Concert Review: The Human Stain

Philip Glass' Music With Changing Parts at Carnegie Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Philip Glass.
Photo by Andras Bitesnich for Orange Mountain Music.

Is there a point, in the creation of art for the entertainment of others, where the value of that creative act has to be weighed against the limitations that the human body can endure? That question applies to both the audience and performers attending Friday night's concert at Carnegie Hall featuring the first New York concert performance in 38 years of Philip Glass' 1970 composition Music With Changing Parts. This performance formed the centerpiece of Mr. Glass' residency at the Hall this season, and of the venue's ongoing festival celebrating the music and culture of the 1960s.

Concert Review: A Minimal Fuss

Steve Reich’s Three Generations opens with John Adams and Terry Riley.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

John Adams and Terry Riley. Their music was celebrated on Thursday night at Zankel Hall.
Photo courtesy Carnegie Hall.

The composer Steve Reich currently occupies the Debs Composers' Chair at Carnegie Hall. That makes 2017 a good spring season for New Yorkers whose tastes run to the masterworks of the late 20th century. Two of those masterpieces were programmed on Thursday at the opening night of Three Generations, a four-concert series that Mr. Reich is curating at Carnegie’s subterranean venue Zankel Hall. Following the performance, Mr. Reich led a short discussion with fellow composer John Adams and Brad Lubman, leader of the evenings performance.

Concert Review: The Master Builder

Steve Reich turns 80 at Carnegie Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Footage from Hindenburg, part of Steve Reich's Three Tales.
Image by Beryl Korot © 2002 Nonesuch Records.

Steve Reich is now 80, and remains at the forefront of the school of American minimalism. On Tuesday night, Carnegie Hall celebrated Mr. Reich's birthday with a concert featuring Sō Percussion, the International Contemporary Ensemble, members of Synergy Vocals and three of Mr. Reich's major compositions, including first Carnegie Hall presentation of his 2002 "video opera" Three Tales, a collaboration with his wife Beryl Korot.

Concert Review: Reunited With Minimal Fuss

Steve Reich and Philip Glass open BAM NextWave--together.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Across the great divide: the composers Philip Glass (left) and Steve Reich.
Photo courtesy Nonesuch Records.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Philip Glass and Steve Reich were friends and sometimes collaborators. A rift between the two men resulted in each becoming a separate driving force behind minimalism, a compositional style that favored small melodic cells, expanded, repeated and grown into huge crystalline structures that beguiled the ear and soothed the mind. Both men are now 77, and have ended their forty-year feud. On Tuesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,  the composers took the stage together for the first time in decades.

Concert Review: The Last and the Biggest

The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra returns to Carnegie Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Balancing act: conductor Mariss Jansons brought the
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra back to Carnegie Hall this week.
Photo from the orchestra's official site, © 2014 Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Although the concert season at Carnegie Hall is breathing its last, Friday night marked the return of one of Germany's greatest orchestras to that historic venue. This was the first of three performances this week featuring the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Mariss Jansons. The program featured concert hall standard by Richard Strauss and Hector Berlioz, preceded by the first Carnegie Hall premiere of John Adams' 1996 work Slonimsky's Earbox.

Concert Review: The Passion, California Style

John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary with the L.A. Philharmonic.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The cast of The Gospel According to the Other Mary with conductor Gustavo Dudamel (left).
Photo by Richard Termine © 2013 Richard Termine Courtesy Lincoln Center.

Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic are back in New York. On Wednesday night, the fiery Venezuelan conductor led the New York premiere of The Gospel According to the Other Mary, a massive, nearly three-hour oratorio by composer John Adams. Other Mary (as it is called in the program) is a follow-up to Mr. Adams' 2000 composition El Niño. It recounts the late works, death, and resurrection  of Jesus from a distinctly feminist perspective.

Concert Review: Allegations and Alligators

The Attacca Quartet plays John Adams.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Attacca Quartet and a former escalator rider.
Photo © AttaccaQuartet.com

The Attacca String Quartet are one of the bright lights of the chamber music scene in New York right now. On Tuesday night, the group celebrated the release of Fellow Traveler, their new CD featuring the chamber music of John Adams with a concert Le Poisson Rouge.  Mr. Adams was in attendance.

Concert Review: Pyramids and Floods

The Collegiate Chorale premieres works by Glass and Golijov.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Pyramid scheme: James Bagwell (center) leads the

Collegiate Chorale and the American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall..

Photo by Erin Baiano © 2013 The Collegiate Chorale.

Last night at Carnegie Hall saw the Collegiate Chorale offer two of the more interesting New York premieres of the 2012-2013 season. The concert, performed with the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of James Bagwell offered Philip Glass' Symphony No. 7 (the Toltec) with Oceana, a cantata by the Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov.

Opera Review: Einstein on the Beach

Reposted from The Classical Review.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Helga Davis (left) and Kate Moran perform Knee Play No. 2 from Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach at the BAM NextWave Festival. Photo by Stephanie Berger © 2012 Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Like a comet that only passes earth once every 20 years, Einstein on the Beach has returned to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This new touring production of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s collaboration—presented as part of the BAM NextWave Festival—keeps the opera’s anarchic spirit intact while still packing an impressive theatrical wallop.

Read the entire review here at The Classical Review.

The Age of Plastic

Einstein on the Beach in LEGO.®

LEGO man on the beach, presumably waiting for Einstein. Photo © SodaHead.com.

As a warm-up for next fall's BAM production of Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach, check out this YouTube visualization of the opera's scenes and knee plays...rendered in LEGO®. Enjoy.

Silent Night

in the style of John Cage.

Image originally posted on Facebook.

Feel free to sing along if you know it.

Happy holidays all, and Merry Christmas, if you keep it.

Concert Review: Existential Park

Philip Glass and the New York Philharmonic play Koyaanisqatsi

Welcome to Vega$. An image from Koyaanisqatsi.

The year 2011 marks the 75th birthday of composer Philip Glass. As part of the celebrations, Wednesday night's New York Philharmonic concert at Avery Fisher Hall featured a complete performance of Mr. Glass' 1982 score for Koyanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, the powerful film by Godfrey Reggio. The performance featured the celebrated orchestra, the Philip Glass Ensemble and the Collegiate Chorale.

Koyaanisqatsi is a meditation on the imbalances of modern life. It is assembled footage, dating from just before its 1982 release to documentary footage and stock imagery dating all the way back to a NASA film from 1962. Although it is only 86 minutes long, time speeds, slows and bends in upon itself as the images fly by. The images range widely: staring pedestrians shot on the street, cars and televisions being assembled, and the most famous, iconic shots: clouds racing across mirror-front skyscrapers.

At the Wednesday night performance, Avery Fisher Hall was darkened. The film was shown above the black-clad orchestra in its entirety. Below, Philip Glass Ensemble director Michael Riesman conducted from a laptop, which displayed the sheet music and a running data-stream of the film footage in the background.

The accompanying score opens with a Bach-like figure played repeatedly, accompanying a bass voice chanting the title over and over. This gives way to surging chorales of horns and human voices singing prophecies in the Hopi language. The effect is hypnotic, and more powerful when combined with Mr. Reggio's potent film. Early images featured the demolition of an abandoned St. Louis housing project. You could almost feel the unease from a New York audience trying not to think of the fate of the World Trade Center.

Like other composers who prefer a place deep in the harmony over taking the lead, Mr. Glass played the second keyboard part. The Philharmonic lent power and depth to the score, creating resonant sonic pictures that worked perfectly with the film. Impressive playing came from the brass and low strings, particularly the cellos led by Carter Brey.

Koyaanisqatsi seems amorphous on its first approach, but this performance revealed a definite structure of the film in a series of acts. The most powerful passage was the high-speed footage of cars hurtling at night through the streets of Los Angeles and New York. This was contrasted with the slow images of pedestrians, staring men and women, and even a man shaving with a disposable razor.

Although the point of this work is serious, much of the sonic trickery and visual jazz of this film is light in nature. Perhaps that is because the stock footage from Koyaanisqatsi has been referenced over 20+ years of The Simpsons: the rising moon, the racing cars, even the shots of hot dogs and Hostess Twinkies being manufactured.

Players and film were at their most serious for Mr. Glass' final crescendo, labeled "Prophecies" on the album. This music accompanied footage of a failed 1962 NASA test flight. The shots of the exploding Atlas rocket  ended the evening in a dramatic, powerful crescendo, showing the folly and insignificance of man's existence before the credits rolled.

Concert Review: First Shots Fired

Bruckner (r)Evolution Opens at the Lincoln Center Festival

Anton Bruckner. Portrait by Josef Büche.

Wednesday night at Lincoln Center saw the opening of Bruckner (r)Evolution, the four-night stand at Avery Fisher Hall featuring the Cleveland Orchestra. Cleveland music director Franz Welser-Möst led the program, which paired Bruckner's Fifth Symphony with Guide to Strange Places, a 20-minute orchestral roadmap by minimalist composer John Adams.

This unusual marriage is part of Mr. Welser-Möst's ambition behind the festival, to demonstrate the influence of Bruckner's unusual symphonic style and cement the Austrian composer as a predecessor of modernism. The humble Bruckner would have been suspicious of the idea, preferring his colossal achievements to stand for themselves as abstract works of art.

The Adams work opened, a dense, harmonically rich four-movement structure played as one on the model of Jean Sibelius' Seventh Symphony. Thick orchestral textures, chugging strings and the guttural honk of the contrabass clarinet combined to create eerie landscapes like the cinematic soundtrack to a recent William Gibson novel.

Like that author's recent trilogy of books, Mr. Adams' work exists in the long shadow of September 11th, and was seen as a kind of threnody for the victims of those terrorist attacks. However, the composer explained in the accompanying concert note that his piece was actually conceived before the attacks, and that it was inspired by an annotated map of Provence in France that provided information on the strange and weird history of that remarkable slice of countryside.

Bruckner's Fifth Symphony has labored under similar misconceptions. It was written at a fiscally difficult time in the composer's life, following the fiasco of his Third. That, and its descending main theme have earned it the nickname "Tragic." But this is a misnomer. The Fifth is like a great stretching bridge to some otherworldly dimension, its span held together by great piers of unison brass and guy-wired by a pizzicato theme that opens the first movement and comes to dominate the finale.

Under Mr. Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestra led the audience on a leisurely tour of this remarkable structure. The brass played with stirring power. The strings gave warm voice to the long melodic lines of the opening movement's second theme and the most lyric pages of the Adagio. The woodwinds came to the fore in the scherzo, written as a pair of interlocking Austrian country dances and reflecting Bruckner's country roots.

The finale led to the most magnificent playing of the evening, a 20-minute movement in which the ideas from the previous three are recapitulated in sonata form and then made to run in place with a colossal double fugue. The effect is remarkably like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, minus the solo voices and the chorus.

Throughout, Bruckner's writing for the orchestra reflects his mastery of counterpoint and his decision to treat a full symphony orchestra as if it were a giant pipe organ. The Cleveland forces responded to this magnificent music with power, enthusiasm and an odd, awkward grace, making this concert a strong opening to this four-night festival.

Bruckner (r)Evolution continues tonight with the Adams Violin Concerto, paired with Bruckner's Symphony No. 7. Symphony No. 8 bows on Saturday, with the 9th at 2pm on Sunday. Watch this space for full and continuing coverage.

Opera Review: Three Faces of the Void

City Opera experiments with Monodramas.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Soprano Anu Komsi in La Machine d'etre.
Photo by Carol Rosegg ©2011 New York City Opera

On Friday night, the City Opera unveiled Monodramas, a triptych of modern operas, each with a single female protagonist. Though two of the works lacked anything resembling a plot, it was a fascinating evening of experimental opera--a bold gesture from a company that nearly went dark two years ago.

La Machine d'etre, ("The Machine of Existence") led off, the first opera by downtown jazz-rebel John Zorn. This was the world premiere of Mr. Zorn's piece, and served as the City Opera debut of soprano Anu Komsi. She was slowly unwrapped, appearing like a Wagner heroine to sing wordless melismas against Mr. Zorn's jagged rhythms and shifting tonal palette.

The plotless work, inspired by the drawings of Antonin Artaud, opened with a memorable image: the City Opera company concealed and rendered genderless by gray burkhas. The performance featured Mr. Artaud's illustrations, animated above the stage on two "flying" cartoon word-balloons. Beneath them, Ms. Komsi displayed an impressive vocal technique. It would be pleasing to learn how this Finnish soprano sounds when she has words to sing.

Kara Shay Thomson, lost in the woods in Erwartung.
Photo by Carol Rosegg © 2011 New York City Opera

Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung is the only familiar opera on this program. Written in 1909, it is the story of a nameless woman (Kara Shay Thomson, in her company debut) lost in a forest at night. Veering on the edge of madness, she encounters the dead body of her lover. Schoenberg's expressionist score captures the madness and torment of the woman. Ms. Thomson's performance was that of a promising dramatic soprano, navigating her big voice through the tricky, and often exposed passages of the half-hour work.

George Manahan emphasized the rich, melodic content of Schoenberg's score, and the City Opera orchestra was in top form. As with the first work, Ms. Thomson was slowly revealed from beneath her burkha. She was surrounded by a small group of silent, female doppelgangers, all wearing identical white dresses, a memorable image. The most mind-blowing moment of Erwartung arrived in the closing bars: an imaginative, superbly executed time-reversal effect that stopped the opera in its tracks.

Cynthia Sieden (left) and the mirrored boxes of neither.
Photo by Carol Rosegg © 2011 New York City Opera

neither is an apt title for the final work on the program, a lengthy excursion into form and function by American minimalist Morton Feldman. Feldman is an expert at writing stretched-out textures on an enormous canvas. (His String Quartet No. 2 lasts six hours if you play all the repeats.) neither is a setting of a text by Samuel Beckett, and true to this composer's style, each word is stretched out to its breaking point over a series of repeated figures in the orchestra.

Cynthia Sieden did a commendable job of singing the work, a formidable task since she had to hit the same pitch again and again for the first half with absolutely no melodic or harmonic development. The words are stretched distorted to the point where not even the supertitles help with comprehension.

The stage action featured skilled physical movement, at a glacial pace that recalled the productions of Robert Wilson. The action, such as it was, took place inside an iridescent, shimmering cube, adorned with colored lights and 66 (I counted) mysterious mirrored boxes that raised and lowered slowly from the ceiling, hanging in mid-air like miniature avatars of the 2001 monolith. It looked really cool. And it was all very mysterious.

Opera Review: Nixon In China Has Landed

"If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together."--Richard M. Nixon

The Nixons (Janis Kelly and James Maddalena) arrive.
Photo by Alastair Muir © 2010 English National Opera

John Adams' Nixon in China arrived last night, taking just 24 years to make the journey from the Brooklyn, (where the opera received its New York premiere) to the big stage of the Met. The straightforward production by Peter Sellars told the story simply and clearly. The composer himself conducted: a minimalist opera played with maximum appeal.

James Maddalena plays Nixon as the ultimate fish out of water from the moment he steps off the plane. In meetings with Mao Tse-Tung, in the banquet scene, and even in his Peking hotel room, his Nixon struggles visibly with his unfamiliar surroundings and his attempts to understand Chinese culture. Mr. Maddalena sings over the enormous orchestra with power, engaging in the all-important physical mannerisms without veering into parody.

Robert Brubaker pulled off the high tessitura of Chairman Mao, adding the dimensions of compelling physicality to show Mao's weakened physical state. He was matched by coloratura soprano Kathleen Kim in the role of Chian Ch'in (Mrs. Mao.) Ms. Kim applied fearless techniques to the dazzling "I am the wife of Chairman Mao" that closes the second act, singing the high F's with laser-like precision and a note of hysteria that recalled Mozart's Queen of the Night.

Baritone Russell Braun was compelling as Chou En-Lai, especially during the Toast that brings the first act to its climax. The house chandeliers came on in this scene, allowing the Party chairman to address the audience directly and adding to the sensation of "you are there."

The Toast is also a good example of an unexpected feature within the score of Nixon: Mr. Adams' decision to create old fashioned soliloquies for his principal characters to comment on the emotional meaning of the opera's action. It's an 18th-century idea re-imagined for the 20th. The choral and ensemble singing in this scene were rhythmically precise, as they were throughout the entire performance.

The cast of Nixon in China.
Photo by Alistair Muir © 2010 English National Opera

As Pat Nixon, Janis Kelly was the focus of Act II. Following her visits to Chinese classrooms, factories, and a pig farm, her big aria, "This is Prophetic!" proved a highlight of the night. She sang with a pleasing intonation that cut smoothly and sharply through the fabric of the score. In the Chinese Opera section, Mrs. Nixon's outrage at the drama staged by Madame Mao (and danced under Mark Morris' expert direction) was an explosive point at the heart of the opera--a demonstration of communication breakdown between the Chinese and American parties.


The third act was the most shocking, and compelling part of the evening. All six main characters sang in an extended, reflective ensemble which included two simulated oral sex acts (both involving the good Chairman) and what might be the first intentional F-bomb dropped on the Met stage during a performance. The opera ends on a questioning note, as Chou En-Lai literally rises from his grave to ask if the historic meeting accomplished anything at all.

Mr. Adams builds walls of sound out of small sonic fragments, treating two or three-note figures as the components of an enormous structure built from Lego® bricks of sound. The work calls for three keyboards, heavy brass, and tremendous orchestral resources to build those walls, and the Met Orchestra responded with an enthusiastic performance.

The score of Nixon uses leitmotivs and orchestration techniques developed by Wagner, in conjunction with the "cultural ear" of Puccini to create an aural clash of East and West. If a choir of saxophones playing jazz next to assimilated Chinese pentatonic melodies sounds like a strange idea, well it is. It originated with Puccini's Turandot.

An Extremely Violent Tribute To Philip Glass

Highway traffic, from the experimental film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance ©1983 MGM/UA.

Yesterday, Jan. 31 was Philip Glass' birthday. Last year, we celebrated with a "minimalist" version of the song "Happy Birthday." You can find a link to it here.

This year, I didn't feel like typing out those words over and over, or paying copyright dues to Jessica Hill.

A few years ago, this great American minimalist composer received this interesting (albeit extremely gory) tribute to his film Koyannisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. Made by I & S studios. Enjoy!



All video content © Gracie Films/20th Century Fox.

In a Silent Way: 4'33"

Two noted music critics at a performance of 4'33"
Image of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy © Hal Roach Library/laurel-and-hardy.com.

There's been a lot of stuff on this blog recently about 4'33", the iconic piece of anti-music by composer John Cage. Over in the UK, there was even an effort to get the piece played as the BBC's Holiday Single, à la the film Love Actually.

Anyway, here's a recent performance from Dutch television featuring composer, conductor and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw offering his interpretation of the piece in front of a television audience. I am sure that you will find it interesting...listening.



If that's not enough about 4'33" then check out my recent 'review' of a studio MP3 recording of the work, currently available on Amazon.com.

IV:XXXIII

John Cage in his kitchen.

An old college buddy of mine just sent me an MP3 being sold currently on Amazon. So I thought I'd oblige him with a review.

John Cage's groundbreaking piano piece 4'33"
uses clever harmonic development to make a profound statement of great musical depth. Celestial harmonies resonate throughout the piece as the lush orchestration (written to be played by a single performer) develops with fluid textures and rock-solid rhythms that echo the very bones of the Earth.



The opening theme of Tacit 1 is a profound one, echoing back to the pauses that feature in Anton Bruckner's mighty Second Symphony. In Tacit 2, Cage's use of rests, played in a complicated fugue has been known to move audience members, and yes, critics, to tears.

The final section, Tacit 3 builds to a powerful climax, with silent thunder resonating back and forth as the composition ticks down into its final minute. The theme returns again, making a profound, shattering statement as the pianist shifts on the bench in order to reach the middle C on the keyboard. But the C is never heard, replaced by strange microtones that are inaudible to all but the most cultured music lover.

And for only a buck, you can now own this fine studio MP3 recording of Mr. Cage's audacious work as performed and released by The Sound Corporation. All you have to do is click the link in this article and buy it. Send it to your friends. Send it to your enemies. It's the perfect IPod stuffer.

John Cage was one of the most revolutionary, groundbreaking composers of the 20th century. And by all accounts (and a photograph published by British symphonic commentator Norman Lebrecht) he could make a mean pasta sauce.

P.S.: This article was written in 4 minutes, 33 seconds. I think Mr. Cage would have liked it.


A live performance of 4'33".

Concert Review: Vivaldi Through a Modern Glass

Robert McDuffie
Photo by Christian Steiner

On Wednesday night, violinist Robert McDuffie and the Venice Baroque Orchestra brought their current tour to Carnegie Hall. The program explores the connection between Vivaldi's Four Seasons, arguably the most famous set of violin concertos ever written, and the Violin Concerto No. 2, a new work by minimalist Philip Glass.

The Four Seasons had an energetic, rustic style, choosing a very fast tempo and playing through his cadenza passages with precise, rapid-fire delivery. "Summer" featured slower, more languid melodies and an impressive thunderstorm from the cellists. The familar "Autumn"was graceful and more elegant, with the small orchestra providing able accompaniment. "Winter," which has the toughest rhythmic passages and some of the most difficult cadenzas in Vivaldi's work, provided a fitting climax to the cycle.


This new concerto, subtitled The American Four Seasons is an unusual Philip Glass composition. The shortened forms allow the New York based composer to experiment with neo-classical textures, shot through with echoes of Vivaldi's own style.

Driving, repeated notes (a hallmark of this composer's style) keep the engine moving and form a strong foundation for the soloist. The result is a series of concise movements with welcome pauses in between. Unlike Vivaldi's works, Glass chooses to let the listener figure out which season belongs to which concerto. (This writer guesses: 1) Winter, 2) Spring, 3) Summer, 4) Fall.)

Glass alternates the movements for orchestra with a series of soliloquoy passages for the violin, instead of the more conventional cadenzas. Mr. McDuffie played the articulated phrases with skill and fire, drawing beautiful sounds from his vintage instrument. As the movements played and the months passed, the orchestra built up momentum. In the final pages, the violinist led the band through racing glissando chords and swift, descending arpeggios, to thrilling effect.

Mr. McDuffie played the solo violin parts standing up, which is not unusual. However, the violinists and violists in his ensemble played standing up as well, which changed the balance of the sound somewhat and allowed more eye-contact interaction between the soloist and his fellow string players. (The lower strings, keyboard, and theorbo remained seated.)

Opera Review: Tick, Tick, Boom

Doctor Atomic nukes the Met.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!"
--Marvin Martian
Some of the greatest operas in history have bombed on opening night. John Adams' Doctor Atomic, which had its Met premiere on Monday night, is an exception--a very successful operatic work about the bomb itself. Penny Woolcock's new production finally gave New York audiences a chance to experience this powerful, oratorio-like work, that tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the launch of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Los Alamos, The Trinity Project, 1945.