Sunday, September 29, 2013

Subway Series (9/24/13)

Going all athletic on us, Meister? Not in the least. This Subway Series is one concert in each of the five boroughs, performed by members of the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. The Ensemble forms the core of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. This year’s program (and I believe it was the 10th annual—how could I have missed this for nine years?) was titled Brass Gardens. I caught the quintet at their Bryant Park concert in Manhattan after work on a beautiful early-autumn evening. It was also a food drive, and since I had just bought some cheese-filled spinach tortellini, I donated the box to the food drive.TMI? On to the music, then.

The performers were Carl Albach and John Dent, trumpets; Patrick Pridemore, French horn; Michael Powell, trombone; and John Rojak, bass trombone.

The program:
Grand Valley Fanfare, Eric Ewazen (b. 1954)
Three Venetian Canzoni (ed. Ray Mase): Canzon 19, Gioseffo Guami (1540–1611); Ricercar del sesto tuono, Andrea Gabrielli (1520–1586); and Canzon 22, Bastian Chilese (b. ca. 1600)
Colchester Fantasy, Ewazen
Elizabethan Consort Music (ed. Mase)
West Side Story Suite, Leonard Bernstein (ed. Jack Gale): Tonight, Maria, I Feel Pretty, Somewhere, and America

The opening fanfare was just that—a brassy, sassy, very pleasant fanfare in a clean style, but with some modern (yet listenable) harmonies. The Venetian Canzoni had nicely shaped dynamics with clean, clear lines in the Guami. The Gabrielli was a quartet (no French horn) with both trumpeters switching out to flugelhorns. The Chilese was both song-like and fugue-like.

Two (of four) movements (all named for pubs) were played from the Colchester Fantasy. The Rose and Crown had a dirge-like opening followed by a brisker section with, once again, modern writing, but still musical and not too far out there, and then a return to the dark chords of the opening. The Red Lion chugged along with a lot of forward movement, even in its slower middle section, and ended with calmer chords.

The Consort Music was arranged for the brass from what originally would have been a consort of viols. Eight dances were listed in the program, but I’m not sure all eight were played. A partial list of composers includes Thomas Morley, Thomas Weelkes, and John Dowland. All of the pieces were interesting examples of what I think of when I think of Elizabethan courtly dances. Some were bright and brisk while others were slightly somber.

West Side Story did not fare quite as well as some of the other arrangements. With only a quintet, some of the lines seemed a bit thin and shallow. Tonight had a couple of bobbles, while Maria had some writing for the lower instruments that was muddy at times. The low writing worked perfectly in I Feel Pretty, though, when the main theme was given to the bass trombone—witty and effective. Somewhere wants to be shimmery, and that’s somewhat hard to pull off outdoors with a brass quintet. America finished the suite off with a bang. Perhaps the familiarity of the music worked against it. I wanted it to be super, but it just didn’t quite make it there for me. YMMV.

A nice Scott Joplin rag, Easy Winners, was played as an encore. I enjoyed it, although the tempo was a little too brisk for my taste. All in all, a very enjoyable evening of brass music. I look forward to next year’s musical Subway Series.

ConcertMeister

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Three for Three—Sort of (9/22/13)

A breezy Sunday afternoon found me in Riverside Park. Not exactly a new venue, as I believe I heard The Main Squeeze, an All-Girl Accordion Orchestra, there a couple of summers ago. But that was in the West 70s while Sunday found me at West 116th Street for The Overlook Concerts series. The Manhattan School Jazz Quintet, led by Isaac Kaplan, put on a fun afternoon of jazz and popular music standards. We heard Isaac Kaplan, trombone; Jonathan Ragonese, soprano saxophone, Kevin Bernstein, piano; Ethan O’Reilly, double bass; and Joseph Peri, drums.

Here’s the program: All the Things You Are, Kern/Hammerstein; How High the Moon, Lewis/Hamilton; Black Orpheus, Bonfa/Maria; On the Sunny Side of the Street, McHugh/Fields; These Foolish Things, Strachey/Maschwitz; A Night in Tunisia, Gillespie; and Things Ain’t What They Used to Be, Ellington.

I don’t know who did the arrangements but I’d be surprised if Mr. Kaplan didn’t at least have a hand in them. As an overview, in standard jazz format, every player gets a crack at the main tune (or a variation on it), and that was the case here. Both of the first tunes carried that format through, and the arrangements were both a little too much the same and a little too long for my taste.

In Black Orpheus, the piano, bass, and drums set an exotic mood and then the trombone laid out the tune. After another piano/bass/drums interlude, the sax stepped in working around the tune as opposed to giving us the straightforward melody. It was a nice arrangement.

These Foolish Things was a little less familiar to me, though I recognized portions of the melody. I like the fact that the lyricists’ names were included, even though there was nobody singing them; that might have been a nice touch. Beautiful Love had a calm ballad-esque feel to it.

A Night in Tunisia took us into more of a bebop jazz style, in contrast to the earlier standards with jazz applied to them. It was bebop—but not too frantic, which is just fine by me. The sax really got a chance to wail, and this (and the Ellington) felt like a more structured arrangement. Or maybe they were just better-structured jazz tunes.

All five of the guys, students and/or recent graduates of the Manhattan School of Music, played well and seemed to be very comfortable playing together and throwing cues back and forth.

There are two more concerts in the series—French Cookin’ Blues Band and the Manhattan Wind Ensemble. I’ll keep an eye on the weather (these are outdoor concerts) but I’m intrigued by a 50-piece wind ensemble. Still, I’m also in search of new venues. Do I want to repeat right away? Tune in ...

ConcertMeister

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

New Venue, II – (9/20/13)

Friday evening found me in the Bohemian National Hall at Czech Center NY for a New Chamber Ballet program, Miro Magloire, choreographer and director, with live music provided by The Argento Ensemble, Michel Galante, conductor. I got my free ticket through the auspices of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, so even though there was not a lot of information available ahead of time, I was fairly sure that the music, at least, would lean toward the avant-garde. I was right. The choreography was very much of the avant-garde, as well.

Composers included Georg Friedrich Haas, Anton Webern, Nina C. Young, Michel Galante, Arthur Kampela, and Beat Furrer; three of the composers were at the performance. The ballets/dances themselves, for five female dancers in various combinations of three, two, five, and one solo (though that was more like a duet, as it included a soprano who only started singing after she had shadowed the dance soloist for a while), were Broken Chains, Echoes, Come Closer, Synch, Fiesta, and Between Us the Night. Not that I made any huge connections between the titles and the pieces themselves.

All five of the dancers were just fine and seemed to have a pretty good grasp of
Mr. Magloire’s style, which looked to me like poses, contortions, unison movements, contrasting movements, etc. They performed barefoot in some pieces, and en pointe in some others. In Echoes, set to Webern’s Four Pieces for Violin and Piano op. 7, all of the dancing occurred in silence, with the four short pieces in between. The choreographer actually commented on that, but it still did not make a lot of sense to me.

In a strange bit of stage management and planning, there was often “dead air” between the pieces. But that led to an interesting backstory to Ms. Young’s composition, Tethered Within (the music for Come Closer). She was commissioned to write a piece for eight musicians, with the imposed restriction that she had to write it in just two weeks. I liked the piece. She also commented on what it was like to see her vision of her own piece reinterpreted by a choreographer. As one of our hosts said, “You just can’t get that from Mozart or Beethoven!”

I’m certainly glad I went, and I do like the idea of hearing live music by living composers, but I’ll be sure to pick and choose carefully just how much avant-garde programming I’ll follow in the future. For me, a little goes a long way. Still, it was one more new venue for the new season—a ballroom in the Czech Center in the East 70s.

ConcertMeister

Monday, September 16, 2013

New Season, New Venues

Sunday afternoon found yours truly at the Schomburg Center up on 135th Street; it’s part of the New York Public Library system. The program, appropriately on the 50th anniversary, to the day, of the Birmingham, AL, church bombing, was “Songs of Freedom.” Performers included Jeremiah Hosea, Jerome Jordan, KimberlyNichole, Martha Redbone, and Tamar-kali as singers, with Messrs. Hosea and Jordan also playing guitar from time to time. Latasha N. Nevada Diggs provided oratory for a few songs as well as some nice tambourining (is so a word, I just used it!). Janelle Reichman came on later in the program for a saxophone solo (with keyboards, unfortunately I couldn’t get the keyboardist’s name), and there was also a drum set onstage. From the outset, the performers let us know that this was a community event. If a song title, listed on a projection slide, said Leader, we were encouraged to join in singing; if it said Soloist, the named performer would sing through alone, though this got a little fuzzy at times.

So, to the songs themselves. We heard/sang This Little Light of Mine, Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom (with some wild hand-clapping rhythm accompaniment), I’m on My Way to Freedom Land, Which Side Are You On?, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle/Letter from a Birmingham Jail (the second portion orated and linked to the song), In the Mississippi River, We Shall Not Be Moved, Come By Here (Kum-ba-yah—that had never occurred to me before), The Ballad of Medgar Evers, A Change Is Gonna Come (powerfully sung by Mr. Jordan), Mississippi Goddam (a Nina Simone song worked over by KimberlyNichole), Alabama (the saxophone solo), Keep on Pushin’ (a little on the weak side, with Mr. Hosea, a bass, singing in a falsetto—always difficult to bring off, especially as there were lots of instruments playing by then, so lyrics tended to get lost), Freedom Highway, Been in the Storm So Long/Fannie Lou Hamer’s Testimony (song and oratory, very nicely done by
Tamar-kali and Ms. Diggs), Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Eyes on the Prize, And Still I Rise (oration, with taped spoken loops added in electronically), finishing with We Shall Overcome.

All in all, the performances were quite good. Some of the harmonies were a bit rudimentary, but that’s to be expected in folk/freedom/protest songs. The meaning trumps the method sometimes. Some of the songs were completely unknown to me, some were familiar, and some I knew pretty well. The message was driven home without going over the top. And the message is just as important now as it was 50 years ago when those four young girls were murdered in an Alabama church.

So, this was a new type of concert for me in a new venue for me. I’m sure I’ll be revisiting some of my usual haunts during this new concert season, but I’ll also be on the lookout to broaden my geographic horizons.

ConcertMeister

Monday, September 9, 2013

Violin, and Piano, and Violin and Piano (9/7/13)

Saturday’s Bargemusic concert was attended by approximately 60 people—the largest audience I’ve seen there. Mark Peskanov started us off with two movements from the Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001 for solo violin, by J.S. Bach. The Adagio was fairly gentle and played very well. The Fuga (Allegro) followed, including finger work fireworks. He then switched gears and played the Partita #3 (also for solo violin), which was in the form of a waltz. He seems very comfortable playing sans accompaniment.

He then introduced pianist Olga Vinokur, who treated us to some solo piano music by Russian composers. She started with four pieces by Alexander Scriabin—I’m not sure whether they were related pieces or four movements from a single work. I am mostly familiar with Scriabin from his highly atonal works, but these were much more lyrical and reminiscent of Chopin’s style of composition. The first piece was calm and fairly lush, with what seemed to be a little more structure than some of the French Romantic/Impressionist styles. The next piece had rippling arpeggios in the left hand and also in some of the right hand lines and phrases, with a brighter tempo and intensity of volume. The third piece opened with some real bombast, followed by a calming section. The final piece had a very rapid tempo and used fiery finger work.

She followed the Scriabin with a movement from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Moment Musicaux. It opened with repetitive figures in the bass line with block chords in the phrases above, from the right hand, followed by more of the rippling writing, as heard in the Scriabin. It had a nice overall shape with a gentle section, then fuller, and a return to a gentle ending.

Ms. Vinokur and Mr. Peskanov then joined forces in the Violin Sonata No. 8, Opus 30, No. 3, by Ludwig van Beethoven. The first movement was bright and sunny, with a few flourishes of drama thrown in for good measure. It had quite a brisk tempo with some driving accompaniment in the piano writing. The second movement, fashioned as a minuet, had song-like (cantabile) writing for the violin with gentler, yet still driving, accompaniment. A brief little “oom-pah-pah” section followed, concluding with a nice interplay of melody in the piano with a countermelody from the violin. The final movement had a very, very brisk opening—a perpetual motion feeling, especially in the piano—that kept the drive going, then a race to the finish. This was a very fun piece in a very fine performance.

These two obviously like performing together, and it shows. Bargemusic is a great standby for a Saturday afternoon culture fix.

ConcertMeister

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

I Beg Your Pardon (8/31/13)

On Saturday, I attended part of the 2013 Harlem Green Garden Tour. Did I mention it was free? It was an all-day affair but I joined in at the Harlem Rose Garden at 6 East 129th Street. But Meister, this doesn’t sound like a concert. Not exactly—but there was harmony in the various layouts of the community gardens, and that harmony works, for me, for this tour to be included as a blog post.

The tour was a blast. Community gardens are vacant lots that have been reclaimed by community organizations and turned into gardens—some just for flowers, some with paths, a bridge here or there, and others for flowers and vegetables. Of the 13 in total, I saw the aforementioned Harlem Rose Garden, the West 132nd Street Garden, Margrichante Community Garden, Success Garden/Harlem Grown, the Morris-Jumel Community Garden, the Convent Avenue Garden, and the William B. Harris Garden. I traveled from East 129th Street to as far north as West 162nd Street, ending up at West 153rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. They even had a barbecue waiting for us!

I walked the tour, with the exception of the W. 134th St. to W. 162nd St. leg. But there was a bus providing transportation from stop to stop for all of the other gardens. The gardens that made the greatest impressions on me were the Rose Garden, Margrichante, and Success Garden/Harlem Grown. The Rose Garden impressed because of its calming nature. Margrichante was interesting because of its communal nature. There are 25 individual plots within the garden, with one person responsible for his or her own plot. There’s also a waiting list of 25 people. I saw cucumbers, Swiss chard, collard greens, spinach, cabbage, pole beans, tomatoes-tomahtoes, green and purple basil, etc. And eggplant. I can’t remember for sure but I think this was the first time I’d ever seen eggplant on the vine. The secretary of Margrichante was there and even provided mint tea, rosemary lemonade, and basil lemonade, using herbs from that very garden.

Harlem Success Garden (as I found it listed on the Web) is a community garden that is also associated with P.S. 175. So, here’s the deal—the students from the school across the street come over to the garden. There’s a seating area where the lesson of the day takes place. Then the children have a hands-on lesson where they do the actual gardening. And here’s the best part—the produce they harvest goes home with them, with recipes provided by one of the teacher/gardeners. How cool is that?

The community garden program gets a big green thumbs-up from me. This was the eighth annual garden tour, and I’m going to be sure to keep my eyes open for the ninth, next year. Just one of the little wonders in this big city. Thank you, community garden volunteers, and thank you, Harlem Green Garden Tour!

ConcertMeister