jwilzewske: harbison

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Sunday, May 18, 2008

Biava String Quartet: Too Much Is Never Enough

T oo much is never enough.”
— Mick Jagger.

However big the repertoire for string quartets gets, it is not possible to have too many string quartets.

The Biava Quartet performed Saturday night at the annual black-tie gala/soiree benefiting the Friends of Chamber Music in Kansas City. Approximately 250 attendees enjoyed the concert-dinner-auction event in the Kirk Hall of the Kansas City Public (Central) Library, a 1906 historic building which was renovated/restored in 2004.

The Biava Quartet was founded in 1998 at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Its members were trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, the University of Southern California, Yale University, and The Juilliard School. Currently the Biavas are the Lisa Arnhold Quartet-in-Residence at Juilliard. They were also the winners of the Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 2003.

The Quartet is named after violinist and conductor Luis Biava, who has been a mentor to members of the group. Biava is Professor at Temple University Boyer College of Music and was previously Conductor-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra. A native of Colombia, Biava was a founding member of the Philarte String Quartet and continues to play first violin with the Philadelphia Chamber Ensemble.

The Biava Quartet’s repertoire features American composers John Harbison, Mason Bates, William Bolcom, and Ezra Laderman. Last year the Quartet premiered and recorded composer Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet No. 2 ‘Demons and Angels’.

[50-sec clip, Stacy Garrop, String Quartet No. 2 ‘Demons and Angels’, Biava String Quartet, 1.2MB MP3]

The Biavas last night gave the gala attendees a dazzling 30 minutes of ‘bon-bons’.

Schnittke—Polka, 1980 (arr. Sergei Dreznin): parts alternately take on serious and jesting poses; extreme rubato propels the circus theatrics; sheet music available from Sikorski; 2 minutes 30 seconds of ironical hilarity in B minor;
Puccini—Crisantemi (chrysanthemums), 1890: a G minor caricature written in a single night, in memory of duke Amadeo of Savoy; Puccini later reused this work in his opera Manon Lescaut; ‘pneumatic’ phrasing heightens the lyrical and dramatic effects, which alternately call into question the authenticity of theatre and of so-called ‘real’ life; Biavas’ incisiveness succeeds in animating these questions in just 5 minutes; sheet music available from MusicForStrings;
Turina—Oración del Torero (Bullfighter’s Prayer), 1925: opens quietly with stealthy pizzicato (What is this bullfighter praying for?); pace progresses impulsively and reveals out-of-control impetuosity and narcissism, then gets a grip in an expansive and calming melody; sheet music available from MusicRoom;
Beach—Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, Op. 80, 1916: sometimes paired with readings from poet Emily Dickinson or American Indian folk literature; coloristic American/Macdowellian whimsy at its finest; sheet music available from RecitalPublications.com;
Shostakovich—Age of Gold Polka (arr. Jason Calloway): incongruous dissonances that opine that ‘stuff happens’, humans are never really ‘in control’ of anything.

The Biava Quartet’s pacing is edgy and precise, neat, white-knuckled—exciting. Passages played expressively in other settings (conventional concerts; recordings) here come across as paradoxically stern (watch violinist Hyunsu Ko furrow her brow!), whereas rigid sections are in a festive mood read more lyrically and infused with humor and theatricality. The Biava Quartet devises a program that is perfect for a gala benefit!

The Biava Quartet’s members are:

Austin Hartman, violin;
Hyunsu Ko, violin;
Mary Persin, viola;
Jason Calloway, cello

This coming week the Biavas will be performing at the Juilliard String Quartet Seminar in New York. (Probably the repertoire there will be not quite so jocular as at the gala?)

It should go without saying that there is no ‘affluenza’ of string quartets, anymore than there is an affluenza of paintings or photographs or films: the threshhold of unmet market demand for excellent string quartets is still higher than the current supply. Instead of the growing classical musical wealth freeing us from ‘materialist’ preoccupations, it has the opposite effect—of making us more conscious of how much more there is to create and to have, and more conscious and less accepting of mediocrity. Not ‘acquisitiveness’ really; just a hedonistic joy in seeking out more of the experiences that the Biavas are providing!

Would there ever be ‘Enough’? If ‘enough’ means ‘satisfying desire’, ‘adequate to meet the need’, ‘sufficient’, I doubt it. What we have right now is, at best ‘in a tolerable but not super-abundant degree, denoting mere acceptableness or acquiescence, and implying a degree or quantity rather less than is desired’. As in, “This quartet was well enough, but I’m still hungry for more.”

There can never be too many string quartets—not compositions; not ensembles; not performances—especially when carried off with such panache. The Biava Quartet’s wonderful performance contributed significantly to reaching the Friends of Chamber Music’s fund-raising goals. A heart-felt thanks to the Quartet members for generously making a place for these sorts of promotional events in their busy schedule of teaching and concertizing! (It’s hard maybe for performing artists to place a value on promotion and audience development. But presenters know well how vital and valuable promotional events are. Without such events there would not be nearly so many commissions for composers, not nearly so many opportunities for up-and-coming performers and ensembles, and, ultimately, a less vibrant community in which publishers, recording companies, and presenters and other stakeholders also can thrive.)

Gala promotional events may not be ideal from acoustic or musical aesthetic perspectives, but they are a life-blood to the classical music community and privately funding chamber music in the U.S. These events are vital not only for retention and bonding with the usual, older philanthropist-patrons in the community; they are also vital for attracting new corporate sponsors, for whom the events have a certain desirable cachet.

F ind an ‘in’. Find a Board member or even a LinkedIn connection who can introduce you [to the business person you intend to solicit for sponsorship of your chamber music organization] so you’re not ‘cold calling’. I always respond to people who come recommended by someone I know, and businesspeople do, too. Start your sentences [addressing potential corporate sponsors] in the right way. Instead of ‘This is what we do,’ say ‘[Look at this.] This is what we can do for you.’ ”
— Katya Andresen, NetworkingForGood, 17-MAR-2008.

Besides this, gala events also attract a fair number of under-40s who see black-tie experiences as a sort of musical ‘adventure travel’. (‘Tourism’ would be the wrong word; too passive. To this group, gala cultural events are ‘expeditions’—opportunities to visit an esoteric place and society that few members of the group would encounter otherwise; a cross-genre dual art of ‘elegant conversation and dining’-plus-‘chamber music’, ‘hybrid art’ as the Australians would say; an ‘extreme contact sport’.) Participating in a civic cultural event, clustered in dinner tables of ten, these under-40s actively create memories. The uncertainties and risks and thrills involved are very much the same sort as arise in travel abroad, to places where you don’t speak the language.

A spirited and thoughtful volume. One of Bruner’s greatest contributions is his constructivist position, from which he views cultures as continually reinventing themselves. Tourist practices are seen as neither simulacra nor ersatz, but as active social performances in their own right. This position allows Bruner to free anthropologists from their previous impasse of thinking along the binary of authenticity-inauthenticity, a persistent focus of tourism scholarship ever since Dean MacCannell’s 1970s writing on ‘staged authenticity.’ Because culture is always emergent, alive, and in process, every cultural act is authentic.”
— Miriam Kahn, review of Bruner’s book, in American Anthropologist, 2004.

Not merely sight-seeing or posing as explorers, they immerse themselves; they talk with the Biavas and bid against socialites for choice live-auction items. Respectful amateur anthropologists, they conduct themselves politely and with earnestness and interest, as they would do when abroad in a foreign country. ‘Destination Culture’ enthusiasts, they take ‘tribal’ photos of the scene and of each other (discreetly on cell phone cameras, to be uploaded later and virally shared), recording the historical facts of their night’s expedition.

This sort of high-touch ‘face-to-face’ audience development (of Bruner-style active destination-cultural ‘explorers’) just doesn’t happen in conventional concert hall settings or tamer pre-/post-concert ‘socials’. There is no doubt that encounters like these are healthy for all concerned—the ‘natives’ and the ‘explorers’.

W hat we have is a circuit of embodiments and disembodiments, a passage of vivid sensations through bodies—first extracted from perceptions and affections, then rendered perceptible in the expressive matter of the artwork, then engaged by audiences swept up into the artwork.”
— Ronald Boque, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, p. 170.

Basically, vigorous, civic-minded ensembles like the Biava Quartet are, through gestures like their superb, unusual performance in Kansas City last night, helping to insure the future of chamber music in this country—by revealing wider, more improvisatory, and less ‘serious’ dimensions of chamber music—to a wider audience, many of whom never imagined that these dimensions existed. Too much gratitude from us for their generosity is impossible—too much is never ‘Enough’.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

‘Terefah’ According to John Harbison: Chamber-like Intimacy in a Symphonic Setting

T he finale, ‘Be ahead of all parting,’ is similarly a self-contained song, but now a duet, intertwining the voices as Orpheus and Eurydice are inextricable in our consciousness. The voice, though, is the poet’s—one of Rilke’s sonnets of ecstatic meditation on the myth, insisting upon an embrace of life that reconciles the necessity of death.”
— Robert Kirzinger, BSO program notes.

B e in front of every Farewell as if
it was already past, like the winter just passing now.
Because among winters comes one so finally Winter
that only by out-wintering it can your heart endure.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell.

T e·re·fah (tə-reyʹ-fə): [Hebrew] (n.)
(1) a person or animal mauled by wild beasts, mortally injured; incurable, but not [yet] dead; in a state of shock, not yet comprehending that she/he/it is dead, or that the wounds are in fact mortal ones;
(2) a flickering flame; an imperiled life; one whose purchase on life is so tenuous and whose body functions are so erratic and compromised that the slightest change might probably extinguish the flame;
(3) one still deserving the respect of full personhood, but whose incurability absolves those attending to the needs of the person from blame for failing to undertake heroic measures that are certain to be futile.”
— Talmud.

John Harbison’s new symphony (No. 5) was premiered last night in Boston at the BSO. The symphony is unusual for its incorporation of singing parts——beautifully delivered by Nathan Gunn (baritone) and Kate Lindsey (mezzo). The work is also unusual for inclusion of an electric guitar.

As Robert Kirzinger (the author of the BSO program notes) observes, ‘The prosody of the vocal line is almost conversational.’ More, I think, than ‘almost’, it is conversational. And the intimacy of the Milosz-, Glück-, and Rilke poems-derived libretto clearly places this ‘symphony’ in a ‘chamber music’ realm. The text makes us wish that it were being presented in a smaller, chamber-like setting.

Nominally this symphony is about the mythical Orpheus and Eurydice—Orpheus’s recovery of his lover from Hades, and his loss of her again, due to his failure to comply with the directive to not look back.

But this is not merely a meditation on loss—the fact of its having already materialized. This symphony is a meditation on the moments preceding dying, on the dying itself, and on the moments just after—on the tenuous state that is referred to in Jewish Halachic law as ‘terefah’.

Harbison’s setting in the first two movements is of Czeslaw Milosz’s 2003 version of Orpheus, this version itself an elegiac response to Milosz’s loss of his wife to cancer two years before his own dying. The third movement sets the text of Louise Glück’s ‘Relic’, and the fourth movement is the adaptation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ to which Robert Kirzinger refers in the blockquote above.

Harbison’s poetic stance is original, as one well familiar first-hand with the dying process, probably from direct experience with family or friends. The moments immediately before, during, and after dying are cataclysmic, and this symphony achieves a credible, highly personal rendering of these cataclysms.

The intrusion of the electric guitar provides a sense of the surreal quality of the experience—the experience, in their own faltering words, of the one who is dying; the experience of the surviving loved ones, our own words, also faltering. The electric guitar isn’t the half of it. Other of Harbison’s compositional choices are similarly unhinging and emotionally evocative.

This symphony is admirable just as it is; just as we heard it in its premiere performance last evening. And no doubt it may take me several hearings to fully appreciate some of size and force of the instrumental parts; I am sure it will ‘grow on me’ over time. I would say, though, that there was, for me, an incongruity between the dynamics of the massive sectional writing and the intimacy of the vocal line, the intimacy of the poems being sung. I wished throughout last night’s performance that, instead of a full orchestra, Harbison had written this for, say, an octet or other small ensemble. Possibly in the future there could be a transcription of Symphony No. 5 for a chamber ensemble. Maybe I am alone in this wish.

Musically, we have in this Symphony the mutation of personhood, of ‘character in extremis’: at the end of life as our minds flicker and fail, we are not quite the persons we once were. Our responses are not quite such coherent embodiments of the character that has inhabited our body for so long. We are not so ‘self-possessed’ as our selfhood falters and our ability to grasp it or bring our ‘self’ forth dwindles.

Likewise, upon the loss of a significant other, our own identities flicker and seem in danger of being blown out like a candle. These are subjects not often addressed directly. More usually art and music characterize mortality as an event or status or relation, and not so much as a process.

If the loved one’s dying has occurred over days or weeks, we survivors have the accumulated fatigue and dislocation from ordinary daily routines that loosens us from our moorings. The end has been anticipated, planned for. The process is arduous. We become horribly tired. And yet, upon the actual event, the whole Earth shifts. There is a holy alertness that prevents our sleeping, even though we are very tired and want to sleep. Everything is surreal or hyper-real.

Eurydice’s awareness of and reaction to her own dying are ones of surprise. She is transfixed——impressed maybe by the quality of nothingness which is overtaking her, for which Orpheus ‘had composed no rhyme’.

Traditional accounts focus on Orpheus’s grief and calibration of Eurydice’s death——focus on the tragic loss itself. This Harbison symphony instead gives us fresh insight into the surprise that comes before the loss—Orpheus’s surprise and Eurydice’s shorter surprise. It reminded me of the existential beauty of volunteering in a hospice.

In the second half of the evening’s program, Ben Heppner (tenor) and Anne Sofie von Otter (mezzo) sang Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, with its mandolin and other unusual orchestration: a meditation on life and mortality that nicely complemented the Harbison work in both texture and content. Conductor James Levine allowed the orchestra’s dynamics to overpower Heppner in the first movement, but the balance was fine for the other movements.

Let’s sing then, of smoking water in your rose-colored daybreaks; of colors: cinnabar, carmine, burnt sienna, blue; of the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs; of our mayfly-like impermanence and juicy days seized while we had the chance. Taking Harbison’s advice, let’s sing like there is no tomorrow.