Deceptively Simple

THE MUSIC OF EZRA POUND

This is probably an unfair entry for the Worst CD Ever Made Award, since Ezra Pound was a poet and not a composer, and because the performances are as spirited and as dedicated as one could ask. But what are they spiriting and dedicating themselves to? Pound’s throwback medievalism from two operas Le Testament and Cavalcanti set French, Italian and Provencal texts, and the singers go after them with guttural abandon. Shrieks, that husky form of vocalizing, something that sounds like Sprechstimme — all are on display here. Stravinsky and Satie knew how to make this sort of thing sound like music, but it eluded Pound. The works date from 1920 to 1933, in case anyone cares.

The instrumental works include a solo violin work from 1923, the Fiddle Music First Suite. Wandering, Stravinskian lines traverse the air, ultimately leading nowhere interesting.

The packaging again makes this perhaps more a curiosity than the Worst CD Ever, with its 80-page booklet; biographies of every singer, none of whom you have heard of; texts in translation; and two essays including score examples. Opening it up again today for the first time in years, an Errata card fell out, pointing out that the rhythmic stresses on page 42 are printed incorrectly. The Errata card lists the correct poetic stresses above the line of poetry, and the musical stresses below. I can think of a few more Erratum which are not listed on the card.

Oh, yes: Clips can be heard here.

Edgard Varèse

The two-night, two-concert summary of Edgard Varèse’s music at the Lincoln Center Festival was that rarest form of musical outings: an honest-to-goodness event. About thirty, maybe more, people were waiting for returned tickets at Monday night’s Alice Tully Hall concert featuring the International Contemporary Ensemble with Steven Schick, and the New York Philharmonic’s concert the next evening was likewise sold out. Arty Brooklyn kids made the trip, alongside your expected new-music veterans, regular subscribers, the art-house demimondaines, and the remaining members of the Frank Zappa cult. Whatever the festival, ICE, and the Philharmonic did to promote this, do it again. The brawny, macho, dissonant, clangorous music of Varèse is one of classical music’s bizarre cul-de-sacs (culs-de-sac?) that has its admirers and its zealots, with virtually no one who merely tolerates it. Maybe that’s all who were there last week, but it felt more like the crowd for a universally acclaimed modern master.

Anu Komsi - photo by Maarit Kytöharju

Monday’s concert began with Poème Èlectronique, Varèse’s audacious electronic piece from 1958, with its ghostly wails and industrial air. Then it was back to pre-War (pre-two world wars, really) France for the song Un Grand Sommeil Noir, featuring soprano Anu Komsi in the first display of her jaw-dropping technique. This brief, Debussy-esque art song contained all the proof needed to show off how deeply indebted to Debussy Varèse was early on. He called Debussy the “fantastic chemist” whose “economy of means and clarity, and the intensity he achieved through them” showed him one possible route forward.

ICE and So Percussion then moved through four Varèse scores of the more-familiar variety from the early 1920′s to 1934: Hyperprism, Offrandes, Intègrales, and Ecuatorial. Their collective virtuosity in these breathtakingly intricate works and the unity and precision they maintained were probably to be expected, but, all the same, it was stunning to hear. Steven Schick’s discipline and spontaneity is one of the better-kept secrets, and I’d love to hear him conduct someone other than ICE (though that’s of course it’s own treat). The bass-baritone Alan Held, who I last heard as a moving Jochanaan in Lyric Opera’s Salome, gave a sumptuous reading of the Spanish text of Ecuatorial, drawn from the Popol Vuh.

The other truly awesome aspect of these pieces was from having So Percussion serving as the percussion section. Usually when you hear Varèse, no matter how great the group, there’s one cymbal-player or gong-beater who’s out in left field and not getting it. These guys were entirely on the same page, and worked as a real unit. This was real instrumental section-playing of the kind we usually reserve for talking about the brass or the strings. Really, really superb.

The twin highlights of the second half were the Étude pour Espace, completed by Chou Wun-chung in 2009, and the solo flute Density 21.5. Kent Tritle’s chorus Musica Sacra were amplified and the orchestra amplified, too, and then “spatialized” throughout the hall. Musica Sacra gamely went through the ominous-sounding texts by Kenneth Patchen, Vincent Huidebro (in Spanish), and another Spanish line from St. John of the Cross. These were combined with Varèse’s own inventions, his “syllables of intensity,” nonsense sounds which come across like an amped-up, more sinister chorus Berlioz could only lunge at for the end of The Damnation of Faust, with his own made-up language. In that same piece, Anu Komsi astounded everyone when she sailed up to an insanely high note, one of those “I did not know people could do that” notes, then held it for a seeming eternity.

Of Density 21.5, the best way to summarize Claire Chase’s performance is to say that the near-ovation she received when first walking onstage was entirely deserved. The naturalness, the poise, the excitement; with all of that in place, it’s difficult to imagine a better performance. The quote in the title is from Ferrucio Busoni’s Sketch of a new Esthetic of Music, which influenced Varèse deeply and which he naturally admired. Schick, ICE, and the other musicians at this concert gave us all a great big window to look at Varèse’s notion of musical freedom.

Claire Chase

Steven Schick

Word came this afternoon that this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival has sold out. Or at least, Sunday has sold out*. And the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is in the middle period of a Beethoven Festival. And the Grant Park Music Festival will soon be upon us, starting next week. Lollapalooza arrives in August, and there’s an entire website dedicated to the various music festivals that land in downtown Chicago throughout the summer. So it’s worth thinking a little bit about what makes a festival a festival, and what happens to festivalgoers.

When I was at Time Out Chicago, we (me, the music editor, and the art editor) had a standing joke that all you needed for a festival was two shows and a panel discussion. It seemed like we were inundated with the buggers; every other week, another one was starting up, on some subject or theme or artist, and lord only knows if they were viable enterprises or not. Still, we persevered, because there’s something about a festival that gets people going.

Like everything else, that excitement is due to several factors: a concentrated dose of one person’s art; a closer look at an artistic movement you may not have encountered much until now; and the social factors. By that I mean, seeing the same people, and being in the same place repeatedly. You start noticing who’s sitting by you, and that you saw them just the other day, and the fact that you were just in this building once this week already helps establish a routine. “This is mine. I belong here,” you start to think.

Having gone to a couple of these Beethoven Festival concerts so far, it’s starting to get into my consciousness. The pre-concert chamber-music performance the CSO players have put on show you another side of Beethoven, and another side of their own playing. That’s always welcome. The symphonic concerts put you in repeated contact with one of the great musical minds of history, and my thoughts invariably end up as they do in these sorts of things, reflecting that someone else nearly 200 years ago heard these same notes, in another concert hall. A listener can follow in greater detail the paths traced by Beethoven’s mind when one symphony follows close on another’s heels.

My point is, what with all these festivals coming up, it can be some enjoyable mental jujitsu to think through what makes them a festival, and not just a collection of shows. Because all you really need for a festival is two of them, plus a panel discussion.

*300 additional Sunday tickets have been released

Alan Rich was a music critic, and the last American critic to have heard Artur Schnabel, and who attended the premiere of Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1945, when he was a student at Harvard. The passing of that musical knowledge marks something in our nation’s musical life. There was no middle ground with Alan—a performance either moved him, or left him cold, and it was the same with performers, composers and their works. Music mattered deeply to him, and his standards for the writing about it were entirely as high, if not even more stringent, than what he expected of the people onstage.

Alan’s journalistic career serves as a convenient guide to the journalism profession in the back half of the twentieth century to the present.  He moved to Los Angeles in the ’70s after writing for years in New York for the New York Herald-Examiner and then New York magazine. The original plan, as he told me one pre-concert evening, was that he was going out there to cover the city for a magazine to be spun off from New York. So he went west, liked it, and decided to stay. I’m pulling this all from the memory banks, so it may not be entirely accurate. But Alan did grow to love Los Angeles, and its people. With his black leather jacket, though, he never really left the pugnacious world of New York.

The magazine folded, Rich moved on to other publications, which folded, and the final blow was when he was fired in 2008 from his LA Weekly column, “A Lot of Night Music,” which summarized a week’s worth of concert activity. He started his blog So I’ve Heard, which took its name from a 2006 collection of his columns, and wrote the occasional piece for Variety. It couldn’t have been an easy existence, but he seemed to love it.

I think Alan exemplified more than any other critic, certainly any classical-music critic, Kenneth Tynan’s dictum that a critic’s job consists of “destroying the bad to make way for the good.” Alan could destroy a performer on the page, ditto a composer or a work. He had no patience at all for Sibelius’s Violin Concerto (“[t]hat wispy gray nagging tune for solo violin…awash in a thin orchestral gruel”), or for showboating stars. The negative opinions gave teeth to the positive notices, proof that this wasn’t someone who handed out gold stars week after week.

Just as he could be negative, so he could write a rave like few others. Los Angeles’ series of contemporary piano music, Piano Spheres, received immense support from him, and it’s partially due to Alan’s support that Gloria Cheng is now rightly viewed as a leading American pianist. Few were also as pleased as Alan with the announcement and appointment of Gustavo Dudamel to the head job with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (“He’s real; he’s ours”). You come with integrity and a good head on your shoulders; you’ll do ok by Alan.

Alan’s savagery found an unfortunate outlet through attacks on his colleagues in print, though. These were always younger writers, and he’d leap on the slightest misstep as proof of their not deserving to be in print. This pushed one of them to quit writing about classical music, and the others simply keep going and ignore him. Classical music operates on society’s margins, classical-music journalism is even farther afield, and these attacks served no real purpose, censuring people publicly in ways that would have been vastly more helpful done in private. Eisenhower’s injunction to “Praise in public; criticize in private,” seems especially relevant here.

We had a major falling out, he and I. I met Alan in 2005, when the Music Critics Association had its annual meeting in Los Angeles. I remember a fine Chinatown dinner with Alan and Russell Platt from the New Yorker, and Alan mentioned later on that he’d looked up some of my reviews and enjoyed them. I passed, I was in. This night was also notable for Alan nearly killing the three of us when he made a left turn into oncoming traffic. His blog says he passed the vision portion of the test just last year, and that seems frankly impossible.

We hung out again the next year when I was out there on vacation, and traded various war stories about colleagues. We shared a pleasant lunch with a record-industry friend at LA MOCA, who was worried that he would pick up the check if she wasn’t quick enough. He did excuse himself at one point, and we found out shortly after that he’d done just that. He could be very generous.

Then a couple months later I reviewed an opera for the Financial Times, and Alan wrote back one of his all-caps emails deriding it. Puzzled, I tweaked part of it and sent it back, since he was someone whose opinion I actually valued, and an even longer all-caps email came back that proved that obscenity can exist without profanity. It would’ve taken the paint off the walls if email had walls. The sign-off was that there was basically no future for classical criticism when people like me were allowed to write about it. Which seemed a tad harsh.

I never heard from Alan after that. I’d read his blog every now and then, and it took a while before that didn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth. Despite all that, it’s a loss he won’t be writing anymore. Sibelius said no one ever built a statue to a critic, but a small memorial near that beautiful fountain outside Disney Hall wouldn’t be too much to ask. Los Angeles couldn’t have asked for a stronger partisan.

Photo from L.A. Places

Stephen Merritt - photo by Marco Krasilcic

“What are you hoping to hear?”

“…Anything from 69 Love Songs would be great, I guess.”

“That’s tied up with an old relationship for me.”

“Yeah. I think we all have a little bit of that.”

First set

1. Kiss Me like You Mean It – 69 Love Songs, vol. 2

2. You Must Be out of Your Mind – Realism

3. Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side – 69 Love Songs, vol. 1 (Stephin Merritt did hold out the big high note at the end)

4. We Are Having a Hootenanny – Realism

5. Shipwrecked – Gothic Archies’ Lemony Snicket soundtrack

6. Walk a Lonely Road – Realism

7. When Will You Love Me Again? – Realism (iTunes bonus track) (also one of the night’s most heartbreaking songs)

8. All I Want to Know – Pieces of April soundtrack

9. Suddenly a Tidal Wave – The Wayward Bus

10. I Have the Moon – The Charm of the Highway Strip

11. Looking for Love (In the Hall of Mirrors) – The 6ths’ Wasps’ Nest

Second set

1. Xylophone – 69 Love Songs, vol. 3

2. Interlude – Realism

3. The Nun’s Litany – Distortion

4. I’m Sorry I Love You – 69 Love Songs, vol. 3

5. The Little Hebrew Girl – Stephin Merritt, Showtunes (Notable for sending me and the gentlemen next to me into fits of laughter for rhyming “Calvinists” with “Jesus exists!”)

6. The Flowers She Sent and the Flowers She Said She Sent – Holiday

7. You You You You You – The 6ths’ Hyacinths and Thistles

8. Always Already Gone – Realism

9. Fear of Trains – The Charm of the Highway Strip

10. The Dolls’ Tea Party – Realism

11. 100,000 Fireflies – The Wayward Bus (Merritt: “Some of you…weren’t even alive when this was written.” [1990])

Encores

1. I Die – i (I may be wrong, but I believe this is the world’s shortest hyperlink)

2. From a Sinking Boat – Realism