From the Classical Vault Dept.: First, let me note that Max Lifchitz remains, as I write this, a distinguished member of the faculty at SUNY Albany (back when the pieces below were written, the newspaper’s style was to represent it as ASU, for Albany State University). He has done an incredible amount of work bringing music old and new, but especially new, to the public’s ear. Trouble is, critics like yours truly come along with some kind of snob-assed chip on the shoulder, and write snarky crap like the review that follows the interview piece below.
MAX LIFCHITZ IS QUICK TO RECOGNIZE the large amount of chamber music that gets performed in this area.
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| Max Lifchitz in younger days. |
He is a new associate professor at Albany State University, a composer-performer-conductor who founded a chamber group especially to reinforce that hope.
The North/South Consonance Ensemble comes to ASU for three performances in the Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center at ASU, beginning at 8 p.m. tomorrow and running at the same time the two successive nights.
“We give five or six programs each year in Manhattan,” he says, “and we also tour the boroughs, New Jersey, and Long Island. This will be our debut in Albany.”The theme of each concert varies. Tomorrow night’s focuses on “Latin American Composers in the U.S.” and salutes Panamanian composer Roque Cordero on his 70th birthday, along with music by Aurelio de la Vega, Orlando Garcia, Luis Jorge Gonzalez, and William Ortiz.
Wednesday is “A Celebration of Women Composers,” featuring works by Linda Bouchard, Laurie MacGregor, Nancy Van de Vate, Elizabeth Bell, and Ursula Mamlok; the last two composers will be present as well.
“Five Albany Premieres” on Thursday includes one by Lifchitz himself: “It’s called ‘Night Voices’ and it was written for marimba and chamber ensemble. I finished it in December and it had its first performance in Merkin Hall in January. This will be its second.”
The other works on that program are by William Kraft, Raoul Pleskow, David Stock, and Steven Strunk.
“I try to program all different styles,” says Lifchitz. “This series goes from so-called minimalism to hard-core serialism, with a vast middle territory as well. I want to expose the public to the variety of what’s being written now.
“To be honest, I know people are sometimes baffled by new music, but my experience is that they usually enjoy these concerts. Some works may seem more likeable than others, but I hope there always is something for someone to like.”
Another feature of this series is a pre-concert Meet the Composer event at 7, during which the audience can chat with composers and musicians. And after each concert the audience will be invited to discuss what’s just been played.
Lifchitz was born in Mexico City in 1948 and has lived in the U.S. for over 20 years. His composition teachers included Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud and he has degrees from Juilliard and Harvard.
This series also gives Lifchitz an opportunity to meet more of the local musical community. “I started at SUNY in September,” he explains. “and I am very happy to be here. My colleagues are friendly and I like the students.
“I hope I can have a positive effect on new music in the area. The new work is usually squeezed between the standard repertory pieces and I don’t think there is enough rehearsal time given to it. Performers get so worried about critical judgment of the, say, Tchaikovsky or Beethoven, that the new piece gets the crumbs of the table.”
Tickets for each concert are $5 (students $3) and will be sold at the door of the Performing Arts Center.
– Schenectady Gazette, 23 February 1987
MUSIC IS LIKE A CHILD: it goes through stages. Classical music has its major divisions, measured in decades, and it is the passion of musicologists to further divide those periods.
This century. with recordings the principal listening medium, it has been possible to go categorically crazy. Never, it seems, have there been so many writing so much that sounds so varied.
The New Music concert that began a three-day festival at Albany State University Tuesday night was categorized to represent Latin American composers in the United States. It was further divided into chamber works: there were but four musicians and no more than two played together at any time. The oldest of the six works on this brief program dated from 1979; the rest were written 1982-85.
This was the area debut of the North/South Consonance Ensemble, a Manhattan-based group specializing in contemporary music. Max Lifchitz, the composer-pianist who founded the ensemble and organized the festival, is a new member of the ASU faculty.
He started things off with a performance of Orlando Garcia’s “Images of Wood and Wire” for piano. The composer describes it as “non-directional” – a series of moments. It also follows minimalist tradition with its repetitive treatment of a few spare elements. Toward the end of the piece. the performer plays at each extreme of the keyboard, a move than put me in mind of a child’s early exploration of the piano. Metaphorically, it is a test of the instrument’s limits, but like so much minimalism, it lacks finesse.
When I was a child, I liked to take things apart. I still do, but I now have the skill to reassemble most of them. An artist needs to take the components of his art apart, but he is entrusted with the mission to reassemble those components with an improved result.
Asking us to view the components alone is artistically narcissistic. William Ortiz’ “Nocturne in a Lost Night” for solo clarinet had the advantage of being placed in a programmatic context. It is an exercise in evoking a single-voiced mood (the tense darkness of a barrio) that traditionally
would be the work of a small ensemble. But it came across as an exercise suggesting the adolescent impulse to defy tradition. Clarinetist Matthew Goodman adroitly rendered this theatrical sketch that included his own vocal and percussive contributions.
The first inklings of Latin rhythms came with Luis Jorge Gonzalez’s “Harawi” for flute and guitar, performed by Lauren Weiss and James Kass. It’s the sort of piece Villa Lobos turned out by the hundreds, but much leaner, as if afflicted by budget cuts.
The music of Roque Cordero is painted with delicate detail, and “Five Portraits for Four Friends,” a solo guitar piece dedicated to four renowned Latin American-born guitarists, are marvelous essays in miniature. They ran the danger, in the context of this concert, of seeming too precious: this music is not easy to assimilate and begins to sound the way a boring upper-crust tea party feels.
Cordero’s “Three Miniminiatures” for flute and guitar were finished almost before they started. The textures were provocative, but you get the feeling the music is being rationed. Shouldn’t it be a challenge to the composer’s imagination to craft a work that develops, with an individual voice, these elements together instead of merely presenting them as elements alone?
The concert finished with “Galandiacoa,” for clarinet and guitar, by Aurelio de le Vega. There was lots of rhythm, but academically treated: it didn’t swing. It did suggest, in its fragments, ethnically derived melodies that would have sparkled in a more considerable treatment.
There was an overall sense of academics writing for other academics, a too-common
practice (universities thrive on it) that can’t help but convey contempt for the general audience – the very audience a concert like this seeks to attract.
The final concert in the series, “Five Albany Premieres,” takes place at 8 tonight in the recital hall of the ASU Performing Arts Center.
– Schenectady Gazette, 26 February 1987
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