From the Classical Vault Dept.: One memorable weekend twelve years ago, the Albany Symphony gave a pair of concerts at a spiffy new hall in Troy – or halls, I should say, because the Symphony itself was in the Concert Hall, the smaller Dogs of Desire unit in the Theater. I was impressed enough to beg for more than the usual space for this longish review.
IT’S POSSIBLE THAT A HALF-CENTURY AGO you could have seen, say, Copland, Bernstein and Schuman at a concert hall during a performance of their music. But back then it was almost unheard of for a major orchestra to put three living American composers on the same bill, never mind in the same room.
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| James Primosch |
ASO conductor David Alan Miller encouraged composer James Primosch to consider a Hudson River theme for his Meet-the-Composer commission. Primosch’s relationship with the orchestra goes back to 1992, when they premiered his “Some Glad Mystery;” for this concert, he drew inspiration from the Hudson River School of painters (Frederic Church. Thomas Cole, et. al.) and wrote a piece titled “Luminism,” a sort of synesthesia – reversing the best-know type – in which color and light inspire music.With so much orchestral color available, and so much musical precedent depicting events like dawn and moonlight, Primosch staked his turf by bookending the piece with a slow intro by the low-voiced strings, soon reinforced by the equivalent brass. Textural details were provided, at various times, by brass and bells, flute and clarinet, both violin sections, horns over strings and plenty of exchanges between brass and the rest of the group. The piece didn’t seek to limn a distinct program, giving it a sense of mystery that should enhance repeated listening.
Primosch counts John Harbison among his teachers, and the latter also was on hand to introduce the suite from his opera “The Great Gatsby.” Harbison has won the awards and worked with the orchestras – his bio is a composer’s dream. So it’s a great (though well-deserved) compliment that the ASO also is recording this piece.
True to its 1920s setting, the opera features a dance band of the era, performing idiomatic material penned by Harbison (but, he noted wryly when introducing the suite, believed by some listeners to be authentic ’20s songs, and why can’t the composer write so melodically?). The stage band players were placed upstage and out of sight, their dance music coming to us as if from a radio. And each sequence they played was reinforced by the larger ensemble, through contrast and occasional accomapniment. It’s a fairly bouncy work that sneaks us into a better appreciation of Harbison’s compositional voice by completing it with the decades-old sound of Americana.
Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s voice was initially shaped by Americans like Persichetti and Sessions, structured by serialism, then ultimately released into a sort of Sibelius meets Shostakovich synthesis that has at the same time its own identity.
Evidenced nicely by his recent Percussion Concerto, written last year for Colin Currie, who premiered it with the London Philharmonic. His batterie centered around marimba and vibes, but included a wealth of other instruments, including congas, bongos, bells, chimes and an array of cymbals.
Over an uneasy tremolo in the strings, tympani rolls and glissandos set a mood broken by the first marimba figures, building over the orchestra and solo clarinet. An arpeggiated figure built in the marimba that suddenly sent Currie to the more robust-sounding vibes, moving from two to four mallets as the tension increased. The emotional journey offered surprises but ultimately seemed inevitable.
After a slow section that gave solo time to vibes and cello, the piece went into a whirlwind finish featuring the theatrical aspect of seeing Currie get in time from place to place. As is characteristic of this composer, the mood often shimmered from unsettling to sweet, but placing percussion at the center showed Rautavaara as a commanding – and playful – agent of rhythm.
The concert opened with two new movements from Stacy Garrop’s “Mytholoigy Symphony”: “The Lovely Sirens” and “The Fates of Man,” building on “Becoming Medusa,” which was premiered last year by this orchestra. As a teenaged classical music listener, I found comfort in programmatic works (here’s where Till Eulenspiegel gets hanged!); now I tend to prefer more abstraction in order to leave the images impressionistic. While Garrop’s new works follow distinct programmatic ideas, including a delightfully anachronistic Morse-code SOS as the Sirens lure a ship to the rocks, none of it proves distracting. In fact, the SOS grows out of an established rhythmic pattern and makes a lot of sense.
A sense of foreboding is established by a conversation between horns and percussion, then a sweep of low strings leads to up-and-down violin glissandos that rise in pitch and, therefore, intensity. Once the shipwrech occurs, the movement ends in a blaze of Holst-like intensity. By contrast, the opening of the next section suggested what might have emerged from Copland had he been trapped for months in Boulez’s house. Melodic, but far from peaceful. The Fates of Man lead to the inevitable: as the strings drop out in clusters and a flutter-tongued trumpet sounds softly, the unhappy brass take over to lead us to a solo cello whose lament abruptly silences. Good thing there’s a fourth movement coming – this would be an awfully depressing finish.
The Dogs of Desire is the small unit drawn from within the ASO ranks – sort of like Bob Crosby’s Bobcats – that performs only commissioned works geared for the unique sound of this ensemble, which is heavy on reeds and percussion.
EMPAC’s Theater is a smaller space than the Concert Hall, very much geared for multimedia presentations but certainly an acoustically splendid space for music, where the Dogs were amplified to an astonishingly unnecessary – and physically unpleasant – degree, and balanced such that it swamped the strings.
Todd Reynolds is a composer-violinist who has been part of such groups as ETHEL and Bang on a Can; in collaboration with Eric Singer, founder of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, he premiered “Centrifuge,” which featured a fascinating piece of electronics called a Guitar Bot, a four-stringed contraption that plays MIDI streams – in this case, a guitar part composed by Reynolds and fed from his onstage MacBook. Which also fed the two Mod Bots, percussion units (also used by Pat Metheney and many others) that added split-second accents in a variety of textures. These were as fascinating to watch as to hear, yet they blended nicely with Reynolds, playing amplified violin, and the Dogs.
The piece energetically built to a climactic Guitar Bot solo, after which synthesizer and ensemble took us out with a flourish. It was a thrilling demonstration of how to put computer-driven acoustic instruments in the service of live performers and a demanding score. The late Conlon Nancarrow, a composer who worked with manually punched player piano rolls, would have swooned.
Ted Hearne’s “Is it dirty” sets a 1964 poem by Frank O’Hara that toys with your concept of the adjective. The only repeated line is “you don’t refuse to breathe do you,” and that repetition brings home the piece. Orchestrally, it has a jazzy, blues-inspired feeling, while vocalists Alexandra Sweeton and Kamala Sankaram sounded beautifully sinuous lines almost at odds with their subject – and, in this case, all the more effective. I liked the deft, surprising chord that sounded behind the word “soot.” Excellent, effective piece, with great vocal writing as well.
Keeping with a theme of technology, Patrick Burke’s “Everything Else” saluted the idea of Nikola Tesla’s inventions, and the music hummed with engaging shifts of often syncopated activity. It was synchronized to a video display by Kamen Bonev that added nothing to the work, and in fact was nothing more than a montage of old photos over a background of sparking current, thus pretty passé.
The other new work was David Mallamud’s “Electric Love: A Ragtime Opera,” offering a sardonic scenario about Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla and competing currents. Overlong and underfunny, it put me in mind of the annoying kid who knows one joke and torments everyone around him by telling it again and again. For example, Mallamud drove to death a not-funny-the-first-time joke about – oh, never mind. I don’t want to encourage him.
Kenneth Eberhard’s “Karaoke Time” took the mickey out of everyone’s favorite sing-along offering a humorous combination of text and images that somehow worked in happy crowds and vintage flying machines. A lightweight but lighthearted work, it succeeds by taking itself not at all seriously.
The opening work, Mark Mellits’ “Froot Loops,” was premiered by the Dogs in 1997 and remains a cheerful buzz of activity – but the simple tech challenge of activating the conductor’s microphone proved too difficult for tech staff.
We went out with a few tried-and-true encores. As always, I applaud the Dogs’ audacity, and hope they’ll continue to push the classical-music envelope.
Albany Symphony Orchestra
Dogs of Desire
EMPAC, Troy, NY, May 21-22
– Metroland Magazine, 27 May 2010
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