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+ REVIEWS LIVE PERFORMANCE p.6 | CD p.20 | BOOK p.24 COOL BRITTANIA p.6 MUSIC FOR SILENCED VOICES p.24 GODS AND ROBOTS p.12 Volume 19, Issue 2 FALL/WINTER 2011 $6.25 U.S. Volume 19, Issue 2 – FALL/WINTER 2011 New Music Connoisseur is a semi-annual periodical focusing on the work of the composers of our time. +++ PUBLISHED BY Center for Contemporary Opera Jim Schaeffer, General Director Durwood E. Littlefield, President in conjunction with The American Composers Alliance +++ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Dellaira ADVERTISING SALES REPRESENTATIVE Jennifer Fair WEBMASTEr Mike Thurlow ART DIRECTION & DESIGN Opus 1, Inc., Raleigh, NC ADVISORS Barry O’Neal Frank Oteri Kelley Rourke Eric Salzman Mark Zuckerman FOUNDING PUBLISHER & EDITOR, ASSOCIATE EDITOR Barry Cohen +++ ADDRESS ALL CORRESPONDENCE TO: New Music Connoisseur c/o Center for Contemporary Opera P.O. Box 3169 New York, NY 10163-3169 Email: [email protected] Web site: www.newmusicon.org Subscriptions are $12.50 annually, $24 for two years. For new subscription requests, renewals, change of address notifica- tions, donations and inquiries, please use the self-addressed envelope inserted into the magazine, or please submit them to [email protected]. For advertising please contact Jennifer Fair at [email protected]. All material © New Music Connoisseur, 2012 2 | New Music Connoisseur IN THIS ISSUE +++ Contributors ......................................................... 4 +++ LIVE PERFORMANCE REVIEWS Cool Brittania by Anne Eisenberg ............................6 Nico Muhly, Dark Sisters by Ben Yarmolinsky .......... 7 Spring for Music by Barry O’Neal ........................... 8 Song and Dance from a Scottish Master by Barry O’Neal ............................................... 10 Gods and Robots by Leann Davis Alspaugh ........... 12 Private Lives: Double Bill at the Glimmerglass Festival by Leann Davis Alspaugh .........................14 Brave New Works by Amanda Keil ........................ 16 Thoughts on Trying to Make Music That Matters by Leonard J. Lehrman .................................... 18 +++ CD REVIEWS In Brief by Andrew Violette ................................... 20 Poul Roders by Andrew Violette ............................ 22 +++ BOOK REVIEWS Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets by Wendy Lesser review by Mark Zuckerman .............................. 24 Fall/Winter 2011 | 3 contributors Leann Davis Alspaugh writes about the performing and visual arts. She is a regular contributor to The New Criterion, among other publications, and blogs about art and literature at www.orangetintedglasses.com. Anne Eisenberg covers new developments in science and technology for the column “Novelties” that she writes for the Sunday business section of The New York Times. Amanda Keil has written for OPERA America, Classical Singer, NewMusicBox, and BachTrack.com. She writes about music on thousandfoldecho.com, and sings with her Baroque ensemble, Musica Nuova (musicanuova.org). Leonard Lehrman, composer of over 200 works to date, founded and directs the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus. In July, 2012 he and his wife Helene Williams will be guest artists in residence at the Halifax Summer Opera Workshop. Meredith Mayer is a painter and printmaker, working in a Vermont barn in summer and at the Manhattan Graphics Center the other months of the year. Her work is shown in Vermont at the Vault Gallery and the Southern Vermont Artists and in New York at the Graphics Center. Barry O’Neal had a piece, NATIVITIE, performed by the eight soloists at his church, St. Michaels Church, as part of a Christmas concert. He continues to enjoy retirement and spent a good part of 2011 traveling to places near (Tanglewood) and far (San Francisco, Santa Fe). Andrew Violette lives and writes in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His new CD, Sonata for the Creation of the World, is out on Composers Concordance Records. Ben Yarmolinsky is the author of the docu-opera Clarence & Anita and the classroom drama Music Appreciation. He is a professor of music at the Bronx Community College. Composer Mark Zuckerman lives in Roosevelt, New Jersey. on the cover: Back Street Ballet, silkscreen, by Meredith Mayer. 4 | New Music Connoisseur Fall/Winter 2011 | 5 LIVE PERFORMANCE reviews Each selection of the evening was introduced by In honor of Mr. Emelianoff, the American COOL BRITTANIA a flute solo played by Patricia Spencer from Sir composer Stephen Jaffe wrote Cameo, a short, Da Capo Chamber Players Bennett’s Songs for the Instruction of Singing striking jewel of a piece that featured both Merkin Concert Hall, New York, Birds that evoked the calls of the starling, cellists at the October performance. October 10, 2011 woodlark, canary, bull finch, and nightingale. “I was honoring the passing of the torch,” The bird calls, which sounded nothing like Mr. Jaffe said. By Anne Eisenberg Messiaen’s, were stretched and molded by the jazz idiom that the composer, who once The theme of the lovely, haunting piece is heard The veteran Da Capo Chamber Players have a supported himself playing jazz piano, has used in a call and response pattern as the two cellos knack for programming, and on October 10 to effect in his film scores. answer one another across the stage. Mr. Jaffe, at Merkin Concert Hall they showed that flair who is a professor at Duke University, said that yet again when they opened their 41st season The program also featured an unusual, powerful the theme of Cameo originated in a piece he’d with “Cool Britannia”– an innovative program piece from the opera The Tempest, composed written earlier for Da Capo called Partito, for featuring contemporary chamber music by by Thomas Adès and Meredith Oakes, and tran- cello, piano and percussion that he wanted to composers born in the British Isles. scribed by Mr. Adès for violin, clarinet, cello and revisit as part of the occasion. piano. The music changed moods swiftly, an Wigmore Hall in London might be a typical occasional sweet strain floating into dissonance The music was playful and elegant. venue for this program, but it transplanted and then reappearing lyrically. “Contemporary music is often so severe,” beautifully to the upper westside of Manhattan. Mr. Jaffe said. “I wanted the cellists to have The young, appreciative audience had a “Cool Britannia” was the occasion not only to fun with this.” II chance to hear the work of musicians across celebrate modern British music, but to salute the pond too rarely performed here, including a departing member of the players: Andre Luke Bedford, currently the first composer in Emelianoff, who has played with the group residence at Wigmore Hall, as well as Sir Richard since 1976. James Wilson is the new cellist. Rodney Bennett, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Thomas Adès, and others. Luke Bedford’s Self-Assembly Composition No. 1 was a spirited highlight of the evening. Like Terry Riley’s In C, the piece is written to be played by any number of instruments. “It’s up to the group to create the structure of the piece from the written suggestions in the score,” Mr. Bedford says in the program notes. “The duration is entirely up to the performers.” In this performance, the music created by the players was fast, intricate and lively, as though a Conlon Nancarrow piece for player piano had been turned into tumultuous, virtuosic chamber music. 6 | New Music Connoisseur NICO MUHLY, DARK SISTERS Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College November 9, 2011 by Ben Yarmolinsky The Mormons are being brought onstage a lot these hoping that the patriarch will choose her to spend days. Ever since Angels in America, they have been the night with him. One tears up a portrait her pressed into service as symbols of pioneer America gone rival has drawn; the other cuts up a garment her haywire in the global age. The opera Dark Sisters is rival has sewn. This seems a gratuitous exchange, obviously not to be confused with The Book of Mormon, particularly in view of what has come before. nor even with the television series Big Love, despite a Apart from the sympathy one naturally feels for common preoccupation with the Fundamentalist Church these bereft and benighted women, there is very of Latter Day Saints and polygamy. Still, it is another ex- little in the exposition to make us care about them ample of how the Mormons are being used to examine as characters. conflicts between religion and the state, traditional vs. contemporary mores, and differing views of sexual roles. The second act is livelier and shorter. It begins in a television studio where the five women (now The opera, with music by Nico Muhly and libretto by wearing interchangeable long dresses) are being Stephen Karam, was premiered on November 9th at the interviewed in a prosecutorial fashion about their Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College. The work polygamous lifestyle. (The audience roared when was co-commissioned and co-produced by Gotham one of the women responded indignantly that Chamber Opera, Music-Theatre Group and the Opera there are some states where men are allowed to Company of Philadelphia. Neal Goren conducted a marry men!) The TV studio scene is enhanced by thirteen-piece ensemble; the stage director was Rebecca video back projections of each of the women in Taichman. Among the many sponsors of the event were close-up as they sing. This was an effective device the NEA, the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, and the as it helped to differentiate the five women from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This looked to be one one another. If I were the director, I would have well-funded opera. used it earlier and more often. After a brief orchestral prelude in a Coplandesque prairie “...is another example of how mode, the drama opens with five women in white night- gowns clutching baby clothes to their breasts as they the Mormons are being used bemoan the recent abduction of their children by Federal to examine conflicts between agents who have raided their compound.

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