Baltimore Symphony Premieres Danielpour's "Rocking the Cradle"

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Richard Danielpour’s Rocking the Cradle Thursday evening at the Meyerhoff Concert Hall in Baltimore. The extensive program notes, with quotes from an interview with the composer, framed the piece programmatically as anti-war with movement headings such as Shock and Awe and In Memory of the Innocent. Danielpour notes that his “hot-blooded” connection with music has disallowed him from ever writing absolute music.

Richard Danielpour (b. 1956), photo by Bill Bernstein

The external context surrounding the work offered listeners a special opportunity to produce their own narratives in an attempt to understand its representation. For example, from the composer’s pacifist point of view, the Shock and Awe movement could represent the polarity between the voice of reason and the voice of aggression. Perhaps the voice of reason, a quick five-note repeated motif in unison found throughout the movement, was fighting the surrounding and somewhat random musical chaos that represented the voice of aggression. At the very end of the movement, the character of the five-note voice of reason is defiled by that of the voice of aggression – the march to war.

With help from the program notes, the second movement, In Memory of the Innocent, could be programmatically interpreted as the battle, death, and mourning of a life lost to war. The soft opening of the movement quickly builds in intensity with the strings playing a passionate multi-octave upward motif. Suddenly, the music goes back and forth between that and the soft material at the beginning of the movement. The section then ends, possibly representing the end of a battle and death of an innocent. The next section, begun by the cello section, has an ethereal quality, possibly representing life after death. The music flashes back and forth between material from the first section – perhaps flashbacks of the battle – and the piece ends in a mournful, unresolved way. Half of the audience was on their feet praising the work, while the other half politely clapped in their seats. This concert nearly coincides with the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War.

Other Reviews: Tim Smith, 'Cradle': a gripping anti-war symphony (Baltimore Sun, March 24) Ronni Reich, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (Washington Post, March 24) Tim Smith, BSO's symphonic protest music (Baltimore Sun, March 23)

In the rest of the program, Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena led Ravel’s Bolero and both suites of Daphnis and Chloë with the Baltimore Choral Arts Society. Conducting without a score, Mena opened Suite 2 with broad gestures in slow motion. Speaking of large gestures, Mena also gave two, perfectly timed jumps to cue climaxes in the movement, with his feet landing as the full forces of the orchestra entered. The wind players and concertmaster, Jonathan Carney, executed their solos with virtuosity and poise.

This concert repeats this evening at 8 pm, and Saturday (without Bolero, as a casual concert) at 11 am. The BSO will not bring this program to Strathmore.

Summer Opera: Danielpour's Margaret Garner

Other Newspaper Reviews: Bernard Holland, Giving New Voice to Former Slave's Tale of Sacrifice (New York Times, May 9) Mark Stryker, 'MARGARET GARNER': Swooning music lifts up a tragedy (Detroit Free Press, May 9)

Ionarts can only go to so many opera locations in one summer, and we have seen opera this summer in Washington, New York, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Santa Fe. One place I really wanted to go this summer, but could not, was Cincinnati Opera Summer Festival. For the first time in their history of 85 years, Cincinnati presented a newly commissioned opera, Richard Danielpour's Margaret Garner, with a libretto by Toni Morrison (actually premiered back in May by Michigan Opera Theater. For some background on the historical events, which took place in the Cincinnati area, and Morrison's fictionalization of them, we read an article (Uncomfortable opera, July 23) in the Cincinnati Post:

The opera has received national acclaim and has set modern attendance records in Cincinnati, with more than 10,000 tickets sold to its three shows, the last of which was Friday night. That interest has been so high and that local reaction has been so intense is just further evidence that we as a region - and as a nation - have yet to finish grappling with the issue of slavery, and some of our personal ties to it. By bringing us face to face with our consciences, and by bringing together whites and blacks both symbolically and physically (via diverse crowds) to discuss this issue, the opera has done this region a service.

Composed by Richard Danielpour with libretto by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the opera focuses on the life of a slave named Margaret Garner, who lived on Maplewood Farm in Boone County, and her attempt to escape her tragic destiny. The opera is not literal truth, changing dramatically what little is known about Garner and her life, much as Morrison put a literary spin on the story with her best-seller "Beloved.'' Further complicating the debate is Steven Weisenburger's locally famous 1998 book "Modern Medea,'' whose facts have been questioned furiously by descendants of the Gaines family, who owned Maplewood. What is certain is that 22-year-old Margaret killed her 2-year-old child, Mary, when confronted with slave catchers after escaping with her husband and his family across the frozen Ohio River in 1856. They were tried before a federal commissioner in Cincinnati under the terms of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and remanded to slavery in Kentucky. Margaret died of typhoid fever on a Mississippi plantation in 1858. Her husband, Robert, fought with the Union in the Civil War and died later in the North. There is plausible speculation that Margaret's owner fathered the slain child. In the opera, Margaret is raped by the Gaines patriarch, Robert is lynched, she kills two of her children, she is tried for "theft of property" in Kentucky and is sentenced to death by hanging.

Andrew Adler reviewed the opera ('Margaret' retells story of slavery, July 21) for the Louisville Courier-Journal (the plantation Margaret escaped from is just south of the Ohio border in Kentucky):

Running about three hours and structured over a broad first act and a swifter second, the opera revels in its bigness. The choral writing is particularly vivid, with Danielpour reaching back to gospel-derived traditions for his slave ensembles. Overall his music extends an aesthetic defined by such composers as Barber and Bernstein: tuneful, conservative in harmonic design, with an imperative to drive the action forward. I wish there was more nuance to his method, which often sounds too facile for its own good. Still, at the second Cincinnati Opera performance, Saturday night, most of the capacity Music Hall audience was clearly enthralled.

No doubt listeners were responding to the exceptional singing of mezzo Denyce Graves in the title role, and perhaps above all to soprano Angela M. Brown's Cilla, Margaret's mother-in-law. [Danielpour wrote the role specifically for Jessye Norman, who was not able to participate at the last minute.--CTD] Both of these artists projected their characters with vocal confidence and, frankly, plenty of guts. Graves also responded credibly to Kenny Leon's muscular stage direction, no matter how physically taxing. She had a capable partner in baritone Gregg Baker's Robert Garner, though baritone Rod Gilfry was in raspy voice as Edward Gaines, Maplewood's master. Stefan Lano conducted members of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra with an appreciation for the sweep of Danielpour's music and evident care for his singers. The remaining Music Hall performance is tomorrow; like the first two, it is sold out.

For more information, Janelle Gelfand wrote a great interview/article (Composer learns from 'Garner', July 17) on Danielpour and the process of writing the opera for the Cincinnati Enquirer, and I also enjoyed this photo gallery of opening night from the Cincinnati Enquirer on July 17. This photo of the opening night, which I would show here except that it's copyrighted, is thrilling to see, because the opera house in Cincinnati is full to the brim with faces both black and white. The performances, I understand, were intense for the audience. The opera's Web site (Margaret Garner) has a page of reviews, too.

Margaret Garner was a joint commission of Michigan Opera Theatre, Cincinnati Opera, and the Opera Company of Philadelphia. Ionarts will hopefully be going to see the latter's production of the opera, scheduled for February 10 to 26, 2006. Charlotte's Opera Carolina is planning a production for April 2006, and given the work's critical popularity so far, it will surely be mounted in other cities in the following season.

A( )live Music: Ann Schein at the National Gallery of Art

Ann Schein, a 20-year veteran faculty member at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, has had an outstanding career that is perhaps less recognized than it should be. From her Carnegie Hall debut to working with the Who's Who of great conductors (George Szell, Seiji Ozawa, James Levine, David Zinman, Stanislaw Skrowacewski, Sir Colin Davis—to name just a few) to playing the complete major Chopin repertoire at Lincoln Center in 1980 (a feat also accomplished by one of her teachers, Arthur Rubinstein), Ann Schein has always shone brightly.

R.Schumann, Davidsbündlertänze, Arabeske, Humoreske, Ann Schein Alban Berg, Altenberglieder, Ann Schein/Jessye Norman Sony

She did again, on a hot, gorgeous Sunday, in the half-empty, half-full West Garden Court in the National Gallery of Art. The ominous audience absence was understandable due to the weather, but a true shame—all the more so because the program on offering was the most exciting I have seen and heard in Washington since the Zehetmair Quartet presented Schumann, Bartók, and Cage in January 2003, also at the National Gallery of Art. Nay—make that the most exciting program ever! An all-20th-century composer program featuring Aaron Copland (1900–1990), Elliot Carter (b. 1908), Sydney Hodkinson (b. 1934) and Richard Danielpour (b. 1956)! (Truth be told, it was perhaps in part the program and not just the weather that kept people away, though I would loath to admit that.)

Unassuming, perhaps like a young, still noble grandmother (of the charming type), Ann Schein came on stage. She rang the first Copland notes out like an assertion of self. So much gusto went into the first chord that a hairclip of hers was flung to the ground. Mechanically, steadily, and yet with a continuous line, she started to assemble the Piano Variations (1930) like an ever-growing Fisher-Price construction kit. As she added notes to this musical building, the structure, the building became more and more visible to the ears, while only the individual building blocks were actually audible at any given time. Fine pianissimos were executed clearly and so delicately that the scratching of my soft pencil seemed obstrusive. Spirited flocks of notes shot all over the piano, like hundreds of ascending flamingos running across the New York Steinway & Sons of the National Gallery.

When someone like Mme. Schein champions a piece like the seldom-heard Piano Variations by Copland (not generally a composer suffering from neglect in this country), it puts the work almost beyond reproach. In this very concentrated, determined performance, still with communicated joy, it would be impossible to dismiss the beautiful (medium-thorny) piece as a flashy intellectual exercise by some modernist composer or deliberately difficult hotshot performer. The only composer no longer alive on the night's program was well served.

Well served, too, were the audience members with Richard Danielpour's The Enchanted Garden from his Preludes, Book 1. These five pieces, 12 years old, are most delightful American impressionist vignettes, and while it may be unsophisticated or at least "too easy" to speak of an "American latter-day Debussy," the association comes necessarily, and not just because of the titles of the work.

Promenade is very much cast in this musical light, if perhaps without the delicate inward structure and tone colors of Debussy. Mardi Gras is more distinctly Danielpour, and the jostling, jazzy rhythms and brassy sections are always present, underlying the music—a visceral audio postcard from New Orleans that should have had everyone's rear moving in their seats. (Admittedly, save mine, I saw no evidence of this.)

Childhood Memory is a more laid-back "dreamery," a sound-weaving of lazy, hot reminiscences, of a different substance than Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 but a similar taste. From the Underground has a comparatively unsettling murmur to it, though I thought that the individual notes took over from the painted mood after a while. Despite the brisker tempo, it is wholly within the vernacular of the other pieces, as is Night, a Whistler-like nocturne: small, nebulous, hard to define, but with distinct moods and calling cards of chords that suggested comfort to my ears. The more vivacious lead-up to the once again soft ending wrapped it up nicely: a most worthy musical discovery for me, indeed.

After the intermission, the few Washingtonians who had not been kept away by the sun were scared away after Copland and Danielpour were finished with them. Only a hard core of a few dozen listeners (a fairly even mix of old and young) stuck around to hear the Sydney Hodkinson 1981 Minor Incidents: Four Character Pieces for Solo Piano, which started out in a somewhat typical modernist way—Lee Hoiby without the bounce—but recovered quickly. Con energia e audace sounded more promising from the title than it was; enjoyable though, still. Con leggierezza, muted and in darker hues, was a fair note-assembly but not one that I could relate to at once or detect structure within, though I would more likely blame myself for this shortcoming than the piece or the composer. The piece, as did the following movement, Con duolo, still had enough to offer on their sonic terms alone that made them more than just bearable: enjoyable (if only just). Con violenza becomes true to its name only at the very end, but has by then fully justified itself.

Elliot Carter, the grand-daddy of American 20th-century composers and his raucous Piano Sonata (1945–46) came next. It often rubs traditionalists the wrong way that the modernist, experimental composer Carter is the predominant living composer in the U.S., at the expense of many very fine, more traditional composers such as David Diamond, Roy Harris, Morton Gould, Stephen Gerber, or Paul Moravec. But while all the latter certainly deserve more attention—Terry Teachout, for example, has always championed Moravec and rightly so, support crowned by Moravec being awarded the Pulitzer Prize last April for his Tempest Fantasy—pieces like the Piano Sonata show why Elliot Carter has the standing that he enjoys. Far more accessible (though no less wild) than his time-experiments (a.k.a. string quartets), this is great music of its time and for all times. The Piano Sonata, as will his Piano Concertos, I am convinced, shall have a place in the repertoire of future generations as firm (if less often performed) as any Beethoven piece of that sort. (All that said without making a direct qualitative comparison of the two, which could only get me into trouble.)

The Carter, it will not surprise, was marvelously played—with all the necessary flexibility and power, at times raw, at times held back. The usual bad acoustics of the West Garden Court that so particularly mar piano recitals seemed to matter little or not at all the entire evening. While the cynic may suggest that these pieces could not be harmed by bad acoustics as one would not be able to tell the difference, and while I may grant him the chuckle, admitting that they may well be more robust than say the Waldstein or Appassionata sonatas by the aforementioned Beethoven, there was also some simply awfully good playing involved. That, and more importantly, intelligent, appropriate playing.

A concert among the very finest for the very few. A refreshing treat of music that screams of being alive, not part of the classical-music-museum-cult that would have classical music end with late Beethoven or, more radically, Ravel. As I overheard a lady say on her way out: "I don't understand the music, but it's excellent." Right on, madam! Excellent indeed. Fabulous. F-ing Fabulous, to be precise.

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