Ballplayers in Prospect Park

At least, that was my drift of my thoughts for several days last week as I ambled across Central Park, and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on one day that proved to be all too short. Following two weeks of brain-flaying financial analysis and enough time spent on enough spreadsheets to gain entrance to, I would hope, any degree-granting finance program in the country, a vacation was desperately needed, and since far too much time had passed since I had last been in New York, it was to New York that I went.

Baseball field in Central Park

And even by New York standards, I think the week beginning May 16 must have been a good one for live music. The Berlin Staatskapelle was finishing its cycle of the Mahler symphonies at Carnegie Hall with Daniel Barenboim (Pierre Boulez having conducted the Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth), the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra was booked for two programs at Avery Fisher Hall, indie-pop darling St. Vincent was down to play Webster Hall downtown, and the International Contemporary Ensemble and Corey Dargel were finally collaborating, a union that took these Oberlin grads far longer to bring about than one would have expected. This was just the stuff I thought I could get to, leaving out entirely all the other calendar items that either A) unaffordable or B) impossible to attend since you can’t be two places at once. [Full disclosure: These concerts feature musicians I already admire, so I'll let you factor in bias however you wish. These aren't formal reviews, more like "I noticed this..." for what it's worth.]

Having been Barenboim-less for some time now, this Chicagoan was looking forward to seeing him back on the podium for Das Lied von der Erde, the Adagio of the Tenth Symphony, and, on Sunday, the Ninth Symphony. The Ninth was quick, pushing along in the middle two movements without pausing for breath, and the final closing movement was one of those slices of audible heaven you get every so often.

Before that movement, though, and in what I think has gone completely unremarked in every review so far, was COMPLETELY WAKKO BIZARRE.  A side door near the stage opened, and an elderly couple walked in. Barenboim and orchestra watched them. The man was in a walker and took a seat, but the woman (his wife? his caretaker? We didn’t know) stared straight at Barenboim and, in a voice loud enough for the entire audience to hear, said,

“My name is Marilyn Mahler.”

Well, ok, then. Come on in to the final symphony whenever you please. My best guess as to their identity is that the man she was with was Gottfried Mahler, the former Keeper of the Fire Island Lighthouse.

Aimard and the Bamberg Symphony also lit up their stage on Thursday night, May 22. The orchestra is under Jonathan Nott’s direction these days, and he brought a sort of “Icons of the 20th Century” theme to their concerts of Debussy, Bartok, and Stravinsky. Aimard was on hand to hold the programs together with all three of Bartok’s piano concertos, with Debussy and Stravinsky talking to each other across that divide.

Photo: Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, R. Naughton

The La Mer Nott led Thursday was of the “Just the notes, ma’am,” school, with both Nott and his flexible players skimming through it, taking time to view the aquatic scenery, but never slowing down to make the moment last longer. The Rite of Spring that followed intermission tore through the hall like the Russian Army, all percussive outbursts and screeching winds. My concert-going companion covered her ears to hide from the maelstrom at different points. It was a memorable Rite, explosive in all the right ways, and as ominous and unstoppable as could be desired.

And then there’s Aimard, who in all his Aimard-ness made Bartok’s Second Piano Concerto sound as if it’s phrases were as easily parsed as “Chopsticks.” The fearsome runs and massive chords make it one of those pieces that’s impossible to find a soloist for, but Aimard managed to put his own unique stamp on it.

Photo: Samantha West

I’ve been listening to Corey Dargel’s music for years now – five, at my best guess – and we’ve become friends in that time, so adjust for the following however you see fit. I’d never seen him perform live, only picking up CDs and mp3s on his website, finding packages of albums in the mail sent by him, so I was greatly anticipating the premiere of Thirteen Near Death Experiences with ICE at PS 122 on the Lower East Side.

The most immediately obvious part of his aesthetic is his amplified, regular-pop-singer voice, bearing no trace of classical training. (Makes sense, since there isn’t any.) He’s admitted a debt to Stephen Merritt, and the influence shows on the sound and the lyrics. For most of his songs, he’s used electronic backing tracks, so the ICE commission was a change of pace with acoustic instruments (though they’re amplified). So it’s to his credit that the Dargel sonic thumbprint is still audible in Thirteen, and that the music and lyrics sound fresh and original and are clearly his invention, and no one else’s.

The songs are all online now, I think, and you can listen for yourselves and see what you think. Should you be massivelypressedfortime, I’d check out “What Will It Be for Me?” and “Someone Will Take Care for Me.” More Dargelmusik is here. His take on a Christmas song is pretty much pitch-perfect.

St. Vincent‘s show will stick in the memory hole for being the night I stood outside a club for 1 1/2 hours waiting for my friend to show up, including a small break for pizza around the corner. Start time was supposed to be 8:00, and there was an opening act (the duo Pattern Is Movement), and we all know how these things go, so I got there around 8:30, figuring I’d hear part of the Pattern Is Movement set, friend would show up, St. Vincent and her four-musician band would start playing and everything would be groovy. In a word, no. Friend’s subway was stuck underground, and what should have been an 8:30 arrival turned into something closer to the 9:45 area of the clock. Which was entirely fine, because the Pattern Is Movement songs I did hear when I finally gave up an headed inside were unmemorable, and St. Vincent herself didn’t begin playing until 10:15. Brooklynvegan has the setlist and a massive cache of pictures from the show.

The advance word had been that unlike St. Vincent’s (or Annie Clark’s, depending on how wedded one is to using a musician’s given name) exquisitely wrought, Swiss-timepiece-engineered recordings, her live appearances tend to be looser affairs. Yea, verily, I say unto you, that is true.

The biggest difference is her devil-may-care guitar-playing, which is about a million times flashier than you’d expect from the recordings. Intricate breaks, full-on whammy-bar whamminess…something unwholesome was taking hold of this girl. And the band she’d assembled was seriously tight. The unison instrumental fills on “Actor out of Work” hung together more fiercely than a lot of music I’ve heard where the musicians didn’t have to contend with power cables, screaming fans, stage lighting. Guitar, saxophone, violin and keyboards, all together…nice. Not content to rest with that, they can also sing a four-voice a cappella chorale when the need arises.

So that was the music. I also ran something like 30 miles in Central Park that week, probably walked another 30 going from museum to museum to lunch place to subway stop, etc., from uptown to downtown to Brooklyn, and caught up with enough friends such that two hands are needed to count them all. And I managed to forget all about those diabolical Excel documents and work email. Praise be.

Continuing the U. of C. theme, composer and critic Kyle Gann returns to Chicago on May 31 to give a lecture on John Cage’s 4’33″ at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society. (FREE) Returns? Yes, returns: He was a stringer for the Chicago Tribune and at the Chicago Reader (archive) in the 1980s and early 1990s before heading to New York for laudations. His commitment to American music was already apparent at that time, as you can see in this Trib review of a concert of John Philip Sousa’s music ($$). I think we can all agree that the music was a better place when a music critic could live in Chicago and write, say, 1100 words on toy-piano player Margaret Leng Tan and nobody batted an eye.

And if eighth blackbird is playing, that must mean that ICE is here, as well. They bring four programs of varying instrumentation, culminating with their Xenakis Portrait show at the Museum of Contemporary Art on June 4. Leading up to it is a duo-piano concert featuring Cory Smythe and Jacob Greenberg on May 29, harpist Bridget Kibbey on May 30, and the entire ensemble playing Crumb on the radio (WFMT) on June 1.

Smythe will always be remembered (by me, at least) for getting Messiaen on a beat-up bar piano to sound like Messiaen on the world’s greatest Steinway. He and Greenberg play the Gyorgys (Kurtag and Ligeti) and Stravinsky at the Sherwood Conservatory, Kibbey plays at the Museum of Contemporary…Photography.

Aaaaaaaaaand, last but not least, the season of the CSO’s MusicNOW series ends on June 8 at the Harris Theater, with music by Osvaldo Golijov (Mariel, featuring cellist Brant Taylor and percussionist Cynthia Yeh), premieres by Mark-Anthony Turnage (Out of Black Dust) and laptoppist (laptopper?) Jeremy Flower, and hyper-accordionist Michael Ward-Bergman. Pizza and beer to follow because after all that music, you’ll be wanting a drink.