jwilzewske: piazzolla

Showing posts with label piazzolla. Show all posts

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Keve Wilson’s ‘Pure Imagination’

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set her free.”
— Michelangelo, on imagination and the creative process.

T he new CD by oboist Keve Wilson and colleagues is really good: 14 tracks showcasing her atmospheric lyricism. This CD was just released by CCR/Naxos on 04-JAN-2011.

T he account of Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Fracanapa’ in fast additive 3+3+2 meter or polyrhythm (almost in 1) is driven; conspiratorial—with Wilson’s blazing double- and triple-tonguing; juicy come-what-may bravado, interleaved with suspenseful diminuendos that withdraw into a secret, interior space but soon emerge again, like a wild animal from its lair. The ‘Imagination’ of the disc’s title is no lie; it is a promise kept.

T he Jeff Marder arrangement of the Lady Gaga hit ‘Poker Face’ is an adventure in 3+3+2 tango minimalism—microtonal passages convincingly convey confrontational aloofness and nothing-to-lose abandon that cohere with the spirit of the Lady Gaga original.

C an you imagine—imagine what I would do if I could do all that I can?”
— Sun Tzu.

J eff Marder’s phrasing is particularly thoughtful—an example of collaborative piano at its best. The playing of Greg Heffernan on cello, Mr. Lei on erhu, Charles Pierce on guitar, Mat Fields and Michael Valerio on fretless bass (on separate tracks), Bernard Fox’s whistling on track #7 ‘Moonbeams’, and Andy Beall on percussion are compelling as well.

I t’s tough to blend double-reeds with other instruments, and doing so requires a lot of knowledge and experience of the tonal properties and the articulative and dynamic constraints—knowledge on the part of the composer/arranger and the performer(s) alike. Close harmony doesn’t necessarily favor the blend, and, given the prolific overtones that oboe and English horn have, wider intervals in the lower register of these instruments are especially risky.

W ith those factors in mind, I must say the blend here is superb, and the miking and mixing are first-rate. Keve’s finesse is all-over phenomenal, but the hairy figures she is able to navigate with panache and control in the lower register are nothing short of astonishing.

Y ou have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can’t imagine something that has never existed before, it’s impossible.”
— Rita Dove.

T he need for sufficient rests or phrasing allowing for breathing: more risks that composers/arrangers may create for double-reeds. For Keve, such challenges are taken in-stride. Circular ‘snorkel’ breathing is likely how Keve accomplishes some of the very-long-duration feats and expressive effects in here (although I am unable to detect any wavering of tone or other evidence of it). Brilliant!

T hrough the inspired, empathetic playing and Joe Castellon’s and Mike Aarvold’s fine engineering/mixing/mastering, you also hear on this disc the considerable merits of the studio environment at Kaufman Astoria Studios (KAS). Without any acoustic isolation, everyone plays like they can hear everyone else perfectly, because, in fact, they can hear everyone else perfectly. These days, there are not many recording venues that are conducive to this, especially for small ensembles on a budget. The environment at KAS is one that is especially congenial to performers. The sonic result is not only clean and consistent and technically precise, but one that also embodies the players’ true selves or authentic identities—‘who’ the performers were and ‘who’ they experienced, each of one another, during the recording session. This is not a self-conscious experience per se; any musician who has spent time in recording studios will attest to this. Instead, it’s like encountering each other on a delicious, clear, and invigorating day—out in the open, breathing the purest of air, imagining anything you want, anything that’s possible.

B ravo to all who contributed to the compositions, arrangements, performances, and engineering and production of this wonderful disc!

T he most obvious effect of getting used to hearing one’s own recordings... is to be come highly self-critical about details... Making a recording becomes a process of detailed self-examination. There are also more subtle forces at work. If you hear the sound of your own voice [or instrument], you are made aware that you cannot hear yourself as others hear you. You learn to hear what others hear... You start adjusting it to something which sounds more like what you thought you were doing.”
— Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording, p. 25.

F irst-rate recording can achieve] a more effective unity between intensity of action and displacement of sound than could be afforded by the best of all [live concert] seasons at Bayreuth.”
— Glenn Gould.

K eve is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and 1997 winner of the International Concert Artists Guild Competition. Keve studied oboe with Richard Killmer and dance with Elizabeth Clark in Rochester. She lives in NYC with her husband, trombonist Kerry Farrell. Keve is a co-founder of the chamber music series Project Accidental in Los Angeles and is solo oboist with Kristjan Järvi’s ‘Absolute Ensemble’. Apart from her concertizing and recording, Keve is deeply committed to educating the next generation and contributes to Pasadena Conservatory, Henry Mancini Institute, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Caramoor Center, and American Festival for the Arts in Houston and Argentina, as well as public school outreach programs in New York City and Los Angeles.

I doubt that the imagination can ever be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, (s)he would grow up to be an eggplant.”
— Ursula LeGuin.

K eve’s up-coming performances include an appearance with Westchester Chamber Orchestra on 12-FEB and with Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas at Alice Tully Hall on 24-MAR.

[30-sec clip, Keve Wilson, Astor Piazzolla, ‘Fracanapa’; (track 4), 2011, 1.1MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Keve Wilson, Astor Piazzolla, ‘Oblivion’, arr. K. Wilson; (track 10), 2011, 1.1MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Keve Wilson, Lady Gaga & RedOne, ‘Poker Face’, arr. J. Marder,; (track 6), 2011, 1.1MB MP3]

Friday, November 5, 2010

London Concertante Chamber Ensemble: Improvisation, Baroque and Beyond

London Concertante at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, © David Wright

T he London Concertante Chamber Ensemble delivered a superb performance last night at St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

Bach - Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
Vivaldi - Concerto for Two Cellos
Bach - Brandenburg Concerto No. 6
Piazzolla - Milonga del angel
Telemann - Viola Concerto
Bach - Concerto for Violin, Flute & Harpsichord in A minor BWV 1044

T he ensemble for the BWV 1044 last night was 3 violins, 2 violas, 1 cello, 1 double bass, and harpsichord. David Gordon’s renderings of the cadenzas for harpsichord in the Alla breve were amazingly organ-like, and the reverberous acoustics of the chancel of St. Martin-in-the-Fields added constructively to this impression.

T he improvisational ‘chorale’-like material in BWV 1044 is not so much reverential as fantastical. The orchestral, organ-like quality to the cadenzas and ritornelli is simply devastating to hear. It has been long-established that sections in this piece are borrowed from Bach’s BWV 894 and also some ‘borrowings’ from Telemann or others. In that regard, it is almost as though Bach—and here David Gordon and collaborators—were ritually invoking the Divine and not at all concerned with ‘originality’.

T he window by Iranian-born artist Shirazeh Houshiary was commissioned in 2008 as part of a renewal project at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The stainless steel ‘cames’ are shot-peened natural raw finish and configured in a Cross shape, and the central ellipse resembles an astronomical ‘globular cluster’ of stars with the grid of cames indicating a gravitational ‘warping’ of time and space in the neighborhood of the cluster, calling into question the nature of ‘creation’ and human experience. The window is symbolically a well-suited backdrop, I think, for the expansive atmospherics provided by London Concertante Chamber Ensemble.

S o… unbridled improvisations within Baroque pieces, profuse improvisations in Piazzolla honoring a different, humanistic god: illuminating to hear these side-by-side in the same program. A wonderful evening!

Adam Summerhayes, Fenella Humphreys, Roger Huckle (violin)
Matthew Quenby, Nick Howson, Robert Smissen (viola)
Chris Grist, Julia Graham (cello)
Ben Griffiths (double bass)
David Gordon (harpsichord)
Julian Sperry (flute)

[50-sec clip, London Concertante Chamber Ensemble, Astor Piazzolla, Milonga del ángel (track 2), 2009, 1.1MB MP3]

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Artemis Quartett: Dissonance, Forensic Evidence, and Knowing

L et’s make nonfiction that is more thrilling than fiction. Let’s use the best of what fiction has to offer and make it more exciting because what happened was real.”
— Ellen Windemuth, founder, Off_the_Fence Productions, Amsterdam.

A rtemis Quartet’s performance in Kansas City last Friday night received a warm reception here.

Natalia Prischepenko, violin
Gregor Sigl, violin
Friedemann Weigle, viola
Eckart Runge, cello

T he all-Beethoven program consisted of Op. 95 (F minor) “Serioso”, Op. 127 No. 12 (E-flat major), and Op. 59 No. 3 “Razumovsky” (C major): supple interpretations throughout, without excesses of any kind, either radical or conservative. In this way, what the Artemis are doing sounds perpetually spontaneous, as though each member is reconsidering the ‘evidence’ that is expressed in her/his part—considering it anew each time they play.

I n fact, one of the qualities that impressed me especially was Artemis Quartett’s emphasis on the dramatic tensions between the parts—discourse between the instruments, yes, but as though the instruments (and the scores) have long-lasting disagreements, and express points of view that are founded on different evidence, profoundly different life-histories, irreconcilably different politics, and so on. Each player/part is not about to renounce what he/she ‘knows’.

[50-sec clip, Artemis Quartett, Beethoven, String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 II, ‘Allegretto ma non troppo’, 1.6MB MP3]

T he exciting (and thought-provoking) result is a durable refractoriness to “nice” conclusions—a richness of trans-indivdual tension and dramatic complexity, even in works that are very familiar to us from repeated listening or performances.

T he encore, Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Suite del Ángel: Milonga del Ángel – Melancólico’, was another 6.7-min illustration of this.

T his Piazzolla suite is part of his series of “ángel” compositions from the 1950s and 1960s, usually performed with bandoneon or other instrumentation instead of this gorgeous arrangement for string quartet. Piazzolla had studied with Nadia Boulanger and famously alleged that his unusual counterpoint methods, for better or worse, could be blamed on her insidious pedagogy. In the “ángel” movement that the Artemis performed as an encore, we have lyrical elements that are passed among the quartet members, some of whose musical ‘testimony’ is corroborative of others’ testimony and some of whose testimony is discorroborative or contradictory. The scordatura-governed dissonance is earnest but not fierce; laconic, not agitated and verbose; and, as noted above, its rhetoric is serious, not whimsical or anecdotal.

T his peculiar Piazzolla suite is similar in narrative technique and orchestration methods to the 1949 ‘Sonata for Double Bass’ by Paul Hindemith. In that work, the bass player uses scordatura, tuning up a whole-step, which lends an unsettling, destabilizing effect to the sonata. In this Piazzolla movement, the cello’s C-string is tuned, I think, a whole-step down. In both works, the parts conjure a song in the form of a dialogue between the instruments. Hindemith: creator of ‘disharmonious counterpoint’ in which traditional combinatorial rules are subverted by a ‘decoupled system’ of tonality, or, maybe more accurately, a novel with an “unreliable narrator” point-of-view character. Piazzolla: creator of ‘testimonial dissonance’, with similar “unreliable” point-of-view characters.

T he same melody can be sung either alone or together with other players/characters, or entirely different melodies can be enunciated at the same time, or with variations that substantially alter the sense that the melody makes—the very embodiment of subjectivity and multiple, unstable points-of-view.

W hile we can recognize that the point of view of the “ángel” cello is constitutionally dour or sometimes irritable/unsympathetic, the subtlety and the disputes among the other parts’ responses prevent us from deciding that the cello-narrator, for all his vividness and probity, is more than just a figment of Piazzolla’s imagination. Our drive for certainty is flouted again and again, but we continue to listen, and there arrive more clues. We continue our listening with feelings of prolongèdly heightened suspense. Or ‘suspense-mingled-with-poignant-sense-of-loss-plus-optimism’.

T he result is that we get a riveting, realistic depiction of what may happen to human psyches when they are self-styled and unrelenting. They each know what they know; they each agree to disagree. Such complexity is emotionally engaging and believable, not confusing. In other words, read the quartet as you would read a good novel—as though it were real.

[50-sec clip, Artemis Quartett, Piazzolla, ‘Milonga del Ángel-Melancólico’, 1.6MB MP3]

T he Beethoven the Artemis offered was remarkably cogent and organic. The group dispatched the agitated, mercurial first movement of the Quartet in F minor (Op. 95) with a deft combination of rhapsodic vigor and cool control.”
— Anthony Tomassini, New York Times, 02-MAR-2010.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Santa Fe Guitar Quartet and Rahim al Haj: Hermanos, Caminando por el Mundo

Santa Fe Guitar Quartet, photo © Diana Molina

M usic is like a clock—it moves around in a circle.”
— Rahim al Haj, interview in Roots World, Bill Nevins, 2006.

E l flamenco parece moverse en un mundo oscuro, cargado de sobreentendidos accesible sólo para un reducido círculo de iniciados—hasta ahora. El cuarteto guitarra Santa Fe explica el lenguaje y los detalles del flamenco, junto con un poco de contexto histórico para que gocemos la total experiencia de este estilo musicál. Las guitarras cuentan siempre una historia de las penas y alegrías, la pasión, la rabia y el amor que se viven…
[Until now, flamenco seemed to me to function in a private, covert, highly-implicated world accessible only to natives and ‘initiates’. The SFG4 explain to us the intimate details of flamenco, along with historic context so that we gringos can finally grasp and enjoy the total experience of this musical style. The guitars emit always a living history of griefs and happinesses, passion, rage and love…]”
— DSM, blown away by SFG4 concert in Albuquerque on 18-JAN-2009.

S ome things passively happen; other things you actively and collectively/collaboratively ‘make happen’. It’s nice when you are able to enjoy and derive joy and satisfaction from both.

T he four members of the Argentinian group, Santa Fe Guitar Quartet (SFG4), performed last Sunday with special guest, the Iraqi émigré oud artist Rahim al Haj, as part of this season’s international program by Chamber Music Albuquerque at the Simms Center recital hall of the Albuquerque Academy, to an appreciative audience of more than 600. Their stage manner was notable for its ‘inclusiveness’ and the warmth and humor of the artists’ remarks, punctuating and interleaved between each piece… shades of Sandow’s admonishments about making classical music accessible in the Age of Pop.

C ombining the individual talents of two Argentineans and two North Americans, the group has been touring internationally since 1989. Santa Fe Guitar Quartet’s members are Miguel Piva, Mariano Fontana, Eric Slavin, Christopher Dorsey—“two Argentinians and two gringos,” as Mariano puts it in his introductory words to the audience.

T he program began with ‘Three Latin Dances’, composed by the Cuban clarinetist Paquito d’Rivera in 2000. In ‘Wapango’, d’Rivera references the rhythm of the Mexican dance called ‘huapango’, exploring relationships between traditional and new, masculine and feminine.

[50-sec clip, D’Rivera, ‘Wapango’, Santa Fe Guitar Quartet, 1.2MB MP3]

P iazzolla’s ‘Cuatro Estaciones’ was composed between 1965 and 1970. Originally written for his quintet of violin, bandoneón, electric guitar, piano, and contrabass, the transcription performed by the Santa Fe String Quartet was filled with rich, homogenized sonorities—made more intense by the familial timbres of the guitars. Tango was transformed by Piazzolla’s writing, and this piece is the pinnacle of that influence, as SFG4 member Eric Slavin told the audience. Baroque counterpoint is obvious in ‘Invierno porteño’, and a fugue-like section begins the last movement, ‘Primavera porteña’.

[50-sec clip, Piazzolla, ‘Invierno porteño’, Santa Fe Guitar Quartet, 1.2MB MP3]

A lbeníz’s ‘Iberia-Almería’ was, for me, a high-point in the SFG4 performance—‘backhandedly’ so, because of my acquaintaince with it as a piano composition. I admit that the depth of my prior experience of ‘Iberia’ has been limited by my modest abilities as a pianist. In fact, hearing SFG4’s arrangement of it for guitar quartet made me think that one brain operating ten fingers and pedals at a keyboard is actually seriously suboptimal—too little grey matter ‘computing power’, to adequately render all of what ‘Iberia’ has to offer.

[50-sec clip, Albeníz, ‘Iberia-Almería’, Santa Fe Guitar Quartet, 1.2MB MP3]

Y es, there is a certain amount of ‘parallel processing’ that each brain is capable of on its own. But with respect to muscle motor activity—fine control of fingers, etc.—and with respect to attending to and coping with ‘affective’ and expressive ‘emotional’ content, the parallelism any person’s one-brain, ‘single-core’ architecture can support is limited, no matter how virtuosic she/he may be. Neural structures in the brain that mediate our ‘active’ (versus passive) emotional coping have been identified anatomically and are located within distinct, longitudinal neuronal columns of the midbrain [the periaqueductal gray (PAG) region]. Active coping is associated with activation of either the dorsolateral or lateral columns of the PAG; whereas passive coping is triggered by activation of the ventrolateral PAG. In each one of us, these brain areas generally attend to one trigger or evoking event at a time. But with SFG4 we have a ‘four-core’ massively-parallel multiprocessor, with an extremely high-bandwidth bus for interprocessor communication. The musical/expressive effect is impressive—as staggering as, say, moving to a supercomputer, after having experienced the execution of a program on a smaller, slower computer.

T he ‘Iberia’ that I thought I ‘knew’ and understood suddenly, in SFG4’s hands, has tremendous new depth. My mouth had already been agog at the beauty and technical virtuosity of their playing. But during their rendering of the Albeníz my jaw was on the floor. [And now that I am back home from Albuquerque I will get out my copy of ‘Iberia’ Books 1 and 2 and try to figure out what else I can learn, about the deep structure of these pieces and about how they work… regardless that my single-core mind could never play them like what the four-core SFG4 has done.]

Albeníz, Iberia-Almería, mm. 53-56, bass melody

O ne example that epitomizes the flavor of SFG4’s interpretation: in ‘Almería’, the 2-vs-3 polymeter (lower parts’ timesignature is 3/4 against 6/8) imbues it with a collaborative ‘caminando’ urgency that completely betrays the ‘dolce’ marking. ‘Caminando’—driving forward, together and urgently, on the road of Life; requiring only the most abbreviated signals amongst yourselves, because you each know so very well what your companions on the journey are thinking and feeling, and you are all simultaneously hearing and seeing the same ‘scenery’.

T he ‘copla’ (melodic line) does not inhibit the other parts from elaborating their own ideas and personalities. Dense, intricate textures; impressionistic, forward-looking but honoring the past. Domestic, not courtly. Exuberant, not brooding. The textural and interpretive diversity here can be understood in terms of notions of authority and autonomy, as Coelho has done. ‘Authority’ refers to the performer’s reliance on the score—the musical text—and established tradition as to performance style. ‘Autonomy’ refers to latitudes taken in animating and interpreting the score in performance. The artistic license they take is in their transcriptions, their mark-ups of the scores; the re-contextualizations of the music, to their own situations and experiences. The pieces are open to interpolation, extension, repetition, suppression, elaboration—the performers’ autonomy is not separable from the composers’ authority. Compositional style is [mathematically, processually] convolved with performance style.

T he ‘middle ground’/’foreground’ structures... pedal tones have their equivalent here, especially (but not exclusively) in the bass guitar part. These generate cues to digressions and returns—the role which otherwise would be borne by transitions involving tonic and dominant. Use of the subdominant as a secondary key and elided/synoptic restatement of the primary theme on its return ... are essentially co-optations of sonata form.

T he tonic pedal tones unite the thematic content—the themes exhibit small but perceptible mutations and modal inflections but are glued together by the tonic pedal tones. But the bass part is not accompaniment, nor is it directorial in its gestures. It's an equal among brothers. In mm. 53-55, for example, the bass part introduces a new melody. The other parts listen, take it into account, acknowledge it without mimicking it. It reappears briefly, in mm. 83-84, which gives way to a (Mixolydian mode?) copla/theme in mm. 87-100 where the tonic and subtonic harmonies alternate, followed by Phrygian-mode designs. These lend a distinctive ambiguity—one that only sinks in over dozens of bars. Probably it would be more accurate to think of the effect as a coloristic, context-imparting device, rather than an ambiguity-inducing one.

A ll of this is distinctly ‘fraternal’ in character. It is far beyond folkloric or nationalistic. And the rhythmic accents (compás) are similar to that of siguiriyas, which are the most ‘jondo’ (deep) of all flamenco rhythms.

I n fact, the entire SFG4 program has what could fairly be called ‘jondo’ spirit. The encore—a quartet composed by Paris-based guitar master, Roland Dyens, was superb. Visit SFG4’s website and buy their CDs. Better, attend their concerts if you possibly, possibly can.

T he concert was notable also for the captivating performance by oud artist Rahim al Haj. Rahim, an Iraqi who was imprisoned by Saddam Hussein’s regime and who emigrated to the U.S. in 2000, played a requiem that he recently composed for an Albuquerque friend of his who had passed away. He joined SFG4 members on the performance of his piece entitled ‘Fly Away’, which was commissioned by SFG4. Phenomenal! Al Haj’s playing deserves a blog post all by itself—something I’ll set myself to in coming weeks.

Argentina musical culture page
Academia Brasiliera de Musica
Festival Nacional de Folklore Cosquin 2009
Roland Dyens, professor of guitar at Paris Conservatoire [CNSMDP]
Browse guitar quartet pages on Wikipedia
'Jondo', 'Siguriya' at Wikipedia
Christensen T. Spanish baroque guitar and Seventeenth-Century triadic theory. J Mus Theory 1992; 36:1-42.
Coelho V, ed. Performance on Lute, Guitar, and Vihuela: Historical Practice and Modern Interpretation. Cambridge Univ, 2005.
Jones M. Key Classes and Textural Dissonance: An Instrument-Specific Study of the Idioms, Textures, and Structures of Selected Early Romantic Music for the Guitar (1799-1850) PhD dissertation, Indiana Univ, 2004.
Summerfield M. Classical Guitar: Evolution, Players and Personalities since 1800. Ashley Mark, 2003.
Taylor T. Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Duke Univ, 2007.