Concert Review: The Next Giant Steps

Lawrence Brownlee in a fierce Liederabend at Zankel Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Tenor Lawrence Brownlee explored 19th century and contemporary song at Zankel Hall on Tuesday night.
Photo by Shervin Lainez for Opera Philadelphia.

The American tenor Lawrence Brownlee has emerged in the past decade as one of the leading lights of the bel canto revival that has swept operatic stages in this young century. He is possessed of a memorable stage presence, formidable technique, a plangent, sweet tone and a powerful, nimble insrument. On Tuesday night, a packed Zankel Hall got to see a different side of Mr. Brownlee, as he led an exploration of the art of the song at the Carnegie Hall venue.

Concert Review: The Swan and the Pigeon

Tenor Mark Padmore gives a Schubertiade.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Tenor Mark Padmore. Photo by Richard Termine.

No composer had it harder than Franz Peter Schubert. His greatest symphonies were locked in drawers until long after his death. His songs brought him some fame but his operas and choral works remain neglected outside his native Austria. And to top it all off, he died at 31, younger even than Mozart and Mendelssohn who each lived four years longer.

Concert Review: The Prodigy and the Proletarian

The Belcea Quartet play Schubert and Shostakovich.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Belcea Quartet (Corina Belcea, Axel Schacher, violins,
Antoine Lederlin, cello, Krzysztof Chorzelski, viola) in concert. Photo courtesy Carnegie Hall.

Although they lived in very different times, there are some parallels between the composers Franz Peter Schubert and Dmitri Shostakovich. Both men composed from a very early age. They lived in troubled, though very different eras, and faced incredible odds. For Schubert, his demon was a protracted and fatal illness that claimed his life at 32. Shostakovich's enemies were depression and the unpredictable political environment of Soviet Russia, where one false move could have fatal consequences.

Concert Review: The Individual Against the System

Yefim Bronfman closes his Prokofiev cycle at Zankel Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The hands. Yefim Bronfman.
Portrait photo by Dario Acosta from the artist's website.

The classical music schedule is a big, hectic thing with artists girdling the globe in their efforts to meet each year's long slate of concerts and professional obligations. Sometimes, though things get re-scheduled and pushed to the very end of the season. That's what happened Saturday at Zankel Hall, when pianist Yefim Bronfman finally played the much-delayed final concert in his ambitious concert project exploring Serge Prokofiev's set of nine sonatas for solo piano.

Concert Review: Blocks, Points and High Explosives

The Piano Music of Pierre Boulez at Zankel Hall.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich played Pierre Boulez' piano works
on Monday night at Zankel Hall. Photo by Neda Navae © 2015 ECM Records.

There are many words that can be used to describe Pierre Boulez. Composer, innovator, iconoclast, maverick, visionary all come immediately to mind following Monday night's recital at Zankel Hall. At this concert, pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich had agreed to perform the difficult feat of playing the composer's complete repertory for solo piano as part of their current North American tour.

Concert Review: Goin' South

The American Composers Orchestra ends its subscription season with Border Vanguards.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Flyer for Border Vanguards, last Friday's concert at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, featuring
the singer Luciana Souza (center.) Art © 2014 American Composers Orchestra.

The American Composers Orchestra is dedicated to the performance of modern music. Under the leadership of former New York City Opera music director George Manahan it remains a crack collection of players who conduct fearless exploration of fresh musical terrain. Last Friday night, the ensemble ended its 2013-14 Orchestra Underground subscription series at Carnegie Hall's downstairs performance space Zankel Hall with Border Vanguards The program explored music from five composers. With two rarities and three premieres, this was an exciting evening laced with exotic sounds and rare percussion instruments.

Concert Review: A Cellist's Last Song

The Kronos Quartet returns to New York.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Kronos Quartet: Hank Dutt, Jeffery Zeigler, David Harrington, John Sherba.

The Kronos Quartet returned to Carnegie Hall's downstairs Zankel Hall on Friday night. This concert marks cellist Jeffrey Zeigler's last New York appearance with the ensemble; he is scheduled to leave Kronos later this year. Future lineup changes aside, the program offered what New Yorkers have expected of Kronos in the ensemble's four-decade history: cutting-edge new music delivered with precision and style.

Concert Review: Miles To Go Before They Sleep

The Ebène Quartet plays Zankel Hall.
by Paul Pelkonen

The Ebène Quartet: Pierre Colombet, Gabriel Le Magadure,
Raphäel Merlin, Mathieu Herzog. Photo © 2011 21C Management.

In the staid world of chamber music, the Ebène Quartet are fast-rising stars. These four energetic young French musicians proved that status on Sunday evening with a concert at Zankel Hall, the final stop on their North American tour. The concert was evenly split between standard repertory of Mozart and Beethoven, and a second set that ranged from modal jazz to modern songwriting. 

This Quartet: violinists Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadure, violist Mathieu Herzog and cellist Raphäel Merlin, has been making waves lately with acclaimed performances of accepted chamber repertory to their fearless assaults on beloved jazz tunes. They have been playing for twelve years, and the tight interaction of these four young musicians makes their concerts fascinating to watch, as the sounds and energy travel telepathically between the players. 

The concert opened with the group's sweet, lyrical side with the D minor quartet written by Mozart and dedicated to Haydn. This allowed the players to sally forth in the galant style, producing rich, warm tone from their vintage instruments. Violins, viola and cello engaged in a sophisticated conversation, inviting the audience to witness the debate as they moved lightly through the four movements.

Beethoven's Quartet No. 14 (Op. 131) is one of the composer's most unconventional late creations. With seven short movements and a climactic central theme and variations, the "1-3-1" broke every compositional rule and laid the groundwork for the composer's last three musical statements. With a slow, sad fugue at the beginning and a bold sonata form at its end, it reversed the normal order of movements and added lilting baroque dances that looked back to Bach. 

The Ebène players brought passion and energy to this unconventional structure, unfolding the work like a complex murder mystery with the composer as the perpetrator.. They met the challenges of phrasing and expression with a head-on attack. The wildest and most chaotic moment: the "snap pizzicato" that predicted the percussive writing of Bartók kept its power to surprise unprepared members of the audience.

This was a passionate performance: expressive and deeply involved in the music. The fugue had an appropriate air of mystery. The dance and scherzo were filled with sad nostalgia. This was not the cosmic exploration that some ensembles bring to this music, but a deep, psychologically complex interpretation that culminated in the aggression of the final movement. They worked through the complex development and recapitulation to the coda, a final re-statement of the strange fugue that opens the piece.

The second half of the evening was devoted to a mix of jazz standards, popular songs and the occasional work by a contemporary composer. It opened with a lucid rendition of Wayne Shorter's jazz classic "Footprints", originally written for Miles Davis. Two violins and the viola took the horn and piano lines against Raphäel Merlin's steady, plucked bass.

The set also featured "Unrequited," a song by contemporary composer/pianist Brad Mehldau that breathed with longing, and a bold, raucous take on the much-covered "Come Together" from The Beatles' Abbey Road. This featured diverse instrumental techniques, from bowed verses to plucked phrases, with a grinding groove of the song's famous riff. 

The Quartet used the same arrangement for "So What" and "All Blues", selections re-arranged from the Miles Davis classic Kind of Blues. Here, the lines of Miles, John Coltrane and Bill Evans were flawlessly rendered, with the odd harmonic foray and re-orchestration representing the alto sax of Cannonball Adderly. 

The Quartet responded to the enthusiastic audience with one encore: an unconventional (and veyr French) take on "Someday my Prince Will Come," written by Frank Churchill for Disney's first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The four members sang the opening and closing verses a capella, returning to their instruments for the central section. The sung final bars ended this concert on a joyous, upbeat note. 

Read the Superconductor interview with the Ebène String Quartet.

Concert Review: No Bears Allowed!

Yale musicians offer "Vocal Britain" at Zankel Hall.

Thanks to the efficient Bear Patrol, William Walton's The Bear was not performed.
Image from The Simpsons © 1996 Gracie Films/20th Century Fox

The Yale in New York music series opened its 2011 New York season on Sunday night with Vocal Britain, a concert featuring rarities from English composers Benjamin Britten and William Walton. The program originally included The Bear, Walton's one-act opera  from 1967. The work was cancelled due to illness, and replaced with the much earlier (and more rare) Façade.

The concert opened with Song for the Lord Mayor's Table a short song cycle by Walton that incorporates medieval rhyme alongside traditional songs and poetry by William Blake. These six poems were sung with energy and clarion tone by mezzo-soprano Janna Baty. The work presented in its original version for piano and voice, with skillful accompaniment by Jill Brunelle.

Ms. Baty brought sardonic resignation to "Wapping Old Stairs," the story of a long relationship and the effect of infidelity upon the doing of laundry. A searching sense of mystery penetrated "Holy Thursday," the Blake poem. "The Contrast" explored the dichotomy of city life with vacations in the country. Ms. Baty pulled out the stops for "Rhyme." In this final poem, her voice rang out even as she evokes the ringing bells of London's church towers.

Chamber musicians from Yale took the stage for the next work, Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. William Purvis played the opening horn solo on a natural horn, and then picked up a valved instrument for the folowing songs. The work moves through a cycle of poems by Charles Cotton, Lord Tennyson, William Blake, Ben Jonson and John Keats, and ends with a final, quiet horn solo played from offstage.

The work was written as a study for Britten's opera Peter Grimes, and explores some of the same bleak emotional territory as that work. Tenor Dann Coakwell took the role of a skilled lieder interpreter, guiding the listener through the work's mood of twilight and disquieting darkness. The final horn part seemed to echo in the emotional void left by the poems, making a powerful, nihilistic statement.

Written in 1922, Façade sets the nonsense poetry of Edith Sitwell in a style that combines singing, sprechgesang and speech. It's a bastard cousin to Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire or Stravinsky's L'histoire de soldat, with deliberately absurd words traded back and forth between narrator John McDonough and Ms. Baty. Although the poetry proved wearing after about five selections, the skilled wind playing from the Yale musicians made this a musical journey worth taking.