Last updated July 1, 2011
MUSIC REVIEW
By ZACHARY WOOLFE
Published: June 3, 2011, the New York Times
You know an ensemble is doing something right when it's 40 years old and almost everything it plays is younger than itself.
Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times André Emelianoff of Da Capo Chamber Players played a piece dedicated to him at Merkin Concert Hall on Thursday.
To celebrate four decades of distinguished commitment to contemporary music, the Da Capo Chamber Players brought to Merkin Concert Hall on Thursday works close to their history, written by composers they have been collaborating with for years.
They performed two works by Joan Tower, one of the group's founders and its pianist for 15 years. "And ...They're Off" (1997), played by Da Capo's violinist, Curtis Macomber, and its current pianist, Blair McMillen, alongside the guest cellist Jeremiah Campbell, flew by in washes of 16th notes, alternately quivering and flowing.
Ms. Tower's "Très Lent (Hommage à Messiaen)" (1994) was written in honor of one of the group's signature pieces, Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," and dedicated to its cellist, André Emelianoff. It unfolds in glacially elegiac phrases that recall Arvo Part, its slow progressions both unexpected and deeply satisfying, and Mr. McMillen and Mr. Emelianoff played it with focus and rich tone.
Mr. Macomber, Mr. McMillen and Mr. Campbell were joined by the group's brilliant flutist, Patricia Spencer, and its eloquent clarinetist, Meighan Stoops, for a performance of Keith Fitch's lilting, twinkling "Midnight Rounds," which the group introduced in Cleveland last fall.
It would not have been a Da Capo celebration without a world premiere, this time George Tsontakis's "Gravity," featuring the core quintet in three easygoing short movements. The second, "Levity," featured rhythmic foot-tapping from the players and an energy that evoked Leonard Bernstein, particularly after the gentle, almost homespun charm of the opening "Moon's Shadow."
The only work older than 40 was another Da Capo signature, Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire," which closed the program and whose centennial is next year. It is one of the defining works of modern music, its influence so vast — there wasn't a piece on Thursday's program untouched by it — that it can seem dated and surprisingly underwhelming itself. The group's performance was impeccably tight and evocative, with a sensitive performance from the veteran new-music soprano Lucy Shelton, but it's now a work that you want to admire from afar rather than hear every day.
The concert opened with "Die Laterne," which Ursula Mamlok wrote in 1988 to one of the Albert Giraud "Pierrot" poems not set by Schoenberg. With its jagged dotted rhythms and Expressionist vocal writing it recalled the master's work a bit too closely. But Ms. Shelton and the virtuosic Da Capo players, who introduced "Die Laterne" back in 1989, brought to it their customary passion and even love. As Ms. Tower said of her old group from the stage after intermission: "They don't do it for the money, and they don't do it for fame. They do it because they love it."
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Mamlok , Fitch, Tower, Tsontakis, Schoenberg: Lucy Shelton (soprano), Jeremiah Campbell (cello), Da Capo Chamber Players, Merkin Concert Hall, 2.6.2011 (BH)
Marking four decades of work including over 100 commissions, the Da Capo Chamber Players celebrated that milestone with a prototypical mix of new works and greatest hits, ending with an early 20th-century landmark that they do about as well as anyone, anywhere. Joan Tower, one of the group's founders, was on hand for some funny, self-effacing remarks, before the players offered Ursula Mamlok's Die Laterne, commissioned by UCLA's Schoenberg Institute. Mamlok uses one of the texts (No. 44) by Albert Giraud not set by Schoenberg in Pierrot Lunaire, and although composed over 75 years later, it is as crisp and exacting as its inspiration, flooded with color. With the Da Capo players clearly needing no warm-up, soprano Lucy Shelton, widely acclaimed for her interpretation of Pierrot over the years, gave a reading that only whetted the appetite for the latter half of the program.
Keith Fitch, head of composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music, wrote Midnight Rounds for the ensemble when they appeared there in the fall of 2010. Among its technical demands: pianist Blair McMillen effortlessly navigated a piano part with his left hand while fingering a celesta with his right. With the superb Jeremiah Campbell as guest cellist, sparkling ensemble passages alternated with paragraphs of thundering violence, and the composer was on hand to acknowledge the appreciative response. Ms. Tower was represented by two strong works, starting with And…They're Off! for violin, cello and piano, with violinist Curtis Macomber, Mr. Campbell and Mr. McMillen stirring up a small tornado. And later in the program, Da Capo's veteran cellist André Emilianoff joined McMillen for the stirring Très lent (Hommage à Messiaen), a moody homage to the composer's Quartet for the End of Time.
George Tsontakis lives in New York's Catskill Mountains and is currently in residence with the Albany Symphony. He wrote his appealing Gravity as a tribute to Mr. Emilianoff, in three movements: "Moon's Shadow" has echoes of Debussy, "Levity" is highly syncopated with some literal toe-tapping near the end, and "Light in Night's Garden" revels in trills and glissandi before bits of the first section reappear. Tsontakis was also present for another warm audience response.
I first heard Ms. Shelton in Pierrot Lunaire back in 2005 on another Da Capo concert – a 90th birthday tribute to the late George Perle. At that time, she performed in front of a small Pierrot doll, but one mark of a great artist is the ability to do something completely different in subsequent interpretations. Here she settled into a large chair in the middle of the ensemble, getting comfortable as if she were someone's kindly aunt, preparing to relate a beloved children's story. As she sat down and looked at her colleagues, one might have been expecting The Story of Babar. But Giraud's still-shocking verses are anything but what one might want to read before bedtime, stocked with blood and gruesome hallucinations.
The brilliance of Ms. Shelton is that she calls upon a huge array of vocal techniques: in one section, "The Sick Moon," she emitted what could best be described as a hoarse croak. Other times were more playful, filled with rapid chatter or childlike tittering – but the child is smoking tobacco from a skull. Another moment she seemed hypnotized, with a beatific look – but she's enraptured by a beheading. Coupled with the dazzlingly alert instrumental work from the five musicians – including Patricia Spencer on flute and Meighan Stoops on clarinet, both astounding – the result was a disturbing, claustrophobic voyage, with Ms. Shelton as the uncomfortably weird guide. The large audience, clearly moved, brought out the performers over and over for a loudly shouted, highly apropos ovation.
Bruce Hodges
Published: Friday, October 29, 2010
Donald Rosenberg, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland
The New York-based Da Capo Chamber Players gave a concert Thursday at the Cleveland Institute of Music. The members, clockwise from left, are clarinetist Meighan Stoops, cellist Andre Emelianoff, pianist Blair McMillen, flutist Patricia Spencer and violinist Curtis Macomber.
No ensemble has been more devoted to championing works by living composers than the Da Capo Chamber Players. Now in its 40th anniversary season, the New York-based quintet continues to take audiences on intriguing sonic journeys.
The crackerjack Da Capo musicians did so again Thursday at the Cleveland Institute of Music's Mixon Hall, where they wound up a joint residency at CIM and Cleveland State University with a concert of works by composers from those schools and other notable new-music figures.
Da Capo flutist Patricia Spencer made it a point to thank CIM composition head Keith Fitch and CSU faculty member Greg D'Alessio for the works they wrote for the ensemble that received world premieres on this occasion.
Both pieces are splendid creations likely to gain favor with ensembles and listeners alike. Fitch's "Midnight Rounds" explores a spectrum of glistening instrumental colors as the players share and transform a wistful theme introduced by the clarinet.
Moments of stillness give way to eruptive gestures and cloudy harmonies. The keyboardist (Da Capo's intrepid Blair McMillen) occasionally plays piano and celesta at the same time. In its haunting fusion of materials and textures, the work casts an otherworldly spell.
D'Alessio's "Al Segno" barely raises its voice as the ensemble ventures through idyllic territory, with hushed flutterings melded seamlessly with unison passages and long, yearning lines. An ardent violin solo (vibrantly shaped by Curtis Macomber) leads to an ending of delicate beauty.
The concert's third local entry was Two Pieces for Violin and Piano, a 1993 work by CSU composition head Andrew Rindfleisch, that travels between spiky interplay and mournful reflection. The violin's G-string is tuned down a half-step, affording an alternate range of resonant possibilities, with the piano often going to the extremes of its range.
The "oldest" score on the program, from 1962, includes the most ancient music, from the 15th-century. In "Bearbeitungen ueber Das Glogauer Liederbuch," Charles Wuorinen puts a distinctive sonic spin on six miniatures, which keep the players – Spencer, Macomber, clarinetist Meighan Stoops and cellist Andre Emelianoff – in piquant and buoyant motion.
The two movements in Samuel Zyman's "Musica para cinco" fluctuate between swinging riffs and romantic dreaminess, showing deep affection for the past while also cooking spicily in the present.
The musicians ended the evening with Marc Mellits' "Spam," which manages to echo fragments without any sense of repetitive monotony. It's a skittish charmer, full of motoric life and winsome personality. Such infectious "Spam" should never be deleted.
© 2010 cleveland.com. All rights reserved.
MUSIC REVIEW
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
The New York Times, June 3, 2010
Stefan Cohen for The New York Times
The Da Capo Chamber Players, including the clarinetist Meighan Stoops, were joined by the soprano Lucy Shelton at Merkin Concert Hall on Wednesday.
Music inspired by night and sleep and the discontinuity between the two formed the backbone of "Illuminating Darkness," a program by the Da Capo Chamber Players at Merkin Concert Hall on Wednesday evening.
The concert, conceived around Donald Martino's "Notturno" (1973), opened with the premiere of the ensemble version of Daniel Felsenfeld's "Insomnia Redux; 4 a.m." Originally written as a piano solo, the work reflects Mr. Felsenfeld's longstanding battle with insomnia and his emotional response to the fraught moments when sleep seems possible but then escapes again. The richly hued work, for Da Capo's core formation of piano, violin, cello, flute and clarinet, colorfully traversed insistent, frantic and introspective moods.
Blair McMillen, the ensemble's pianist, then offered an elegant rendition of William Bolcom's "Graceful Ghost Rag" (1970), a gracious exploration of ragtime rhythms written in memory of Mr. Bolcom's father.
The Da Capo players were joined by the soprano Lucy Shelton for the premiere of Four Nocturnes from Carl Schimmel's "Oblivion Ha-Ha," a setting of poems by James Tate. Vivid word painting and a dramatic vocal line complemented the surrealist texts, sung with conviction by Ms. Shelton.
"The Sleeper," the third song in the cycle, was particularly effective. Singer and ensemble frantically mirrored the final section of the poem:
His house is floating, gasping, exploding
under the ocean of his children
who flee on insane ladders
into the dark university.
Mr. McMillen and Meighan Stoops, Da Capo's clarinetist, gave the premiere of "Out Standing" by David Claman. Not particularly memorable, it uses simple piano chords and a soulful bass clarinet line to evoke the song "Outstanding" by the Gap Band, an American funk group.
George Crumb used excerpts from "The Sleeper," by Edgar Allan Poe, for his song of the same name. Its soft, spare textures — including plucked piano strings, bell-like harmonics and whispered vocal lines — were evocatively conveyed by Mr. McMillen and Ms. Shelton.
The two musicians barely paused before performing three English lute songs by John Dowland, whose melancholy, introverted mood, graciously rendered here, seemed a natural continuation of the Crumb. In a witty touch after the concluding verse, Mr. McMillen plucked a piano string, which suggested a lute.
The piano strings were also used during Mr. Martino's "Notturno," which concluded the concert. The percussionist Matthew Gold joined the ensemble, which was conducted by Michael Adelson. While the piece, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, felt long overall, the dramatically shifting nocturnal moods provided intriguing moments.
By ALLAN KOZINN
The New York Times, September 16, 2008
With Elliott Carter's centenary getting all the attention, the large and estimable group of American composers turning 70 this year — the "generation of '38," as it is being called — has to scramble for a share of the spotlight. But through a fluke of scheduling, the Carter festivities are on hiatus this month, leaving the field free for Joan Tower, whose 70th birthday was on Sept. 6. On that day Merkin Concert Hall opened its season with a Tower tribute. And on Monday, at the same hall, the Da Capo Chamber Players extended their felicitations as well.
Da Capo has an unusually close connection with Ms. Tower: she was the group's pianist for its first 15 seasons. So you might have expected it to devote a program fully to her music. Not so. Only two of the seven works the ensemble played were Ms. Tower's. Two others were by her friends Chen Yi and Tania León, and two were by young composers who had studied with Ms. Tower, Sergei Tcherepnin and Conor Brown. The seventh — actually the first, in order of appearance — was a graceful, energetic curtain-raiser, "Short Fanfare for an Uncommon Composer" (2008), by the group's flutist, Patricia Spencer.
A quality all the works shared, however different the composers' styles, was a sense of inexorable growth from a simple idea to a complex texture within a single-movement form. Ms. Tower's "Trio Cavany" (2007) begins with a melancholy violin theme that is passed to the cello and, in a more elaborate form, the piano, before the solo strands coalesce in a rich, acerbic texture that becomes denser, more tense and more overtly virtuosic without sacrificing its initial gravity.
"Noon Dance" (1982) is from another world. Here, too, virtuosity is crucial, but it is of a more playful kind: much of the work's action emerges from trills that expand into finely detailed melodic lines. And its scoring, for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion (vibraphone and xylophone), gives it a brighter, flightier palette of timbres.
Ms. Chen's evocative "Happy Rain on a Spring Night" (2004) evolves slowly from a delicate blur — the musical equivalent of magical realism — to a hefty, shimmering structure with a vehemence that seems odd, given the cheerful title. "Alma" (2007), Ms. León's contribution, is a more consistently light-spirited but technically demanding work for flute and piano. Ms. Spencer negotiated its swirling figures and multiphonics deftly.
The works by Ms. Tower's students were from a different, if tangential, universe, and they put the generational shift in high relief. But they also had little in common. Mr. Tcherepnin's pleasantly consonant "Regenerations" (2008) is laconic and at times meandering. It stands in stark contrast to Mr. Brown's "Cloud Forest" (2008), in which currents of Turkish and Latin American folk music yield a zesty, off-kilter march that crops up throughout the piece like the ritornello of a Baroque rondo. Maybe Mr. Tcherepnin and Mr. Brown should trade work titles.
The New York Times
June 7, 2008
By ALLAN KOZINN
New-music groups almost always include a premiere or two on their programs, but reviving works that have been set aside is important too. For the closing program of its 37th season, on Thursday evening at Merkin Concert Hall, the Da Capo Chamber Players resisted the lure of the new and revisited seven substantial works by five composers.
A few, in truth, had already found an afterlife. Luciano Berio's "Sequenza I," for example, is a staple of the solo flute repertory. But this is the work's 50th anniversary; surely it deserved the passionate, warm-blooded performance that Patricia Spencer gave it. And "Sequenza VIII" (1976), for violin, is not played as much as it should be. Curtis Macomber negotiated its intricate textures — juxtapositions of the jagged and the silken, and pianissimo double-stopped trilling punctuated by sharp-edged fortissimo chords — with a thrilling virtuosity.
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Mario Davidovsky's "Synchronisms" for instruments and electronic sound are famous but rarely heard. In "Synchronisms No. 2" (1964), the taped and live string and woodwind lines begin in parallel universes but eventually move toward common ground. "Synchronisms No. 12" (2006) works similarly, setting a solo clarinet against an electronic texture built of sampled (and heavily processed) clarinet tones. Meighan Stoops, in her vibrant, richly shaded performance, began by weaving her line through the recorded sounds as if through an obstacle course, and eventually used overblowing and other extended techniques to match the electronic timbres.
The main attraction of Chinary Ung's "Spiral I" (1987), scored for cello, piano and percussion, is the seamlessness with which it blends contemporary Western harmonic conventions and Asian melodic influences. Asian timbres are approximated as well, with the cello line, played by André Emelianoff, sometimes sliding between pitches. Elsewhere, Blair McMillen, the pianist, and Matthew Gold, the percussionist, played tandem lines with an otherworldly shimmer.
Sebastian Currier's substantial "Static" (2003) toyed with the dual meaning of its title, with sustained, hazy chords that represented both stasis and white noise (as in radio static) as a starting point. But mostly the work escaped both definitions: its woodwind, string and piano writing was fleet, imaginative and at times arrestingly beautiful.
"Rotae Passionis" (1983), an early Christopher Rouse score, closed the program on an electrifying if devotionally somber note. A 25-minute textless passion play, the piece uses violent wallops of percussion, wailing string and woodwind lines and dissonant piano writing to describe the final days of Jesus, from Gethsemane to the tomb, ending in a meditative pianissimo movement.
Mr. Rouse was barely known when he wrote this score, but his talent for orchestrational vividness was already fully developed. The performance, conducted by Paul Hostetter, could not have been more gripping.
The New York Times
November 23, 2006
By ALLAN KOZINN
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Of the new works Mr. Pritsker's "Self Laceration" (2006) was the most immediately striking, its off-putting title notwithstanding. It begins with a rhythmically insistent, irresistibly zesty movement in which the focus moves briskly around the ensemble. The clarinet, violin, cello, flute and piano each have exposed lines that capture the character of the instrument and create a lively dialogue. The individual instruments speak in distinct, idiomatic voices.
Mr. Chasalow's Flute Concerto (2005) packs a lot of ideas into 15 minutes. Its movement titles -- "Flight and Confusion," "Eggshell, More Like a Heart" and "Feather, Breath, Mirror" -- look impressionistically vague on paper, but Mr. Chasalow's appealingly symmetrical writing evokes them in a painterly way, by making vibrant, sharply articulated textures morph into stretches of wispy lyricism and back. Patricia Spencer played the solo line with a deft command of both technique and timbre.
Mr. Carter's "Conversation Piece" (2006) is based on his chamber opera, "The Sister," and has a decidedly operatic quality: as in Mr. Pritsker's work, the instruments suggest specific, sharply drawn characters in a fluid drama, and their lines have the angular, anxious quality of contemporary vocal writing. The players also make fragmentary spoken contributions, and if they offer only the barest glimpse into the missing libretto, the real action is in the shapely instrumental dialogues.
All three new works drew on a rigorous harmonic and rhythmic language, tempered by a lyrical eclecticism that rounded off the potentially harsh edges, and gave the pieces a direct appeal. The older scores worked similarly, with the exception of Philip Glass's "Modern Love Waltz" (1980), which burbled along pleasantly in Mr. Glass's consonant style, in an ensemble arrangement by Robert Moran. Philippe Bodin's "Peal" (2000) opened the program with an explosion of brash timbres and insistent rhythms that gradually melted into softer textures. And Stephen Jaffe's three-movement "Nonesuch Serenade" (1984), an essay in constant textural shifting, prefigured the essentially vocal style of Mr. Carter's score.
Besides Ms. Spencer, the group's superb players are Meighan Stoops, clarinetist; David Bowlin, violinist; André Emelianoff, cellist; and Blair McMillen, pianist. In Mr. Chasalow's work Michael Adelson conducted, and Thomas Kolor was the percussionist.
The New York Times,
June 8, 2006
"Ears to the East" was the title of the Da Capo Chamber Players' final program of their 35th season, played on Tuesday night at Merkin Concert Hall. The six pieces on the program were all written by Asian composers except for Evan Ziporyn's solo work for bass clarinet, "Tsmindao Ghmerto," which was influenced by folk traditions of Eurasia (specifically Georgian religious vocal music, which Mr. Ziporyn evoked by having the performer, here Meighan Stoops, sing as she played, creating slightly otherworldly harmonies).
Thirty-five years ago this kind of program would have been exclusively the province of a small contemporary music group like Da Capo. But today music with non Western influences in general, and by Asian composers specifically, has become a part of classical music's mainstream. Next season world premieres by Tan Dun at the Metropolitan Opera and Unsuk Chin at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich are scheduled, while Bright Sheng, Chen Yi, Zhou Long and Chinary Ung, whose "Spiral VI" wound and unwound in bursts of music to open Tuesday's program, are by now familiar presences on the music scene.
Tuesday, moved from musical outbursts to a spoken Chinese poem. It doesn't detract at all from Da Capo's thematic program to say that it's nice to realize that non - Western composers and music no longer have to be lumped together to be heard.
Da Capo certainly made the music sound as if it were worth hearing. Although the group has been performing since 1970, and some of its veterans, like the cellist André Emilianoff, were firm anchors of this evening, it is clearly open to new blood.
Blair McMillen, a young pianist and a strong presence in all but one of the pieces, made the most of Akemi Naito's "Rain, Calling Autumn," a rather slender work for solo piano that would have tended toward self -conscious self-expression had Mr. McMillen not done everything in his power to bring it to deeper life. (A wonderful effect was the introduction of a coin under a string of the piano for the final movement, creating a gong effect that was like a duet with the regular notes.
The showpiece of the evening was the 100th composition commissioned by Da Capo since its inception: "Phoolan Devi Songs" by Shirish Korde, three excerpts from an opera-in-progress about Ms. Devi, the Indian "Bandit Queen" and legislator who was assassinated in 2001.
This is a colorful, attractive piece, set on a lush, gaudy bed of amplification, aiming at an entertaining stylistic fusion; it will perhaps take a more charismatic singer than the game Alexandra Montano to pull off the lead role, defiantly non-Western in its vocal writing. The highlight was the tabla playing of Samir Chatterjee in the final scene, which stood out from the other instruments with the kind of vivid, exciting performance that draws Western composers to non-Western music in the first place.
from Seen and Heard International
Eric Moe: Hey Mr. Drummachine Man (2004)
Philippe Hurel: Pour Luigi (1994)
Derek Bermel: Language Instruction (2003)
Gene Pritsker: Sorrow, Like Pleasure, Creates Its Own Atmosphere (2003)
Kyle Gann: The Day Revisited (2005)
Martin Bresnick: Bird As Prophet (1999)
Michael Gordon: ac dc (1996)
Patricia Spencer, flute
Meighan Stoops, clarinet
David Bowlin, violin
André Emilianoff, cello
Blair McMillen, piano
Dennis DeSantis, dj
Kyle Gann, keyboard
Bernard Gann, electric bass
Matthew Cody, conductor
With an electronic "pseudo-canned drumbeat" as anchor, Eric Moe's Hey Mr. Drummachine Man offered pianist Blair McMillen the chance to show his considerable chops as well as his sense of humor. The slightly cheesy beat jumps right in, then continues inexorably as the pianist rides above it -- sort of "Bartók meets techno" (as well as 1970s television, it turns out, with a canny reference to the theme music from The Phil Donahue Show). If it wasn't an exercise in profundity, it slyly set the tone for the Da Capo Chamber Players' excursion into some repertoire they don't usually encounter.
Changing the mood completely, the insightful conductor Matthew Cody guided the ensemble in Philippe Hurel's Pour Luigi, with echoes of Andriessen and Messiaen in its chords often separated by silence. Hurel has professed an interest in combining jazz and funk rhythms with harmonies achieved through spectral techniques, and this intriguing piece is perhaps the apotheosis of this exploration. Da Capo produced lush, mouth-watering textures, all deftly coordinated by Mr. Cody in one of the highlights of the evening.
The first half concluded with Derek Bermel's entertainingly goofy Language Instruction, with nimble stage direction by David Cote. Bermel is an outstanding clarinetist who often writes with a theatrical bent, and some of his works, to be effective, require much more than merely learning the scores. Inspired by his experience with Portuguese language tapes, Bermel has constructed a mini-drama in which the clarinet -- the versatile Meighan Stoops -- tries to "teach" phrases to the rest of the players. As Ms. Stoops "explained" a glissando figure to the other musicians, some were able to mimic it immediately, but Mr. McMillen responded with puzzlement, since the piano can't really duplicate the woodwind timbre. One could draw many conclusions from the humorous chaos that ensued, but perhaps Mr. Bermel is commenting on the rehearsal process itself.
Gene Pritsker's title is from Balzac's novel Cousin Bette, and is scored for flute and samplestra, an "orchestra" of sampled sounds including Indian voice and flute, drums and electronics. Patricia Spencer offered sensitive playing to complement Pritsker's waves of perpetual motion, creating a dreamlike landscape of fluttering, twittering sounds, breathing and eerie vocals. Microtones figure prominently in Kyle Gann's The Day Revisited, based on a 29-note octave, clustered around a droning D note. After a couple of false starts (apparently a keyboard was not cooperating, and this time not in jest, either) the ensemble settled into a satisfying groove, creating a clouds of floating timbres using Gann's self-described "simple harmonies."
I've now heard Martin Bresnick's sensuous Bird As Prophet two or three times, and without a doubt, David Bowlin's alert violin work puts him at the top of the interpretive list. The title is a reference to Schumann's piano miniature from Waldszenen, invoked with jazz great Charlie Parker. With Mr. McMillen in rapturous form on piano, Bowlin expertly characterized the work's rhapsodic, not-quite-tonal episodes, all imbued with a slightly melancholic tone -- gorgeous.
The evening ended with more Andriessen-esque precision with Michael Gordon's exhilarating ac dc, which the composer explains in typically terse style, "refers to electrical currents." There was certainly no shortage of wattage by Ms. Spencer, Ms. Stoops, Mr. Bowlin, cellist André Emilianoff and Mr. McMillen. If any of these works were to embody the night's aesthetic and show the mettle of these outstanding players, this grueling piece (as well as the Hurel) might be the one. Further, the Knitting Factory's intimate caverns are known primarily for housing alternative rock and jazz, but the place works remarkably well for a Da Capo, celebrating its 35th anniversary this season and seemingly reinventing itself in the process.
Bruce Hodges
Classical Music Review Da Capo Chamber Players
By ALLAN KOZINN
New-music groups periodically undertake theatrical collaborations, both as a way of reaching new listeners and to shake things up for the listeners they have. The Da Capo Chamber Players joined forces with the Yass Hakoshima Movement Theater - which is to say with Mr. Hakoshima, a choreographer, dancer and mime - on Tuesday evening for a program of George Crumb and Joan Tower works at Symphony Space.
It was an arrangement that, visually at least, took the Da Capo musicians out of the spotlight: they deployed at a corner of the stage, leaving the rest to Mr. Hakoshima. That isn't to say the group disappeared, or that it didn't offer theatrical touches of its own, including sparkly jackets in the second half of the program, and the almost choreographic movement written into Mr. Crumb's "Eleven Echoes of Autumn" (1966), "Black Angels" (1970) and "Vox Balaenae" (1971). In a way, two shows played simultaneously: the musical performance made one set of points, either abstract or programmatic; Mr. Hakoshima's elegant, stylized mime occasionally illuminated the music, but more typically offered an alternative narrative. In "Black Angels," for amplified string quartet, Mr. Crumb had a vast agenda that included exploring the extremes to which string timbres can be taken, juxtaposing the antique (by way of distorted quotations from older works) and the avant-garde, and protesting the Vietnam War. Mr. Hakoshima, though, built his dance around the duality of good and evil, God and the Devil, a notion Mr. Crumb touched on in a program note.
He took other interesting paths as well. His "Autumn Fields," set to Mr. Crumb's "Eleven Echoes of Autumn," had the feeling of a harvest ritual, and "Marionette," his setting of Ms. Tower's lively "Petroushskates" (1980), built on the idea of Petroushka trying to break free of the puppeteer's strings.
The Da Capo players were in fine shape. Their reading of "Black Angels," one of Mr. Crumb's most powerful, haunting works, drew on both the violence and the mystery in the score. The group did full justice to the extended timbres in "Vox Balaenae," and to the more conventional shimmer of "Petroushskates." Meighan Stoops, the ensemble's clarinetist, had a star turn in Ms. Tower's "Wings" (1981) and André Emelianoff, the cellist, and David Bowlin, the violinist, played unaccompanied interludes between some of the pieces.
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By ALLAN KOZINN
With Elliott Carter, at 96, getting so many performances of his works these days, some of his equally deserving junior colleagues have been overlooked. The Da Capo Chamber Players took a step toward remedying that on Monday evening at Merkin Concert Hall, with a program largely devoted to the music of George Perle, whose 90th birthday is on May 6.
Mr. Perle, like many of his generation's most serious composers, saw an irresistible logic in serialism -- a style in which works are created from predetermined series of pitches, rhythms and other elements -- and he used its techniques to drive his own works. He also wrote several useful books on the subject, and on the music of Alban Berg, one of its principal early practitioners. So it was fitting that the rest of the Da Capo program was devoted to music of Schoenberg, who invented serialism although all the Schoenberg the group played predated that revolution.
One thing that separated Mr. Perle from so much of the serialist pack was that his music, whether serial or not, is driven by a deeply expressive and often lyrical impulse. Curiously and, as it turned out, interestingly the Da Capo players avoided works in which Mr. Perle's lyricism was especially evident. Instead, they illuminated his humorous, playful side in performances that were consistently agile and transparent.
His ''Critical Moments'' (1996) and ''Critical Moments 2'' (2001), are collections of aphoristic movements in which flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion exchange piquant thematic fragments.
The most striking thing about these sets (the first includes six movements, the second has nine) is the economy with which Mr. Perle uses timbre and gesture to create distinct characterizations. A flute or clarinet line may scamper over a piano ostinato until a brief percussion figure acts as a punctuation mark. The sharp sound of the marimba is offset by the gentler tone of the vibraphone. A toneless burst of wind, in a flute line, alternates with a waltzy figure in the other instruments.
Mr. Perle used similar animation techniques, but couched in grander gestures, in his Sonata for Cello and Piano (1985), to which André Emilianoff, the cellist, and Blair McMillen, the pianist, gave a deft, spirited reading. The gestures of the cello line often seem like those of an actor: they describe both attitude and action. They also meet more standard expectations -- clarity of form, for one, and instrumental virtuosity.
Two of Mr. Perle's early vocal works, settings of Rilke's ''Du meine heilige Einsamkeit'' and ''Der Bach hat leise Melodien'' (1941), were set beside a group of Schoenberg's turn-of-the-century songs. Lucy Shelton sang them all with a warmth that bridged the nearly half a century between them. And on the second half of the program, Ms. Shelton and the Da Capo musicians gave a hair-raising, theatrical account of Schoenberg's ''Pierrot Lunaire.''
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By ALLAN KOZINN
Instrumental works framed the program by the Da Capo Chamber Players at Merkin Concert Hall on Tuesday evening, and in some ways those pieces gave the performance grit and ballast. But vocal works - song cycles by Aaron Jay Kernis and Sir Harrison Birtwistle, for soprano and cello, and André Previn's "Vocalise," for soprano, cello and piano - were the heart of the program.
These days, barely a week goes by without one of Mr. Kernis's works turning up on a program somewhere. Performers are mining his backlist, bringing some rarely heard but worthy scores into the spotlight. In some cases performers can capitalize on having spotted him way back: his expansive "Love Scenes" cycle 1987) was written for André Emelianoff, the cellist in the Da Capo ensemble, when Mr. Kernis was 27. Its text is a set of 11 poems by Anna Swir about the course of a romance, from bliss to failure, a range that gives a composer plenty to work with, even when confined, as in this case, to two melody lines without the harmonic support usually provided in a piano part. Mr. Kernis treated the voice and the cello equally, exploring in each the range from graceful lyricism to explosive histrionics. Mr. Emelianoff and the soprano Lucy Shelton met the work's challenges eloquently.
They also made a strong case for Sir Harrison's "Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker" (2000), a cryptic group of pointillistic miniatures, and with Lisa Moore at the piano they settled comfortably into Mr. Previn's attractive "Vocalise."
The Da Capo Players opened the concert with a revival of Joseph Schwantner's "Wind, Willow, Whisper ...," a work written for the group's 10th anniversary in 1980. Scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, it skirts tonality to create a magical atmosphere through which themes emerge from a mist and fade away just as quickly. The players -- Patricia Spencer, flutist; Jo-Ann Sternberg; clarinetist, Renee Jolles; violinist, with Mr. Emelianoff and Ms. Moore -- gave the piece a fluid, inviting reading.
Elliott Carter's "Esprit rude/Esprit doux" (1985), for flute and clarinet, is more elemental, and Ms. Spencer and Ms. Sternberg played it with spirited virtuosity. Ms. Spencer, Ms. Moore and Meghan Stoops closed the program with Jonathan Harvey's "Riot" (1993), a rugged, high-energy piece in which broad dynamics and startling gestures create the contours of an animated conversation, if not necessarily a riot.
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By ALLAN KOZINN
New-music groups flourish in New York, and quite a few of them have shown remarkable staying power, even
if individual members come and go. The Da Capo Chamber Players have been exploring and helping create the modern repertory for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano for the last 30 years, although only its flutist, Patricia Spencer, remains from the earliest days.
To celebrate the ensemble's threedecade history, Ms. Spencer and her current colleagues - Jo-Ann Sternberg, clarinetist; Eva Gruesser, violinist; Andre Emelianoff, cellist; and Lisa Moore, pianist - along with a handful of guest musicians, offered a retrospective at Merkin Concert Hall on Tuesday evening.
The program did not include anything as old as the group itself: the earliest offering was "Petroushskates" (1980), written for Da Capo's 10th-anniversary season by Joan Tower, who was the quintet's pianist for its first 15 years.
["Petroushskates" is]a vivid, high-energy score that alludes slyly to the textures and harmonic shimmer of Stravinsky's "Petrushka" but is its own work. [Tower] performed with Ms. Gruesser and Mr. Emelianoff in her piano trio, "Big Sky" (2000), a brief but emotionally hefty work in which intricate piano figuration is set against beautifully shaped string lines. Ms. Tower's works closed the concert, but the contrasts between the whimsical "Petroushskates" and the more sober "Big Sky" mirrored the spirit of the program as a whole. On the lighter side, Bruce Adolphe's "Machaut Is My Beginning" (1989) strips Machaut's "Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement" of its antiquity and reconstructs it as a neo-Romantic, often Coplandesque fantasy. And Alla Borzova's song cycle, "Mother Said" (1997), takes a mostly humorous look at relationships between parents and children and insecure lovers. Ms. Borzova's work, the most expansively scored on the program, calls for a large ensemble including cimbalom. horn, shofar, a trap set and a Chinese flute, and illustrates
its texts by touching on traditional and popular styles, from klezmer and a Chinese pastiche to jazz and rap. Paul Sperry was the tenor soloist, and Ms. Borzova conducted.
The program's weightier side included Shulamit Ran's "Mirage" (1990), a thorny work for the core Da Capo instrumentation that offered a good deal of graceful interplay between the instruments at its heart.
Included as well was Giya Kancheli's "Night Prayers" (1992), a string quartet (written for the Kronos), a work of considerable intensity and passion.
Da Capo's recording of "Pierrot lunaire", with soprano Lucy Shelton, was listed by Allan Kozinn as a favorite in a recent New York Times article about Arnold Schoenberg ("Finding the Saint in a Musical Devil", Friday August 13, 1999). Commenting that "central to Schoenberg's style was his belief that the music must actively illuminate the text's underlying spirit", he goes on to say "Nowhere is this clearer than in "Pierrot lunaire", a magical work that is central to the modern canon. Lucy Shelton's recording includes two remarkably expressive performances: one in the original German, the other in Andrew Porter's English translation, which keeps the relationship between music and text in high relief."
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By PAUL GRIFFITHS
Instrumental music is irredeemably real. Singers, actors or dancers can disappear entirely into imaginary worlds onstage, but instrumentalists are always doing something earthbound and actual, their attention devoted to a physical machine for making sounds in the here and now. It becomes hard, therefore, to believe in an instrumentalist as a character in a drama. Instrumental performance is a drama all of its own, and it is happening now, before us, not in some make-believe action.
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The works of Karlheinz Stockhausen of the last quarter-century have been bold attempts to create, nevertheless, dramas for instrumentalists, though he has had to accept the reality of instrumental performance by devising his dramas so that the role the player enacts is that of a player. A singer can be a Roman painter, a Cretan king or a Moorish general, but a flutist is always a flutist, and so she remains in Mr, Stockhausen's "Kathinka's Chant als Lucifer's Requiem," for amplified flute with recorded sounds, which Patricia Spencer played as part of the Sonic Boom festival at the Miller Theater on Thursday.
Music examples, the kernels of the 24 "exercises for listening" that make up the main body of the piece, bedeck the stage and the player represents a magician: costumed as a catwoman, she is part underworld divinity, part nightclub hostess. But the magic she exerts is music. As she steps around the stage so, figuratively, she steps around her melody, playing fragments over and over, exploring single notes. Most of the part is delivered sotto voce, and in this universe of faltering tone Mr. Stockhausen is able to concentrate on fine nuances: on tones admixed with breath, or with song, and on microtones and glides.
Ms. Spencer was in full command of this virtuosity at a whisper, and of the score, which, of necessity, she played from memory. If she was not also convincingly in her role, that might be because she shares the feeling that Mr. Stockhausen's drama is far less credible than his music. We do not see a sibyl leading prayers for the dead; we see - and saw - an expert musician.
In the rest of this program of theater music, Lisa Moore gave a startlingly good performance of Frederic Rzewski's "De Profundis" for speaking pianist: she was lustrous at the keyboard, and at once engaging and challenging in her delivery of the text, from Oscar Wilde's prison memoir. Finally there was a new production of Peter Maxwell Davies's "Vesalii Icones," where the Stations of the Cross are danced and musically meditated upon. André Emelianoff was the eloquent cello soloist, and there was powerful playing too from Jo-Ann Sternberg on clarinet. David Gilbert conducted and Rebecca Stenn resolutely executed her own choreography.
"SONIC BOOM IV." Elliott Carter: Esprit rude / esprit doux (1984) for Pierre Boulez; Sonata for Cello & Piano (1948); Enchanted Preludes; Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord (1952) -- Henry Cowell: Quartet for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord (1954) -- Goffredo Petrassi: Tre per sette (1967). Da Capo Chamber Players. Miller Theater, Nov. 17, 1996,
For its fourth concert in the Sonic Boom series, Da Capo focused on the music of Elliott Carter, choosing two works from the period in which he first formulated his ideas and two of the works be bas written recently. In addition, the program included two pieces by composers who had a certain connection with Mr. Carter. Thus the concert gave us some perspective on the composer's historical position and helped us understand his musical intentions.
In the first work, the solo sonata, we hear Mr. Carter beginning to work with the ideas of independent characters and rhythms, as well as the procedure known as "metrical modulation," although the important thing isn't that the meter modulates (changes) but rather that the tempo does. That is intended to unify the music by relating all tempi to one basic tempo. The procedures are further developed in the sonata for four instruments, which has won its way into the 20th century repertory. Both of these compositions are adventurous, expansive and fairly long.
By contrast, the two duos are miracles of compression, saying all they have to say -- a good deal -- in about four minutes. Characteristics noted in the earlier works are fully developed in the later ones, and there is a sense of overall mastery that, I suppose, is to be found only in the late works of a great composer.
The program notes by Mr. Carter include a clear statement of his way of thinking about music and composition and should be required reading for anyone interested in the contemporary scene. Fortunately, they are readily available as the liner notes for two recent recordings.
The discussion at intermission, brought up an important issue. Mr. Carter stated that, as he saw it, the forms of nature appear simple on the surface but show much complexity when studied closely, giving a leaf as one example. His intention, he said, is to present that complexity in his music. But if the analogy is to be pursued closely, why not write music that seems simple or, at least. straightforward and direct on the surface behind which their's considerable complexity? How much complexity can be meaningfully perceived as music moves through time at its own speed? To be sure, a simple surface without any complexity behind it is simplistic, and we've had enough of that, But I wonder if it fits the way the human mind works to present great complexity on the surface and expect the listener to grasp that -- in real time.
Mr. Cowell's 1954 quartet is unpretentious and delightful, and its inclusion on the program shows another aspect of American music, contemporaneous with the two earlier Carter works. The Petrassi shows a keen ear for sonorities and considerable ingenuity in getting a variety of tonal colors from three players by having them play seven different instruments during the course of a fairly short piece.
The brilliant players of Da Capo have probably reached the point where there are few challenges left for them, and they took up this difficult music with zest. I've often thought that there's more virtuosity to be found in modern music concerts than in the commercial concert halls and this concert was a good example.
The regulars of Da Capo -- Patricia Spencer, flute; André Emellanoff, cello; Lisa Moore, piano -- were joined by guest artists Ronald Roseman, oboe and Jo-Ann Sternberg, clarinet.
L.K.
The intense musicians here were Da Capo Chamber Players Patricia Spencer (flute) and Lisa Moore (piano), plus guests Jayn Rosenfeld (flute), Jean Kopperud (clarinet, and Ms. Jolles (violin.)....
At Da Capo's tribute to Elliott Carter November 17, the emphasis was not on new or recent music. The evening's big pieces were nearly 50 years old, dating from the time the brightly developing Carter started becoming the groundbreaking-and-shaking Carter who even now, at 87, won't stop composing revolutions. Just a week previous to the concert, he finished his first clarinet concerto for a world premiere to be conducted in Paris in January by Pierre Boulez. Daniel Barenboim's company in Berlin has asked him for an opera, but he can't find a subject. That's a problem also blocking the nearly two-decades-younger Boulez.
Headlining the Sonic Boom concert were the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948) and the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord (1952). In the first, cellist André Emelianoff, pitted his entrance of lyrical phrases in free rubato against the sternly regular piano pacings of Lisa Moore. From then on, they hauled in their abundant piles of jazz references and their eager-to-deceive metric modulations (the slight-of-hand that Carter invented to gradually change tempi behind the listener's perceptions). What really mattered was not the methods but the sweepingly outgoing musical messages and this particular expressive deep-digging performance. Just as remarkable were the ensemble precision, lyrical nuances, and generous brio that Emelianoff, Moor, flutist Patricia Spencer, and oboist Ronald Roseman brought to the other sonata.
In briefer Carter pieces, Spencer and Emelianoff also deftly tossed back and forth the fast swirls of Enchanted Preludes (1988) and then mixed them together smoothly. There was a fine balance between rough and smooth in the playing by Spencer and clarinetist Jo-Ann Sternberg of Esprit rude / Esprit doux (1985). In the part of the program devoted to composers Carter knew as friends, Goffredo Petrassi's Tre per sette (1967) was well worth hearing for its clever juxtaposition of peppery flights and dives and for the performances of Spencer, Roseman and Sternberg. But Henry Cowell's Quartet for the same instruments used by Carter in his 1952 Sonata was at best harmless in its melodically and harmonically trivial pursuit of rhythmic innovation. Put the gentleman's ghost back on those banshee-sounding piano strings, and I'll follow. There was some bright talk onstage among Carter, Emelianoff, and Spencer, but there were also clips from a Dutch-made documentary blemished by an almost incomprehensible soundtrack. However, Conlon Nancarrow could be heard asking Carter who invented the term "metric modulation." Carter's answer? "Some critic." Oh well...
Leighton Kerner, "The New York Music Season Gets a Sonic Boost"
In a program of works by Louise Talma, George Perle and Pierre Boulez on Monday night, the Da Capo Ensemble gave pride of place to the 90-year-old Ms. Talma. Her trademark blend of lyricism and austere textures could be savored in Keats and Landor settings from the song cycle "Lengthening Shadows," given an expressive world premiere by the soprano Rosalind Rees. "Ambient Air," a suite of nature sketches written for Da Capo in 1988, preserved the composer's marvelously lucid language without a clear tonal base.
Mr. Perle's "Night Song" (1990) makes highly imaginative use of Da Capo's blend of violin, cello, flute, clarinet and piano. Rich, distantly tonal harmony hovers in wide intervals; the formal structure is a single- Movement, elegant twilight fade. "Sonata a Cinque," in which the place of the flute is unexpectedly taken by David Taylor's bass trombone, is a more lively and contrasted affair, shot through with slithery chromaticism.
The second half was nothing but Boulez, "Le Marteau sans Maitre" is considered by connoisseurs to be one of the composer's most rigorous and profound; despite Julia Bentley's poetic singing, I still find it a static, overfastidious Webern homage, Klangfarbenmelodie without the tunes. "Derive," on the other hand, is a sensuous triumph of untrammeled Impressionism, Like everything else in the program, it received a sensitive, exact performance from the Da Capo players.
ALEX ROSS
Even Elliott Carter's ."Enchanted Preludes" had a lighthearted air, offering exquisite conversation between Patricia Spencer's flute and André Emelianoff's Cello...
Bernard Holland
The Da Capo Chamber Players celebrated "A Triple Anniversary" in an
adventuresome November 6 program at Columbia University's Kathryn Bache Miller Theatre, saluting Pierre Boulez in his 70th year, George Perle in his 80th, and Louise Talma in her 90th. It was a nice poetic twist that the oldest work on the program was by the youngest of the Composers, and vice versa: Boulez's Marteau sans Maitre was completed in 1955, Talma's The Lengthening Shadows is a 1995 song cycle still in progress. She. was on hand (as was Perle) to say that she planned a total of nine songs based on English poets; we heard two, to texts by Walter Savage Landor and John Keats. (John Donne just missed the boat, she said, because she hadn't had time to get the parts copied.) lt. could not escape notice that in an age of abstract compositional methods, all three composers anchored themselves to literary references or suggestions: even Perle's "Sonata a cinque," though bearing no title, had descriptive headings for each of its movements.
Taima's own leaning toward the picturesque was evident in her "Ambient Air" (1983) for flute, violin. cello, and piano. Its four movements, "Echo Chamber ... Driving Rain ... Creeping Fog ... Shifting Winds" were nicely caught in music that was by turns fragile and translucent or abrupt and episodic. The two songs of the ongoing cycle sung by soprano Rosalind Rees, were spare and set to pleasantly lean accompaniments.
Perle's instrumental "Night Song," too, explored a meticulous fragility, marked by brief phrases and a sense of distilled concentration. The "Sonata a cinque" was written for trombonist David Taylor, who took the base trombone part here; he generated an appropriate pounding pace in the second movement ("Perpetual motion") of this quite witty work and demonstrated a fine, quick agility. A base clarinet added depth to the solemnity of the third movement, "Chorales and Diversions," and the final "Dance" moved energetically in fits and starts. It is a bright, alluring work.
The intense glitter and mercurial flickerings of Boulez's 1984 "Derive" for chamber ensemble still strike the ear as fresh and challenging. As for "Le Marteau sans Maitre," a classic now 40 years old, it continues to offer enough adventure to keep any musical explorer busy through many hearings. Conductor David Gilbert led Da Capo and its guest artists through the work's spiky, brittle, splintered, erupting textures with a sure hand, and mezzo soprano Julia Bentley handled the serpentine vocal part beautifully. Da Capo's artistic directors, flutist Patricia Spencer and cellist André Emelianoff, who have been creating stimulating concerts for a quarter of a century, deserve a special hand for this one.
SHIRLEY FLEMING
By ALLAN KOZINN
The New York Times, September 16, 2008
With Elliott Carter's centenary getting all the attention, the large and estimable group of American composers turning 70 this year — the "generation of '38," as it is being called — has to scramble for a share of the spotlight. But through a fluke of scheduling, the Carter festivities are on hiatus this month, leaving the field free for Joan Tower, whose 70th birthday was on Sept. 6. On that day Merkin Concert Hall opened its season with a Tower tribute. And on Monday, at the same hall, the Da Capo Chamber Players extended their felicitations as well.
Da Capo has an unusually close connection with Ms. Tower: she was the group's pianist for its first 15 seasons. So you might have expected it to devote a program fully to her music. Not so. Only two of the seven works the ensemble played were Ms. Tower's. Two others were by her friends Chen Yi and Tania León, and two were by young composers who had studied with Ms. Tower, Sergei Tcherepnin and Conor Brown. The seventh — actually the first, in order of appearance — was a graceful, energetic curtain-raiser, "Short Fanfare for an Uncommon Composer" (2008), by the group's flutist, Patricia Spencer.
A quality all the works shared, however different the composers' styles, was a sense of inexorable growth from a simple idea to a complex texture within a single-movement form. Ms. Tower's "Trio Cavany" (2007) begins with a melancholy violin theme that is passed to the cello and, in a more elaborate form, the piano, before the solo strands coalesce in a rich, acerbic texture that becomes denser, more tense and more overtly virtuosic without sacrificing its initial gravity.
"Noon Dance" (1982) is from another world. Here, too, virtuosity is crucial, but it is of a more playful kind: much of the work's action emerges from trills that expand into finely detailed melodic lines. And its scoring, for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion (vibraphone and xylophone), gives it a brighter, flightier palette of timbres.
Ms. Chen's evocative "Happy Rain on a Spring Night" (2004) evolves slowly from a delicate blur — the musical equivalent of magical realism — to a hefty, shimmering structure with a vehemence that seems odd, given the cheerful title. "Alma" (2007), Ms. León's contribution, is a more consistently light-spirited but technically demanding work for flute and piano. Ms. Spencer negotiated its swirling figures and multiphonics deftly.
The works by Ms. Tower's students were from a different, if tangential, universe, and they put the generational shift in high relief. But they also had little in common. Mr. Tcherepnin's pleasantly consonant "Regenerations" (2008) is laconic and at times meandering. It stands in stark contrast to Mr. Brown's "Cloud Forest" (2008), in which currents of Turkish and Latin American folk music yield a zesty, off-kilter march that crops up throughout the piece like the ritornello of a Baroque rondo. Maybe Mr. Tcherepnin and Mr. Brown should trade work titles.
The New York Times
June 7, 2008
By ALLAN KOZINN
New-music groups almost always include a premiere or two on their programs, but reviving works that have been set aside is important too. For the closing program of its 37th season, on Thursday evening at Merkin Concert Hall, the Da Capo Chamber Players resisted the lure of the new and revisited seven substantial works by five composers.
A few, in truth, had already found an afterlife. Luciano Berio's "Sequenza I," for example, is a staple of the solo flute repertory. But this is the work's 50th anniversary; surely it deserved the passionate, warm-blooded performance that Patricia Spencer gave it. And "Sequenza VIII" (1976), for violin, is not played as much as it should be. Curtis Macomber negotiated its intricate textures — juxtapositions of the jagged and the silken, and pianissimo double-stopped trilling punctuated by sharp-edged fortissimo chords — with a thrilling virtuosity.
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Mario Davidovsky's "Synchronisms" for instruments and electronic sound are famous but rarely heard. In "Synchronisms No. 2" (1964), the taped and live string and woodwind lines begin in parallel universes but eventually move toward common ground. "Synchronisms No. 12" (2006) works similarly, setting a solo clarinet against an electronic texture built of sampled (and heavily processed) clarinet tones. Meighan Stoops, in her vibrant, richly shaded performance, began by weaving her line through the recorded sounds as if through an obstacle course, and eventually used overblowing and other extended techniques to match the electronic timbres.
The main attraction of Chinary Ung's "Spiral I" (1987), scored for cello, piano and percussion, is the seamlessness with which it blends contemporary Western harmonic conventions and Asian melodic influences. Asian timbres are approximated as well, with the cello line, played by André Emelianoff, sometimes sliding between pitches. Elsewhere, Blair McMillen, the pianist, and Matthew Gold, the percussionist, played tandem lines with an otherworldly shimmer.
Sebastian Currier's substantial "Static" (2003) toyed with the dual meaning of its title, with sustained, hazy chords that represented both stasis and white noise (as in radio static) as a starting point. But mostly the work escaped both definitions: its woodwind, string and piano writing was fleet, imaginative and at times arrestingly beautiful.
"Rotae Passionis" (1983), an early Christopher Rouse score, closed the program on an electrifying if devotionally somber note. A 25-minute textless passion play, the piece uses violent wallops of percussion, wailing string and woodwind lines and dissonant piano writing to describe the final days of Jesus, from Gethsemane to the tomb, ending in a meditative pianissimo movement.
Mr. Rouse was barely known when he wrote this score, but his talent for orchestrational vividness was already fully developed. The performance, conducted by Paul Hostetter, could not have been more gripping.
The New York Times
November 23, 2006
By ALLAN KOZINN
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Of the new works Mr. Pritsker's "Self Laceration" (2006) was the most immediately striking, its off-putting title notwithstanding. It begins with a rhythmically insistent, irresistibly zesty movement in which the focus moves briskly around the ensemble. The clarinet, violin, cello, flute and piano each have exposed lines that capture the character of the instrument and create a lively dialogue. The individual instruments speak in distinct, idiomatic voices.
Mr. Chasalow's Flute Concerto (2005) packs a lot of ideas into 15 minutes. Its movement titles -- "Flight and Confusion," "Eggshell, More Like a Heart" and "Feather, Breath, Mirror" -- look impressionistically vague on paper, but Mr. Chasalow's appealingly symmetrical writing evokes them in a painterly way, by making vibrant, sharply articulated textures morph into stretches of wispy lyricism and back. Patricia Spencer played the solo line with a deft command of both technique and timbre.
Mr. Carter's "Conversation Piece" (2006) is based on his chamber opera, "The Sister," and has a decidedly operatic quality: as in Mr. Pritsker's work, the instruments suggest specific, sharply drawn characters in a fluid drama, and their lines have the angular, anxious quality of contemporary vocal writing. The players also make fragmentary spoken contributions, and if they offer only the barest glimpse into the missing libretto, the real action is in the shapely instrumental dialogues.
All three new works drew on a rigorous harmonic and rhythmic language, tempered by a lyrical eclecticism that rounded off the potentially harsh edges, and gave the pieces a direct appeal. The older scores worked similarly, with the exception of Philip Glass's "Modern Love Waltz" (1980), which burbled along pleasantly in Mr. Glass's consonant style, in an ensemble arrangement by Robert Moran. Philippe Bodin's "Peal" (2000) opened the program with an explosion of brash timbres and insistent rhythms that gradually melted into softer textures. And Stephen Jaffe's three-movement "Nonesuch Serenade" (1984), an essay in constant textural shifting, prefigured the essentially vocal style of Mr. Carter's score.
Besides Ms. Spencer, the group's superb players are Meighan Stoops, clarinetist; David Bowlin, violinist; André Emelianoff, cellist; and Blair McMillen, pianist. In Mr. Chasalow's work Michael Adelson conducted, and Thomas Kolor was the percussionist.
The New York Times,
June 8, 2006
"Ears to the East" was the title of the Da Capo Chamber Players' final program of their 35th season, played on Tuesday night at Merkin Concert Hall. The six pieces on the program were all written by Asian composers except for Evan Ziporyn's solo work for bass clarinet, "Tsmindao Ghmerto," which was influenced by folk traditions of Eurasia (specifically Georgian religious vocal music, which Mr. Ziporyn evoked by having the performer, here Meighan Stoops, sing as she played, creating slightly otherworldly harmonies).
Thirty-five years ago this kind of program would have been exclusively the province of a small contemporary music group like Da Capo. But today music with non Western influences in general, and by Asian composers specifically, has become a part of classical music's mainstream. Next season world premieres by Tan Dun at the Metropolitan Opera and Unsuk Chin at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich are scheduled, while Bright Sheng, Chen Yi, Zhou Long and Chinary Ung, whose "Spiral VI" wound and unwound in bursts of music to open Tuesday's program, are by now familiar presences on the music scene.
Tuesday, moved from musical outbursts to a spoken Chinese poem. It doesn't detract at all from Da Capo's thematic program to say that it's nice to realize that non - Western composers and music no longer have to be lumped together to be heard.
Da Capo certainly made the music sound as if it were worth hearing. Although the group has been performing since 1970, and some of its veterans, like the cellist André Emilianoff, were firm anchors of this evening, it is clearly open to new blood.
Blair McMillen, a young pianist and a strong presence in all but one of the pieces, made the most of Akemi Naito's "Rain, Calling Autumn," a rather slender work for solo piano that would have tended toward self -conscious self-expression had Mr. McMillen not done everything in his power to bring it to deeper life. (A wonderful effect was the introduction of a coin under a string of the piano for the final movement, creating a gong effect that was like a duet with the regular notes.
The showpiece of the evening was the 100th composition commissioned by Da Capo since its inception: "Phoolan Devi Songs" by Shirish Korde, three excerpts from an opera-in-progress about Ms. Devi, the Indian "Bandit Queen" and legislator who was assassinated in 2001.
This is a colorful, attractive piece, set on a lush, gaudy bed of amplification, aiming at an entertaining stylistic fusion; it will perhaps take a more charismatic singer than the game Alexandra Montano to pull off the lead role, defiantly non-Western in its vocal writing. The highlight was the tabla playing of Samir Chatterjee in the final scene, which stood out from the other instruments with the kind of vivid, exciting performance that draws Western composers to non-Western music in the first place.
from Seen and Heard International
Eric Moe: Hey Mr. Drummachine Man (2004)
Philippe Hurel: Pour Luigi (1994)
Derek Bermel: Language Instruction (2003)
Gene Pritsker: Sorrow, Like Pleasure, Creates Its Own Atmosphere (2003)
Kyle Gann: The Day Revisited (2005)
Martin Bresnick: Bird As Prophet (1999)
Michael Gordon: ac dc (1996)
Patricia Spencer, flute
Meighan Stoops, clarinet
David Bowlin, violin
André Emilianoff, cello
Blair McMillen, piano
Dennis DeSantis, dj
Kyle Gann, keyboard
Bernard Gann, electric bass
Matthew Cody, conductor
With an electronic "pseudo-canned drumbeat" as anchor, Eric Moe's Hey Mr. Drummachine Man offered pianist Blair McMillen the chance to show his considerable chops as well as his sense of humor. The slightly cheesy beat jumps right in, then continues inexorably as the pianist rides above it -- sort of "Bartók meets techno" (as well as 1970s television, it turns out, with a canny reference to the theme music from The Phil Donahue Show). If it wasn't an exercise in profundity, it slyly set the tone for the Da Capo Chamber Players' excursion into some repertoire they don't usually encounter.
Changing the mood completely, the insightful conductor Matthew Cody guided the ensemble in Philippe Hurel's Pour Luigi, with echoes of Andriessen and Messiaen in its chords often separated by silence. Hurel has professed an interest in combining jazz and funk rhythms with harmonies achieved through spectral techniques, and this intriguing piece is perhaps the apotheosis of this exploration. Da Capo produced lush, mouth-watering textures, all deftly coordinated by Mr. Cody in one of the highlights of the evening.
The first half concluded with Derek Bermel's entertainingly goofy Language Instruction, with nimble stage direction by David Cote. Bermel is an outstanding clarinetist who often writes with a theatrical bent, and some of his works, to be effective, require much more than merely learning the scores. Inspired by his experience with Portuguese language tapes, Bermel has constructed a mini-drama in which the clarinet -- the versatile Meighan Stoops -- tries to "teach" phrases to the rest of the players. As Ms. Stoops "explained" a glissando figure to the other musicians, some were able to mimic it immediately, but Mr. McMillen responded with puzzlement, since the piano can't really duplicate the woodwind timbre. One could draw many conclusions from the humorous chaos that ensued, but perhaps Mr. Bermel is commenting on the rehearsal process itself.
Gene Pritsker's title is from Balzac's novel Cousin Bette, and is scored for flute and samplestra, an "orchestra" of sampled sounds including Indian voice and flute, drums and electronics. Patricia Spencer offered sensitive playing to complement Pritsker's waves of perpetual motion, creating a dreamlike landscape of fluttering, twittering sounds, breathing and eerie vocals. Microtones figure prominently in Kyle Gann's The Day Revisited, based on a 29-note octave, clustered around a droning D note. After a couple of false starts (apparently a keyboard was not cooperating, and this time not in jest, either) the ensemble settled into a satisfying groove, creating a clouds of floating timbres using Gann's self-described "simple harmonies."
I've now heard Martin Bresnick's sensuous Bird As Prophet two or three times, and without a doubt, David Bowlin's alert violin work puts him at the top of the interpretive list. The title is a reference to Schumann's piano miniature from Waldszenen, invoked with jazz great Charlie Parker. With Mr. McMillen in rapturous form on piano, Bowlin expertly characterized the work's rhapsodic, not-quite-tonal episodes, all imbued with a slightly melancholic tone -- gorgeous.
The evening ended with more Andriessen-esque precision with Michael Gordon's exhilarating ac dc, which the composer explains in typically terse style, "refers to electrical currents." There was certainly no shortage of wattage by Ms. Spencer, Ms. Stoops, Mr. Bowlin, cellist André Emilianoff and Mr. McMillen. If any of these works were to embody the night's aesthetic and show the mettle of these outstanding players, this grueling piece (as well as the Hurel) might be the one. Further, the Knitting Factory's intimate caverns are known primarily for housing alternative rock and jazz, but the place works remarkably well for a Da Capo, celebrating its 35th anniversary this season and seemingly reinventing itself in the process.
Bruce Hodges
Classical Music Review Da Capo Chamber Players
By ALLAN KOZINN
New-music groups periodically undertake theatrical collaborations, both as a way of reaching new listeners and to shake things up for the listeners they have. The Da Capo Chamber Players joined forces with the Yass Hakoshima Movement Theater - which is to say with Mr. Hakoshima, a choreographer, dancer and mime - on Tuesday evening for a program of George Crumb and Joan Tower works at Symphony Space.
It was an arrangement that, visually at least, took the Da Capo musicians out of the spotlight: they deployed at a corner of the stage, leaving the rest to Mr. Hakoshima. That isn't to say the group disappeared, or that it didn't offer theatrical touches of its own, including sparkly jackets in the second half of the program, and the almost choreographic movement written into Mr. Crumb's "Eleven Echoes of Autumn" (1966), "Black Angels" (1970) and "Vox Balaenae" (1971). In a way, two shows played simultaneously: the musical performance made one set of points, either abstract or programmatic; Mr. Hakoshima's elegant, stylized mime occasionally illuminated the music, but more typically offered an alternative narrative. In "Black Angels," for amplified string quartet, Mr. Crumb had a vast agenda that included exploring the extremes to which string timbres can be taken, juxtaposing the antique (by way of distorted quotations from older works) and the avant-garde, and protesting the Vietnam War. Mr. Hakoshima, though, built his dance around the duality of good and evil, God and the Devil, a notion Mr. Crumb touched on in a program note.
He took other interesting paths as well. His "Autumn Fields," set to Mr. Crumb's "Eleven Echoes of Autumn," had the feeling of a harvest ritual, and "Marionette," his setting of Ms. Tower's lively "Petroushskates" (1980), built on the idea of Petroushka trying to break free of the puppeteer's strings.
The Da Capo players were in fine shape. Their reading of "Black Angels," one of Mr. Crumb's most powerful, haunting works, drew on both the violence and the mystery in the score. The group did full justice to the extended timbres in "Vox Balaenae," and to the more conventional shimmer of "Petroushskates." Meighan Stoops, the ensemble's clarinetist, had a star turn in Ms. Tower's "Wings" (1981) and André Emelianoff, the cellist, and David Bowlin, the violinist, played unaccompanied interludes between some of the pieces.
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By ALLAN KOZINN
With Elliott Carter, at 96, getting so many performances of his works these days, some of his equally deserving junior colleagues have been overlooked. The Da Capo Chamber Players took a step toward remedying that on Monday evening at Merkin Concert Hall, with a program largely devoted to the music of George Perle, whose 90th birthday is on May 6.
Mr. Perle, like many of his generation's most serious composers, saw an irresistible logic in serialism -- a style in which works are created from predetermined series of pitches, rhythms and other elements -- and he used its techniques to drive his own works. He also wrote several useful books on the subject, and on the music of Alban Berg, one of its principal early practitioners. So it was fitting that the rest of the Da Capo program was devoted to music of Schoenberg, who invented serialism although all the Schoenberg the group played predated that revolution.
One thing that separated Mr. Perle from so much of the serialist pack was that his music, whether serial or not, is driven by a deeply expressive and often lyrical impulse. Curiously and, as it turned out, interestingly the Da Capo players avoided works in which Mr. Perle's lyricism was especially evident. Instead, they illuminated his humorous, playful side in performances that were consistently agile and transparent.
His ''Critical Moments'' (1996) and ''Critical Moments 2'' (2001), are collections of aphoristic movements in which flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion exchange piquant thematic fragments.
The most striking thing about these sets (the first includes six movements, the second has nine) is the economy with which Mr. Perle uses timbre and gesture to create distinct characterizations. A flute or clarinet line may scamper over a piano ostinato until a brief percussion figure acts as a punctuation mark. The sharp sound of the marimba is offset by the gentler tone of the vibraphone. A toneless burst of wind, in a flute line, alternates with a waltzy figure in the other instruments.
Mr. Perle used similar animation techniques, but couched in grander gestures, in his Sonata for Cello and Piano (1985), to which André Emilianoff, the cellist, and Blair McMillen, the pianist, gave a deft, spirited reading. The gestures of the cello line often seem like those of an actor: they describe both attitude and action. They also meet more standard expectations -- clarity of form, for one, and instrumental virtuosity.
Two of Mr. Perle's early vocal works, settings of Rilke's ''Du meine heilige Einsamkeit'' and ''Der Bach hat leise Melodien'' (1941), were set beside a group of Schoenberg's turn-of-the-century songs. Lucy Shelton sang them all with a warmth that bridged the nearly half a century between them. And on the second half of the program, Ms. Shelton and the Da Capo musicians gave a hair-raising, theatrical account of Schoenberg's ''Pierrot Lunaire.''
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By ALLAN KOZINN
Instrumental works framed the program by the Da Capo Chamber Players at Merkin Concert Hall on Tuesday evening, and in some ways those pieces gave the performance grit and ballast. But vocal works - song cycles by Aaron Jay Kernis and Sir Harrison Birtwistle, for soprano and cello, and André Previn's "Vocalise," for soprano, cello and piano - were the heart of the program.
These days, barely a week goes by without one of Mr. Kernis's works turning up on a program somewhere. Performers are mining his backlist, bringing some rarely heard but worthy scores into the spotlight. In some cases performers can capitalize on having spotted him way back: his expansive "Love Scenes" cycle 1987) was written for André Emelianoff, the cellist in the Da Capo ensemble, when Mr. Kernis was 27. Its text is a set of 11 poems by Anna Swir about the course of a romance, from bliss to failure, a range that gives a composer plenty to work with, even when confined, as in this case, to two melody lines without the harmonic support usually provided in a piano part. Mr. Kernis treated the voice and the cello equally, exploring in each the range from graceful lyricism to explosive histrionics. Mr. Emelianoff and the soprano Lucy Shelton met the work's challenges eloquently.
They also made a strong case for Sir Harrison's "Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker" (2000), a cryptic group of pointillistic miniatures, and with Lisa Moore at the piano they settled comfortably into Mr. Previn's attractive "Vocalise."
The Da Capo Players opened the concert with a revival of Joseph Schwantner's "Wind, Willow, Whisper ...," a work written for the group's 10th anniversary in 1980. Scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, it skirts tonality to create a magical atmosphere through which themes emerge from a mist and fade away just as quickly. The players -- Patricia Spencer, flutist; Jo-Ann Sternberg; clarinetist, Renee Jolles; violinist, with Mr. Emelianoff and Ms. Moore -- gave the piece a fluid, inviting reading.
Elliott Carter's "Esprit rude/Esprit doux" (1985), for flute and clarinet, is more elemental, and Ms. Spencer and Ms. Sternberg played it with spirited virtuosity. Ms. Spencer, Ms. Moore and Meghan Stoops closed the program with Jonathan Harvey's "Riot" (1993), a rugged, high-energy piece in which broad dynamics and startling gestures create the contours of an animated conversation, if not necessarily a riot.
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By ALLAN KOZINN
New-music groups flourish in New York, and quite a few of them have shown remarkable staying power, even
if individual members come and go. The Da Capo Chamber Players have been exploring and helping create the modern repertory for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano for the last 30 years, although only its flutist, Patricia Spencer, remains from the earliest days.
To celebrate the ensemble's threedecade history, Ms. Spencer and her current colleagues - Jo-Ann Sternberg, clarinetist; Eva Gruesser, violinist; Andre Emelianoff, cellist; and Lisa Moore, pianist - along with a handful of guest musicians, offered a retrospective at Merkin Concert Hall on Tuesday evening.
The program did not include anything as old as the group itself: the earliest offering was "Petroushskates" (1980), written for Da Capo's 10th-anniversary season by Joan Tower, who was the quintet's pianist for its first 15 years.
["Petroushskates" is]a vivid, high-energy score that alludes slyly to the textures and harmonic shimmer of Stravinsky's "Petrushka" but is its own work. [Tower] performed with Ms. Gruesser and Mr. Emelianoff in her piano trio, "Big Sky" (2000), a brief but emotionally hefty work in which intricate piano figuration is set against beautifully shaped string lines. Ms. Tower's works closed the concert, but the contrasts between the whimsical "Petroushskates" and the more sober "Big Sky" mirrored the spirit of the program as a whole. On the lighter side, Bruce Adolphe's "Machaut Is My Beginning" (1989) strips Machaut's "Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement" of its antiquity and reconstructs it as a neo-Romantic, often Coplandesque fantasy. And Alla Borzova's song cycle, "Mother Said" (1997), takes a mostly humorous look at relationships between parents and children and insecure lovers. Ms. Borzova's work, the most expansively scored on the program, calls for a large ensemble including cimbalom. horn, shofar, a trap set and a Chinese flute, and illustrates
its texts by touching on traditional and popular styles, from klezmer and a Chinese pastiche to jazz and rap. Paul Sperry was the tenor soloist, and Ms. Borzova conducted.
The program's weightier side included Shulamit Ran's "Mirage" (1990), a thorny work for the core Da Capo instrumentation that offered a good deal of graceful interplay between the instruments at its heart.
Included as well was Giya Kancheli's "Night Prayers" (1992), a string quartet (written for the Kronos), a work of considerable intensity and passion.
Da Capo's recording of "Pierrot lunaire", with soprano Lucy Shelton, was listed by Allan Kozinn as a favorite in a recent New York Times article about Arnold Schoenberg ("Finding the Saint in a Musical Devil", Friday August 13, 1999). Commenting that "central to Schoenberg's style was his belief that the music must actively illuminate the text's underlying spirit", he goes on to say "Nowhere is this clearer than in "Pierrot lunaire", a magical work that is central to the modern canon. Lucy Shelton's recording includes two remarkably expressive performances: one in the original German, the other in Andrew Porter's English translation, which keeps the relationship between music and text in high relief."
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By PAUL GRIFFITHS
Instrumental music is irredeemably real. Singers, actors or dancers can disappear entirely into imaginary worlds onstage, but instrumentalists are always doing something earthbound and actual, their attention devoted to a physical machine for making sounds in the here and now. It becomes hard, therefore, to believe in an instrumentalist as a character in a drama. Instrumental performance is a drama all of its own, and it is happening now, before us, not in some make-believe action.
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The works of Karlheinz Stockhausen of the last quarter-century have been bold attempts to create, nevertheless, dramas for instrumentalists, though he has had to accept the reality of instrumental performance by devising his dramas so that the role the player enacts is that of a player. A singer can be a Roman painter, a Cretan king or a Moorish general, but a flutist is always a flutist, and so she remains in Mr, Stockhausen's "Kathinka's Chant als Lucifer's Requiem," for amplified flute with recorded sounds, which Patricia Spencer played as part of the Sonic Boom festival at the Miller Theater on Thursday.
Music examples, the kernels of the 24 "exercises for listening" that make up the main body of the piece, bedeck the stage and the player represents a magician: costumed as a catwoman, she is part underworld divinity, part nightclub hostess. But the magic she exerts is music. As she steps around the stage so, figuratively, she steps around her melody, playing fragments over and over, exploring single notes. Most of the part is delivered sotto voce, and in this universe of faltering tone Mr. Stockhausen is able to concentrate on fine nuances: on tones admixed with breath, or with song, and on microtones and glides.
Ms. Spencer was in full command of this virtuosity at a whisper, and of the score, which, of necessity, she played from memory. If she was not also convincingly in her role, that might be because she shares the feeling that Mr. Stockhausen's drama is far less credible than his music. We do not see a sibyl leading prayers for the dead; we see - and saw - an expert musician.
In the rest of this program of theater music, Lisa Moore gave a startlingly good performance of Frederic Rzewski's "De Profundis" for speaking pianist: she was lustrous at the keyboard, and at once engaging and challenging in her delivery of the text, from Oscar Wilde's prison memoir. Finally there was a new production of Peter Maxwell Davies's "Vesalii Icones," where the Stations of the Cross are danced and musically meditated upon. André Emelianoff was the eloquent cello soloist, and there was powerful playing too from Jo-Ann Sternberg on clarinet. David Gilbert conducted and Rebecca Stenn resolutely executed her own choreography.
"SONIC BOOM IV." Elliott Carter: Esprit rude / esprit doux (1984) for Pierre Boulez; Sonata for Cello & Piano (1948); Enchanted Preludes; Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord (1952) -- Henry Cowell: Quartet for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord (1954) -- Goffredo Petrassi: Tre per sette (1967). Da Capo Chamber Players. Miller Theater, Nov. 17, 1996,
For its fourth concert in the Sonic Boom series, Da Capo focused on the music of Elliott Carter, choosing two works from the period in which he first formulated his ideas and two of the works be bas written recently. In addition, the program included two pieces by composers who had a certain connection with Mr. Carter. Thus the concert gave us some perspective on the composer's historical position and helped us understand his musical intentions.
In the first work, the solo sonata, we hear Mr. Carter beginning to work with the ideas of independent characters and rhythms, as well as the procedure known as "metrical modulation," although the important thing isn't that the meter modulates (changes) but rather that the tempo does. That is intended to unify the music by relating all tempi to one basic tempo. The procedures are further developed in the sonata for four instruments, which has won its way into the 20th century repertory. Both of these compositions are adventurous, expansive and fairly long.
By contrast, the two duos are miracles of compression, saying all they have to say -- a good deal -- in about four minutes. Characteristics noted in the earlier works are fully developed in the later ones, and there is a sense of overall mastery that, I suppose, is to be found only in the late works of a great composer.
The program notes by Mr. Carter include a clear statement of his way of thinking about music and composition and should be required reading for anyone interested in the contemporary scene. Fortunately, they are readily available as the liner notes for two recent recordings.
The discussion at intermission, brought up an important issue. Mr. Carter stated that, as he saw it, the forms of nature appear simple on the surface but show much complexity when studied closely, giving a leaf as one example. His intention, he said, is to present that complexity in his music. But if the analogy is to be pursued closely, why not write music that seems simple or, at least. straightforward and direct on the surface behind which their's considerable complexity? How much complexity can be meaningfully perceived as music moves through time at its own speed? To be sure, a simple surface without any complexity behind it is simplistic, and we've had enough of that, But I wonder if it fits the way the human mind works to present great complexity on the surface and expect the listener to grasp that -- in real time.
Mr. Cowell's 1954 quartet is unpretentious and delightful, and its inclusion on the program shows another aspect of American music, contemporaneous with the two earlier Carter works. The Petrassi shows a keen ear for sonorities and considerable ingenuity in getting a variety of tonal colors from three players by having them play seven different instruments during the course of a fairly short piece.
The brilliant players of Da Capo have probably reached the point where there are few challenges left for them, and they took up this difficult music with zest. I've often thought that there's more virtuosity to be found in modern music concerts than in the commercial concert halls and this concert was a good example.
The regulars of Da Capo -- Patricia Spencer, flute; André Emellanoff, cello; Lisa Moore, piano -- were joined by guest artists Ronald Roseman, oboe and Jo-Ann Sternberg, clarinet.
L.K.
The intense musicians here were Da Capo Chamber Players Patricia Spencer (flute) and Lisa Moore (piano), plus guests Jayn Rosenfeld (flute), Jean Kopperud (clarinet, and Ms. Jolles (violin.)....
At Da Capo's tribute to Elliott Carter November 17, the emphasis was not on new or recent music. The evening's big pieces were nearly 50 years old, dating from the time the brightly developing Carter started becoming the groundbreaking-and-shaking Carter who even now, at 87, won't stop composing revolutions. Just a week previous to the concert, he finished his first clarinet concerto for a world premiere to be conducted in Paris in January by Pierre Boulez. Daniel Barenboim's company in Berlin has asked him for an opera, but he can't find a subject. That's a problem also blocking the nearly two-decades-younger Boulez.
Headlining the Sonic Boom concert were the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948) and the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord (1952). In the first, cellist André Emelianoff, pitted his entrance of lyrical phrases in free rubato against the sternly regular piano pacings of Lisa Moore. From then on, they hauled in their abundant piles of jazz references and their eager-to-deceive metric modulations (the slight-of-hand that Carter invented to gradually change tempi behind the listener's perceptions). What really mattered was not the methods but the sweepingly outgoing musical messages and this particular expressive deep-digging performance. Just as remarkable were the ensemble precision, lyrical nuances, and generous brio that Emelianoff, Moor, flutist Patricia Spencer, and oboist Ronald Roseman brought to the other sonata.
In briefer Carter pieces, Spencer and Emelianoff also deftly tossed back and forth the fast swirls of Enchanted Preludes (1988) and then mixed them together smoothly. There was a fine balance between rough and smooth in the playing by Spencer and clarinetist Jo-Ann Sternberg of Esprit rude / Esprit doux (1985). In the part of the program devoted to composers Carter knew as friends, Goffredo Petrassi's Tre per sette (1967) was well worth hearing for its clever juxtaposition of peppery flights and dives and for the performances of Spencer, Roseman and Sternberg. But Henry Cowell's Quartet for the same instruments used by Carter in his 1952 Sonata was at best harmless in its melodically and harmonically trivial pursuit of rhythmic innovation. Put the gentleman's ghost back on those banshee-sounding piano strings, and I'll follow. There was some bright talk onstage among Carter, Emelianoff, and Spencer, but there were also clips from a Dutch-made documentary blemished by an almost incomprehensible soundtrack. However, Conlon Nancarrow could be heard asking Carter who invented the term "metric modulation." Carter's answer? "Some critic." Oh well...
Leighton Kerner, "The New York Music Season Gets a Sonic Boost"
In a program of works by Louise Talma, George Perle and Pierre Boulez on Monday night, the Da Capo Ensemble gave pride of place to the 90-year-old Ms. Talma. Her trademark blend of lyricism and austere textures could be savored in Keats and Landor settings from the song cycle "Lengthening Shadows," given an expressive world premiere by the soprano Rosalind Rees. "Ambient Air," a suite of nature sketches written for Da Capo in 1988, preserved the composer's marvelously lucid language without a clear tonal base.
Mr. Perle's "Night Song" (1990) makes highly imaginative use of Da Capo's blend of violin, cello, flute, clarinet and piano. Rich, distantly tonal harmony hovers in wide intervals; the formal structure is a single- Movement, elegant twilight fade. "Sonata a Cinque," in which the place of the flute is unexpectedly taken by David Taylor's bass trombone, is a more lively and contrasted affair, shot through with slithery chromaticism.
The second half was nothing but Boulez, "Le Marteau sans Maitre" is considered by connoisseurs to be one of the composer's most rigorous and profound; despite Julia Bentley's poetic singing, I still find it a static, overfastidious Webern homage, Klangfarbenmelodie without the tunes. "Derive," on the other hand, is a sensuous triumph of untrammeled Impressionism, Like everything else in the program, it received a sensitive, exact performance from the Da Capo players.
ALEX ROSS
Even Elliott Carter's ."Enchanted Preludes" had a lighthearted air, offering exquisite conversation between Patricia Spencer's flute and André Emelianoff's Cello...
Bernard Holland
The Da Capo Chamber Players celebrated "A Triple Anniversary" in an
adventuresome November 6 program at Columbia University's Kathryn Bache Miller Theatre, saluting Pierre Boulez in his 70th year, George Perle in his 80th, and Louise Talma in her 90th. It was a nice poetic twist that the oldest work on the program was by the youngest of the Composers, and vice versa: Boulez's Marteau sans Maitre was completed in 1955, Talma's The Lengthening Shadows is a 1995 song cycle still in progress. She. was on hand (as was Perle) to say that she planned a total of nine songs based on English poets; we heard two, to texts by Walter Savage Landor and John Keats. (John Donne just missed the boat, she said, because she hadn't had time to get the parts copied.) lt. could not escape notice that in an age of abstract compositional methods, all three composers anchored themselves to literary references or suggestions: even Perle's "Sonata a cinque," though bearing no title, had descriptive headings for each of its movements.
Taima's own leaning toward the picturesque was evident in her "Ambient Air" (1983) for flute, violin. cello, and piano. Its four movements, "Echo Chamber ... Driving Rain ... Creeping Fog ... Shifting Winds" were nicely caught in music that was by turns fragile and translucent or abrupt and episodic. The two songs of the ongoing cycle sung by soprano Rosalind Rees, were spare and set to pleasantly lean accompaniments.
Perle's instrumental "Night Song," too, explored a meticulous fragility, marked by brief phrases and a sense of distilled concentration. The "Sonata a cinque" was written for trombonist David Taylor, who took the base trombone part here; he generated an appropriate pounding pace in the second movement ("Perpetual motion") of this quite witty work and demonstrated a fine, quick agility. A base clarinet added depth to the solemnity of the third movement, "Chorales and Diversions," and the final "Dance" moved energetically in fits and starts. It is a bright, alluring work.
The intense glitter and mercurial flickerings of Boulez's 1984 "Derive" for chamber ensemble still strike the ear as fresh and challenging. As for "Le Marteau sans Maitre," a classic now 40 years old, it continues to offer enough adventure to keep any musical explorer busy through many hearings. Conductor David Gilbert led Da Capo and its guest artists through the work's spiky, brittle, splintered, erupting textures with a sure hand, and mezzo soprano Julia Bentley handled the serpentine vocal part beautifully. Da Capo's artistic directors, flutist Patricia Spencer and cellist André Emelianoff, who have been creating stimulating concerts for a quarter of a century, deserve a special hand for this one.
SHIRLEY FLEMING
