Category Archives: Live

A Dance of Strings: Sweden’s Premier Chamber Orchestra Takes on Beethoven and Mozart

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Swedish Chamber Orchestra
Garrick Ohlsson piano
Thomas Dausgaard conductor
Bailey Hall, Cornell University
April 26, 2013
8:00 pm

SCO

There is nothing like a heaping helping of Beethoven to cap off a prodigious concert season. That was just what we got on Friday night when the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, under the baton of Thomas Dausgaard, took to the Bailey Hall stage. Between the sweet concentrate of the Coriolan Overture and the unprecedented volume of the Third Symphony, there was much to savor. Like the spring weather that has finally waved its magic wand over the fertile Ithacan landscape, it was a veritable flowering of activity.

The overture revealed an orchestra blessed with just the panache and dynamic control required of any Beethoven interpreter. The piece contains two themes, one in C minor (representing the tenacity of its eponymous protagonist, an ancient Roman leader) and the other in E-flat major (representing the forlorn mother who shuns his bloodlust). The latter theme set the tone for the night, not only in spirit but also because the remaining works on the program followed the same key. The smoothness of execution was top-flight, achieving heartrending contrast between tense string arpeggios and recurring cinematic sweeps of battle.

In addition to superb control of dynamics and tempi, the players of the SCO found delightful traction in Dausgaard’s programming. In this regard, closing with the unwieldy “Eroica” symphony was a reflective choice. Not only did it embolden the exploits of Coriolanus with its martial overtones (the piece originally bore dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte), but it also transcended its political wrapping into the variegated gifts within. Long even for its time, Eroica feels even heftier in this age of quick sound bytes.

Notable are the three French horns, whose golden blasts resolve a brooding funeral march in the second movement and whose hunting calls add punch to an already agile scherzo in the third. Yet it was the first and closing movements that honed the orchestra’s deeper talents. Following intermission, Dausgaard (who conducted the symphony without a score) was barely on the podium before a swing of his arms threw us headlong into a storm of intense, restrained energy. Moving between the ethereal and the worldly at the flick of a bow, the strings never strayed into melodrama, and the wind section maintained admirable footing throughout.

Ohlsson

Yet the concert found its brightest star in Garrick Ohlsson, whose appearance spiced the meat of this classical sandwich at program center. A student of the late Claudio Arrau, the White Plains, New York native has since grown into one of our generation’s most elegant pianists. His poise and range at the keyboard were immediately apparent as he engaged the SCO in the exchange that opens Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9. Written when the composer was just 21 years old, it bears the subtitle “Jenamy,” so named for the daughter of a dancer whom Mozart befriended in 1773. Sure enough, dance was just what Ohlsson’s did as they navigated the tireless runs and trills (a highlight of his playing) so profuse throughout the opening Allegro. The contrast between his gritty left hand and airy right in the cadenzas was nothing short of remarkable. After the almost funereal sublimations of the Andantino, the concluding Rondo made for a flourish to remember. That Albert Einstein once referred to this piece as “Mozart’s Eroica” was no coincidence. Its scope and focus were comparably arranged. Both made for exciting performances.

“These days we like everything to be local,” said Ohlsson, who addressed the audience by way of pouring a sonic aperitif to the hefty concerto. He lamented not knowing anything by an Ithacan composer, but settled on The White Peacock by Charles Griffes (1884-1920) from nearby Elmira. Perhaps his most well known piece, its Gershwin-like swirls and touches of French impressionism made for a competent and programmatic detour. As if to carry over the feeling of dancing, the SCO closed the concert properly with “Wenn so lind dein Auge mir” from Brahms’s beloved Liebeslieder Waltzes. And with that, we were taken.

(See this article as it originally appeared in the Cornell Daily Sun.)

A Little Bit Wiser: Jason and Alicia Hall Moran

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Jason Moran piano
Alicia Hall Moran voice
Barnes Hall, Cornell University
April 11, 2013
8:00 pm

JAHM

In January of 2012, pianist Jason Moran and his wife, mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran, were slated to perform on Cornell University’s intimate Barnes Hall stage. A Broadway gig prevented Alicia from being able to appear and bassist Dave Holland was kind enough to substitute. The result was an unforgettable evening [link] of music. Yet I always wondered what spells the original billing might have spun. At last, some 15 months later, that magic was realized.

There was something about the way that Jason opened with his solo rendition of Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose” that assured us we were in for something special. His flourishes were straight from the heart, not in the least bit rhetorical. He took those classic threads and re-spun them: same colors, different weave. This was the first of a handful of solo pieces, which also included John Scofield’s “Fat Lip” (a jauntier affair, coated in silver and wine) and some original music written for Alonzo King. The latter revealed the gentler side of an artist whose panache lays it all on the table: diamonds, clubs, hearts, and spades.

Or maybe it was the way in which Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats” tumbled from Alicia’s lips. A poetess in her own right, she took to the platform fully prepared for the power of love in a world riddled with hindrances. Her natural resonance filled the room, sharing the rafters with spiders’ webs and history. Like Clifton’s timeless words, she manifested a fully embodied style (her pulse was audible during sustained notes).

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear

Alicia used these interludes as doorways to personal reflection. Not only because she wrote the melodies, but also because in her was a storyteller whose loom was strung with moonbeams. By the end of the night we knew how she and Jason had met and fallen into oneness, how music had called to them as equals and set their phasers to shine. Their autobiographical transparency cut the fourth wall like butter.

may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back

A soulful rendition of a Stevie Wonder classic, endearingly altered as “I Was Made to Love Him,” set off a string of standards. Of these, “My Funny Valentine” stood out for its rasp, traversing a bridge of good fortune into a swinging “Summertime.” Leonard Bernstein’s “Big Stuff” was the icing on an already optimistic cake, boxed and tied with a bow.

may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever

Two pieces by Jason from a commissioned suite based on hymns of the quilters at Gee’s Bend, Alabama were the reigning portion of the set. “Here Am I” was downright transcendent, melding supplications into sustained, train-like chords from the keys. “People are more important than things,” Alicia sang, and we could feel that theory made real in practice. This was followed by “You Ain’t Got but One Life to Live, You Better take Your Time,” the notes of which rubbed up against one another as Alicia looked us all in the eye and straight into our hearts. She walked offstage, her voice still carrying before boomeranging back to encore with Duke Ellington’s “I Like the Sunrise.” A glint of light at the end of this long winter, it glowed until we were warmed.

and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

By this point, we had experienced something more than a show. It was a life lesson. Thus spoken and sung for, we carried snatches of post-concert conversation in our pockets out into a maze of streetlights, strung to the gills with joy.

Carry on, butterflies, carry on.

All 4 One: The Anonymous 4 Sparkle at Sage Chapel

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Anonymous 4
Sage Chapel, Cornell University
April 5, 2013
8:00 pm

Anonymous 4

Although the Anonymous 4 have been singing for over 25 years, to hear them is to experience what feels like centuries more. The current lineup of this all-female vocal quartet (two of its original members have moved on to other projects) consists of Ruth Cunningham, Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, who together presented “Marie-Marion: Motets & Songs from 13th-century France” to a packed Sage Chapel audience last Friday night. Motets formed the bulk of the program, each built around Old French and occasionally Latin texts. The latter were mostly dedicated to Marie (the Virgin Mary), who along with an earthly counterpart, Marion, was the main protagonist of the evening’s dedications. The presence of both Marie and Marion made for a creative pastiche of the divine and amorous. The singers augmented this with a selection of plainchant standards and solo renditions of the trouvère (troubadour) love songs to which the grander settings often alluded.

Fans of the Anonymous 4 will be familiar with their classic Love’s Illusion. While in that program the focus was on courtly love, here a deft mash-up of sacred and secular themes formed the backbone of a dramatic and sometimes-prurient corpus. The motets were complex in their own right, with two or three voices singing from entirely separate texts over a wordless “tenor” line. The selections came from the Montpellier Codex, compiled in the south of France circa 1300. Paring its 315 motets down to an hour-long “best of” was certainly no easy task, but the end result was nonetheless intuitive and sure.

The flowing nature of the program was such that parsing of individual pieces seemed as unnecessary then as it does now. Moods ranged from forlorn to joyful, but were always flavorsome. If any distinction can be made, it is that the most secular passages were often also the most restless. Staggered rhythms and the occasional unexpected change in pitch attested to the singers’ sparkle of execution amid a landscape of maidens, shepherds, and holy visions.

The concert culminated in a final juxtaposition of the two “Marys,” who came to represent the fullness of consciousness, the depth and shallowness of human concern in the forest of life. For indeed, the Anonymous 4 achieved a verdant sound. Their blends, at moments uncanny, allowed single voices to rise and fall with the tide, such that the ringing qualities of each could shine through. Of those qualities we heard plenty in the solo chansons: Cunningham’s roundedness; Hellauer’s sweeter, raspier blush; Genensky’s sharper, earthy tone; and Horner-Kwiatek’s fair, supple lilt. In each was the flutter of a genuine medieval heart.

We might compare these ancient settings to contemporary popular songs, for in them were brief, simple introductions, engaging riffs and satisfying conclusions. That being said, we must remember that the motets especially were considered avant-garde for the time(s) in which they were composed. Either way, it is refreshing to know that one can still be privy to such splendor in concert, navigating its mazes as if they were our own, held only to the standard of our adoration, unadorned. Keeping true to their name, the talented songstresses of Anonymous 4 presented melodies without discernible authors, a dynamic that might seem as distant from us in this age of intellectual property as the Old French in which much of this music was sung. Whatever the language, we could not help but be fascinated.

(See this article as it originally appeared in The Cornell Daily Sun.)

Serving the Music: Going Astral with Charles Lloyd

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Charles Lloyd New Quartet and Friends
with Special Guest Maria Farantouri
March 15, 2013
7:00 pm
Met Museum, NYC

Charles Lloyd tenor saxophone, flute, tarogato
Maria Farantouri voice
Alicia Hall Moran voice
Jason Moran piano
Reuben Rogers bass
Eric Harland drums
Socratis Sinopoulos lyra

Temple of Dendur

Blessed. That was how Charles Lloyd expressed what it felt like to stand before the Temple of Dendur at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, nodding to the fortune of making a life in music, that torch of never-ending flame. The celebration was nominally in honor of Lloyd’s 75th birthday. Spiritually, however, it was in celebration of all creation, offering as it did the greatest gift of all: beauty. Like the Egyptian temple itself, each tune was transported and rebuilt, stone by stone, until its architecture stood by whim of its own gravity, channeling an energy that flows through rivers wide and narrow. Lloyd’s fingers thirsted for that water, gathering its holistic power in the vessel of his horn until the particles sang.

Strayhorn and Ellington loomed intimate in his opening gambit with Jason Moran at the keys. That unmistakable tenor filled a reverberant space with soul, soul, and more soul. Every run was a flutter of the heart, every split high note a distant supernova. Moran’s quiet flow brought the sound homeward, chiming the ashen bells of recollection until their surfaces glistened afresh. He brought with him a jagged array, sewing ragtime shadows to his Peter Pan feet and running through patchwork fields.

The duo’s brief exhale of “Abide With Me” welcomed the rhythm section to the stage. With a drum roll and a splash the band jumped into raging waters. So began the New Quartet portion of the evening, wherein fire and ice embraced their differences and found peace in aquatic compromise. A solo from bassist Reuben Rogers drew a sidewinder’s path in the dunes, turning heat into nourishment. Lloyd and his band not only rode the train, but also laid the tracks, stoked the fire, and wound through glowing thematic tunnels. Drummer Eric Harland left an ephemeral trail of steam, soloing with the strength of a thousand signal flares. Rogers further pinholed the darkness with constellations to the tune of Moran’s twenty-fingered chording.

From behind his sleek shades, Lloyd turned day into night with every lick, keeping the sandman at bay and digging low only occasionally for effect. It was in this context that his gentle dream-weaving over a Saharan beat provided as yielding a surface as was needed to welcome Alicia Hall Moran into the mix for a spirited “Go Down Moses.” With its serpentine refrain of “Let my people go,” her operatic contralto painted the sheltering sky with prophecy. A gentle cascade from Moran trickled into Lloyd’s “New Anthem,” moving through rhapsodic changes reminiscent of Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Fly, songbird, fly.

Yet it was Greek singer Maria Farantouri who spread the richest wings of the concert. Joined by lyra master Socratis Sinopoulos, she assumed a vast presence in her rendition of the Greek Suite from the Athens Concert album. A lone improvisation from Sinopoulos served to emphasize the holiness of the space. Farantouri was the twilight itself, an Adriatic dream realized before the ears. Lloyd and Farantouri always seem to bring out the best in each other, and on this stage the vibe was no different. Traveling down the River Styx and back again, Moran appending thoughtful diacritics along the way, the group inscribed its journey with nary a backward glance. Harland wound a fantastical roll to whisper strength, the lyra tracing a perfect horizon line.

After this two-hour tour de force, Farantouri lightened the mood by singing “Happy Birthday” to Lloyd before encoring with the joyous “Yanni Mou,” thus signing off on a living résumé of the saxophonist’s legacy and influence.

Lloyd live

The morning following the concert found me well rested and in Lloyd’s hotel room, where the star of the hour was anything but. “After I play,” he explained, “I’m exhausted but exhilarated, so I can’t go to sleep. Two, three, four, five in the morning I go to sleep, and now I’ve got to recuperate.” Being the inquisitive soul that he is, he first took more interest in me, my wife, and our new son, asking about our family histories, how we met, the values that drew us together. By the time I got around to my brief questions, I forewent those I’d written down and went with the flow. I asked first about Hagar’s Song, for I’d noticed after listening to the album a few times, and having just heard him and Jason start the concert with some of its material, that a feeling of history far beyond music was coming through. “I can’t get over someone taking this 10-year-old child and wrenching her from her parents and then impregnating the daughter at 14,” Lloyd responded, referring to the great-great-grandmother to whom the album is dedicated, and whose history of enslavement only recently became clear to him. “It’s sick. But here’s the thing about that recording. It’s all part of that fabric. I don’t know why people are trying to separate them. ‘Why did you insert this into these beautiful ballads?’ Some people have asked me that.”

Well, the real question is: How do you take it out?

Right. That came to me, that information, and it was like a wall for me.

What impressed me—and I think this bears testament to the power of music, and the human spirit more broadly—is that an undeniable core of joy comes out in the music. And I’m wondering if that’s something you saw in her spirit as having been passed down through the story. She survived, she gave that feeling…

She’s obviously a beautiful soul. All I can do is reinvent the world. My thing is about beauty. There’s all that ugliness out there. I’m trying to wipe it out with beauty. I’ve always been trying to do that. I can’t change my stripes now. I’m an idealist and dreamer. My dreams are still bigger than my memories. Maybe that’s why I don’t succumb to age or polarities, lines of demarcation…. I’m not the one for that stuff. Obviously, to me she’s very beautiful and I wanted to enfold that. I started out with Strayhorn’s “Pretty Girl” because there was this flower and I don’t know how to not do what I do. Things just happen along the way. These things, they’re all my world.

Did you feel anything different this time around recording a duo album with Jason as opposed to the quartet, or is it all part of the same fabric?

Yeah, you’re naked. We made that sound. It’s a homemade pancake.

Can you talk more about that sound and how your relationship with ECM has built it?

I like the idea of being in one place for a long time and developing something. When I recorded Fish Out Of Water, I just went in and played. Some of the big companies have come to me, but I have a home here. I always knew that ECM made great sound, hermetically sealed, but I need what I need, because I’m a sound seeker.

Maybe sound seeks you as well.

What you’re looking for is looking for you.

On that premature note, it was time for us to go. Before leaving the hotel room, subject to whatever might be looking for us, my wife and I said our goodbyes, but not before Lloyd laid a hand on my son and said a prayer for him in Sanskrit. The silent wonder in the boy’s eyes as life began to take shape in them was as inspirational as anything we’d heard the night before. Blessed indeed.

(To watch the concert in full, click here.)

Breaking down the set

Of Tears, Of Privilege: Adam’s Lament at Lincoln Center

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Adam’s Lament
Latvian Radio Choir
Sinfonietta Rīga
Tõnu Kaljuste conductor
Alice Tully Hall, Starr Theater
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
November 17, 2012
7:30pm

Of Tears…
It would be easy to paint the maturation of Arvo Pärt in the shape of a funnel. The Estonian composer was trained in the language of modernism but came to consolidate his musical foci into so-called “holy minimalism”—a catchall term that, while descriptive enough, ultimately defeats itself. In Pärt’s vision, minimalism seems better represented as pinpoints of light, stars that would be nothing without their limpid sky. Such mutual dependency is what makes the music sacred. We do better, then, to twin the funnel into an hourglass, endlessly turned by the hands and mouths of whoever bestows its truths to those fortunate enough to hear them. So we are when the Latvian Radio Choir and Sinfonietta Rīga, under the masterful guidance of Tõnu Kaljuste, present an all-Pärt program as part of Lincoln Center’s annual White Light Festival. Anticipation is high and met when the first strains of the Berliner Messe (1990-91, rev. 2002) touch our cortices. Composed on commission after Pärt’s emigration to Berlin, this setting of the Ordinary possesses a remarkable permeability. Around the standard texts and interjected Allelujas, strings sketch the thunder of conversion. Their pulse is elemental, hidden. Suspension awaits in Pärt’s setting of the Te Deum (1984-85, rev. 1992), the work that introduced me to its composer and which has since lived inside me. It develops motives like a book: knowledge that came before feeds into that which follows. A digitally sampled wind harp unfurls a constant and godly breath, piano dipping into the font of reason and stirring double basses to higher registers. Every crescendo equals stillness. We feel it in the soles of our feet, in the palms of our hands, in the stigmata of our collective memory.

Intermission brings about the surreal din of interpretation, snatches of recreated melody and soloists praised for the sake of proving knowledge.

Trisagion (1992, rev. 1994) begins the second half. Written in celebration of the 500th anniversary of a small Finnish parish, its title comes from the Greek for “Thrice Holy” and makes reference to Orthodox prayer and to the piece’s three core pitches. It is an overturned cup, spilling unspoken words. It is the beat of mortality. It is crystal, tarnished and restored. Also restored are the writings of ascetic Silouan of Athos (1866-1938), something of a touchstone of Pärt’s work and the red thread of Adam’s Lament (2009), the landscape of which resonates with suffering. Tears feed its soil as sunlight feeds the flora that grow from it. The mountains shiver, fauna likewise in their dreamless slumber. All the more appropriate that the musicians encore with Estonian Lullaby (2002, rev. 2006), bringing with it needed repose in an age so restless that only a child’s mind can contain its temper.

Of Privilege…
Nestled in the orchestra section of Alice Tully Hall, and in the most prayerful music I have experienced firsthand in years, I become uncomfortably aware of the allowances that brought us together. In the suffering of Silouan’s Adam lies the root of strife. How can Pärt not have this in mind when he has suffused his reading with the pain of the mortal body, its skeleton at once fractured and bonded by immeasurable sorrow? On this note, I must respectfully disagree with Zachary Woolfe, who in his November 19 New York Times review characterizes Pärt as having “defined a seductive vision of modern spiritual music, one that seeks to escape our world…rather than to embrace it.” I wonder if we are listening to the same music, for it is anything but escapist. Rather, it reminds me that I am experiencing an $80-per-ticket luxury even as innocents continue to die for nothing at the hands of self-interested regimes. Its surplus of beauty only serves to emphasize the rarity thereof. In spite of venue and context, the intimacy of the musicianship heightens my awareness of these realities. That their charge transcends the commercial trappings of the festival speaks to precisely the love that went into its creation, even if it does nothing to obscure the tightrope I walk in balancing appreciation with the hypocrisy of my inaction. I feel this acutely as, in the wake of a standing ovation, concertgoers debate the technical ups and downs of what they have just heard. With such effect still whirring inside us, what difference do a few glitches in the first half make?

In the toy chest of temptation, there is a kaleidoscope of shadow. Through it, one sees that the world has become sick with perlocution. Turning it in the hands only darkens its glory. It blinds us to those in need. Awareness, this music tells us, is not enough. One must also know the vitality of experience. Grace is not something to be won back through good deeds or mere contemplation, but felt when one no longer seeks it. When I seek Mr. Kaljuste instead and inform him that I will be writing this review, he humbly wishes me good luck. Yet I read a deeper truth into the statement. Without luck, I would not have been here. May I never forget that.

Let me know Thy touch,
that I may know of life.
Let me know Thy touchlessness,
that I may know the path.

Brightly Does It: Serkin and Shanghai Dazzle

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The Shanghai Quartet
Weigang Li violin
Yi-Wen Jiang violin
Honggang Li viola
Nicholas Tzavaras cello
with
Peter Serkin piano
Bailey Hall, Cornell University
Friday, November 9, 2012
8:00 pm

Reputations of internationally renowned ensembles are bound to influence our expectations; the immediacy of a live performance allows us to put aside the accolades and bask in the music. Such was the dynamic at Bailey Hall last Friday, when pianist Peter Serkin joined the Shanghai Quartet for nearly two hours of enrichment. The centerpiece was Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng’s Dance Capriccio, making its New York state premier. Born in the quartet’s namesake, Sheng spent seven years studying folk culture of the Tibetan borderlands during the Cultural Revolution before entering the Shanghai Conservatory and uprooting to the US, where he now teaches composition at the University of Michigan. The spirit of that research continues to inform his work, and the Dance Capriccio’s deft shuttling of western Nepalese Sherpa idioms through a loom of classical counterparts is no exception. Yet rather than oversimplify his craft as a fusion of “East” and “West,” as much press on Sheng is wont to do, we did better to take this newly commissioned piece on its own terms, as dictated by the very ones for whom it was written. The spectral qualities of its awakening were clear from note one, its eddies of ink and time as brooding as they were animated. This brief glimpse into the lives of an ethnic group rarely known for anything beyond mountaineering was a treat for jaded ears. The layering of rhythmic signatures, combined with challenging octave splits from Serkin, made for rich tonal brocade and many translucent, if not also transcendent, passages. Like a stormy sky enjoying its thunder, memorable flashes of brilliance marked its canvas.

Making a sandwich of the evening were two no-less-colorful examples of standard repertoire. Of these, the A-Major Piano Quintet of Antonín Dvořák made the deepest impression and paired naturally with Sheng’s montage. At its heart is the Dumka, a Slavic form of which Dvořák was particularly fond. As the jewel of the performance, it showcased the musicians’ superb dynamic control—even the single pizzicato strokes from second violinist Yi-Wen Jiang rang true. The Dumka’s characteristic balance between sadness and gaiety was embodied to the gills by Serkin and cellist Nicholas Tzavaras. The composer’s affection for the cello, outside of his concerto for the same, is elsewhere hardly so apparent, and its mind-meld with the keys formed the golden thread that began the piece and flowed through a landscape, pastoral yet pensive, toward an effervescent Scherzo in the Bohemian style. All of this seemed mere preamble to the gnarled Finale, in which Dvořák’s cellular approach and astonishing instinct for forested textures was clear as day.

The concert opened with Mozart’s String Quartet No. 17 in B-flat Major. Nicknamed “The Hunt” and so called for the first movement’s triadic evocation of hunting horns, it offered a conservative start to a concert otherwise roiling with emotion. These delicate considerations drowned in the swoon of the second movement, with its beautiful gilding from first violinist Weigang Li and permeable support from violist Honggang Li. The Adagio was the night’s first highlight and proved that these four bows are at their virtuosic best when given time to ponder. With so much elasticity to savor, we were won over by the enchanting syncopations of the final movement. Its winding circles of light, full of intent yet never cajoling, played a game of chase in lieu of capture. The quartet rendered Mozart just right: evocatively without ever being too theatrical.

Serkin, a player I’ve long admired on disc (not least for his duo recording with András Schiff on ECM), was splendid on stage. He plays like a violinist, wiggling his fingers for a cerebral vibrato effect, sculpting notes in their post-attack resonance. He also possesses some of the most elegant legato phrasing in the business. In combination with this world-class act, the effect was dazzling.

(See this article in its original form at the Cornell Daily Sun.)

Tout Court: Les Violons du Roy Brings Late Baroque to Bailey

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Les Violons du Roy
Bernard Labadie music director
Emmanuel Pahud flute
Cornell University, Bailey Hall
October 19, 2012
8:00 pm

More than anyone, we have Frederick the Great (1712-1786) to thank for last Friday night’s program at Bailey Hall. Though progeny to the post-Enlightenment despotism of the times, the Prussian king was first and foremost a student of the arts. Enchanted as a lad of 16 by the virtuosity of Johann Joachim Quantz, he immediately began studying with the German flutist and, much to his warmongering father’s chagrin, added Czech violinist Franz Benda and Johann Sebastian Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel to his roster at court. In due time his sonic coterie would grow to 50, the burgeoning hub from which our artists for the evening, Les Violins du Roy, drew their effervescent bows. The chamber orchestra hails from Québec City, where musical director Bernard Labadie has since 1984 nurtured its reputation for scintillating musicianship and spirited playing of the 17th- and 18th-century material in which it excels. Flutist Emmanuel Pahud, fresh from his tenure at EMI Classics with harpsichordist/conductor Trevor Pinnock, brought his expertise to bear with memorable panache.

Like many creatively inclined patriarchs before him, Frederick fancied himself a composer and penned the Flute Concerto No. 3 in C Major that proved Pahud’s delicacy with his entrance. Its stately dance evoked vine-drenched courtyards and butterfly wings, each a memory passing slowly like the reflections of clouds across water. An intimate interlude cast the final movement like a ray of light: swift, sure, and heaven-sent. Before this was the concert’s opener by Benda. The lilting cadences of his Sinfonia No. 1 in C Major spawned buoyant and programmatic side paths. Particularly evocative were the cautious footsteps in the Andante, for all like a lover for whom the forest was both prison and escape. Every sweep of violins painted a branch heavy with the foliage of parting.

While competent enough, these two pieces were thin on the ground in light of Quantz’s masterful G-Major Flute Concerto. From the luscious open chords of the Allegro, one thing was clear: here was the living echo unheard in the preceding architecture. Bach and Vivaldi peeked through that distinct veneer like recessive genes in search of expression. A heart-tugging slow movement, brimming with imagery for the hungry ear, found its dearest traction in the intermittent pizzicato shared by double bass and cellos. Incidentally, my newborn son, for whom this was his first live concert, at last settled into sleep during this passage, and on through the blossom of the final Presto. Transcendent.

J.S. Bach made his requisite appearance through the Ricercare from his Musical Offering. This seminal six-voice fugue is an epic in and of itself, and made for grave and inescapable listening. Cinematic before there ever was such a concept, its genius was all the clearer for Les Violons du Roy’s weighted playing—impressive after the concert’s gallant first half. The music of C.P.E. then brought its expressive foil through two works. His Symphony in B Minor was a treat to hear in close quarters. With sparkling invention and drama, it showed us a unique voice indeed, managing to step away from his father’s legacy while trailing just enough of it like a Peter Pan shadow. So too with the Flute Concerto in A Major. Despite being a younger work, it harbors some of his most mature lyricism in the Largo. From its inward sigh and downright Beethovenian tension in the lower strings, we felt a heart broken and restored. This made the final Allegro all the more cathartic for its implosive double stops. Pahud excelled here most of all, navigating a geography that was jagged but never sharp. The latter was a guiding philosophy for an orchestra that knows how to spike its punch, for even at their most intense, under Labadie’s direction the strings were never grating. Likewise, Pahud’s tone struck rare balance between the shrill and rounded capabilities of his instrument.

It would have been a travesty to have had a world-renowned flutist and Baroque chamber orchestra and not be treated to Father Bach’s famous Badinerie from the B-minor Orchestral Suite No. 2. In this respect they delivered with embellishments galore that had us leaving in the same laughter and lightness of spirit that this delightful encore provided.

Maximum Impedance & Chris Corsano: Improvisations

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Maximum Impedance (Trevor Pinch and Annie Lewandowski, electronics)
Chris Corsano (percussion)
Barnes Hall, Cornell University
September 25, 2012
8:00 pm

I. Behind the test is a promise, a fissure to be licked clean by the stage. We are seated, chambered, only steps below yet an underworld apart. Tricks and trundling trees fall flat on their faces, hoping the alliterations might leave them be. But the winds are here, arms outspoken and trembling, and with them the interactive sun blazing in its faraway cage. For space there is only the milk of a lonesome thistle whose dreams have all but popped from every faltering intimacy. We do not hear the sounds of such demise, only see them floating above our heads, a rafter’s song turned idle by philosophies of the knob and dial. In this analog bath, we are the soap. The posture of a Zeitgeist: hunched over an internal soundboard, tangled in something like hair. If lava lamps have hearts, they may not sing, but at least in the photographic realities of this performance we know they can dream. The earthworm squirms—at once siren, telegram—and jacks its communications into a root’s live wire.

II. Scooped as if by Ursa Major’s saddle and poured into the mouth of a river is the moon, who shines like death watching its own reflection. The posture recedes, even as a cottage takes its place. Vine-gnarled and knowing, it spews fairytales from its open door, weeps costumes from its windows, excretes happy endings into the basement. Choirs melt behind a scrim of frosted glass, where only light can know the words beyond.

III. Craned necks and circumstance: double agents of the gamelan mind. A wing’s brea(d)th away from certainty, the mallets are antennae. The choice to brush or strike is one and the same, he seems to say, breathing into the snare’s foghorn blood-flow. Refrain of bees without honey. Clicking the triangle breeds flies instead, each the life of a talking head drowned many times over. The cymbal wears a hat. Its name is “eggshell.”

IV. A shake within a shimmy, a rock within a wince. Traffic moves at the rate of pedestrian thought, sliced and served on copper plates. Looking only where they are, his hands do the work of ten eyes. The mouth, an elephant’s trunk twinned, is alive with lyrical auroras. Preparation equals immediate action.

V. Four-dimensional train, arriving as it departs. Lines to feed the brain with stop-light red.

VI. The hit snaps veins like wings. The feet of resistance now fallen on their arches, keystones electrified beyond recognition (only Achilles can tell). A mammoth’s tusk hollowed and blown. A flick of the wrist, and the cricket sings.

The seizure is now.