#focm

Ferrari 458, F430 and F355

Heute habe ich mir einen neuen Lagavulin vorgeknöpft. Es handelt sich um eine Abfüllung für die Friends of Classic Malts. (Diageo's Whisky-Club). Von vier weiteren Brennereien wird es eine solche Abfüllung geben. Alle sind bis heute jedoch noch nicht bekannt gegeben. Ich habe noch keine weiteren Details. Semi-Blind-Probe!

48%, glaube ich! Auge: klar, Amber Nase: sehr delikater Rauch, sehr würzig, geradezu opulent aber noch nicht wirklich definierbar. Erst etwas Wasser bringt Frucht hervor, getrocknete. Ich bin mir nicht ganz sicher, vielleicht Dattel und Pflaume. Dann ist da entfernt noch Vanille, Pfeffer, und frische rote Kirsche. Es ist eindeutig ein Lagavulin. Ein guter! Ich frage mich wirklich was das für Fässer waren. Ich schätze, es handelt sich um verschiedene Sherry-Finishes von Ex-Bourbon-Fass-Whiskys. Mund: ja, verschlossen! Wasser bringt Süße und kitzelt den Sherry sowie seine typischen Aromen hervor. Über allem, der vertraute Rauch. Getrocknete Früchte und etwas pfeffrige Würze dominieren dahinter. Hier und da Fragmente der Eindrücke aus der Nase. Finish: ohne Wasser recht trocken, Mundgefühl wie gute Zartbitter-Schokolade und zu lange gezogener Tee, viel Rauch. Mit Wasser ein vielfaches angenehmer. Langsam klingt er ab, mit Würde. Es ist ein Lagavulin, wie ich ihn mag. Einzig das Finish, dürfte für meinen Geschmack etwas harmonischer sein.

RIP, Lee Hyla; here's my interview with him on "Howl," his string quartet (with Ginsberg) that the Brentano String Quartet played in Kansas City in 2008. (Hyla died June 6, 2014).

With ‘Howl, ’ the Beat goes on ; Ginsberg poem sets the tempo for Brentano Quartet performance.

9/28/2008

By Steve Paul

The Kansas City Star

When the Brentano String Quartet returns to town Friday night at the Folly Theater, it’ll be hauling onstage a fairly typical mix of old and new.

The group is widely admired for championing the work of contemporary composers alongside quartet standards going back 200 years or more.

"For me there’s nothing as great as playing a Haydn quartet, " said Mark Steinberg, the Brentano’s first violinist, who indeed will romp with his fellow players through Haydn’s Opus 20 Quartet in G minor, one of the acknowledged touchstones of the form.

But it’s also thrilling, Steinberg said, to switch gears in an instant and rise to the extreme challenges presented by the newest work on Brentano’s program for the Friends of Chamber Music, Lee Hyla’s "Howl."

Hyla’s first significant string quartet, from 1993, is not your granddad’s chamber music, unless in his former life your granddad was hip to the mind-blowing Beat poetics of Allen Ginsberg.

And "Howl" is not just a musical soundtrack inspired by a landmark, notorious piece of American poetry. It’s a unified, high-energy piece of modernity where the instrumentalists churn, hover and clash alongside Ginsberg’s exuberant voice.

Ginsberg had performed the work a few times with the adventuresome Kronos Quartet, which commissioned it from Hyla. Ginsberg recorded the poem in a New York studio in 1996, a year before his death, for the Kronos disc "Howl, U.S.A."

A handful of quartets have taken it up since, including one that used an actor onstage for a live reading with the music.The Brentano will use the Ginsberg recording -- all 25 minutes or so of mad, madcap and surreal American language.

Along with the musical contortions of Hyla’s piece, playing along with a recording is a challenge in itself.

"Some of the writing is very difficult, " Steinberg said by phone recently from New York. "It jumps around, it’s rhythmically complicated, but a lot of the challenge is just the coordination with the speaker, with Ginsberg.

"He’s not reading it in a metered way, the way music is notated. And there are places we have to be sensitized as he rushes ahead or holds back, and we have to correspondingly alter the way we go with the flow of the music. ... That’s a different way of working than we’re used to.

"I’ve worked with other pieces with a tape part, but usually those are programmed by the composer, and they’re very precise. This isn’t precise. ... We have to find a way to take on his pacing as our own. Eventually in the performance we don’t want to feel like we’re adjusting. We want to internalize the poem, and that informs what we do."

Internalizing the poem means absorbing its words and its rhythms as Ginsberg recorded them. His resonant voice makes a headlong rush through the nightmare world he imagined in the anxiety days of the mid-1950s.

"I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, " it famously begins.Elsewhere there’s just enough acerbic wit in his sound to suggest his "humorous hyperbole, " as Ginsberg once put it.

At times the musicians fight for attention as the poem’s long, incantatory lines unfold, and at others they quietly subside, just in time to reveal phrases such as "angel-headed hipsters" and "the Holy Bronx on Benzedrine."

For his part, Lee Hyla had the challenge of directing the musicians on paper but  leaving them free enough to go with the flow.

"I had to come up with a system of something I referred to as bailout procedures, " Hyla said recently from Chicago,  where he has become the Wyatt Chair of Music Composition at Northwestern University after 15 years at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

"If Allen was going really slow or really fast,  and the musicians weren’t lining up,  there was a set of arrows in the piece that when certain words were spoken,  everybody had to be together. And then there were other places where the arrows meant it’s a good idea that everybody be together,  but it’s not essential. And there were other places where it’s just a point of reference,  you know,  this should theoretically happen.

"The music does respond to images in the poem,  but one of the things I intentionally did was to let Allen have moments where he was just sailing with the wind at his back,  and then there were moments where there was fierce competition. At the end of the first movement,  they come together completely after wandering in separate deserts."

For listeners familiar with the Kronos recording,  Hyla expects the four-movement piece to take on a new character in the Brentano’s hands.

"Brentano is a really electric,  rhythmically charged-up group, " he said. "They are really phenomenal and have a great sound as a group also. Their energy is very different than Kronos’,  so I think it’s going to be a different sounding piece."

The Brentano has been quartet in residence at Princeton University since getting together about 15 years ago. This Friends of Chamber Music concert marks its sixth area appearance in the last decade,  and one that undoubtedly will take the Friends series into previously uncharted territory,  at least in terms of the poem’s occasionally unprintable language,  which is still bluntly graphic 50 years later.

"Howl" represented Hyla’s first opportunity to work with texts along with instrumentation. He returns to that in his latest major piece,  "Lives of the Saints," released a few months ago and including texts from Dante and others.

Does that mean he has gone from the profane to the sacred?