Review: Richmond Festival of Music

April 29, Second Presbyterian Church

Charles Ives commonly is described as a "maverick" American composer, but in truth he was an even more American character: a cuss. Not just an old cuss, either – he started young as a contrarian who made a study of going against the grain, complicating the issue for the joy of it or the hell of it. His cussedness can be fascinating or endearing, but sometimes he just tests your limits.

Ives’ Piano Trio (1904-11) see-saws between endearment and aggravation. He wrote it as a reminiscence of his student years at Yale; the listener can hear it as a riotous memoir or as a dense jumble of memories. A spoof of earnest Socratic dialogue is followed by "Tsiaj" – "this scherzo is a joke" – a medley-in-bedlam of 19th-century folk songs and popular tunes, which is followed by an outrageously florid prelude leading into a harmonically warped rendition of "Rock of Ages."

This fiendishly difficult score demands a go-for-broke performance, and that’s what it got from pianist Carsten Schmidt, violinist Diane Pascal and cellist James Wilson in the third installment of this year’s Richmond Festival of Music.

The three musicians projected Brahmsian expression and rhetorical effect, but with a crazed urgency, as if Brahms had ingested amphetamines. Their idiomatic singing of the old tunes sounded like miraculous outgrowths from Ives’ thicket of harmonies and sonorities. Against the odds, they usually managed to keep their voices in balance. Schmidt even cut through the fog of the piano part – no mean feat.

A less manic but no less eventful Ives emerged in a set of songs from mezzo-soprano Leslie Mutchler and pianist Gabriel Dobner. Mutchler’s rich, operatic voice was best employed in the bittersweet reverie of "Tom Sails Away" and the shimmering impressionism of "The Housatonic at Stockbridge." She had the enthusiasm, but not the boyish voice, for "The Circus Parade," and allowed tone to overcome style and diction in Ives’ wistful early ballad "Waltz."

In a set of five songs by Stephen Foster, Mutchler sounded most attuned to the Celtic-styled "Hard Times Come Again No More" and "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair."

Dobner, an accompanist of long experience, supported the singer admirably and was masterful in conveying Ives’ energy and reproducing the composer’s tone-painting.

Flutist Mary Boodell, clarinetist Laura DeLuca and Schmidt were tightly integrated and highly animated in "Barn Dances" (2004) by Libby Larsen. These updatings of hoedown and fiddle tunes frequently recall the treatments of American style produced by European composers of the 1920s – imagine Poulenc strolling along the Chisholm Trail. Boodell made especially fine work of the fluttering effects in "Rattlesnake Twist."

Pianist Lori Piitz opened the program with a brittle rendition of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s showpiece "The Banjo." She was in more fluent form by the time she joined Pascal and DeLuca in the evening’s finale, four pieces from "Afternoon Cakewalk," a suite that William Bolcom arranged from ragtime tunes by Scott Joplin, Louis Chauvin and himself, highlighted by Bolcom’s best-known rag, "Graceful Ghost."

The Richmond Festival of Music continues with concerts at 8 p.m. May 2 at Bon Air Presbyterian Church and 8 p.m. May 3 at the Virginia Holocaust Museum. Tickets: $25. A free "Ear Project" lecture-recital will be staged at 11 a.m. May 3 at the Richmond Public Library’s downtown Main Branch. Details: (804) 519-2098; www.richmondfestivalofmusic.org

Arts and smarts (con't.)

Researchers now suggest that correlations between arts education and improved academic performance are off the mark, Ann Hulbert writes in The New York Times Magazine:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

Elsewhere

My interview with George Daugherty, the conductor leading the Richmond Symphony on May 3 in "Bugs Bunny on Broadway," classic Looney Tunes animations with classic(al) scores of Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn, in print in Style Weekly, online at:

http://www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=16900

Henry Brant (1913-2008)

Henry Brant, the composer best known as a pioneer of "spatial" music, has died at the age of 94 at his home in Santa Barbara, CA.

Brant, who was born in Montreal and moved to New York in 1929, decided in the 1950s that “single-style music . . . could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities, and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit.”

His 1953 work "Antiphony I," for five groups of instruments placed at a distance from one another onstage and in the auditorium, was the first of many pieces in which Brant treated space as music's "fourth dimension," the other three being pitch, time and timbre.

After teaching at Columbia University and the Juilliard School, Brant taught composition at Bennington College (1957-80). His orchestral work "Ice Field" won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2002.

More on Henry Brant and his music:

http://www.jaffe.com/brant.html

Rattle retained

The Berlin Philharmonic has voted to keep Simon Rattle as its chief conductor beyond the expiration of his current contract in 2012. Details of the extension are still in negotiation.

The orchestra's musicians, who elect their conductor, chose Rattle to succeed Claudio Abbado in 2002. A few seasons into his tenure, though, the British conductor's progressive ideas reportedly generated dissension between musicians wedded to traditional repertory and those receptive to Rattle's programming of modern and contemporary music and performances in uncoventional venues.

Boulez the optimist

Pierre Boulez on the classical audience's receptivity to modern and contemporary music: "20% are very interested in new things, 50% can be persuaded and 30% are in their coffins before their time."

The 83-year-old enfant terrible-turned-patriarch, profiled by Nicholas Wroe in The Guardian:

http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2276332,00.html

Review: Richmond Symphony

George Manahan conducting
April 25, Second Baptist Church, Richmond

Give George Manahan a complex, colorful modern score and he will give you a performance to remember. Multiply that by three and you have the program Manahan conducts in his first dates with the Richmond Symphony since he left the orchestra 10 years ago to become music director of the New York City Opera.

In what he drolly calls "a nostalgic look back at the good old days of the 20th century," Manahan brings extraordinary vividness and vitality to Debussy’s "La Mer," Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, with Karen Johnson, the symphony’s concertmaster, as soloist.

Johnson, performing on a high stool as she mends a broken foot, plays a highly collaborative role in the Stravinsky, which casts the violin as an interlocutor more than as a conventional solo voice. The composer harks back to – at times virtually quotes – his "L’histoire du Soldat" ("The Soldier’s Tale"), in which the violin carries on running dialogues with trumpet and other instruments in a chamber ensemble. Here, the solo violin’s exchanges are with orchestral soloists, most prominently bassoon and trumpet, as well as each section of the orchestra.

The violinist, with bassoonist Jonathan Friedman, trumpeter Rolla Durham and other partners, sustained a lively, largely good-humored discourse in the first of three weekend performances. She tone was brightly projected and focused but not loud, and expressively austere, even in the relatively lyrical showcase Stravinsky gives the soloist in the second aria movement.

The alert, rhythmically pointed and color-sensitive playing that Manahan obtained in the Stravinsky was matched, although on far broader soundscapes, in the Debussy and Bartók.

"La Mer," of course, bathes in tone color (both subtle and garish) and generates great waves of sonority; but this music’s impact is compounded in a reading that attends to details of rhythm, dynamics and balance. Manahan and the orchestra clearly had seen to those details in rehearsal, and so were able to deliver a performance of crystalline clarity that did not stint on spontaneity.

The Bartók was, in a word, amazing. The score calls for every soloist and section of the orchestra to play virtuosically, and everyone played up to that standard. (The strings' figurations in a quite briskly paced finale were especially impressive.) Normally precarious balances in the orchestration sounded naturally even-keeled; treacherous rhythmic currents were negotiated faultlessly, seemingly effortlessly; every color and accent was in its place and packed its intended punch.

Great care obviously went into preparing this work, but it sounded like play – music as extreme sport, you could say. I have never heard the wit of this piece better expressed, or its colors more vividly rendered, or its varied strains of energy more powerfully harnessed. This belongs on the short list of greatest performances in the orchestra's half-century history.

The program repeats at 8 p.m. April 26 at First Baptist Church in Richmond and 8 p.m. April 28 at St. Michael Catholic Church in Glen Allen. Tickets: $20-$50. Details: (804) 788-1212; www.richmondsymphony.com