Chamber Music for Fun and Prizes
The town of Westport is one of the moneyed centers gravity in southwestern Connecticut, so I don't have much business in going there except for their neighborhood chamber music series, which feels like you suspect other town chamber music series would feel except that they're absolutely loaded to the gills with cash. Back in February they had the Kronos Quartet in, for example; last weekend they had the slightly more modest guests Trio Solisti (violin/cello/piano) and the composer Paul Moravec. This is still a good catch.
After a brilliantly satisfying Mendelssohn piano trio and one of those magnificent, interchangeable Astor Piazzolla arrangements, the trio added a clarinetist and played Moravec's "Tempest Fantasy," which won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2004. It is in fact a very good piece, mercurial but direct and appealingly airy. Moravec keeps a busy canvas going, with a multitude of lyrical lines and figures appearing and disappearing and bumping into each other at high speed. Harmonically it's pretty consonant but abstract, with the emotional touch kept very light. Think of a Sergei Prokofiev-style neoclassical piece, shattered into a zillion mirror-like pieces and then reconfigured into a mosaic.
There's a recording of it out, though I suspect it would lose a lot of personality offstage. (David Krakauer was not the clarinetist at last weekend's performance, by the way. I haven't heard him, but I hear he's amazing.) You wonder often about the survival prospects of new chamber music--where do you ever hear this stuff?--but hopefully this one will stick around.
Moravec himself is an appealing presence, thoughtful and down-to-earth--bonus points for wearing tennis shoes to the concert, in my book. Hopefully some more of his music will be floating around the region; I'd love to hear more.
More prizewinning chamber music listening: Sebastian Currier's "Static" (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano) from '03. It won the Grawemeyer Award this year and very shortly after came out on CD (hooray cultural funding) with some slightly earlier works. This is texturally very vibrant stuff; in particular, "Night Time" for violin and harp sounds like it has an impossibly rich range of sounds and colors. Stylistically it's modernist in the newer, less confrontational fashion; still, all the touchstones in the music are color, harmonic shading, gesture. Recommended if this is the sort of thing you like to sit down and pay attention to for a little while.
I'm glad to see a lesser-known composer take the Grawemeyer again; it's a large amount of cash, so on a purely functional level you'd like to see it going to an up-and-comer as opposed to, say, Pierre Boulez, which it did several years back. (Or even Gyorgy Kurtag, last year; he's great but he's old, and he already seems to be composing what he wants to.) On the other hand, the presence of the established top-of-their-game types makes the list of past Grawemeyer winners read as a pretty striking list of modern accomplishments. A good portion of that list is available on CD; what I've heard from it has been well worth hearing.
After a brilliantly satisfying Mendelssohn piano trio and one of those magnificent, interchangeable Astor Piazzolla arrangements, the trio added a clarinetist and played Moravec's "Tempest Fantasy," which won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2004. It is in fact a very good piece, mercurial but direct and appealingly airy. Moravec keeps a busy canvas going, with a multitude of lyrical lines and figures appearing and disappearing and bumping into each other at high speed. Harmonically it's pretty consonant but abstract, with the emotional touch kept very light. Think of a Sergei Prokofiev-style neoclassical piece, shattered into a zillion mirror-like pieces and then reconfigured into a mosaic.
There's a recording of it out, though I suspect it would lose a lot of personality offstage. (David Krakauer was not the clarinetist at last weekend's performance, by the way. I haven't heard him, but I hear he's amazing.) You wonder often about the survival prospects of new chamber music--where do you ever hear this stuff?--but hopefully this one will stick around.
Moravec himself is an appealing presence, thoughtful and down-to-earth--bonus points for wearing tennis shoes to the concert, in my book. Hopefully some more of his music will be floating around the region; I'd love to hear more.
More prizewinning chamber music listening: Sebastian Currier's "Static" (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano) from '03. It won the Grawemeyer Award this year and very shortly after came out on CD (hooray cultural funding) with some slightly earlier works. This is texturally very vibrant stuff; in particular, "Night Time" for violin and harp sounds like it has an impossibly rich range of sounds and colors. Stylistically it's modernist in the newer, less confrontational fashion; still, all the touchstones in the music are color, harmonic shading, gesture. Recommended if this is the sort of thing you like to sit down and pay attention to for a little while.
I'm glad to see a lesser-known composer take the Grawemeyer again; it's a large amount of cash, so on a purely functional level you'd like to see it going to an up-and-comer as opposed to, say, Pierre Boulez, which it did several years back. (Or even Gyorgy Kurtag, last year; he's great but he's old, and he already seems to be composing what he wants to.) On the other hand, the presence of the established top-of-their-game types makes the list of past Grawemeyer winners read as a pretty striking list of modern accomplishments. A good portion of that list is available on CD; what I've heard from it has been well worth hearing.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home