Dawn Upshaw and members of Ensemble ACJW yesterday
Some colorful reviews of yesterday's concert at Carnegie's Zankel hall, which was a riot, and a wonderful celebration of Dawn Upshaw's incredible range and versitility. The performance of Piosenki was spectacular all-round, Evan Hughes joined Dawn and ensemble ACJW, with the wonderful Steve Prutsman conducting. But the lagerphone also rightfully received plenty of the attention:
David Bruce incorporates his lagerphone into the final section of his vivacious song cycle “Piosenki” (in Polish, popular songs), which concluded the program and was its highlight.
Mr. Bruce’s lagerphone, a percussion instrument in the shape of a long stick, is covered with bottle tops (hence the “lager”) and other metal noisemakers and decorated with colorful streamers. When pounded on the floor, it produces a jingly sound akin to a tambourine’s but louder. The rest of the colorful score evokes Polish folk music and Slavic wedding bands with klezmer clarinet tunes, zesty piccolo riffs, syncopated rhythms and energetic fiddling. The audience laughed at the musical flatulence of “Smelly,” the fourth verse.
In the final Polish song of this ecstatic recital ... bass-baritone Evan Hughes picked up a four-foot-long thick stick decorated with bells, and stomped it repeatedly on the floor or dangled it with the bells jingling. And as he and Dawn Upshaw sung, the untranslatable words (Trumf, Trumf! Misia Bela!!) and the entire chamber orchestra wailed and trilled and the klezmer clarinet warbled and the drums drummed, not only this scrivener but everybody in the packed Zankel Auditorium wanted to thump and jingle along with Mr. Hughes and the now foot-stamping orchestra.
Piosenki has a further performance with Dawn Upshaw, Baritone Evan Hughes and Ensemble ACJW at Carnegie's Zankel Hall this Sunday. It's Piosenki's third performance at Carnegie in little over 18 months, which is obviously quite a treat and an honour for me. Also on the program, some gorgeous Dowland arrangements by Stephen Prutsman, Golijov's equally gorgeous Lua Descolorida, and the new piece Treny by Michael Ward-Bergeman, which I talk about here.
My opera A Bird in Your Ear has just been selected as one of three finalists of the National Opera Association's Chamber Opera Competition. Extracts the opera will be performed at NOA workshops in Arlington, Virginia in January, and one of the three finalists will go on to a full production the following year.
A Bird in Your Ear is a 60 minute opera with a fantastic libretto by Alasdair Middleton (whose work includes Jonathon Dove's Pinnochio, soon to have a new production at Minnesota Opera). It was commissioned at Dawn Upshaw's behest by Bard College, NY, for the inaugural production by Upshaw's students on the Graduate Vocal Arts Course at Bard. The forces used are manageable for a small opera company or university establishment (Bard draughted in a few extra instrumentalists, but the vast majority of the orchestra were undergrads, and the choir was non-music majors, so would be manageable by any amateur choir). The 8 solo parts (5 sop, mez, ten, bar) are more challenging but have a range of vocal styles and each singer is given a moment to shine in performance.
Pictured above with Dawn Upshaw, baritone Evan Hughes, and my friend the lagerphone, after the 2 performances of Piosenki with the St Paul Chamber Orchestra. Sadly Dawn caught a cold and had to stand out of the second concert, but Evan did an incredible job of learning the Polish tongue-twisters in a matter of hours, and earned a standing ovation for it. We're all now really looking forward to the next performance in Carnegie's Zankel Hall on November 2nd. Details here
Something I've always been drawn to in music - I admit in a slightly geeky way - are rhythmic patterns that appear to be have the downbeat in one place, when it is actually somewhere else entirely. In both the following examples, it appears clear where the downbeat is, but once the full ensemble kicks in you realise it is somewhere completely different. It's just a bit of fun, but for some reason I can go back to these examples and enjoy them again and again.
The first is from the Brand New Heavies self-titled album, and is called simply BNH. Here the downbeat clearly seems to be on the first of the bass drum notes, whereas it's actually on the last. A little game to try is to beat 4 in time with either of these 'downbeats' and try to continue throughout - very difficult!
Many years ago, I took this example to one of George Benjamin's all-day-Sunday classes (at RCM), he listened with interest, then after sampling the rest of the album he said "It's not uninteresting harmonically". Well all then fell about laughing that this would make a great quote on the album cover from an esteemed professor of the Royal College of Music.
The second is from a great album I stumbled across earlier this year from Orchestre Baka de Gbine recorded when members of the group Baka Beyond recorded an album with the Baka on a mobile solar-powered studio in the rainforests of Cameroon. The entry of the bass drum in this throws me every time (this rhythm, incidentally, inspired the final dance in my piece Gumboots). Gloriously, this song is called 'Boulez Boulez' - I'd love to know the translation, which I suspect is probably not a double homage to the composer of Le Marteau sans Maitre, nor an invitation to play the favourite French pass-time.
Lagerphones to the ready! - October brings some of the most exciting performances of my career to date, kicking off in Minnesota with two performances of Piosenki by Dawn Upshaw and the St Paul Chamber Orchestra. Dawn is one of five artistic partners the orchestra has, and here she has put together a great program featuring folk-inspired music from around the world. The exciting young singer Evan Hughes takes the baritone role, and indeed doubles on lagerphone.
Dawn is of course, no stranger to the charms and difficulties of the Polish language, having sung on the million-selling recording of Gorecki's Third Symphony, and also being the dedicatee of Lutoslawski's charming Chantefleurs et Chantefables (*). It's a great honour for me to have her singing my music, especially in what- as you can see below- looks to be pretty spectacular venue (the Ordway Center,MN):
(*) Update There are two major errors with the crossed-out statement. 1) As can easily be inferred from its title, Lutoslawski's Chantefleurs et Chantefables is not actually in Polish. 2) Dawn tells me she wasn't the dedicatee of the piece. Oops.
Lewis Hyde's book The Gift is one of the most beautiful and thought-provoking books I have read in a long time. In essence it talks about gifts and gift economies and how they function as compared to purchasing and market economies. A gift is something that encourages community between giver and receiver, whereas a purchase is faceless and requires no community. This partly explains how as our Western societies grow more and more focussed on buying and selling as the primary means of transaction, our communities grow more and more fragmented. Hyde then uses this distinction to define a view of the Arts as essentially part of the 'gift economy', and that the fact that artists find it hard to make money from their work, will often be a sign of the healthiness of the art - the more commercial an art becomes, the harder it is for it to retain its soul, its essence.
What I find particularly attractive about the book is that Hyde doesn't really take a strong political stance, he's not moralising (although he does in an afterword attack the 'corporate theft' of public domain by the continual extension of copyright laws), he's rather trying to define Art in the modern world. It's a subtle task, and one to which my summary here will do no justice. But there's such beauty and depth in his writing, it somehow completely transforms your understanding of the world.
