Author: coogan-brennan

 The Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival’s September 16 show at the Jefferson Theater took on the difficult task of bringing classical music down from the ivory tower, and into the iPod-primed ears of today. Clarinetist Matthew Hunt, who had brought the audience to its feet earlier in the festival with his performance of Steve Reich’s Counterpoint for clarinet and tape, came on stage in a T-shirt. Violinist Pekka Kuusisto performed Bartók brilliantly in classic high-top sneakers. In homage to the more recent rock tradition, the concert even started late. But nothing proved more fresh than the music itself.

The audience, which had succumbed to the relaxed atmosphere, came to rapt attention at the screamingly violent bars beginning George Crumb’s Black Angels. The performers kept that rapture for the entirety of the 13-movement piece, transforming the Jefferson into a temple of the strange, yet solemn. Crumb wrote the piece for an “electric string quartet” and in it used a variety of extended techniques, defined as unusual practices such as bowing on a violin’s neck or having the performers speak or yell.

Some contemporary composers use such extended techniques for their theatrical, rather than aural, value, but Crumb does not. The opening movement, “Night of the Electric Insects,” uses reverb to draw out the otherwise faint overtones from the violins, viola and cello, and sets an eerie, evil mood. “Sounds of Bones and Flutes,” uses artificial harmonics on all the string instruments to form a ghostly, but achingly sweet, chorus. Extended technique also highlighted the virtuosity of the players: Raphael Bell, cellist and co-director of the festival, solidly executed several difficult passages involving artificial harmonics, allowing the audience deeper into the music.

Sunday’s concert at Old Cabell Hall brought the festival from the all-out experimental to the no-question-about-it classical. Beethoven’s Piano Quartet in E-flat Major and Jean Sibelius’ Voces Intimae provided a strong traditional feel to the concert while Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor gave it a deep gravitas. 

It’s impossible to separate Shostakovich’s music from the early 20th-century Soviet political world that informed the dangerous game of oblique social criticism and satire, both present in his work. In the trio’s third movement, for example, one could view the initial, ferocious piano chords played by the powerful Alasdair Beatson as leading the violin and cello in a passionate piece of music. While the trio riffed on an Ashkanazi waltz-dance in the following fourth movement, however, the piano’s strong command now seemed more dictatorial as it harshly marched the oom-pah bassline and nearly dragged along the ragged accompaniment of its strung comrades. Kuusisto played this part beautifully, alternating between the sickly—achieved through slightly bending notes and limited bow strokes—and the brave—with long, full strokes and strong vibrato.

The Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival should be commended for the breadth of music it has brought to Charlottesville in a mere two weeks, the caliber of its guest musicians and the incredible endurance of Raphael Bell and Tim Summers, who have both directed the festival, provided wonderful program notes and played in every single concert thus far.

 On the program for this year’s Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival is both old-guard classical work (Mozart’s Violin Sonata in B-flat, for example) and stunningly modern pieces (Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint, George Crumb’s Black Angels, among others). The dichotomy appeases conventional classical music lovers, while attempting to draw a fresh audience with sexier works. Then again, all the pieces are experimental, some more obviously than others.

The festival began on Thursday at the Paramount Theater with Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-flat Major for violin, cello and piano, among the composer’s first published works. The bubbly and classic melodic phrasing could have been confused with Mozart, until the nuanced keyboard work of pianist Benjamin Hochman began to reveal the cracks in the restrained façade. Runs on the piano would suddenly go beyond the expected cadences and burst into a romantic flourish only to return, somewhat reluctantly, to the rest of the ensemble’s measured playing.

The festival’s co-artistic director Raphael Bell and Hochman then performed a series of early works from the turn of the 20th century by Anton Webern and Alban Berg, two important figures in the development of European atonal composition. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross wrote recently that Berg “sweetened the bitter pill of atonality,” and it seemed the festival organizers used his piece, along with Webern’s short sketches, to give the audience a quick, painless taste of the power of modernism in music.

The festival’s second concert on Sunday at Old Cabell Hall dwelled on the French Impressionist era, taking full advantage of the hall’s full, resonant acoustics. Highlighted in the first piece by Maurice Ravel was harpist Marie-Pierre Langlamet, one of the world’s top players who, among many accomplishments, became principal harpist for the New York Philharmonic shortly after turning 17. Her earnest performance in the ensemble showed off her dynamic virtuosity, effortlessly walking the line between being a featured instrument in the work, supporting other soloing instruments and contributing to the coalesced fullness of the ensemble.

Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint for clarinet and tape took the audience deep into American minimalist music. New York Counterpoint is similar to Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, written for jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, where a solo instrumentalist—in this case, clarinetist Matthew Hunt—plays live against 11 previously recorded tracks of himself. The piece drives forward with its industrial, repetitive rhythms outlining basic melodies that barely change. It is your ear that changes, grappling with the relative stasis and inevitably becoming hypnotized by the piece’s staggering, simple beauty. Hunt’s performance was wonderful, earning him a standing ovation afterwards.

The festival continues this Thursday with an exciting third concert at the Jefferson Theater. On the program is American composer George Crumb’s Black Angels, written in 1970. It reflects Crumb’s perception of the Vietnam War through televised news reports of embedded journalists and so moved violinist David Harrington when he heard it on the radio he decided on the spot to found an ensemble, later known as the Kronos Quartet, to play the piece. Needless to say, the concert is not to be missed.

 It would be quite easy to dismiss the experimental music played at The BridgePAI Saturday night. In fact, the term “experimental music” itself might already have your eyes rolling. But don’t sell yourself short, Charlottesville. Just because screaming was the preferred vocal gesture and the most virtuosic player was sticking metal objects into a block of dry ice doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant.

The young and refreshingly unpretentious Benjamin O’Brien started the night off with two works performed on a setup of his Fender Telecaster, a few effects pedals and a computer running the music composition program Max/MSP. Both pieces explored a script he had written for Max/MSP which would identify the frequency O’Brien played on his guitar and trigger a preloaded action based on the determined note. The subdued influence of O’Brien’s former teacher Fred Frith, the British guitarist and improvisation pioneer, was pleasurably apparent in much of the melodic phrasing during the performance. While O’Brien lacked a confidence that may only come with age, his work was promising.

The following duo, KAMAMA, showed a similar insecurity which may simply be endemic to younger artists. Cellist Audrey Chen’s screaming and drummer Luca Marini’s extended technique suggested an element of primal disregard for convention, but the two, along with O’Brien, didn’t seem to overcome the liability of self-awareness. It’s one thing to be inspired in the moment to lodge a pencil between the cello strings, or to play the snare with a rubber ball. But the audience should be convinced it’s a moment of invention rather than a gesture predetermined to be appropriately weird.

Members of the Friction Brothers, the final act, are well established in the avant-garde world and have nothing to prove. (Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm studied with New York School composer Morton Feldman, and both he and percussionist Michael Zerang collaborate with Jim O’Rourke, the producer, experimentalist and former Sonic Youth member.) This allowed them to fully occupy their sound in a way the previous two acts could not. Lonberg-Holm and Zerang provided a rich, grinding sound to accompany Michael Colligan’s dry ice playing. Colligan has developed a technique of embedding spoons, coins, pots or thin sheet metal into dry ice which, as the ice melts, emits a haunting timbre similar to an exorcism. Zerang and Lonberg-Holm’s low register playing and Colligan’s metal polyphony was a gorgeous death rattle of the industrial age and the perfect soundtrack for our time.

How did you spend International Goth Day, which was last Saturday, May 22nd? If you’re a member of the endangered species Gothicus Charlottesvillianius, you were at The Southern seeing local gothic darlings Bella Morte and the synth-pop duo Synthetic Division.

Bella Morte frontman and vocalist Andy Deane worked hard to recreate the magic that made them famous back in 2002. This included much jumping, head-banging and robot dance moves. The intensity might have seemed more sincere had it been done eight years ago.
 

The world has changed much since 2002 but Bella Morte really hasn’t. Deane’s signature mohawk looked tired (he blamed the rain), the songs quickly became repetitive and, by end of their set, one began to understand why such a small crowd turned out for an internationally famous band.
Most impressive Saturday night was their capacity to produce a full, powerful sound. Unfortunately even this proved to be inauthentic. The presence of a synth line, but no synth player, confirmed Bella Morte was playing with a backing track—a previously recorded instrument track played through the PA system in coordination with the live performers. While this is common practice among synth-pop bands, the backing track provided could have been handled live by a decent keyboard player. The technique merely reinforced the ersatz quality of angst on display.

Synthetic Division frontman is Charlottesville local Shawn Decker. Decker contracted HIV through a tainted blood transfusion in the 1980s at age 11. At the time, HIV/AIDS was barely understood much less effectively treated. His dying wish, fulfilled through Make-A-Wish Foundation, was to meet Depeche Mode.

Twenty years later, Decker, based on his performance Saturday, is still very much alive. Decker was inspiringly optimistic and self-confident while singing and charmingly uncomfortable in between songs. It was clear music had inspired his difficult life as he closed his eyes and conducted synth pop in the air.

 Last Tuesday night’s “Digitalis,” the annual computer music festival at UVA, was different from most computer music concerts I have been to for three reasons. First, it was well attended. Second, most of the audience was not waiting their turn to take the stage. Last, it delivered on the most promising element of computer music: interactivity.

Erik DeLuka’s “The Bats of Carlsbad Cavern” best captured the interactive potential of the sea of laptops in Old Cabell Hall. After dividing the crowd into 12 sections, DeLuka instructed audience members to open his application (downloaded prior to the event), enter their section number and, on his cue, all start his program simultaneously. 

Gradually, a striking sonic experience emerged. The curved architecture of Old Cabell became the mouth of a cavern, and laptop speakers created a swarm of crying bats swirling around the room in a subtle yet distinct physical pattern. DeLuka orchestrated the rare feat of transporting, if only for a moment, listeners away from their reality into his created world.

Other pieces also employed the crowd laptop ensemble with varying degrees of success. Megan England’s “blip.” encouraged the audience to voice phonetic phrases (“sigh,” “beep,” “bzzz”) while “Unity Groove” presented a game in which users were encouraged to match a sounding tone—different on each laptop—to their neighbors’ tone by adjusting its pitch and tempo.

While these pieces blended the audience-performer relationship, they also challenged pieces on the program less interested in aural crowdsourcing. Aurie Hsu and Steven Kemper, for example, combined dance and sound in “Shadows No. 4” by attaching sensors to Hsu’s body, creating information then translated into sonics by a program manned by Kemper. Hsu’s guided and articulate motions contrasted with the broad sonic groans produced digitally, creating a mesmerizing schizophrenic performance.

Matmos, the headliners at “Digitalis,” delivered a complex performance only matched by their intense rhetoric. (At their lecture in the music department the day before, had I been playing post-structuralist bingo, I would have won at least three times in the first four minutes.) Using live video, a qi measuring device, electric pedal steel, samplers, house beats, bells, keyboards and voice, they expertly evoked their musique concrete techno into being. 

Near the end of Matmos’ last piece, some members of the audience took their laptops and left early. Despite avant-garde techniques and mastered showmanship, it turns out random sonic chaos is much more fun when everyone’s involved.

 Hate to break it to you, but the music on the radio, in YouTube videos, in your iPod—it’s all dead. All recorded sound is a bunch of ones and zeros graphing—as best they can—the shape of a soundwave made in an isolated soundbooth far away and long ago. Technically speaking, the most vibrant music today is live music. Classical music carries on timeless sentiments over hundreds of years to touch and move audiences throughout time. For Kate Tamarkin, musical director of Charlottesville & University Symphony Orchestra, revitalizing century-old music is epitomally human. “There is a reason why people come back time and again to recreate this music,” she says.

Saturday’s Charlottesville & University Symphony Orchestra concert, “English Variations,” played heavily on the idea of reaching back to older traditions to inform current creative projects. Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” took as its theme a motif from Henry Purcell, a 17th-century British composer. Immaculate and stunning already, Britten amped up Purcell’s theme to a magnificent, British imperialist-worthy orchestra study. After the grand statement of theme, Britten lead the audience through the orchestra sections, each with its own variation. The piece highlighted extremely well the overall instrumental caliber of the orchestra, most notably I-Jen Fang’s artfully restrained timpani playing during the percussion’s “Moderato Variation.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” continued the generational interplay, Tallis’ theme being composed in 1567 and Williams’ “Fantasia” in 1910. “Fantasia” takes the Tallis folk melody and injects it with a rich Celtic mysticism. CUSO’s string section unfolded the work to its fullest extent, taking the open nature of Williams’ orchestration and enveloping Old Cabell’s occupants in a thick sonic blanket.

Ending the program was Elgar’s “Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma).” “Enigma Variations” paints 14 portraits of lives past, 13 being Elgar’s friends and the fourteenth being Elgar himself. Most popular from the variations is “Nimrod”, a meditation subtly influenced by Beethoven’s “Pathétique Sonata.” Its achingly moving lines celebrate life, both in its glory and tragedy. The fourteenth variation brings back all the previous motifs creating an aural gathering of Elgar’s closest companions. Fun and playful yet deep and nuanced, it was a wonderful cadence to the piece and the concert. And what better way to end the most lively form of musical expression than with a party?