Schubert Club Gems - Ah, Human Voices

The British a capella vocal group Stile Antico came to town Tuesday night to present a program devoted to the music of the Renaissance English composer William Byrd on the 400th anniversary of his death. This group has been making waves for a good long time now, though I'd never heard of them until they appeared on the Schubert Club Mix schedule a few months ago. 

My tendency is to lump Byrd in with Thomas Tallis, John Dowland, and Orlando Gibbons as agreeable composers of mostly rich, somber, and ecclesiastical music from the era when "standard" chord progressions did not yet exist. The musical lines, so I thought, tended to fold back upon themselves in peculiar ways, in ever-shifting cadences, all within a narrow range of intervals, rather than marking out an exposition, a secondary theme, a variation or two, a return, a coda, and a finale.

The pieces in Stile Antico's program confirmed that assessment. Which is not to say they were bad. On the contrary. It was as if we had entered a musical world based on an entirely different set of suppositions, the result being less like narrative adventures suitable for a Buster Keaton movie and more like ever-changing waves of sound, with voices rising and falling, appearing and disappearing, and harmonies squeezing into odd shapes as the individual voices followed their distinctive paths.

The textbook term for this musical approach is "polyphony," as we were reminded during the "pub quiz" during intermission,  but it's worth pointing out, I think, that the polyphony of the Renaissance is far more peculiar than that of the Baroque. (The harmonic patterns of Machaut and Dufay, from an earlier period,  are stranger still. ) Bach later made use of the same approach, and arguably brought it to an unparalleled expressive peak, but his works have far fewer of those bizarre harmonies and surprising cadences than do the works of Byrd and his contemporaries. Bach's music always seems to be going somewhere. Byrd's often seems to say, "Let's turn back and relish what we've already got." And more than occasionally they get caught up in harmonic eddies and backwaters offering no obvious means of escape. Yet escape they do.

Such theoretical niceties are difficult to discuss, and I suspect I've made a hash of it here. Which may explain why the interpretive material in the Schubert Club program and the review in the Star Tribune a few days later focused less on the musical elements of the performance than on the challenges Byrd faced as a practicing Catholic in the protestant court of Queen Elizabeth I.   

We left the Landmark Center enriched and subdued. I'm sure I'll never hear Byrd sung better—though I think back fondly to a performance of the Concert of Music with Emma Kirky in the basement of a church in Edinburgh, circa 1983.

But I think the stuff they were singing was Italian. 

Two days later we were back at the Landmark Center in St. Paul to hear a free courtroom recital by mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski and pianist Ahmed Anzaldúa in a program featuring Brahms, Catalan composer and pianist Federico Mompou, and several local composers. Clara is one of our favorites, and I was also looking forward to the crisp sound of a piano, after all those gorgeous waves of Renaissance vocal shape-shifting. The performance did not disappoint.

To my ear the Mompou pieces were the best of the lot. They had just the right amount of strange modernist digression in the piano line, and the lyrics were sheer poetry, though a bit over the top:

Above you are only the flowers.

They were like a white offering:

The light that they shone on your body

will never again belong to the branch.

An entire life of perfume

with their kiss was given to you.

You were radiant in the light,

treasured by your closed eyes.

That I could have been the flower’s sigh!

Given myself, like a lily, to you, that my life

might wither over your breast.

And never again to know the night,

that from your side has vanished.

The texts chosen by the other composers concerned themselves with red-winged blackbirds, a feather, and rabbits. Several of the poets involved were in the room, and MC Abbie Betinis invited them up to discuss their work, which is often difficult for a poet to do. But little matter. Clara's rich, soaring vocals held our attention in any case, and in the context of these fresh, modern works, the three Brahms pieces at the end of the program sounded tuneful and harmonically straightforward, almost like folk songs.

On our way back to Minneapolis we stopped in at Gai Noi, a new Laotian restaurant facing Loring Park that's been getting a lot of press. By an utterly strange coincidence—we don't eat out much—we had already been to chef Ann Ahmed's two other restaurants, Lat 14 and Khaluna. Here the food is just as good (or almost) and both the prices and the tipping practices are more reasonable.

Our waiter was a boy wonder: attentive, articulate, knowledgeable, and gracious. The afternoon was gray, and looking out from our table at the window, I almost got the impression it was going to snow. 

We don't get down to Loring Park much these days, and it was a pleasure simply to walk past the gardens on the way to our car, watching a flock of white pigeons swooping back and forth amid the trees.  

  

The fabric of the universe?

Metaphysical questions typically arise at an early age, when we first ask ourselves, "Why am I me, and not you?"  Before long this question leads to a second one: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" Such questions may give us a eerie pleasure, or they may induce anxiety or even panic. In either case, answers are seldom forthcoming, and we usually put those questions aside, though with time a variety of lesser issues along the same lines are likely to rear their heads, including "Why are there mosquitoes?" and "Why is Mrs. Edstrom, my kindergarten teacher, persecuting me?"

Injustice, pain, the nature of meaning itself? For the most part, philosophers have done only a middling job of answering such questions. There are insights to be found in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and many others, but they tend to be strewn like shining nuggets amid a vast outwash plain of well-meant but unilluminating ratiocination.

In recent times—that is to say, in the last few centuries—thinkers have devised a number of approaches to such problems, drawing on the methodologies of mathematics, physics, linguistics, and other disciplines that lay claim to a more limited scope but firmer foundations. The results have been dismal.

Just the other day, Scientific American published an article carrying the title: "Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?" (You can read it here.) It describes the results of a conference recently held to discuss the fact that no nuts-and-bolts physical or neurological description of consciousness has ever been devised.

The chosen title poses an even larger issue: In what way can it be said that the universe has a "fabric"?

Skirting this enormous question, the conference attendees analyzed the question of whether a panpsychic theory—that everything in the universe already possesses consciousness—might solve the problem. It's a wonderful theory, though it begs the question. It has been proposed by many philosophers including Giordano Bruno, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Denis Diderot, all of whose investigations the attendees seem to have been entirely unaware. In any case, such an approach doesn't address the pertinent issue, which is less about the existence of consciousness than the nature of sentience.

Consciousness is always consciousness "of" something. And that connection between inner and outer worlds is always colored by the individual who makes that connection. So what? The conferees seem to have been content to analyze the question of whether the color "red" that I see actually looks like the "red" you see. That's a trivial question. More important would be to analyze how my understanding of beauty or justice aligns with, and differs from, yours.

Going further, we might explore the wonderful fact—and it is an empirical fact—that my notions of justice and beauty are similar to the ones my family and friends hold. For example, we gnash our teeth in concert as we summon images of the dastardly and dangerous rogues in the Republican Party who are dead set on destroying our sacred institutions. This, in part, is why we've become "family and friends."

Such affinities are widespread but they're rarely perfect, which is why many of us continue to explore the nuances of the world we live in and the wide array of consciousnesses we share it with—animal, vegetable, and mineral.

Maybe the universe has a fabric after all?

Home from Nova Scotia

Returning home from a vacation leaves me in a state of mild euphoria that I have no desire to dispel. I know there are things I'm supposed to be doing, and I do a few of them. I write a press release, make a postcard, update a website, send some metadata to a distributor, answer an email or two.

But I mostly enjoy the feeling of being at home with memories of ten days of sublime adventuring on the Atlantic Coast drifting through my head. It doesn't hurt that upon our return the skies here at home were clear, the air was cool, and as we discovered the next morning, the lower angle of September light was giving the vegetation a pleasant glow.

Our departure from Halifax had been delayed by the arrival of Hurricane Lee; we missed our connection in Toronto and spent six additional hours at the airport trying to figure out clever ways to use up the complimentary (but meager) food vouchers we were given by way of compensation.  It was fun.

But back here at home the refrigerator was empty. We scrounged a few chunks of pickled herring from the bottom of the jar and sliced up the chunk of Canadian cheddar cheese from my carry-on bag that had befuddled security personnel in both Halifax and Toronto. (Maybe it looked like explosive putty? It was getting a little ripe.)

The next morning, not yet ready to re-engage in normal life, I looked through ten days of mail—mostly pleas from the Democratic Party, Nature Conservancy, Habitat for Humanity, Mercy Corp, and so on—and hit upon the latest Daedalus catalog.  Daedalus sells remainders—discounted books—and I have vowed several times never to look at that wretched catalog again. It's a sign of how free and loose and uncluttered my head had become on the beaches of Nova Scotia that I not only paged through it, but found several books of interest. The next morning I placed an order!

Break It Up: a history of the many ways various states—and not just the southern ones—schemed to leave the United States before the Civil War broke out.

The Book Of The People: a book about the Bible written by the author of Dante in Love, which I enjoyed.

Evening In Paradise: a collection of short stories by Lucia Berlin, a woman I've never heard of.

The Quotable Machiavelli: the title says it all.

The Coldest Case: an inspector Bruno mystery that Hilary read recently and enjoyed.

Follow The Flock: a history of the role played by sheep in the development of civilization. I have read this book. It's a classic.  

Montale-Poems: I have a copy of Montale's collected works—a doorstop of a book. This tiny volume looks more manageable.

I'm not eager for the order to arrive. Just think what a burden it will be!

 

Summer Evening: Tenth Wave Music

It was a walk down memory lane, sort of, as we ate dinner at the venerable Tea House, a Stadium Village fixture for more than fifty years, I think, then drove the backstreets of Dinkytown looking for the University Lutheran Church of Hope. We were on our way to a concert scheduled to take place in the church courtyard presented by a chamber ensemble called 10th Wave (never heard of them). The program consisted of five or six compositions written in the last quarter-century by composers unknown to me.

What drew us to such an event? I would say it was the setting and the instrumentation: violin, viola, flute, clarinet, piano, and cello. Such an ensemble is likely to offer clear, open line rather than a flood of sound, and the clarinet in particular recalled to my mind pieces such as Stravinsky's "Pastorale," Poulenc's Clarinet sonata, and Milhaud's many chamber works for winds.

Of course, one never knows. They might just as well have presented a program devoted to compositions by disciples of Gyorgi Kurtag, Hindemith, and Skrowaczewski!

But there has been a healthy swing in recent decades away from post-war anxiety and doom-speak toward openness and lyrical expression, usually without the mid-century pastoral schmaltz.  A post-modern oddness and the revival of interest in deliberately—almost mechanically—repetitive figures helps to keep things fresh.

Here I am, analyzing recent trends in "classical" music like an Alex Roth wannabe. What do I know about such things?

I do know that I enjoyed all of the pieces on the program. The opening number, "Karakurenai," by Andy Akiho, was my favorite. It was written for a steel drum ensemble, but it sounded great with more traditional instruments. The pianist, Mirana Moteva, maintained a simple rhythmic pattern heavy on octaves and common intervals that reminded me of the works of the Armenian priest Komitas, who died in 1935. if that means anything to you. (You can hear a very brief fragment here.)  

"Eviogimenos," by Sungji Hong, was also very fine, though I don't remember much about it now. "Ralph's Old Records," by Kenji Bunch, offered a five-movement aural tour of the music the composer listened to as a child along with his dad. It started off with a rich, swooning rendition of a few bars of "Deep Purple" and moved on from there in several interesting, though less familiar, directions.

The performers were all top-flight, and it was wonderful to be reminded yet again how lovely individual instruments can sound when they're being played nearby.

It was a chilly evening. The crowd seemed to me a mix of younger middle-aged and elderly people: family and friends of the performers, budding young composers, a few parishioners perhaps.    

With its youth, ethnic diversity, contemporary musical focus, and agreeable aura, Tenth Wave has clearly got a good thing going. I want to hear more.

 

It's a Party. You're invited.

We drove down to the Icehouse the other day to catch a show by the Flamenco Collective, one of the groups that sustain that art-form on our area while supporting themselves giving dancing lessons and touring outstate on government grants, I would imagine. We had seen the featured dancer, "La Chaya" Nishiuchi, at the same venue a few years ago. Good stuff.

But I really pricked up my ears when I read that they were bringing in a singer, a dancer, and a guitarist from Seville. Our local artists are good, but I have never heard a local singer who possessed that rough, flamenco puro, open-throated rasp without which all the shouting doesn't carry the anguish required, and begins to sound like caterwauling. Javier Heredia's voice has that quality, and he has the snappy dance movements to go with it.

The Icehouse is a perfect venue for these tablao-style performances, where the artists—dancers, singers, clappers, guitarists—sit in a row on straight-backed chairs taking turns in the spotlight while urging one another on with a glorious and infectious energy. I've lost the knack of identifying the forms they were using, but I'm sure I heard several bulerias, some tangos, and perhaps a rumba or two. All of these are pulsing flamenco chico forms full of anguish but also of excitement.

Each of the three dancers was given an extended solo with guitar and palmas accompaniment (see a bit of La Chaya's solo, and feel the energy  here) , the two guitarists both had a solo opportunity to shine, and two thirds of the way through the show, when the energy was high, Heredia stepped to the mic to gesture, stomp, and bewail in the best flamenco tradition. (You can listen to a bit of it here.)

As a final touch, at the end of the show La Chaya invited a few of her students up on the stage to do a few steps in the midst of the finale, accentuating the fact that such tablao performances are based less on virtuosic display than on a genuine yet casual rapport first of all between the artists on stage, which, as the night develops, extends to the aficionados in the audience sitting only a few feet away.

I listen to flamenco on CD from time to time—Vicente Amigo, Pepe Habichuela, Remedios Amaya, Chicuelo, Cameron—but it's important (and wonderful) to be reminded of the art-form's community spirit, which can only develop in a club environment.

I'm sure half the people in the audience knew, and perhaps studied with, one of the dancers on-stage. It's a small world, just like Nordic fiddling or Balkan tamburitza music. We learned just how small it is when we spotted our friends Marnie and Bryan in the crowd and went down to chat with them after the show. I wasn't surprised to see them; Marnie studied flamenco dance seriously for quite a while, and Bryan plays all sorts of music. But I was surprised to learn that La Chaya and her husband, Bobby, are practically their next-door neighbors. Small world indeed.          

   

Midsummer Voices

 

We caught a bit of opera and razzmatazz down at the Trailhead on a Saturday afternoon on the invitation of some friends who have been following the Mixed Precipitation Opera Company for several years. The drama was familiar—Romeo and Juliet. The performance took place on the grass behind the building, with young women and men on mountain bikes speeding up and down the hill in the distance. And the zany acting style, which I enjoy only to a degree, was counter-balanced by the inclusion of arias from Bellini's 1830 opera The Capulets and the Montagues. Shakespeare was nowhere to be seen, or heard, which I also consider a plus, and it made sense, considering Bellini based his opera not of the Bard's rendering but on a far older Italian novella.

The troupe seemed to be a little short on props. At one point in their update of the original tale, the two lovers drive away on a motorcycle. They didn't have one, however, so we watch Romeo and Juliet tear across the field in front of the stage in the back of a pick-up truck holding a cardboard image of a motorcycle on a stick.

At another point a duel takes place between two rivals making use of Venetian blinds!

It was all great fun, and the singing was very fine. So were the contributions from the pit band, which consisted of a cello, a violin, and an electric piano. The director wisely dispensed with anything resembling a recitative, replacing those passages with spoken dialog or a song by Fleetwood Mac, the Pixies, or the Fugees. A line dance here and there also livened the show.

Some viewers might have taken the casting of women in both the title roles as a gender-bending update. I did. Looking it up later I learned that Bellini wrote it that way. 

It was a brilliant but blistering afternoon, and many in the audience were more than happy to have their program mounted on a stick.

Our enthusiasm for opera revitalized, a few days later we attended a Metropolitan Opera "encore" performance of Il Travatore at a nearby multiplex. The production was lavish, the singers top-flight, as one might expect, considering the source. In fact, we saw this very performance a few years ago when it was originally released in theaters.

The plot is an odd one, and I'd forgotten the last few wrinkles. Though there were only ten people in the audience, I was reminded how noisy elderly viewers can be, chatting in a normal tone of voice as if they were sitting at home in their living room. But all things considered, it was a fine evening.

 A few days later we headed downtown after supper to listen in on an evening of art songs presented as part of the Source Song Festival that takes place every year in early August. We used to attend regularly during the fest's early years, when concerts were held near the river at Antonello Hall. Parking was easy to find, the concerts were free, they started early, and we could grab a bite to eat a block away before the show at Zen Box Izakaya's happy hour.  When the festival expanded and moved uptown to Westminster Church we lost touch.

The organization is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. The performance we attended featured rising opera star Tamara Wilson and renowned baritone Anthony Dean Griffey, and it was a great pleasure to be there. We even enjoyed the drive downtown, which took us through a traffic jam near Target Stadium along with thousands of people who were there to hear a concert by Pink. (Who?)

Once we got past the parking ramps near the stadium the traffic thinned out considerably, and we enjoyed watching people hurrying on foot down Hennepin Avenue to one of the theaters carrying a touring Broadway show.

Once we got past Nicollet Mall, the traffic disappeared.

Yes, our own little event was well-attended. Eighty people? A hundred and twenty? It was so low-key that no one was scanning tickets. (In fact, I think several of the organizers smiled at me warmly because I was the first person they'd seen that night whom they didn't know.) Conversation from row to row and from aisle to aisle before the performance was widespread; we might have been the only couple there who knew NO ONE else in the audience.

To my untrained ear, Tamara Wilson's voice was, above all else, strong, but I think I'd rather hear her doing the title role of Aida (which she sang at the Met recently) than the cute song cycle based on a book of childish magic spells with which she opened the evening. The warmth of Griffey's handling of two brief Ned Rorem songs came as a welcome contrast, and he also breathed more than a touch of sincerity and life into a few selections from Copland's somewhat hackneyed Old American Songs.

But Tamara really hit her stride after intermission. Her voice was perfect for Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder, sung in German with all due intensity and weight.

It was a fine evening from start to finished, and we even enjoyed wandering the church library at intermission looking at black-and-white photos of the many distinguished women and men who have been guest speakers at the Westminster Town Hall Forum over the years.

But something essential was missing, and I was pleased when Hilary noticed in the program that another concert was scheduled for the following night, during which the young artists who had participated in the week-long series of workshops that the festival is mostly "about" would display the fruits of their efforts on stage. This would be an even more interesting show, so I thought, with ten performers instead of two, and new compositions from start to finish.

And so it proved to be.

The following evening the traffic downtown was thinner. The voices on stage were more varied and no less pleasing. And the compositions were, if anything, more delightful, though they weren't all new. Each performer had chosen a famous song, and then had gone to work with their collaborating composer, spinning a new creation in light of that chosen classic. That's why songs by Wolf and Debussy, Schumann and Schönberg, Rachmaninoff and Grieg, showed up on the program alongside the compositions of the largely unknown women and men who had been the festival "fellows" during the week.

The words were largely incidental. The explanations for the words that the composers offered before each performance were sometimes revealing, sometimes insightful, occasionally misguided. They exposed each young composer's brilliance, youth, character, and  naiveté. The melodies and the singers, all of them sopranos, carried us along. No intermission. A giddy sense of excitement filled the room, as if we were witnesses to an event at which the participants had began to discover for themselves or reaffirm how good they really were.  

 

It All Started with Eggplant

There are times in midsummer when it's hard to resist the well-rounded shape and shiny aubergine color of an eggplant. "Now or never," it seems to cry out. So you convince yourself once again that you DO like ratatouille, some of the time. And you're suddenly reminded of a recipe that an old buddy from Bookmen gave you years ago called Monsieur Henri's Eggplant that was very easy to put together. And you begin to imagine the Provençal lift that preparing such a dish will provide as the aromas of rosemary and basil and garlic fill the kitchen.

You need a lift, because you've just left the office of a physical therapist who's given you a few simple stretching exercises that are suppose to alleviate (though it seems highly improbable) the chronic leg pain you've been suffering for a month; the result of an obscure condition called illiotibial band syndrome that you developed as a result of playing tennis or traversing the trails at Elm Creek Regional Park with undue gusto. Who knows?

Suddenly a new idea takes shape: "Let's make something new with that eggplant." And so we did.

The eggplant itself gets peeled and baked, then pulverized in the food processor along with some sautéed garlic and anchovies. Meanwhile, you sauté some capers and chopped red peppers and toast some slices of bread in the oven.

You can imagine what comes next: slather the toast with the eggplant puree and top with peppers and capers. Delicious!

That might have been the end of it, but the recipe called for only a few anchovies, and even after doubling the quantity, we were left with half a can. What to do? What to do?

Just this morning I saw four little potatoes sitting on the kitchen counter. Eureka! Salade Nicoise. I boiled the potatoes and drenched them in a vinaigrette while they were still hot, then boiled some frozen green beans in the same water. I took a stroll out to the garden plot alongside the driveway and harvested a bit of basil, though it's not doing well. (The sage, as usual, is thriving.)

And all the while, I had an old CD mix going on the stereo that must be at least a quarter-century old. I call it my cheesy Brazilian mix, but it's really quite good, with several numbers each by Marisa Monte, Lee Konitz, Flora Purim, Chet Baker, and a few artists I no longer recognize.

I'll assemble the salad when Hilary gets home from the potting studio.  Now it's time to get back to work. 

But I have no work!

Perhaps it's time to sit in the shade on the deck and enjoy the cool August morning, while waiting for a hummingbird to appear at the feeder. That feeder had been hanging against the wall in the garage for years. The other day we brought it outside and attached it to the pole on the feeder, and the hummingbirds arrived within the hour.