Thomas May's Blog, page 12

“Urlicht” with Samuel Hasselhorn

I reviewed baritone Samuel Hasselhorn’s latest harmonia mundi release, Urlicht, for Gramophone:

Samuel Hasselhorn’s first orchestral release, this album follows his inaugural instalment of the ambitious ‘Schubert 200 Project’ (Harmonia Mundi, 11/23). Die schöne Müllerin, which won the 2023 Diapason d’Or, launched the young baritone’s collaboration with the pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz to record all of the lieder penned by Schubert in his last five years, with the undertaking to culminate in the bicentennial of the composer’s death in 2028….

continue

Happy Birthday, Marcel

“…même quand j’eus écouté la sonate d’un bout à l’autre, elle me resta presque tout entière invisible, comme un monument dont la distance ou la brume ne laissent apercevoir que de faibles parties. De là, la mélancolie qui s’attache à la connaissance de tels ouvrages, comme de tout ce qui se réalise dans le temps.”

(“Even when I had heard the sonata from beginning to end, it remained almost wholly invisible to me, like a monument of which distance or a haze allows us to catch but a faint and fragmentary glimpse. Hence the melancholy inseparable from one’s knowledge of such works, as of everything that acquires reality in time.”)

— from A l’ombre des jeune filles en fleur by Marcel Proust, born on this day in 1871

Marcel Proust, premier mouvement from Radio France

Käthe Kollwitz in New York

“Face With Right Hand,” Käthe Kollwitz

Born this day in 1867 in what is now Kaliningrad, Russia (Königsberg in Prussia at the time), the great artist Käthe Kollwitz is the subject of a retrospective at MOMA in New York that traces her development over several decades, from the 1890s through the 1930s — a period with all-too-familiar resonances to our current moment.

From the brilliant Philip Kennicott’s review: “As other artists working in Germany during the same period steeled themselves with irony and satire, rendering the worst of the world in lurid shapes and hues, Kollwitz stared it down without flinching… She committed a number of sins against artistic orthodoxy, making art for a large public, making art that was figurative rather than abstract, making art focused on the emotional lives of women and narratives of motherhood and loss.”

Here’s an appreciation (in German) from SWR Kultur.

2024 Summer Festival with Seattle Chamber Music Society

Violinist James Ehnes, Seattle Chamber Music Society’s artistic director, performs with colleagues during a SCMS Chamber Music in the Park concert. SCMS’ Summer Festival runs July 1-26 this year. (Jenna Poppe)

Tonight is the opening concert of the 2024 edition of the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s annual Summer Festival. I wrote a preview for The Seattle Times here:

Sure, the Seattle Chamber Music Society has a menu of the usual star composers — Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák — for its Summer Festival running July 1-26. But this year, the festival is boasting an actual menu that will be designed onstage by Seattle star chefs. …

continue

The Pain and Insight of Saariaho’s “Innocence”

Here’s my review for Musical America of the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s final opera, Innocence, which was presented by San Francisco Opera this month:

Innocence at San Francisco Opera-review-June 2024Download

Adams’s Early Masterwork “Harmonium” Strikes a Chord in Seattle

Ludovic Morlot conducting the Seattle Symphony; photo courtesy of the Seattle Symphony

For their second-to-last program of the season, the Seattle Symphony added John Adams’s early breakthrough Harmonium to its repertory with a breathtaking performance led by Conductor Emeritus Ludovic Morlot. During the 1970s, Adams had been building a reputation as an experimental composer doing his own thing in the Bay Area. He had become an advisor on contemporary music to the San Francisco Symphony’s then-music director Edo de Waart and received a commission to write a big choral-orchestral piece to help the orchestra celebrate its first season in Davies Hall, SFO’s new home across the street from the War Memorial Opera House. The premiere in April 1981 was a sensation that launched Adams on his path toward international stardom.

In his guise as a conductor, Adams has paid multiple visits to Seattle to lead the musicians in various of his own compositions and regards the SSO as “an excellent orchestra.” So it was especially satisfying to finally hear the collective forces of the SSO and its Chorale perform this pivotal work from more than four decades ago for the first time.

As it happened, I’d just come from hearing the original septet version of Adams’s 1978 piece Shaker Loops the week before at the Ojai Music Festival (performed by members of the visiting Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with fresh birdsong obbligato from the trees surrounding the outdoor Libbey Bowl). Adams had adopted the idioms of Minimalism in his distinctive, “impure” way in Shaker Loops and does something similar in Harmonium, but working for the first time with the much larger canvas of symphony orchestra and chorus. It was interesting to notice that some of the DNA of Shaker Loops is still present in varied form in Harmonium. At the same time, aspects of the signature language Adams would go on to develop (mostly orchestral, but in some respects choral as well) also appear in this score — certain timbral gestures from the tuned percussion, a shine that anticipates Grand Pianola Music (1982), or the stirring choral “pillars” found in the operas.

But the very fine performance led by Morlot kept me from falling into the trap of viewing a great artist’s early work merely contextually, as a launching pad toward future greatness. Harmonium proved completely compelling on its own terms, a splendidly structured choral triptych that conveys states of transcendence, serene contemplation, and unbridled joy.

Adams initially considered setting texts from the Wallace Stevens collection called Harmonium and then thought of writing for a wordless chorus, relying on their pure sounds, before he found a basis for what he imagined — “human voices — many of them — riding upon waves of rippling sound in John Donne’s “Negative Love” and two poems by Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “Wild Nights.”

Morlot showed his sensitive understanding of Adams’s dramatic use of sudden harmonic modulations — at this stage in his career, the composer had been likening it to the process of “gating” in electronic music — and shaped the sense of progressive revelation via negation in the opening Donne section with a tenacious clarity.

The Chorale, excellently prepared by Joseph Crnko, encompassed an enormous sonic spectrum, from mystic whispers to ecstatic, Whitmanesque yawping that sent shockwaves crashing through Benaroya Hall. (Fittingly, the concert had begun with Tromba lontana, an “anti-fanfare” from 1986 in which the composer uses a pair of trumpets to sound an elegiac rather than military mood, calling to mind Whitman’s poem “The Mystic Trumpeter.”) Adams’s guiding image of surging waves of sound came to life most thrillingly in the final “section”Wild Nights” movement, a drastically contrasting juxtaposition with Dickinson’s death meditation preceding it.

Seattle Symphony Chorale plus part of the fabulous SSO brass section; photo courtesy of the Seattle Symphony

One of the most unforgettable moments in Harmonium is the seamless transition between the polar Dickinson poems, in which Adams builds up an irresistible, orgiastic flow of momentum. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which occupied the second half of the program, happens to offer a plausible parallel in the musical “tunnel” that interlinks its last two movements.

Curiously, the program on which Harmonium was given its world premiere in San Francisco also involved a Beethoven pairing: in that case, with the Emperor Piano Concerto No. 5 — a work whose aura Adams confronted the next year in his wonderfully over-the-top Grand Pianola Music. On this occasion, Morlot — in his first reunion with the SSO since the sadly under-attended opening night of the season last September — approached the Beethoven with a clear sense of proportions and architecture. And with a bigger, more-rounded sound overall than in his Beethoven interpretations of several years ago, when he was music director.

Morlot held back from imposing an “interesting” perspective on the score, following Beethoven’s command of a single eighth-note rest between the first two statements, for example. He followed all of the repetitions — including, a bit surprisingly, even in the Scherzo. Still, the vision that emerged was more finale-centric, it seemed to me, with the terseness of the opening movement as a mere station on the way forward rather than an existential state. Despite brisk tempi, Morlot shaped the eccentrically long-spun melody of the Andante’s main theme with style and drew a magnificent dark sheen from the strings in particular, with bold strokes in the finale.

If aspects of the Scherzo felt understated, Morlot steered clear of the feeling of anti-climax that deflates so many renditions of the finale. The return of the ominous Scherzo music actually felt surprising, and the insistent paragraphs of C major brought to mind something of the French Revolutionary era music that was a clear inspiration for the young Beethoven.

review (c) 2024; all rights reserved Thomas May

“Infinite Refrain”: Pride 17th-century Venice Style

Featuring countertenor Randall Scotting and tenor Jorge Navarro Colorado, comes the album Infinite Refrain, Music of Love’s Refuge offers a focus on queer relationships and gay love in 17th-century Venice. They collaborate with the Academy of Ancient Music, led by conductor Laurence Cummings, to perform a program celebrating Venice as a place of unusual tolerance in the Baroque era. Infinite Refrain is framed as the journey of two men in love and tells its story through 17th-century music.

“Ironically, it was Venice’s decline as a trading powerhouse that led to its reputation as a Mecca for gay tourism,” writes Clive Paget in the excellent liner notes. “The annual Carnival, with its frenzy of sexual licence and promise of anonymity, had always drawn the crowds, but with the downturn in commercial revenue the authorities were increasingly inclined to turn a blind eye in exchange for a healthy injection of the 17th-century version of the pink pound. And so, something that had been swept under the carpet for over a century became something the Venetians could sell.”

“Onstage in the 1600s, people were playing different genders than they represented in their everyday life,” explains Scotting. “Men were wearing dresses, women were often in men’s suits, male castrati were singing in high voices… so many things were fluid about opera and music at this time.” Navarro Colorado adds: “Many of the duets on the album were also composed to be purposely ambiguous in terms of gender and allowing for queer interpretations so that whoever is listening will feel connected to their message of love.”

Alongside duets by Monteverdi and Cavalli are contemporary premieres of music by little-known composers Boretti, Melani, and Castrovillari, including an impassioned love duet for the mythic lovers Hercules and Theseus — “Se per tè lieto mi lice” (“To be happy for you is precious to me”). “This duet portrays two of the greatest heroes of Greek antiquity matter-of-factly proclaiming their love for each other and it is offered here just as Venetian audiences would have heard it in 1670,” says Scotting.

2024 Ojai Music Festival

With Mitsuko Uchida as Music Director, this year’s Ojai Music Festival from 6-9 June promises an intriguing mix of Mozart piano concertos, early Modernist masterpieces (with a focus on Arnold Schoenberg), and pieces by contemporary composers who hold special significance for her. I had the privilege once again of writing the program notes, which are available here.

Visit OMF’s homepage for livestreams and replays of the concerts here.

Earth Song: How Music Can Serve as a Response to the Climate Crisis

Trey Lee, Eldbjorg Hemsing, and John Luther Adams

Included in the latest issue of Strings magazine is my story on efforts by Trey Lee, Eldbjorg Hemsing, and John Luther Adams to address the climate crisis:

Nature sings in the work of countless composers in the Western classical tradition. The calls and flutterings of birds, spine-tingling thunder, falling raindrops: Vivaldi transformed a repertoire of found sounds from the natural world into some of the most memorable moments in The Four Seasons. …

continue

Editor’s Choice: “Girls of the Golden West”

My review for Gramophone of the new concert recording of John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West, which has been selected as an Editor’s Choice for June 2024:

The opera repertoire would be considerably diminished if composers had abandoned their ‘problem children’ at the first sign of trouble. John Adams confronted one of the biggest disappointments of his career when Girls of the Golden West was panned by a chorus of critics at its premiere in 2017….

continue