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Los Angeles Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Is there a Los Angeles musical style?
The composer and critic Virgil Thomson once defined American music as music written by Americans. There is no arguing with that. Less obvious, however, is figuring out what, if anything, describes L.A. music. Los Angeles is the home of film music. The two most influential classical composers of the first half of the 20th century, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, lived here. (In Stravinsky's case, the Russian composer spent more of his life in L.A. than in any other city.) The composer with the most radical influence on the second half of the 20th century, John Cage, was born and grew up here. Ferreting out L.A.'s bearing on jazz and the many, many aspects of popular music, as well as world music, is a lifetime's effort. Yet these seeming incongruities of musical life are what fascinate the most. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, for instance, flirted, if futilely, with writing Hollywood film scores. The money was a lure. The possibility of reaching the masses, irresistible. Picture Schoenberg, in 1935, in the office of Hollywood's prevailing film producer, Irving Thalberg, offering untenable requirements to score MGM's feature film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's 'The Good Earth.' Picture the composer, considered by many the instigator of the most daunting music of all time, asking for $50,000 (more than $1.1 million today adjusted for inflation) and full control of the movie's sound, including having the actors recite their lines to his rhythms and suggested pitches. Picture, again, eight decades later and 3,000 miles away, the head of the Opera of the Future project in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's ultra-futuristic Media Lab, mulling over an idea for an opera based on that remarkable Thalberg incident as a way to examine the profound implications of art and entertainment had Schoenberg been given the green light. A new production of Tod Machover's 'Schoenberg in Hollywood,' which had its premiere in Boston seven years ago, finally reaches L.A. on Sunday afternoon for the first of four performances by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music at the Nimoy. Those very names — Schoenberg, who taught at UCLA from 1936 to 1944, Alpert and Leonard Nimoy — couldn't better illustrate the marvelous fantasy of L.A. musical juxtapositions. Also Sunday at First Lutheran Church of Venice, the Hear Now Music Festival concludes its 2025 season of three concerts. This festival is L.A.'s most dedicated resource for surveying local music. Over the last 14 years, it has featured more than 200 composers, from the most famous to the most obscure, from academia and from Hollywood, be they John Williams, an electronic wizard at CalArts or a kid fiddling away with a guitar in the garage. The idea of artistic place and physical place are at the heart of Hear Now. If L.A. music is anything, it is a music that challenges the notions of borders. The festival came about because its co-founder, composer Hugh Levick — who divides his time between France, Spain and Venice Beach — said the music that his L.A. colleagues were writing was easier to hear being performed abroad than in venues here. Composers in L.A. are far-flung. Looking at universities alone, UCLA, USC, CalArts, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, Pomona College and the Cal State campuses in Northridge, Long Beach and Fullerton are all centers of musical activity that have had widespread influence. The seeds of Minimalism, the most prominent style of late 20th century music as propagated most famously by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, can be traced to Los Angeles City College in the 1950s. That's where La Monte Young — while studying with, and finding encouragement from, pianist Leonard Stein (who had been Schoenberg's assistant) — began to consider what would happen if he radically slowed everything down. I sat down with Levick recently to discover what he had learned from the festival. Having coffee at a Santa Monica cafe, we were near a cottage where Cage had lived in the early 1930s, when he found his first music job. It was as an assistant to pioneering animator Oskar Fischinger, who came into artistic conflict with Walt Disney over 'Fantasia.' Cage didn't last long, falling asleep on the job and dropping a lighted cigarette on flammable celluloid. Levick has probably encountered a greater variety of composers in this part of the world than anyone else. The way Hear Now works is that any composer can submit scores, so I asked the obvious questions. Could he detect any commonality, as one might in, say, Paris or Berlin? Is there West Coast and East Coast music as there once seemed to be? Does L.A. have its own sound or maybe laid-back sensibility? 'Not really,' Levick said. 'There are people whom you could vaguely put together stylistically. They may have obvious influences, but mostly they have gone their own way. What is a little different about the West Coast and the East Coast is there is a certain fluidity and flexibility here and certain rigidity on the East Coast.' When asked what has surprised him over the years, Levick pointed to the fact that although John Williams, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès and Andrew Norman may attract audiences, curiosity also drives crowds. Of this year's festival, which features works by 28 composers, I've previously encountered only four. Even Levick was surprised by the great many submissions from composers he didn't know. Yet that turns out to be a draw. At this year's festival, the first two programs were sold out. I attended the first at 2220 Arts + Archives in March devoted to often arcane electro-acoustic music, and it attracted a diverse and enthusiastic audience taking pleasure in not knowing what to expect. No two works were remotely the same. If Levick shies away from generalization, he too is a composer not easily pinned down. He started out as a fiction writer who, while living in Paris, chanced upon avant-garde jazz and took up the saxophone. That led him naturally to classical avant-garde. The concert Sunday will feature his latest work, 'The Song of Prophet X,' for speaker/singer and piano quartet, a similar configuration that Schoenberg used in his antiwar 'Ode to Napoleon,' We cannot escape Schoenberg. This season has seen widespread celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Last year, on April 30, Hear Now ended its festival with a large-scale concert given at the UCLA music department's Schoenberg Hall and featuring the UCLA Philharmonia conducted by Neal Stulberg, the same forces tackling Machover's 'Schoenberg in Hollywood.' The campus was on edge from news of a violent attack on a Palestinian protest that day just across from Schoenberg Hall. Hear Now, nevertheless, went on as scheduled. The concert was not a political statement, the music had nothing to do with protest movements. Even so, the symbolism of the occasion was impossible to ignore. Schoenberg, who had fled Nazi Germany, wrote scores of protest music such as 'Ode to Napoleon' and 'Survivor From Warsaw.' He also dallied with Hollywood. Schoenberg might ultimately be seen as the great juxtaposition. Leonard Stein and John Cage were in Schoenberg's UCLA classes. Film composers David Raksin ('Laura') and Leonard Rosenman ('East of Eden') studied with Schoenberg. Both Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman brought up Schoenberg when I interviewed them, and it was their world of progressive jazz that led Hugh Levick to Hear Now. Could we then define L.A. music as simply be music of, and open to, juxtapositions?
San Francisco Chronicle
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: S.F. Symphony and Giancarlo Guerrero deliver orchestral showstoppers
Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero's two previous appearances with the San Francisco Symphony amply showcased his flair for colorful, dramatic music. After a two-year gap, he's back at Davies Symphony Hall with a program of glittering orchestral showpieces. The late Kaija Saariaho composed 'Asteroid 4179: Toutatis' in 2005 as a complement to a Berlin Philharmonic concert featuring Gustav Holst's 'The Planets.' The asteroid in question is tiny and irregularly shaped, and at about four minutes in length, the music matches the object's scale. In addition to the astronomical theme, there are the typical Saariaho trademarks: beautiful, ingeniously layered orchestration and power that wells up over the course of the work. The piece opens with crystalline transparency, a piccolo, percussion and celesta floating above the larger orchestra. Massed brass instruments interrupt, and after a brief climax, the orchestra dies away into silence. It was a thoughtful start to this flashy program heard on Friday, May 2, the first of two concerts at Davies, concluding on Saturday, May 3. Igor Stravinsky's great ballet score 'Petrushka' unfolds on a completely different scale, taking some 40 minutes to tell the story of three puppets brought to life by a magician. Guerrero led a taut, exciting account of the work, performed in Stravinsky's revised 1947 version. One of the Costa Rican conductor's superpowers is his ability to throw a spotlight on a piece's structure through knife-edge timing and control of dynamics. Another is knowing when to step back and let the musicians do their thing. Tight ensemble playing was a hallmark of this 'Petrushka.' At the same time, Guerrero gave associate principal flute Blair Francis Paponiu complete freedom in her beautifully played cadenza. The conductor's emphasis on sharply articulated rhythms paid off throughout the work, especially in 'The Grand Carnival' section, when competing bands seemingly play in different meters. Every crescendo and decrescendo was perfectly timed. Occasionally, a section or player was drowned out in the welter of sound. John Wilson's casual virtuosity on piano, positioned right in front of the conductor, was a highlight of the 'Russian Dance,' but Guerrero covered Wilson's playing too often in the opening tableau. The strings were sometimes obliterated by the brass. Nonetheless, this was a thrilling account of a great work. What do Stravinsky and Ottorino Respighi have in common? Both composers studied with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, one of the great orchestrators of the 19th century, and both came away with enormous skill in handling huge forces. The second half of Friday's program was devoted to Respighi's 'Fountains of Rome' and 'Pines of Rome,' flamboyant blockbusters that have to walk a fine line to avoid turning into kitsch. (This is never an issue with Stravinsky.) Guerrero performed them with a straight face, and his enormous technical skill and ear for color and dynamics made this music sound better than perhaps it fundamentally is. The first work makes its way around Rome, picturing fountains in different locations throughout the day. The 'Valle Giulia' movement, with chiming winds and a prominent celesta part, seemingly pays homage to Richard Strauss' opera 'Der Rosenkavalier.' Special kudos to Marc Shapiro, whose celesta playing contributed beautifully to all four works on the program, and to principal oboe Eugene Izotov and principal flute Yubeen Kim for their work in both Respighi pieces. The brass, too, played brilliantly throughout. It's an oddity of 'Pines of Rome' that the splashy first movement, 'The Pines of the Villa Borghese,' sounds more like an actual fountain than anything in 'Fountains of Rome.' In 'Pines Near a Catacomb,' Guerrero finely judged every climax; principal trumpet Mark Inouye was magnificent in his moody offstage solo (and also in 'Petrushka'). Principal clarinet Carey Bell's long-breathed, introspective solo in 'The Pines of the Janiculum' was another highlight, as were the silken strings and oceanic sound Guerrero conjured. As for the last movement, 'The Pines of the Appian Way,' here Respighi generates excitement through some of the more obvious tricks in a composer's arsenal: antiphonal brass playing from the terrace, full-orchestra chromatic slides and an admittedly electrifying five-minute-long crescendo. The movement is intended to evoke marching Roman legions, but it might just as well be invoking Italian Fascists or Imperial Stormtroopers. We describe, you decide. San Francisco Classical Voice.
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Britten Sinfonia/Sinfonia Smith Square review – quiet fervour and formal grace
Innovative as always, Britten Sinfonia joined forces with Sinfonia Smith Square for a programme of music for wind ensemble by Messiaen and Stravinsky, alongside Stravinsky's Mass and 20th-century French motets (Poulenc, Duruflé, more Messiaen) sung by the choir of Merton College, Oxford. There were two conductors, Nicholas Daniel for the wind ensemble music, and Benjamin Nicholas (Merton's director of music) for the a cappella works. Daniel, also the Britten Sinfonia's principal oboist since its founding in 1992, steps down at the end of the current season, and this was effectively his final concert with the orchestra. The programme was sombre and beautifully constructed. The main work was Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, Messiaen's great memorial to the dead of both world wars. It was commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the second, and is still an essential reminder, another 60 years on, of the necessity of hope in dark times. It was prefaced by other 20th-century works reflecting on conflict. The echoes of both Russian Orthodox church music and The Rite of Spring that lurk behind Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments suggest a world lost to revolution and exile, while his Mass, written in the US between 1944 and 1948, moves from hard-edged austerity towards a chilly peace, tentative at best. Poulenc's Quatre Motets Pour un Temps de Pénitence, only three of them sung here, date from early 1939, their surface calm barely concealing deep unease at impending crisis. Ritual elements rightly predominated in performances. Daniel's way with the closing sections of Symphonies of Wind Instruments proved extraordinarily moving, as the music moves towards sad resignation. The Mass was a thing of quiet fervour and formal grace, beautifully sung and played. The reverberant acoustic of St George's Cathedral, Southwark, can sometimes swallow definition and detail in Stravinsky. The vast hieratic ceremonials of Et Exspecto, in contrast, expanded and resonated superbly into the space in an interpretation of intense solemnity, superb control and, at times, cataclysmic loudness. Merton College choir sounded beautiful in the motets: Duruflé's Ubi Caritas et Amor was particularly exquisite. And Daniel also gave us a transcription for oboe of Messiaen's Vocalise-étude, originally a conservatoire test piece for soprano and piano, done with exquisite tone, extraordinary lyrical poise and wonderful depth of feeling.
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A sensational, spine-tingling evening with the Britten Sinfonia
This wonderful concert from the Britten Sinfoni a, Sinfonia Smith Square and the Choir of Merton College, Oxford was uplifting on two counts. It was another sign that the classical music world, reeling from the blows of Covid and the evident but never actually stated hostility of Arts Council England, hasn't lost its mojo. This was a big-scale event, composed almost entirely of 20 th -century religious music, put together out of a conviction that unfashionable but great music can attract big audiences – as indeed it did. As for the music itself it was a wonderful antidote to that all-pervasive soft-centred 'spiritual' music that cosies up to you, in an attempt to persuade you religion is about having warm feelings. There was nothing cosy in this concert. The music was as remotely beautiful as the stars and as stark and chiselled as a block of marble, with only the occasional concession to emotional warmth. The first piece, Stravinsky 's Symphonies of Wind Instruments seemed to be the odd one out, with no ostensible religious purpose. But the outcries from high winds over soft chanting in the flutes seemed like priests in dialogue, and the austere alternation of different speeds, directed with perfect control by Nicholas Daniel – better known in the musical world as a superb oboist – sounded like the acting-out of some obscure ritual. The final chorale, rising up with suppressed ecstasy into the lofty neo-Gothic spaces of St George's Cathedral, made one's spine tingle. There were many such spine-tingling moments in the Mass by Stravinsky, where the Choir together with ten wind and brass evoked the ancient Latin liturgy in a way that seemed ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, all at once. It was beautifully shaped by Daniel, who softened the music's severe metronomic tread just enough to let the music speak. In between the Symphonies and the Mass came sacred choral music from Francis Poulenc, a composer who revered Stravinsky but didn't hold feeling at such a long arm's length. One felt the terror in Timor et Tremor and the radiance in Vinea mea electa. The choir under Benjamin Nicholas sang beautifully, but the women seemed somewhat stronger and more secure than the men. To these feelings were added tenderness in two short pieces by Olivier Messiaen. In one of them, an orchestral arrangement of the early Vocalise-étude, Nicholas Daniel played the soaring melody—a poignant moment, as it marked his last performance as Principal Oboe of the Britten Sinfonia. Finally came Messiaen's Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (And I wait for the Resurrection of the Dead) which feels more like an awe-inspiring evocation of fiery stars and nebulae than anything religious. Daniel made sure the silences between movements felt as vast as the music itself, and he gave space to the deafening gong-strokes and apocalyptic brass in a way that made the cathedral's echoey acoustic seem an advantage rather than a hindrance. Like all the music, the piece became the sounding symbol of something incomprehensible beyond this world.
Boston Globe
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
BSO triumphs with Shostakovich's 6th Symphony
The links between the Vrebalov and Stravinsky pieces are numerous and intentional. The BSO asked Vrebalov, who won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for composition last year, to score Biblical psalm texts and use an orchestra similar to the ingeniously odd one Stravinsky assembled for the 'Symphony of Psalms' – replete with winds and brass but omitting violins, violas, and clarinets. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up They make for an even more fascinating contrast, though. 'Love Canticles' has a numinous air to it, its laudatory texts set against largely dreamy, diaphanous textures. As God's virtues are enumerated, things begin to fragment, and the music becomes more muscular and martial. After a tremendous climax and dissipation, the closing 'Hallelujah' brings echoes of Byzantine chant, intoned by the chorus over flickering harmonics from the orchestra. This is a beautiful and mysterious piece, expertly orchestrated to create that impression. Advertisement Next to the Vreblaov's cosmic warmth, the 'Symphony of Psalms,' an apex of Stravinsky's neoclassical period, was bound to come across as even more rigorous and ascetic than it already is. If 'Love Canticles' offers the psalms as a mystical embrace, Stravinsky presents them as solemn statements of fact. The blocklike choral writing, the intricate counterpoint in the middle movement, and the oasis of calm with which it concludes create an atmosphere that is profoundly moving in its sheer austerity. Nelsons, the BSO, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus were equally good in both works. The clarity of the choral singing was notable, as were the perfectly managed balances between the two large forces. Occasionally during the Stravinsky one wished for more variation in the dynamics, as everything seemed to exist on the same plane of loudness. As for the Shostakovich, it is one of the composer's strangest symphonies. It opens with an immense slow movement — so slow as to border on stasis —followed by a fast scherzo and an even faster finale. Especially in comparison to the symphonies Shostakovitch composed before and after it, the 6th seems largely free of both a political program and the angst that colors so much of Shostakovich's other music. It is, as they say, a hard nut to crack. Sunday's performance didn't really shed any light on what the composer might have 'meant' with this unusual work. As a purely musical experience, though, it was a comprehensive triumph. It is difficult to imagine an orchestra playing this music better than the BSO did – a model of depth, transparency, and cohesive power. Nelsons' pacing was expert, especially in the first movement, which never lost momentum despite its span. In the finale, he pushed the tempos to an extreme to show how antic and unironically witty this music is, almost as if Shostakovich were taking his cue from Haydn, music's great comic master. If that was the 'decoding' intended, mission accomplished. Advertisement The final program of both 'Decoding Shostakovich' and the season – consisting of the Violin Concerto No. 1 and Symphony No. 8 – is this weekend. David Weininger can be reached at globeclassicalnotes@
