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July 20, 2008
Classical Music
Adventures in Concert Programming
ByANTHONY TOMMASINI

THOMAS W. MORRIS, a former executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra and now a consultant to orchestras, is hardly naïve about the tradition-bound field of classical music. He realizes that conductors of American orchestras face many pressures to play it safe in choosing programs.

Still, it exasperates him that so many conductors seem so wary of taking chances with unconventional or challenging programs.

“When I’m on a consulting project and I encounter a boring program,” he said in a telephone interview, “inevitably I’m told, ‘The marketing department made us do it.’ ” But to him hewing to the timeworn three-part program (an overture, a concerto, a popular symphony) makes as little sense financially as it does artistically.

So, when his friend and colleague David V. Foster, the president of the management firm Opus 3 Artists, approached him with the idea of doing something to reward innovation among orchestras, Mr. Morris jumped onboard. Along with other colleagues, including Mary Lou Falcone, a public relations consultant, he and Mr. Foster recently announced the formation of the Festival of North American Orchestras, an organization they hope will embolden timid music directors to rattle the status quo and follow their passions. Planning has begun for a festival, Spring for Music, at Carnegie Hall in May 2011, with Mr. Morris as artistic director.

Concerts by orchestras large and small, major and regional, will be presented over nine days. Hall rental costs will be covered by the festival, which will also handle production and marketing. Orchestras will be chosen, Mr. Morris said, according to one criterion: the creativity of the programs they propose. Under the umbrella of a Carnegie Hall festival, an orchestra can seize the chance to do something adventurous.

Yet what exactly constitutes an adventurous program? The term is thrown around by critics who routinely prod stodgy American orchestras to be more challenging. Mr. Morris is probably right that in the public mind “adventurous” has become code for “contemporary music.” But the issue is more complicated.

Certainly when the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s arresting conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, presented a series of concerts pairing Haydn symphonies with works by Gyorgy Ligeti, this represented one kind of adventurous programming. Without overstating the links between the Classical master Haydn and the audacious modernist Ligeti, who died in 2006, Mr. Salonen simply invited audiences to hear the intriguing resonances between the two that had struck him.

For a completely different kind of adventurous thinking Mr. Morris cited a Cleveland Orchestra program from 1990,, during the glory days of Christoph von Dohnanyi’s tenure as music director. Mr. Dohnanyi began with the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony, followed by Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto with Mitsuko Uchida as soloist. After intermission he offered the Andante from Schubert’s unfinished 10th Symphony, followed by Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony.

“I’m a sucker for programs that have wide contrasts,” Mr. Morris said. “That one certainly did. It offered fascinating sets of connections and took us on a journey. Yet it didn’t have any real contemporary work on it.”

Mr. Morris said he hopes the festival he is planning will generate such excitement that no one will want to miss out on the adventure. But there is a potential downside if Spring for Music in any way propagates the notion that an orchestra needs the support system of a Carnegie Hall festival to present challenging programs.

This reservation was voiced recently by Alan Gilbert, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, a 41-year-old New Yorker and devotee of contemporary music, during an interview. Mr. Gilbert has a demonstrated talent for devising programs that juxtapose old and new works in engrossing contexts, notably during his tenure as chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, which ended in June.

“Anything that pushes orchestras to think in a creative way is useful,” Mr. Gilbert said. Devising such programs should be the goal of any orchestra, he said, especially the Philharmonic. But he added, “I’m not going to limit my most creative programming ideas to some festival.”

Like Mr. Morris, Mr. Gilbert emphasized that adventurous programming should not be equated with contemporary music. Programming is “about making interesting combinations,” he said, “not about tallying up the number of contemporary works and saying at the end of the year, ‘Look, we did 25 new pieces this season.’ ”

Often, in presenting new pieces, wary conductors resort to what Mr. Gilbert called “the ‘Bolero’ effect.” “You know,” he said, “ ‘We can put a new piece on a program as long as we end with “Bolero.” Then people will still come.’ ” But this tactic, he said, creates an “unavoidable impression that we didn’t believe in the new piece after all.”

Asked to give an example of creative programming, Mr. Gilbert cited a concert he conducted with the Philharmonic last year that, he felt, provided a rich context for a challenging recent work, Ligeti’s complex, otherworldly Violin Concerto (1992), with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist. He ended the program with Schumann’s Third Symphony. Each half opened with what might seem a curious companion piece: first Leopold Stokowski’s colorful arrangement of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, then Anton Webern’s austerely beautiful orchestration of the Ricercar from Bach’s “Musical Offering.”

“All of these pieces are rooted in Bach,” Mr. Gilbert said. “The Ligeti concerto has a passacaglia in it. The Schumann symphony is filled with counterpoint. And the Bach is, of course, Bach” — but as transformed by major 20th-century musicians.

Mr. Gilbert was not tempted to give this program a catchy thematic title. “Simply because you can give a title to a program doesn’t make it a good program,” he said. “By the same token, a program that doesn’t necessarily have a name or a stated, expressible theme is not necessarily an un-thought-out idea.”

What matters is that the musical connections among the works on this Philharmonic program fired Mr. Gilbert. If an audience is going to “get it,” he said, the performers have to convey their excitement about the musical resonances in the program through their playing.

Performers must learn to trust their instincts about what pieces belong together, Mr. Morris said, pointing to two bold pianists as ideal examples: Peter Serkin and Pierre-Laurent Aimard. (Mr. Morris, who is also artistic director of the Ojai Festival in California, invited Mr. Aimard to be guest music director there in June.)

Mr. Morris cited an especially exhilarating recital Mr. Aimard played in 2006 at Zankel Hall, featuring 24 piano études, by an eclectic array of composers: Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Messiaen, Bartok and Ligeti. Mixing and matching the pieces in surprising ways, he invited the audience to make its own connections. The modernist edges of Ligeti’s formidable études were softened alluringly by hearing them in context with Debussy and Chopin. On the other hand the Russian late Romantic Rachmaninoff, amid his 20th-century colleagues, emerged as a fully worthy innovator.

For me another standout program that combined old and new music came from Mr. Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 2002, part of a series planned with Mr. Morris’s input. The second half was devoted to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. But the program opened with an early Lutoslawski work, “Musique Funèbre” (1958) for strings, written in homage to Bartok. It begins with a quizzical fugue that builds to anguished, thick-textured intensity, before thinning out and reaching an inconclusive ending. Then came the New York premiere of the German composer Wolfgang Rihm’s “ ‘Concerto,’ Dithyrambe” for string quartet and orchestra (with the Emerson String Quartet). Written in an amalgam of modern styles, the piece came across as highly charged, hazy and fitful, full of swirling figures that spiraled into nothingness. Though riveting from moment to moment, the music seemed structurally elusive. “What is going on?” I kept wondering.

With these works fresh in mind, the slow introduction to the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh sounded comparably elusive, with its strange starts and fits, its phrases that tease you and disappear. “What is going on?” I asked myself again. Surely Mr. Dohnanyi intended for his audience to hear such qualities in all these works, at least subliminally.

Had he conducted an all-Rihm program, it would have been less adventurous. Those concertgoers at Carnegie who primarily wanted to hear the mighty Cleveland Orchestra play the Beethoven Seventh were asked to take a chance on Lutoslawski and Rihm. The gamble paid off. The ovation was tumultuous.

If this new festival works as Mr. Morris hopes it will, a chosen orchestra, having played a bracing program at Carnegie Hall, may feel empowered to push the boundaries of creativity at home.

Philharmonic audiences, meanwhile, should ready themselves for challenges when Mr. Gilbert arrives in 2009. “There is amazing enthusiasm within the orchestra,” he said, “and we are prepared to look at what we do in a new way, not just the music we present but how we present it, and how we connect with audiences.”

The New York Philharmonic as an avatar of adventurous programming? Sounds good to me. Maybe it will even get to play a program in Spring for Music.

New York Times

July 22, 2008
Music Review | New Juilliard Ensemble
International Divertimenti for Sculpture and Traffic
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

There must scarcely be a country not represented in the United Nations of composers programmed by Joel Sachs in Juilliard’s annual Summergarden concerts at the Museum of Modern Art.

This series takes place in the museum’s Sculpture Garden on Sundays, alternating between concerts offered by Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School. This last weekend it was Juilliard’s turn. Argentina, Venezuela, Ukraine, Britain and the United States were represented with four New York premieres and one world premiere. All featured music performed by members of the New Juilliard Ensemble, with some combination of clarinet, violin, cello and piano.

Given the steady hum of traffic noise from West 54th Street, the subtleties of these diverse composers are often lost to the elements, sometimes rendering the most exuberant works the most successful. On Sunday the performers (and listeners) also had to battle the stupefying humidity.

The sometimes raucous debate of the British composer Daniel Giorgetti’s “Dialogue for Violin and Piano” (played in the second half of the program) penetrated through the heat and noise with a conversation in the highest register of the two instruments. With violin pizzicatos, piano staccatos and muted piano strings, it sometimes sounded like an angry couple shrieking and slamming doors, before a violin cadenza full of whining slides heralded a reconciliation.

Much of the one-movement Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano by Valentin Bibik, a Ukrainian composer who died in Israel in 2003, fared less well under the auditory circumstances. The work, played in the first half of the program, opened with a melancholy cello line, eventually building to an intense middle section before fading out to a (barely audible) introverted conclusion.

The program opened with the tango-inspired “Hipermilonga” for violin, clarinet and piano, by the Argentine-American composer Pablo Ortiz. Energetic, jazzy riffs alternated with sultry interludes, with soulful clarinet solos played elegantly by Sean Rice. The other performers on Sunday included Mr. Sachs on piano, the cellist Elizabeth Lara and the violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron, who all played with conviction.

The second half of the concert felt more convincing than the first. After Mr. Giorgetti’s “Dialogue” came the Venezuelan-American composer Ricardo Lorenz’s “Compass Points,” the most successful piece on Sunday’s program. Each of the work’s three sections was written in a different location and reflects the composer’s state of mind and circumstances at the time. The first movement, composed in Umbria, Italy, offered a sultry canvas with passionate violin interludes. The second — both melancholy and defiant, with languid clarinet riffs — was written in Bloomington, Ind., as a tribute to the pianist and composer Robert Avalon. The frenzied, driven dance rhythms of “Scherzarengue,” the last movement, evoke a busy period in the composer’s life when he moved to East Lansing, Mich.

The concert concluded with the world premiere of “Homage Leroy Jenkins” by the American composer Elliott Sharp, a rhythmically intense tribute to Mr. Jenkins, the jazz violinist who died last year, with a ragalike, hypnotic pulse.

New York Times

Stefan Asbury conducting the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in Carter’s Variations for Orchestra.

 July 23, 2008
Music Review
At Tanglewood, a Composer Nears the Century Mark
ByALLAN KOZINN

LENOX, Mass. — The Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood usually brings together composers of many stripes in a concentrated jamboree of new and recent works, punctuated now and again by a venerable modernist classic. This year’s festival, which started on Sunday and runs through Thursday, is different. To celebrate the life of Elliott Carter, who turns 100 on Dec. 11, the Tanglewood Music Center — Tanglewood’s teaching arm, which runs the festival — is devoting this year’s programs entirely to his music, presenting 47 works in 10 concerts, along with panels, interviews and a video screening.

There is another crucial difference. James Levine, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a devoted fan of Mr. Carter’s, cares deeply about new music and has removed the wall that has long existed between the orchestra and the festival. He has taken on the directorship of this year’s installment, and he spent two years assembling the programs. He planned to conduct several concerts as well but withdrew because of his kidney surgery this month.

His absence deprived the student musicians of an inspiring force, but the festival itself was not derailed. Oliver Knussen and Stefan Asbury, both experienced Carter conductors, added some of Mr. Levine’s conducting tasks to their own, and a handful of the center’s student conducting fellows picked up works as well. The resulting performances by the center’s students, faculty members and guests have been up to the current international standard: they let listeners focus on the poetry in Mr. Carter’s music instead of its difficulty.

Mr. Carter can still be surprising. A new work, “Sound Fields” (2007), composed for the festival, does away with almost everything you expect in a Carter work. Counterpoint, sharply contrasting dynamics, tempos and coloration: all gone. This work is about shifting densities, from single notes to thick textures, and is scored for a homogenous string ensemble that plays entirely at a calm mezzo forte. Think of it as Mr. Carter’s Adagio for Strings, with a nod to Morton Feldman.

Mr. Asbury conducted the work twice on Sunday evening (it lasts only four minutes) before giving a performance of the grander Variations for Orchestra (1955), which, as in Mr. Levine’s recent readings, was so bold, supple and rich-hued that you could almost mistake it for neo-Romanticism.

Mr. Asbury drew an equal eloquence from his players on Monday evening in several of Mr. Carter’s works for multiple ensembles that play simultaneously but independently: the Triple Duo (1983), a zesty study in gamesmanship and humor for three pairs of instruments; “Syringa” (1978), a vocal score in which a John Ashbery poem and an ancient Greek text (sung with an appealing clarity and emotional heft by Kristen Hoff, a mezzo-soprano, and Evan Hughes, a bass-baritone) are juxtaposed; and “Penthode” (1985), in which a melody evolves slowly and with ample decoration as it travels among five groups of four instruments each.

Independent ensembles also crop up in Mr. Carter’s concertos, several of which were played on Sunday. In the Double Concerto for Harpsichord, Piano and Two Chamber Orchestras (1961), on Sunday morning, the solo instruments — with Ursula Oppens playing harpsichord and Charles Rosen, piano — dueled it out alone and as parts of the opposing ensembles. Mr. Knussen made the ensembles’ often incompatible meters sound as if they fitted together naturally.

But the most striking aspect of Mr. Carter’s concerto writing is his insistence that the soloist and the ensemble share the spotlight (and the difficulty) equally. In the Clarinet Concerto (1996), the soloist, Thomas Martin, moved among widely placed instrumental groups, each eliciting a different kind of clarinet color and phrasing. Erik Nielsen, an already accomplished conducting fellow, led that performance with decisiveness and assurance, a quality he also supplied in a vital account of “Dialogues” (2003), with Nicolas Hodges playing the dazzling solo piano line.

New York Times

Bill Charlap, left, and Kurt Elling, performing in "Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein" at the 92nd Street Y.

 July 24, 2008
Music Review
Bernstein as a Fount of Fusion
BySTEPHEN HOLDEN

Elegance without ostentation: that would describe the overview of Leonard Bernstein songs that the pianist Bill Charlap and the singer Kurt Elling brought to Bernstein’s theater music at the opening program of the 92nd Street Y’s Jazz in July series on Tuesday evening. Bernstein, especially in his score for “West Side Story,” which dominated the concert, created some of the most operatically ambitious music ever composed for Broadway. Emotional extravagance, swirling urban color, Latin American fireworks — in other words, flamboyant ostentation — are its hallmarks.

For the concert, “Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein,” Mr. Charlap was joined by Peter Washington on bass, Kenny Washington on drums, Brian Lynch on trumpet, Jimmy Greene on tenor sax and Joe Gordon on alto sax. Except for the guest pianist Ted Rosenthal’s rollicking “Wrong Note Rag,” Bernstein’s exuberance was discreetly tamped down, the songs treated as impeccably worked-out think pieces removed from their theatrical origins. Instead of conjuring familiar lyrics and the star-crossed passion of Tony and Maria, the concert considered Bernstein’s still-fresh fusion of pop, bebop and Afro-Cuban jazz.

Even those songs that were sung — “Lucky to Be Me,” “Maria,” “Somewhere,” “Some Other Time” and “Cool” — were held at arm’s length by Mr. Elling who exhibited a detached technical perfectionism and attention to tonal shading. At times he recalled Mel Tormé, the suave master of genial pop-jazz balladry who could break loose into machine-gun scat. But Mr. Elling maintained an even loftier sense of distance. There was no breaking loose. Near the end of “Cool,” he interpolated a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, reciting it Beat style with piano, bass and drums.

Among several polished ensemble arrangements, the best was “Something’s Coming.” Featuring the close, slightly dissonant harmonies of Mr. Green, Mr. Gordon and Mr. Lynch, it evoked lines of traffic slipping down a midnight avenue; wild teenage expectation translated into slouching urban cool.

Mr. Rosenthal’s version of “Wrong Note Rag” lent the evening a welcome dash of slapstick comedy. He played it as though two clowns were roughhousing, one doing pratfalls and sticking out his tongue, while the other played sedate stride piano.

As the evening’s unfailingly courtly host Mr. Charlap was deferential to his guests. But I would rather have heard him perform all the songs without instruments other than a rhythm section.

Even when displaying his formidable technique and stylistic flexibility, his piano spoke in a modest voice. You wanted to follow every note and sudden change in his musical thinking. As ferociously percussive as Mr. Charlap can become, his most telling signature is musical punctuation that can be as delicate as the distant ting of a wind chime.

New York Times

Philippe Entremont in concert on Wednesday night at the International Keyboard Institute and Festival at Mannes College

 July 25, 2008
Music Review
From a Veteran at the Keyboard, a Mozart Staple and a Finger-Busting Ravel

ByANTHONY TOMMASINI

In the 1950s, when the French pianist Philippe Entremont emerged on the international scene, he was hailed as a distinctive artist who combined Old World French refinement and youthful virtuosity. His recordings of concertos by Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saëns and Ravel were big sellers.

In the 1970s Mr. Entremont shifted his focus to conducting, taking posts with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra (for nearly 30 years) and the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. Opinion was divided about his conducting. I recall some quite ineffective concerts he presented with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra during the 1980s, when his work both as conductor and pianist, leading Mozart concertos from the keyboard, was mannered, listless and overly plush.

Now 74, Mr. Entremont gave a piano recital at Mannes College the New School for Music on Wednesday evening as part of the International Keyboard Institute and Festival. Jerome Rose, who directs this annual event, has made a point of including veteran artists who have been out of the loop for a while. The auditorium was packed, evidence of the regard Mr. Entremont built up as a pianist during a long career.

He opened the program with Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A (K. 331), the piece that ends with the “Turkish Rondo,” a staple of the student pianist’s repertory. As Mr. Entremont began the main theme of the first movement, some fudged passages and blurry pedaling seemed worrisome signs. But he soon settled down and played with poise and sensitivity. By taking his time, making the most of each lyrical turn of phrase and observing all the structural repeats, Mr. Entremont had this single movement, a theme and variations, seeming like a significant 15-minute piece unto itself. The Menuetto was hardy and jocular. He played the rondo with dash, delicacy and whiplash articulation of the rolled left-hand chords that evoke the Turkish drums and cymbals.

Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata might not be the wisest choice for Mr. Entremont, given his diminished technical resources at this stage of his career. His finger work, for the most part, was nimble and clear, but leaps and bursts of fortissimo chords gave him trouble. This was a rather atmospheric account of music usually mined for its rhythmic intensity and sudden dynamic contrasts.

The all-French second half offered works by Debussy and Ravel. There were curious moments at which Mr. Entremont’s playing of surging passages in Debussy’s “Images,” Book 1, especially the middle section of “Reflets Dans l’Eau,” turned clangorous and steely. But mostly he played with an ear for intriguing inner voices and hazy colorings, as well as effortless glissandos in his exuberant account of Debussy’s suite “Pour le Piano.”

If a phrase here and there was muffed in Mr. Entremont’s performance of Ravel’s finger-twisting “Alborada del Gracioso,” it was enjoyable to hear him cutting loose to relish the piece’s snappy dance rhythms and sultry harmonies.

For an encore, Mr. Entremont played Chopin’s Polonaise in C sharp minor, conveying both the burly vigor and the ruminative tenderness of this mercurial work.

New York Times

Elliott Carter walks on stage at the end of the Contemporary Music Festival at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass.

July 26, 2008
Music
A Century Has Passed; His Time Is Still Now
ByALLAN KOZINN

LENOX, Mass. — In a 2003 letter to Elliott Carter included in “Carter’s Century,” an exhibition of photographs, scores and letters here at Tanglewood, James Levine outlines an ambitious plan to transform the Boston Symphony Orchestra into a first-rate Carter ensemble, with all the composer’s major works in the repertory. He has made good on that promise: better than good, really, having also commissioned a half-dozen works from Mr. Carter in the four years he has been the orchestra’s music director.

The word is that the orchestra grumbles about its new-music load under Mr. Levine. But to judge from the Carter program it played in Seiji Ozawa Hall on Thursday as the finale of the Festival of Contemporary Music — a five-day, 10-concert celebration of Mr. Carter’s centenary, programmed by Mr. Levine — the ensemble has thrown itself fully into the task.

The concert was one of several Mr. Levine had planned to conduct before he was sidelined by kidney surgery, but Oliver Knussen and Shi-Yeon Sung, one of the orchestra’s assistant conductors, deputized for him to superb effect. Ms. Sung opened the program with “Three Illusions” (2002-4), a set of studies that concentrate on the constant transformation of timbre rather than the development of themes. And with James Sommerville as the soloist, Ms. Sung led the Horn Concerto (2006), a work that had its premiere in Boston last season.

Mr. Carter’s characteristically taxing horn line has the instrument buzzing around its lower reaches and singing chromatically in the meatier part of its range. Mr. Sommerville, the orchestra’s principal hornist, played this difficult score with remarkable virtuosity and assurance.

Mr. Knussen’s half of the Boston Symphony program included “Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei” (1993-96), three character works that, though roped together after the fact, work well as a 45-minute symphony with an arresting, plangent slow movement.

But a greater joy was the Boston Concerto (2002), which shows off an orchestra’s component sections in much the same way the pivotal Concerto for Orchestra (1969) does. Mr. Knussen conducted the Tanglewood Music Center’s student orchestra in an astonishing account of that work on Wednesday. The Concerto for Orchestra is Mr. Carter at his most involved and intricate, and there aren’t many conductors who know it as thoroughly as Mr. Knussen, whose copy of the score is copiously annotated with everything Mr. Carter has told him about his intentions, as well as corrections of misprints and a carefully highlighted guide to the main themes, which dart from instrument to instrument.

In the performance on Wednesday evening, the work lived up to its reputation for being big and noisy (in a good way), but with a dramatic core and themes that sang with a beguiling sweetness.

If orchestral music was the heart of this festival (25 of the 47 works were for large ensemble), Mr. Carter’s vocal and chamber music, as well as the many solo pieces he has composed in recent years, were well represented too. Of the vocal scores performed later in the festival, the most compelling was “In the Distances of Sleep” (2006), six refined and at times movingly dramatized Wallace Stevens settings, heard in a ravishing performance by the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey on Tuesday. Ms. Lindsey’s velvety tone and an intuitively supple phrasing took these pieces straight to the heart. It was a performance likely to have disarmed anyone who still regarded Mr. Carter’s writing as harsh or impenetrable.

The same program included Jo Ellen Miller’s bright-hued account of “A Mirror on Which to Dwell” (1976) and “Mad Regales” (2007), a new work for vocal sextet in an updated madrigal style. Mr. Carter rarely looks to the musical past, but the madrigals edge in that direction. So did another work on Tuesday, the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord (1952), a classic in which the brittle tone of the harpsichord hints at a Baroque sensibility within a modern harmonic setting.

Even in an expansive festival like this, gaps were inevitable. Little of Mr. Carter’s early music was performed. And of his five string quartets, only the second (from 1959) was on the bill. That work, heard on Wednesday, was given a reading so fluid you would hardly have guessed that it was once considered brutally difficult.

Such was often the case here: the Tanglewood Music Center’s students are virtuosic and fearless, and all through the week they attacked this music with evident enthusiasm and professional polish. (Mr. Carter, in an onstage interview on Thursday, said the student performances were among the best he had ever heard.)

In the Second Quartet, Stephanie Nussbaum, the first violinist, played the extended cadenza with the warmth and nuance you would expect in a Kreisler piece, yet with ample modernist grit when the score veered in that direction. On Thursday Ms. Nussbaum brought the same expressive and coloristic range to “Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi” (1984) and “Rhapsodic Musings (for Robert Mann)” (2001).

Among the other solo performers, Kathryn Bates, a cellist with a beautifully rounded sound, made the uneasy balance between lyricism and drama in “Figment I” (1994) and “Figment II” (2001) sound organic, as it should, on Tuesday afternoon. Also memorable on that program were a high-energy performance of the chromatic, perpetual-motion “Caténaires” (2006) by Sandra Gu, a pianist; and a fluid rendering of the contrastingly sharp- and soft-edged sections of “Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux” (1985) and “Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux II” (1994) by Brook Ferguson, flutist; Brent Besner, clarinetist; and Nick Tolle, marimba player. And Mr. Besner’s performance of “Steep Steps” (2001), with its perilous leaps of a 12th, was a highlight of the Thursday afternoon program.

For five days, this festival was a kind of parallel universe, in which only Mr. Carter’s music was heard, in two concerts a day, with audiences packing the hall and shouting as if they were at a rock concert when Mr. Carter took his curtain calls.

More crucial, it offered a magnificent overview of the variety of Mr. Carter’s compositional interests, from the complexity of his works of the 1960s to the relative accessibility of his recent scores. It touched on his early attraction to neo-Classicism and his more recent fascination with texture on its own terms. And it examined the many engines that drive his music: the polyrhythms of multiple ensemble pieces, the restless melodies that bounce across an ensemble’s timbres and the natural, speechlike rhythms of his vocal works, for example.

If you’re going to devote a festival to a single living composer, this is the way to do it.

New York Times

The New Amsterdam Orchestra and pianist Steven Lubin performed at St. Peter's Church in Chelsea

July 26, 2008
Music Review
Mozart, Schubert, Chelsea: The Trio
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

Concertgoers who attend both star-studded and off-the-beaten-track events probably notice that the better community and youth orchestras can sound more inspired than big-name ensembles or performers, who sometimes collect hefty fees after trudging through repertory with the enthusiasm of kids in after-school detention. On Thursday evening, in front of a full house at St. Peter’s Church in Chelsea, the New Amsterdam Summer Orchestra — a collaboration between the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra (a community ensemble founded in 1976) and the Music in Chelsea series — offered spirited performances of works by Mozart and Schubert.

Matthew Oberstein, the energetic young guest conductor, opened the program with a zesty rendition of Mozart’s Overture to “The Impresario.” Steven Lubin was the soloist in Mozart’s “Coronation” Piano Concerto (No. 26 in D), given its nickname because the composer performed it in Frankfurt during the coronation of Emperor Leopold II in 1790. Mr. Lubin, a member of the Mozartean Players and a veteran of the early-music movement, was one of the first pianists in New York to perform extensively on the fortepiano.

On Thursday he performed on a modern piano but approached the work from the perspective of a musician steeped in period practice. Some pianists play Mozart with long, smooth phrases and a warm Romanticized sound, but a period approach generally favors crisp articulation and spare use of pedal. Robert Levin, another fortepiano expert, has written that Mozart favored a translucent sound and a singing melody that “must flow like oil,” while pointing out that “legato” was not a term the composer applied to his keyboard works. Beethoven reportedly told Czerny that Mozart had a “fine but choppy way of playing, no legato.”

Mr. Lubin demonstrated this approach with clearly delineated articulation in the outer movements, but with a few stumbles as well. In the slow second movement, he played with a singing tone while retaining a firm, detached touch. His playing sometimes sounded rather clinical by comparison with the warmer quality of the orchestra, from which Mr. Oberstein elicited sharply etched phrasing, an ideal buoyancy and mostly clean playing.

There were more noticeable orchestral slips in Schubert’s Symphony No. 3, with some messy patches in the strings in particular and occasional ensemble problems, particularly in the fiery finale. But there was also plenty to commend, including some fine woodwind playing and a lively momentum. Mr. Oberstein ably captured the youthful energy of the sunny work and respected its Classical proportions and textures, which reflect the 18-year-old Mozart’s absorption of the symphonic style of Beethoven and Haydn.

New York Times

REVIEW
Ling triumphant in Blossom return
Cleveland connection kicks in for performance by orchestra that's vital, emotionally connected
By Elaine Guregian
Beacon Journal arts and culture critic

Published on Monday, Aug 04, 2008

When the conductor Jahja Ling comes back to conduct the Cleveland Orchestra, as he did on Saturday and Sunday nights at Blossom, the orchestra is on solid ground. Sunday night, the triumphant, organ-like blend in the final measures of the Sibelius Symphony No. 2 completed this year's visit on a glorious high.

For two decades, Jahja Ling was on the conducting staff of the orchestra. As the resident conductor from 1985-2002, he was former music director Christoph von Dohnanyi's right-hand man. From 2000-2005, he was the director of the Blossom Festival (a position that no longer exists).

Ling is now entering his fifth year as music director of the San Diego Symphony, but as soon as he stepped onto the Blossom pavilion stage on Saturday, that longtime Cleveland connection kicked in for a performance that was vital and emotionally connected.

Often summer seasons are about old favorites. Opening Saturday's concert, it was diverting to hear a newer piece that worked particularly well in Blossom's casual setting, John Harbison's Remembering Gatsby: Foxtrot for Orchestra. The American composer put together this work from sketches he had made for an opera on the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz-age novel. Harbison finished Remembering Gatsby in 1985, well before his full opera premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1999.

Harbison wove dark hints of the story's tragic turn through a score that also bubbles with the fizzy, carefree attitude of the Roaring '20s. The colors of a bright soprano saxophone and muted trumpet, along with the dance rhythms of the Charleston, place the score definitively in the jazz era. The orchestra played with panache and subtlety, and Remembering Gatsby made a good opener for George Gershwin's Concerto in F for piano and orchestra.

The French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet has become known to a wide audience lately, by recording soundtracks to Pride and Prejudice and Atonement.Well before that, Thibaudet began appearing at Blossom, starting in 1991. Thibaudet's feathery, elegant, rhythmically incisive playing suited Gershwin's jazzy writing in the concerto. Particularly in the outer two movements, the orchestra and soloist tossed off Gershwin's syncopated banter with style.

A Cleveland-born composer, Eric Ewazen, visited on Sunday from New York, where he teaches at the Juilliard School, to hear the orchestra and soloists play his Ballade for Clarinet, Harp and Strings. The piece has an expectant, hold-your-breath beauty, conveyed persuasively by clarinetist Franklin Cohen and harpist Trina Struble. The orchestra brought glistening life to the piece's impressionistic colors and painterly beauty.

Cohen, Struble and the orchestra followed the 10-minute work with an Ewazen encore, the Caprice for Clarinet, Harp and String Orchestra, that also was received enthusiastically by the audience.

A major work anchored each night's concert.

For Sunday night's Sibelius Symphony No. 2, a huge, radiant orchestral sound and Ling's decisive leadership drew a clear path through writing that sometimes meanders and experiments. Formidable brass playing and sumptuous strings created thrilling results.

Saturday's program closed with the Brahms Symphony No. 1, led by Ling with intelligent pacing and an invincible sense of direction. The orchestra is at home in this repertoire, and so is Ling.

The blend of sound wasn't as rich as it usually is at Severance Hall — or as it was in the Sibelius on Sunday night. Even so, this Brahms First was substantial and emotionally rewarding. The folksy melodies woven into the symphony are touchingly open-hearted and trusting, amid the tragic themes. While John Harbison's premonition of doom is different, both scores offered beauty at the brink.

Jahja Ling returns to Blossom with Cleveland Orchestra
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Donald Rosenberg
Plain Dealer Music Critic

Blossom Music Center, gorgeous as it is, seems to have become a second thought for the Cleveland Orchestra. The programming usually is so standard that it can border on the hackneyed. We hear only a few conductors and soloists of international stature.

And yet, with the right guests in the right works, the Cleveland Orchestra has the power to take us deeply inside the music.

The orchestra's concerts over the weekend filled the bill to a pleasurable degree in this respect. On the podium was Jahja Ling, the ensemble's former resident conductor and Blossom Festival director, who is music director of the San Diego Symphony.

Ling's long connection with the Cleveland Orchestra tends to reap artistic rewards when he returns to Northeast Ohio. His two programs on this occasion respected beloved composers (Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius) while also paying attention to Americans, one deceased (Gershwin) and two living (John Harbison and Eric Ewazen).

The Americans stood proudly amid their European counterparts. Gershwin's Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra is a familiar friend, its jazz influences melded into a classical framework with seamless suavity. The soloist Saturday was French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who has the impish wit and lyrical grace, if not the tonal juice, to project the concerto's alluring qualities. Michael Sachs' bluesy trumpet solo in the slow movement was a highlight.

Saturday's concert began with Harbison's "Remembering Gatsby: Foxtrot for Orchestra," which the composer wrote during the long gestation period of his opera, "The Great Gatsby." The foxtrot dances with antic, sinuous urgency alongside moments of haunting darkness. The orchestra, including a dashing soprano sax soloist, gave it a vibrant account.

The American on Sunday's concert was Ewazen, a native of Middleburg Heights who teaches at New York's Juilliard School. Ewazen's Ballade for Clarinet, Harp and Strings sings lovely pastoral lines, almost like a British idyll, and takes the clarinet to the skies with the birds (Blossom's aviary ensemble was in fine form).

Franklin Cohen, the orchestra's principal clarinet, gave luminous flight to Ewazen's phrases, and principal harp Trina Struble provided silvery filigree. In an encore, Ewazen's Caprice (scored for the same forces), Cohen switched gears and became a paradigm of refined acrobatics.

The big work on Saturday's program was Brahms' Symphony No. 1, which Ling and the orchestra treated with disciplined intensity and authority. Ling emphasized the score's lyricism, maintained a sure sense of pacing and allowed the ensemble to speak in its most articulate solo and ensemble voices.

The orchestra sounded alert Sunday in Beethoven's overture to "The Creatures of Prometheus" and wondrous in a spacious, detailed performance of Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 that kept the audience listening anew to the well-traveled sonic itinerary.

Ling's view of the piece has changed markedly over the decades. It is more brooding, expansive and noble than ever. He guided the orchestra Sunday as if he didn't want to let go, and the musicians helped him build Sibelius' majestic edifice to a stunning peak. Attendance was sparse, the response torrential.