Month: January 2017

“Dark the Star” at Florida State

jamesprimoschLeave a comment

My Dark the Star for baritone and chamber ensemble was selected to be performed at the Florida State University Festival of New music next week. Here are the details:

Thursday, February 2, 2017, 7:30 pm: Dark the Star

Evan T. Jones, baritone
Deborah Bish, clarinet
Greg Sauer, cello
Heidi Williams, piano
Peter Soroka, percussion
Alexander Jimenez, conductor
Opperman Music Hall
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL

A great deal of music is packed into the three days of the Festival – go to the Festival website for more information.

Special guest performers for the Festival include the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo, and violinist Monica Germino. The featured composer is Louis Andriessen. I’ve never met Andriessen, but I played his 1963 work Registers for piano at the 1977 Gaudeamus Interpreters Competition in Rotterdam. This graphic score is very different from the later music for which he is principally known, with its influences from minimalism and Stravinsky. You can get some sense of what the score looks like in this video, though the image is quite reduced in size. (A shame the performer in the video is not identified.)

Heidi Williams, the pianist for the performance of Dark the Star, is in the midst of a big CD project with soprano Mary Mackenzie, including quite a lot of my vocal music. I will linger in Florida after the Festival to attend a recording session for my Three Folk Hymns with Mary and Heidi. (Mary just gave a wonderful performance at a Collegium Institute event at Penn, along with pianist Eric Sedgwick.)

Here’s the first movement of Dark the Star in the Bridge recording made by the forces for whom the piece was written: William Sharp, the 21st Century Consort, and Christopher Kendall, conductor.

Jeremy Denk’s 600 years of music

jamesprimoschLeave a comment

Jeremy Denk’s recital in Philadelphia tonight, presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, was an astonishing tour-de-force: 24 pieces drawn from 600 years of music.

img_1735

img_1736The very early music was of course the greatest novelty for a piano recital. Not knowing the original pieces in every case, I can’t say how much “arranging” Denk did, but I can say that the playing was colorful, with contrapuntal textures clearly delineated, and flexibly dancing rhythms.

The big extroverted pieces stood out, inevitably – the Bach, the Debussy, the Liszt/Wagner. But there were memorable smaller pieces as well – Stravinsky’s cubist evocation of ragtime, the profoundly inward Brahms, and the scintillating Scarlatti sonata among them. I’m glad to have heard the Stockhausen live for the first time; I wonder if I will ever hear it again?

Denk ordered the pieces wisely, creating not just a satisfying recital program, but a narrative arc, a through-line. For those of us who live in music, he told the story of our lives. I am grateful to have heard that story told with elegance, flair, and imagination.

Sacred Songs at Penn

jamesprimoschLeave a comment

sacred-songsThe Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture has asked me to give a talk on my music, to be held next Monday, January 23, at the University of Pennsylvania – details on the poster above. Mary Mackenzie and Eric Sedgwick will perform my Three Sacred Songs, Waltzing the Spheres, and excerpts from Holy the Firm, and I will offer a few comments on the pieces. Mary has done my music several times, including recording a superb CD of Sacred Songs and Meditations – give a listen here.

The Anti-Inaugural Ball

jamesprimoschLeave a comment

I got a note from Jason Eckardt about an event called The Anti-Inaugural Ball, to be held, of course, on Inauguration Day, January 20, at 7 pm, at the Di Menna Center in NYC. As the announcement puts it:

Musicians from across the NYC experimental and jazz community counter cynicism with sound with performances by

Phyllis Chen & Friends • Jordan Dodson • ETHEL
Flor de Toloache – Mariachi Femenino • Flutronix • Gemini
International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) • JACK Quartet
Darius Jones • loadbang • So Percussion • Adam Tendler

With dancing provided by DJ Robert Maril

On January 20th, 2017, all-star musicians from throughout the experimental and jazz communities of NYC will come together for a marathon fundraiser concert/dance party in the acoustically intimate Mary Flagler Cary Hall at the The DiMenna Center for Classical Music. The concert is FREE to attend, and will provide laptop stations for attendees to donate funds for institutions that uphold America’s democracy and diversity including ACLU, LAMBDA Legal, Planned Parenthood, Southern Poverty Law Center, Hollaback!, and more. Representatives from organizations will be in attendance.

Join us in our response to the current political climate for a night of positive action, deep listening, ecstatic sound, and community.

Go here for more information.

Let’s All Sing Like The Birdies Sing

jamesprimoschLeave a comment

Well, I did it, I gave in, I am giving Twitter a try, with the wildly imaginative handle of @james_primosch. For years I have restricted myself to just blogging, feeling that’s quite enough to keep up with when I really should be composing and practicing, but my friend Matt Levy of the Prism Quartet urged me to try it. Of course, it might help if I actually had some followers, so have pity on me and sign up. In the meantime, a few avian videos:

Oh, yes, the post title is explained by this.

Clarinet to the Max

jamesprimoschLeave a comment

9461_cover_rgb_largeMax Reger: Music for Clarinet and Piano. Alan R. Kay, clarinet; Jon Klibonoff, piano. Bridge Records 9461

Reger is a composer many people love to hate – the pieces are said to be too long, the harmony too wanderingly chromatic. (Not everybody; Rudolf Serkin was a fan.) But the two clarinet sonatas of Op. 49 are only about 20 minutes long each, and with a bit of patient listening, the harmonic labyrinths of this late romantic music become less forbidding. Along with Reger’s slightly longer sonata Op. 107, they deserve to be heard much more frequently as  alternatives to the Brahms sonatas on clarinet recitals. The three sonatas plus a couple of very brief character pieces make up this wonderfully performed disc, notable for the sheer beauty of sound achieved by both players.