Month: May 2010

Seattle Opera premieres Amelia

Nathan Gunn as Paul. Photo by Rozarii Lynch photo.

By R.M. Campbell

During the past 25 years or so of Speight Jenkins’ tenure as general director, Seattle Opera has traveled in many music waters. However, none involved commissioning a work. That absence was rectified this weekend at McCaw Hall with an often compelling and poignant “Amelia.” The climate for new operas has changed considerably since Jenkins took over the reins: then new opera was rarity, now it is common, despite the huge costs (“Amelia” cost $3.6 million) and huge risks of artistic or box office failure.

Jenkins did not go about the task of commissioning an opera with little thought. He began the process in 2002 with a search for a composer. The following year, Daron Aric Hagen was approached as the composer. Hagen suggested the subject of flight. The next year Hagen introduced Jenkins to the poetry of Gardner McFall, and, in 2005, Hagen and McFall began to toss ideas around at Yaddo, the artists’ colony. A story on flight emerges, and Stephen Wadsworth joins the team to create a story based in part on McFall’s own history in which her father, a flight commander in the U.S. Navy, was lost in a training mission, in 1966. A workshop of the complete opera was given in Seattle two years ago.
Continue reading Seattle Opera premieres Amelia

Haptadama comes to a close at Olympic Sculpture Park on Saturday night

Composer/conductor Eric Banks explains Haptadama to a capacity audience Saturday night.

With Haptadama: The Seven Creations of Ancient Persia, Eric Banks unexpectedly challenges audiences to reconsider how they think about opera. It’s not that Banks is dabbling in new forms or means of expression – although he does have a tremendous gift for contemporizing ancient languages and melodies in ways that observe texts, respect original ideas, and avoid kitsch. Banks calls Haptadama a choral opera. However the piece synthesizes opera, song cycles, and sacred music that leads listeners in a number of different directions.

Banks got the idea to write Haptadama after two visits to India. The material for the piece comes from the Persian creation story of the Zorostrians drawn from both the Gathas and Bundahisn. The Gathas, perhaps the oldest written music in history, provide an austere framework for the piece. The Bundahisn, on the other hand, gives the music its mystical quality. The creation story follows a well worn formula. A benevolent creator coexists with evil. The creator creates life and the known world. Evil strikes back causing cataclysm and robbing the world of its innocence. The creator redeems the world by wiping everything out with a cleansing flood.
Continue reading Haptadama comes to a close at Olympic Sculpture Park on Saturday night

Quarter notes: Le Grand


Gyorgy Ligeti supposedly spent the last years of his life worried that when he died no one would remember him or his music. His worries weren’t entirely unjustified. The work of many, many composers has slipped into obscurity. For Ligeti, an artist on the fringes of the musical mainstream, the possibility of anonymity is even more pronounced.

Thank goodness for the NY Philharmonic then, which is preparing a concert performance of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre May 27-29. When the opera hits the concert stage later this month it will be the NY premiere of this 20th Century masterpiece. To prep listeners, the orchestras have released three new videos in their FlipCam series.

Doug Fitch, Le Grand’s director, takes the Phil’s FlipCam camera man (or woman) on a tour of his studio and reveals some of the designs that will be used.

The NY Phil has a number of other videos — non FlipCam — worth investigating too. In this video, Douglas Fitch and Edourad Getaz give an overview of the opera and the project.

In another video (a non FlipCam video) Alan Gilbert shares his own thoughts on Le Grand.

The adventurous can always download (or buy a CD version) of Sony’s EP Salonen led performance of the piece.

Closer to home, don’t forget Seattle Opera’s Amelia which will be unveiled to the concert going public for the first time tonight. Amelia, unlike the photo of Ligeti at the top of this post, is guaranteed not to frighten (that’s my own personal guarantee not Hagen’s or SO’s.) There is lots of good information about the opera (especially J. Dean’s listening guide) over at . If you don’t like to read, here is the final video is SO’s series.

Manze makes his SSO debut

By R.M. Campbell

Early in his distinguished career, Andrew Manze was known as a Baroque violinist. But not any violinist. He brought zeal, ebullience, intelligence and scholarship to everything he touched. Those qualities he brings to the podium, as his Seattle Symphony Orchestra debut testified to this weekend at Benaroya Hall. He has a small orchestra, not quite 30 musicians, all strings. The balance is at McCaw Hall doing its duty with Seattle Opera and the premiere of “Amelia.” In some ways it makes no difference because the English conductor can accomplish what he wants with whatever means he has as his disposal. What one did glimpse were his predilections toward the Baroque era, in which he has spent a good share of his career, and English music.
Continue reading Manze makes his SSO debut

Jordi Savall’s Jerusalem at Lincoln Center

By Gigi Yellen

With his characteristic blend of deep research and virtuosic performance, historical accuracy and jazzlike improvisation, Jordi Savall and his band have created in “Jerusalem: City of Heavenly and Earthly Peace” a mesmerizing and troubling contemporary performance piece. Maestro Savall, esteemed creator of over 160 honored recordings of early music, combines ancient instruments, chants, recitations of sacred texts, folk tunes and even a Sufi dance in this concert (based on his 2008 2-CD set of the same name), which I was privileged to see performed on May 5 as the focus of a three-day “Jerusalem” event at New York’s Lincoln Center. I wanted to share with you some impressions and some thoughts about this most unusual Savall project.

Silhouetted against a huge dawn-like screen, a robed man blows an immensely long, grandly twisted shofar, the flawless opening notes of a fanfare that expands to include half a dozen players of these beautiful ram’s horns and as many players of the equally long, impossibly slender Arabic trumpets called annafirs. The shofar, a wake-up call most associated in our time with synagogue High Holiday services, is played by the Israeli virtuoso Yagel Harel, one of a collection of multi-ethnic players Savall has carefully gathered to demonstrate how historic enemies can melt their differences in the warm light of their musical similarities.
Continue reading Jordi Savall’s Jerusalem at Lincoln Center

Quarter notes

Stephane Deneve

Anne Midgette .  What will the press say about our own local world premiere? We’ll start to find out this weekend.

. He also received with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra — his original post. There were a handful of people who though Deneve might be a suitable music director for Seattle and is scheduled to return to the SSO next season. Does this announcement take him out of the running? Can the SSO still find a suitable replacement? How does the ongoing Philadelphia saga and the nascent search for MD’s in Cincinnati and Indianapolis affect the landscape?

Happy Birthday! with a concert tonight at the Chapel Performance Space. On the bill a new piece by Wayne Horowitz, violist Melia Watras, the Icicle Creek Trio, and the Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet.

Jordi Savall’s Jerusalem seeks to mend cultural fabric

Jordi Savall

By Gigi Yellen

The pre-eminent early-music artist of our time has to be the tireless Jordi Savall, whose combination of scholarship, musicianship, and visionary good will has produced over 150 important recordings. Many of these center on a theme. When this year’s US tour brought Savall and his band, Hesperion XXI, to Seattle (Town Hall, via Early Music Guild) in March, they offered a women-themed program based on their album “Lux Feminae.” Gathering Note’s R.M. Campbell called that concert “a kind of rare adventure.”

New York’s Lincoln Center is hosting Savall and company in another kind of rare adventure, a three-evening series, “Jordi Savall: Jerusalem” part of its Great Performers season. Two of the evenings are concerts based on Savall’s recordings: Sunday May 2, the 2006 album “Orient-Occident,” and Monday, the 2008 2-CD set “Jerusalem: City of Double Peace: Heavenly Peace and Earthly Peace.” It’s my good fortune to be in NY for these, and I want to share with you some of the experience of this series.
Continue reading Jordi Savall’s Jerusalem seeks to mend cultural fabric

Questioning the conductors: Andrew Manze

Andrew Manze

The early music world has known Andrew Manze for years as an accomplished Baroque violinist, but the rest of the classical music world is getting acquainted with Manze as an assured, intelligent conductor working hard to establish a reputation as an interpreter of core 18th and 19th century repertory.  Manze’s recent Beethoven recordings have even been met with praise from David Hurwitz, a period performance skeptic of sorts.

For my interview with Manze yesterday, I was most curious about his view on the limits of historically informed performance practice (HIPP). We talked at length about vibrato, its appropriateness, and HIPP as it relates to 20th Century music. Manze’s concerts this week with the Seattle Symphony juxtapose music by Corelli and Tallis with Tippett, Elgar, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. 3/5 ths of the program was composed in the first half of the last century.

Manze struck me as an artist who lets HIPP guide his work on the podium without dominating it. He readily admits that Elgar wouldn’t sound like Elgar without vibrato and the contends (although not explicitly) that there hasn’t been a time before vibrato and a time after vibrato.

There was one shocking moment in the interview. As we talked about how he inhabits the musical world of the composers he is conducting, Manze admitted (after a question from me) that he doesn’t understand Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and other nationalist composers.

The SSO is split this week and for the next few weeks because of Seattle Opera’s premiere of Amelia.  Even with the smaller forces of the SSO Manze’s insights from the podium and a Baroque influenced program should make for good listening this week.

from on .

MOR commissions Vedem; receives world premiere next week

Composer Lori Laitman

By Peter A. Klein

The poetry of teenaged Jewish boys imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp will be given new life in the oratorio “Vedem,” by composer Lori Laitman and librettist David Mason. “Vedem” will receive its world premiere at Music of Remembrance’s spring concert on Monday evening, May 10 at 8:00 PM in Benaroya Recital Hall.

Laitman believes that these lines of Mason’s express the essence of the piece:

We lived for what we wrote and painted,

as if imagination were a jewel.

Terezín (aka Theresienstadt) is an old Czech fortress town which the Nazis turned into a transit camp during the Holocaust. 144,000 Jews were sent to Terezín, including many from the arts and letters. One-quarter of the prisoners died there, and two-thirds were later killed in the death camps. Yet they created an astounding cultural life in Terezín, which existed right alongside starvation, cold, overcrowding, disease, and death.
Continue reading MOR commissions Vedem; receives world premiere next week

May Day! May Day! part three

May Day! May Day! has come and gone. Thanks to everyone who attended. But I’d also like to thank the musicians who made it possible. The whole day a quote from Robert Spano was ringing through my head “there is no ghetto for new music.” By taking Seattle’s vibrant new music scene and putting it in a venue like Town Hall for 12 hours, I believe we helped the cause of new music. But I also think the performances helped too the cause too.

If you think new music is only noisy and unapproachable then this was the festival for you. It would have definitely changed your view of what constitutes new music in our city.

In my sets, there was the Odeonquartet’s performance of Nat Evans’ Candy Cigarettes. You can hear the piece, as performed on Saturday .

The composer says about the piece:

“One idea I keep coming back to is one particular may day event when I was in elementary school. every year on may day the whole school went out to the front lawn and had lunch, then went to the big field in the back for various events and games. everyone always looked forward to this day because it was a day away from class, and after may 1 you could wear shorts to school! anyway, one particular year, in first grade, Victor Merril — the class bully and general rabble rouser — was overjoyed and ecstatic to discover that he had candy cigarettes in his lunch! I was entranced by them and wanted one, as did everyone else. victor wouldn’t share…but then, just as the whole class was running in a rush out to the field after lunch victor (who was wearing cowboy boots, cut off jeans shorts and had a mohawk) secretly gave me one! I was overjoyed at this sudden act of generosity, and as I went around to the different may day stations out on the field I felt great knowing i’d been acknowledged by the class bully and gotten a candy cigarette.”

Continue reading May Day! May Day! part three