whiteside, who warms to her himself, after delivering a winsome tap solo in cowboy boots.

The company found a fine companion piece for Rodeo in Antony Tudor's Pillar of Fire, premiered in 1942. Set to the string orchestra arrangement of Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, the story also seems to be set in middle America. Gillian Murphy brought a compelling look of constraint and tension -- all frozen jaggedness --to the sexually repressed Hagar, a middle sister between the prim, maternal Eldest Sister of Stella Abrera and the obnoxious flirt of Cassandra Trenary's Youngest Sister. When the little sister comes between Hagar and her last chance at happiness, the steadfast Friend of Alexandre Hammoudi, she has an ill-advised liaison with the sebaceous Young Man from the House Opposite of Marcelo Gomes. Her pregnancy implied but not overtly shown, she is reconciled with the Friend, who accepts and forgives Hagar as they walk through a transfigured night (this is the tie-in with Richard Dehmel's poem Zwei Menschen, which is the story told by Schoeberg's gorgeous score.)

Other Reviews: Sarah Kaufman, A sparkling start to American Ballet Theatre’s D.C. engagement (Washington Post, March 26)

The only slight disappointment was the company's revival of George Balanchine's Theme and Variations, set to the last movement of Tchaikovsky's third orchestral suite, from 1947. Balanchine later set this choreography as the final act of Suite, a setting of Tchaikovsky's complete suite, but it is the variations seen here that are the meat of the music and the dance. Isabella Boylston and Daniil Simkin made a lovely couple, alternating in duo or solo scenes with the corps and especially in the extended pas de deux (with a fine violin solo from concertmaster Oleg Rylatko), although Simkin was a little stiff, not quite steady in the spins, and a little knee-buckled in lifts, especially at the end. The women of the corps did especially beautiful work, especially in their arm-linked groups of three to the woodwind variation. Conductor Ormsby Wilkins seemed to take the finale at a pace that felt too fast for both dancers and the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra.

This triple-bill repeats tonight only. The company also dances Frederick Ashton's choreography to Prokofiev's Cinderella (March 26 to 29), with the chance to see Gillian Murphy and James Whiteside again as Cinderella and the Prince, on Thursday night only.

NSO New Moves

Some of the great scores of music history were made to accompany dancing. All too often, musicians and conductors play these without thinking about the choreography that went with them, something that has become evident to me in the last ten years, thanks to the chance to review a lot of ballet. Even so, when one cannot see these dances live -- some of these ballets are rarely mounted, after all -- there is the invaluable resource of Internet video, where many original choreographies, or reconstructions of them, can be viewed. The first thing that musicians and conductors, faced with one of these ballet scores, should do is to watch such videos, to get an idea of the movements that went with the music they are going to play. This is the strongest idea -- or it could have been -- behind the National Symphony Orchestra's New Moves series, a trilogy of concerts that may not have succeeded on all points but is ultimately the latest evidence of Christoph Eschenbach's willingness to embrace innovative programming.

The music selected for the first two of these concerts did not interest me all that much, but the third program, heard and seen last night, offered the strongest combination, still with some reservations. Sadly, scores that instantly come to my mind in this context, like Debussy's Jeux or Satie's Parade or Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat or Stravinsky's Pulcinella or Les noces, were not included. For the third concert, guest conductor Thomas Wilkins led two pieces that were rarely heard contemporary pieces not particularly associated with choreography. Michael Daugherty's Red Cape Tango, the conclusion of the Grammy-winning but not all that interesting Metropolis Symphony, has the rhythmic ostinato of the Habanera, complete with castanets, but is so repetitive that it grows tired about half-way through. Daugherty incorporated the first couple phrases of the Dies Irae, a long sequence whose later melodic material could have added some much-needed variety. The Sinfonia No. 4 ("Strands"), co-commissioned by the NSO from Washington-born composer George Walker, seemed even less about dance, a rather monochromatic wash of dissonant clusters that seemed to go nowhere, partly due to the pedestrian conducting of Wilkins, whose left hand generally did little other than mirror his baton hand, orderly but not revealing much else.

Other Reviews: Sarah Kaufman, Jessica Lang Dance, waltzing delightfully with Leila Josefowicz and the NSO (Washington Post, May 17) Anne Midgette, NSO’s ‘New Moves’ festival closes with Jessica Lang and Leila Josefowicz (Washington Post, May 17) ---, NSO New moves and UMd 'Appalachian Spring' join dance with orchestras (Washington Post, May 2) ---, NSO festival aims for fusion of symphony and dance at Kennedy Center (Washington Post, May 8) Robert Battey, National Symphony Orchestra's New Moves symphony + dance mini-festival (Washington Post, May 12)

The final piece on the first half, Copland's Appalachian Spring, was made for a choreography by Martha Graham. Seeing it danced live transformed the way that I hear that score, and anyone studying or playing it should watch it. The NSO played only the suite for full orchestra, which is another removal from the music's origins in dance, but even these selections are often boring without the story of the ballet and Graham's movements. The absence of dance was already felt in the first half, but it became glaring by comparison with the second half, for which the Jessica Lang Dance company gave the premiere of their director's new choreography, Scape, to the accompaniment of the violin concerto of John Adams. The soloist was Leila Josefowicz (pictured), who has performed the composer's work for electric violin, The Dharma at Big Sur, with both the NSO and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in recent years. Adams completed the violin concerto in 1995 1993, after which it was used for a choreography by New York City Ballet's Peter Martins. The music percolates with energy, with unusual sounds contributed by two synthesizers (whose players were seated near the conductor's podium) and a range of percussion instruments.

Lang's choreography went against the grain of the music for the most part, opening slowly with the nine dancers -- five women and four men, costumed in pajama-like outfits of soft colors, rarely featured in solos -- appearing in the chorister seats above the stage. In that location, movements were constrained, and almost no gestures seemed to have been inspired by the antic, creeping music, except when the soloist's cadenza corresponded with the disappearance of all but one of the group. As the dancers took the stage, extended out from where the orchestra sat by a platform bathed in icy blue-purple light, space-music sounds again seemed not to match with the clumping and spreading actions of the dancers, including some impressively long lifts. Only in the return of a more manic tempo in the third movement did the choreography seem related to the music, taking elements from various popular dances. Lang's style is abstract rather than narrative, recalling other choreographers' work without really adding up to its own character, but one might describe the story, if there had to be one, as the process of bodies being awakened by music, gradually taking on its pulses and gestures.

This concert repeats tonight, at 8 pm, in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

James Ehnes @ Clarice Smith

Charles T. Downey, Violinist James Ehnes and pianist Orion Weiss display vital chemistry at Clarice Smith (Washington Post, March 8, 2014)

Prokofiev, Complete Works for Violin, J. Ehnes (Chandos, 2013)

Among the leading violinists performing today, James Ehnes seems to fly under the radar. Because of his recordings and past performances in the Washington area, with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra, the Canadian violinist is one not to miss. Yet his accomplished recital Thursday night, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland, did not fill the small Gildenhorn Recital Hall, an indication perhaps that Ehnes’s musicianship outstrips his attention-grabbing notoriety, entirely to his credit.

Aaron Copland’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano” was cool and airy, playing perhaps too much into the immaculate quality of tone Ehnes produced on his 1715 “Marsick” Stradivarius. The piece is a little snoozy, and Ehnes gave it no sizzle. [Continue reading]

James Ehnes (violin) and Orion Weiss (piano)
Copland, Sonata for Violin and Piano
Grieg, Violin Sonata No. 2
Schubert, Fantasy in C major
Clarice Smith Center

PREVIOUSLY:
Bartók | Paganini | Strads

BSO: 2011 | 2009 | 2007
Philadelphia Orchestra: 2012

Brandon Cedel, Rising

Charles T. Downey, Brandon Cedel makes Kennedy Center debut (Washington Post, December 6, 2013)

Vaughan Williams, Songs of Travel (inter alia), G. Finley, S. Ralls

Attentive Washington audiences recognize the voice of Brandon Cedel. I heard him as an apprentice singer at the Castleton Festival last year, and he appeared at Wolf Trap this summer. The young bass-baritone won a grand prize at this year’s Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, leading to his debut on the Met stage this fall. The savvy folks at Vocal Arts D.C. presented his first show at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday night in the Terrace Theater.

Cedel was not in the best vocal shape, and thus a little cautious at the top of his range, but he made a fine impression. He came most alive in the opening set of songs by Aaron Copland, with a lusty tone but also a sweet crooning sound when he needed it. He showed the same level of animation in the “Songs of Travel” set by Ralph Vaughan Williams, relishing Robert Louis Stevenson’s melancholy poetry. [Continue reading]

Brandon Cedel, bass-baritone
Vocal Arts D.C.
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

PREVIOUSLY:
Charles T. Downey, Brandon Cedel at Castleton Festival (Ionarts, July 2, 2012)

Anne Midgette, Wolf Trap Opera’s ‘Il viaggio a Reims’ (Washington Post, June 23, 2013)

Christine Brewer vs. Pollen

Charles T. Downey, For Christine Brewer, a rare miss at Kennedy Center Terrace Theater
Washington Post, April 27, 2013

Strauss, Four Last Songs (inter alia), C. Brewer, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, D. Runnicles (Telarc, 2006)

Christine Brewer does not play it safe in programming, which means that not every recital by the lauded American singer will be a winner. She is one of the most exciting dramatic sopranos in the music of Wagner and Strauss, but she has excelled in everything from Gluck to contemporary song. Her recital of Iberian and American songs on Thursday night, presented by Vocal Arts D.C. at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater (rescheduled from October, when it was canceled because of Hurricane Sandy), was one of the rare misses.

Part of the problem was that Brewer was suffering from pollen allergies, and her voice sounded a little raspy and disconnected between registers. The music on the Iberian half was sometimes disappointing, with the lushly chromatic songs of Catalan composers Federico Mompou and Fernando Obradors as notable exceptions.
[Continue reading]

Christine Brewer, soprano
Vocal Arts D.C.
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

PREVIOUSLY:
2011 | 2010 | 2005

Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra

Charles T. Downey, Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra at Renwick Gallery
Washington Post, March 5, 2013

Stravinsky, Dumbarton Oaks Concerto (inter alia), Ensemble Intercontemporain, P. Boulez

Three pieces of music composed in the years around World War II can reveal not only the range of emotions inspired by world events, but also the ferment of musical styles in that era. This was the goal of an excellent program offered by the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra on Sunday night, in the Grand Salon of the Renwick Gallery, executed thoughtfully and with admirable precision.

Stravinsky’s Orchestral Concerto in E-flat came to be known by the name of the house where it was premiered, Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown, in 1938. The first movement bubbled along, the players adroitly avoiding the many possible pitfalls of shifting meter, the poky second movement animated by jabs of melody punctuated by bassoon bleats, jazzy bass syncopations and a chatty flute solo. [Continue reading]

Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra
Music by Stravinsky, Copland, Shostakovich
Renwick Gallery

Shaham Plays Barber with the BSO

Charles T. Downey, At Strathmore, BSO’s Americana optimism
Washington Post, September 24, 2012

Barber / Korngold / Walton, Violin Concertos, J. Ehnes, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, B. Tovey

At the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert of the new season, heard at Strathmore on Saturday night, the orchestra played a program of classic Americana with grace and power. The music, from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, all sounded much the same, a reminder of the era before serialism and experimental composition had taken over classical music.

The symphonic suite from the film score for Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” was the first offering. It includes some of Leonard Bernstein’s most polished and searing music — from the suite’s plaintive opening horn solo and lonely wail of the saxophone, through the savage intensity of its percussion-driven fast sections to its fragile love theme massed into a raging surge. Conductor Marin Alsop led a convincing performance throughout. [Continue reading]

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
With Gil Shaham, violin (Violin Concertos of the 1930s)
Music Center at Strathmore

Ionarts-at-Large: Alex Ross' Belmont Prize and an Evening of Americana

When Douglas Boyd spoke passionately—in his beautiful melodic Scottish—about Charles Ives as one of the most enigmatic 20^th century composer to the audience of the Munich Chamber Orchestra’s audience, the introductory excerpts of the hymn tunes took on a slight melancholic Scottish twang. His preparatory remarks fell on fertile ground, as a good part of the audience had already been readied to appreciate an evening exploring a century of American (East-Coast) music by the preceding prize ceremony where Alex Ross received the Forberg-Schneider Foundation’s Belmont Prize and chatted with the MKO artistic director Alexander Liebreich about music in general and “The Rest is Noise” in particular: A charming, if none-too profound conversation, spiced-up and in turn defused by Liebreich’s narcissism and Ross’ near-diffident modesty.

Programming American music (with the possible exception of Carter who appeals to European modernist-seeking audiences) is usually a recipe for empty halls. It speaks to the intelligent programming and meticulous audience-building of the MKO that the beautiful Prinzregententheater was full. And once audiences turn out to hear it, whether prepared to accept the music or not, they do embrace American classics.

C.Ives, Symphonies 2 & 3, A.Litton / Dallas SO Hyperion E.Carter, Sound Fields etc., O.Knussen / BBC SO Bridge A.Copland, Clarinet Concerto et al., S.Drucker / L.Bernstein / NYPhil DG

They certainly appreciated Aaron Copland’s snappy Clarinet Concerto and particularly the snake-charming contortions of Martin Fröst. The Swedish instrumentalist appreciates the physicality of playing the clarinet to the point of distraction, but never at the expense of unrivaled gorgeous playing. The bold white borders of his black suit (with equal hints of Wild West, Pan Am 70s revival, and Barnum & Bailey’s) picked up the Americana-theme of the evening. It also enhanced how Fröst associates every phrase with a motion or position. That, in turn, suited the stereotype that Copland created; a kind of resounding Americanism that never was, but that hit—literally—a chord with its audiences. It reminds me of P.G. Wodehouse’s characters that created a world of their own; real shadows of an invented reality. Until the cadenza finally penetrates this soppy world of would-be concord, it is a simple, calm beauty that pervades the Copland concerto. Especially compared to Ives’ Third Symphony which preceded it.

Charles Ives begins his Symphony with deceptively harmonious pleasantries that glide upward with the grace of imaginary young ladies on their way from Sunday school to the debutant ball. The honest, sturdy chorales and hymns seem innocent on their arrival in the brass. But Ives gently breaks each tune’s spine and bends them into a new construction of his own—a fluid musical cubism that reminds superficially of Mahler-episodes, except without the vulgarity. Humorous sometimes, sometimes clamorous, but the original grace—morphed manifold—remains the red thread that leads through it. When chords of Ives’ don’t go into the conventional direction they don’t melt subversively or rebelliously as they are prone to do in, say, Schnittke. Instead they strike as a wholly novel, brilliant solution to a new kind of beautiful. A marvelous composition that rewards keen ears on every new listening.

Listening to Elliot Carter, two things usually come to mind: “Boulez, but with a smile” and “Haydn”. Not that Carter and Haydn have any cursory commonalities, but the geniality of Carter, his humor (not in the ‘comic’ sense, but the mood and its underlying wit) seems to rhyme with Haydn. It is as if Carter was so secure in his pared-down, formally sound sophistication that he doesn’t also need to be unnecessarily serious about it. In that spirit, I found that the ears seemed to nod as they listened to his 2007 “Sound Fields”, as though the offering were optional, not didactic. The underlying pulse is undeniable—all the way to its stolen last sentence in B-flat-major.

Fitting, that the finale was a Haydn Symphony: The peckish Symphony N0.83 (‘La Poule’), which got a terrific performance that underlined the violent surprised and boldness throughout and kept the Minuet from becoming sonic duty with a jazzy bend. Avant-guard from 1785.

Picture © David Michalek

Martha Graham, Looking Back

Katherine Crockett in "Move Variation" by Richard Move (photo by Costas, courtesy of Martha Graham Dance Company)

Ground-breaking dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, who died in 1991, lives on in the company that bears her name. To celebrate the company's 85th anniversary, the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance is on tour, and their stop on Friday night at George Mason University's Center for the Arts was on one of my top picks for the dance season. The performance did not disappoint, offering the opportunity to revisit the company's history and some of its most celebrated choreographies. The experience also demonstrated that although the company carries on its founder's ideals, it is also becoming more and more like a museum. By contrast, the company founded by one of Graham's early collaborators, Merce Cunningham, is in the midst of closing permanently after Cunningham's death.

The first half of this program was a sort of guided tour of Graham's life and her work in dance. Films and images of Graham's early work, supplementing a historical narration, introduced a chronologically arranged series of short dances. It began with the embarrassingly cheesy exoticism of Graham's early work with Ruth St. Denis's Denishawn company, a sort of faux-Cretan priest of Knossos dancing to Erik Satie's dreamy Gnossienne No. 1 (complete with the misguided addition of a final cadence to give the music some finality) and a Carmen-esque gypsy-lite Serenata Morisca to music by Mario Tarenghi.

There were only the most superficial similarities from that early work in Graham's breakthrough pieces, Heretic (shown in video) and Lamentation. In the latter work, premiered in 1930, Graham used a sort of sheath of costume material to make her body into a series of geometric shapes, with stark movements, mostly while seated on a simple bench, evoking the vocabulary of grief. Video of Graham's performance showed that the dancer in this version, the tall, beautiful Katherine Crockett, was if anything more precise, more abstract, but also somehow less spontaneous than Graham's original. With the color of the costume now a more somber black, it was difficult to avoid seeing the costume, enveloping Crockett's head and body, as something like the Middle Eastern abaya, giving a different twist of meaning to this particular lamentation, something that the stark, folk-inflected music by Zoltán Kodály did not discourage.

Two more dances from Graham's most influential period, the 1930s, filled out the picture. Steps in the Street, with its crowd-like movement of women in black dresses, all seemingly disconnected from one another, seemed prescient of the existential loneliness of Giacometti sculptures, with some movements in silence and others set to music. Panorama, a paean to social activism, was recreated by George Mason University students, moving like flocks of birds in bright red dresses in angular, unsmiling movement, not with the same unity and polish as the professionals but with admirable enthusiasm.

The highlight of the evening was the most recent work, three dances by young choreographers called Lamentation Variations, in response to Graham's signature work, mentioned above, commissioned for the 2007 anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Crockett was back in the middle dance, Move Variation, bending and twisting in a shaft of sideways light, a playful intertwining of balance and stillness. The third dance, Keigwin Variation, brought the whole company together, each dancer seemingly checking himself or herself in a mirror. Fretting, worried gestures increased until the entire group collapsed in death, leaving one couple standing in an embrace, until slowly the woman of the couple slid from her partner's arms.

Other Reviews: Sarah Halzack, Martha Graham dancers bring vitality to classic works (Washington Post, October 23) Calvin Wilson, Dance performance enhances legacy of Graham (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 17)

It was certainly worthwhile to see the company's recreation of perhaps Graham's most famous choreography, Appalachian Spring, which Graham and her company premiered in 1944, in the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium. The work is perhaps not quite as iconic as Aaron Copland's score, but its sincere war-time nostalgia -- the hopeful story of a homestead wedding somewhere on the American prairie -- is still affecting, if a little hokey. Samuel Pott, as the Husbandman, was tall and all-American in the boundless strength and gumption of his movement, while Maurizio Nardi's Preacher (a role danced by Merce Cunningham at the premiere) had both earnest faith and an odd note of menace. Isamu Noguchi's minimalistic set had just enough lines to suggest the simple country house, the silhouette of a rocking chair used as the seat of authority by Katherine Crockett's wise, overseeing Pioneering Woman.

The next modern dance event not to miss is the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater (December 2 and 3).

NSO Opens Its New Season

See my review of the season opening gala concert from the National Symphony Orchestra:

National Symphony Orchestra’s Season-Opening Gala Performance (The Washingtonian, September 27):

Bruch / Mendelssohn / Mozart, Violin Concertos, J. Bell, ASMF, N. Marriner / English Chamber Orchestra, P. Maag

In cultural terms, the bad economic climate has spared Washington, which has lost neither its opera company nor its most important local orchestra, both now permanently associated with the Kennedy Center. The National Symphony Orchestra, in fact, ended up with a new music director, Christoph Eschenbach, who led a remarkably good debut season last year. The continued generosity of local patrons of the arts has made possible the extension of Eschenbach’s contract with the NSO, for two more years, at least through the 2014-15 season. David Rubinstein, the chairman of the Kennedy Center, has also donated a large sum of money to purchase and install a new theater organ in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. The old organ, one of the most notoriously bad and unreliable instruments in the city, will be replaced some time next year. Both of these announcements were the centerpiece of Sunday night's NSO season-opening gala performance, in celebration of both the NSO’s 80th anniversary and the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy Center.

Musical stars were on hand to mark the event and dazzle the high-powered audience. The evening started with violinist Joshua Bell, who played the latest of umpteen performances of Max Bruch’s jewel-like first violin concerto. (This past week alone, he has performed the piece at season openers and gala performances in Colorado and Dallas, all part of the jet-setting schedule of a performer at Bell’s level.) It’s a piece of angelic sweetness, Bell’s specialty. He excelled at the tender themes of the first and second movements, drawing them out with an attention to arching line and purity of intonation and tone color. At the podium, Eschenbach kept the level of the orchestra carefully calibrated to Bell’s sound, never covering him, but also giving a much-needed energy boost to the fast concluding movement. Gasps of excitement filled the auditorium when Bell announced that he would play one of his most famous encores, the “Meditation” from Massenet’s Thaïs. The piece is a syrupy concoction that is played so often and so poorly -- not here. Bell gave a performance that was light on the sugar but filled with a tender nostalgia. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Anne Midgette, With much to celebrate, NSO does just that (Washington Post, September 27)

NSO Puts John Adams in Perspective

Read my review published today on the Washington Post Web site:

Charles T. Downey, Adams brings his own "Perspectives" to the NSO
Washington Post, May 14, 2010

The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer, ed. Thomas May

American composer John Adams appeared on the podium of the National Symphony Orchestra last night, continuing a series of concerts at the Kennedy Center devoted to his music that began with Jennifer Koh's recital on Sunday. Composers are possibly too close to their own work to know how to treat it objectively, as a conductor must, to obtain the best result. Yet a composer-led performance, precisely because of that subjectivity, can also tell you something unique about what the composer was thinking.

The Adams-on-Adams treatment was applied to “The Wound-Dresser,” a 1988 symphonic setting of Walt Whitman’s recollections of his service as a caregiver to wounded troops in the makeshift Civil War hospitals along Washington’s National Mall. It was not necessarily the work one most wanted to hear from Adams, not least because he also conducted it in a similar program with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007. The piece can be powerful on first hearing, but after repeated listening its extended elegiac tone can become static. The orchestra played the pulsing chords elegantly, with electronic synthesizer touches recalling the timbre of a glass harmonica. Eric Owens lent a smooth, intense bass-baritone to the vocal part, supported by ghostly violin solos and anguished, disembodied cries from the solo trumpet that strained painfully into the stratosphere. [Continue reading]

National Symphony Orchestra
With John Adams (guest conductor) and Eric Owens (bass-baritone)
John Adams: Perspectives
Kennedy Center Concert Hall

PREVIOUSLY:

• John Adams with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (October 6, 2007)
  
• John Adams, Composers in Conversation with Marin Alsop (September 27, 2007)

EXPANDED COVERAGE:

Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man

From Howard Pollack's biography of Copland: Copland conceived Billy the Kid for a 1938 production with Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan, a traveling company formed with choreographer George Balanchine, which later reassembled and eventually became New York City Ballet. He worked with choreographer Eugene Loring to adapt the life of Billy the Kid from a book by Walter Noble Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid. Copland incorporated six actual cowboy tunes in the score (Great Granddad, Whooppee Ti Yi Yo Get along little dogies, Old Chisholm Trail, Old Paint, Dying Cowboy, Trouble for the Range Cook), altering them to suit his music, later recalling the irony that he arranged these American folk songs in Paris, living on the Rue de Rennes.

From The John Adams Reader, edited by Thomas May: The Wound-Dresser is set to some of the words from the devastating Civil War poem by Walt Whitman. It was composed at a time when Adams's father was dying of Alzheimer's and his mother's life was focused on caring for him: "I was plunged into an awareness not only of dying, but also for the person who cares for the dying. [... The work] is a statement about human compassion that is acted out on a daily basis, quietly and unobtrusively and unselfishly and unfailingly. Another poem in the same volume states its theme in other words: 'Those who love each other shall become invincible'." (quoted by Sarah Cahill)

Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute, ed. Peter Dickinson

Barber adapted the Adagio for Strings from the middle movement of his own string quartet, premiered at the Library of Congress in 1937. After the premiere, Barber heavily revised the final movement, and the second-movement Adagio was arranged several times and in different ways (not all by Barber himself). Barber immediately understood the success of the Adagio, reportedly remarking, "It's a knockout!"; the piece later became a bit of an albatross around his neck, like Ravel and Bolero. Menotti later recalled (in an interview with Peter Dickinson) that Barber "was not particularly fond of the String Quartet, but he did like the Adagio and decided to orchestrate it. He wrote it in Austria at St. Wolfgang. [...] He did mind that it was always played at funerals. As a matter of fact, I was careful not to have it played at his funeral because I knew he'd rather have the croutons [sprinkled on his grave, as he joked with his friends -- some did it at his funeral] than the Adagio for Strings!"

Julian Rushton, Elgar: Enigma Variations "Composers commonly go out of fashion shortly after their death; Elgar achieved this in his lifetime." (p. 3) Elgar, Enigma Variations, cond. Elgar

Of Elgar's Enigma Variations, John Adams notes, "There is a recording of the Enigma Variations made in the late 1920’s. Any conductor today taking the piece up must listen carefully to this recording, for it reveals a kind of approach to orchestral performance that has all but disappeared in the intervening years. The string playing is full of rich, drooping portamenti, a kind of melodic slipping and sliding that listeners today only associate with corny old movie music from the silent film era. But in the context of Elgar’s music it sounds warm and deeply expressive." Adams has more thoughts on the piece at his blog today.

Julian Rushton specifies that the word "Enigma" was added above the theme by A. J. Jaeger (who is cast as Nimrod), on Elgar's instruction, when the work went to publication. Rushton concludes that "Enigma" is not the title of the composition, "but an emblem for the theme" (p. 1). He catalogues the variations as follows: 1. Caroline Alice Edgar, the composer's wife; 2. Hew David Steuart-Powell, amateur pianist; 3. Richard Baxter Townshend, scholar and eccentric; 4. William Meath Baker, squire of Hasfield Court; 5. Richard Penrose Arnold, son of Matthew Arnold; 6. Isabel Fitton, amateur violist; 7. Arthur Troyte Griffith, architect; 8. Winfred Norbury, secretary of Worcestershire Philharmonic Society; 9. A. J. Jaeger, publishing manager of Novello's publishing house, who advised and supported Elgar (cast as Nimrod, the mighty Biblical hunter); 10. Dora Penny, later wife of Richard Powell; 11. George Robertson Sinclair, organist at Hereford and owner of a bulldog named Dan -- the music does not represent Sinclair's playing or the bells at Hereford, but Dan falling into the Wye river, paddling upstream, and barking with satisfaction at climbing out of the water; 12. Basil Nevinson, amateur cellist; 13. Lady Mary Lygon, of Madresfield Court; and 14. Elgar himself.

Flicka and Ramey

One of many things to have taken a hit in the financial crisis is the gala performance. True, the Metropolitan Opera did quite well with its 125th anniversary gala earlier this month, but it did so with major star power and an opera-centered, staged production instead of speeches and fluff. In better times, it was understandable for Washington Performing Arts Society to think it could book two operatic legends, Frederica von Stade and Samuel Ramey, to sing a lightweight program and fill the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. In the current climate it could have worked in a smaller hall, but the Washington visit of what Ramey has called "the seniors tour" was not enough of a draw to fill such a large hall.

Both voices are long past their prime, threadbare in tone and with notable declines in agility and clarity. That being said, there are still contributions for singers in this career phase to make, as Ramey has shown in recent years with appearances as Claggart in Billy Budd and as Bluebeard and Gianni Schicchi. In 2010, von Stade will make her Chicago farewell in a new opera composed for her by Jake Heggie at Chicago Opera Theater and a solo recital with Heggie at the piano. Unfortunately, this sort of gala-like event barely holds serious interest for very long with the best voices in demanding repertoire. For von Stade and Ramey, the repertoire of their past glories served only to underscore their vocal decline, and the far more numerous examples of fluff, occasionally charming but just as often campy and embarrassing, quickly tried the patience.

Other Articles: Ronni Reich, The Personality Touch of Frederica von Stade and Samuel Ramey (Washington Post, John Fleming, Mighty operatic duo of Ramey and von Stade aims for fun (St. Petersburg Times, March 20) Adam Parker, Two opera stars close Charleston Concert season (Charleston Post and Courier, March 15)

Von Stade's Mignon was once a wonderful thing, but she is long past the time to be the wide-eyed Frédéric singing the pants-role gavotte Me voici dans son boudoir or the pure, innocent Mignon of Connais-tu le pays, as wonderful as both arias are. She was most in her element in the comic aria Ah, que j'aime les militaires, from Offenbach's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, a role that Felicity Lott, another singer of roughly von Stade's age, has performed to great acclaim. Von Stade was always, and continues to be, charming and funny on stage, although certain concessions have to be made in terms of her ability to be heard clearly, especially in rapid passagework.

Ramey noted wryly before he began his corresponding set of three big devil arias (Berlioz, Gounod, Boito) that he had spent "probably 75% of my career playing the Devil," adding, "I'm not sure why - my mother always thought I was a little angel." His voice still has enough boom to it for the laughing "Ha-ha-ha" refrain of the Gounod Sérénade, but the wobble noted in both recent stage appearances remains prominent. For a sexagenarian he cuts an admirably slender figure, but it is unlikely he will be picking up his shirtless Mefistofele costume anytime soon. The first half ended with a decent set of Copland songs: most of the cost of a ticket was probably compensated by the chance to hear von Stade's imitation of a goose in I Bought Me a Cat, turned into a duet with Ramey. The second half degenerated into an evening of popular song, with some Gershwin tunes and other "favorites" from American musicals. Martin Katz, the highly regarded accompanist of about the same age as the singers, hopefully was paid double his normal fee.

The next event in the WPAS classical series is this afternoon's appearance by the London Symphony Orchestra (March 28, 4 pm), with Valery Gergiev conducting Prokofiev's first and sixth symphonies, the latter having already reduced Alex Ross to a cold sweat.

Hindemith's Tribute

Paying Homage to Lincoln in Song
Washington Post, March 10, 2009

Cathedral Choral Society
Washington National Cathedral
Hindemith, When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd
Copland, Lincoln Portrait

UPDATE:
I was somewhat surprised that no one wrote a firebomb comment in response to me trashing Copland's Lincoln Portrait in this review. Writing to applaud me for doing so, a friend recently reminded me of the perfect send-up of Copland's trite piece, the hilarious Bach Portrait by the inimitable Peter Schickele (sound embedded below).

Master Chorale of Washington

Master Chorale of Washington at National Presbyterian Church
Washington Post, February 23, 2009

American A Cappella
Master Chorale of Washington
National Presbyterian Church