This past Thursday I was invited to go see Cadillac Moon Ensemble (CME) perform by two colleagues of mine, Evelyn Farny and Patti Kilroy. Opening up for them was Magic Names Group, a troupe of six vocalists founded specifically to perform the work Stimmung, which they performed in excerpt that evening. They also performed a work [...]
|
||||||
|
Redhooker at Le Poisson Rouge Last Sunday I went to see Redhooker and Arturo en el Barco at Le Poisson Rouge. Arturo en el Barco (AEEB) was the “opener” for Redhooker even though they appeared afterward. AEEB is headed by Angélica Négron, a member of my composer consortium Circles and Lines, so I won’t be [...] I was first introduced to this video a few years ago and my first thoughts, (before my general revulsion towards the aesthetics of the work manifested) were that this work is a seriously poor allocation of resources. If you think about the money sunk into the work to contract and fly the four helicopters for the [...] One of my favorite contemporary composers and a fantastic young orchestra. Listening to this particular work is interesting, as I generally think of Golijov as a world music composer, and yet these songs must have fascinated the arranger so much that he would use his orchestration style to mingle with the Romanticism of Schubert. The result is a placid exhale of neo-romanticism that lingers on in my early morning, jet-lagged stupor. I find this effect to be very different from the original Schubert piano-soprano arrangements, as the first three songs in the set Golijov used have much more Strum and Drang (This is fitting as the text is by Goethe). Take a listen and you’ll hear how Schubert’s more overt “longing” and “suffering” get bent into something more bittersweet and nostalgic. I think that this is partly due to the color changes that come from an orchestral arrangement. I have the video of The Knights playing it below, and beneath the break are the original renditions of the songs by Schubert.
I recently chronicled attending an avant new music concert at Teatro IATI where Bora Yoon would run what she sang/played through a looping pedal. She would layer harmonies, melodies and pulses on top of each other to create a whole texture. She is not the only one to be using this technique. Here is a different [...] Last night I was invited to see a show that is part of Teatro IATI’s Performing Arts Marathon. The program was made up of two electro-acoustic acts Sabrina Lastman and Bora Yoon. Both used elements of electronics in concordance with their voice, though Ms. Lastman’s fell more on the acoustic side of the spectrum. Ms. Lastman’s performance [...] The Pacifica Quartet has mastered playing as a unit. Last night I saw the Pacifica Quartet perform at NYU’s Frederick Loewe Theater. As a quartet on the younger side of the classical music business they showed why they are Musical America’s ensemble of the year and Grammy winners for best chamber music performance. Their playing was [...] Yesterday I played for the band Princeton in their effort with a dance troupe. In between my stints of playing for the band’s rock songs and the collaborative dance work, the dancer put on their own pieces. Some were incredibly boring, but one that I thought was unexpectedly effective was a dance where a short passage [...] I went to my good friend, Alana Bennett’s, Senior Recital yesterday. She ended her program with the entire Dvorák Dumky Trio. For one, the players who included Patti Kilroy (her blog link is on the upper left hand side of the page), played great. Here and there they had some ensemble issues, but over all I thought the music was played with technical facility and thoughtfulness. The thoughtfulness probably comes from the direction and coaching of Marion Feldman. The connection between Patti and Alana was clear which made the pianist Eun Jung Bae seem the odd-man lady out. This should be expected as the string players had been performing together for three years at this point. Aside from the performance aspect, I would like to comment on Dvorák’s compositions. Dvorák writes really cool sections of music, at least in the Dumky, but when placed in the whole of the work, each section comes across as cheesey (I’m going to be slaughtered by an angry mob of Czechs tomorrow). Listen to the first movement to about 2:30. This is rediculous. I am not saying it’s an affront, and the humor in it is clear. But it sounds like a cheap gag: This kind of sillyness is repeated in nearly every movement. In the last movement, where the music isn’t particularly conducive to contrasting humor like the first, I laughed for most of it. This because the difference in mood is so great, from the sublime to an intense anger of some sort. Below the fold are the rest of the videos of Beaux Arts Trio playing all the other movements. It’s recital season and I have been going to a few in between stints of practicing for my own. At the end of last month, I played in a chamber concert hosted by Noam Feingold, where I played the Prokofiev Quintet. On the end of that concert was a group playing Messiaen’s Quartet for the End [...] |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2010 Open Source Music - All Rights Reserved |
||||||