Classical

Erkki-Sven Tüür: Strata (ECM New Series 2040)

| Tyran Grillo

Strata

Erkki-Sven Tüür
Strata

Jörg Widmann clarinet
Carolin Widmann violin
Nordic Symphony Orchestra
Anu Tali conductor
Recorded May 2007 and June 2009, Estonia Concert Hall
Engineer: Maido Maadik
Assistant engineer: Jaan Tsadurjan
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

The music of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür is much like his name. Its frame contains doubled elements, a cosmic chemical signature that embraces a hyphenated signifier in the middle, connection to some gravid space from which one can observe the unfolding of his distinctly personal character. Of that character we get plenty on this album, his fifth for the New Series, for which the usual roster of ECM performers is swapped for the phenomenally talented Nordic Symphony Orchestra and its principal founder and conductor, Anu Tali. Together they bring luminescence to two recent works with mellifluous authority.

The Symphony No. 6, the subtitle of which gives this album its name, is in fact dedicated to Tali and the NSO, who commissioned it. From the first bars, the reasons behind this inception become clear, for the musicians play this music as if they have known it all their lives. Composed in 2007, Tüür’s massive symphony is a master class in affect. It heralds a new direction for the maverick composer, who abandons his “architectonic” method (although echoes of Crystallisatio remain) in favor of self-styled “vectorial writing.” Where the former embodied an interlocking or amalgamation, the latter is more of an expansive or, in the composer’s terms, “genetic” development. One might say that architectonics constructed the body in which the cellular divisions of his vectorial composing could divide. Evolution over invention.

The nature of this newer method is obvious in the symphony’s opening and closing bars, stretching as it does a sudden awakening into a dream of perpetual motion that, like all such experiments, inevitably journeys toward stasis. The result of all this is an orchestra that moves amorphously but singly, even if particular instruments do leave trails in the water. In the latter vein, for instance, piano and harp share a brief yet memorable dialogue. On the whole, strings lurk in recession for some time before revealing their palette of light—all the more effective in music that seeks through a glass darkly.

What makes this feel like a symphony at all is perhaps its grandness of scope, which nevertheless retains an internal spirit, as indicated by the subtle (and not-so-subtle) percussive touches throughout. Tüür’s feel for color and space in this regard is so acute that it opens doors in the mind one never knew were closed. The smoothness of his transitions likewise enhances another symphonic staple: a feeling of luxuriance and orientation of detail that are remarkable for a 33-minute duration. Tüür’s narrative language is thus overlapping yet practical, a form of meta-speech that stretches a whisper to a sigh and allows the listener to draw any number of conclusions.

Noēsis, composed in 2005, grew out of a very different commission (by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra London, at the behest of Neeme Järvi). Although billed as a concerto for clarinet, violin and orchestra, the soloists are scurrying forces, less leading and more integrative. Each section of the orchestra becomes the panel of a fan, unfolding one rib at a time to reveal a connected focal point. Clarinetist Jörg Widmann joins his sister, violinist Carolin Widmann, in this wonderfully evocative piece, which is equally illustrative of Tüür’s new approach. Unlike the symphony, it begins in a hush of ambience that smoothes into the clarinet’s refracted introduction. The violin, on the other hand, is possessed of a free, if trembling, quality. The orchestra, meanwhile, pitches slowly, a boat on waves of molasses. The ending is one of Tüür’s finest, a braid of violin and clarinet carried into afterlife by a soft gong hit, resonant and touched by the sun.

Tüür’s craft has always been deeply physiological, but with Strata he shows it to be also physiologically deep. Whereas his previous work seemed forged from raw material (cf. Ardor), now it issues a line of spider’s thread, pulled by an unseen hand from galaxy to galaxy. It is an expansion rather than a compression of time, the audio equivalent of quantum physics, the equation of which again finds articulate form in the name.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Canto di speranza (ECM New Series 2074)

| Tyran Grillo

Canto di speranza

Bernd Alois Zimmermann
Canto di speranza

Thomas Zehetmair violin
Thomas Demenga cello
Gerd Böckmann voice
Robert Hunger-Bühler voice
Andreas Schmidt bass
WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln
Heinz Holliger conductor
Recorded May 2005, Kölner Philharmonie
Engineers: Brigitte Angerhausen and Günther Wollersheim
Edited and mastered by Renate Reuter
Produced by Harry Vogt

In his 2003 monograph, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music, musicologist David Metzer describes West German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970) as having “exposed the delusion behind the modernist renunciation of the past and offered a vision of time in which [past, present, and future] were interconnected.” Zimmermann, he goes on to say, “saw time as a broad sphere in which all periods were equally within reach.” Such philosophy was at the heart of a self-styled pluralistic approach to composition, taking comfort in a Joycean spirit of drift and adaptation.

One might say that ECM’s New Series imprint has followed suit, pulling lesser-heard composers like Zimmermann into an orbit equidistant from the massive planets he references. In line with this spirit, the label has brought together a meticulous team of interpreters—at the core of which Heinz Holliger conducts the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln—to paint the portrait of a composer whose personal demons eventually won out: the final piece of this disc was, in fact, completed just five days before his suicide. Such biographical details, however, render the Violin Concerto that opens this disc all the more effective for its unabashedly serial touches. Completed in 1950 and cited as a model for the postwar concerto, it spans three richly contrasting movements, opening in a cacophony of details at once whimsical and shadowy.

The soloist’s relationship to the orchestra is very much in the Romantic mode, as emphasized by violinist Thomas Zehetmair’s gorgeous traversal of the second movement. As in the work of Erkki-Sven Tüür, the piano figures mysteriously, a distant echo of the violin’s central presence, a simulacrum of the internal. It finds entry points in the periphery and parasitizes the orchestral body therein. Despite some beauteous, even transcendent moments, this portion of the concerto is no fantasy, but rather an intense reality of its own making that transitions into the final movement, which dances circles around a joyful center: a rite of spring, if you will. Some magnificent brass writing spurs a solo violin passage into explosive yet contained finale.

Zimmermann’s sound walks the line between capriciousness and foreboding. Despite the composer’s fatalist (?) trajectory, the concerto exudes panache, presenting the soloist with no small technical task. His neoclassicism suggests Stravinsky and Bartók, but influences from Bach to jazz are equally discernible. His plurivocity is clearest in the cadenzas. The almost bacchanal exuberance and rhythmic color of the concerto is every bit as intense as the program’s relatively brooding title composition, which at the fingertips of cellist Thomas Demenga delineates an even thinner line between nostalgia and forgetting. Originally composed in 1952 and revised in 1957, the title of this “cantata” for cello and small orchestra means “Song of Hope,” although its distinctly internal dialogue would seem to shelter very little at first glance.

The sparse instrumentation yields a world of ideas, which Demenga handles with remarkable sensitivity. Tension is so smooth that it no longer feels like tension, but rather like the metaphorical harmony of lock and key: the yin of security and the yang of trespass. The chamber aesthetic, especially in Zimmermann’s pointillist writing for percussion, is solemn and melds beautifully with the cello’s forthright porosity. Demenga brings to these energies a feeling of such effortlessness that the music seems to unfold of its own need to be heard.

Yet, no solemnity can match that of the final piece on the program: Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht, das geschah unter der Sonne (“And turning then, I saw there great injustice is done under the heavens”). Designated as “an ecclesiastical action for two speakers, bass soloist, and orchestra,” this 1970 oratorio sets biblical verse and Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” parable from The Brothers Karamazov. Andreas Schmidt is the singer, a pathos-ridden reflection of actors Gerd Böckmann and Robert Hunger-Bühler, who provide the spoken voices.

Despite the large instrumental forces at his command, Zimmermann makes spare use of textural overlap, with brass and percussion adding particular and occasional resonance to the immediate voices. One can almost hear the theatrical gestures built into the score, the very comportment of which forms a language unto itself that is subtext to the piece’s articulated surface. Even with knowledge of German or a translation of the texts in hand, this is morose going. Sitting with it is a nevertheless dark fascination. Some moments recall the drama of Shostakovich’s The Execution of Stepan Razin, while others are their own brand of interlocking parable. It ends with a brass iteration of the Bach chorale “Est is genug” and an orchestral afterthought thereof, the latter an indication of a mind at play to the very end.

Concerning the level of musicianship required bringing this music to life, it is only appropriate that Holliger should hold the baton. This is clearly music after his own heart. Even the most dedicated listeners aren’t likely to pop Ich wandte mich… into their car stereo, but its rewards come earlier in the program, felt only as a retroactive lean toward infinity. In accordance to Zimmermann’s “sphericality of time,” the aftereffects are just as musical as the performances they follow, and sow their traces into our mental fields until, some time later, they sprout anew.

Arvo Pärt: Lamentate (ECM New Series 1930)

| Tyran Grillo

Lamentate

Arvo Pärt
Lamentate

The Hilliard Ensemble
Sarah Leonard soprano
David James counter-tenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
Steven Harrold tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Alexei Lubimov piano
SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra
Andrey Boreyko conductor
Lamentate recorded June 2004 at Stadthalle Sindelfingen
Engineers: Dietmar Wolf and Jürgen Buss
Da Pacem Domine recorded April 2005 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Tempting as it may be, the typing of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt as a spiritual modernist hardly begins to assess the reach, import, and atmospheric integrity of his music. The more closely one listens to it, the more one hears between every heartbeat an alternating current, whereby shadows take solace in their own orientation of elements. Awareness of this dichotomy throws sanctity over the banal, and lends banality to the sacred, so that by the end of any Pärt listening experience one emerges changed yet profoundly the same—the self made clear under a magnifying glass polished by sound.

And so, while Lamentate may be said to represent a new direction for Pärt, whose music has hardly sounded this visceral since his formative dips into the avant-garde, it also feels like a reflection back to the womb, if only because the composer has so carefully woven into its basketry a conscious structural flaw. Said flaw is the essence of being human. It is what turns the visage of existence firmly away from the realm of fantasy toward the mirror of reality. This “lamento for the living” takes its inspiration from the enormous sculpture “Marsyas” by Anish Kapoor, at the time located in Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, and anchors a piano soloist (here it is Alexei Lubimov at the keyboard) in an orchestral ocean. In the album’s liner notes, Pärt describes his first encounter with the sculpture: “My first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead—as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present.” Lamentate thus concerns itself with time—or, more precisely, with those who deal with time. The work was premiered at the sculptural site in London on February 7 and 8, 2003, and was recorded for ECM in 2004 at Germany’s Stadthalle Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart.

Before throwing us into these prophetic waters, the disc opens with the prayer for peace that is Da pacem Domine. Composed in 2004 on the basis of a ninth-century Gregorian antiphon and recorded here a year later at St. Gerold monastery near the Austrian mountains, it features the Hilliard Ensemble with soprano Sarah Leonard in a moving, timeless performance (the work reappears in updated form on In Principio). Like much of Pärt’s choral writing, its simplicity is its strength, requiring discipline from interpreters to bring out inner complexities. The antiphon is stretched to reveal a stratum unto itself, a melody to be born into and from. Its lines mark the binding of a book of experiences, the pages of which fade in one direction and become crisper in the other. All, however, bear equal wisdom of the divine hand that inscribed them.

With such pulchritude still warming the chest, Lamentate (2002) comes like a hit in the gut. Each of its ten movements is a monument—now fragile, now menacing—to some emotional shell. These surfaces act as palimpsests for the cellular activities that unspool from a brass incantation. A bass drum rumbles as would the hand of a god trapped beneath the earth’s surface pound for escape. In that frustration are flashes of a life confounded by lifelessness, declarations of dependence wrought in beat and bow. Over the piece’s own lifespan, the recording takes on a wavelength that cracks open intersections of space and time and spins from their yolks an entirely new cosmos. In this parallel universe, the winds are seemingly still yet utterly dynamic like nebulae as fetal kicks javelin fresh thought through a needle of questioning. The piano’s solitude provides the only answer it ever needed to breathe, for in the crafting of flesh lurks a question far beyond our articulation, and to which music nevertheless brings us steps closer. As relays of brass, piano, and percussion give way to whispering tides, echoes of earlier compositions (such as Psalom) make themselves known as a lilting oboe swims against the current. And even the nominal resolution treats alignment like a fantasy, leaving us by the end looking above for any sign of what it means to be below.

Marsyas
(Photo credit: Empics)

John Holloway: Veracini Sonatas (ECM New Series 1889)

| Tyran Grillo

Veracini Sonatas

Veracini Sonatas

John Holloway violin
Jaap ter Linden cello
Lars Ulrik Mortensen cembalo
Recorded September 2003, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Executive Producer: Manfred Eicher

Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768) is the subject of John Holloway’s fourth ECM traversal of Baroque violin repertoire. Joined now by cellist Jaap ter Linden and harpsichordist Lars Ulrik Mortensen, who together comprise a formidable continuo, Holloway mines the ore of yet another underrepresented violinist-composer, this one an iconoclast to the last: showman, itinerant solo artist, and experimenter. The variety of his contributions to the sonata canon of the time—in both its four- and five-movement incarnations—is expertly represented on this disc. Through them all runs a deep mineral vein of melodic and atmospheric sensitivity.

The Sonata No. 1 in g minor, composed in 1721, comes from the composer’s Opus 1. Its pentagonal structure flies effortlessly from Holloway’s bow, by which he elicits a tone so organic that one hardly notices the trills and mordents of his interpretive genius—some of the most artful to be found in the world of Baroque violining. Whether by the leaping Allegros or the darker, quasi-operatic turns, Holloway and friends mark the passage of this music with instruments as cartographic as they are sonorous.

One quickly notices an airiness to this music that, while charming, is never paltry. This is due equally to the writing and to the playing, both of which work in lively, scintillating congruence. And even though Holloway occupies the spotlight, the interactions between cello and harpsichord are so integral—the former weaving comets through the latter’s pinpointed stars—that to imagine the music without them is to imagine a sky without clouds. The result is a sense of open space, whereby each sonata lends grandeur to even the airiest movements—to wit: the Largo that begins the Sonata No. 5 in C Major. Taken from the Sonate a violino, o flauto solo, e basso, a collection that predates the Opus 1 by five years yet which was published only posthumously, it sketches canvas with bolder ground lines. This renders the exuberant movements all the more emphatic, enacting balance between the violin’s flight paths and the bass lines entrenched below. The concluding Allegro emotes with bravado in a blush of call and response.

The date of composition of the Sonata No. 1 in D Major, from Veracini’s “dissertation” on Corelli’s Opus 5, is uncertain. Considering its programmatic brilliance, youth dominates the possibilities. The dual voicing in particular invokes the antennae of a butterfly fresh from the cocoon. The contrast of this sonata’s shadows and lights presage the maturity of narrative voice achieved in the Sonata No. 6 in A Major, from Veracini’s Opus 2, the Sonate accademiche. Written in 1744, its sweep and drama are on par with Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The brief Siciliana that opens betrays nothing of the variety about to ensue. This one has it all: tearful beauty and folk-like revelry in equal measure. At its center is a memorable Andante, in which we are treated to a lute-registered harpsichord, while pizzicato cello and muted strings from the violin touch hands in a most delicate choreography before funneling into a spirited Allegro assai to superb closure.

Where some composers have left only breadcrumbs for future listeners to follow in the wake of paltry imitations, this benchmark recording offers loaves of sonic goodness that are as warm and nourishing as the days they were first baked. The mastery of their realization is matched only by the engineering, which captures details from a respectable distance. Yet another essential document of 18th-century repertoire from those who know its secrets best.

Leonidas Kavakos/Péter Nagy: Stravinsky/Bach (ECM New Series 1855)

| Tyran Grillo

Stravinsky:Bach

Stravinsky/Bach

Leonidas Kavakos violin
Péter Nagy piano
Recorded October 2002, Radio Studio DRS, Zurich
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Mirrors or two sides of the same coin? This electrifying album by Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos and Hungarian pianist Péter Nagy answers the question: neither. Stravinsky was indebted to Bach, as so many who put pen to staves ever will be, and explored the Baroque master’s architectures to the very end—even working, the story goes, on Bach transcriptions on his death bed. Yet the Russian iconoclast accomplished a remarkable something that set him apart. Unlike so many before him, he did not shine his light through Bach’s prism but rather shined Bach’s through his own.

Stravinsky’s crucible in this regard was at its hottest in the Duo concertant (1931/32). One of two pieces written for violinist Samuel Dushkin (this for violin and piano, the other his 1931 Violin Concerto), it was not in a format the composer favored at the time but one he nonetheless reconciled through neoclassical rigor. Oscillating between the earthly and the mythological, the piece its composer called a “musical versification” finds unity in gradually joining the two. The first and last of its five movements—the Cantilène and the Dithyrambe—bear mysterious nomenclature. The one blossoms from a pianistic blush to an overpowering charge from the bow. The other drips with lachrymose quality, suspended high above Olympus casting threads to mortal hearts down below. Between them is another dyad, this of two “Epilogues” of friction and protraction in turn. And with them is the sprightly Gigue, one of Stravinsky’s finest moments, played here with integrity.

What sets Kavakos’s playing apart is his ability to be at once fluid and sharp, a quality that lends itself well to the above but also to the below, for in the Partita No. 1 in B minor that follows we hear exactly this contradiction at play. Although two centuries separate these works, Bach’s solo violin masterpiece feels remarkably present in this rendering. Kavakos gives the almighty Allemande a stately treatment, beginning with it a series of four movements and their faster “Doubles.” The first of the latter reveals barest tuning issues in Kavakos’s instrument, but these are quickly brushed away by the Corrente, which he plays with especial care, in the process exploiting the record’s engineering at full potential. The Sarabande likewise unfolds in its dance of blade and water toward the final Tempo di Borea and its Double, by which the music reaches a cavernous interior filled with stalagmites pontific.

The program returns to Stravinsky with the 1933 Suite Italienne for violin and piano. Based on his ballet Pulcinella, it proves the glistening counterpart to the Duo concertant, the spring to its thaw. The affirmation of its introductory motives barely hints at the fiery Tarantella which is the piece’s prime turn—a ball of yarn expertly unraveled. Kavakos’s hefty double stops nourish their flames on Nagy’s pointillist sparks. The folk-like Scherzino is another highlight and sets up the Minuet and Finale with authorial flourish.

From these concentrations we return once more to Bach, whose Sonata No. 1 in G minor reveals further affinity. From the cautious first half to the dawn-like awakening of the third movement and into the forward thinking of the final Presto, it develops itself like one long proclamation—slowed here and sped up there—until it glows.

Those thinking of buying this album for ECM’s treatment of the Bach will want to check out Holloway and Kremer’s versions first. In any event, the Sonatas and Partitas will always overshadow their interpreter. For the Stravinsky? Look no further.

Songs of Fire and Ice: OCO and Tetzlaff Dance with the Gypsies

| Tyran Grillo

OCO

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
with Christian Tetzlaff, violin
March 26, 2014
Bailey Hall, Cornell University
8:00pm

When the first stirrings of the Hungarian Rondo resounded from the bows of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, time and space collapsed. Zoltán Kodály’s transcription and embellishment of Magyar (old Hungarian) soldier’s songs began an intimate night of music making at Cornell University’s Bailey Hall, where light struck prism in a program of gypsy refractions. Impressive though this rarely heard music was, so too was the musicianship fronting it. The OCO worked by turns smoothly and jaggedly, bringing warmth and coolth where needed. Through it all, a pastoral clarinet crept in and out of frame, troubling the waters here and breaking surface there. However far the scales tipped, a central theme brought assurance with its periodic balance.

Such dynamic brazenness carried over into Béla Bartók’s 1939 Divertimento for string orchestra. Among the composer’s most beloved works, it was given a robust interpretation. Between the insistence of its underlying pulse and the violins spiraling above and beyond it, artful contrasts ensued. As throughout the Kodály, a core of soloists emerged and receded, morphing between concert hall elegance and fireside rusticity. Remarkable about the performance was its clarity of voices, each cutting a strong thematic figure. As the orchestra moved from pen & ink to the charcoal of the second movement, one could feel a cinematic charge arising from the dust, so that by the gilded final Allegro the light was that much clearer for having passed through darkness.

Christian Tetzlaff

Following intermission, violinist Christian Tetzlaff took to the stage to unravel the Violin Concerto No. 2 in D minor of Joseph Joachim. Composed between 1854 and 1860, it remains one of the most notorious pieces in the repertoire. Tetzlaff was more than prepared to overcome its maze of double stops and chromatic fingerwork, the latter of which enacted a dance in and of itself not unlike the folk tunes that had inspired it. Aside from being a technical tempest, the composing drew on a range of influences, from the Beethovenian drama of its introduction to the Paganini-like finish. Yet the closest analogue was undoubtedly Dvořák, whose own violin concerto was duly inspired by Joachim’s ways with bow and pen. The OCO accordingly showed a retroactive side, one more subdued, that it might allow Tetzlaff to express himself without obstruction. The violinist’s interpretive prowess soared, especially in a cadenza that was, as the kids say, off the chain. The bird-like slow movement at concerto center presaged more of Dvořák’s later work, although the spirit of the dance was never far away, as if we were catching snatches of some revelry just beyond the pastures. And revelry we got in the joyful finale, which put Tetzlaff in the unenviable position of tying a plethora of loose ends—a feat he accomplished with tact.

Following suit of the orchestra half-circled around him, Tetzlaff emoted effortlessly and with controlled passion, so that even the encore (Hungarian Dance No. 19 by Brahms) went down like a delicate confection at the end of a five-star meal.

Tempesta di Mare: A Live Review

| Tyran Grillo

Tempesta

Tempesta di Mare
Barnes Hall, Cornell University
March 6, 2014
8:00 pm

In the 1991 French film Tout les Matins du Monde, Gérard Depardieu plays an aged Marin Marais—in-house composer at the court of Versailles around the turn of the 18th century. Gussied up in all the accoutrements of his station, a corpulent Depardieu stares off camera, filled with envy at the ambitious young man he once was. The real Marais studied under Jean-Baptiste Lully, who by the patronage of King Louis XIV singlehandedly defined the French baroque style. Listeners at Barnes were treated to his “March of the Turks” Thursday as part of a lively program by Tempesta di Mare. Much in contrast to the self-scorn of Depardieu’s Marais, who indifferently conducts the same march early on in the film, Tempesta brought flair and steady passion to its evening performance. Under the title “Apollo at Play,” Philadelphia’s premier baroque chamber orchestra culled a thoughtful program of incidental music by Lully, British emulator Matthew Locke and 20th century iconoclast Igor Stravinsky before coming full circle to Lully protégé Johann Sigismund Kusser, whose Apollon Enjoüé, composed in 1700, ended the concert.

Because the entire program consisted of music written for the stage, individual movements were as rich as they were compact. With its stately undercurrents and detailed orchestration, Lully’s descriptively astute Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) set the bar high. Even without the titles provided for our edification, we could feel the sway of tailored cloth in the “Dance Teacher” scene and imagine the revelry of “The Uninvited Guests,” of which the Spaniards led the way with castanets and vihuelas blazing. On that note, Lully’s colorful palette represented a fascinating transition period in the evolution of Western European classical music, when the aristocratic impulses of court-appointed composers shared staves with motifs borrowed from earlier Sephardic traditions, as evidenced by the bevy of percussion at Tempesta’s employ.

Consequently, Lully’s sound world was equal parts pomp and folk. Enhancing its spread were recorders, bassoon, harpsichord and theorbo, a sort of lute on steroids sporting an elongated neck fitted with sympathetic bass strings. The latter provided a visual element that was the subject of much pre- and post-concert conversation. Yet the theorbo, played by the ensemble’s co-director Richard Stone, was a subtle anchor for the dramatic goings on. So too, in Locke’s instrumentals for The Tempest (1674) was the canvas replete with vivid splashes of baroque charm. Shuffling weighty pauses into upbeat turns of phrase, lovelorn abandon into systematic denouements, Locke’s writing emerged swift and sweet.

The next portion of the concert, however, brought to the fore what proved to be the evening’s only flaw: Tempesta’s battle with tuning. Although tuning issues first arose in the wind section of the Lully, the off-key slips of which were quickly smoothed over, in the all-string intimacy of Stravinsky’s 1928 Apollon musagète two mismatched cellos grated on the ears. Such inconsistencies, however, come with the territory, especially when performing on period instruments (although it seemed most were modern copies—the harpsichord, for example, having been built in 2012), and the fine musicians of Tempesta handled these hiccups with grace and fortitude. There were also the uneven temperatures of the venue itself, which required musicians to flit between a cold backstage room and a warmer auditorium: further proof, perhaps, that this year’s winter has overstayed its welcome. Nevertheless, they muscled through with a perseverance that certainly did not go unnoticed.

All said, Tempesta gave us a treat with Stravinsky’s gorgeous paean to the French style. By turns mournful and frolicking, each movement was like a shard of glass in a slowly turning kaleidoscope. But the best came last with Kusser’s fabulous orchestral suite, from which the program borrows its name. Not only did the ensemble smooth out its tuning snags; it also presented us with the loveliest and most adventurous music of the night. Full of surprising twists and virtuosic performances all around, it left us all with something to smile about. In that respect, the joys won over the nitpicks. Challenges make us human, and finishing strong in spite of them is no small feat. In this respect, Tempesta di Mare reminded us of why we go to hear live music in the first place: to remind us that we are all human.

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

Philip Glass and Tim Fain: A Live Review

| Tyran Grillo

Philip Glass & Tim Fain Promotional Images at Emory University.

Philip Glass: An Evening of Chamber Music
with Tim Fain
State Theatre, Ithaca, New York
March 1, 2014
7:00pm

If you have ever said a word over and over until it sheds all meaning and becomes its own sound, raw and devoid of attachment, then you know what the sound world of Philip Glass feels like. His melodies evolve in just such a way, nurturing new aspects with every iteration until they blossom of their own accord. His music has been called many things, from hypnotic to interminably monotonous. Its repetitive arpeggios and insistent themes have polarized listeners for decades. His admirers—myself among them—take comfort in his recognizability. His many critics, on the other hand, are often guilty of the very monotony of which the iconoclastic composer stands unfairly accused. Either way, resistance to his minimalist (im)pulses is futile: There’s nothing minimal about them.

But this is only half the story. Many will have heard Glass the composer, whose soundtracks for such films as Koyaanisqatsi and The Illusionist have long tickled the ears of even those unfamiliar with his name. Saturday night’s intimate chamber concert at the State Theatre was a choice opportunity to experience Glass the musician. Poised mountainously at a rococo baby grand piano yet with the touch of a willow’s tendril on water, he took concertgoers on a journey through his varied career by way of its most essential colors. To that end, he opened with a spirited performance of “Mad Rush.” The song was written—he explained to the audience—in response to a commission for a piece of “indefinite length.” This comment brought a collective chuckle and showed Glass as one at ease with his critics. It was obvious that the piece was originally written for organ as its waves crashed over one another in a gorgeous tumble. He also performed three selections from his Metamorphosis series. Like a jump between dream levels in the film Inception, each movement proceeded from a deeper place. The crosshatching of their dynamic pianism recalled the “stagger” technique of Baroque harpsichordists, and served to make an already resonant instrument brim with overtones.

Although Glass has ever been his own best interpreter, he has found in Tim Fain a viable partner in time. The American violinist, also no stranger to cinematic crossovers (he can be heard in Black Swan and, most recently, 12 Years a Slave), has emerged as one of the most exciting and innovative violinists of our generation. It was in the spirit of affinity that he joined Glass on stage for a smattering of scenes from The Screens. This incidental music, written for a stage production of the play by Jean Genet, was by turns sprightly and mournful. So, too, the concluding Pendulum, condensed here from a trio to a duo.

Yet it was Fain alone who secured the performance’s most stirring memories in the form of a two-part “Chaconne.” Excerpted from the seven-movement Partita for Solo Violin, it ranks among the solo violin works of Eugène Ysaÿe as a true inheritor of Bach’s hallowed craft. The purity and surety of Fain’s tone was alive with purpose as he leapt through a near constant chain of double stops. Concertedly, his strings sang the most recent music on the program, bringing everything back to Glass the composer and reminding us of just how he has evolved. Here was his art, soaring, full-throated, and open to whatever may come.

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