Sunday, March 17, 2024

A Celebration of Strings to Open Mason House Season


l-r: Ambroise Aubrun, Cécilia Tsan, Kate Hamilton.

REVIEW

Aubrun, Hamilton, and Tsan play eight works by seven composers at Mason House
JOHN STODDER

Mason House in West LA started its 2024 season with a concert featuring two of the series’ most familiar and cherished performers, violinist Ambroise Aubrun and cellist Cécilia Tsan. They are locally-based but global-class musicians, and there is really no reason ever to skip a concert that either is playing in. Here, however, they were joined by a violist new to Mason House, Kate Hamilton, also well-traveled and vastly experienced. Based on these performances, she shares Tsan and Aubrun’s marvelous ear for mixing and matching string tones.

Hamilton and Aubrun also perform and tour as Duo Novae, and together they played all five short pieces that took up the first half, among them host Todd Mason’s Duo for Violin and Viola. After intermission, Tsan joined Aubrun to play Bach, and then all three as a trio gave us the show’s two main courses, the one-movement Schubert String Trio in B-flat major D. 471, and the world premiere of Mason’s String Trio


Opening his pre-concert talk, LA Opus’ David Brown (right) said that Todd had challenged him to “find a common thread" among the seven composers and eight compositions featured in the concert, and the challenge led him on a fascinating sweep through eras of Western classical music history, from J. S. Bach’s time to the present day. Taking the composers chronologically rather than in performance order, we learned: 

… that the much-loved Bach Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043, has been arranged in at least 56 different ways from Bach’s original for two violins, strings and continuo (and not including the one we were to hear today)….

… about where in Franz Schubert’s brief and chaotic timeline he found time to compose (but not finish) this particular trio (when he was 19 and had just moved out of his “crowded and oppressive” family home, personal turmoil not betrayed by the calm, civilized discourse of the piece itself)…

.. that Robert Fuchs (1847-1927), now obscure as a composer, was a professor at the Vienna Conservatory who taught some of the most celebrated 20th century composers, including Enescu, Korngold, Mahler, Wolf, and Sibelius...

… that the Norwegian Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935), whose piece was to close the first half, is also a rather neglected composer now, but in his lifetime was a celebrated violinist and conductor: his output included three symphonies… 

… that Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) was incredibly prolific: when the Swedish company BIS took on the challenge of recording his entire output, it ran to 75 CDs’ worth, of which 11 were devoted to chamber works that are mostly unknown, including what we were to hear today…

… and that the inexhaustible 20th century Polish modernist Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020), known for music so jarring that it regularly winds up in horror films like The Exorcist and The Shining, turned toward a more tonal and romantic style in the late 1970s and continued to compose well into the 2010s.

Finally, we learned from Todd Mason (left)—speaking for himself as the only living composer on the program—that the Duo had been commissioned by Duo Novae, and that the Trio was written because his concert series has acquainted him with so many great string players.

This bounty of information foreshadowed a bounty of music and of styles, specifically the styles and techniques a violinist, a violist, and a cellist use to perform a wide range of compositions.

Sibelius, c.1891.
Each of the first six pieces lasted less than eight minutes, and the jumping between eras and style reminded me of when I played in student recitals during high school and college. In a recital, the pieces program themselves, and that was sort of true for this concert—if there was a common thread, it was the love by composers of string musicians, and the myriad ways players can serve composers’ artistic needs.

The first item was Sibelius’ Duo in C Major for Violin and Viola, JS 66 (1891), and its opening highlighted Aubrun’s violin singing plaintively over a steady, soft, liquid beat of arpeggios on Hamilton’s viola; as if he were walking alongside a river singing his song.

Penderecki, 2008.
Penderecki’s Ciaccona for Violin & Viola (2005) came next. Originally written in memory of Pope John Paul II, the Polish pope who died that year, it was later incorporated into the composer’s Polish Requiem. It vividly presented the violin as a conveyor of grief and yearning. Hamilton provided support in the form of murmurs, whispers, and gentle reminders. It was hard to listen to this piece and not visualize two grieving souls, working through loss together.

Nos 3, 4, 8 and 12 from Fuchs’ 12 Duos for Violin and Viola Op. 60 (1898) felt the most like what one would expect to hear at a recital—clever studies to showcase techniques and the qualities of each instrument. Of the four pieces, the third (#8 if you’re keeping score) intrigued me the most, as it gave Aubrun yet another opportunity to showcase his beautiful tone. Hamilton’s unerring rhythmic framing propelled the final, charming, #12.

Robert Fuchs.
Mason’s Duo was next. Although this concert was its LA debut, the Duo is already popular and has been included in concerts around the US, which is appropriate, because the piece feels a bit like a travelogue. Mason gave Hamilton her best opportunity up until this point in the concert to show off her gorgeous tone, her “liquid gold” as one reviewer put it.

But this piece was also ready to confront the listener, as one of its shifting moods. It felt dissonant with a purpose—to wake up the listener. And it’s also a showcase for two virtuosos, and it makes perfect sense that violinists and violists around the country have been excited to play it.

Johan Halvorsen.
Halvorsen’s Sarabande with Variations (1897) was almost jarringly familiar after these unfamiliar explorations. The piece is based on a theme by Handel—the one that haunts Stanley Kubrick’s masterful Barry Lyndon. After immersing us in the languor of the dirge-like theme, in the ensuing 11 variations Halvorson creates a maze of challenging virtuoso moments that Aubrun and Hamilton navigated with style and skill.

With the Bach that opened the second half of the program, I was again reminded of the period of my life attending and playing in recitals. The three movements of the “Bach double,” as everyone called it, were each perfect showcases for strings fast and slow, joyous and sedate. Aubrun and Tsan played only the central Largo, which includes one of Bach’s most beautiful melodic lines.

It was interesting to hear this highly familiar piece played by a spare ensemble of two voices from different parts of the scale, in this new arrangement for violin and cello by cellist Cicely Parnas (right). The contrasts between their instruments illuminated different qualities of Bach’s writing. This movement can have a hypnotic, even soporific effect, but heard this way it seemed more formal and abstract, allowing us to hear the voices more independently. The word in my notes for this performance was “painterly,” meaning I could hear the brushstrokes. It made something old hat sound new.

Schubert, by Klimt.
After the Bach, all three musicians took to the Mason House stage to conclude the concert. Schubert’s Trio in B-flat was completely satisfying as a kind of midpoint between Classical charm and craft and the more passionate feelings and images that early Romanticism evokes.

Aubrun again amazed me here, but with a different skill—his ability to pull back, to shave a little bit from the bright, singing tone he used to help fill the room during the duos, and make more space for music in which the spotlight was intended to be shared equally.

That quality of musicians listening to one another and making intuitive small adjustments was most in evidence in the Schubert. Being able to perceive this interplay is one of the key pleasures of hearing chamber music in the small performance space of Mason House. As the Schubert wound down, Aubrun, Hamilton, and Tsan played ever more quietly, leaving each moment that much more exposed, until finally ending in unison, on a downbeat so soft it sounded like a breath.

After receiving grateful applause, they returned to take us on another journey entirely in Todd Mason’s String Trio, an acute reflection of the anxieties of now, which began harshly and spun into a kind of chase scene, each instrument running to a rhythmic pattern of 16th notes, making brief sonic gestures, two or three notes, before rejoining the unsettling, unpredictable flow.

Then, as if finding each other in a safe place, the running stops, and lyrical passages begin, led mostly by Aubrun, wailing laments gradually coming under control, allowing the three voices to come alive together and achieve a kind of peace and clarity. Then, with about a minute to go in this 11-minute piece, the slashing and running resumed but with a slightly different orientation—excited, almost giddy, accelerating toward what sounded like home.

Altogether this program was quite a workout for Aubrun, Hamilton and Tsan, packed with music that stretched their talents in so many directions, both artistically and technically. Nonetheless, these musicians proved to be the perfect vessels for the artistry of composers from the 18th to the 21st centuries. 


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Mason House Concert, 3484 Redwood Ave., Mar Vista, CA 90066, 6:00 p.m., Saturday, January 20, 2024. 
Images: The performance: Todd Mason; Sibelius, Penderecki, Fuchs, Halvorsen, Schubert: Wikimedia Commons; Cicely Parnas: artist website.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Supplication, Serenade, and Cosmogony at Long Beach


The Long Beach Camerata Singers and UCLA Chamber Singers, with soloists Elissa Johnston
and Kevin Deas, perform Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, with the LBSO under Music
Director Eckart Preu.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach
DAVID J BROWN

Some politicians are prone to saying that their attitudes to certain issues have “evolved”—and that does sum up my feelings toward Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45. Time was when its lack of the Verdi Requiem's operatic flamboyance and intensity, or Berlioz’s apocalyptic grandeur and extraordinary orchestral innovation, were minus points: perhaps as a hangover from first getting to know it via now-forgotten and less-than-ideal performances, there seemed always the threat that this choral magnum opus of Brahms’ earlier years could turn out simply dull.

But comparisons are indeed odious, and last Saturday’s performance of the Requiem by the Long Beach Symphony, Long Beach Camerata Singers, UCLA Chamber Singers, and soloists Elissa Johnston and Kevin Deas, all under the baton of LBSO Music Director Eckart Preu (right), was the perfect storm to blow away any last tatters of such a view: a cogent, lovingly-shaped account, clocking in at a trim 65 minutes or thereabouts, sung with skill, commitment, and palpable joy by the choirs, and underpinned by and clothed in orchestral playing of depth, sensitivity and poise.

By omitting the Requiem’s ad lib organ part, and with it any “churchy” connotations, Maestro Preu nailed his colors to the mast that this is essentially a humanistic rather than a narrowly religious work—a view that had been adumbrated in his rewarding pre-concert conversation with Dr. James Bass (below, left), Artistic Director of the Camerata Singers, and Mr. Deas.


The removal of that sepulchral rumble aerated Brahms’ textures in the lower register of the orchestra and exposed fascinating details often obscured. At the very opening, marked Ziemlich langsam und mit Ausdruck (Rather slow and with expression) one could hear far more clearly than usual the two low horns an octave apart: an arresting sound, at once ominous but somehow vulnerable. Again, at the beginning of the third movement, they perfectly complemented Mr. Deas’s oaken tones as he began his first big solo.

Brahms in 1868, the year he completed
the German Requiem.
Brahms began composing the Requiem in the wake of his mother’s death early in 1865, and it’s often been opined that in it he also memorialized his mentor and friend Robert Schumann. The work’s growth was spasmodic and protracted: movements I, II and IV were written by the end of April 1865, but the remainder of what was conceived as a six-movement whole was not completed until August 1866. This had its premiere, to considerable acclaim, in Bremen Cathedral on Good Friday, 1868, but within a month Brahms had added a seventh movement, to be inserted between the existing IV and V.

For his texts Brahms did not use the traditional Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, instead selecting verses in the Old and New Testaments and Apocrypha from the Lutheran Bible, and in so doing side-stepped anything overtly doctrinal. Rather than redemption through Christ’s sacrifice, or condemnation for unbelievers (no Dies Irae here), the message is comfort for the mourning, acknowledgment of the transience of life, and a measure of aspiration for something after death.

Kevin Deas.
Musically, Brahms embraces the richest and widest of contrasts, from gentle consolation to implacable fortitude to exuberant hope—the latter expressed in propulsive contrapuntal and fugal writing for the chorus, especially in movements II, III, and VI. The massed Long Beach forces excelled in all of this, perhaps most notably in II, which was propelled from the solemn funeral march of Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras (For all flesh is as grass) into the fugal Allegro non troppo at Die Erlöseten des Herrn werden wieder kommen (And the ransomed of the Lord shall return) with a galvanic sense of accumulated tension being released.

Elissa Johnston.
The baritone soloist only appears in movements III and VI, while the soprano has even less to do: nonetheless Ms. Johnston duly seized her moment in movement V, exquisitely floating the solo line from the opening Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit (And ye now therefore have sorrow) onward, while Mr. Deas was as sonorously reflective as could be desired in his two movements. Given the uniqueness of the German Requiem’s text and Brahms’ response to it, one’s only regret about the performance was that the words were neither projected as supertitles nor printed in or enclosed with the program book.

Brahms’ Requiem, unlike the Verdi, Berlioz or Dvořák, is a little too short to fill a whole concert but—as with the Requiems of such varied composers as Donizetti, Stanford, and Arnold Rosner—only requires an additional 25-30 minutes of programming to make up the full evening. The latter half of Maestro Preu’s imaginative solution was to turn to another composer who was a past master at cherry-picking texts from many sources to suit his expressive purposes, Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (center, back row) and
Sir Henry Wood (center, front row) with the
Serenade to Music’s 16 original singers. Their
recording was recently remastered, together
with solo performances by each of the singers.
However, unlike his large-scale choral works Sancta Civitas and Dona Nobis Pacem, for the Serenade to Music, composed by Vaughan Williams in 1938 to mark the 50th anniversary of conductor Sir Henry Wood's first concert, the composer chose a single text, from William Shakespeare, and set Lorenzo’s speech to Jessica in praise of music from Act V, Scene 1, of The Merchant of Venice for 16 celebrated singers of the day (right).

After 32 measures of orchestral introduction the singers come together as a chorus for the first four lines, but thereafter enter sequentially as soloists, singing one or two lines each, and only again together in four brief instances. The total effect is of magical intimacy and a rare perfect match between text and music.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1936.
Given the large choir, and the fact that RVW later made versions of the Serenade for SATB soloists plus chorus, and for chorus only (both with orchestra), I wondered whether Maestro Preu would opt for either of those, but in the event his performance retained the solo contributions, albeit shared between 10 singers rather than 16, and used the full chorus elsewhere.

All drawn from the Long Beach Camerata Singers, these were Emily Scott, Sarah Lonsert, Maddie Reynolds (sopranos), Kate Gremillion, Kim Mendez (altos), David Morales, Dongwhi Baek (tenors), and Randall Gremillion, Brandon Guzman, Connor Licharz (basses).

This really was a solution that made the best of both worlds, with the effect maintained in the main body of the piece of the differing solo voices seeming to hand on each to the next the jeweled words, but book-ended by and briefly interspersed with the sumptuous combination of full chorus and orchestra. Finally, the seraphic playing by Concertmaster Roger Wilkie of the violin solo that suffuses the introduction made me think that yet another of RVW’s arrangements of the Serenade, for violin and orchestra alone, would grace any future concert…

Serenade to Music.
Though the LBSO’s devoted playing was integral to the success of both the Brahms and the Vaughan Williams, neither work enabled the orchestra to properly show off its purely virtuosic chops. That, however, had already been remedied in the opening item. Many composers have been drawn to the cosmos as a subject, and to judge by its opening movement, Aleph, the Cosmic Trilogy by Guillaume Connesson (b.1970) is a worthy addition to the roster.

Guillaume Connesson.
Reviewers of its only commercial recording so far likened its sound-world to a range of other composers: for me the ones that came most immediately to mind were two Johns—Adams and Williams—given the prevalence of strong but intricately detailed and restlessly changing rhythmic patterns, punchy scoring with plenty of percussion (the opening represents nothing less than the Big Bang itself!), and in Aleph’s latter half, an aspiring theme emerging on violas that brought to mind ET and Elliott’s aerial bike-ride across the Moon’s disc.

It would be easy to call the piece derivative, but in this performance Aleph made a marvelously invigorating concert-opener, greatly contrasted with the works to come. The LBSO under Maestro Preu threw themselves into it with galvanic energy, commitment and, so far as one could tell, accuracy—proving yet again to be a virtuoso orchestra that seemingly can take on and conquer any challenge it's faced with, however unfamiliar. Bravo!

Overall this quite splendid concert made one look forward even more to the one remaining blockbuster program in the LBSO’s 2023-24 season: Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 on June 1—will it really work with those two pieces in that order? We’ll see...

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, March 9, 2024, 8 p.m.
Images: The performance: Joseph Hower; Eckart Preu: Caught in the Moment Photography; Dr. James Bass: Long Beach Camerata Singers; Brahms: www.brahmsinstitut.de; Kevin Deas, Elissa Johnston: artists' websites; Serenade to Music CD cover: Courtesy Albion Records; Vaughan Williams: National Portrait Gallery, London; Guillaume Connesson: Christophe Peus (composer website).

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Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Shostakovich, Beethoven, and Griffes at Pacific Symphony


The Italian virtuoso Alessio Bax performs Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.3 with the Pacific
Symphony under guest conductor Andrew Litton.

REVIEW

Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa
DAVID J BROWN

I did not consciously realize until after the event how young and indeed how remarkably close in age were all three composers—one 20th century American, now little remembered, and two familiar masters from the 19th and 20th centuries—when they wrote the works that were included by visiting guest conductor Andrew Litton in the Pacific Symphony’s most recent concert at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall.

Charles Tomlinson Grifffes.
As program opener, Maestro Litton chose neither a familiar repertoire overture nor one of the brief, celebratory explosions of orchestral fireworks that seem to appear with ever greater frequency from young and not-so-young contemporary composers on both sides of the border, but instead reached back just over a century to the work of Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920)—and for this listener at least, his selection couldn’t have been more welcome.

Griffes is one of the fascinating might-have-beens of American music. By the time he fell victim at only 35 to the “Spanish flu” pandemic, his compositional output already reflected a wide and fertile range of influences—German Romanticism from his early studies in Berlin, contemporary French music (his fascination with which had him dubbed the “American impressionist”), Japanese art, drama and music, and an array of literary influences from Goethe and Blake to John Masefield and Oscar Wilde in his choice of song texts.

Literature also imbued many of Griffes’ piano works including his Roman Sketches, Op. 7, all four of which drew their inspiration from the 1891 verse collection Sospiri di Roma by the Scot William Sharp, writing as “Fiona Macleod.” Griffes wrote Roman Sketches in 1915, and four years later orchestrated the first and last of the piano pieces, The White Peacock and Clouds. It was with the former that the concert began.

The soft rising and falling phrases on solo oboe and flute that begin the piece certainly earn the “impressionist” epithet, but interestingly, Griffes changed the initial marking from Languidamente in the piano version to Largamente in his orchestral score (with e molto rubato qualifying both). Maybe this implied a greater degree of purposefulness: if so, it was certainly borne out in Litton’s handling of the work, which proceeded with impressively controlled inevitability to the single powerful climax, sometimes taken to represent the full glorious opening out of the titular peacock’s tail.

Though quite economical in woodwind and brass scoring, Griffes lavishly enriched The White Peacock’s textures with two harps and celesta, and their almost constant presence in the aural picture glittered ravishingly in the Segerstrom’s marvelous acoustic. At just five minutes, the piece as ever left one wishing that there was more of it, but it was an effective and refreshing concert-opener.

Ludwig van Beethoven, c.1801.
The sense of controlled purpose in Litton’s interpretative style was certainly maintained in the Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37 of Beethoven. With each string section reduced by a couple of desks, the orchestral exposition was light on its feet but vigorous and lithe, and full of arrowed focus. It’s not hard to sense in this Concerto—which was probably completed some time in 1800—that Beethoven, still not quite 30, was filled with an awareness of boundless possibilities at the onset of the new century.

The pianist announces his presence with upward sweeping scales and emphatic restatement of the principal subject, already given plenty of attention in the orchestral exposition. This entry could hardly be more assertive of confidence and purpose, but there was no sense of rhetorical display for its own sake here or anywhere else in the Italian virtuoso Alessio Bax’s account of the first movement, where the feeling of through-composed unity extended even to the cadenza, which by some alchemy felt wholly integral to the argument rather than an occasion for everyone else to sit on their hands and wait.

Alessio Bax.
In the slow movement, Bax effortlessly unfurled the thickets of 64th-notes that Beethoven’s odd conjunction of a 3/8 time signature and Largo tempo marking necessitated, while the irresistible Rondo finale, with conductor, soloist, and orchestra all figuratively and very much literally on the same page, cemented the impression of a masterpiece that manages to combine both youthfulness and maturity.

The standing ovation brought an encore, but not as we usually know it, Jim. Bax shifted over on the piano stool to make room for Maestro Litton, and together they launched into a hilariously helter-skelter account of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5 in F-sharp minor in its original piano four-hands form that elicited as much laughter as applause.

Alessio Bax and Andrew Litton share a moment in their encore performance of
Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5.
During a pre-concert chat with host Alan Chapman and also in remarks from the podium immediately before the performance, Maestro Litton reminisced about having, at the age of 13, met Dmitri Shostakovich briefly in New York in 1973 (right), and then went on to outline the sociopolitical circumstances behind the composition of his Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, which filled the second half of the concert.

With Pravda’s withering denunciation of his recently staged 1936 opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District representing a literal threat to Shostakovich's life, and his radically original Fourth Symphony unperformed and indefinitely shelved, it’s remarkable that when he came to pen his “Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism,” as he dubbed the Fifth Symphony, the result was no feeble clone of some supposed Classical model but a powerful, personal, and in places deeply moving work that has become a repertoire staple worldwide ever since its rapturously received Leningrad premiere in November 1937, only two months after the composer turned 31 years of age.

Dmitri Shostakovich.
That it also clearly holds a special place for Maestro Litton was evident throughout the performance, masterly paced alike in the far-reaching dramatic arc of the first movement, the piquant, texturally inventive Allegretto (essentially a scherzo-and-trio), and the long-drawn, tragic intensity of the Largo—all delivered with individual and collective finesse, eloquence, and power by the Pacific Symphony at the very top of its considerable game.

Finest of all was the finale. In his remarks Litton had also recalled hearing—at the beginning of his appointment as Assistant Conductor for the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C.—its then music director Mstislav Rostropovich, who had been a close friend of the composer, rehearse this symphony. Knowing the finale in what were then typically fast and jubilantly triumphant performances, Litton had queried Rostropovich’s slow tempi and got the unequivocal response that this was how the music was meant to go.

His own performance left no doubt that this was a lesson well learned. The Allegro non troppo opening, taken at the marked quarter-note=88, became heavily menacing, and thereafter felt like an unseen but ever-present background threat to the more tranquil, even aspiring, expressive uplands of the movement’s central section. 

But when the oppressive slow motion bombast returned, it swept all before it until reaching colossal fff unisons on the timpani and bass drum—as apt an aural metaphor as you could imagine for Orwell’s chilling vision from 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.


This marvelous performance—inspiring and disturbing in equal measure—came just as the Pacific Symphony was announcing its upcoming 2024-2025 season—its 46th since its founding in 1979 and a particularly special one in that it marks the 35th year of Carl St. Clair’s tenure as Music Director.

There are far too many intriguing items across the 12 concerts to list here, but for this listener the standouts include Samuel Barber’s marvelous Symphony No. 1 on November 14-16 in an exceptionally rich program that also includes Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini and Brahms’ Violin Concerto; the startling juxtaposition on January 9-11, 2025 of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Strauss’s Alpine Symphony (with “jaw-dropping visuals,” we are promised); and most enticing of all, a semi-staging of Wagner’s Das Rheingold on April 10-15, 2025.

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Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Thursday February 22, 2024, 8 p.m.
Images: The performers: Doug Gifford; Griffes: New York Public Library; White peacock: Galleria Home Store; Beethoven: Wikimedia Commons; Shostakovich and Litton: Andrew Litton; Shostakovich: State Central M. Glinka Museum of Music, Moscow.

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Sunday, February 25, 2024

West Coast Premiere of “X” Triumphs

 

Philip Newton

REVIEW: Seattle Opera

McCaw Hall, Seattle

ERICA MINER

First opera by Black composer on Seattle Opera main stage 

The opening night of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X proved a winner for composer Anthony Davis, librettist Thulani Davis, and story author Christopher Davis, all of whom were in the audience for the February 24 Seattle Opera premiere. The trifecta have created a work replete with tour-de-force roles for multiple singers, plenty of action, and high drama as high art. Themes of truth vs oppression were driven home by the dramatic music and the compelling libretto and story.

The trailblazing work is not new. It first premiered at New York City Opera in 1986 and was performed to huge success this past season at the Metropolitan Opera. These days it takes a village to create innovation in the opera world; the current revival of this co-production of Seattle Opera, Detroit Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Met, and Opera Omaha remains as revolutionary—both musically and politically—as it was at its outset.

That Malcolm X endures as a dynamic, yet puzzling and misunderstood, public figure is a testament to his continued significance in modern society. To this day, opinions about him amongst people of all races vary wildly. All the more reason why an opera chronicling his life and times is more relevant than ever.

Rex Walker, Leah Hawkins
Philip Newton
Two major figures, both of them tour-de-force roles, stand out from the cast. Not surprisingly Kenneth Kellogg in the title role rises to the top. Omnipresent as a character, from the Malcolm of his childhood, played with remarkable panache by Rex Walker in his SO debut, and throughout the work, the demands of the role are huge, and Kellogg proved worthy of the task. His sizable voice projected to great effect over the large orchestration, and his dramatic portrayal of the enigmatic leader was convincing in all of its permutations. One never tired of watching him.

As Elijah Muhammad, Joshua Stewart stood out from the very first for his impressive clarion vocality. The voice sounded glorious in all registers, and especially in the top range, where the tessitura was challenging.

Joshua Stewart
Philip Newton
On the female side of the ledger, debuting artists Leah Hawkins and Ronnita Miller gave striking performances. As Malcolm’s mother Louise, Hawkins started off the evening with an arduous aria that demanded virtuosity in every range, from the profound bottom notes to the extreme high ones. She also was effective as Malcolm’s wife Betty. Miller’s Wagnerian instrument was imposing in the roles of Ella and the Queen Mother. Joshua Conyers was outstanding as Malcolm’s brother Reginald.

Robert O’Hara’s stage direction, along with debuting associates Melanie Bacaling and Nicholas Polonio, demonstrated a powerful vision of the protagonist’s social identity that was consistent and balanced in its historical view yet maintained the radical intensity of the subject matter. All of the characters integrated with each other in the multiple vignettes as true, living beings in a momentous episode of our past. Every scene connected seamlessly with the next, providing a context that made the viewer feel as if they were witnessing events in real time.


The bold set designs of Clint Ramos and his associate Diggle grabbed the attention from the beginning. Part Star Trek, part temple ministry of both past and future, the visuals were arresting and skillfully integrated into the story and action. The lighting designs and projections of Alex Janchill and Yee Eun Nam, both in their SO debuts, with assistance from debuting designer Paige Seber, were nothing short of dazzling. The eye-catching amalgamation of lighting and projections made the drama stand out in every scene.

Philip Newton
The chorus ensemble of friends and others were also stars of the show. Appearing in a variety of ways in multiple scenes, these outstanding singers negotiated the many roles required of them with memorable brilliance. The Greek chorus of dancers, inventively choreographed by Rickey Tripp and Arianne Meneses in their SO debuts, provided a throughline of activity that heightened the many contrasting dramatic moments.



Philip Newton




Sunny Martini













Davis’s music, from the jazz-inflected overture to the poignant arias and vibrant choruses, was mesmerizing. The urgency of the narrative was vividly portrayed in each moment, whether action driven or meditative. His score was masterfully done: creative and innovative, with an improvising ensemble embedded within, providing intriguing hints of his later operas to come.

Conductor Kazem Abdullah maintained exceptional control of the orchestra with sensitivity and clarity of movement, in a score that contained huge contrasts in style from scene to scene. Great demands were made on the orchestra, especially the extensive trumpet solos which were admirably executed, and Abdullah made sure the appropriate voices stood out when needed.

X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X is without doubt a definitive event for Seattle Opera, and worth experiencing in all of its many extraordinary aspects. 

Kenneth Kellogg
Sunny Martini



Photo credits: Phillip Newton, Sunny Martini
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 Erica can be reached at: [email protected]

Friday, February 23, 2024

Dvořák, Mussorgsky/Ravel, Price, and Preu at Long Beach


Cécilia Tsan and the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra under Eckart Preu perform Antonín Dvořák's Cello Concerto.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach
DAVID J BROWN

Dvořák in 1893.
Snatching a few days’ respite between the Southern Californian rainstorms, the largest Long Beach Symphony audience in a long while filled the Terrace Theater on the third Saturday of February for a concert in which the centerpiece account of Antonín Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104, B. 191 by the LBSO's Principal Cellist Cécilia Tsan and the orchestra under its Music Director Eckart Preu fully realized and projected those qualities that make it arguably the greatest of all works in its particular genre.

Commemorative plaque on the
site of Dvořák’s NYC residence.
Although the Cello Concerto was not Dvořák’s last major composition—five symphonic poems and four operas were to follow in the nine years left to him after its completion at New York in 1895—its magisterial symphonic scale and structural mastery, together with a memorably haunting beauty and unprecedented exploration of the cello’s expressive potential as a concerto solo instrument, certainly would have made it a triumphant conclusion to his career had that actually been the case.

Maestro Preu launched the extensive orchestral exposition of the Allegro first movement with uncompromising boldness, the pervasive principal motif of a rising and then falling 3rd ringing out like a minatory warning and then, in its full fortissimo flowering, wholly living up to Dvořák’s Grandioso marking, where the tuba (a very rare instrumental presence in a 19th century concerto) added its singular tombstone heft to the massive chord’s foundations.

More than usual did this opening recall not so much the “New World” Symphony, written only a couple of years previously, but rather the soundworld of Dvořák’s earlier and more dramatically concentrated Symphony No. 7, though when the second subject melody finally arrived—immaculately intoned here by principal horn Melia Badalian—its molto espressivo added the element of heartfelt reverie that belongs to this Concerto alone.

Another grandiose tutti ensues and then winds down gradually to clear the way for the cello’s entry. Given as always the proviso that the Terrace Theater’s acoustic tends to drain some of the impact of any string soloist, Ms. Tsan demonstrated from her first statement of the principal motif that she “owns” this Concerto: carefully observant of all the instructions with which Dvořák surrounds the solo entry—forte, risoluto, and Quasi improvisando—she launched her long journey with fervent and infectious spontaneity.

Antonín Dvořák (right) with family
and friends in New York, 1893.
Indeed, this account of the Cello Concerto made the best imaginable case for the view that a performance by a gifted orchestra principal in complete accord with their respected and loved colleagues can be at least as satisfying as that of any visiting soloist, however starry, and in this particular instance Ms. Tsan has openly averred that this particular work more than any other originally inspired her to pursue her career as a cellist.

After the wide-ranging drama of the first movement, the Adagio ma non troppo was as warmly expressive as anyone could wish, without any of the tendency to wallow in sentiment that can afflict some performances (the whole work came in at a trim 40 minutes). Most impressive of all was the Finale, which Maestro Preu skilfully navigated from bold re-awakening after the slow movement’s long dying fall to a perfectly integrated handling of the remarkable coda.

Though Dvořák completed the Cello Concerto's initial version in New York over winter 1894-95—with news of the serious illness of his much-loved sister-in-law Josefina Kounicová already coloring its content and sensibility—after his return home in April 1895 and then Josefina’s death in the following month he inserted into the coda some 60 new measures of quietly autumnal music, as if surveying and bidding farewell to the Concerto's long journey from its trenchant opening, before rousing itself to the ff conclusion. The remarkable unanimity between Ms. Tsan and the LBSO under Preu’s baton gave this extended leave-taking a time-stopping raptness, underlining with what sureness Dvořák in his final revision had further refined and deepened what was already a masterpiece.


Florence Price.
The concert had begun with Florence Price’s Concert Overture No. 2, written in 1943, but only rediscovered in 2009 amongst the trove of many of her once-lost works unearthed in St. Anne, Illinois at her former summer home, by then derelict.

The Concert Overture No. 2's B minor tonality and overall mood of nostalgic longing made it an appropriate opener to precede the Cello Concerto, but as a not notably inventive meditation on the spirituals “Go Down Moses,” “Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit,” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” the Overture seemed over-extended at nearly a quarter-hour.

Eckart Preu and
Hans Peter Preu.
The sole work programmed for the second half was Maurice Ravel’s celebrated orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, enhanced on this occasion by the projection of Viktor Hartmann’s pictures on a screen above the orchestra. Before this, however, from the podium Maestro Preu announced that there would be an extra surprise item.

His elder brother, the composer and arranger Hans Peter Preu, was visiting from Germany, and Eckart had invited him to write a piece for this concert, given the availability of the large forces required for Mussorgsky's Pictures and suggesting that a comparable treatment of a visual subject would be appropriate.

The result was The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, inspired by William Blake’s watercolor illustration (left) for the Book of Revelation.

Hans Peter Preu’s musical depiction really did justice to the weirdness of Blake's vision, and the LBSO responded whole-heartedly to his five minutes of apocalyptic orchestral mayhem—full of almost Messiaenic gong-and-gamelan sonorities—under the direction of the composer and with the Lovecraftian figure of the Dragon looming over them from the screen above. The audience, too, enthusiastically applauded what for many must have been an unexpectedly Modernist score.

Pictures at an Exhibition has been orchestrated by so many other people besides Ravel that, given how often the latter's arrangement appears on concert programs, it would be good once in a while to hear one of those different alternatives—my money would be on Sir Henry Wood’s even more opulent take on the piece, while any planner looking for a slightly shorter item could well think about Stokowski’s version, which omits two of the Pictures

Modest Mussorgsky (left); Maurice Ravel (right).
Nevertheless, Mussorgsky/ Ravel it was and of course the combination of the former’s vividly original responses to his friend Hartmann’s drawings and watercolors and Ravel’s boundless resource of orchestral color once again beguiled and thrilled, from the latter’s subtly differing treatments of the opening Promenade as it recurs between the first few images to the signal grandeur of X The Great Gate of Kiev. 

Viktor Hartmann's design for the
Bogatyr Gates at Kiev (Kyiv).
And as we listened from I Gnomus and II The Old Castle through to that conclusion so we were also able to see projected, in some cases, the definitively identified original images that inspired the music (e.g. The Great Gate of Kiev (left) and V The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks (below)), and in others an imaginative selection from Hartmann’s surviving output of artworks that made a plausible accompaniment to the music.

The last time I heard the Mussorgsky/ Ravel Pictures live was by no lesser forces than the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Riccardo Muti (reviewed here), but by comparison the Long Beach Symphony and Maestro Preu were by no means outshone. The near-capacity audience responded appropriately on its feet, and overall this quite splendid concert made one look forward even more to the two remaining blockbuster programs in the LBSO’s 2023-24 season: The Brahms German Requiem preceded by an orchestral piece from the contemporary Frenchman Guillaume Connesson and Vaughan Williams’ delectable Serenade to Music on March 9; and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 on June 1: will it really work with those two pieces in that order? We’ll see!


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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, February 17, 2024, 8 p.m.
Images: The performance: Caught in the Moment Photography; Dvořák portrait, Florence Price, Blake’s Great Red Dragon, Hartmann’s Plan for a City Gate: Wikimedia Commons; Dvořák plaque: Yelp; Dvořák family: Czech National Museum; Mussorgsky & Ravel: Courtesy St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

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