Alex Ross's Blog, page 86

A Robin Minard moment

Czernowin on CD

The music of Chaya Czernowin, whose immensely powerful new opera Infinite Now I review in this week's issue of The New Yorker, is well represented on records. At the center of her discography are four discs on the Mode label: Afatsim, which gathers scores from the earlier part of her career, running from the bass-flute piece Ina of 1988 to the title work of 1996; Shu Hai practices javelin, which presents three settings of poetry of Zohar Eitan from the period 1997 to 2001; Pnima...ins innere, a DVD of her extraordinary first opera, on the theme of the inexpressibility of the trauma of the Holocaust; and MAIM (2002-6), her vast symphonic trilogy on the theme of water, which Tim Rutherford-Johnson rightly describes in Music After the Fall as "one of the most significant orchestral works of the new century." Picking up the chronological narrative is a recent Wergo disc that offers another orchestral trilogy — The Quiet, Zohar Iver, and Esh — alongside the guitar concerto White Wind Waiting and the unearthly beautiful At the Fringe of Our Gaze, written for Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Also on Wergo is Shifting Gravity, featuring the 2008 chamber cycle of that name. Arriving soon from Kairos is a selection of Czernowin's Wintersongs cycle, based on an ICE performance that I previewed in The New Yorker in 2014. Finally, DG has a DVD of Adama, the theatre piece that Czernowin wrote as an interstitial counterpoint to Mozart's unfinished Zaide. (Next month Theater Freiburg will première a new choral version of Adama.) More can be found on YouTube, including Knights of the Strange, Ayre, and Pilgerfahrten. As for Infinite Now, it travels in coming weeks to the Mannheim National Theatre (May 26 to June 18) and to the Paris Philharmonie (June 14). Czernowin is now looking ahead to her next operatic project – a love story, she says.

As I note in passing in The New Yorker, Czernowin is also an influential teacher of composition — as is her husband, the formidable experimental composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi. (I missed my chance to see his wild Coney Island-inspired spectacle Sideshow live — Zoë Madonna and Mark Swed supplied enticingly perplexing descriptions — but I've been listening to an audio version on his website.) Although she resists the idea of a Czernowin Schule, her pupils at Harvard and elsewhere — Ashley Fure, Stefan Prins, Trevor Bača, Michelle Lou, and Ann Cleare, among others — have plainly learned much from her in the art of deploying advanced techniques toward viscerally expressive ends. (Lou and Bača have both written perceptively about her music.) Many of them were present in Gent for Infinite Now — appropriately so, since the score bears the dedication "To my students."

Czernowin's Infinite Now

Cataclysm. The New Yorker, May 15, 2017.

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest.

— Kurtág, Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir; Reinbert de Leeuw conducting Asko / Schönberg and the Netherlands Radio Choir (ECM)

— Katharina Rosenberger, SHIFT and other works; wasteLAnd and Rage Thormbones (hat art)

— Cage, Works for Percussion 4, featuring 51'16.657" for a speaking percussionist; Bonnie Whiting (Mode)

— Monteverdi, Vespro della Beata Virgine; John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, English Baroque Soloists (Archiv, reissue)

— Alex Mincek, Torrent, Pendulum VII, Harmonielehre; Wet Ink, Yarn / Wire, Mivos Quartet (Sound American)

— Daniel Corran, Refractions; Isaura Quartet and Jeremy Kerner (Populist)

— Ted Hearne, Sound from the Bench, Consent, Ripple, Privilege; The Crossing (Cantaloupe)

— John Adams, Chamber Symphony, Son of Chamber Symphony; Alarm Will Sound (Cantaloupe)

— Schubert, Piano Sonatas D. 960 and D. 664; Javier Perianes (Harmonia Mundi)

Pelléas in Cleveland

Credit: © Roger Mastroianni, courtesy of The Cleveland Orchestra.

A production of Pelléas et Mélisande is playing now at the Cleveland Orchestra, under the theatrical direction of Yuval Sharon, with Franz Welser-Möst conducting. Travel abroad prevented me from attending, but fortunately the authorities in Cleveland have forwarded a video excerpt from the production, which I have embedded above. (Be sure to click on "full screen.") This is the scene between Golaud and Yniold in Act 3. Hanno Müller-Brachmann is Golaud and Julie Mathevet is Yniold. There will be further performances on Thursday and Saturday. 

Miscellany

The superb British new-music label another timbre will host a three-day festival at Café Oto, in London, this week. Music by the likes of Linda Catlin Smith, Jürg Frey, and Cassandra Miller.... The first issue of Sounds Like Now, a UK new-music magazine under the editorship of Tim Rutherford-Johnson, is now available.... Harry Partch's possible masterpiece Oedipus will receive a performance at the University of Washington in Seattle on May 5 and 6. UW is now, of course, the home of the original Partch instrumentarium. I wrote about a 2005 performance at Montclair State, when the instruments were housed there.... The next WasteLAnd concert in LA features music of Catherine Lamb, Michael Pisaro, Erik Ulman, and James Tenney. Matt Barbier, Scott Worthington, and Scott Cazan perform.... Ensemble Pamplemousse hosts a new-music festival entitled Chance and Circumstance on May 11-14, at Jack in Brooklyn. The TAK Ensemble, Object Collection, and Tyshawn Sorey also perform.

At the orthopedic clinic of Dr. Berwald

The new Stravinsky

A Cultural Comment on Funeral Song, April 25, 2017.

Iceland in LA

Nordic Fire. The New Yorker, May 1, 2017.

A Trevor Bača moment