Music, Miscellaneous

St Olaf Choir in its 2015 Winter tour (2/6/2015) at Carnegie Hall.  I absolutely loved The Battle of Jericho (arr. Moses G. Hogan Jr.). Other highlights included Veni Creator Spiritus by Anthony Bernarducci, Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying by Philipp Nicolai (setting by F. Melius Christiansen), Kala, Kalla (Five Hebrew Love Songs) by Eric Whitacre, and  Lullaby (Three Nocturnes) by Daniel Elder,

Park Avenue Chamber Symphony's Fifteenth Anniversary Celebration (2/22/2015) at Jazz at Lincoln Center.  They did Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Maazel's The Ring Without Words. Maazel's son, a cellist, recently joined the symphony, and his widow read a piece about the constraints Maazel followed in synthesizing Wagner's Ring Cycle: no composing fillers or bridging; include all leitmotifs; everything in chronological order.  She said Maazel "did not want to write a single note" that was not in the original, a curious statement, when you think about it.  It's like saying you want to write a synopsis of Hamlet without writing a single letter that is not in the original -- but presumably all 26 letters appear in the play, so that leaves the field wide open for total revision.  In either case, I think it would be more accurate to speak of an intention not to use a single phrase that was not in the original.  But that's just me. 

With respect to the Rite of Spring, I'm not very familiar with this piece, but at the very beginning I thought certain phrases sounded like Looney Tunes cartoons. The first movement also made me think of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, particularly the line about smale foweles that "slepen al the nyght with open ye."  I also noticed a slight nonconformity in the music, as if the notes were slipping or slightly slippery; but they were played very precisely. 

After a slow beginning for the second movement, a percussive pizzicato jolted me into attention. My eyes snapped open and I had a moment of cognitive dissonance: a glowing Arabic script writing itself in mid-air above a pool of ink soon resolved itself into the musicians' illuminated faces and bright bows raised and bouncing in boisterous pizzicato over a sea of dark clothing. The music soon became wide and brash, ocean waves crashing into a crescendo.  A female bassist put her whole body into playing each note.