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“You can’t always convince,” young Israeli conductor Noam Zur said at his North American debut, “but every performance has to make a statement.”

Known as an important educational and recreational center for the performing arts, as well as a place of spirituality, Chautauqua originated as a Sunday school, and Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra (CSO) became a professional performance ensemble in 1929.  Chautauqua draws its mostly long-time members out for nine weeks, employing them for an intense schedule of 21 concerts.  Part of Chautauqua’s charm in music making is that these shows craft an intimate communal experience.

Chautauqua’s unique and exemplary educational role supports an endless variety of learning experiences in a congenial atmosphere.  At times, Chautauqua’s performances are also brought to a wider public through PBS and NPR broadcasts, bringing together the new, the noteworthy, and the extraordinary, and projecting it to all who care to listen.

Noam Zur’s effervescent demeanor and his ability to connect with both the orchestra and the audience made for a fantastic season-closing concert at Chautauqua last week. Zur opened his show with high-energy, uptempo repertoire that included a traditional rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Johann Strauss Jr.’s Fledermaus Overture. The show was the last in a lengthy series, so the technical execution was less than perfect at points, but nonetheless the orchestra achieved nuanced ‘picture-perfect’ moments during Ravel’s orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ managing to expertly convey the miniature scenes’ suggested sound-worlds. Zur’s demands of both the orchestra and the audience were persuasively articulated at all times; his undeviating directorial approach completely exemplified a conductor’s ability to form connections between the visual and audial occurrences that make up the energy of a live concert.

Performing Chopin’s 2^nd Piano Concerto under Zur’s baton for the second time, Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov had many towering expectations to fulfill as the anchor of this featured piece. Trifonov’s honors precede him, as he has recently won awards at three major international piano competitions, and his talents have been endorsed by superstar musicians, including Martha Argerich, who said she had “never heard a touch like his” (Financial Times 2011).

What brought both Zur and Trifonov together at Chautauqua speaks to the dynamics of international concert culture, and how friendships are born on the competition circuit.

Vice president and Director of programming Marty Merkley manages Chautauqua’s program office’s annual budget of $8 million.  This generous endowment allows the ensemble to invite reputable and up-and-coming guest artists, including many young First Prize winners on the international competition circuit.  Merkley, having been involved with several major projects in the music market like Michael Tilson Thomas’ New World Symphonyin Miami, is able to actively engage with competitions, and the artists that they endorse.

As the First Prize winner of the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in 2011, Daniil Trifonov was offered several performance opportunities by Uri Zur of ArtPro- Management (Noam Zur’s father), who has been handling Prize winners’ concert performances since 2003.  Former First Prize winner Alexander (Sasha) Gavryluk‘s 2005 performance at Chautauqua is still remembered by its music-loving audiences. It was a feature concert like this taking place in Tel Aviv which brought Trifonov to the Kulturwald Festival in Germany’s Bavarian Forest last September to perform with Noam Zur for the first time. Noam Zur had become Principal Conductor of the Frankfurt Chamber Philharmonic, and had been chosen to direct a production of Die Zauberflöte at Kulturwald. It did not take long for the festival’s director and Uri Zur to realize that this dynamic could easily translate into a performance with Trifonov, Zur, and orchestra.

Uri Zur, who has covered a lot of professional ground in the music industry including managing Naxos’ record distribution in Israel, and of course founding his artist management company ArtPro, is always in close contact with Marty Merkley at Chautauqua, but he had not intended to promote his own son for this concert season.  Nevertheless, when Trifonov expressed interest in performing at Chautauqua at a time when CSO was without a conductor, there was no reason not to look to Noam for the position, given his substantial merit as a director.

The festival’s extremely chaotic schedule only allowed Zur and Trifonov one rehearsal before their live performance, so the team decided to reprise Chopin’s 2^nd Piano Concerto, and attempt to recreate the captivating performance that Zur and Trifonov had presented in Germany.  Asked about rehearsals, Noam Zur commented that “conductors never feel they have the right amount.”  He says, “it’s either: ‘I don’t know what to do anymore, and we still have three days left,’ or ‘there is so much to do and we only have three days left!’ Especially in Opera, it happens a lot that you get no rehearsals.”  He says that sometimes, performers need to get by on very little rehearsal, or even just ‘wing it’: “I know the piece, you know the piece, let’s meet in the evening.”

Noam Zur assisted Pierre Boulez at the Lucerne Festival’s academy orchestra from 2006 to 2008. Inspired by the great Maestro’s style, he embraced an ambitious, yet relaxed attitude. He still recalls conducting for Boulez in an open master class at Lucerne.  As Zur shook in his shoes and dripped with sweat, Boulez stopped him saying: “this was very, very good…now do it again, and this time do it fantastic!”  Zur recalls that, “in all the animated music discussions we had, he never tried to impose his opinions. Yet I learned to be discerning and critical enough not to let people get away with everything.”

As a former trombonist, Zur says he looks at the score from the point of view of an orchestral musician. “It’s not choreography,” he says. “In this measure I stand still… it’s important how it looks, it should look beautiful still, but only because you want a certain sound. The movement is the impetus that gives the performing musicians the meaning and phrasing – the philosophyof what it should sound like.”

Even though Trifonov had concerts lined up after taking gold at the 2011 Rubinstein, which is a notable marathon of pianism, and an extremely draining experience, he decided to see if he could continue his winning streak at the Tchaikovsky competition, as he was already enrolled.  Uri Zur, noted that Trifonov “did not have the highest expectation, having just completed the Rubinstein, but he was going to give it a shot anyhow.”

Trifonov’s superior rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1, in the last round of the competition with the Mariinsky Orchestra under Russian conductor Valery Gergiev won him yet another gold. Gergiev did not hesitate to support his young compatriot, whom he had awarded the competition’s Grand Prix prize.  Gergiev brought Trifonov on board for several concert events, at times he even trafficked Trifonov across the hemisphere from       performance to performance in his own private jet. “Once he dropped me at a performance rehearsal, then went on to conduct his own concert and made it back to my performance. [They were] in different countries.” Trifonov smiles at this memory, thankful for the generous attention that the artist he calls “one of the most towering [and] busiest musicians worldwide” extended towards him. This past season alone, Trifonov performed with Maestro Gergiev in multiple concerts, tackling repertoire including Prokofiev’s 1^st Piano Concerto, Gusonow’s 2^nd and Liszt’s 1^st.

For the 2013 season, Trifonov is preparing a great deal of new repertoire for even more performances under Gergiev, including Rachmaninov’s 3^rd Piano Concerto, and Prokofiev’s 2^nd, which he will perform at the White Nights Festival in St.Petersburg. “I am also going to learn some Schedrin. It’s modern, for a change. I am very interested to explore more of the modern repertoire, which I did not have had much of a chance to do yet,” says the 21 year-old virtuoso pianist. “The Russian School of Piano concentrates on the Classical works, some Bach and the Romantics,” he says.

Two days prior to his own performance in Tel-Aviv, Trifonov had a chance to attend a performance of Chopin’s 1^stConcerto with the iconic Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin under the baton of Zubin Mehta, the Israeli Philharmonic’s Music Director for Life. Trifonov was always a big admirer of Kissin’s artistic individuality.  Both musicians attended Moscow’s famous Gnessin School for Gifted Children, which Trifonov describes as lacking the wonderfully equipped practice rooms he now uses at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he is about to enter his fourth year. “At Gnessin-School I played on an upright, old, banged up Bechstein,” Trifonov recalls.  Having access to modern, well-maintained Steinway Concert Grands makes a tangible difference in practice and performance according to Trifonov, especially when conquering ‘large’ repertoire like Rachmaninov, which he only started to explore this year. At the Cleveland Institute, Trifonov studies under Armenian pianist and conductor Sergei Babayan. Trifonov’s repertoire was always heavy with Chopin, but his recent studies with Babayan have opened him up to a whole new understanding of the idiosyncratic microcosm that constitutes Rachmaninov’s body of work. “He showed me a very different approach than the one I learned in Russia.  Even though ultimately everyone goes back to Neuhaus, there are very different approaches within. Babayan opened my mind without taking away what I had. With him it’s all about the touch! He added an enormous dimension to my playing,” Trifonov says. When asked about how he learned his otherworldly pianissimo touch, Trifonov describes how students hold their breath during Babayan’s studio performance classes in an effort to hear his impossibly quiet tones. It seems that it is a combination of the Russian School’s principles and Babayan’s ethereal, yet calibrating modes of touch that brings these pianists’ pianissimo to the next dimension. I personally have heard Babayan perform and it is true- one hears the echo of the master’s touch in a personally processed nature.

The young artist says that he aims to continue studying for an artist diploma with Babayan even though he only studies about 15 percent of the time, as he still feels like he has much to learn. Trifonov realizes that he must come to learn the music of each new composer in his own time. He sees himself tackling Beethoven at a later point in his career.  “Even Schubert was a challenge for me,” Trifonov admits modestly, playing Schubert’s last Sonata in B flat-minor, “though the Mozart concerti have always been a special experience for me.”

The collaboration between Noam Zur and Trifinov was a resounding success. “It ended up a spellbinding and hair-raising experience. The audience did not dare to move in order not to miss any sound in this fantastic ‘Chopin at the barn’- like atmosphere,” Zur recalls. “We really connected not only musically. We definitely became friends. I am so happy to be together again this year with Daniil, and I really have to thank him for this one here.” To no one’s surprise, Trifonov delivered pure lyrical lucidity in his piano playing, and Zur expertly supported even the most delicate pianissimo that Trifonov extricated from the piano with his delicate, almost magical caress.  Their synergy was never more evident than in the concerto’s strikingly poetic and extremely affecting Lhargettomovement. Zur and Trifonov indeed managed to yet again reconstruct some of the most magical moments of their first performance together.

Thanks to performance opportunities at festivals like Chautauqua, young talents like Trifonov and Noam Zur can begin to instill in audiences an ever-expanding sensibility for the beauty of music and life, and continue in a longstanding tradition of talent that permeates the international concert scene.  While this concert was Noam Zur’s North-American Debut, it was also a touching curtain call for the eminent CSO lead cellist Chaim Zemach, who exited the stage at Chautauqua in a revelatory state of mind after 45 concert seasons.  As Chautauqua moves forward, I am sure we can continue to expect excellence and innovation on its stage.

The 100th anniversary of the birth of John Cage was celebrated in Pasadena, California at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center with a concert by Gloria Cheng titled Two Sides of Cage’s Coin. The Boston Court venue is comfortably cozy and all but a few of the 100 seats were filled to hear Water Music and the entire sequence of Sonatas and Interludes. Despite the modern industrial construction of the hall – it has corrugated steel walls – and a play going on in the adjacent theater, the acoustics proved more than adequate for the intimate space.

John Cage was born in Los Angeles and has many connections here despite being known primarily as a New York composer. Cage studied with Schoenberg at UCLA – where Gloria Cheng is now a faculty member. He lived for a time in Pacific Palisades and later in Hollywood. Cage was also a colleague of Lou Harrison and taught at Mills College in the Bay area. To mark the centennial here in Los Angeles of the birth of John Cage – one of Americas most influential composers – is entirely fitting and appropriate.

The first piece on the program is known generically as Water Music but as Ms. Cheng explained the official title should be Boston Court, Pasadena August 24, 2012 because Cage had intended the title to be taken from wherever it was performed. This piece was first presented as 66 W. 12 at Woodstock, NY August 29, 1952 and so the title is updated on each playing. Water Music is partly music and partly performance – the score calls for a table radio, three kinds of whistles, cups and pitchers of water, a wooden stick and a deck of playing cards, all in addition to the piano. (A similar piece - Water Walk – was once performed by Cage himself on the old I’ve Got A Secret TV program and you can see this here on You Tube.)

Boston Court, Pasadena August 24, 2012 started with the rolling out of a small cart full of items to center stage – the radio plays – and Ms. Cheng began a series of activities such as pouring water from cup to pitcher, blowing various whistles, etc. This was all done by timing the sequence of actions with her iPhone (a nice 21st century touch) and following Cage’s score, which was projected overhead for all to see. No one brings as much dignity to the concert stage as Gloria Cheng, but she could have been a 1950s housewife scurrying about attending to various domestic chores. When the score called for a chord or two on the piano, however, everything changes: it is the virtuoso who – with just a few notes struck – suddenly and decisively shifts the focus to an artistic perspective. It is this overlap between the mundane and the suddenly artistic that makes this piece so intriguing – our ordinary lives are never quite removed from the arts – and art bleeds into our everyday experience.

Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano was written over two years,1946 to 1948, at a time when John Cage was working with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Ms. Cheng explained that because there was no room in the dance studio for drums, Cage hit upon the idea of adding various pieces of hardware to the piano strings to give it a more percussive sound. He eventually devised explicit instructions on how the piano was to be prepared and he specifies individual types of screws, bolts and plastic pieces for each of 45 different notes on the piano. A complete chart by Cage showing how the piano is to be prepared was included in the program.

To those who have never heard a prepared piano the resulting sound invariably exceeds prior expectations. The lower prepared notes have a wonderful gong-like quality while the middle register can produce beautiful bell tones. The higher notes tend most toward the percussive, at times resembling the notes from a music box. The added texture of the prepared piano is fully explored in Sonatas and Interludes which are, by turns playful, dramatic, solemn, agitated, languid, mysterious and tranquil. The ‘Sonatas’ are played in groups of four followed an ‘Interlude’ for a total of 20 pieces – all played sequentially. This work was written at a time when Cage was studying South Asian music and culture – the various pieces in Sonatas and Interludes evoke a definite exotic and mystical feeling and are intended to portray the eight permanent human emotions as defined by Indian philosophy.

As might be expected, Sonatas and Interludes is a very challenging work for the performer – from the 3 hours of piano preparation time to understanding just how each note will feel and react. And of course you can see that the piece is technically difficult just by looking at the notes on the score – rapid runs of complex arpeggios, soft quiet stretches and dramatically loud passages. Because the hardware tends to shorten the duration of the sound when a prepared note is struck, this music is typically a sequence of single notes and rapid runs with very few long chords – a good test of the performer’s dexterity. Ms. Cheng was up to all of this but what impresses most is her ability to find just the right dynamic and “touch” for each section – even with 45 of the keys prepared. I asked her afterwords if she had much chance to practice on a prepared piano and she responded that at one time she did so but now feels confident given her experience with Cage’s music. In any event the results were well-received by the audience who brought Ms. Cheng back for two curtain calls amid much cheering. Gloria then invited those interested to come on stage to look inside the piano – and help her “de-prepare” it – a gracious gesture from an accomplished performer.

This concert was sponsored by Piano Spheres and information on their upcoming concert season can be found here.

Maybe the BBC didn’t pull out all the stops to celebrate the John Cage centennial, but they did pull out quite a lot of them. August 17 was Cage day at the Proms. In addition to a mammoth-length concert mostly of his music in the evening presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (who only the night before was playing an all Vaughan Williams concert–more about that later) and the chorus Exaudi along with conductor Ilan Volkov and a cast of almost thousands, including such super-stars of the avant garde as Joan La Barbara, John Tillbury, Aki Takahashi, and Christian Wolff, they staged earlier in the afternoon a “Music Walk.” The Music Walk involved guided group walks around the area of South Kensington in the general vicinity of the Albert Hall, where along the way ten composers and sound artists, some in collaboration, including Alwynne Pritchard, Ian Dearen and David Sheppard, Dai Fujikura, John Woolrich, David Sawyer, Tansy Davies and Rolf Watlin, Claudia Molitor, Alvin Curran, Jose Cutler, and Judith Weir were present for playings over mp3 players of their music at specific sites.

Periodically one met groups of people carrying placards with pictures of Cage or of mushrooms. The composers were at their assigned sites holding placards which said “I am…(whoever they were);” in some cases — that of Dai Fujikura, for instance, who seemed to be having a picnic with his family — they were just present, in others there were other non musical elements which involved the composers: Alvin Curran sat on a platform in the loading dock of the Albert Hall seeming to be having a sort of television interview with somebody, which we didn’t hear because we were listening to his piece; David Sawyer had a skit in which he was dismembered and presented at the end in a bag; Joe Cutler swept the street in front of the Royal College of Music while somebody threw crumpled-up pages of his score down at him from one of the rooms in the College, and so on. There were several groups, none of which visited every site; the group I was in heard/saw Curran, Fujikura, Sawyer, Cutler, and Weir. All of the groups converged at the Serpentine Gallery for Weir’s music, which accompanied a model of the Albert Hall floating in the pond in front of the building. After that the composers led everybody in a march back to the Albert Hall and the main concert.

The concert itself was, as I said, a massive affair. Since it had not been clear to me that it was going to be about four hours long, I had made plans for later and as a result, wasn’t able to hear the second half of the concert, which included the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra, Branches, But what about the noise of crumpling paper..., and a quartet improvised by David Behrman, Takehisa Kosugi, Keith Rowe, and Christian Wolff. I was very sorry not to have heard the Concerto. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I talked to Brooklyn-based composer William Zuckerman about living in New York, his ensemble Symphony Z (featured left) and his new album Music In Pluralism. I featured Symphony Z on Sequenza21 back in April, ahead of their successful debut performance at the Tribeca New Music Festival.

This Sunday, Symphony Z takes the stage again at the Lower East Side Music Festival, on a bill that also features multi-genre composer/songwriter Danielle Eva Schwob and pianist Tania Stavreva. The concert is at Dixon Place, and doors open at 5 PM with the show starting at 7.

I’ve published my conversation with William as part of my show, We Are Not Beethoven, on Washington Public Radio. You can access the episode here.

If you’re free this Sunday, go see Symphony Z, Danielle Eva Schwob and Tania Stavreva at Dixon Place. Or, if you’re curious about the musical stylings of William Zuckerman, look for Music In Pluralism on Spotify, Amazon and CD Baby.

The Real Pianists of the Hamptons

Judging by the great number of reality TV shows observing real time happenings ranging from anxiety-inducing restaurant kitchens, to the glamorous on- and- off-the-dance floor drama in Dancing with the Stars, it was only a matter of time before someone would come up with the idea of televising a behind-the-scenes look into the real life of pianists.

Sharing the daily experiences of the young pianists attending East Hampton’s Pianofest, Konstantin Soukhovetski, pianist/actor and host of the new reality web series The Real Pianists of the Hamptons, conveys his deep sentiment for the genre of classical music, and the emotions and events experienced within this particular institution with panache.

The show’s trailer includes scenes from last year’s summer session, shot on location at Pianofest’s home in East Hampton, which houses eight pianos and all of the participating pianists. One gets a voyeuristic kick from peeking into the students’ intense practice for their weekly concert-performances, as well as the personal interactions between the young musicians as they work and play.

The viewer is invited to observe the emotional states of these kids as they pursue and discuss their daily practice routines, which include focusing on the challenges of their repertoire, instruments, and expressiveness in their music.  Yet the key element of the show lies in the coverage of the students’ social interactions, giving us an intimate view of the performers as peers who eat, drink, love, and party.

By revealing the musicians outside of their usual concert hall setting, the show’s intimate perspective bridges the distance between the private personalities of these artists, and their polished on-stage personas. This revelation is perhaps a natural outgrowth of the featured generation’s exposure and involvement through social media networking.  Young performers now feel the need to share their passions, hopes, and fears with their audiences, most of all with their peers. These talented musicians, whose careers have already introduced some of them to illustrious, international concert stages, have often had to put their studies ahead of their social lives at a very young age. This web series provides them with a chance to reconnect with others their age, and share both their art and personal experiences with the world. This reality show offers an opportunity for a global audience to get a glimpse into the current state of classical music, and provides insight into the motivations of young and often entrepreneurial musicians, like Soukhovetski himself. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 13 the violist Lawrence Power and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Susanna Mälkki, presented the first UK performance of Olga Neuwirth’s Remnants of Songs… an Amphigory. The title of the work is a reference to the book of the same title by Ulrich Baer, which is a discussion of the varying responses of artists, as exemplified by the poets Baudelaire and Celan, both to the shocks of everyday modern life and to catastrophic historical events: works reflecting desperate seriousness or antic playfulness, but also sometimes combining the two, producing works which are amphigories (defined by the OED as “a nonsensical burlesque composition”).

Neuwirth’s work combines a serious, if not tragic, expressive quality, with a great stylistic variety, ranging from severe, albeit serene, modernity to a what Paul Griffiths in his program note described as “a landscape of brightly colored tonal debris,” somewhat in the manner of the third movement of the Berio Sinfonia, but consisting of generalized material rather than quotations of specific works. The title of the second movement refers to Sadko, the hero of the Russian epic, but the other movement titles, the first “Wanderer,” and the third “..sank to the bottom of the sea…)–“ (the fourth and fifth movements don’t have titles) may imply that the whole work has something to do with that legend. The writing for the instruments, both the soloist and the orchestra, is imaginative and effective, and the balancing of the soloist with the orchestra is controlled in a masterful fashion (including the moments where the orchestra overwhelming the viola seems to be the point).

The whole work is always engaging and powerfully compelling. Neuwirth is yet another composer whose music I have encountered for the first time; this piece makes me want to seek out more of it. The performance of the Neuwirth by Powers and the orchestra was magisterial. The concert also included a performance of the first suite from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, and a magnificent and moving performance of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most appealing and satisfying things about the Proms is the way that they support and showcase British composers. There are a number of commissions each year (a Proms commission is a sort of right of passage moment for up and coming composers), and not first performances of recent works as well. It is very surprising, and a just cause for sorrow and consternation, then, that the Proms Matinee on August 11 at Cadogan Hall, given by Britten Sinfonia, with soloists Nicolas Hodges, Susan Bickley, and Nicholas Daniel, conducted by Clark Rundell, was the occasion of the first Proms performance in twenty-four years of any music of Michael Finnissy. Finnissy, as well as being one of the most vital and interesting composers alive, is undoubtedly one of the major figures of British music, as a teacher as well as a composer, and the absence of his music from the Proms for so long, let alone his not having received a Proms commission, over all that time is simple inexplicable, as well as being sad for all of us who have lost by such an omission.

The Finnissy work included on this particular concert was the 36-year-old Second Piano Concerto, with Nicolas Hodges as soloist. One of the usual memes having to do with the concerto, that it is a piece opposing the soloist as the one against the many in the orchestra is not exactly operative in this case. First of all the band is a small one, strings and two flutes, and rather than opposing the solo part, they pick out and highlight details in the stream of the work’s continuity which is entirely in the almost ceaseless piano part. Finnissy’s music is often thought of as fearsome, and it can be extremely difficult to play (not that you could tell that from Hodges’s beautiful and lucid performance), but the sound of it, when it’s done well, as it was here, is downright beguiling–gossamer and shimmering, and its continuity, a sort of stream of consciousness, clear and convincing, and easy to follow. It is to be hoped that it won’t be another 24 years before there’s more Finnissy on the Proms.

Hodges also presented the UK Premier of Harrision Birtwistle’s Gigue Machine for solo piano. Making the difficulties and complications (and they are considerable) obvious is one of the points of this piece, which is an exploration and deconstruction of the rhythms and phrasings of the old dance form, and they were presented and dispatched both compositionally by Birtwistle and pianistically by Hodges, with flair and aplomb, and obvious relish. Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC Proms is massive and rich festival with lots of moving parts. What one makes of any one season largely depends on which slice of it one happens to experience. My slice this year, of which this is the first installment, is pretty rich with recent music.

I haven’t heard much of James MacMillan’s music before now, and what I have heard I haven’t cared much for, so I was curious about his Credo, which was on the August 7 Prom presented by the BBC Philharmonic, along with the Manchester Chamber Choir, the Northern Sinfonia Chorus, and the Rashly Singers, conducted by Gang Men. Credo turns out to be a specific rather than a general title, since the piece is a setting of the creed oUf the mass, for chorus with a large orchestra. Nowadays, since the liturgical practice is for the congregation to sing (or say) the creed, a composer writing mass settings for liturgical use, as MacMillan has done several times, would not have dealt with setting the creed, as MacMillan hasn’t, until with this piece, whose length and scope, as well as its forces, by intention, make it unsuitable for liturgical use.

Virgil Thomson used to say that unlike the other parts of the mass, which are all hymns of one kind or another, the creed is a contract, with lots of fine print; that quality of the text, along with its length, often set it apart from the other parts in most mass settings both in terms of its character and of the style of text setting . MacMillan’s division of the text into three sections highlighting the way that the Trinitarian aspect of Christian belief are reflected in the structure of the text of the creed is unusual and insightful.

Credo itself is somewhat frustrating and disappointing. In many ways it reflects MacMillan’s impressive compositional mastery: its writing for the chorus is idiomatic and effective, and it’s orchestration is brilliant. On the other hand it doesn’t go beyond the initial insight into the text to get, as Thomson would say, right into it, to make the structure and movement of the music on either the local of global level, reflect the movement and meaning of the words and meld them into an indivisible whole. The individual moments, all of which are skillfully wrought, somehow, at least for me, remain a series of disconnected events, rather than related parts of a organic argument. Although MacMillan’s notes describe the piece as being festive, it all seemed a little grim and uncelebratory. I should add that, given that the concert started with the most curiously static, however beautifully played, performance of the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde I’d ever experienced, it is certainly possible that another conductor might have given Credo a greater sense of motion and connection. Read the rest of this entry »

Today would have been Lukas Foss’s ninetieth birthday, and I’m remembering him fondly. Linked here is a piece I wrote for NewMusicBox, commemorating him after his passing in 2009.
Thanks to Frank J. Oteri for digging it out of their online archives.

Research has indicated a genetic link between autism and the prodigiously gifted.

Professor of Psychology at Ohio State University, Joanne Ruthsatz, is currently heading a comprehensive study that is investigating the fascinating aspects of such an autism-prodigy connection. Enthralled with its implications, the Southampton Arts Festival, brainchild of pianist Elena Baksht and violinist Dmitri Berlinsky, integrated this aspect of musical heritage to this summer’s Southampton Arts Festival, now in its third year.

“I knew that so many musicians, who had made it to an elaborate level within their music careers, started out as child prodigies. When I heard that 70 percent of the current study cases are music prodigies, it made perfect sense to lend our full support to the cause and at the same time offer performance possibilities for these gifted musicians,” says Baksht.  “In addition, our support also ends up helping the less fortunate side of the prodigy/autism equation.”

The festival offers concerts, performed by acclaimed and award-winning musicians at a variety of locations, including the Southampton Cultural Center and some unique private estates. This year, the festival’s musicians play in cooperation with some of the prodigies, brought to the festival by Ruthsatz.

Their fruitful collaboration has already brought on board Nobel Prize Laureate Jim Watson of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, who now supports Ruthsatz’s research efforts. In addition, the festival will donate a portion of its August concerts’ proceeds to the research.

Read the rest of this entry »