(pictures: Wild Up at 92nd St Y, Saturday 22 March & Julliard @ Zankel, Monday 24 March)
Experimental & New Music: Wild Up on Saturday & Julliard @ Zankel on Monday
Saturday night was Wild Up at 92nd St Y. Wild Up is a new music festival in LA that I had never heard of before. But it evidently does a lot of music with an experimental bent, especially playing with alternate tuning, etc. That's what this program was.
Most interesting were the 2nd and 3rd pieces. 2nd was Leilehua Lanzilotti's 'with eyes the color of time'. I've no idea what the title meant, but the piece itself was a variety of different interesting textures -- alternately tonal or scratchy or otherworldly. It felt partially, but not fully organic as the natural interacted and conflicted with structurally architectural hard surfaces. I enjoyed.
I'd never heard much Claude Vivier before -- I enjoyed 'Zipangu'. Again, a lot of different surfaces, mostly surfaces and blocks of sound (quoting from the NYTimes review!), but they fit together well. As opposed to James Tenney's 'Saxony', which mostly seemed arbitrary -- almost but not quite like some of Cage's overlapping 'clocked' pieces. Two seconds before it ended I had no idea it was ending. First had been Scott Walker's "Rubato (It: 'Stolen Time')", which started off with a siren wail and then seemed to have the instruments mimic it/work with it as we heard more sounds of war. (Note that the war theme was explicated after by the conductor/artistic directory Christopher Rountree. It seemed so formulaic. And as an experience of interesting noise, I liked it, but I didn't find any meaning in it. Still, I love experimental experiences like this -- it would be interesting to see Wild Up in its native habitat.
Monday night was Julliard at Zankel. The president of Julliard (a very well-spoken former ballet dancer--he's really good at speaking!) introduced it all with a bunch of self-congratulatory history about Julliard and collaboration. Ultimately, it was about three people: Jessie Montgomery, Matthew Aucoin and Caroline Shaw, all of whom are a creative associates at Julliard.
Jessie Montgomery & Caroline Shaw both partially evoked Copland to me, in different ways. Montgomery's pieces (and her violin concerto which I've been listening to at home) appear to evoke Americana in the broad manner of Copland, but with a far more expansive (aka modern) notion of what America really is. This felt especially true in 'Musings' a set of violin duos. The second piece, 'Peace', was a small gentle piece (inspired by the Pandemic) that was proceeded by a Neruda poem that obviously spoke to the Pandemic. The 'big' piece was 'Concerto Grosso' which was still pretty gentle, melodic and though constructed in a baroque form, still feels to be evoking it's own version of Americana.
I've heard Shaw before, especially her string quartets (sometimes with her own singing accompaniment). Her style is bold chromatic tonalism and it is quite joyous. This reminds me of Copland's statement that there's lots of wonderful music still to be written in C major (or whoever said it -- can't find the quote). Just like Montgomery, all of her works felt right-sized. The two different quartet pieces are small and gentle, and Shaw's introduction of 'audience participation' in the form of humming a b-flat during the piece contributed more than expected. Interestingly, she rescored an Ives song and they were played sequentially -- the transition from the Ives to Shaw was obvious as the chords dropped in place.
In between the two womens' pieces were two much bigger works by Matthew Aucoin. A duo piano work, expanded from a single piano, Leggiero that Aucoin said was probably going to be made into part of an opera inspired by Dostoyevsky's Demons -- the thickness of the work was a sharp contrast to the preceding Montgomery. And his second piece This Earth was big and bold with another big subject--text from Dante's Purgatorio when Dante first emerges into the open air from the inferno. I enjoyed, but they both felt so distinctly different.
After the evening's final piece on the printed program -- a very gentle piano 'unstudy' by Shaw, Shaw came out first to accept applause and then quickly sat down and started playing with the pianist a basic set of chords from the unstudy piece. Then everyone who had played that night came out playing the same chords and the actor who had read the Neruda came out and finished the last line of the poem -- "one ... two .. three" up to twelve. The effect was astonishingly moving -- what could have been kitschy or trying too hard just felt so right and beautiful and touching--an amazing end to an excellent concert.
