Bernard Herrmann Festival

B. Herrmann, Moby-Dick / Sinfonietta, R. Edgar-Wilson, D. Wilson-Johnson, Danish National Choir and Symphony Orchestra, M. Schønwandt (Chandos, 2011)

Charles T. Downey, Ensemble shines spotlight on Herrmann’s film scores, and for good reason (Washington Post, April 19)

Bernard Herrmann was the score composer for many great film directors, beginning with Orson Welles and continuing with Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese.

Joseph Horowitz, whose PostClassical Ensemble is co-hosting a festival honoring the composer, wants us to remember that Herrmann was more than just a film composer, even though the majority of the festival’s events are film screenings. PostClassical Ensemble’s last festival performance fell on Sunday afternoon at the National Gallery of Art.

There should be no shame in being known as a film composer, especially when one’s credits include Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which critic Alex Ross once described as “a symphony for film and orchestra”... [Continue reading]

PostClassical Ensemble
Bernard Herrmann: Screen, Stage, and Radio
National Gallery of Art

SEE ALSO:
Armando Trull, 'Psycho' And So Much More: Composer Bernard Herrmann Gets A D.C. Festival (WAMU, April 15)

Rachel Barton Pine Recites Violin Bible

Bach, Complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, R. Barton Pine (released on April 1, 2016) Avie AV2360 | 125'33"

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine has long been an Ionarts favorite, although I have had to miss her last two local appearances, playing all of the Paganini Caprices in 2013 and on the Candlelight Concert series last year. Given her impeccable musicality, astounding technique, and beautiful tone, we were hoping she would get around to recording the six solo violin works of J. S. Bach, pieces known around here as the "Bible of music" (Gidon Kremer). Avie is about to release Barton Pine's top-notch account of the "Sei solo," as Bach put it on his manuscript copy of these pieces. I have only just started to listen to them, but her set is up there among my favorites of recent recordings, with Isabelle Faust (now available as a discounted 2-CD set) and Alina Ibragimova, although Viktoria Mullova and Rachel Podger still reign supreme in the Ionarts heart.

Barton Pine came home, in a way, in her choice of recording venue, to the sanctuary of St. Pauls United Church of Christ in Chicago, where she attended church as a child. She first performed Bach's music there, at the age of four, she explains in her booklet essay, and an image of Bach from one of the church's stained glass windows adorns the album. "You must practice Bach. It is the music of Gott!" Barton Pine recalls being told by elderly German ladies there. To accompany my delectation of the recording, Barton Pine chose Easter Sunday to be at the National Gallery of Art to give a live performance of the violin bible. So, after singing for an Easter Vigil and two Easter Day Masses, it was off to a different kind of sacred service for Ionarts.

Not all performers can speak with such easy authority about the music they play, but during this concert Barton Pine offered many insights about each sonata and partita, without ever abusing our attention. Introducing the first sonata, she described Bach’s written-out ornamentation as a way to prevent over-embellishment, but for the record Barton Pine’s excessively ornamented version, a fragment offered as an amusing way of being over the top, would probably make for great listening. After all, it is possible that Bach wanted to make sure that the performer did ornament these pieces, so he offered one plausible way of ornamenting, perhaps to encourage performers to go even farther.

Other Reviews: Joan Reinthaler, Violinist Rachel Barton Pine brings joy to Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ (Washington Post, March 29)

In general, Barton plays this music with no vibrato, at one point in the first movement of the second sonata using a strong vibrato as an ornament, which had a striking effect. She played with her Baroque bow on her modernized 1742 Guarneri del Gesú instrument, so the sound was akin to what she achieves on the recording, with impeccable intonation, including in multi-stops, so that the fugal structures in the sonatas were precise and clear. One overarching facet of her approach was to keep meters strict, without becoming mathematical or mechanical. This makes her Ciaconna, the famous piece at the end of the second partita, feel again like a dance, a sense of rhythmic organization that can get lost in other performances, propelled at essentially the same tempo in all sections, including the shift to major. Each time that the opening section returned, sort of a "refrain" in the piece, she tightened the emotional impact of the piece.

Only the start of the second partita felt slightly dull in this performance, the only time my mind wandered slightly. As Bach intended in many of his pieces like this, designed as encyclopedic compendia, the third sonata and partita are climactic. The third sonata, with its most complex fugue, based on the chorale tune Komm, Heiliger Geist, was solemn and grand, followed by a simple, spare Largo as a moment of repose. Lest we take too seriously the God-minded side of Bach, he of the motto Soli Deo Gloria, the set ends with the much lighter third partita, here deft, sometimes thrilling, but without the heaviness of having to make too profound a statement. Life, after all, is far too serious not to dance.

NGA Vocal Ensemble

Debussy, Music for the Prix de Rome (Le Gladiateur, La damoiselle élue, L'enfant prodigue), Flemish Radio Choir, Brussels Phil., H. Niquet (Glossa, 2009)

Charles T. Downey, National Gallery of Art Vocal Ensemble provides some pleasant surprises in concert
Washington Post, June 10, 2014

Composers and painters have influenced one another in many eras, and in France at the end of the 19th century, the ties were strong. In a concert Sunday evening, the National Gallery of Art Vocal Ensemble explored the atmosphere of that period, offering music that complemented the museum’s exhibit of works by Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt.

The selection featured many unexpected choices, and the performance was generally good, despite a few... [Continue reading]

NGA Vocal Ensemble
Music in honor of Degas/Cassatt
National Gallery of Art

All the Possibilities, Layer of Mystery: Winogrand at NGA

 

She has been caught off guard. One moment an attractive young woman was walking along, window shopping, engaged in her own thoughts, enjoying a cone of ice cream -- then surprise! Was she the innocent she appears to have been? or a murderess, leaving a trail of headless men in her wake?

She became an iconic image, one of my favorites by the photographer Garry Winogrand, whose exhibit is up until June 8 at the National Gallery of Art. Winogrand never cared for the processing of his film, preferring to be out traveling the country, shooting. Much of his work was never processed or seen. There are sixty freshly printed images in this exhibit being shown for the first time.

Poulenc Trio @ NGA

Charles T. Downey, Poulenc Trio brings urbane mix to National Gallery of Art
Washington Post, March 25, 2014

Glinka / Poulenc / Others, Poulenc Trio (Marquis Music, 2009)

The Poulenc Trio takes its name from a composer who actually wrote a piece for their unusual combination of instruments: oboe, bassoon and piano. Most of their other repertoire is arrangements of music for other combinations, and they brought an urbane mix of such pieces for their concert at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday evening.

A trio sonata by Handel more traditionally would have two treble instruments on the upper parts and the bassoon or another bass instrument doubling the continuo, but talented bassoonist Bryan Young’s light and agile approach to the second treble part made it work. Oboist Vladimir Lande had a consistently beautiful sound in Glinka’s “Trio Pathétique,” originally for clarinet, cello and piano, while pianist Irina Kaplan, generally content to be more in the background, gave a gossamer touch to the many decorative roulades in the keyboard part. [Continue reading]

Poulenc Trio
With Anton Lande, violin
National Gallery of Art

Thoughts on the English Suites

Charles T. Downey, Bach’s ‘English Suites’ tackled at Phillips Collection and National Gallery of Art
Washington Post, March 4, 2014

Bach, English Suites (inter alia), C. Rousset (Ambroisie, box set, 2010)

Bach’s “English Suites” are among his most diverting music for the keyboard, where a delight in patterns and brilliant finger-work crowds out a severe contrapuntal approach. Bach’s encyclopedic tendencies meant that he had a plan when he grouped works into a set like this, so one gets more out of a complete performance than hearing these pieces singly. So the complete performance offered on Sunday afternoon and evening, in numerical order and split between a harpsichordist at the Phillips Collection and a pianist at the National Gallery of Art, was most welcome. [Continue reading]

Bach, English Suites
Anthony Newman, harpsichord
Phillips Collection
Peter Vinograde, piano
National Gallery of Art

Jeffrey Mumford Portrait at the National Gallery

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

Jeffrey Mumford (b. 1955) is composer-in-residence this month at the National Gallery of Art, and in his second concert there, violinist Miranda Cuckson and cellist Julia Bruskin offered an intimate portrait of the D.C.-born composer. They played five works spanning nearly a quarter-century of Mumford’s output, providing a time-lapsed exposure that revealed a consistency of style. Since each of the pieces contained multiple parts, they seemed less like five independent works than an extended series of variations on a central idea.

The implications of this for a listener’s enjoyment or otherwise are obvious. They depend both on one’s taste for the style in question and on one’s attention span. (I started strong on the first but wound up somewhat hamstrung by the second.) Mumford’s music is freely atonal, occasionally dwelling on a few repeated notes but usually unmoored from any pitch center. Many of his phrases are short and bracketed by silence, exquisite aphorisms that carried well in the Gallery’s super-resonant acoustic. There are several elegiac lines that would sound simply sweet if played alone but which are unsettled by the addition of minor second intervals. The music explores a narrow range of moods, mostly alternating between pensive disquiet and fidgety restlessness, with occasional panic attacks, but it never stays in one mood for very long. Hysteria quickly loses steam and falls quiet, while a hushed meditation is rudely interrupted by an anxious outburst.

Receiving its world premiere, eight aspects of appreciation II for violin and cello was a finely crafted revision of an earlier piece. Starting in dialogue, the voices soon drifted apart. In one section they traded off the notes of a gentle lullaby, but agitation kept intruding. (One of Mumford’s favorite gestures is a blunt outburst followed by quiet ruminations, like the splash of a stone in water followed by its ripples.) Another movement evanesced with the violin floating and the cello sinking to the top and bottom of their respective registers, as if falling off opposite ends of the audible spectrum. The final section riffled through themes from the prior ones, as if hurriedly searching for something and not finding it before giving up with a brusque shiver.

Other Articles: Stephen Brookes, Jeffrey Mumford rightly vaunted by National Gallery of Art as composer-in-residence (Washington Post, February 4)

For two rhapsodies for cello & strings, Bruskin was joined by six members of the National Gallery of Art Chamber Players. Compared to the duos and the violin solos, this instrumentation was not as well suited to the acoustic, producing a murky, bass-heavy sound. Though consistent with Mumford’s other pieces, here the material took on a more forbidding aspect, losing the fragile beauty present in the others; it might have fared better in a different space. The two soloists shined throughout the evening. Cuckson in particular had a fine sense for the room, which allowed her to play Mumford’s often-thorny music with great clarity despite a challenging acoustic.

Cage 100, Part 4: Cage's Influence

The official closing concert of the week's John Cage Centennial Festival came on Sunday night at the National Gallery of Art. A varied program, filling out the festival's retrospective of Cage's oeuvre, was staged in the atrium of the museum's East Building, a space that has not always been successful for concertizing but which suited this performance quite beautifully, especially because of the role of spatialization issues in some of the works featured. I stand by my dividing line for Cage's works at about the year 1960, the point at which, to my ears, Cage became too obsessed with chance determinations and the negation of traditional musical parameters (rhythm and meter, melody, harmony) for his own good. Imaginary Landscape No. 4, a piece for 24 players controlling 12 transistor radios, from 1951, was lighthearted fun, its pulse indicated by a conductor and completely random sounds swooping in and out in crescendos and overlapping entrances. Contrary to what some people might think, given how often he used transistor radios, Cage did not like radios and embraced them as a way to hand over control beyond his own tastes. The goal, he once said, was to "erase all will and the very idea of success."

Technology was also a way to introduce random elements into his music without allowing human associations to creep in, through improvisation. The Cage exhibit at American University's Katzen Arts Center is worth seeing, not so much for the composer's artwork (noteworthy because it was created by Cage, more than for its own merits) but because of the other documents, including the manuscripts and typescript versions of the score of 4'33". Another document in the exhibit is a typewritten letter from October 17, 1963, addressed by Cage to Leonard Bernstein ("Dear Lenny," it begins), who was then performing Cage's music (and that of others) on a concert that incorporated improvisation, as a way to show the freedom Cage introduced into his music. This irked Cage so much that he wrote, rather sternly, "Improvisation is not related to what the three of us [Cage, Feldman, Brown] are doing in our works. It gives free play to the exercise of taste and memory, and it is exactly this that we, in differing ways, are not doing in our music."

Pianist Stephen Drury played Cage's prepared piano piece Music for "Works of Calder", from 1949-50, a spell-binding play of gamelan gong-like sounds and other cymbal-like or bell-like tones, punctuated by stretches of silence, with Calder's enormous site-specific mobile looming overhead. The rhythmically energized section of this piece, with a bouncy ostinato, was a reminder of the loss Cage imposed on himself in later works by eliminating rhythm in favor of duration. Cartridge Music, from 1960, was rendered on all sorts of amplified doodads, including a piece of tape ripped up from the table surface and Slinkys suspended from microphone stands, definitely at the edge of trying as one tried to make sense of the work, determined as it was by dots on star charts. Worst of all was the final Cage work, Ryoanji (1983-92), related to three prints Cage made from tracings of the rocks in the Zen garden of the Ryoanji Buddhist temple in Kyoto (on exhibit in the Concourse). The same chord, slightly altered, is repeated countless times, with amplified cello (and cellist's voice) moaning in the background, the kind of Cage piece that is annoyingly tiresome.

Other Reviews: Stephen Brookes, Cage festival closes on some fitting notes (Washington Post, September 11) Cage Festival: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

A set of pieces by composers influenced by or who influenced Cage was a nice touch, including Henry Cowell's rather gorgeous Tides of Manaunaun (1917), heard live for the second time this year and played here, somewhat haltingly, by Margaret Leng Tan. Robert Ashley's Resonant Combinations featured composer Roger Reynolds producing overtones on a piano on the floor, with the partials hovering in ghostly ways as instrumentalists placed around the atrium took them up in the distance. Tan also performed a new piece by Reynolds, OPPOrTuniTy, which involved the building up of a cluster on prepared piano and the shouting of fragments of the name "John," which had the effect of a seance summons, a welcome example of whimsy from the normally far too serious Reynolds. George Lewis's new work Merce and Baby attempted to recreate the collaboration of Merce Cunningham and the jazz drummer Baby Dodds, with the catchy transcription of Dodds's spiffy solos stealing the show. Pianist Jenny Lin gave Steve Antosca's evocation, also from 2012, a busy energy, although the piece seemed to evoke Prokofiev's second sonata more than Cage until its eerie, buzzing conclusion, produced by pieces of twine pulled through the piano's strings.

Leslie Amper @ NGA

Charles T. Downey, Pianist Leslie Amper offers a slice of the soundtrack to George Bellows’s era
Washington Post, June 26, 2012

Henry Cowell Plays His Own Piano Music

Can we re-create the sound world of a previous era? That was the goal of pianist Leslie Amper in a concert hosted by the National Gallery of Art on Sunday evening. In conjunction with the museum’s exhibition of the works of American painter George Bellows, Amper performed American music from the first quarter of the 20th century, when Bellows was active, and Chopin’s music admired by the painter’s pianist wife.

In terms of technical or interpretative accomplishment, there was not much to inspire wonder, but the American selections, rarely heard in concert, proved worthwhile. Amper dived into Henry Cowell’s “Tides of Manaunaun,” creating a vast rumble of waves on the elbow-to-fist left-hand clusters under an almost trite, vaguely Celtic right-hand melody. Amper grouped this daring work with more tonal selections, Edward MacDowell’s “Joy of Autumn” and Amy Beach’s “Honeysuckle” (from her collection “From Grandmother’s Garden”), the latter a sort of Chopinesque polonaise. The more demanding sections of Charles Griffes’s piano sonata were rough around the edges, including a couple of memory slips. But the “Thoreau” movement from Charles Ives’s “Concord” sonata had an idyllic dreaminess, wandering amid half-voiced echoes and wistful rhythmic freedom, albeit without the optional flute part that Ives added, a ghostly evocation of the instrument that Thoreau often played while boating on Walden Pond. [Continue reading]

Leslie Amper, piano
Lecture and Concert
National Gallery of Art

Screening of The New York Hat, a 16-minute silent short by D. W. Griffith, made just three years before The Birth of a Nation, starring Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore

Recital program:
Charles Griffes, Piano Sonata
Henry Cowell, The Tides of Manaunaun
Charles Macdowell, New England Idyls
Ives, Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord, Mass., 1840-60") -- fourth movement ("Thoreau")

From Thoreau's Flute by Louisa May Alcott:
"Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
There came a low, harmonious breath:
'For such as he there is no death;
His life the eternal life commands;
Above man's aims his nature rose.
The wisdom of a just content
Made one small spot a continent
And turned to poetry life's prose'."

George Bellows @ NGA

Yesterday afforded the opportunity to take in the relatively new George Bellows retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. George Bellows (1882-1925) has been eclipsed in recent years by Edward Hopper, the other famous student of Robert Henri, who led what was later called the Ashcan School in New York. Hopper hit his stride in the late 20s, just around the time that Bellows died -- prematurely, from complications arising from a burst appendix -- when Bellows, in fact, seemed poised to make a breakthrough. What Bellows was able to create ranges from unforgettable to regrettable, and this exhibit of over a hundred prints, drawings, and paintings makes clear that it is perhaps not only for painting that he should be remembered.

Pierre Henri pushed his students to go back into art history beyond Impressionism, and the influence of Manet and the Realists weighs heavily in Bellows's work. The many fine lithographs and ink drawings in the exhibit are the best examples of how Bellows brought the satirical and political leanings of Daumier and the graphic shock tactics of Goya to his focus on the common man in New York City in the early 20th century. A well-meaning socialist, Bellows documented the squalor and hunger of the tenements like a journalist: the urchins in street fights or run-ins with the law, a brawl in Times Square on the night of a New York gubernatorial election, the grueling excavation to build Penn Station, hungry stray dogs prowling for scraps on a garbage heap, the hardships of prison, and the grim view of executions both state-sponsored and vigilante. Bellows achieved a Rembrandt-like intensity in many of these works, which he was not always able to transfer to paint, but he also crossed the border into bathos with a series of sensationalist propaganda images relating the human rights abuses perpetrated by German soldiers in Belgium in World War I.

Where Daumier loved the stage and performers of all kinds, it was the boxing ring that most memorably caught Bellows's eye. It was here that he was best able to catch in paint the newspaper-like immediacy he accomplished in lithographs, especially in Stag at Sharkey's, a boxing portrait that is one of his best paintings, grouped in the exhibit with two other less familiar boxing portraits and complimented by lots of print images on the subject (the NGA has quite a collection of the boxing works, including the lithograph of Stag at Sharkey's, which is even better than the painting). Bellows was also particularly moved by the plight of children in the poor neighborhoods of New York, a subject that he caught so memorably in the Corcoran's Forty-Two Kids, capturing the rubbery bodies of poor kids at the industrial river's edge with beautifully brushed loops and whorls of paint. The same subject is explored in a selection of other paintings from private collections and museum loans, including River Rats and Hals-like portraits of these tough-nosed urchins -- Paddy Flanigan and Frankie the Organ Boy (an orphan organ grinder) -- who might later become the blood-spattered pugilists of the private boxing clubs.

Other Reviews: Peter Schjeldahl, Young and Gifted (The New Yorker, June 25) ---, Audio Slide Show: George Bellows (The New Yorker, June 21) Rupert Cornwell, Streetwise scenes with plenty of punch (The Independent, June 18) Philip Kennicott, National Gallery takes a holistic view of George Bellows’s art and career (Washington Post, June 7) Kevin Nance, Another Round for a Realist Contender (Wall Street Journal, June 1)

Working in paint, Bellows seemed to be distracted by the possibilities of color, a part of what caused the linear clarity of his lithographic approach to become indistinct on canvas. The landscapes and seascapes in the show are beautifully composed but often unbalanced by the bright color palette: without the edgy subject matter, that love of the marginalized, Bellows lost his punch in most cases. The human figure likewise fared poorly under Bellows's brush, when a single body, and especially a single face, becomes the focus of a painting, at least until the final paintings of the 20s. In the works shown in the exhibit's final room, the influence of newer modernist styles was shaking up Bellows's approach.

The George Bellows exhibit will remain on view at the National Gallery of Art through October 8, after which it will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (November 15, 2012, to February 18, 2013) and the Royal Academy of Arts in London (March 16 to June 9, 2013).

JACK Quartet @ NGA

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

I. Xenakis, Complete String Quartets, JACK Quartet (2009)

We will take every chance we can get to hear the JACK Quartet play, and we have had plenty of chances this season. The group, which specializes in new music, took part in the Ives festival hosted by the Post-Classical Ensemble last November, and performed at the Library of Congress the year before that. We even had to miss a lunchtime concert they gave at the National Gallery of Art just this past April, which we recommended but could not attend. Happily, the group was back at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday evening, in the auditorium of the museum's East Building, for another concert of contemporary music. It was sparsely attended, especially after some members of the audience heard the first one or two pieces, but a few masochistic stalwarts stuck it out to the end. A composer could not ask for more committed interpreters of his or her music: a performance by the JACK Quartet is likely to put any music these musicians believe in in the best light. Sadly, that is still not always enough.

Bookending the concert were two composers whom this eclectic foursome has championed most steadfastly. Georg Friedrich Haas's fifth string quartet, which opened the program, is not the one performed in complete darkness -- that is the disorienting no. 3, "In iij. Noct." -- but it plays with the same issues of space and time. The four players were positioned at the auditorium's four corners, surrounding the audience, making little snatches of sound swirl around our heads. These musical ideas -- glissandi, tremolos, dissonant clusters, consonant harmonies, microtones, overtones making the harmonic series buzz, sometimes moaning like human voices, sometimes whining like electronic feedback -- bounced antiphonally from player to player, in a little, semi-contrapuntal stretto of close imitation, beats of dissonance setting the air aflutter. The JACK Quartet has not yet recorded any of Haas's quartets, but I am not sure that the real effect of this music can be captured on sound equipment.

The Haas was paired quite nicely with much older music, three vocal pieces by 14th-century Guillaume de Machaut in a transcription by JACK violinist Ari Streisfeld, music that had its own fierce rhythmic complexity, in hocket-like interactions between the voices, and modal harmonies that can be hair-raising to tonally oriented ears. The JACK Quartet has recorded the quartets of Iannis Xenakis, heard at the end of the concert, and to magnificent effect. They gave everything they had to Tetras, a jolt of energy that brought me back to equilibrium after the middle part of this concert. It is a piece that exults in chaos -- or seems to, since most of the composer's music is rigorously controlled -- but it is enlivened by rhythmic vigor verve and shape. "Buckle up," was the pithy comment offered by cellist Kevin McFarland, and it was good advice.

In the middle were three pieces that can be enjoyed and appreciated fully just by hearing what they are about -- indeed it is probably better that way than actually hearing them. Roger Reynolds spoke about not forgotten, from 2010, as being inspired by the experience of hearing the Arditti Quartet play a new piece by Elliott Carter on two different occasions, first at the premiere and second a year later: the difference between the two performances made clear to him that "discovery was being replaced by mastery," that something about performers encountering the music new changed the nature of the performance. Reynolds based the inner four movements of his work on four excerpts from other composers -- when those little snippets surfaced, it was generally the most pleasing part -- leaving it to the performers to choose the order of the movements.

The other two pieces came from a composition seminar Reynolds led this spring, in which five students completed a work for string quartet that the JACK Quartet would perform and record. In Probabilities, Diarmid Flatley took 36 excerpts from earlier string quartets, one for roughly each decade of the genre's existence, and combined them using a mathematical probability structure. Jacob Sundstrom, for no comment from the Grey Room, used a similarly computer-oriented approach, taking a William S. Burroughs poem, breaking it into fragments, assigning musical ideas to each fragment, and recombining it. Some aspects of the words remained in the piece, in the form of consonants and vowels interjected by the musicians during the performance. If this sounds more like a process of assemblage than composition, you will not be surprised that it sounded that way, too. Even computers that have been taught to compose music have learned to introduce randomness, some digital approximation of inspiration, to be able to mimic human composers.

Next Sunday the free concert series at the National Gallery of Art returns to West Building's West Garden Court for a recital by soprano Rosa Lamoreaux and baritone William Sharp (June 10, 6:30 pm), in music by Barber, Musto, and other composers.

Rose Ensemble at the National Gallery

Il Poverello: Medieval and Renaissance Music for Saint Francis of Assisi, Rose Ensemble

Charles T. Downey, Music review: Rose Ensemble (Washington Post, December 13, 2011)

Just in time for Hanukkah, the Minnesota-based Rose Ensemble performed a program focused on Sephardic music at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday night. Similar to a program offered by the Boston Camerata at Dumbarton Oaks the previous weekend, the concert mingled music from Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions in an evocation of medieval Spain and the Mediterranean. That requires a healthy dose of speculative reconstruction, which felt more authentic in the Boston Camerata’s collaboration with an Arabic music ensemble.

Much of the credit for this program’s success was due to the generally fine contributions from the five singers, who formed a well-blended ensemble.

[Continue reading]

What to Hear Next Season: National Gallery of Art

See my preview of the 2011-2012 season of free concerts at the National Gallery of Art:

Free Classical Music from the National Gallery of Art (Washingtonian, August 11):

Along with the Library of Congress, the other major series of free concerts in Washington is hosted by the National Gallery of Art. These concerts are free and require no reservation or ticket. All seats are first-come, first-served, so early arrival is recommended, since at some concerts many empty seats remain, while at others a line forms long in advance and overfill seating is packed or exceeded. Concerts are generally offered on Sunday evenings (beginning at 6:30 PM), or on Wednesdays at lunchtime (beginning at 12:10 PM).

The only drawback of the NGA series is its main venue, the pretty but acoustically challenged West Garden Court, where most Sunday concerts take place (one should enter through the doors at Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue, Northwest, which open at 6PM). It is a large stone-walled room with a particularly live, wet acoustic that does not flatter all types of performances. A central fountain and numerous trees and plants give a large portion of the seats unsatisfactory sight lines. Wednesday concerts are generally presented in the lecture hall on the ground floor of the West Building, and some performances do happen in other locations in either the East or West Building, so check the Web site carefully before you attend.

The performers featured on this series are a mixture of local ensembles, including several ensembles resident at the museum, and visiting musicians. They are generally very good performances, with interesting choices of music, and occasionally there are excellent concerts to be heard. Top picks on the 2011-12 season include the ongoing complete cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets, which begins with the NGA String Quartet (October 2) and continues with the Talich Quartet (November 6) and the Pacifica Quartet (December 4). Washington Performing Arts Society is co-hosting the broadcast of the entertaining radio show From the Top, with pianist Christopher O’Riley and some talented child and teen musicians (October 16). [Continue reading]

What Else to Hear Next Season
Washington Performing Arts Society | Opera | National Symphony Orchestra
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra | Vocal Music | Chamber Music | Early Music
Phillips Collection | Washington Ballet | Dance | Library of Congress

Joel Fan Bludgeons Chopin

Read my review published yesterday in the Style section of the Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, Pianist Joel Fan performs at the National Gallery of Art
Washington Post, June 7, 2011

Joel Fan, West of the Sun: Music of the Americas

It was a relief to attend a summertime concert that did not invite the listener to turn off his mind and just relax. Pianist Joel Fan, known for his work with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project and his adventurous programming, returned to the National Gallery of Art for a solo recital Sunday evening.

Fan claimed that the choice of music revolved around two themes, “spirituality” from different world cultures and the “breakdown of tonality.” Both applied to the hair-raising rendition of Scriabin’s ferocious fifth sonata, a jumble of melodic themes and near-eclipsing cascades of notes that evoked the summoning of creative force like a sorcerous incantation. In Schoenberg’s “Three Piano Pieces,” op. 11, Fan proceeded from the same sort of post-Romantic chromatic voluptuousness, making the score’s thickets of dissonance as sensual as possible. [Continue reading]

Joel Fan, piano
Music by Schoenberg, Beethoven, Chopin, et al.
National Gallery of Art

Venice Comes to Washington

Vivaldi: Concertos and Sinfonias for strings Concerto Veneziano (Tartini, D. 96) Vivaldi, Concertos

With the prospect of a shutdown of the U.S. government narrowly avoided on Friday, the National Gallery of Art remained open for the concert by the Venice Baroque Orchestra on Sunday night. One of the leading historically informed performance ensembles, the group has been coming more to this side of the Atlantic, to Strathmore just last fall and to the Library of Congress in 2007. The echo chamber of the NGA's West Garden Court was not the best acoustic for their rhythmically taut, sharp-edged approach to the Italian Baroque concerto, but their performance of seven such pieces (.PDF file) -- a wag might add "interchangeable" -- was a fitting tribute to the museum's Venetian-themed exhibit on Canaletto and his contemporaries.

The group has already recorded a lot of Vivaldi concertos, but this well will not run dry for a while, even though the opening Sinfonia in A major sounded a bit too much like garden-variety Vivaldi. The other selections that did not feature a soloist were more pleasing, especially Baldassare Galuppi's Concerto a Quattro in G minor, which featured the contrast of a solo group (two violins, viola, and continuo) with the tutti. With a group composed only of strings -- six violins, one each of viola, cello, and violone -- it was otherwise up to the continuo group of harpsichord and the smiling, colorful Ivano Zanenghi on lute to provide diverting color.

For the works with soloist the group brought along its regular collaborator, violinist Giuliano Carmignola, who is guaranteed to add a dynamic, even diabolical flair to these showpieces. Sour tuning issues spoiled the first of these pieces, Giuseppe Tartini's A major violin concerto, D. 96, as Carmignola, perilously flat, slashed and scraped his way through the piece, here as elsewhere attacking the fingerboard with such force that it made some popping, percussive sounds. In the three Vivaldi concertos on the second half, he was erratic at times but his sudden outbursts, punctuated by stamps of his foot, kept one guessing. The E-flat concerto ("La tempesta di mare," RV 253) was the most heart-stoppingly virtuosic, with Carmignola chewing up the scenery and the cello and violone rumbling like thunder in the closing Presto.

Other Reviews: Joe Banno, Venice Baroque Orchestra at the National Gallery of Art (Washington Post, April 11) Michael Huebner, Venice Baroque Orchestra goes beyond history, to pure music (Birmingham News, April 3)

The G minor concerto, RV 332, had the more serious, luscious sound, especially in the first two movements, while the last, phrased sort of like a fandango, rattled along at a devilish pace. Perhaps finally warmed up, Carmignola ducked and skittered through the final piece (D major, RV 210), backed up only by lute and pianissimo strings in the lovely second movement. Encores included the blistering final movement from the summer concerto of the Four Seasons, making for one hell of a hailstorm, and one another fast movement, as yet unidentified.

Head back to the National Gallery of Art for a lunchtime concert by violinists Christian Tetzlaff and Antje Weithaas (April 28, 12:10 pm).

Quatuor pour la fin du temps, 70th Anniversary

Read my review published today in the Style section of the Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, Inscape performs ‘Quartet for the End of Time’ at National Gallery of Art
Washington Post, April 5, 2011

Trio Wanderer, P. Moraguès R. Rischin, For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet

In January 1941, Olivier Messiaen premiered his “Quartet for the End of Time,” in a performance by the composer and three other prisoners in a German war camp. Two months later, the National Gallery of Art was dedicated in Washington, to house the artworks collected by Andrew W. Mellon. The museum commemorated both of these anniversaries Sunday, with a performance of Messiaen’s landmark quartet in the West Garden Court of the West Building.

Like much of Messiaen’s music, the piece depicts a mystical scene, the cessation of the flow of time at the end of the world, based on words in the biblical book of Revelation. Rhythmic patterns drawn from classical Indian music, harmonies from Messiaen’s synesthesia-inspired vocabulary of chord colors, and the composer’s dissonant transcription of bird song converge to give the sense of time being suspended, by an angel heralded by trumpets in a “dance of fury” and crowned by rainbows. [Continue reading]

Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps
70th anniversary of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time / 70th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art
Inscape Chamber Music Project
National Gallery of Art

"Never have I been listened to with such attention and such understanding." -- Messiaen's description of the first performance of Quatuor pour la fin du temps, at Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany (currently Zgorzelec, Poland) on January 15, 1941

FURTHER THOUGHTS:

• Alex Ross for The New Yorker
  
• Cambridge Music Handbook by Anthony Pople
  
• Messiaen's 100th anniversary in 2008
  
• Some new recordings of the quartet
  
• Lots of other recordings
  
• Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, A POW's Awe-Inspiring Act of Faith (Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2011)

Happy Norwegian New Year!

Read my review published today in the Style section of the Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, National Gallery of Art Orchestra delivers rousing muscial end to Norway festival
Washington Post, January 11, 2010

Grieg, Peer Gynt Suites / Six Orchestral Songs, Malmö Symphony Orchestra, B. Engeset

The National Gallery of Art Orchestra offered a rousing conclusion to the Norway Comes to Washington festival at the museum's annual New Year concert on Sunday evening. Norwegian conductor Bjarte Engeset combined some of the traditional music for such concerts, such as the overture to Strauss's "Die Fledermaus," with less expected pieces by Norwegian composers, from Johan Halvorsen's "Scenes from Norwegian Fairy Tales" to Grieg favorites.

Even with the back-desk violins, the double basses, and the percussion tucked behind and around various columns, the orchestra made the best of the echo-heavy stone acoustic of the West Garden Court. Hearing the encores from the back corner of the space, where there were plenty of empty seats, confirmed that the ensemble sounded crisp and unified even there, although at full-bore the brass and percussion overpowered everything else. This overblown quality was an asset in the pairing of marches by John Philip Sousa and Johannes Hanssen, a former director of the Oslo Military Band who is more or less the American March King's Norwegian counterpart. [Continue reading]

NGA Orchestra
With Bjarte Engeset (guest conductor) and Jessica Jones (soprano)
National Gallery of Art

Nordic Voices

Read my review published today in the Style section of the Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, Nordic Voices group showcases Norwegian composers at National Gallery of Art
Washington Post, October 12, 2010

Lamentations (Victoria, Gesualdo, White, Palestrina), Nordic Voices

The six-voice a cappella ensemble Nordic Voices performed at the National Gallery of Art Sunday evening, in a concert of contemporary music co-sponsored by the Norwegian Embassy. These new pieces by Norwegian composers thankfully avoided the trend among some choral composers toward overly saccharine holy minimalism. With a group like Nordic Voices, composers can stretch their legs more, even if some of this music is unlikely to sound as good performed by anyone else.

The plainchant setting of Henrik Ødegaard's "Ubi caritas" was sometimes reminiscent of Duruflé's beloved arrangement, but he also reordered the text of the refrain in ways that changed the meaning into a question. Percussive consonants distilled from the text of Ødegaard's more challenging "Ave verum corpus" evoked the spitting and wounding of Christ's passion, and the six singers added whistling to create phantom harmonies. In two pieces composed especially for Nordic Voices, Lasse Thoresen incorporated not only Norwegian folk song but the otherworldly sounds of Asian overtone chanting. [Continue reading]

Nordic Voices
Music by Ødegaard, Thoresen, Kverndokk, Havrøy
National Gallery of Art

In the Darkness, Light

Mark Rothko, No. 7 (1964, National Gallery of Art) Morton Feldman, Rothko Chapel, UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus

The final installment of this year's artistic meditations for the Triduum (see Holy Thursday and Good Friday) comes from an unlikely source, the installation of Mark Rothko's late black-on-black paintings in the tower room of the National Gallery of Art's East Building. Well, perhaps not so unlikely -- Rothko had just finished these seven paintings when he received the commission from John and Dominique de Menil to decorate a Catholic chapel in Houston. As a result, he made larger versions of the same idea to be installed in the octagonal room (the original architectural design by Philip Johnson was completed by Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry) now known as the Rothko Chapel. The artist attributed his inspiration for the black theme -- darkness as light -- to the window of blackness in a late Matisse painting, Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (1914, now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou).

The truth is that, when you look at these paintings up close (for those unable to make it to the museum, there is an online slideshow), they are more complex than the term black-on-black describes. They are right in line with most of Rothko's abstract work, in that a black (in one case, brown) rectangle hovers over backgrounds of slightly different colors and, also like many other Rothkos, even more colors are masked underneath the uppermost layer of paint. In many cases, those lighter hues glow around the edge of the central rectangle, like a halo or the corona of sunlight at the edge of an eclipse. Spending some time sitting in the trapezoidal room at the top of the East Building made me recall that the focus of the Tenebrae service is, after all, darkness: the darkness into which Christ cast himself, offering himself up for a ruination to be compared with that of Jerusalem razed by its attackers.

Other Articles: Blake Gopnik, National Gallery exhibit challenges traditional view of Rothko's black paintings (Washington Post, March 14) Bill O'Leary, Alfred Molina and Mark Rothko's Strokes of Genius (Washington Post, March 27)

The symbolism often seen in the Tenebrae service is that candles (and other lights) are gradually extinguished, until the final candle is carried from the room, leaving utter darkness. The sense of entering an otherworldly space is heightened in this exhibit because the museum, quite brilliantly, is showing the Rothko paintings while playing a recording of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel, the piece commissioned for the 1971 opening of the Rothko Chapel. (The recording is a recently re-released one from the New Albion label, linked above, paired with Feldman's Why Patterns?.) It is one of Feldman's more tonal, and therefore more easily accessible, works, and it plays off the Catholic setting of the chapel in its use of antiphonal choirs, forming clusters of notes or trading wordless motifs, with a viola's solo lines and touches of celesta and percussion filling the gaps. (For a thoughtful appreciation of Feldman's absorption of influences from the New York abstract painters, see this article by Alex Ross. You can also listen to the whole thing online.) The whole experience suits the Holy Saturday conclusion to the Triduum, where even in the selections from the Lamentations assigned to the day, there is a glimmer of light in the agonized darkness: "The Lord is my portion, said my soul, because of that I shall wait for him" (from Lamentations 3: 22-29).

In the Tower: Mark Rothko will be on view at the National Gallery of Art through January 2, 2011.

Amarcord

Rastlose Liebe (2009) Apollon Classics RK ap 10108 Album Français (2008) Apollon Classics RK ap 10107 The Book of Madrigals (2007) Apollon Classics RK ap 10106

In 1992 former choristers of the boys' choir of Leipzig's St. Thomas Church founded an a cappella vocal ensemble they called Amarcord. They have not been on my radar, although their repertoire consists largely of medieval and Renaissance music, but in the last decade they won a few competitions and have released a series of recordings on the Apollon Classics label. Next Wednesday the group will give a free lunchtime concert at the National Gallery of Art (March 17, 12:10 pm), the start of a U.S. tour lasting about a fortnight. The program has been announced as consisting of "16th- and 17th-century German music," which may include some of the selections from the best of their three recent releases, The Book of Madrigals. Their sound -- all male, with all the singers listed as tenors, baritones, or basses -- puts one in mind of the King's Singers, with the highest voices actually going quite a bit above the normal tenor range. The balance and intonation are quite beautiful, with only a few times the lower voices pushing the higher ones into unpleasant stridency.

The Madrigals release is not really devoted solely to madrigals -- like one of the King's Singers discs that I have listened to repeatedly over the years when I get an itch for English madrigals -- but the more general category of male-voice partsongs. A few German accents in the English mean that the King's Singers are still the reference in this repertory, but there are a number of fascinating rarities (as well as some of the usual suspects) in this compilation, including some charming pieces by Ludwig Senfl, a few hilarious evocations of animal noises by Adriano Banchieri, Antonio Scandello, and Juan del Encina, and the gorgeous Triste départ by Nicholas Gombert (whose death in 1560 makes this his 450th anniversary year). The participation of veteran percussionist Michael Metzler, while highly speculative in the creation of what are basically backbeats, makes for some of the best tracks, especially the opening Now is the month of Maying, which has ensured that I never hear Thomas Morley's music quite the same way ever again.

The other two recent releases that have been in my ears lately are less easy to recommend, interesting certainly, well performed, but just not must-have discs. The latest, Rastlose Liebe, is a self-declared "declaration of love to our hometown, Leipzig." It includes pieces for male chorus by one-time Leipzig-based composers Robert Schumann (one of this year's anniversary boys), Felix Mendelssohn (anniversary last year), and relative unknowns Carl Steinacker, Heinrich Mühling, Carl Friedrich Zöllner, and the Marschners (Heinrich August and lesser-known relative Adolf Eduard). Not much of it is all that distinguished -- lots of lush, chromatically turned harmony denoting love, longing, anguish, whatever -- but there are a few little delights like Zöllner's Der Speisezettel, a hilarious setting of the words from an actual restaurant menu, collected by the composer at Zill's Tunnel in Leipzig, and H. A. Marschner's Testament, a memorable drinking song, and charmingly nerdy Declaration of Love by a Tailor's Apprentice, as well as A. E. Marschner's simple but harmonically interesting Ständchen, a nifty piece that men's choirs should be singing more often.

The group's selection of French pieces for male chorus (Album Français) is noteworthy because it includes all of Poulenc's works for the combination: Salut, Dame Sainte from the Quatre petites prières de Saint François d'Assise is particularly lovely. Poulenc occasionally indulges in the music-hall harmonic progressions he loved to use in his secular songs (Seigneur, je vous prie), but many of these sacred works are on the austere side, seemingly in imitation of chant and medieval polyphony. Much of the music recorded here is of a disappointingly similar character, in the style of so many forgettable Romantic pieces (the Rossini and Saint-Saëns), but then there is Milhaud's 7-voice setting of Psalm 121 (122), I was glad when they said unto me (Laetatus sum), a test of the ensemble's close-harmony intonation, and the lovely and odd set of meditative songs by Jean Cras, Dans la montagne.

Hear the singing of Amarcord in person at their free lunchtime concert next Wednesday at the National Gallery of Art (March 17, 12:10 pm).