Louis Andriessen and Passover Seders

Louis Andriessen at 70

Years ago I discovered a stunning and monumental work for Chorus and Orchestra called De Staat (which translates to The State or in this case, ‘The Republic’ based on Plato’s Republic).  If you haven’t heard it (and I strongly recommend checking out a recording), it’s kind of like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, but with the volume, heart-pounding repetitions and unisonic craggy lines of force taken to 11 (as Spinal Tap would put it). It made a big impression on me, even though I only heard it on recordings, and I even remember using a bit of it in a lecture I gave about the tools and techniques that a composer can use to manipulate the subjective perception of time.  The Dutch composer Louis Andriessen wrote it, and in some ways it has become, like Stravinsky’s Rite,  one of those big, iconic pieces in music history where audiences got to feel not so much a tide turning as a tidal wave crashing upon them. To give you an idea of some of the power of this work, listen to this bit near the beginning where sections of the orchestra pound away until (in a style not unlike contemporary cinema) they get spliced right on to a vista that opens up:

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Now imagine a piece for large orchestra and chorus that does this kind of thing for over a half hour with no break. Sections build, crash, and coalesce, like tectonic plates crunching. It’s huge, exhausting, and I would imagine, shattering. As you’d expect, De Staat doesn’t get played very often, but I hope some day to hear it live.

Big orchestra or not, I was thrilled that last week, Andriessen was here, in Vancouver, as part of a world tour, celebrating his 70th Birthday and as part of the Music on Main series. The Turning Point Ensemble, one of Vancouver’s few New Music ensembles, played at Heritage Hall, a distinctive old building on Main. Andriessen’s Zilver, which he wrote in 1994 was last on the program, set up by a series of works by other composers, some of them present in the hall (and a piece by Andriessen’s father, Hendrik, which was a charming, if somewhat out-of-place 19th century-sounding Intermezzo for flute and harp).  Of all the works leading up to Zilver, I liked best David Lang’s Sweet Air, dedicated to Andriessen on his 60th Birthday. Lang won a Pulitzer last year for his Little Match Girl Passion, a setting of Hans Christian Anderson’s story set as a work for singers and orchestra (like Bach’s St. Matthew Passion). It is indeed sweet, and floats along, spinning out endless variations on this opening set of repeating patterns:

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While I don’t have a recording of Zilver (and have never heard it), it was a lot of fun, and full of all sorts of interruptions and collisions of one layer of instruments with another. We also had the treat of Andriessen telling a few funny stories before the performance, alikening the organ’s pedal parts in Bach’s Chorale Preludes to little duets between birds being interrupted by a cow mooing, and how he once performed in a ‘Left-Wing’ Ensemble called ‘Perseverance’ that made the unfortunate choice of setting up their free outdoor concert near the flight path of planes coming in for a landing at a nearby airport, where the interruptions here were a lot bigger than a mooing cow. He was wearing a fedora and raincoat, and seemed to be having as much fun as the rest of us were.  I hope we’ll get 30 more years, at least, of music and stories from this merry agitator from the Netherlands.

Seders in Vancouver, Detroit and Washington D.C.

Last night we hosted a small (3-person) Seder for Pam, her friend Heather, and me, technically on the second night of Passover. I cooked the some of the usual fare: the mortar-symbolic Charoset, which is sort of chutney of chopped apples, mixed nuts, a little honey, cinnamon and red wine, and tzimmes (lots of variation here, but basically it’s sweet carrots with some prunes, and other items – sometimes even with meat). The centrepiece of the meal was a small leg of lamb (or was it the leg of a small lamb?). I roasted it with some rosemary and it came out OK, but I’m still not satisfied with how I cook lamb and need to work on getting a foolproof technique that doesn’t produce meat that’s either rubbery or dried out and greasy.

I found out that the night before (in addition to my parents and other relatives having their Seder in Detroit), there was a Seder at the White House. I was frankly surprised and pleased that Obama would do such a thing, especially as he is the first President to ever host a Seder. The holiday celebrates the end of a period of slavery in the Old Testament, so the parallels between the the Emancipation of American Slaves and the Exodus of Jewish Slaves from Egypt was something that I hope was not lost on the people around the table. Having extended the hand of friendship toward the Muslim world last week in Turkey and preparing to participate in the typical Christian activities this weekend (Attending Church Services on Sunday, the Easter Egg hunt on the White House Lawn, etc.), the Obamas were a class act to include the Jewish holiday as well.

We Heard Him Here in Vancouver, First

Pam’s discovery, the Roby Lakatos Ensemble, who we heard with Matt and Maktaaq at the Chan Centre last year, is performing in Carnegie Hall in New York City this coming week.

From This Week on 96.3 FM WQXR:

The Roby Lakatos Ensemble

The Roby Lakatos Ensemble — Photo by Lakatos vzw

Gypsy violinist Roby Lakatos is not only a scorching virtuoso, but a musician of extraordinary stylistic versatility. He’s a gypsy violinist, a classical virtuoso, a jazz improviser, a composer and arranger, and a 19th-century throwback all at once. Click here to see how he performs Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5. Carnegie Hall presents Roby Lakatos and Friends as part of three festival series in Stern Auditorium this Tuesday, and the Roby Lakatos Ensemble is in concert at the State Theater in New Jersey this Thursday. But before you see him there, hear him on WQXR. Roby and his ensemble join Elliott Forrest for live performances in our studio on Monday, January 26th at 4:30 P.M.

Those concertgoers in New York and New Jersey are in for a treat. Lakatos really is a stunning performer, and his ensemble’s Cimbalom player may have been the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a human moving at superhuman speed. He was literally a blur. It was also a revelation to hear the music that Brahms and Liszt based their Hungarian Rhapsodies on, real, alive and performed with the same passion and agility that those composers who heard were so thrilled by. Not only did the music that Lakatos plays have a huge influence on the development of music in the Romantic era, but it’s just plain fun and never boring.

My parents heard some Gyspy ensembles when they were vacationing in Hungary years ago and were also blown away. It’s remarkable how this music has survived all of these centuries intact.

Happy Birthday, Ludwig Van!

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Today would have been Ludwig van Beethoven’s 238th birthday. Even though he only lived to the age of 56,  a lifetime of 238 years would have been fine with me, if he could have kept writing music.

The piece and excerpt above are from his Fifth Piano Concerto, sometimes called the ‘Emperor’ Concerto, which he wrote between 1808 and 1809 for the Archduke Rudolph of Austria. This opening, no matter how many times I hear it, is always fascinating. To begin the piece with these big, loud chords, with the strands of what sounds like a free improvisation strung from column to column until it finally takes off, like a car shifting into drive, is such a fantastic idea, and so arresting, that I’d be hard-pressed to come up with many other pieces of music that are both as startling and ultimately satisfying…and not written by the same guy.

Here’s to one of the greatest, 238 years later, still shouting beauty.

Dr Atomic in Vancouver

A couple of weekends ago, Pam and I, as part of an early holiday gift from my parents, went to a performance with them at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  Well, not exactly. What we did do, was see a production, by the Met live, in downtown Vancouver, just as they were viewing the same production in Baltimore. This is actually a bit of technological magic that I never expected to see work so well, and certainly not so close to home.

Believe it or not, once a month or so, the New York Metropolitan Opera broadcasts live performances, via High Definition video and CD-quality multichannel sound, to a satellite, which then beams them down to movie theatres all across North America, including a couple here in Vancouver (the Scotiabank Paramount theatre on Burrard, as well as one in North Vancouver). I’ve since learned that the Toronto Ballet is doing much the same with some of their performances of the Nutcracker.

So on that Saturday morning, at 10:00 AM (because it’s live, and in New York City it’s 1PM in the afternoon, the perfect time for a matinee), we saw Doctor Atomic, the new opera about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project by American composer John Adams.

Bear in mind that although it is pretty amazing that you can do this sort of thing at all, the fact that it’s easy is even more impressive. Of course, I could buy tickets online and have them charged directly to my Bank Account via Interac (they were a little less than $25 apiece). There were no lines that morning at the ScotiaBank Theatre. The broadcast was being shown in two theatres, and one was nearly full, so Pam and I opted for the second, smaller theatre, and got very, very good seats, the kind you could never get in New York.  If you were going to actually attend the same performance in New York, $25 would probably not cover the parking, much less your actual theatre tickets for even standing room, not even counting the plane fare, hotel and meals…etc.

Before the production started, the movie screen showed the inside of the Met in Lincoln Center. I’ve been there a couple of times, so it was fascinating to see it again, live, with audience members either in their seats or arriving, the famous chandeliers all in the down position (they get pulled up just before the show is about to start),  from the other end of the continent.

After a moment’s introduction from backstage by Susan Graham, the host of the broadcast, the camera cuts to the main technical director telling the conductor that it’s time for the performance to start.

The opera?  The first act was a little slow, dramatically, but the music was superb. I think it’s one of the composer’s best scores. The aria on words of John Donne (his Holy Sonnet XIV) at the end of the first act is brilliant:

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason yhour viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you, and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

I also was struck by the beauty of Adams’ orchestration and his ear for brilliant sonorities, which I’d come to know from his earlier work (and one of my favourite orchestral pieces) Harmonielehrer, a sort of three-movement symphonic salute to to romantic music of the late 19th and early 20th century. The ending of the opera is dramatically shattering, with an extremely intense countdown to the brilliant flash of the first atomic bomb test, the moment when Oppenheimer and his coworkers saw that the human race now, for the first time in history, had the power to destroy themselves and the planet, a burden that we all bear to this day.

As we listened to the music and saw the singers on stage, we also saw subtitles, so we didn’t have to wonder what they were singing. There was also an excellent bit of documentary and interview with the composer and some of the performers (and I kept feeling like they should be left alone to relax a bit after a half hour of straight singing rather than be badgered in their stage makeup by Ms. Graham!)

After the performance, I talked to my parents by phone. After all, we had all just been to the same performance together, and I wanted to see how they liked it. They told me that my cousin in Detroit had actually also been to the same performance in her town, and talked to them by cell phone during intermission. Score another one for telecommunications technology. I guess the next step will be to recreate the Met holographically for us in Vancouver, and after that, it’s ‘beam me to Lincoln Center, Scotty’.

What a Month!

Is it really Halloween again? The month, like Scarbo the ‘half goblin, half ghost’ character from Gaspard de la Nuit, a poem and the third in a set of 3 extraordinary piano pieces by Maurice Ravel, has twitched, jerked and reared up and dropped down, pirouetting like a threatening demon (at least in terms of my nail-biting regarding the Stock Market and the US Presidential Campaign)  and now is about to vanish:

Mais bientôt son corps bleuissait, diaphane comme la cire d’une bougie, son visage blémissait comme la cire d’un lumignon,—et soudain il s’éteignait.

But then, his body would change, became as blue and diaphanous as the wax of a candle, his face as pale as candle grease – and suddenly he would be extinguished.

– The original poem by Louis Bertrand

(The first few measures and an excerpt that goes on a little longer are below. It’s truly some of the most menacing and spooky music that Ravel ever wrote, I think, and appropriate for this dark evening):

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He he he, creepy enough for you?

Earlier in the Month

I guess the piano music excerpt is partly because piano music is partly on my mind. Last week I got to a concert at the Chan Centre by Piotr Anderszewski, a very interesting pianist who was making his return engagement to the Vancouver Recital Society. He played Bach, Mozart and Schumann, and I’d have to say that it was the Mozart that I really liked best. Mozart Sonatas, like the Sonata in C minor, K 457 that he played are often played (badly) by children. Teachers give them to their students fairly early in their development, partly because the music seems simple and ‘easy’ to play. The fact is, when a really good pianist plays them, the music reveals how complex and really difficult it is. I didn’t always love what Anderszewski did; sometimes, particularly in the Schumann Humoresques (op. 20), he would take long floating pauses, and play some passages so softly and weakly that it was almost as if they were being whispered. Even if his readings seemed to lose the thread of continuity at times, I have to admit that he made me think — a lot, and that’s something that not every performer can do for you. I think we’ll be hearing more of him in the future on the international concert circuit. In some ways, he reminded me of Radu Lupu, a Romanian pianist who was particularly active in the 70s and 80s, and who won an Edison award for his Schumann (including the Humoresques as well!).

Last Night

Pam and I got an invitation to attend another live filming of a television sitcom pilot, this time in the South Burnaby area in a studio right by the Riverway Golf Course. The pilot, called Memory Lanes and was produced and created for the CBC by one of the actors in it, Ryan Stiles, of The Drew Carey Show and Whose Line is it Anyway? fame. While it is fun to see, it is also a real education, because nearly every scene is filmed a few times, and it was a real pleasure to see Janet Wright, who plays Brent Butt’s mother Emma Leroy on the series Corner Gas practice her craft in person. Ms. Wright was a perfectionist, sculpting her delivery and gestures with each take, and always making it better (and funnier). For me, she stole every scene she was in. I found out from her bio that she’s directed over 40 productions at the Vancouver Arts Club theatre (in addition to work all over Canada, including the Stratford Festival). It shows. I hope I’ll get to see more of her; I really gained new respect for just how much a great actor can add to a sitcom character.

Oh right, the sitcom? Memory Lanes may make it to the CBC line up next year. I’d say it was a better than average script, and the characters and situation show some promise. In some ways, it reminded me of Wings, another sitcom that revolves around a pair of odd-couple brothers who end up running a family business. In the end, it will be the writing that makes or breaks it. Lets hope it gets a chance, something that never happened to the pilot of All the Comforts that we saw nearly a year ago.