Tasks in hand

A few tasks in hand:

I mentioned recently that I have of late been granted the great pleasure and thrill of working with Giora Feidman. After working on a number of smaller arrangements together, Giora has now given me the even greater honour of asking for a piece for him to perform and record with Vladimir Spivakov and the Moscow Virtuosi (above).

At the same time the delightful Bruce Levingston has commisisoned a new piano piece which he will premiere in New York some time next season.

As if that weren't more than enough, I'm still fighting with libretti, and hope to have more news on the development of a new chamber opera fairly soon...

Tattered rags

Having been through several opera ideas recently before eventually discarding them, the process seems to be something along these lines:

1. Take a large old black tattered rag.
2. Your opera subject is hidden behind it. You can make out little details here and there.
3. You must stare at the rag with an enormous intensity and try to get it to catch fire.
4. If you're lucky, and after an awful lot of intense staring, little fragments of the cloth burn away. If you're really lucky, eventually the whole thing catches fire, the tattered rag burns away completely and the whole opera subject lies before you, view unhindered.
5. If you're not so lucky, however hard you stare the holes just glow red, a brief puff of smoke, and out. The holes don't get any larger, the opera as inaccessible as before, despite all your efforts. Eventually you realise this rag ain't gonna to light. You are forced to abandon it.

Golden Gumboots

The Golden Gumboot in Tully, Australia

I just heard from Lachlan O'Donnell from the Strahlend Quintet who have just finished their tour of regional Queensland where they were performing Gumboots. The final concert of the tour threw up a rather fantastic coincidence, as Lachlan relates:



I'm delighted performances of Gumboots have taken off in recent months. There is a further performance by Chroma here in the UK in December, the Ensemble ACJW performances at Carneige in February and an exciting one brewing in Belgium, of which hopefully more soon.

Mr Adams, I presume

I've always enjoyed a heavy musicological discussion. I even, in my day, used to write some fairly heavy-duty articles for the Musical Times; but after a while you begin to question whether it all matters. If nobody listens to contemporary music anyway, what's the point of arguing endlessly over the finer details? One contemporary composer people do listen to a lot is John Adams, and Adams has, much to everyone's surprise (does the guy really have any time on his hands?) he has started a blog.

So in a post discussing Adorno, Adams talks about what he calls an 'Empty Form' - a form in which elements that have an 'intentionality' create an 'intentionless' whole. He counts Mahler as an exponent of such forms.

Adams then also sings the praises of these forms: "but those exhausted, shattered empty forms still exalt, can still conceal and contain a lot"

Now I think I get the idea of elements that have an 'intentionality' creating an 'intentionless' whole - isn't Adams really talking here about music that makes a kind of sense moment to moment - as his music always does - but that does not have an overall form that makes a grand 'summing-up' kind of statement. Indeed, I once wrote about this idea in the Musical Times in connection to Birtwistle's music, and in connection with Maxwell Davies's statement that music could no longer have a "unifying confidence of outlook" found in earlier periods of music, because this would be "inimical to contemporary experience" (quotes from Paul Griffiths's book on Max).

If that is roughly where Adams is coming from I can understand it. Indeed, thinking about it again here, I can see Max's statement in a more positive light than I did 10 years ago. I took it originally to be a rather pessimistic and patronising position that 'because modern times are so tough, we can't possibly have an optimistic, visionary unity', but now I can see you could take it as 'because contemporary life in general is so fast-paced and so much more diverse and fragmented, then you can't expect art not to be those things either' - which makes total sense. Ahh, the navel-gazing value of blogging!

However, what makes me question whether I really get Adams' premise at all is his further points - firstly, are Mahler's forms really 'intentionless' as Adams seems to suggest? Meandering maybe, but surely highly 'subjective'; and 'intended'; and trying to make a ballsy, unifying statement if ever I heard someone trying to do that. And then when Adams talks about an 'exhausted, shattered' form - what are we talking about? Surely it is the classical, traditional forms that are 'exhausted, shattered', surely an 'intentionless' form is forever fresh and new because it is always chaotic and ...unintended???

Well, like I say, I love trying to get my teeth into these matters, and to be honest it's rare enough to find someone, like Adams, who is interesting enough to want to even engage in these kinds of questions with. So, yes, please keep up the blogging Mr Adams, and good to bump in to you here out in the jungle!

Giora

Some time back in the mid 90s I got hold of a CD that changed my view of what a clarinet - and indeed music itself - was capable of. This was the klezmer clarinet music of Giora Feidman, and these sounds - the shrieking, the wailing, the laughing, and a pianissimo of extreme serenity - have reverberated through my compositional style ever since. Indeed, I fashioned the blaring opening of my mini-opera 'Seven Tons of Dung' (I knew how to title a piece in those days) after a particular moment on the CD, without at that point realising that Giora had himself been imitating the Shofar, the traditional ram horn used in Jewish religious ceremonies.

So it was hard to beleive, 15 years later, when Giora himself got in touch with me, after hearing some of my music, and invited me to work with him on some projects, kicking off by making some arrangements for a forthcoming recording project. It's a tremendous honour for me, and quite surreal to be on the end of the phone to Tel Aviv with one of my musical idols, who seems only capable of speaking words of tremendous wisdom.

Centers of gravity

Dawn Upshaw, Bridget Kibbey and Avi Avital in the premiere of 'The North Wind was a Woman'

What a wonderful world-premiere of The North Wind was a Woman on Wednesday evening at the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Centre. We had a great reaction from the audience, which CMS director and cellist-extraordinaire David Finckel kindly describes on his blog:



The New York Times also praised the work, calling it the center of gravity for the evening, and describing it as 'fresh' and 'striking'. I was particularly happy that my dear friend and collaborator Avi Avital was singled out for much deserved praise of his 'exquisitely sensitive playing'. Bravo Avi!


Alex Fiterstein and Todd Palmer, who play a bass clarinet duet
in the opening of 'The North Wind was a Woman'



With Mandolinist Avi Avital after the performance.

A warm welcome from Alice

Tomorrow night is a very special night for me. My new piece The North Wind was a Woman will be premiered at the Gala opening of the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Center.

Special for the sheer quality, beauty and warmth of the singing, playing and atmosphere. It's a beautiful hall and a beautiful occasion. Sometimes you can't help feeling incredibly lucky...

A climactic Push!

In this month's Spectator magazine, Michael Tanner's subject is the new 'Grimeborn' festival in Dalston, Cumbria. But he starts by reminiscing over a decade of similar chamber opera ventures, and Tête à Tête's role at the forefront of that movement. Tanner then writes



It's a pleasant surprise to get a good review when the topic of the review in question isn't even your piece. It makes you feel like they must really mean it!

[>> read more about Push! here]

Gumboots in Queensland

More details here of one of the Strahlend Quintet's performances of Gumboots in Nambour, a short hop up the sunshine coast from Brisbaine on 16th Oct.

They are touring as 2009 winners of Queensland Arts Council’s Gertrude Langer Ensemble Award, which each year sends a talented young ensemble on a debut Queensland tour.

Other dates on the Queensland tour are up on my Calendar page

Dawn in Hyde Park

Dawn Upshaw was in town at the end of August for her Prom concert with the Tonhalle orchestra from Zurich (who impressed me tremendously). The day before we took the opportunity to do some publicity shots ahead of our concert at the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Center on 23rd Sept. The photos were done by Neil Matthews. Here are a couple of the best:




and then there's the cutest one :