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When Henri Dutilleux received the hefty Kravis Prize from the New York Philharmonic last year, he generously announced that he would be sharing the money with three other composers.  Peter Eötvös was named at that time; last night, at a concert honoring the venerable Frenchman, Anthony Cheung and Franck Krawczyk were revealed as the others.  In addition, Sean Shepherd, whom Philharmonic listeners already know from his vibrant CONTACT!  commission, These Particular Circumstances, was announced as the Kravis Emerging Composer, and will write a piece for the 2013-14 season. ( This prize is to be bestowed every other year, when the main award is not given.)  Cheung, a sharp writer as well as composer, said of Dutilleux, "Every time I return to his work, I rediscover what made me want to pursue composition in the first place: music that is brilliantly conceived, heard, and articulated, but filled with mystery, ambiguity, and spirituality." 

In the video above, Matthias Pintscher conducts Cheung's Fog Mobiles.  Another piece of new-music news this week is that Pintscher has been chosen as the next music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, succeeding Susanna Mälkki.  Pintscher will be one of the three conductors of Gruppen at the Philharmonic, on Friday and Saturday. 

The New York Philharmonic goes modern this week: tonight is a special concert in tribute to Henri Dutilleux, and the weekend brings two Park Avenue Armory performances centered on Stockhausen's Gruppen.  Because, as studies show, people just don't care for crazy atonal music, hundreds of tickets are still available for Gruppen.  Oh no, wait, they're sold out.... Notable pieces in the current Opera News: Russell Platt on Hugo Wolf, Fred Cohn talking to Gerald Finley.... The summer calendar for Bargemusic is rich in modern fare: note especially the John Cage mini-festival on July 6, 11, and 18, and the "Here and Now" series.... Tanglewood, celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary this summer, is streaming seventy-five broadcasts from its archives, with one free offering every day.  Berio's Sinfonia, under the direction of the composer, can be heard on June 30.... Not every American orchestra is in disarray: the St. Louis Symphony, a superbly managed group, has concluded a new musicians' contract one year early, with modest salary increases built in.... It's good to see the Guggenheim presenting a concert of Cage, Brown, Scelsi, and Stockhausen in conjunction with its current show of 1950s abstraction.  Musicians from ICE, Ne(x)tworks, and Either/Or will be led by Christopher McIntyre, with R. Luke DuBois explicating. 

Bob Shingleton, in a characteristically trenchant post on the corporate rodomontade surrounding the 2012 Olympics, mentions, in passing, a peculiarity of the Aldeburgh Festival in its present form: Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who just completed his fourth year as artistic director, exhibits a "reluctance to engage" with the music of Benjamin Britten, without whom the Aldeburgh Festival would not exist.  Bob adds a link to a short item I wrote about Aimard's Mostly Mozart appearances in 2010.  Having not been to Aldeburgh since 2000, I can't pass judgment on the current state of the festival, but the critical consensus gives a generally positive impression: the programming has been infused with the old-guard modernists whom Aimard reveres, while Britten and older classics are still regularly performed.  The juxtaposition of different schools of twentieth-century style — from Finzi to Cage — must be bracing.  Yet, according to the brochures, not one note of Britten has been executed by the artistic director himself.  Isn't this more than a little strange?  Aimard has explained in interviews that he is "not a Britten specialist."  That's nonsense; if he can play Mozart, Schubert, Bartók, and Stravinsky, he can play Britten.  Shouldn't he at least give the music a try, as a sign of respect?  What has happened to this pianist's sense of intellectual adventure?  Whether or not Aimard takes the plunge, Aldeburgh shan't lack for Britten next year, as a beta version of the Britten 100 site shows.  Among the offerings: Peter Grimes on the beach. 

Update: Bob Shingleton has warm words for a recent multimedia project by Aimard. 

At midday on June 21, I posted a report from the Vexations marathon on Wall Street — an eighteen-hour vibraphone rendition of that short Satie piano piece which, if one takes the composer's elusive note at face value, is to be played 840 times in a row.  Here are a few more pictures, videos, anecdotes, and thoughts from this year's Make Music New York celebration, which seems to have been an especially successful edition, although gratuitously hot weather may have affected daytime attendance.  An overview of the Vexations scene in the morning, with the vibes at bottom center:

The performance aroused curiosity from some passersby, although many walked by without seeming to notice.  You could draw dire conclusions from such inattention, in the manner of that 2007 Washington Post article finding significance in the fact that commuters exiting the L'Enfant Plaza subway stop one morning — on their way to jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, Homeland Security, and other neighboring government buildings — failed to dawdle around listening to Joshua Bell play Bach.  But I doubt that Satie, progenitor of musique d'ameublement and grandfather of ambient music, would have minded.  In any case, the performers did have all manner of curious encounters with the public over the course of the day; one gentleman, I was told, recognized the piece and joked that he had performed it himself and messed up on the 840th Vexation. ( He had a child at Oberlin.) 

I spent three strangely soothing hours this morning in the company of the Vexations chapter of Make Music NY, reading a little Hermann Hesse on the side. ( Vexations, for anyone who doesn't know, is the Satie piece that, in the tradition established by John Cage, is played 840 times in eighteen-hour sessions.  I covered such a marathon for the New York Times in 1993.)  This Vexations is emanating from a single vibraphone on the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street, right outside the New York Stock Exchange.  In the video above, Matt Evans mans the vibes while Sean Statser keeps track of the repetitions by way of old-school technology.  Here, Sean plays while Carson Moody counts.  Amy Garapic, who organized the event, has handily finessed various obstacles: the permits are in place, the police are amenable, and, on this very hot day, a Black & Decker mobile AC unit is providing relief.  Unfortunately, there were several last-minute cancellations, leaving only six performers to cover the eighteen-hour stretch.  I am sure that beverages and snacks would be gratefully received.  Hint to visitors: there's a cooling downdraft on the steps to the right of the player. 

Vexations will continue until midnight; sixteen other marathons are proceeding around the world, as you can see at Vexations Central. ( Unfortunately, annoying ads intrude every time you switch from one stream to another.)  Make Music NY will get very dense in the late afternoon and early evening: there's Circuit Bending and Humming in Dumbo (6pm-9pm), Alvin Curran's Maritime Rites(Central Park Lake, 5pm), Stockhausen's Musik im Bauch (also Central Park, 7pm), a Philip Glass singalong in Times Square (6:30pm; download the score if you want to join in), Prokofiev's solo Sonata in the many-violin version (Cornelia Street), Frederic Rzewski's Les Moutons de Panurge (Soho), and Wendy Mae Chambers's KUN for sixty-four toy pianos (South Street Seaport, 4:30-8pm), among hundreds of events in dozens of genres. 

The good news is that there seems to be no chance of rain in New York tomorrow, as Make Music NY takes hold of the city.  The bad news is that it's going to be very hot.  You might want to get your Vexations in early or late.  The Chicago forecast anticipates a high of 80 and a thunderstorm in the morning.  Los Angeles is, of course, sunny and warm.  In Phoenix AZ, where it will be 110, Vexations is safely indoors.  A full list of Vexations performances worldwide can be found here. 

The Mighty Wurlitzer at the legendary Castro Theatre, in San Francisco, prepares a sold-out crowd for the movie of the night.  When I lived in the Bay Area, in 1990 and 1991, I enjoyed this ritual dozens of times.  I enjoyed it a little more last night, when the movie in question was my husband's creation.  David Hegarty has been the lead organist at the Castro since 1978. 

Lincoln Center's White Light Festival has announced its offerings for 2012.  William Christie will lead Les Arts Florissants in Charpentier motets; Paul Lewis, placing himself in risky competition with Mitsuko Uchida, will essay the last three sonatas of Schubert; Emanuel Ax tunes in; Heiner Goebbels returns to the city; Cameron Carpenter plays organ works of Bach; Akram Khan and Fabulous Beast head a dance contingent; Mary Chapin Carpenter and the Latvian Radio Choir sing (not together); and Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philhamonia present the Mahler Ninth.  It's especially good to see Joseph Drew and his Analog Arts project given a high-profile gig.  I've been following Drew's work for years, often from afar, and last fall I caught his superb presentation of Stockhausen's Cosmic Pulses at the old ISSUE Project Room. ( See Seth Colter Walls for a full report.)  In all, it looks to be another variegated yet through-composed White Light season. 

When composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries entered the shadow realm of dissonance, they often went in quest of
emotional extremes.  So it was with
Strauss’s “Salome,” Schoenberg’s “Erwartung,” Berg’s “Wozzeck,” and other
landmarks of modernism.  Yet the progression toward atonality also had a
mystical aspect: these uncanny new
chords could serve as esoteric icons,
emblems of the sacred.  Such is the import of certain late works of Liszt, of
Scriabin’s music of divine ecstasy, of the
occultist pieces that Satie wrote for the
Rosicrucian theatre of Joséphin Péladan.  Schoenberg’s atonal language
found its ultimate purpose in the opening measures of his opera “Moses und
Aron,” where hexachords represent
God speaking through the burning
bush.  Twentieth-century composers
went on to create a staggering corpus of
sacred music, arguably eclipsing the
production of the preceding century. 
Even secular-minded artists like György
Ligeti and Morton Feldman wrote works
of a spiritual nature, perhaps because
their chosen language drew them toward the unsayable. 

John Adams has described himself
as a “secular liberal living in Berkeley, California,” yet he, too, has tilted
toward sacred subjects.  His opera “The
Death of Klinghoffer” juxtaposes
Jewish and Islamic theology, and his
opera-oratorio “El Niño” gives a contemporary spin to the Nativity story. 
“Doctor Atomic,” Adams’s opera
about the Trinity test, has religious
overtones.  In part, these themes stem
from the preoccupations of the director Peter Sellars, Adams’s longtime
collaborator, who has sought to engage
with various spiritual traditions in a
theatrical vision informed by social activism.  All along, though, Adams has
shown a mystic bent: the sumptuous
tonal chords of early pieces such as
“Harmonium” and “Harmonielehre”
come across as apparitions or illuminations, to use favored words of Olivier
Messiaen, the leading religious composer of the past century. 

Adams’s latest work, “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” had its
première at the end of May, in Walt
Disney Concert Hall, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction
of Gustavo Dudamel.  A Passion play in
all but name, it is a huge, strange, turbulent creation, brushing against chaos. 
The modernist tradition of the dark sacred, of the radical sublime, is alive and
well; a composer who started out as
an acolyte of Boulez, Stockhausen, and
Cage has rediscovered his avant-garde
roots, and those who prize him as an
audience-friendly neo-Romantic are in
for some shocks.  Although the structure
is unwieldy and overloaded—the first
performance lasted nearly three hours,
intermission included, and a good portion of the audience didn’t stay to the
end—it contains some of the strongest,
most impassioned music of Adams’s career.  Above all, it is a work of daring: a
popular, celebrated artist has set aside
familiar devices and stepped into the
unknown. 

The libretto of “The Other Mary,” which Sellars devised in consultation with Adams, depicts the last days
of Christ from the perspective of the
three people devoted to him: Martha,
her brother Lazarus, and their sister Mary, who, following an old Catholic tradition, is conflated with Mary Magdalene.  Jesus is
quoted, but does not sing.  Much of the
familiar drama of the Crucifixion—the
betrayal of Jesus, the trial under Pontius Pilate, the selection of Barabbas,
and so on—is absent; instead, passages
from the Old and New Testaments, focussing on inward matters of life, death,
doubt, and faith, are intermingled with
religiously tinged poems by Rosario
Castellanos, Rubén Darío, Primo Levi,
June Jordan, and, most crucially, the
Native American writer Louise Erdrich. 
(There are four pieces from her 1989
collection, “Baptism of Desire.”)  Sellars’s riskiest move is to incorporate
writings of the radical Catholic activist
Dorothy Day, letting Mary and Martha
voice Day’s journals and commentaries
in turn: the sisters become fighters for
social justice, Mary prone to wild emotion, Martha steadier and steelier.  Day
is a mighty figure, but her hortatory
prose is not easily made into music, and
these sections tend to be weaker than
the rest. 

Adams’s orchestra is not large by
modern standards: twelve woodwinds,
eight brass, and the usual complement
of strings. ( Beethoven used similar
forces for his Ninth Symphony.)  There
is, however, a major battery of percussion, including a forest of Almglocken,
tuned gongs, and tam-tams.  The most
novel timbres come from a quartet of
piano, harp, bass electric guitar, and
cimbalom—the hammered dulcimer
that Stravinsky memorably employed in
“Renard” and “Ragtime.”  As in “El
Niño,” a trio of countertenors supplies much of the Biblical exposition.  In all,
it is a fantastically varied sound-world,
running the gamut from the neo-medieval harmonies of the high male voices to
the end-times funk of the bass guitar,
with the twang of the cimbalom lending a gritty exoticism to almost every
page of the score. 

The work begins in spectacularly
abrupt fashion, with slashing chords
and the words “The next day in the city
jail we were searched for drugs.” ( This
is from Day’s recollection of a humiliating imprisonment that she experienced in her radical youth.)  The chorus interjects an apocalyptic prophecy
from Isaiah—“Howl ye; for the day of
the Lord is at hand”—while the horns
bellow in dissonant proximity to each
other, and the winds and strings scurry
underneath.  The two female leads are
introduced, and a Spanish-language
chorus sways, buoyantly, in a minor
mode.  It is in the third scene, devoted
to the raising of Lazarus, that “The
Other Mary” is overtaken by a divine
weirdness.  Rapid arpeggios accumulate into a Ligeti-like fog, suggesting
the wafting away of a life; woodwind
glissandos hint at decomposition
(“Lord, by this time he stinketh”); and
a moaning, muttering, and shouting
chorus evokes fear and awe before the
awakening of the dead.  Few musical
works have conveyed so vividly the
fundamental spookiness of the idea of
resurrection. 

The sequence that follows is more
conventional, at least within the intricate, collagelike template established by
Adams and Sellars in “El Niño.”  There
is an austerely dancing chorus in the
vein of Lou Harrison (“Drop down, ye
heavens”); Lazarus sings a raw, rollicking aria of celebration; and Mary tears
into Erdrich’s poem “Mary Magdalene”
(“I will drive boys / to smash empty bottles on their brows”), with the chorus
declaiming Hildegard von Bingen’s medieval text “Spiritus Sanctus” behind
her.  One gnashing dissonance in this
passage comes out of Beethoven’s “Eroica.”  The final scene of Act I, dedicated
to the Last Supper, starts haltingly, with
Dorothy Day’s prickly defense of her
focus on poverty during the Second
World War, and then takes wing, with
a sublimely songful setting of Primo
Levi’s “Passover.”  Listening to the latter, I had the thought that, in an alternate existence, Adams might have
had a career like that of Sondheim, writing musical theatre at an exalted level. 
But the orchestral postlude for the
scene could never play on Broadway:
forty-two visionary bars in harmonic
limbo, with piercing chords for the brass
and with strings pulsing in heartbeat
rhythm, all coming to rest in a Messiaen-like haze of saturated tonality.  The
entire sequence is a wonder, equalling
the impact of “Batter my heart,” the
surging finale of Act I of “Doctor
Atomic.” 

Act II opens with a ferocious Erdrich
chorus (“Orozco’s Christ”) and another
momentum-slowing Dorothy Day disquisition, recounting her arrest during a
1973 United Farm Workers action in
Salinas Valley.  This is the final lull:
from the first bars of the Golgotha
scene to the end, “The Other Mary”
moves on a very high imaginative plane. 
Low gongs, bass guitar, and the soft
screech of a bowed tam-tam create a
cavernous aural space.  Bassoons, cellos,
and basses crawl through the lower register.  The ranting chorus returns, now
directed to be “yelling, mocking, abusive,” with a crowd of unhinged mourners ensuing.  A klezmerish clarinet wails;
a police whistle blows in the wake of an
extended scream of lamentation.  When
the Virgin Mary is described as beholding her Son on the Cross, those who
know “El Niño” will hear a heartbreaking echo of that work’s Mary music. 
Oboes and clarinets keen through a lament by Mary Magdalene, based on Erdrich’s poem “The Savior.”  Ashen
choirs of wind and brass mark the three
days in the tomb.  It is all terrifyingly
beautiful. 

Messiaen haunts several pages of the
score, but Adams lacks his predecessor’s
unquestioning belief.  The Resurrection
elicits no major-key blaze of glory; instead, the shadows of Golgotha simply
steal away, yielding to a tableau of awakening nature, of instrumental rustling
and chirping mixed with recorded
sounds of frogs.  The chorus, reverting
to childlike innocence, delivers a crisply
syncopated setting of Erdrich’s “The
Sacraments” (“It is spring.  The tiny frogs
pull / their strange new bodies out / of
the suckholes . . .”).  A roar of percussion
signals the earthquake that opens Christ’s tomb; then that noise, too, subsides.  Mary Magdalene, near the tomb,
gazes at a man whom she takes to be a
gardener. “ Mary,” the figure says, in the
countertenors’ narration.  The orchestra shimmers, shakes, and rumbles all
around, with the cimbalom trilling at
the center of the sound.  Then it vanishes into silence. 

The Los Angeles Philharmonic began rehearsing “The Other Mary” immediately after the last of a
series of staged performances of “Don
Giovanni”—a coolly stylized production under the direction of Christopher
Alden, with arresting crumpled-paper
sets by Frank Gehry.  The orchestra
had not been expecting Adams to deliver quite so vast a piece, and rehearsal
time was limited.  Under the circumstances, and, indeed, by any standard,
they played magnificently; the brass
section, in particular, deserves a medal
for courage under fire.  The vocal
leads—Kelley O’Connor, as Mary;
Tamara Mumford, as Martha; and
Russell Thomas, as Lazarus—gave
red-blooded life to elusive characters. 
Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings, and
Nathan Medley, the countertenors,
sang with purity and intensity.  The Los
Angeles Master Chorale threw itself
vehemently, even dementedly, into the
proceedings.  Dudamel, who apparently
knew the score inside out, led with a
clear, sure hand.  The L.A. Phil demonstrated once again why it is the most
creative, and, therefore, the best, orchestra in America. 

“The Other Mary” has yet to reach
its final form: when Sellars presents a
full staging of the piece—first at Disney,
next March, and then at Lincoln Center, later that month—it will undoubtedly change complexion.  Also, because
Adams wrote more quickly than he
might have wished, beginning the score
eighteen months ago and finishing it
just three weeks before the première, he
may reconsider matters large and small. 
Some cuts should only heighten the impact of what is already an immensely
potent work, one that may prove pivotal
in the composer’s output.  At the age of
sixty-five, Adams seems to be entering
a new phase, revisiting the danger zones
of twentieth-century style, and the first
results are astonishing. 

The Cage just doesn't stop around here.  Tonight at Greenwich House Music School the esteemed pianist Taka Kigawa plays various pieces by the master, including some of the Études Australes.  On Saturday night, the Darmstadt series presents an all-Cage program at ISSUE Project Room, with rare performances of Hymns and Variations and Twenty-three alongside the familiar String Quartet in Four Parts.  ISSUE's programming is very rich this month, with Philip Glass-led fundraisers June 13-15 and Stockhausen on Make Music day, June 21.  Note also that there will be a Satie-Cage Vexations marathon that day — one of several around the world.... Michael Mizrahi appears on behalf of his acclaimed new record The Bright Motion at LPR on June 12; the viola's Nadia Sirota is also in the house.... Speaking of Sirota — I'm not sure if there's a relation here [update: in fact, there is none] — Raphael Mostel tells of bringing Beate Sirota Gordon to the recent Marc-André Hamelin performance of the Busoni concerto; her father, Leo Sirota, gave the Viennese premiere, with Busoni conducting.... The Brooklyn Philharmonic finishes up a remarkable season in Bed-Stuy on Saturday, with a program of Beethoven, Andrew Norman, Lena Horne standards, and Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def).  The same night, David Robertson leads the second of two New York Philharmonic CONTACT!  concerts, featuring Boulez, Michael Jarrell, and an Elliott Carter world premiere.... Wordless Music, a crucial addition to the NYC scene since 2006, comes to Millennium Park in Chicago this summer; the July 5 show, with the aforementioned Norman, looks particularly good.... Jacaranda in LA announces its 2012-13 season, with a Cage and Britten focus.  Season after season, the twentieth century comes to life in Jacaranda's programs: only here can you get Vexations and Curlew River.... Here's a fun smackdown between Tony Scott and David Carr, both of the New York Times, on the subject of critical vs. popular taste. 

If I could be forgiven for straying off topic, I'd like to trumpet briefly a series of forthcoming events involving Gayby, the acclaimed feature-film debut by my husband, Jonathan Lisecki. ( It has won, among other prizes, the audience award for Best Feature and the jury award for Best Acting Ensemble at the Ashland Independent Film Festival.  Jonathan received his prizes from none other than theTwin Peaks Log Lady.)  The movie is playing now at the Seattle International Film Festival.  It shows in Hartford CT on June 9.  On June 15 and 16 it will appear at the Provincetown Film Fest.  That same day, the 16th, it will play both at Frameline in San Francisco — the great Castro Theatre — and at the LA Film Fest, where it will have a second screening on June 21.  And on June 22 it will be featured at BAMcinemaFest, with a showing to follow in NYC's Rooftop series on June 23. " Hilariously bitchy but sweet," says the Village Voice.