Author: jamesprimosch

composer and pianist

“A Sibyl” Premieres in Boston

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sibyl1

the Sibyl of Cumae in the Sistine Chapel

Written on a Fromm Foundation commission, A Sibyl is a cycle of six songs on texts by Susan Stewart, whose poetry I have set in several other pieces - Holy the Firm, Dark the Star, and Songs for Adam. Susan wrote the poems specifically for this new project. Collage New Music will premiere the piece at the Longy School in Cambridge, MA on October 15, 2017 at 3 pm. (There will be a pre-concert chat at 2 pm.) Mary Mackenzie will be the soprano soloist and David Hoose will conduct. Here’s my program note on the piece:

When I asked my friend Susan Stewart to write a set of poems for a new work for soprano, she responded with reflections on the mysterious prophetess spoken of in Virgil and Ovid. The sibyl sings of her prophecies written on leaves, and of how the god possesses her; she warns Aeneas before his descent to the underworld; she celebrates the moon. Having been granted eternal life, but failing to ask for eternal youth, she is reduced to no more than her voice. I understand the sibyl as an archetype of the musician who sings for us of fate and the mysteries of life, death, and love; who guides us in moonlit and shadowy places; and whose prophetic voice resounds unendingly, in power, and in vulnerability.

A Sibyl was written for Collage New Music on a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation. I am grateful to the Foundation, to Collage, and to Mary Mackenzie for making this work possible, and to Susan Stewart for words to sing.

Mary has performed many pieces of mine, and she recorded Sacred Songs and Meditations with the 21st Century Consort, led by Christopher Kendall.

She has also recorded a big 2-CD collection of songs by various composers with pianist Heidi Williams that will include four pieces of mine, to be released on Albany later this season.

Collage Fellow Joseph Sowa published an interview with me on the Collage website - I talk there about working with Susan’s poetry and my history with Collage.

 

“The Avowal” at Emmanuel

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Emmanuel_Church_(Boston)_-_DSC08191

UPDATE: due to a scheduling issue, this performance of The Avowal has been postponed.

Back in the late 20th century, John Harbison conducted my solo cantata, The Cloud of Unknowing, with Lucy Shelton and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. After the concert, John floated the idea of me writing something for Emmanuel Music, (with which John was, and still is, long affiliated) to be sung at an Emmanuel Church Sunday Eucharist. I responded with a setting of Denise Levertov’s poem called “Candlemas”, calling my piece Meditation for Candlemas. The late Craig Smith conducted the premiere. I was told that it was a nice coincidence to have chosen Levertov, as she had attended services at Emmanuel at one time. When I wrote a sequel to the Candlemas piece, I again chose a Levertov poem, “The Avowal”. This 1997 setting will be performed again at Emmanuel, with Ryan Turner conducting, on Sunday, October 15, 2017, as part of the 10 am liturgy. It’s the first event in the triple-header of performances of my music in the Boston area that day. Next week I’ll be posting about the other concerts of that day - the premiere of A Sibyl with Collage New Music, and the Boston premiere of my Quintet for oboe, strings and piano by Winsor Music.

Chamber Music of Richard Wernick on Bridge

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UnknownRichard Wernick: Sextet; Concerto for Cello and Ten Players; Piano Trio No. 1. Bridge Records 9480. Here are three masterfully crafted and powerfully expressive works from an exceptionally underappreciated American composer. (I say “exceptionally” because, as the late Steve Stucky once said to me, “we’re all underappreciated!”) Richly contrapuntal, the music is in a dissonant post-tonal idiom, finding coherence in its focussed use of striking motifs and economical harmonic vocabulary. The pitch language is nicely balanced between consistency and variety. When I was in the grad program at Penn, Wernick used to exhort my fellow students and I to “make your own tonality!” He does so in his own music and succeeds brilliantly.

The sextet is scored for strings and piano - a piano quintet plus bass. The addition of the bass gives a quasi-orchestral weight to the vigorous passages here. But Wernick can also deploy his forces in a beguilingly delicate, Webernesque texture, as in the work’s opening Arioso. The Chamber Concerto is the earliest piece on the album. I am taken aback to realize I was at the premiere of this piece some 37 years ago, with the 21st (then 20th!) Century Consort conducted by Christopher Kendall, with Barbara Haffner as the soloist, as she is on this recording. I find this earlier piece to be more expressionist in style, more rhapsodic in shape than the later music on the disc (the Trio is from 1994; the Sextet from 2003.) There is a somewhat neo-classical character to the later music, though Wernick’s idiom is very different from that of, for example, the music of Stravinsky that is normally associated with that term. I remember especially admiring at the premiere - and I continue to admire now - the second movement of the concerto, one of Wernick’s grandest conceptions, a sixteen-minute passacaglia that very gradually builds and builds in density and power. The terse and animated outer movements of the Piano Trio contrast nicely with the contemplative middle movement, centered around a still point of repeated piano harmonics. It’s an all-star group playing the Trio, with Gregory Fulkerson, violin; Barbara Haffner, cello; and Lambert Orkis, piano; the players for the concerto and the Sextet are from the Chicago area, including members of the Lyric Opera’s orchestra, and are no less fine. Robert Trevino conducts the concerto.

Here’s the opening of the Sextet:

Narucki and Berman at Tufts

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43-231708452f2b1da7481ac1d67e2aecf6I just got word that the fabulous duo of soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Donald Berman is giving a program at Tufts this coming Sunday that will include my setting of a Kathleen Norris text, Who Do You Say That I Am?, and two songs from my set of Three Folk Hymns - the ones based on Be Thou My Vision and What Wondrous Love is This? The concert is at 3 pm at the Distler Performance Hall in the Granoff Music Center at Tufts University in Medford, MA - more info here. The program is an attractive one. Susan and Donald are calling it: “Stop Endings: Intimate Songs on Nature, Loss, and Spirituality”. Besides my own material there will be music of Schumann, Zemlinsky, and Kurtág. (Susan coached with the famously demanding Kurtág.)

There’s lots of great stuff from Susan on YouTube, including Carter, Crumb, Davidovsky, Vivier, etc. For a start, here’s her Bridge recording of the third song in my Rilke cycle From a Book of Hours for chamber ensemble and soprano (the piece also exists in the original orchestral version). Christopher Kendall conducts the 21st Century Consort. There’s a perusal score of the chamber version below and the orchestral version is here.  You can hear Donald play piano music of Scott Wheeler here; lots of Ives from Donald on YouTube as well.

(photo credit: Richard Bowditch)

 

Voices from the Morning of the Earth

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Complete George Crumb Edition, Volume 17: Voices from the Morning of the Earth (American Songbook VI); An Idyll for the Misbegotten; The Sleeper. Bridge Records 9445. George Crumb’s profoundly American compositional voice is perfectly suited to the tunes and texts that form the basis of his huge American Songbook cycle, based on folk tunes of all kinds (plus a couple of folk-like tunes of his own devising) and scored for one or two solo voices, percussion quartet, and amplified piano. Philadelphia’s Orchestra 2001, led by James Freeman, has this repertoire deep in its bones, and all of Crumb’s meticulously detailed effects are realized with exquisite care. While baritone Randall Scarlata sings with affecting beauty, it’s the composer’s daughter Ann Crumb who is even more captivating with her highly characterful singing. Ann and pianist Marcantonio Barone offer a reading of Crumb’s Poe setting, The Sleeper that is full of misty atmosphere, and flutist Rachel Rudich, alongside three percussionists, is eloquent in the Idyll. It was surely no simple matter to capture for recording both the barely discernible rumbles and tremendous bass drum thwacks of this piece. The uncommonly wide dynamic range of Crumb’s music benefits greatly from the capabilities of digital sound.

With the country in the midst of both political and ecological catastrophes, the mournful songs that Crumb draws upon (the texts include dying children, dying cowboys, dying lovers, dying solidiers, and the dead in general), enveloped in the ghostly resonances of Crumb’s sound-world, struck me as especially poignant.

“A Sibyl”, Wagner, and Chopin

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I wasn’t teaching at my day job this summer for the first time in a while, so I had a little more time than usual - but the unbridgeable gap between what one hopes to accomplish and what actually happens remained wide. Still, a few things got done.

The most important task accomplished was completing A Sibyl, my Fromm commission for Collage New Music. This is a cycle on texts by Susan Stewart that she wrote specifically for the project, and is scored for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion. Mary Mackenzie will be the soloist. I estimate the piece will run about 25 minutes. There are six songs, setting poems that build on what can be found in Virgil and Ovid about the mysterious figure of the Cumaean Sibyl in somewhat the way Susan built her texts for my Songs for Adam (a work for baritone and orchestra) upon the Biblical stories. Collage has set the premiere of A Sibyl for the afternoon of October 15, the same day Emmanuel Music will do a motet of mine in the morning at Emmanuel Church, and Winsor Music will do my recent quintet for oboe and piano quartet in the evening. Three performances in Greater Boston in a single day is an amazing trifecta of good luck - more details to follow.

I spent many summer hours at the piano, working on the B-flat minor Scherzo of Chopin and playing through the piano score of Die Walküre. On the basis of playing that score, I can confirm a few things you already knew about the Wagner: yes, it really is very long;  yes, if you had a dollar for every diminished seventh chord in the piece you could retire today, and yes, the harmony in the Todesverkündigung is impossibly gorgeous. What I had not realized is how many passages throughout the opera are essentially recitative of a relatively straightforward kind - the “endless melody” you read about in your undergrad music history textbook is not quite so endless as Wagner fools us into thinking.

I still get bothered by the amount of literal repetition in the Chopin Scherzi; I suppose I wish the pieces were actually four more ballades. At least there is less literal repetition in the B-flat minor than in the B-minor, the other one I have practiced. Much of my time was spent on baffling questions of fingering - when it is better to stretch, when to cross…  Fingering remains a mystery to me - I often don’t realize when I am doing something unnecessarily awkward, or don’t see what could be a viable alternative. The cliché about the easiest fingering not necessarily being the best fingering is not terribly helpful when “easiest” and “best” seem to be moving targets that shift from day to day. Pianistic issues aside, engaging with pieces by playing them is essential nourishment for me - as a composer, but also as a person, and I was glad to have a little more time for that nourishment over this past summer.

Quartet No. 2 in Chicago

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I just found out about this performance: Access Contemporary Music has included my String Quartet No. 2 on a program at the Davis Theater in Chicago on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 7:30 pm. More information here.

The quartet was written for the Cavani Quartet (based at the Cleveland Institute of Music) on a commission from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Here’s a program note on the piece:

String Quartet No. 2 (After Zurbarán)

 The concerts and exhibits of the Cleveland Museum of Art were an important formative influence for me during my student days.  So when the invitation came to create a new work celebrating this institution on its seventy-fifth anniversary, I was not only happy to accept, but knew immediately that I wanted to write a piece that would somehow relate specifically to the museum.  I decided to make the work a reflection on a painting in the museum’s collection: Zurbarán’s The Holy House of Nazareth.  My quartet is not program music in a narrative sense, but rather a kind of meditation that takes its tone from this painting’s remarkable integration of intense affect, mysterious repose and secret geometry.

Besides Zurbarán’s painting, the piece is occupied with a purely musical object of contemplation: the hymn tune “Picardy”, best known with the text Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.  This tune permeates the harmonic and melodic life of the quartet, sometimes appearing in a very simple, straightforward fashion, but often hidden amidst more complex structures.  I was attracted to the melody for its musical qualities, but later realized that the hymn’s text also resonates with the mood of the painting; the words speak of a reverent awe, of “cherubim with sleepless eye”, and of the mystery of the Incarnate Word who must suffer: “King of kings, yet born of Mary…”

And here is the Zurbarán painting:

The Cavani made a splendid recording of the piece for a New World Records cd.

Beethoven and the Daedalus in Philly

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The Daedalus Quartet, which is in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, is embarking on a complete Beethoven quartet cycle. It’s hard to believe, but this seems to be the first time all the quartets will be heard in Philly as part of a cycle in a single season. I hope to be at as many of the events as possible, given the very high quality of the Daedalus’s playing and the rare chance to hear all the quartets in fairly close succession. Here’s a trailer, shot in West Philadelphia:

Daedalus Quartet - The Complete Beethoven Quartets from Christopher Andrew McDonald on Vimeo.

It’s a good moment to re-read Joseph Kerman’s book on the quartets, one of my all-time favorite books on music.

Heat Wave Listening

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Pretty hot here in Philly, and I am trying to progress on my song cycle for Collage New Music (October 15 premiere!). But still, I am always trying to do some listening. A few discs I’ve heard recently:

Haydn: Piano Sonatas II - Marc-André Hamelin. Hyperion.
It’s a safe bet you don’t have enough Haydn in your life, particularly the piano music. Here’s an excellent way to rectify that deficiency, part of a series of superbly performed and recorded albums by Hamelin surveying the piano sonatas. Known as a hyper-virtuoso, I didn’t find Hamelin’s skills intrusive. The uncannily glassy smoothness of the runs, the exquisitely balanced and articulated chords, the occasional exceptionally fleet tempo- all this seemed to serve the music rather than draw attention to itself. To very roughly generalize: Haydn’s sonatas are about intimacy and wit, rather than being pocket-sized opera arias or concerti, like some of Mozart’s sonatas, or heroically symphonic works like some of Beethoven’s. A tougher sell perhaps, but deeply rewarding.

By the way, at one time Hamelin played new music in a way that he has not for some time - a pity. But I am interested to see that he is releasing an album of Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus, maybe this portends a repertoire shift.

 

All Rise - Jason Moran. Blue Note.
Subtitled “A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller”, I felt that this album honors the pop side of Waller’s legacy as much or more than the jazz component, with vocals by Meshell Mdegeocello and arrangements that include virtuosic instrumental work but also have a few moments where, forgive me, the words “smooth jazz” came to mind. Sometimes it felt like he was simply referring to the source material rather than deeply engaging with it. I preferred the edgier moments when Moran’s playing takes flight. The album is brilliantly executed, but the jazz nerd in me prefers Moran albums like Ten and Modernistic.

 

Notes Aligned in Boston

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It’s a little ways off, and I don’t have all the details, but I want to let you know about a happy coincidence has taken shape on my schedule of performances. On the afternoon of October 15, Collage New Music with soprano Mary Mackenzie, will premiere my current project, a song cycle called A Sibyl on Susan Stewart poems, at the the Longy School of Bard College in Cambridge, MA. David Hoose will conduct. And that evening, Winsor Music will present the second performance of my Quintet for oboe, violin, viola, cello, and piano, this at St. Paul’s in Brookline, MA.

Mary Mackenzie, who has done a fabulous job with my music on several occassions, including this CD, will be the soloist for A Sibyl.

I’ve put in a request with Ryan Turner of Emmanuel Music to do one of my motets at Emmanuel Church that morning - maybe there will be three performances of my music in Boston that day!

UPDATE: Ryan has confirmed that he will include my music at Emmanuel’s 10 am service that day - it’s a Primosch festival in Boston!