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St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, 10.30.07
Violinist Julia Fischer, playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto
SPPO, with Artistic Director (since 1988) Yuri Temirkanov, having just performed Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5
A study in contrasts this past weekend from two renowned quartets, heard less than 24 hours from each other. Saturday was opening night for the People's Symphony Concerts' 108th season at Washington Irving High School, which I've been attending since 2000 and have written about previously. It was the usual packed house to see the Guarneri String Quartet, one of America's great string ensembles. Sadly, we were informed by People's Symphony director Frank Solomon that the Guarneri have announced their retirement in 
2009, at the conclusion of their 45th season. (Unlike many quartets who rotate in new players over time, the Guarneri still features three of its original four members: first violinist Arnold Steinhardt, second violinist John Dalley and violist Michael Tree; cellist Peter Wiley replaced David Soyer in 2001.)
They presented a mixed bag of music from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, starting off with Bartok's challenging and dissonant 2nd quartet. Performances of Bartok's six quartets have become more-or-less commonplace on string quartet concerts: a remarkable evolution for a genre commonly referred to as "chamber music." The Guarneri threw off the many fast and difficult passages with ease.
Apparently, the combination of the disturbing sounds and an unventilated auditorium was too much for one elderly listener, who collapsed during the piece's final movement, setting off a flurry of gasps and shouts in the rear of the hall. The Guarneri, to their credit, continued to play as if nothing had happened: no doubt they've been through it more than once before. It took several minutes for the chaos to settle, just in time to hear the work's dark conclusion of two ominous plucks, which never sounded scarier. (Fortunately, we were told after intermission that the elderly woman had merely fainted.)
The remainder of the concert was more conventional fare: Haydn's bright and cheerful Quartet in D Major, Op. 20 and Bederich Smetana's pastoral Quartet No. 1, "From My Life." The playing was basically solid throughout, though seemed to flag at certain points, failing the energy and precision a younger ensemble might have brought to the proceedings. That takes nothing away from the Guarneri's astonishing career, and their essential contribution to the fabric of this music. One can only hope that they've been able to pass along some of what they've learned - and helped create - to the next generation of players.
On Sunday afternoon, it was a quartet of an entirely different stripe: St. Petersburg's Terem Quartet, making a rare stateside visit as part of the 92nd St. Y's Russian Sundays series. The Terem play traditional Russian instruments: the domra, the bayan-accordion and the balalaika. Actually, not just any balalaika: a double-bass balalaika, played on its side like some kind of mutant guitar, but sounding more like Mingus.
The Terem quartet have been around for 21 years and have given performances in over 60 countries. Their specialty is arrangements of classical standards: they started off with a powerful version of the Bach Toccata and Fugue, and moved on to works by Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and an Albeniz imitation by Rodion Schedrin. They played everything from memory, in an engaging, theatrical style: more than once, accordion player Andrey Smirnov leapt from his chair at the end of a piece.
After an imtermission of tea served from samovars in fine china, the second half of the program expanded their palate to music by Astor Piazzola, Gershwin and Nina Rota. They even managed a riff on "Happy Birthday", which would have come off sounding cheesy under most circumstances, but somehow felt appropriate here. The crowd - which spoke far more Russian than English - shouted it's appreciation and clapped in rhythm, just like they do overseas. And on the way out, we were all treated to some premium Russian vodka: just the right touch of warmth on a cool autumn evening.
The Russian Sundays program continues throughout the 2007-2008 season, with performances by Ljova and the Viola Contraband and Valery Ponomarev and his V.P. Jazz Big Band. Tickets available at the box office or online.
Without any pre-set plans, I decided to slop through the rain last night to Issue Project Room's new location on 3rd Ave. and 3rd St. in Brooklyn. The new space is a straight shoebox on the third floor of an old can factory: not as interesting as the silo they used to inhabit, but it still has the same omni-directional speakers and quirky, underground feel.
I arrived mid-set of an electro-acoustic outfit called Ike Yard, that apparently developed something of a following during it's brief existence in the early 80's, and became the first American band to record for the UK's legendary Factory Records. While there were interesting moments bleeding techno and acid house, it was - to my ears - mostly bad noise, and felt a bit like fantasy camp for fifty-somethings.
On my way out, I overheard that there was another happening called Tranzducer down the avenue at LEMURplex, on 9th St. "LEMUR" stands for the "League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, and is devoted to the creation of robotic musical instruments with names such as, "The Ill-Tempered Clangier": a xylophone-like contraption that clangs percussive melodies on forty-four tuned metal pipes.
There was a DJ spinning when I arrived, but he soon gave way to the fascinating Radio Wonderland, composer Joshua Fried's solo project in which he scans FM stations and remixes them live with the help of software called Max/MSP on his laptop. His choice of samples is often sly, looping the phrases "People have a heart" and "Exact duplicates of others" distorted by turning a steering wheel on top of a rickety stool. Later, he banged out a classical sample on old shoes, making it sound like a Burmese pat waing. Fried is a brilliant improviser; his main issue is letting folks know whether they should sit and listen or get up and dance. If Fried's own nonstop gyrating was any indication, I'm sure he wouldn't mind the latter. 
Maybe it was my far-off seat up in the mezzanine, or the less-than-half-full house, but I wasn't immediately impressed by the Theatre of Voices performance at Zankel Hall last night. It started out with a Gertrude Stein-esque poem read/sung by leader Paul Hillier, followed by Luciano Berio's A-Ronne, a nonsensical mix of German, Italian, French and English, mixed with burps, snores, and choking sounds. Later, Berio worked in elements of early polyphony -
Theatre of Voices' usual fare - which provided a pretty contrast to the chaos, but somehow didn't totally satify.
Things looked far more promising once I snuck down to the main level for the second half, and found myself seated in the same row as composers Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon. They were all there for the world premiere of David Lang's the little match girl passion, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a young girl who freezes to death while trying to sell matches on the evening of New Year's Eve. Lang, who wrote the libretto, combines Andersen's story with text from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, highlighting the martyr overtones in the original tale. The music occasionally referred to Bach, but more often resembled the vocal music of Reich or John Adams.
the little match girl passion is filled with sad and beautiful moments, as in the passage when the girl is discovered the next morning frozen to death, clutching a burnt bundle of matches:
"No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen, nor into what glory she had entered, on New Year's Day."
The piece ended with a haunting dirge, repeating the words "Rest soft" while chimes tolled like church bells, fading quietly away. The crowd - which had grown significantly - offered warm and generous applause: after, I spotted Reich embracing Lang's wife, obviously moved by the work. (Hillier directed the premiere of Reich's The Cave, and Reich wrote Proverb for them. Next month, Theatre of Voices will be performing a concert of Reich's music at the upcoming Festival d'Automne in Normandy.)
For those who missed it, Alex Ross had a excellent and enlightening piece in last week's New Yorker about how the Web might just save classical music: from blogs, to webstreams, to Naxos downloads. No mention of this particular venture - which I'll chalk up to my increasing musical schizophrenia - but he does call out a couple of Bay Area blogs that are worth a glance.
Yesterday, the hosting service Alex and I share published a brief interview with him, where he discusses the ever-growing appeal of music blogging:
"The blog allows me to indulge in a kind of writing that I couldn't pull off anywhere else — a little bit sly, a little bit whimsical, a little bit aphoristic, a little bit poetic, some days nothing more than a photo, other days a fragment of an essay. It's a very "now" medium, but it also somehow harks back to the nineteenth century when authors would publish bits and pieces of treatises and diaries in the columns of newspapers."
You can always count on Alex for just that right dash of esoterica...
He's out on the left coast right now, touring bookstores in tandem with the recent release of his debut book, The Rest Is Noise, but will be back in Gotham next week with a pair of events, including the Halloween-themed "An Evening of Spooky Modern Music," featuring a performance by pianist Ethan Iverson at the National Arts Club. Tickets are $25, and include cocktails.
My experience seeing the London Symphony Orchestra this past Sunday afternoon did not start off on the best foot. After a series of ridiculous subway delays and re-routes, I made it to Avery Fisher with about one minute to spare, only to be held up at the door by an overzealous guard who didn't want to let me in with my slightly-outsized camera. I eventually talked my way through, but by the time I scrambled up to the orchestra level, I was told that I would need to wait until the end of Part I before I could enter the hall - a full half-hour wait. So, I grabbed a chair at the end of the foyer facing Broadway and set it up underneath one of the PA speakers, so I could at least listen to the performance. Even with the tinny distortion, it sounded glorious. (There were also flat-panel monitors showing a closed-circuit broadcast of the performance.)
When they finally let patrons in, I quickly found my seat in the right-center of the orchestra. Unfortunately, an elderly couple were already planted there, and before I could take off to find another open seat, an usher appeared to show the couple to their proper seats, one row in front of mine. Except that another elderly couple was already seated there, the male member of which protested loudly when asked to move. All this time, Sir Colin Davis stood quietly on the podium, head down, waiting for the commotion to cease. Certainly not the way I had hoped to be introduced to one of the great conductors of our time.
The Creation is one of the great miracles of music, written by Haydn when he was in his mid-60's, at the end of a long career that encompassed some 104 symphonies, 68 string quartets, 15 operas, and countless sonatas, concerti and other works. The seed for this monumental oratorio had been planted during one of his two extended stays in London, where he encountered Handel's Messiah for the first time, at a performance at Westminster Abbey. (Reportedly, Haydn burst into tears at the "Hallelujah" Chorus, exclaiming: "He is the master of us all!") A few years later, Haydn was handed the libretto for The Creation - a mixture of the Book of Genesis and Milton's Paradise Lost that was originally prepared for Handel - and immediately began setting it to music. He spent two full years writing it - the longest he ever spent on any single composition - and claimed the composition was divinely-inspired. "Not from me," he reportedly said. "It comes from a power above." It was an immediate and huge success at it's 1798 premiere in Vienna, and was soon being performed to sold-out houses throughout Europe.
There are some extraordinary musical moments in The Creation, not the least of which is the opening "Representation of Chaos," with its full-on dissonances and off-sounding winds that presage the primal sounds of his pupil Beethoven, or even Richard Wagner's Ring operas. After the archangel Raphael sings in a near-whisper baritone about the darkness on the face of the earth, the chorus enters with the words:
"and God said: Let there be Light,
and there was Light."
The chorus hit the second "light" with extreme force, followed by an explosion in the violin section. Here, Haydn announces, is the beginning, unleashed like a supernova. The remainder of the oratorio - some two hours in all - is written in the dominant key of C-major.
Throughout The Creation, Haydn pays homage to Handel's techniques within his own, significantly more evolved musical language. The stunning choruses at the end of the Third and Sixth days made me sit straight up in my seat, just as Handel's "Hallelujah" always does. Even more stirring were the duets for soloist and chorus at the end of the Second, Fourth and Fifth days, with the orchestra and singers playing off one another. Haydn also appropriates Handel's "text painting" throughout, as in the Sixth day, where the orchestra mimics the roar of a lion, the leap of a tiger, and the light gallop of a stag (much as Camille Saint-Saens would do 100 years later in his Carnival of the Animals.)
Most extraordinary of all is Part Three, titled "Adam and Eve in Eden." After a passage in which the first humans praise God and his new creation, we are suddenly presented with a romantic love duet, catching the listener off-guard much as it must have surprised Adam and Eve themselves.
The performances were universally first-rate. Dietrich Henschel, as Raphael/Adam, sang with a powerful baritone that belied his slight appearance. Superstar tenor Ian Bostridge brought his usual expressiveness to the role of Uriel. Sally Matthews' powerful soprano easily transcended the forces surrounding her in the role of Gabriel/Eve. The London Symphony, in a downsized version of itself, was supple and stunning, giving the lie to the NY Philharmonic's oft-repeated complaints about Avery Fisher's acoustics. (AFH, in fact, bears a remarkable resemblance to The Barbican in London, where the LSO performs.) And the London Symphony Chorus, with their pure tone and heartfelt delivery, showed once again why the British are clearly the best singers in the world.
And, of course, there is Sir Colin Davis himself who, at 80, conducted with power and deliberation. He is a surprisingly Puckish figure, tiptoeing around the musicians' chairs like someone half his age. Sir Colin serves as the LSO's President: an honorary title which basically allows him to set programs and conduct performances without holding any administrative responsibilities. (The LSO is a famously self-governing institution, as are the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics.)
After the final triumphant chorus praising God and his creation, the nearly-full house greeted the massive forces on stage with a warm and well-deserved ovation. One can only hope the LSO's annual trip - now in its 10th year - will continue for decades to come, and that Sir Colin will cross the pond with them for as long as he's able.
(Haydn's house in Vienna, where he wrote The Creation between 1796 and 1798.)
I made it back from the LSO in time to catch this month's installment of Barbes Classical, featuring the talented young violinist Jessica Lee playing before an intimate crowd. She started with a fiendishly difficult Bach Chaconne, continued with a Paganini caprice, and ended the first half with two pieces by Korean composer Isang Yun. The second half consisted of the Tchiakovsky Violin Concerto, with the orchestra part played on piano by a friend of Lee's. Which made me wonder: what's the difference between a concerto and a sonata? The setting was far from ideal - and I swear I'm going to hurt someone if I have to hear one more performance of that concerto - but I did hear some gritty detail that would otherwise have been swallowed up by a concert hall, or out in some park.
The next concert on Nov. 11 mixes things up a bit, featuring the Parker Quartet playing with house band Las Rubias Del Norte. 
After five days of CMJ, I'm up at Avery Fisher for the ultimate palate-cleanser: a performance of Haydn's Creation with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, soloists Sally Matthews, Ian Bostridge, and Dietrich Henschel, and conductor Sir Colin Davis - who turned 80 last month but doesn't look a day over 60 on the podium. The performance is radiant and glorious: I'll have more to offer once I'm back in front of a computer.
I made the most of my day off yesterday, starting out at the free day show at Piano's, sponsored by Brooklyn Vegan. (Thanks, too, to Svedka vodka for all the free Bloody Marys and Burritoville for the free food-to-go.) 
Tiny Masters of Today (Brooklyn garage duo featuring 12 year old Ivan and 10 year old sister Ida, along with drummer Russell Simins from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion)
Georgie James (Washington, DC)
Julia Kent (formerly or Rasputina and currently of Antony and the Johnsons)
Foals (Oxford, UK)
Tim Bracy (formerly of The Mendoza Line)
Walter Meego
(Chicago, IL)
After a short break, my friend Pete and I caught a cab uptown to see the sold-out Spoon show at Roseland. I saw them at ACL last month, and thought they were deserving of a second listen indoors. Opening were The Ponys, who were a bit in over their head, but good enough for filler.
The Ponys (Chicago, IL)
More Austin majesty invaded New York tonight, this time in the form of ACL Fest favorite Ghostland Obervatory, who absolutely tore the house down at Webster Hall. Lead Aaron Behrens seems to be channeling everyone from Robert Plant, to David Bowie, to Vince Young, while DJ/piano man Thomas Turner obviously has Daft Punk on the brain. Catch them next chance you get.
