MUSIC REVIEW
October 4, 2007
The generation of great Modernists who moved music into new, abstract and expressionistic directions after World War II is often accused of having done irreparable harm to classical music. In the visual arts, we now hail the Abstract Expressionists, as we do the jazz innovators of the '50s and '60s, the Beats in literature and the French filmmakers of the New Wave. Yet the equivalent rebellions in classical music are still said to instill fear in the hearts of listeners.
The Gloria Cheng program that opened Piano Spheres' new season Tuesday night in the Colburn School's Zipper Hall paid tribute to such Modernists and the slightly younger (at 70) Helmut Lachenmann. One youngster was allowed in with the premiere of the Piano Sonata No. 1 by Dante De Silva, born in 1968.
A hard sell? One to terrorize listeners? Hardly. The hall was full. Even Piano Spheres seemed taken by surprise and had failed to print enough programs.
In introducing several of the pieces, Cheng noted their formidable technical difficulties. But she also made it clear that those issues were her problem, not ours. Hard piano music is nothing new for the virtuoso; our job is to take pleasure in the results.
As described by Cheng, Berio's Sequenza IV (1966), with its interplay of hammered-out resonances and busy movement, was like a shy person going through life, growing. The pianist also demonstrated the personality behind the intricate constructs in Elliott Carter's "Intermittences," written two years ago, playing it as if eavesdropping on colorful characters at a party.
Takemitsu's "Litany," the Japanese composer's 1989 reworking of a piece from 1950, became a study in muted color. Messiaen's 1949 "Cantéyodjayâ" was revealed as a Champagne-drunk burst of Indian rhythm.
Xenakis' 1973 "Evryali" was not merely a brilliant pianistic spray but also the sounds of nature and the waves of excitement from a political demonstration -- by a composer who was a freedom fighter in World War II.
Playfulness was also a part of postwar pianistic progress. Lachenmann and Cage celebrate a percussion instrument. In "Guero," the German composer turns the hand around; his piece was written to be played with fingernails. Cheng, like other pianists, used credit cards, which clattered up the keys and along the strings to arresting effect.
In Cage's 1952 "Water Music," a radio plays and the pianist undertakes many anti-pianistic activities, including blowing on a duck whistle in a bowl of water. The trick is to be serious and let humor arise on its own.
Cheng was silly. But perhaps she needed a break from a long, finger-busting, brain-twisting program that she otherwise made consistently compelling.
De Silva, who belongs to a new generation rebelling against the new, was the odd man out. His sonata, titled "Arcata," took Beethoven's "Les Adieux" sonata as a model. It returns aesthetically and pianistically to the first part of the 20th century. But he has a feeling for the keyboard, and the bell-like chords of the slow movement were beautiful.
mark.swed@latimes.com
MUSIC REVIEW
Gloria Cheng finished her Piano Spheres concert last Tuesday with the piano smoldering on the Zipper Hall stage and the near-capacity audience in about the same state. Iannis Xenakis' music will do that to you sometimes. His 1973 Evryali certainly did: a portrait of "the eldest of three hideous Gorgon sisters…with hands of brass, sharp fangs…" Cheng's program was, as usual, a fascinating tour around the sphere of today's pianistic possibilities: from the trickery of Helmut Lachenmann's anti-musical Guero - in which the performer extracts dry-point clicks and clacks by attacking the keyboard with a credit card (Amoco or Mobil, we were informed) to the visionary quietude of a Takemitsu Litany and an exotic jungle fantasy by the very young Messiaen. Of lesser interest was a brand-new, bone-dry sonata by UCLA grad student Dante de Silva, still in the academy in more ways than one.
That sorry venture was nicely balanced, however, by an elder, wiser venture of John Cage, whose 75-year-old Water Music got the proceedings back on track. "Water," as you might guess, actually consisted of a bowl of the stuff, plus some whistles, a radio, a pack of cards and some gadgetry for "preparing" the piano; all thoughts of Mr. De Silva's run-of-the-mill formalities were nicely demolished, as our Gloria neatly restored the Piano Sphere to its proper dimension. A couple of knockout works by Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter filled out the program; Piano Spheres, one of our most cherishable concert enterprises, is again in orbit.
Program Notes, Gloria Cheng 10.2.2007
Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935): Guero (1969/revised 1988)
Lachenmann has referred to his work as musique concrète instrumentale, suggesting a musical language that encompasses the range of instrumental sounds produced by both conventional and highly unconventional techniques. In Guero the piano is "played" on six surfaces: the front surfaces of the white keys, the tops of the white keys, the tops of the black keys, the tops of the white keys and the fronts of the black keys simultaneously, the tuning pegs, and the strings within the piano. Pizzicati on various regions of the piano and pedal noises complete the sound world of this 3-minute work. Though the piece was intended to be performed entirely with the fingernails, an alternate Guero performance tradition has been embraced, for obvious reasons, which replaces fingernails with plastic credit cards as the means of sound production. Tonight's performance utilizes cards issued by Mobil and Amoco.
Luciano Berio (1925-2003) : Sequenza IV (1966)
The fourteen Sequenzas that Berio composed for various solo instruments constitute one of the more remarkable musical projects of the second half of the 20th century. Each an astonishing essay in virtuosity and timbral resources, the Sequenzas were written for specific performers over a span of almost 40 years. The 10-minute piano Sequenza opens with a concentrated exploration of nuance prompted by minute shifts within a chord cluster. These chords, spasmodic and jazz-like in their initial appearances, are subjected to a gradual process by which they are transformed into shimmering arabesques of harmony and overtone resonances, then restored to their original state to close the piece. Two layers of activity are established from the outset: one a series of sustained chords, and the other a volatile, impetuous improvisation encircling them. Berio's fascination with pure piano resonance, that is, the echoes and residual sounds that follow the strike of a key, found later expression in his Sequenza X for trumpet and piano resonance (1984), which includes a minimal but vital part for a piano serving as resonating chamber. Sequenza IV was premiered by its dedicatee, the Brazilian pianist Jocy de Corvalho.
Elliott Carter (b. 1908): Intermittences (2005)
"The many meanings silences can express in musical discourse challenged me to use some of them in Intermittences. This title was suggested by 'Intermittences du Coeur ', one of the chapters in Marcel Proust's novel. It is a short work that also uses many different piano sounds to convey its expressive meanings. It was co - commissioned by the Carnegie Hall Corporation and The Gilmore International Keyboard Festival for Peter Serkin and composed in 2005." --Elliott Carter, November 9, 2005
Dante De Silva (b. 1978): Piano Sonata No. 1 - "Arcata" (2007)
Piano Sonata No. 1 - "Arcata" is my first attempt at a major piano work. For some reason, a solo piano work has eluded me even though piano is one of my primary instruments. The tradition set down by previous greats seemed daunting when I considered adding my piece to the canon.
The movements have a slight program to them. They reflect emotions similar to the ones in Beethoven's "Les Adieux" Piano Sonata, op. 81a. I was offered a teaching job in Northern California, which, after long discussion with my then-fiancée, I took. The first movement, Moderato ritmico, is based on the anxiety of leaving my fiancée and eagerness of a new job. The second movement, Largo - Poco animato, draws upon the overall darkness and loneliness that Northern California had to offer that winter. Although most of that time felt dim, there were times of glee, which are represented in the Poco animato parts. Finally, the third movement, Toccata agitato, was based solely on the drive home. The excitement and joy of returning home ran through my mind like a Trinidadian Carnival.
This piece was commissioned by the wonderful Gloria Cheng and Piano Spheres.
Enjoy. --Dante De Silva
Dr. Dante De Silva, a native Californian, received his education at Humboldt State University, UC Santa Cruz, and UCLA. His teachers have included David Lefkowitz, Paul Reale, Ian Krouse, Roger Bourland, David Cope, Paul Nauert, and J. Brian Post. He has performed nationally as a pianist, percussionist, and guitarist. De Silva's compositions have been performed by Pacific Serenades, the Definiens Project, Santa Cruz New Music Works, Neoteric ensemble, Santa Monica Symphony Woodwind Quintet, Bakersfield Symphony New Directions Ensemble, Tonoi Ensemble, Westside Collective, and the UC Santa Cruz Orchestra and Wind Ensemble. He was the composer-in-residence with the Definiens Project from 2005 to 2007 and the Tonoi Ensemble in the 2006-2007 season. He has recently completed his Suite: Pandora, a suite for orchestra, and Elegia for euphonium and crotales. Current projects include his first Sonata for Guitar, String Quartet No. 2, and his chamber opera Dorian Gray. De Silva lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife and two lazy cats.
John Cage (1912-1992): October 2, 2007 (1952) [Water Music]
2007 is the year in which Cage the composer, thinker, mycologist, and self-described anarchist, would have turned 95. Water Music was premiered 55 years ago last June. The score includes the following note by the composer:
"The ten accompanying sheets constitute the material for a single sheet of music for a pianist-musician, the title of which changes to be that of the place or date of its performance. David Tudor first performed it at the New School for Social Research in New York City and it was entitled 66 W. 12; at Woodstock, N.Y. it was entitled August 29, 1952.
"Generally programmed as Water Music […] these sheets should be suitably suspended or affixed so that the notation is visible to the pianist and to the audience.
"Three whistles are required: water warbler, siren and duck (plastic) whistle, obtainable in toy or five-and-dime stores; a bowl of water; two receptacles for receiving and pouring water; a radio; a pack of playing cards; a wooden stick; and 4 (four) objects for preparing a piano (e.g., bolts, screws, rubber strips, etc.). […] A watch with a second hand is useful in performance."
Due to broadcasting changes enacted since the 1950's that shifted most music programming to FM bands, the AM radio frequencies specified in Cage's score are now the domain of talk radio, religious, and ethnic programming. As new broadcast protocols emerge, performances of this and Cage's many other compositions with radio will, befittingly, represent a true Music of Changes: timely and up-to-the-minute in perpetuity.
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): Cantéyodjayâ (1949)
Cantéyodjayâ dates from a period during which Messiaen was primarily concerned with new rhythmic and modal procedures. The title refers to the Hindu rhythm upon which the recurring principal theme of the work is based. Though Messiaen's thorough study of Indian rhythmic systems had influenced his earlier musical language, this work integrated a veritable catalogue of Indian rhythms, each clearly labeled in the score. The piece also contains striking sections set in a mode de durées, de hauteurs et d'intensités, a procedure which expanded the notion of an ordered series (mode) beyond pitch to encompass rhythm, register, and dynamics (foreshadowing Messiaen's daring piano etude of later that year, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités). Chords in Messiaen's music often exist as self-contained coloristic entities, yet, like the discrete panes of a stained glass window, coalesce into a harmonious whole. In spite of its collage-like, non-narrative structure and perhaps an overabundance of material, the piece bears an unconventional yet ecstatic shape.
Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996): Litany, in Memory of Michael Vyner (1950, revised 1989)
Takemitsu frequently acknowledged his indebtedness to the harmonies of Debussy, the modes and metrical freedom of Messiaen, and the colors and spacing of the Japanese Garden. In expressing his overarching musical philosophy, he stated: "I want to give sounds the freedom to breathe."
Litany originated as one of Takemitsu's earliest compositions, written while confined to bed with tuberculosis at the age of 19. Though the once-performed, never-published manuscript has been lost, Takemitsu retained sketches and vivid memories of the two-movement work. Nearly 40 years later, he revisted and recast it as a memorial to Michael Vyner, an ardent friend of new music during tenures with the music publisher Schott & Co. and as director of the London Sinfonietta. With Litany Takemitsu therefore performs two offerings of remembrance: one to his youthful compositional effort and one to his esteemed friend.
Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001): Evryali (1973)
The creature known as Evryali was the eldest of the three hideous Gorgon sisters of classical Greek mythology. Among the family traits bestowed upon her and her sisters Sthenno and Medousa were: hair of poisonous snakes, hands of brass, a beard, sharp fangs, a vicious personality, and the ability to turn the living to stone with a single glance. Xenakis described this daunting work named for the malevolent goddess as 'a sort of athletics for hands, body and soul.' In fact, portions of the score are manifestly at odds with human anatomical considerations, and the piece has engendered a good deal of discussion amongst pianists about how exactly to negotiate the impossible. An architect and engineer by training, Xenakis derided serial music for the contradiction between its deterministic musical processes and the fact that "what one hears is in reality nothing but a mass of notes in various registers." Dispensing with fabricated musical theorems in favor of "stochastic" processes based on principles of probability and combinatory calculus, Xenakis applied these mathematical laws to the behavior of sonic events. Evryali's regular rhythmic pulse and straightforward 4/4 meter is interrupted only by two passages with a more spare, pointillistic texture, and in moments of measured silence. In other sections, thousands of small-scale isolated musical interactions amass into densities of sheer texture, "like a collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field." The musical result resembles massive and fascinatingly textured waves of sound that swell and recede with dazzling, primal power.
MUSIC REVIEW
March 29, 2007
OF the four permanent members of the local group Piano Spheres, Mark Robson has the lowest profile. He is a former behind-the-scenes pianist and assistant conductor for Los Angeles Opera, but he may, in fact, be better known in Paris, where he gave a series of recitals last fall. His ongoing Beethoven sonata cycle is scheduled to conclude next month at an off-the-radar church in South Pasadena.
Perhaps Robson simply doesn't get out much. He included in the biography for his marvelous Piano Spheres recital Tuesday night at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall the fact that he has yet to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony live.
But one thing this spectacular pianist clearly does is practice. He has one of the great techniques. He has an inquiring mind. And he put together a program Tuesday of hard-to-categorize mid- to late Modernist music that made perfect sense to the ear. He called it "Fast-Soft-Loud-Slow." I would add Overstated-Garish-Ghoulish-Understated and, maybe, Bright-Aggressive-Mellow-Dark.
There was, to begin, Louis Andriessen's belligerent "Trepidus," ferociously yet engagingly banged out. Next, Morton Feldman's "Last Pieces," a series of muted chords freely played, was 15 minutes of exquisite engulfing pastel haze. Mauricio Kagel's "MM 51: Ein Stück Filmmusik für Klavier" followed Feldman like a drunken lout squashing a garden of delicate flowers. The score, written in 1976, is a stunt.
For it, Robson changed from new-music black shirt and slacks to concert dress tails, not quite put together and with fly open. He lunged onstage waving scissors. Kagel intended the piece as pseudo film music. The pianist performs against a tyrannical metronome, gestures melodramatically, cackles like a villainous landlord demanding the rent and plays threatening tremolos. The piece ended with Robson slumped over the keys, the metronome still clicking away.
The recital's second half began with the piano version of John Cage's 1947 ballet score, "The Seasons." This music surprises with its Satie-esque shimmer, its poignant half-heard melodies, its sense not of passing weather but of passing consciousness, of quiescence (winter) and preservation (summer). The piano writing is not especially difficult, but Robson gave it a virtuoso spin and made it glisten with unsuspected colors.
He then concluded with György Ligeti's four last études. The late Hungarian composer's 18 études may one day become as common as Chopin's 27 - if geneticists find a way of producing a super race of 12-fingered pianists. For now, though, very few mortals can manage the pieces. Robson is one. He tossed off the luminous "White on White" (No. 15), the incandescent "Pour Irina" (No. 16), the frantic "À bout de souffle" (No. 17) and the tortuous Canon (No. 18) as if none were more trouble than those gauzy Feldman chords, but, just as in the Cage, he brought to them wondrous coloration.
Robson is a major pianist with a small career. Maybe that is good in that it means local audiences get to hear great playing in small spaces for reasonable prices. Still, it means he has also been turning up lately as an organist - "with a view," he says in that bio, "to increasing my earning potential in the world."
It is hard to understand why composers aren't lining up to write for Robson. And as for Beethoven's Ninth, someone should invite him to hear Michael Tilson Thomas conduct it at the Hollywood Bowl this summer. Then someone should invite him to appear on the Bowl stage himself.
mark.swed@latimes.com
December 7, 2006
TRIPLE THREAT Thomas Adès - composer, conductor, pianist - took over the Walt Disney Concert Hall in February when he began a two-part residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The second half of that residency, extending beyond Disney and the Philharmonic's reach, began last month with a student performance of his hit opera, the R-rated (for explicit depictions of sexuality while singing) "Powder Her Face" at USC, and ended Sunday with Adès conducting the Philharmonic in his hit orchestra score, "Asyla."
But with Los Angeles eager to keep the young British composer around a bit longer, and Adès, apparently, eager to be kept, he stayed on a couple more days to make a guest appearance in a Piano Spheres recital at Zipper Concert Hall. The program was eccentric, including several quirky, dreamlike, slightly crazy miniatures.
For the first half, he began with five sketchy Janacek scores from early, middle and very late in the Czech composer's career. He continued with Janacek's shimmering suite "In the Midst" and ended the first half with two of his own early works, "Darknesse Visible" and "Traced Overhead." After intermission, Adès explored an idiosyncratic piano travelogue by the late avant-garde Italian composer and pedagogue, Niccolo Castiglioni, as well as offbeat Stravinsky and Conlon Nancarrow's player-piano-inspired, rhythmically-next-to-impossible "Three Canons for Ursula."
These are works that Adès has been playing for some time (many are on an EMI recital disc released in 2000) and quite a few have the quality of party pieces. But with a Berlin Philharmonic premiere of a major new orchestra work soon as well as festivals of his music in London and Paris early next year, Adès can hardly be expected to be learning new repertory. And who else plays such uncharacteristic and obscure Stravinsky as the Germanic ditty "Souvenir d'une Marche Boche," or the Frenchified "Valse pour les Enfants"?
In much of this program, Adès seemed to be interested in the ways composers catch a listener off guard. Castiglioni's eight-minute, 10-movement "How I Spent the Summer" begins with a startling ragtime and only sounds a little more characteristic during a musical description of ice, in which, after gleaming chords ring out loud and long, overtones slowly melt away over time.
The important works were Adès' own. "Darknesse Visible," from 1992, is a John Dowland song from the Renaissance mussed up with lacy tremolo passages and interrupted by punchy loud outbursts. "Traced Overhead," written four years later, is a Romantic flight of filigree fancy, all the keyboard used at once in glittery brilliance.
ALTHOUGH Adès' technique is big and bold, he loves misty sounds, especially in his own music. Oddly enough, though, Janacek's "In the Mist" was unusually (and maybe overly) dramatic. Still, Adès' musical range can be large and expressive, and elsewhere on the program he exhibited both a boyish sense of humor and an adult sense of irony.
He is even a master of the Chico Marx one-finger technique, which he used on one of Nancarrow's canons. Those canons are composed of erratic rhythms that must be maintained in jerky, mathematically complex meter ratios. They are hard enough for the ear to follow. How the fingers can manipulate them is a wonder. Adès' dazzling performance left one's head spinning in the best, most exhilarating sense.
The encore was Janacek's "The Golden Ring." It was said to be written as he lay dying, his final music. It lasted 10 seconds, gone before you knew it. This is not so much music as the spirit of music.
So if earlier Nancarrow had produced a music of the spheres, if Castiglioni had paraded a music of fun and games, or Adès had traced the past in the present, Janacek here simply vanished. But he left traces. And Adès has left traces. May he return soon and often.
http://www.calendarlive.com/music/cl-wk-ades7dec07,0,7002795.story
mark.swed@latimes.com
September 21, 2006
FOR the last dozen years, a small but devout band of piano fans in the know has known that there is no better concert deal in town than a $20 ticket for Piano Spheres. This collective of four pianists with inquiring minds, sensational fingers and sterling musicianship puts together smart, unusual programs full of discovery and satisfaction.
I have never left one of its concerts disappointed, nor have I known anyone who has. If there has ever been a bad Piano Spheres review, I've not seen it and probably wouldn't believe it.
But Tuesday night, when Gloria Cheng began a new season for the series in Zipper Hall, something had changed. The auditorium was nearly full. Piano Spheres is no longer one of the best-kept secrets in town. Also unusual were Cheng's invitations to four very different sorts of colleagues to share the stage with her.
Robert Winter, a well-known Beethoven scholar and music popularizer, joined in for the two-piano version of Beethoven's gargantuan "Grosse Fuge." Grant Gershon, the popular music director of the Master Chorale, sat at the second piano for "Hallelujah Junction," which John Adams wrote for him and Cheng in 1997. Another conductor, Neal Stulberg, currently visiting director of orchestral studies at UCLA, was her partner for Saint-Saëns' Variations on a Theme by Beethoven.
That was hardly all. On her own, Cheng played an early piece, "Still Sorrowing," by Thomas Adès - the young British composer, pianist and conductor who will be a special guest soloist in the series Dec. 5 - with crystalline beauty. She tackled persuasively two impressive post-Minimalist, post-Messiaen movements from Steven Taylor's "Seven Memorials," which she premiered two years ago.
And she was joined by a young soprano for another early Adès work, "Life Story," with a wistfully nasty text by Tennessee Williams. The young soprano was Angel Blue, who is in the graduate opera program at UCLA. She is also a beauty queen (a runner-up to Miss California). She wore stilettos, a short skirt and a big beauty pageant smile.
She also exhibited a very big talent. She began in a disarmingly breathy, jazzy tone, which she soon proved she could turn on and off at the drop of a hat. In fact, she made this short text about a one-night stand that ends with a cigarette after sex, drowsily dropped in a hotel bed, funny, sexy, disturbing and ultimately devastating. She has killer high notes and killer theatrical instincts.
Cheng, here, was a pianistic straight-woman, calm, collected, meticulous, judicious, insisting on ultimate respect for the score and the perfect support for Blue. Drama, yes; nonsense, no.
But with the "Grosse Fuge," Cheng had her work cut out for her, and not just in her commanding mastery of Beethoven's visionary fugue, written as the finale of a late string quartet and later arranged by the composer for two pianos. She had to be the rock on which Winter could rely. Once a formidable pianist, he has allowed his technique to lapse but remains an interesting musician.
No such problems with the conductors, both superb pianists. Saint-Saëns' variations are full of filigree, and Cheng and Stulberg made the trills and arpeggios not just enticing frosting on a Beethoven cake but almost as exciting as Adès' real-deal glitter.
Other pianists have taken up Adams' "Hallelujah Junction," a Minimalist romp. But Cheng and Gershon own it and understand exactly its mixture of dazzle and laid-back repetitions.
mark.swed@latimes.com
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Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
The crowd at Zipper Hall last Tuesday night, for the first of this season's "Piano Spheres" concerts, was one of those spectacles that renew your confidence in the future of energetic, serious musical programming. These concerts have been going on now for 12 years, and the audience has steadily increased while the programs themselves have become more and more adventurous - including not only great works of the piano repertory but some interesting wanderings afield. Last week's big work had begun life as part of a string quartet; another was built around the reading of a sad and sexy poem. I heard nobody complain that there wasn't enough piano.
That's because the pianist was Gloria Cheng, one of the series' great founding spirits and a superb adventurer on her own. The big work was the "Great Fugue" of Beethoven's Opus 130 String Quartet, bipolarity in music if anything ever was, in a keyboard transcription that Beethoven may or may not have had anything to do with. Robert Winter delivered some of his typical madcap program notes and joined Gloria in a two-piano reading of similar quality that had to put everything else on the program somewhat in the shade. "Everything else" included some rather harebrained Beethovenesque variations by Saint-Saëns and the delightfully footloose Hallelujah Junction by John Adams (both also for two pianos, with the two splendid conductors Neal Stulberg and Grant Gershon on the second), as well as some morose bits by Thomas Adès in anticipation of his full participation on the next "Spheres" program come December.
Two movements from Stephen Andrew Taylor's Seven Memorials made no stronger case for this composer than the complete performance had two years ago. Never mind: Overall, this was another cherishable concert, music for the thinking listener by the thinking musician. The season has begun.
People in Glass Houses ...
They built it, and we came.
Nonchalantly tripping over the TV cables in the plaza where the lima beans once grew, brushing away the cinders from the fireworks that hailed the inaugural of their new concert hall, the folk of County Orange cornered one another, and waylaid the visitors just in from I-405. Had their Millennium now truly dawned? they wondered; could the Boston Symphony, and Carnegie Hall, and those pretenders from beyond the mountains now truly eat their hearts out in sheer envy? "No, not yet," the answer seemed to resound, "but any day now."
The journalistic hoo-hah that greeted the unveiling of Costa Mesa's Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall was, of course, not a decibel less than the building's $200 million price tag merited. Read carefully some of the meticulous prose - Daniel J. Wakin in The New York Times, for example, or Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post - and the undertones begin to rise to the surface.
... Shouldn't Stow Thrones
"We're in complete control of our artistic destiny," Mr. Wakin has Henry Segerstrom, realtor, former bean farmer, telling his new tenant, the Orange County Pacific Symphony. "The hall can do anything you guys can do." That being so, I don't see much "destiny" in the freelance orchestra that shivered its way through a Mahler symphony on its first night in its new hall (a performance norm in recent years) and mounted three half-baked performances of Lou Harrison under the rubric of an "American Composer Festival" last spring (while the Los Angeles Philharmonic's "Minimalist Jukebox" festival, I might as well notice, was drawing worldwide notice and worldwide participation).
Mr. Kennicott, meanwhile, has our Gubernator Schwarzenegger, whose homeland offers such acoustic and architectural splendors as the Vienna Musikverein and that city's Philharmonic, pronouncing the Segerstrom masterpiece as "the best in the world," which ought to be of some use in the Angelides camp. Okay. So there were those pretty-good fireworks, a pretty-good sit-down dinner, and Pacific Symphony honcho John Forsyte (not so long ago of the Kalamazoo Symphony), now flashing his supersmile, mouthing off about comparisons with Boston and New York. The next few months at the new hall offer a few serious concerts, and lots of pop and ice shows. Next door, at the old hall, there is some opera, as usual.
The promotion circulating around Costa Mesa's new hall, in the reams of wastepaper that have landed on my doorstep in recent weeks and in the civic bluster at the ceremonies in recent weeks, might lead one to believe that the construction of this large bubble of glassy glitz signals some kind of much-needed cultural advance for its area. I wish I could believe that, because I do believe that a major musical force in Orange County, with genuine musical talent at its core and energetic, enterprising programming as its purpose, can succeed as well as anywhere else in this interesting nation. Unfortunately, in Orange County, perhaps more than elsewhere, a preponderance of overambitious, unrealistic leadership has gotten there first. What I would suggest, while there is still some land available down there, is for someone to plant a few lima beans, wait a couple of years and start all over again.
Impossible? Check out the history of "Piano Spheres" and ask yourself once more.
- MINIMALIST JUKEBOX - Walt Disney Concert Hall
Program
Thursday, March 30, 2006 at 8 PM Piano Spheres
Gloria Cheng, Vicki Ray, Mark Robson, Susan Svrcek, pianos Thomas Raney, percussion
REICH Four Organs
GLASS Opening and Wichita Vortex Sutra Ms. Ray
RILEY Ragtempus Fugatis Ms. Cheng
MCPHEE Balinese Ceremonial Music Mr. Robson, Ms. Svrcek
PÄRT Annum per annum Mr. Robson, organ
CAGE In a Landscape Ms. Svrcek
LANG Orpheus Over and Under Ms. Cheng, Ms. Ray
ANDRIESSEN Workers Union
October 6, 2005
For composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who can be very literal when he wants to be, the 1960s ended right on the button. In 1970 he gave up a years-long attempt to tap into the collective consciousness and returned - big time - to his own. No more group improvisations. A seer, a German with a dominant grandiosity gene, he decided that his special awareness could itself be, like that of any enlightened being, the collective consciousness. He determined to let his own personal mantra reverberate throughout the cosmos - and throughout history.
What changed everything was "Mantra" - composed for two pianos and electronics and premiered by brothers Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky on Oct. 18, 1970, in Donaueschingen, a new music center in southern Germany.
The work lasts slightly more than an hour. It was heralded as a masterpiece by those at the premiere. A recording by the Kontarskys, strictly (very strictly) supervised by Stockhausen, was heralded as a masterpiece by a lot of people. A classic had been born. New principles of writing music were revealed that would lead Stockhausen into creating "Licht," a seven-day (!) operatic cycle he began in 1977 and is just now completing.
That "Mantra" is a masterpiece I believed then and believe now. But at the moment, it is a little difficult to call it a classic.
Tuesday, to open this season's Piano Spheres series, Vicki Ray and Liam Viney presented a rare performance of "Mantra" in Zipper Hall at the Colburn School. Only a small audience showed up for this special event, even though Stockhausen remains a cult figure. Amoeba Records in Hollywood, Stockhausen headquarters in these parts, seems to have no trouble selling the composer's personally produced recordings, which cost about three times the price of a normal CD. But ever more out there, he no longer commands the attention he once did.
No matter. Tuesday's was a first-rate performance of music that, once it starts twirling around a "formula," just gets twirlier and twirlier. "Formula" is the composer's fancy name for a melody, if one with mantra-like aspirations. And, on a basic level, "Mantra" is no more than a traditional theme and variations. But Stockhausen creates an utterly distinct sound world, teeming with detail, that can trick the willing brain into thinking that inner and outer space conjoin.
The pianists have wood blocks and antique cymbals by their sides to tap on from time to time. Stockhausen directed that these textures be electronically mixed with those of the pianos, and with shortwave radio sounds, through a once-clumsy electronic device known as a ring modulator. At Zipper, Shaun Naidoo expertly ring-modulated with a laptop computer.
In the score, Stockhausen goes after his "formula" like a Zen priest meditating on a mantra to find its soul, like a physicist contemplating the quantum nature of matter, like a philosopher looking for the inner meaning of an utterance, like a mad surgeon cutting open living matter, yanking out organs and seeing how long he can keep them quivering.
Quiver they do. Trills become super-trills. Pitches are irradiated into the atmosphere as if each had a plutonium core. Where other composers mean an accent to show a player should emphasize a note and move on, Stockhausen aims to startle listeners out of themselves. Colors are new and brilliant; pianos never sounded like this before.
Stockhausen, of course, takes himself very seriously. The piano parts are exceptionally difficult, and when the Kontarskys played "Mantra," it was no laughing matter. I wonder what Stockhausen would have thought of Ray, a member of Piano Spheres, and Viney, a young Australian pianist on the CalArts faculty.
Their virtuosity went beyond technique (with which they are fully equipped). They added the element of joy, and even humor, as if to say that Stockhausen may be over the top but that "Mantra" is a great piece anyway. I thought they got it just right.
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Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
For one among the giants
The late Leonard Stein and his vision are honored as Piano Spheres opens its 11th season.
Oct 28 2004
There was a touch of melancholy in the air at Zipper Concert Hall on Tuesday night, for the founding father and kindly guiding light of Piano Spheres, Leonard Stein, was not in the house.
One of the last links to a now-distant era, when such giants as Stravinsky and Schoenberg lived and worked in Los Angeles, Stein died unexpectedly June 24 at the age of 87. Among other things, he was a baseball fan, and it seemed appropriate that the third game of a closely watched World Series was going on as his own innovative, intimate concert series opened its 11th season.
Fortunately, Stein appears to have left Piano Spheres in good shape, for plans are in place for this season and next, with guest pianists augmenting the resident lineup of Gloria Cheng, Vicki Ray, Mark Robson and Susan Svrcek.
Obviously, Cheng's opening program was going to be her memorial to Stein, yet above all it was a statement that the feisty mission of Piano Spheres - to present the new, the unusual and the overlooked - was still in play.
Cheng started with a tiny, mordant masterwork that Stein often performed himself, Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces, Opus 19; the results were heavily legato, with a nice flash of temperament in the fourth piece. A different kind of humor crept into the mix with Conlon Nancarrow's early Prelude and Blues, written before his epic series of player-piano studies yet infused with a similar jazzy, antic spirit.
Cheng tended to downplay the ragtime flair of the Prelude, but the Blues (not really a "blues" per se) received a slow, ambling, stone-faced treatment that heightened its humor.
Then Cheng unveiled something big and special: the first performance of Stephen Andrew Taylor's "Seven Memorials," a splendid sonic tour of natural phenomena all over the globe. The 32-minute piece is really a modern example of old-fashioned tone painting - cascading ripples depicting a Yellowstone geyser, icy struck chords in the treble clef evoking an Antarctic glacier, a pedal-induced haze of ascending and descending figures suggesting the thin atmosphere of a Tibetan plateau etc.
Here, Cheng ravishingly exploited not only Taylor's extraordinarily colorful writing but also the marvelous acoustics of Zipper Hall itself, especially during the resonant, thumping ostinatos of the prepared-piano episode depicting underwater lava flows.
There is also a composer named Stephen James Taylor, whose wanderings toward a volcanic peak - or pique - of rage in "Expressions" seemed like a succinct response to his near-namesake's expansiveness. The fourth movement from Harrison Birtwistle's "Harrison's Clocks," which bears a dedication to Stein, was a formless series of flourishes trailing off into nothing.
At Stein's request, Cheng also presented the West Coast premiere of George Benjamin's "Shadowlines" (it was scheduled for a recital he was forced to cancel last season). The work features tumbling dissonances in a legato cloud and a slow movement that gradually pulls itself together, but nothing as gripping as Benjamin's orchestral music.
Cheng topped off the evening with a melting performance of the slow movement from Ravel's Sonatine. It was the most touching Stein memorial of all.
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
Robson shows versatility
He sparkles with display of speed, control and delicacy as Piano Spheres opens season.
By Mark Swed
Mark Robson opened a new season of Piano Spheres on Tuesday night at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall with a display of dazzling speed, exquisite control and surprising delicacy for a player with his burly strength. The music was unusual, interesting and important. The audience was not large, but the atmosphere was that of a salon of connoisseurs. It was a terrific occasion.
Piano Spheres is a uniquely Los Angeles series. It was started 10 years ago by a local legend, Leonard Stein, as a way, the octogenarian pianist and former secretary to Arnold Schoenberg told Tuesday's audience, for him to keep playing. Gathering four impressive if considerably younger colleagues [Robson, Gloria Cheng, Vicki Ray and Susan Svrcek], he organized the annual programs, during which each pianist plays a recital of music not likely heard anywhere else. All are superb musicians who work gigs around town playing this and that; at Piano Spheres, they are themselves.
With a day job at Los Angeles Opera as assistant chorus master, Robson gets less exposure than some of his other colleagues. Yet he is a born soloist. With a cool manner and stunningly secure technique, he reminds me of a great old-school virtuoso such as the late Jorge Bolet. But his musical ideas are up-to-date. He is even a composer himself, and he included the premiere of a new piece on his program.
The big work of the evening was Busoni's Seven Elegies. Completed in 1907 and lasting nearly 40 minutes, these pieces do a remarkable job of capturing the mood of their musically transitional times. In them, Busoni, a great pianist himself, displayed his roots as a Lisztian virtuoso while at the same time pressing music forward into vague shifting tonalities. One elegy makes futuristic hay with Neopolitan folk tunes; another is a glitteringly impressionist arrangement of "Greensleeves." The best, though, are more somber in a moody, spiritual, Germanic manner.
Robson played all seven with an unfussy surety that, like Busoni's music, was able to communicate two things at once. His brilliant finger work commands its own kind of attention, but the probing seriousness of Robson's style easily took the ears much further than the eyes into the sonic depths of Busoni's mystical harmonies.
Robson's new piece "Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs" - its title taken from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" - displayed the pianist's attraction to other mystical music, especially that of Scriabin and Messiaen. A study in tremolo, it began with a long trill in the right hand, decorated by left-hand flourishes in the lower and upper parts of the keyboard, and it never stopped shimmering for its attractive seven minutes. From there, the transition was easy to the seductive, exotic harmonic language of Szymanowski's "Calypso" from his suite "Métopes."
The recital began with an intriguing rarity, Liszt's "Andante Amoroso," a kind of written-out improvisation on the motif that runs through Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique." The final work was Boulez' "Twelve Notations," 12-bar etudes written by the composer in 1945 that have proved to be the source of some of the French composer's most recent orchestral work.
Robson learned these technically demanding pieces in little time when he replaced an indisposed Mitsuko Uchida at the Ojai Festival in June. He played them impressively then. Now he has more fully absorbed them and he brought exciting character to each one.
Copyright 2003 - Los Angeles Times
October 23, 2003 Los Angeles Times Music Review
Pieces from the American masters
Gloria Cheng charms audiences with provocative and unusual choices.
By Daniel Cariaga
For the best part of a decade, the five brilliant pianists who make up the Piano Spheres team have delighted a sophisticated and growing audience with provocative programs of recent, unusual and neglected areas of the repertory.
At the second concert of the group's 10th season Tuesday night in Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School of Performing Arts, Gloria Cheng continued that tradition with a selection of music by American masters.
The most engaging and pianistically idiomatic works bookended the program: the late Jacob Druckman's "The Seven Deadly Sins" (1955) and William Kraft's "Translucences" (1979).
Both are transparently emotional essays in non-tonal style, and both were delineated by Cheng with force and sensitivity. In Druckman's suite of variations, "Pride" emerges with leonine dignity; "Envy" slithers deviously; "Anger" is not loud, but fast and skittish; and so forth. Kraft's cogent, nine-minute piece deals in multicolored expressivity and a playful serialism.
Kraft was in the audience, as was Steven Stucky, whose recent "Album Leaves," also nine minutes, promises much from a composer who has only lately begun writing for solo piano. It is attractive and idiomatic.
John Harbison's Sonata No. 1, multi-textured and virtuosic, deserves wider currency. Cheng played it, as all the rest of the demanding program, with an assurance and communicativeness that revealed its charms.
A longtime advocate of the thorny music of Elliott Carter, Cheng also played two recent caprices, "Retrouvailles" and "90+" - brief but dense pianistic essays - and the massive "Night Fantasies" (1980). The latter remains disturbing and challenging a quarter-century later.
Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
on the occasion of the opening of Piano Spheres' 10th anniversary season, is pleased to present
Life Membership
for his extraordinary leadership as
Leonard Stein continues to make a unique and exemplary contribution to the exploration and understanding of new music. He has steadfastly encouraged the performance of new music through innovative presentations such as "Encounters", concerts and lectures at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, and Piano Spheres. He is a generous teacher and mentor, having brought many composers and musicians into the public eye. Through his performances and lectures of, writings about, and editorship of many written and musical works of Arnold Schoenberg he has proved to be a crucial interpreter of that composer's music and thought. Leonard Stein is a treasured friend of composers and their music the world over.
We, the community of Los Angeles composers, members of the American Composers Forum of Los Angeles, wish with this award to express our profound appreciation and gratitude to our friend Leonard Stein.
The Board of Directors
September 30, 2003 Los Angeles, California |