Greg Stepanich

The best local concerts of 2006: Part II

Here's the second part of my list of the top 10 local performances of 2006 (in chronological order):

6. Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, July. All four of the concerts in this series' 15th season were distinguished by its two most durable qualities: Fresh programming and risk-taking. Each of the programs had a memorable performance, from Walton's Facade on the second program to a lovely chamber work by d'Indy on the fourth, but the one that sticks in my head most is the first one, dedicated to 2006's birthday boys, Mozart and Shostakovich.

Good performances of the A major Flute Quartet (K. 289) and the E-flat major Wind Serenade (K. 375) were followed by an excellent reading of the Shostakovich Piano Quintet. Pianist Lisa Leonard (at right) was especially good here, and the whole concert gave listeners a worthwhile look at the reason we cherish these two composers.

7. Ibis Camerata, September. In the first concert of the current season, this Miami-based chamber ensemble offered works by Mozart (the C Major Piano Trio, K. 458), the Brahms Clarinet Trio and two pieces by Argentina's Astor Piazzolla. In a concert at Delray Beach's Church of the Palms, the members of the group -- pianist Biljana Milovanovic, clarinetist Christopher Graham, violinist Dmitri Pogorelov and cellist Ian Maksin -- gave accomplished, insightful readings of the Mozart and Brahms in a church whose echoing acoustics make it that much harder to maintain good ensemble.

And two Piazzolla works, in which Maksin played a prominent role, drove the audience into a near-frenzy. The Ibises have just released their first CD, and you can expect to see and hear a lot of them in the near future hereabouts.

8. Biava Quartet, October. Florida Atlantic University's Shostakovich centenary retrospective was considerably enlivened by the appearance of this string quartet, founded in 1998 at the Cleveland Institute of Music and now based in New Haven, Conn. The Biavas -- Austin Hartman, Hyunsu Ko, Mary Persin and Jacob Braun -- gave a passionate, intense and riveting transversal of the Eighth Quartet in which all of the composer's drama and color were impressively displayed.

The group also gave an equally powerful rendition of the second Rasumovsky quartet of Beethoven distinguished by spit-and-polish ensemble and fiery Romanticism. A wonderful afternoon of chamber music by a group of rising stars.

9. Seraphic Fire, November. Further proof that Patrick Dupré Quigley is the coming man of South Florida classical music was firmly in evidence at an all-Domenico Scarlatti concert given by his chamber choir, Seraphic Fire. The performance at All Saints Episcopal in downtown Fort Lauderdale was easily the finest Seraphic Fire concert I've ever heard, a beautiful evening of first-class singing and rarely heard, marvelous repertoire.

In a bit that shows the care Quigley brings to his programs, the Scarlatti selections (two hymns, the La Stella Mass and the Stabat Mater) were interwoven with trio sonatas by other Italian composers of the period -- Gabrielli, Torelli and Zipoli -- beautifully played by cellist Gyongy Erodi and keyboardist Henry Lebedinsky. The encore, too, was special: A rapturous version of the American composer Randall Thompson's Alleluia.

10. Lynn Philharmonia, December. This mostly student ensemble from the Lynn University conservatory in Boca Raton acquitted itself admirably in a fine performance of the Tenth Symphony of Shostakovich on a program that also included works by Joseph Schwantner and a concerto by Wieniawski. Conductor Albert-George Schram asked a lot of his charges in having them tackle this difficult, powerful work, and they delivered.

It says volumes about Schram's ambition and the depth of the young talent at this music school that this intense 20th-century masterwork should have been so seriously taken on and so creditably mounted.

The best local concerts of 2006: Part I

I went to a great many concerts this past year; most weekends you can find me attending at least one event, many of which I don't end up writing about (next year, though, I'm planning to get some more short reviews written).

I missed quite a few things that I wanted to see, but overall, there was plenty of really good classical music in evidence here in South Florida. The best things tended to be in chamber music or solo instrumentalists; the absence of the Florida Philharmonic, however inconsistent it could be, has left us without a core performing ensemble to give the region a true art music identity.

Until such time as an orchestra can be reconstituted on a permanent basis, and given its own permanent home, South Florida is today a patchier place for classical music than it was about 10 years ago, when the Florida Phil was announcing its Beethoven on the Beach summer festivals. I should also note that former conductor James Judd continues to win high critical plaudits for his recorded work on Naxos of the music of the New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn.

Again, Judd and the Florida Phil weren't yet in the top tier of national orchestras, but they were on their way. That an area this wealthy was not able to resolve the group's money problems or help it build a permanent home is disgraceful, and at this point it should be clear what the absence of the group means.
Here are the first five of my top 10 performances from 2006, in chronological order:

1. Janine Jansen and the Cleveland Orchestra, January: The young Dutch violinist gave a wonderful performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, and guest director Vladimir Ashkenazy put an epic stamp on the Elgar First Symphony, glorying in its rich late Romanticism. A concert with real firepower, and one that introduced an enthusiastic audience at the Broward Center to an imaginative soloist who inhabits the pieces instead of only performing them.

2. David Finckel, cellist, and Wu Han, pianist, February: Cellist Finckel and his wife, pianist Han, offered a magnificent reading of Russian cello works in a concert at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach. In addition to works by Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, the duo presented a fresh piece by the young Russo-American composer Lera Auerbach. Finckel and Han are wonderful musicians, and they were in top form for the Society recital.

3. New World Symphony, March: Michael Tilson Thomas showed me why the Schubert Ninth Symphony is a great work in a concert at the Broward Center; never have I heard this piece played with such joy and warmth as I heard it by these young professionals. Also on the program was a fine rendition of the Webern Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, and a beautiful performance by the Finnish soprano Lilli Paasikivi of the Kindertotenlieder of Mahler. Paasikivi was filling in for the originally scheduled soloist, the ailing Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died in July of cancer at 52.

4. Sergio Tiempo, pianist, March: This Argentine musician should be on the short list of major pianists around the world, judging by the recital he gave at the Kravis Center. His Gaspard de la Nuit was frightening in its accuracy and power; here is a pianist who can not only play Ravel's fiercely difficult music but has it under complete control. His Chopin B Minor Sonata was gloriously colorful and intense, and he gave a reading of the familiar Liszt Consolation No. 3 something very close to sublimity. A great talent, and one hopes he'll be back soon.

5. Master Chorale of South Florida, April: The chorale founded from the ashes of the Florida Philharmonic chorus did a service to musical literature by performing the Robert Levin completion of Mozart's C Minor Mass. It wasn't a flawless performance, though it was generally good overall, but the best part was that this group took on this controversial completion of what in its incomplete form is a masterwork, and made a persuasive case for it. Not all of Levin's ideas about scoring are on the money, and perhaps the completion as a whole is a trifle too seriously Bachian, but thanks to this performance, this is how I now prefer to hear the Mozart C Minor Mass.

Tomorrow, the next five.

Daniel Pinkham contributed beauty to Christmas

At this time of year in churches around the country, ambitious music directors and choirs tackle the Christmas Cantata of the American composer Daniel Pinkham.

It's got a fresh, spiky sound, and lots of tricky rhythms; it's a fine work, and always worth hearing.
Pinkham died last week at age 83 of leukemia, and so passes another American composer who contributed music of real, lasting value to his nation's store of music.

I remember interviewing him for a story more than a decade ago, and found him charming, energetic and funny. Besides telling me that royalties from the Christmas Cantata had pretty much paid for the house he occupied, he asked me who my composition teachers had been in Boston when I studied there for two years.

I told him, and he proceeded to follow that up with a devastatingly accurate imitation of one of my professors. It was hilarious, really, and it was so unexpected and so sharply done that it took me at least half a minute to stop laughing.

The other thing that struck me at the time was that I expected Pinkham to be much more fearsome as an interview subject simply because I'd had trouble getting his time changes down when playing his music. But he was precisely the opposite, and interviewing him briefly for my story was a real joy.

I think it's wonderful that a new piece of his was premiered at Harvard University the night before he died. He was composing right up to the end, and that's the definition of a person living a fulfilled work life.

I wish I'd had the chance to meet him in person, but reading the tributes that have rolled in on his Website and over at Sequenza21 shows that he was greatly beloved by a large number of people. Here's an obit from The Boston Globe; this Christmas we have a reason for sorrow at his passing, but with his music, we have much more reason to celebrate a life well-lived.

Pink Martini's 'Little Drummer Boy'

Heading out to do some long-delayed shopping on Saturday, I decided to stop on the way down to Boca Raton at a Starbucks near my house and get a nice little festive peppermint mocha.

Because I wanted to do the full-on holiday thing, I succumbed to an impulse buy and picked up a copy of the Starbucks holiday CD, Santa Baby, to listen to on our way to and from the shops. And in so doing, I made a pleasant discovery.

One of the songs is The Little Drummer Boy, which was a big hit for the Harry Simeone Chorale decades ago, and it's been covered many, many times since. And yet, someone has found something new to do with it that re-energized by listening batteries and got me thinking once again about the power of a good arrangement to help a piece say something fresh.

This version of The Little Drummer Boy (an adaptation of a Czech carol with lyrics written by Katherine Davis, the liner notes say) is arranged by the Oregon-based lounge band Pink Martini, and it's a lovely thing. Looked at one way, this band is a model for the kind of eclectic style-crossing that younger musicians are pursuing. This band does everything from Villa-Lobos to Japanese pop on its new album, Hang On, Little Tomato, and they're not afraid to mix genres and try something bold.

In the case of this carol, Pink Martini (the notes don't say, but the chief mover of this band is Thomas Lauderdale, and perhaps this was his idea) has reimagined it as a kind of louche bolero. It starts with just the percussion quietly thumping away with insistent single notes, and if you're used to hearing the steady-as-she-goes regular version, it's not clear at first where the voice is going to come in.

But when it does, it's beautiful. Vocalist China Forbes has a friendly, open sound with a touch of child in it, before she opens up when the song modulates. She sings the "rum-pa-pum-pums" as triplets, unlike the original, and through most of the song, there's some full-throated trombone obbligato work that stands out because of how tasteful and the background is.

The piano holds way back, which is one of the beauties of this arrangement, but when things get louder, it follows the tune with power and restraint. The verses end with a little Spanish-Arab motif from the piano (Lauderdale), and then some nice slightly diminished chords toward the end that add a sudden splash of rich color.

The whole thing is imagined much like an abstract painting with very few figures, it seems to me: A stark background, plain lines of paint, each one pregnant with meaning because it's accompanied by so little else. It's marvelously effective, and stripped of all the cloying sentimentality that has often burdened what was at first a pretty good idea for a Christmas carol. It is, in short, a very sophisticated, adult version of this song.

If you get a chance to hear it, give it a couple listens to hear how cannily this arrangement is put together, how expertly it showcases Forbes' voice, and how it throws just enough of a twist on a old holiday chestnut to make it come alive again.

He made 'The Nutcracker' dance

The music of Christmas is so much with us these days that it's hard actually to see it sometimes for what it is, to really appreciate it.

For instance, there's this:

His Majesty was delighted, summoning me to his box and heaping compliments on me. The staging of both the one and the other was magnificent, and that of the ballet even too magnificent -- the splendor tires the eyes.

The monarch referred to here was Tsar Alexander III of Russia, and the author of those sentences was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, writing to his brother Anatoly in December 1892 after the tsar had seen the dress rehearsal of the composer's opera Iolanta and his ballet The Nutcracker, which were on a double bill.

Critical reception of both works was decidedly cool, and indeed Tchaikovsky himself wasn't thrilled with The Nutcracker, feeling he'd run out of inspiration. But he was still writing well, and prolifically, less than a year later, when he died at the age of 53, perhaps accidentally of cholera, and perhaps deliberately by suicide.

The music of The Nutcracker, certainly the most well-known ballet score of all time, is over-familiar by this point. The Simpsons even had some fun with it the other night, with Homer and the family singing wacky lyrics to its indelible tunes. The words scanned well, they were funny, and the melodies worked just fine.

In composer Ned Rorem's new book, Facing the Night, which I have just finished reading, he remarks a couple of times that writers about ballet rarely give any attention to the score that makes the whole thing work, and I think this is true of The Nutcracker. It is one of those pieces that is so familiar we don't actually pay enough attention to it; we can admire how beautiful it is to look at -- and it is -- but a closer look at the craft that went into the writing of it pays good dividends.

Aside from one or two pieces that are a little too harp-heavy for me, most of The Nutcracker is marvelous, and marvelous in a way that's almost impossible to emulate, because it requires not only a person with an exquisite sense of mood and color, but also one who is a tunesmith of the highest order.

Tchaikovsky has simply spun out one great melody after another, and then orchestrated them in beautiful colors. Most composers, having created so many fine tunes, would have beaten them to death, or overorchestrated them, or perhaps have saved some of the best ones for something else and substituted something second-tier.

But not Tchaikovsky. He was a consummate professional, he knew exactly what he was capable of, and he simply sat down and turned it out -- and at the same time that he was busily turning out an opera. And so this year, if you go to a performance of The Nutcracker for a holiday tradition, or you simply hear the opening notes of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and it put you in the seasonal spirit, spare a thought for the complicated, brilliant Russian composer who made it all possible.

Looking for 'Messiah' stories

This last weekend offered no fewer than four performances of music from George Frideric Handel's Messiah; there was one the weekend before that, and there will be still another in the weekend to come.

This 1741 oratorio remains a staple of the Christmas season, and it's not likely we'll ever see it dislodged, even though it's actually an Easter piece (it was first performed in Dublin in April 1742 for a benefit concert) and the Christmas part is just that — one part of it. It remains popular not only because it's tuneful and pleasant, but also because with even a halfway decent choir and orchestra, it can make a big impact.

By now, millions upon millions of people must have taken part in a Messiah production of one kind or another, in church, in college, with a professional choir, etc. Here's a blog entry from a woman named M who writes a blog called Dog and Pony Show about a Pentecostal version of the oratorio (some salty language in this entry, so reader beware). M also doesn't like Messiah, either.

All of which leads me to this question: Anybody out there have any other good Messiah stories? I don't have any prize money or treats to offer (though Sharon and I did just do our big baking weekend), but I'd love to read some stories about the most memorable Messiah you took part in, in the chorus, as a soloist, in the orchestra, in the wings, or even in the audience. I'd like to hear from performers most of all, but in general I'd like to gather some stories. If they're good enough, we can put some together maybe for a newspaper piece.

Go ahead and post your stories in the comments of this entry.

Heck, it's not a bad idea for a book proposal, either. Call it Doing Messiah, and gather all the stories from everyone who has a sad, funny, uplifting or depressing story to tell, and then step back and try to figure out why it is that this piece has such a hold on us after all this time, and why it shows no signs of stopping.

Web station to offer American classical

Dec. 6, 2006

A nice little release from the American Music Center has crossed my desk, pitching a new 24-hour online station called Counterstream Radio.

It hasn't officially been launched yet, apparently, but the demo's up (click here). The AMC says the station will provide continuous streaming of American music; part of the text under "About" reads:

The only principle that defines the music we broadcast is that it's never about the bottom line: this is music created with no regard for anyone who says, "You can't do that!"

As I'm writing this, I'm listening to a recording of the Serenata for Orchestra by Walter Piston (that's him at left), one of the finest of our 20th-century composers, and one whose music never gets much of a hearing nowadays. I'm enjoying this piece, though, which I knew nothing of before going to the Website.

It's accessible without being cloying, it has a strong feel for a kind of recondite melody that might not be instantly hummable but is lovely nonetheless. And the orchestration is very well done, too; in short, it's a good piece of American music I should have known already, but didn't.

I don't know when Counterstream is going to launch officially, but I love the idea of being able to bookmark the site and being able to quickly plug in for audio evidence of the vastness of our country's classical music heritage. They haven't forgotten good old commerce, either: You can buy the discs they feature on the site, and there's an iTunes download option, too.

The AMC deserves credit for all of its work for more than 60 years on behalf of American classical music, too. Take a look at the home page if you haven't seen it. I enjoy reading the Webzine NewMusicBox, which has a good essay this week from the young composer Missy Mazzoli (seen at the top of this entry) that suggests the presentation of new music might have helped its reception during a recent contemporary music concert series done by the Minnesota Orchestra.

This is the kind of place where the musical word is getting out these days, further proof that Web technology will turn out to be one of the best things that ever happened to the American classical composer.

Review: Lynn Phil does Wieniawski, Shostakovich

The concert season so far this year has featured plenty of fresh programming and impressive music-making, if you know where to look.

This past weekend, the Lynn University Philharmonia demonstrated this with a fine concert of a recent American work, a venerable violin concerto with an exciting young soloist, and a commendable performance of a major symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Conductor Albert-George Schram and the orchestra, made up mostly of Lynn conservatory students, deserve a lot of credit for taking on the challenge of the Shostakovich Tenth, which Schram called “a supreme masterwork” in remarks before the performance. He indicated that he and the orchestra were still in the process of understanding this often recondite piece, and while there was some sense of this reading still being a work in progress, it nevertheless carried real emotional power.

The concerts Saturday night and Sunday afternoon also featured the winner of the school’s concerto competition, the young Uzbek violinist Valentin Mansurov, who played the Second Concerto (in D minor, Op. 22) of the Polish violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski (pictured at right).

Mansurov gave a vigorous and accomplished performance of this very difficult virtuoso work from 1862, and it can be truly said that its pyrotechnics hold few horrors for him.

Mansurov possesses a very intense, penetrating tone that gives even the calmer moments of the Wieniawski a nervous energy that compels the listener. That said, it’s not a particularly big sound, either, and while Schram and the orchestra proved to be deeply sensitive accompanists, at times Mansurov sounded a little less than commanding.

Wieniawski, after all, wrote this concerto as a showpiece, and to be most effective it needs to have a soloist who will step forward and dominate the proceedings. Mansurov is unquestionably a fine player who has learned the music thoroughly; now he needs to make it more his own by bringing some bigger gestures to the table.

The concert opened with a contemporary American work, New Morning for the World (Daybreak of Freedom) by Joseph Schwantner (at left), a Lincoln Portrait-style piece from 1982 that features texts by Martin Luther King Jr. The narrator was Gordon Johnson (father of concertmaster Gareth Johnson, currently making a name for himself farther than at home), who read these powerful texts with authority and conviction.

Schwantner’s music is quite pleasant and almost innocuous, with its big, sweet brass writing and extensive use of drums and mallet instruments making plenty of sound without much of a compositional profile. Still, it works well as background for some truly inspiring and important speeches from the nation’s civil rights struggle.

The second half was devoted to the Shostakovich Tenth Symphony (in E minor, Op. 93), one of the composer’s most compelling orchestral essays. Written on the heels of the death of Stalin in 1953, it also bears evidence of the composer’s recent immersion in counterpoint, which he drew on for his seminal collection of preludes and fugues for piano, written three years earlier.

The Tenth is a purely instrumental symphony, and makes extensive use of the “DSCH” four-note motto that Shostakovich employed in several other important works. It also contains virtually every challenge a large symphonic piece can present for an orchestra, from virtuoso-style note blizzards for entire sections to an austere emotional palette that requires deep concentration and unity of purpose to bring off successfully.

And for the most part, it was successful: The Lynn orchestra has plenty of talent all through its ranks, and Saturday night at Boca Raton’s St. Andrews School it showed good ensemble work overall. There were pitch problems in some unison passages, and during the third movement, the narrative tension faded somewhat, making the music sound discursive.

But the Philharmonia gave a ferocious account of the brutal whirlwind that is the second movement, and I was also impressed with the breadth of interpretation Schram and his charges showed in the long opening movement. This is a tough movement to bring off because it seems to want to head in several different directions; it’s essentially an introspective, tragic movement, though, and the pacing here was just about right for bringing listeners through its profound emotional depths.

Although the Florida Philharmonic’s absence is acutely felt by longtime area concertgoers, it’s cheering to know that there is a local orchestra here that can persuasively tackle a major 20th-century composition and play it well enough to increase audience comprehension of modern society’s rich legacy of musical art.

Shedding light on women composers

The season brings gifts from local classical groups, including Seraphic Fire (a live recording of its survey last season of the six Bach motets), the Ibis Camerata (a disc on Albany Records featuring University of Miami-related composers), and finally, the only one I have at this time, a record of three works for cello and piano by female composers.

The record, just out on Eroica, and called Works for Cello and Piano by Women Composers, features the cellist Iris van Eck, who directs Fort Lauderdale’s Chameleon concert series, which opens another season next week (details here). The pianist is Arielle Vernede, who like van Eck is a native of the Netherlands.

I’ve listened to this disc a couple times, and need to hear it some more to make myself more familiar with this music, but it’s certainly worth hearing, especially if you’re interested in rarely played works of the literature.

This disc opens with a Sonata from 1919 by the Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans (1895-1952). Bosmans (pictured above) was a pianist, and apparently quite a good one. She came from a musical family — her father was a cellist and her mother a pianist.

This sonata is a powerful, dark work, full of lovely, mournful melody and somber color. It's written in a post-Romantic style that doesn’t break much new ground for its time, but it’s committed, passionate music. The first movement, in particular, sounds like what Rachmaninoff would have written like if he was more like Fauré.

It's a good piece, with plenty of difficult work for both players, and it would make an attractive addition to the usual run of Beethoven and Brahms on the standard cello recital program.

The second selection on the disc is the Cello Sonata No. 1, Op. 46, of the French composer Louise Farrenc (1804-1875), written in 1857, is a fine work, skillfully and elegantly composed.

It's redolent of Mendelssohn (Felix and Fanny), Schumann and Beethoven, and idiomatically written for both instruments. The slow second movement has some nice harmonic surprises that add a touch of pathos to its serene beauty.

Last up is the Passacaglia on an Old English Tune by the English violist and composer Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979). This is an arrangement for cello of a viola original, and a good piece it is. Clarke was a real talent whose work should be played more often; her Viola Sonata is a masterful piece that always goes over well with audiences.

The majority of classical music has been composed by men, but there are many more women writers active these days (and here's a wiki list of the better-known names of the past centuries), and it won’t be too much longer before a great woman composer’s music enters the canon (Ellen Taaffe Zwilich? Kaija Saariaho? Sofia Gubaidulina?).

In the meantime, there are other composers besides the two who I'm guessing are most performed — America’s Amy Beach and France’s Cécile Chaminade — whose work should be programmed more frequently, and this cello disc makes a good case for them.

This disc has spurred my interest in hearing more music by these writers — in particular the later music of Bosmans, which apparently underwent quite a stylistic switch in the late 1920s. For now, this disc serves as a good introduction, and I’m grateful to Iris van Eck for sending it along.