For Those of You
For those of you who don’t already know Nico Muhly, bust out your Rolodex and get a pen. His music is so sharp it can chop butternut squash like its cantaloupe. Forward-thinking, socio-culturally astute, internationally recognized and informed, Muhly identifies more with Björk and Teitur than John Adams and Steven Stucky. I first heard about his ambition and precocity from a New Yorker expose, not written by Alex Ross, from February 2008 (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/11/080211fa_fact_mead). He is bright, young, prototypically fresh and innovative, and has a unique voice at an early age. I found his album Mothertongue, not long after reading the article, and fell deeply under its spell. It is a blisteringly topical and well-interpreted song cycle of vocal twitchings and minimal orchestration, at times involving harpsichord, whale blubber, and other barks from the deep. In a nutshell, marry Paul Curreri to Björk, have them birth a little tuber named William Byrd, and take a portrait of the fam in their deep South abode. I strongly suggest the listening experience to any and every ear that has the capability. Wittgensteinian interpretations of language and its cultural meaning splice through your mind while the beauty and post-tonal mentality sweetly sings you to a place of absolute harmony.
I instinctually swung some tickets to the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Chorus Plus Organ performance at Disney Hall that transpired last night. It was a soothing, brilliant selection of master choral works built by a century of reverance and dignity, supplemented with two world premiers and the West Coast premire of Muhly’s Expecting the Main Things From You. We arrived a mere 20 minutes after the 6 o’clock pre-concert talk had commenced, and BP Hall was already filled to capacity because KUSC’s Alan Chapman was moderating a discussion between, not only Grant Gershon, the Master Chorale music director, but Andrea Clearfield, Steven Sametz, and Mr. Muhly himself as well. Unfortunately we were bureaucratically ushered to a safe distance from overflowing hall to view the discussion on a monitor without speakers. Nice.
Arvo Pärt’s tragically moving De Profundis initiated the program. I have admired this piece for some time now because of its Absolute execution of Pärt’s mystical and holy homage to the resonance of bells. It is a sublime effort to fuse simplicity with integrity in a symmetrical movement more akin to the motion of tides than calling to God. It is short, moving, and enveloping. It makes you feel like you have something you have lost and are forlorn about, even while the sheer jubliance it gives you still rises within. For all who have not experienced the 6,125 pipe organ built by Caspar Glatter-Götz, you simply must to understand its feeling.
Two Bruckner Motets, minimal and reductive choral arrangements dialectically envisioned as a shadow of his vast architectonic platitudes, followed the profound stunningly. Brahms also provided two wonderful little arrangements. Lass dich nur nichts nicht dauren was exceptional, while Ave Maria was just as vital but somehow less impressive.
I had only heard fragments of Andrea Clearfield’s work until last night. Her piece being premiered was called Dream Variations, a tad trite and unexpecting. She wrote it for The Debussy Trio, which provided flute, viola, and harp accompaniment to chorus and organ. It was a mixed experience. The piece was moderately well written, but bland and uninteresting. She clearly exudes control of density and transition, but relies too heavily on traditional gestures. Her four note motif that splices through the three pieces based on poetry by Langston Hughes is at times creatively expanded and reorchestrated, and the trio provides exhilarating movement. But something felt overdone about it. Marcia Dickstein, even if a morbidly rude instructor, plucked the harp’s many tethers virtuously, as if making a blanket from an ancient loom. If a college student wrote it for a thesis project, job well done. But it left something to be desired coming from a professional portfolio. Too pleasing, too creatively empty. Well-crafted? Yes. Innovative, new, and intelligent? Hardly.
Sametz is a choral man and is very well accomplished in his genre. His piece world premiered was a commision of Kathy and Alan Freeman (long time supporters and staff of the Chorale) and based on their daughter’s poetry. The piece was sweepingly beautiful and led gracefully by one of LA Opera’s shining sopranos. However, Music’s Music felt weary from the start. There is no denying its elegant transparency and soothing nodes, but its literal basis and poor poetic symbology, trite as it is serene, was overdone. It was a score for a film at best, possibly a new adaptation of The Sound of Music directed by Michael Bay.
Muhly’s work, on the far other hand, was engaging from the first note, elegantly textured, not overly ambitious, humble, innovative, and well-written. You can’t help but hear intellectual echoes of Sigur Ros permeating the organ work here. Its subtle and non-interrogative, like having Bob Ross paint mountainous backgrounds and moving forests beneath the roots of your ears, as the jolting string quartet rhythmically drives the chorus to its conclusion. A genuinely new piece of music written by someone who has as immiment a grasp on his gift as the recession has on our wallets. He made Clearfield and Sametz look like the 28 year olds in the hall.
