Review: Vicki Ray and Elissa Johnston's Piano Spheres recital at Zipper Hall
April 27, 2010
For the Piano Spheres' season finale, pianist Vicki Ray and soprano
Elissa Johnston gave a haunting and beautiful account of Messiaen's
hour-long song cycle, "Harawi." Ray and Johnston were so inside these twelve
songs, written by Messiaen after Peruvian folksongs, that their performance
of this profound meditation on love and death reached an almost cosmic
scale. Johnston's dramatic flexibility and wide vocal range, along with
Ray's imaginative and near-hypnotic collaboration on piano made these songs
of fatal love irresistible. It was a fittingly powerful end to a Piano
Spheres' season full of wonders."
Out West Arts Blog Tuesday saw the end of the Piano Spheres season at Zipper Concert Hall downtown with a program dedicated to the late Alan Rich who had been a big advocate of the series for many years and will be greatly missed by many in the L.A. music community. Perhaps it was appropriate, though coincidental, that the program featured the music of Olivier Messiaen, a composer who wore his spiritual and romantic heart on his sleeve most times. The single piece on the program was Harawi, a song cycle for soprano and piano based on the Tristan and Isolde myth with Messiaen’s own devout, yet psychedelic take on things. (To hear a sample listen to the clip below.) Like the best of all his music, Harawi eventually enters that space where time seems to stand still and the heavens themselves threaten to open up. That the players achieved this is a testament to the prodigious skills of pianist Vicki Ray and soprano Elissa Johnston, two figures well known in L.A.’s contemporary music scene. Johnston took a somewhat subdued approach to the vocal lines, keeping them light and understated. While at times I yearned for more of a piercing clarion call in the performance, the strategy paid off more in the other-worldly moments of these 12 songs. Messiaen mixes nonsense syllables in with his text in passages with a more urgent and darker edge and Johnston and Ray made the most of these. Also of interest in the performance was a video work by Lars Jan that was presented in conjunction with the performance. Jan took footage from two different films both entitled “The Holy Mountain” in English: Leni Riefenstahl’s 1926 silent feature (see the top video clip) and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal 1973 art film. The pieces were spliced together to enhance the Tristan elements as well as the more psychedelic overtones in Messiaen's music. There were beautiful moments where the film and performance meshed perfectly, the Tristan figure in Riefenstahl's film lost on a freezing mountainside hallucinating in technicolor about Jesus and toads. Video of this sort is always a risk in that it can overwhelm one's perception of the musical performance, but Johnston and Ray were not cowed on Tuesday leaving the audience with a glimpse of something from above. http://outwestarts.blogspot.com/2010/04/into-black.html
Review: Joanne Pearce Martin's Piano Spheres recital at Zipper Hall
March 17, 2010
The great Italian composer Luciano Berio once observed that "a musical work is never alone - it always has a big family to cope with, and it must be capable of living many lives." That insight seemed to inform Joanne Pearce Martin's extraordinary and elegiac Piano Spheres recital Tuesday at the Colburn School's Zipper Hall.
The two premieres were both typical of a program filled with musical gestures and remembrances: Esa-Pekka Salonen's "Pavane in Memory of Steven Witser," the principal trombonist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic who died last April at age 48, and Gernot Wolfgang's "Theremin's Journey" for Theremin, piano and electronica.
The pianist, in her ninth season as principal keyboardist for the Philharmonic, began by boldly digging into a bright-toned Fazioli piano in four selections from Stephen Hartke's "Post-Modern Homages," which included a pleasing riff on Satie. More impressive was Pearce Martin's finely shaped reading of "Distances" (1988), Meyer Kupferman's moody memorial to a friend.
Gabriela Frank's stunning "Sonata Andina" pushed Pearce Martin to the limit with its artful use of Andean folk music and rhythmic drive. The rousing finale, written in homage to Alberto Ginastera, showed her exhilarating power at high speed. In the inventive second movement, "Himno Inca," Pearce Martin became her own percussion section, clapping and making ticking sounds with her mouth.
But the heart of her program came after intermission with Salonen's "Pavane." The piece, about six minutes, references the trombone theme in Sibelius' Seventh Symphony, which was the first big solo Witser played with the Philharmonic and Salonen. There are hints of French Impressionism throughout, then the music seems suspended and suddenly stops. Some in the audience were in tears.
Well into Wolfgang's "Theremin's Journey," the electronics cut out, so Pearce Martin started over. The Theremin, a precursor to the synthesizer, is known mostly for that eerie whine from science-fiction films of the 1950s, but it became a lovely expressive thing in Pearce Martin's hands (she played it standing in bare feet). She also performed on the piano to prerecorded contemplative and jazz-infused grooves. The finale, given to the Theremin, conveyed melancholy. But the pianist chose to conclude her program with the stirring virtuosity of George Antheil's Toccata No. 2. Life goes on.
Susan Svrcek is one of the four valuable local citizens who together co-created the "Piano Spheres." Her recital last month at Zipper Hall turned out to be a more-than-anticipated valuable part of this season's "Piano Spheres" series...the sphere rolled smoothly, and there was a near-perfect matchup between the player and the played: a Schoenberg set that sounded as if co-written by Brahms -- as was the old boy's music back when -- some misty Xenakis that sounded like the same very smart young boy playing with piano colorations and, more delightful than "Piano Spheres" concerts ever get to be: a gathering of Messiaen's "Small Bird Sketches," each preceded by tape of that bird in song, as if a smart listener might fail to note the obvious link between the portraitist and the portrayed.
Two important performances featuring piano music by Polish composers were presented recently in the Los Angeles area. The first took place on March 17 at the Zipper Concert Hall on the campus of the Colburn School of Music. The second concert was held at the Alfred Newman Recital Hall on the USC campus on March 28.
The common denominator for these two events was provided by Susan Svrcek, a local pianist who throughout her career has specialized in performing modern music. She is one of the founding members of Piano Spheres, a gifted group of Southern California musicians who exclusively program contemporary music, now enjoying its fifteenth season.
The first half of Ms. Svrcek's Zipper Hall program was devoted to piano compositions by Tom Flaherty, Jeffrey Holmes, and Virko Baley. Flaherty's opening Nightstars (1996) was the longest and most amorphous of the three piano essays, with moments of arresting beauty interspersed by episodes of creative wasteland. It was followed by Cyan by Jeffrey Holmes, a work composed in 2007 especially for Ms. Svrcek. According to notes provided by the composer, Cyan is meant to convey "a general feeling of the coldness of winter, the motions of water, the darkness of the night, and nihilism that I see and feel everywhere." Such diverse phenomena certainly add up to an ambitious agenda, perhaps more appropriate for a large-scale symphonic work. The first half of the program closed with Virko Baley's Nocturnal No. 2, "Tears" originally dating from 1960 but revised in 1998, and a more recent Pajarillo (2001). The Nocturnal's poetic opening and its tighter formal layout provided some framework for the composer's ideas, whilst the post-modern Pajarillo beguiled the listener with its flamenco-inspired rhythms and its tongue-in-cheek humor.
After the intermission, the charmingly familiar suite, Melodie ludowe [Folk Melodies] by Lutoslawski brought the audience back in time to the mid 1940s, when Polish composers were forced to inventively use folk idioms in order to keep the communist censors and cultural czars at bay. Lutoslawski's language here is delicate and discriminating with finely-wrought harmonies, and just as sophisticated as it would be two decades later, when Lutoslawski could compose without any formal diktats. The concert closed on a strong and effective counterpart to Lutoslawski, a 2003 composition by Krzesimir Debski, entitled Organismi. With it, Debski, a prolific composer of concert, stage and film music, provided a welcome surprise for the Zipper Hall audience. Organismi is a compositional tour de force-both as a brilliant piano piece and as an efficient use of a very traditional formal design. Listening to the well-structured motivic development, one had a sense of hearing a modern-day Chaconne, with all its power, sweep, and irrefutable consequence of every musical gesture. The work received its American premiere that evening, and it certainly should surface on concert programs again.
Throughout the evening, Susan Svrcek successfully coaxed beautifully nuanced and colorful textures from the Colburn Steinway. In addition to her discriminating touch, Ms. Svrcek's search for understanding within complex modern works and her desire to permeate her interpretations with personal engagement proved a big bonus for the listener.
These very qualities were once again evident in Ms. Svrcek's appearance at the Spring Concert organized by the Polish Music Center at USC on March 28. The program was devoted exclusively to works by Grazyna Bacewicz, in celebration of the centenary of her birth and the fortieth anniversary of her passing. Bacewicz's towering Second Piano Sonata stood at the center of the program that also included her String Quartet no. 4 and Quintet for Winds. The Sonata is a complex and challenging piece with three substantial movements, demanding considerable pianistic prowess from the performer. The work was premiered in 1953 by the composer, who is chiefly remembered these days as a virtuoso violinist and a prolific composer, not as a concert pianist. Susan Svrcek's ability to shape the music's narrative thread and bring its rousing content to the audience was much appreciated on both occasions of her recent appearances at Zipper and Newman concert halls alike.
...And then Sunday evening the four pianists of Piano Spheres (Gloria Cheng, Vicki Ray, Mark Robson, Susan Svrcek) gave us “California Keyboard”, a survey of some of our music. The opening work was instructive. The spotlights shone on four toy pianos as the four pianists came on stage and bent down to the keyboards for John Cage’s Music for Amplified Toy Pianos (1960). Initially there were some titters: the sounds were a bit odd and the sizes were humorous. But four pianists, focused on the music, brought the audience from humor into music appreciation, and the performance cast a spell. Mark Robson then played the oldest works: four of Henry Cowell’s Miniatures (1914 to 1935), and we heard how original Cowell was, and how modern he could be.
But there was so much in the program. My own favorites included a concerto-like work for piano and electronics by Shaun Naidoo, Bad Times Coming (1996), played by Vicki Ray. I also really liked William Kraft’s Requiescat (Let the bells mourn for us for we are remiss) (1976), commissioned by Ralph Grierson and premiered at the 1975 Ojai Festival. This was a lovely work for electric piano. And the concert closed with a beautiful work by Daniel Lentz, NightBreaker (1990) for four pianos. A great concert!
Jerry Zinzer
To read entire review see:
Los Angeles Philharmonic's West Coast: Left Coast Festival on Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 7:30 pm in Disney Concert Hall.
Program:
Cage – Music for Amplified Toy Pianos
Cowell – Anger Dance
Powell – Setting for Two Pianos
Kraft – Requiescat (Let the bells mourn for us for we are remiss)
Jarvinen – The Queen of Spain (Part One)
INTERMISSION
Lesemann - Nataraja
Naidoo - Bad Times Coming
November 30, 2009
For the occasion of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's ongoing West Coast, Left Coast series, the 16-year-old Piano Spheres recital series was invited to the party. The invitation was logical enough, given the series' contemporary focus and often West Coast connections. On Sunday night, the series headed across Grand Avenue from its regular venue, Zipper Hall, to the grander expanse of Walt Disney Concert Hall's stage and house.
What transpired in the program called "California Keyboard" was anything but a neat-and-linear survey of keyboard music, often involving keyboards off to the side of the usual grand piano home base. The series' accomplished, ever-game pianists — long-timers Vicki Ray and Gloria Cheng and later arrivals Susan Svrcek and Mark Robson — did impressive musical bidding on toy pianos, a Rhodes electric piano (William Kraft's intriguingly sonorous "Requiescat (Let the Bells Mourn for Us for We are Remiss)", electric harpsichords (Arthur Jarvinen's raucous mock-rock-Baroque "The Queen of Spain (Part One)"), and prepared piano (Frederick Lesemann's secular gamelan-like "Nataraja"). Musically, the program moved from the graceful and jazzy serialism of Mel Powell and Kraft to more abidingly tonal fare.
Opening the evening, tentative ripples of laughter greeted John Cage's "Music for Amplified Toy Pianos," but a proper sense of stilled awe soon took over, as Cage's Zen poise filtered into the hall. Continuing on the gentler path, Robson laid out the tender, loopy lyricism of Henry Cowell's piano miniatures. Shaun Naidoo's "Bad Times Coming" was the evening's token rocker, pitting Ray's rigorous parts against a fairly sterile, prefab electronic drum groove. In new music, the presence of an insistent groove can still arouse suspicion that riff-raff is invading the serious music temple -- unless said groove is aligned with Minimalism.
Speaking of which, noted West Coast Minimalist Daniel Lentz capped off the concert, working against type. "NightBreaker," for four unadulterated pianos (finally) proceeds with a tonal, almost post-impressionistic, post-pop language, but Lentz's sly subversiveness is at work in the margins. Harmonic bearings are never as static as they seem, and motivic fragments continually shift and interrupt each other, to exciting ends. Call it ADD Minimalism, which may seem an oxymoron, but somehow works via Lentz's individualistic designs.
In short, the concert's restless invention aptly conveyed the moving target that is "California Keyboard."
October 30, 2009
MANY ROOMS: Actually, the spirit of newness and the joy of exploration filled many rooms these past few weeks. Two of our most imaginative, best-planned, courageous and stimulating concert series – Piano Spheres at Zipper Hall and Jacaranda at Santa Monica's First Pres — sprang into action in adjacent weeks, both greeted with enthusiasm and delight by properly capacity crowds, Gloria Cheng, our precious piano pioneer, drew a fine, full house at Zipper, even against the competition of a Murray Perahia recital at Disney across the street. Her concert, the season's first PianoSpheres enterprise, offered an enticing, imaginative mishmash — handsomely delivered in the blend of eager artistry and flawless technique that are Gloria's glory: a mist-shrouded piano+tape relic by Luigi Nono, an equally enchanting, fogbound essay by Tom Adès, Alfred Schnittke's sozzled, gesturesome Piano Quintet (with the excellent Calder Quartet in collaboration), Andrew Waggoner's sleep-inducing modern take on the ancient dance "La Folie" and, best of all to my taste, John Harbison's set of "Anagrams" on the name of the Piano Spheres founding saint, Leonard Stein. Shorter in length and perhaps more reticent than anything else on this varied, imaginative program, the Harbison was the work that people seemed most eager to praise, out on the sidewalk after the concert. And with good reason.
October 15, 2009
Piano Spheres, one of the Los Angeles classical music landscape's more surprising and also inspiring success stories, began humbly 16 years ago, and the seeds have fully flowered. Launched at Pasadena's Neighborhood Church by the late, legendary Leonard Stein, pianist, pedagogue and assistant/direct link to Arnold Schoenberg, the series was designed to feature himself and a handful of gifted students, dealing with mostly contemporary piano repertoire.
All these seasons later, Piano Spheres is an ongoing boon to both the piano and contemporary music concerns in town, and to the West Coast.
At Tuesday night's season opener, in the more acoustically embracing Zipper Hall, some well-deserved internal celebration was in order -- for the main attraction of this year's recital by famed contemporary music interpreter Gloria Cheng was a clear and captivating world premiere performance of John Harbison's entrancing but also coolly measured 'Leonard Stein Anagrams."
True to Harbison's innate spirit of invention, compositional command, and dogma-free musical range, he has concocted something fascinating, a diverse and connective set of 13 miniatures (the last titled '12a," in deference to the '13"-phobic Stein and Schoenberg). Each piece bears a title based on anagrams of Stein's name, including 'Note slid near," 'L.A. trend: noise" (a garrulous and exciting blast of piano sound) and 'Tender as a lion," a suitable impression of the imposing yet affable Stein.
Stylistically, we get hints of the influence of Schoenberg — and his miniature-minded pupil Webern — and also Satie (especially in 'Rise tone, lad!"), along with revealing doses of Harbison, Stein himself, and detectable elements of Cheng's musical persona.
Harbison's work, in fact, was one of two notable world premieres here, alongside Andrew Waggoner's 'La Folie (Fantasme on a Ground)," a more maximal organism. This is music at once viscerally charged and intellectually curious — curious as in strangely compelling and actively, restlessly searching. The piece morphs and folds over itself, unveiling a series of ideas, interests and aspects of what the composer calls the 'continuous variation." It's a wild ride, in other words, but with self-assurance and dignity beneath the sometimes crazed and Messiaenic surfaces.
Cheng tends to tap into relevant "gestalt," to borrow her term. At last year's Piano Spheres recital, she performed Lutoslawski, Steven Stucky and Esa-Pekka Salonen, music featured on a CD that garnered a Grammy in February. This year's recital model followed a coherent theme and a broad sweep through modern music, involving pieces written in memoriam and with echoes of music's past.
She began, logically, with pieces from Shostakovich's Bach-inspired Preludes and Fugues, middle-distance modernism looking back and leaning forward. Kaija Saariaho's Prelude and Ballade revel in cloudy swirls of harmonic texture, and Thomas Adès' 1992 'Darkness Visible" uses tremolo effects and Dowland deconstruction to haunting, lamenting ends (Adès was in-house, incidentally). Luigi Nono's '…sofferte onde serene…", the program's most abstract moment, surreally blends live piano with taped, ghostly echoes.
For a finale, the ever-impressive Calder Quartet joined Cheng for Schnittke's Piano Quintet, written —slowly — in memory of his late mother. The piece works its way through passages of tension and layering to the mesmeric finale. Here, strings dispense echoes of previous themes over the pianist's sweet, repetitive music box-like patterns, playing like a life passing before our ears, wistfully.
-- Josef Woodard
April 30, 2009
Mark Robson -- Los Angeles' long-standing best-kept-secret pianist - gave his annual Piano Spheres recital Tuesday night in Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School. The turnout was disappointing. The concert was not.
Robson is a power-house pianist with a monster technique, but his career has been largely carried on out of the limelight. He spent 14 years as an assistant conductor and coach at Los Angeles Opera. He recently performed a Beethoven cycle in a South Pasadena church. He teaches voice and diction at California Institute of the Arts. Now and then he supplies a stupefying Messiaen evening for the Jacaranda series in Santa Monica. He composes as well, but he doesn't push his music on his audiences.
The feeling of this recital was like that of a very carefully chosen gathering of remarkable characters. In ways that are hard to quite grasp, these small pieces from different periods and different places seemed to speak to each other.
Eight composers were featured. The period of time covered was from 1906 to the present, with one world premiere. No work lasted more than 11 minutes. With the exception of three etudes by György Ligeti, no composer was represented by anything major. Ives' "Song Without (Good) Words" and Morton Feldman's "Nature Pieces for Piano" were early, obscure and extremely minor.
Robson was not physically demonstrative at the keyboard. He presented rhythmically complex music and pianistically extravagant music without a lot of fuss. He was the perfect host. All the attention was directed to the idiosyncratic guests and an appreciation of their lovable eccentricities.
And what a gathering this was. The evening began with Schoenberg's Five Piano Pieces, Opus 23. Written between 1920 and 1923, these very small pieces have been accused of doing music much harm. It was during this period, and to some extent in these pieces, that Schoenberg developed his 12-tone system and thus systematically eradicated the comforting tonal harmonies, melodies and structural character felt to be the heart of an art form.
In fact, these are little adventures -- fluid experiments in organic form. In his program notes, Robson wonderfully describes the physical interplay of Schoenberg's rhythmic shapes as "imitations of processes from the natural world -- from cell division on up to things that go bump in the night." When played with Robson's combination of clarity and majesty, Schoenberg suddenly seemed the most interesting person in the room (which those who knew him said he was).? ?With this, the stage was set for an emphasis on the other composers' peculiarities as well. What might the serious Schoenberg have thought of an etude by the late Argentine cutup, Mauricio Kagel, which is a stream-of-consciousness string of amusing one-liners? Maybe a fight would have brewed. Patricio Da Silva's lively "Fantasy and Nocturne," which was written for the occasion and commissioned by Piano Spheres, answered Kagel with pleasing harmonies and fistfuls of notes flying from the keyboard.
Etudes by Maurice Ohana and Ligeti were the cosmopolitan voices of wandering (and wondering) Jews. Ohana, a "French" composer was born in Morocco and waited out World War II in England. Ligeti escaped Nazi-occupied Hungary and became a prime mover in the postwar German and Austrian avant-garde. Both composers layered African and European elements in their etudes, splashing pianistic color around with abandon and demonstrating terrific compositional flair.
Beat Furrer, a 54-year-old Austrian Modernist born in Switzerland, toys with tiny pin pricks of sound in his "Voicelessness. The Snow Has No Voice" from 1986. Morton Feldman's "Nature Pieces" also spend most of their time in the pianissimo territory. Written in 1951 when the composer was 25, they were the music of a garrulous, large man delighted with his imagined delicacy.
Finally, Ives' "Song Without (Good) Words" was a pretty song without, Ives apparently felt, good harmonies. He took care of that, as he often did, by thickening the plot.
There wasn't a dull moment. Robson rendered each composer, even in his most minor statement, a big, unique and quirky personality. Everything the pianist touched sparkled.
12:00 PM, February 4, 2009
There isn't much sex in John Adams' operas or his work in general, which might explain why "Eros Piano" is so neglected. But there is plenty of musical sensuality all through his music, so even that explanation doesn't quite account for why this lush, torchy 1989 valentine for piano and orchestra is seldom heard and has had but a single recording.
Still, at least a few have fallen for "Eros Piano." Five years ago, Peter Martins choreographed the score for New York City Ballet. And for her annual contribution to the Piano Spheres series, Vicki Ray took matters into her own hands Tuesday night at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall. She premiered a solo version of "Eros Piano" that she made with the composer's blessing.
The 15-minute piece was born, Adams said at the time, from an obsession with Toru Takemitsu's "riverrun," an equally short and dreamy work for piano and orchestra that was given its premiere by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1984. Adams said that he so loved "riverrun," which he had on his car stereo for weeks and couldn't stop listening to, that he eventually had to write his own version to get the piece out of his system. His starting point was the interest he and the Japanese composer shared in the introspective style of jazz pianist Bill Evans.
And without the drowsy strings in the background, "Eros Piano" really does begin to sound more like Evans than Adams. But Ray's languid, sumptuous performance made something else apparent.
"Eros Piano" can now be heard as a sketch for an incandescent, complex aria sung by Kitty Oppenheimer in Adams' recent opera, "Doctor Atomic." In this scene, Kitty tries to get in husband Robert's light as he reads, as a way of getting in his psyche. The aria is among the most beautiful things Adams has written. So, for that matter, is "Eros Piano."
Ultimately, I missed the strings. But Ray's radiant playing served to reveal the significance of Adams' feminine side, which he normally likes to present in a broader context.
Speaking of context, Ray's entire program was one of concertos and cadenzas presented out of context. She began with Stravinsky's Concerto for Two Pianos, a concerto that Stravinsky wrote without an orchestra. She played two piano cadenzas extracted from larger works: Rand Steiger's "awhirl," which the composer arranged as a short solo from his ensemble piece "Dreamscape," and a piano solo from Frederic Rzewski's "Pocket Symphony."
She ended with "my lips from speaking," a wild fantasia on the opening piano chords of Aretha Franklin's "Think," which Julia Wolfe originally wrote for six pianos but then refashioned as a solo piece with electronics, making it an offbeat (in many more ways than one) concerto.
All of this, other than "Eros Piano," is dazzling, dizzying music. For Stravinsky's concerto, Ray was joined by Bay Area pianist Julie Steinberg in a performance with rhythmic bite but with a fuller, warmer, less percussively brittle tone than is the norm for Stravinsky.
Like Wolfe, Steiger adds an electronic component to the piano, and he operated the soundboard at the back of the hall for "awhirl." In so doing, he did indeed set the piano awhirl from loudspeakers surrounding the audience. He also added body to the sound. Yet even with all that, the real whirl came from Ray's fingers, which were on continuous virtuosic dancing display here as well as in the flamboyant Rzewski cadenza.
I haven't heard the six-piano original of Wolfe's "my lips from speaking," but this 15 minutes of grooving and bashing and banging on those familiar Franklin chords, along with much more keyboard thunder emanating from the speakers, created an irresistible air of funky celebration.
Ray's encore was "My Funny Valentine," and it was funny -- the melody played on a melodica, or blow organ, with her right hand and the accompaniment on an amplified toy piano with her left. It became the trickster yang to the "Eros Piano" yin.
October 4, 2007
The generation of great Modernists who moved music into new, abstract and expressionistic directions after World War II is often accused of having done irreparable harm to classical music. In the visual arts, we now hail the Abstract Expressionists, as we do the jazz innovators of the '50s and '60s, the Beats in literature and the French filmmakers of the New Wave. Yet the equivalent rebellions in classical music are still said to instill fear in the hearts of listeners.
The Gloria Cheng program that opened Piano Spheres' new season Tuesday night in the Colburn School's Zipper Hall paid tribute to such Modernists and the slightly younger (at 70) Helmut Lachenmann. One youngster was allowed in with the premiere of the Piano Sonata No. 1 by Dante De Silva, born in 1968.
A hard sell? One to terrorize listeners? Hardly. The hall was full. Even Piano Spheres seemed taken by surprise and had failed to print enough programs.
In introducing several of the pieces, Cheng noted their formidable technical difficulties. But she also made it clear that those issues were her problem, not ours. Hard piano music is nothing new for the virtuoso; our job is to take pleasure in the results.
As described by Cheng, Berio's Sequenza IV (1966), with its interplay of hammered-out resonances and busy movement, was like a shy person going through life, growing. The pianist also demonstrated the personality behind the intricate constructs in Elliott Carter's "Intermittences," written two years ago, playing it as if eavesdropping on colorful characters at a party.
Takemitsu's "Litany," the Japanese composer's 1989 reworking of a piece from 1950, became a study in muted color. Messiaen's 1949 "Cantéyodjayâ" was revealed as a Champagne-drunk burst of Indian rhythm.
Xenakis' 1973 "Evryali" was not merely a brilliant pianistic spray but also the sounds of nature and the waves of excitement from a political demonstration -- by a composer who was a freedom fighter in World War II.
Playfulness was also a part of postwar pianistic progress. Lachenmann and Cage celebrate a percussion instrument. In "Guero," the German composer turns the hand around; his piece was written to be played with fingernails. Cheng, like other pianists, used credit cards, which clattered up the keys and along the strings to arresting effect.
In Cage's 1952 "Water Music," a radio plays and the pianist undertakes many anti-pianistic activities, including blowing on a duck whistle in a bowl of water. The trick is to be serious and let humor arise on its own.
Cheng was silly. But perhaps she needed a break from a long, finger-busting, brain-twisting program that she otherwise made consistently compelling.
De Silva, who belongs to a new generation rebelling against the new, was the odd man out. His sonata, titled "Arcata," took Beethoven's "Les Adieux" sonata as a model. It returns aesthetically and pianistically to the first part of the 20th century. But he has a feeling for the keyboard, and the bell-like chords of the slow movement were beautiful.
mark.swed@latimes.com
MUSIC REVIEW
Gloria Cheng finished her Piano Spheres concert last Tuesday with the piano smoldering on the Zipper Hall stage and the near-capacity audience in about the same state. Iannis Xenakis' music will do that to you sometimes. His 1973 Evryali certainly did: a portrait of "the eldest of three hideous Gorgon sisters…with hands of brass, sharp fangs…" Cheng's program was, as usual, a fascinating tour around the sphere of today's pianistic possibilities: from the trickery of Helmut Lachenmann's anti-musical Guero - in which the performer extracts dry-point clicks and clacks by attacking the keyboard with a credit card (Amoco or Mobil, we were informed) to the visionary quietude of a Takemitsu Litany and an exotic jungle fantasy by the very young Messiaen. Of lesser interest was a brand-new, bone-dry sonata by UCLA grad student Dante de Silva, still in the academy in more ways than one.
That sorry venture was nicely balanced, however, by an elder, wiser venture of John Cage, whose 75-year-old Water Music got the proceedings back on track. "Water," as you might guess, actually consisted of a bowl of the stuff, plus some whistles, a radio, a pack of cards and some gadgetry for "preparing" the piano; all thoughts of Mr. De Silva's run-of-the-mill formalities were nicely demolished, as our Gloria neatly restored the Piano Sphere to its proper dimension. A couple of knockout works by Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter filled out the program; Piano Spheres, one of our most cherishable concert enterprises, is again in orbit.
MUSIC REVIEW
March 29, 2007
OF the four permanent members of the local group Piano Spheres, Mark Robson has the lowest profile. He is a former behind-the-scenes pianist and assistant conductor for Los Angeles Opera, but he may, in fact, be better known in Paris, where he gave a series of recitals last fall. His ongoing Beethoven sonata cycle is scheduled to conclude next month at an off-the-radar church in South Pasadena.
Perhaps Robson simply doesn't get out much. He included in the biography for his marvelous Piano Spheres recital Tuesday night at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall the fact that he has yet to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony live.
But one thing this spectacular pianist clearly does is practice. He has one of the great techniques. He has an inquiring mind. And he put together a program Tuesday of hard-to-categorize mid- to late Modernist music that made perfect sense to the ear. He called it "Fast-Soft-Loud-Slow." I would add Overstated-Garish-Ghoulish-Understated and, maybe, Bright-Aggressive-Mellow-Dark.
There was, to begin, Louis Andriessen's belligerent "Trepidus," ferociously yet engagingly banged out. Next, Morton Feldman's "Last Pieces," a series of muted chords freely played, was 15 minutes of exquisite engulfing pastel haze. Mauricio Kagel's "MM 51: Ein Stück Filmmusik für Klavier" followed Feldman like a drunken lout squashing a garden of delicate flowers. The score, written in 1976, is a stunt.
For it, Robson changed from new-music black shirt and slacks to concert dress tails, not quite put together and with fly open. He lunged onstage waving scissors. Kagel intended the piece as pseudo film music. The pianist performs against a tyrannical metronome, gestures melodramatically, cackles like a villainous landlord demanding the rent and plays threatening tremolos. The piece ended with Robson slumped over the keys, the metronome still clicking away.
The recital's second half began with the piano version of John Cage's 1947 ballet score, "The Seasons." This music surprises with its Satie-esque shimmer, its poignant half-heard melodies, its sense not of passing weather but of passing consciousness, of quiescence (winter) and preservation (summer). The piano writing is not especially difficult, but Robson gave it a virtuoso spin and made it glisten with unsuspected colors.
He then concluded with György Ligeti's four last études. The late Hungarian composer's 18 études may one day become as common as Chopin's 27 - if geneticists find a way of producing a super race of 12-fingered pianists. For now, though, very few mortals can manage the pieces. Robson is one. He tossed off the luminous "White on White" (No. 15), the incandescent "Pour Irina" (No. 16), the frantic "À bout de souffle" (No. 17) and the tortuous Canon (No. 18) as if none were more trouble than those gauzy Feldman chords, but, just as in the Cage, he brought to them wondrous coloration.
Robson is a major pianist with a small career. Maybe that is good in that it means local audiences get to hear great playing in small spaces for reasonable prices. Still, it means he has also been turning up lately as an organist - "with a view," he says in that bio, "to increasing my earning potential in the world."
It is hard to understand why composers aren't lining up to write for Robson. And as for Beethoven's Ninth, someone should invite him to hear Michael Tilson Thomas conduct it at the Hollywood Bowl this summer. Then someone should invite him to appear on the Bowl stage himself.
mark.swed@latimes.com
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Susan Svrcek performed the complete Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-1948) by John Cage in the end-of-the-season PianoSpheres concert last night. I had not heard this before; it's never been on a concert program I attended, and no one had pointed me in the direction of a recording. This was my loss. This was beautiful music, reminding you that this was the same composer who wrote In a Landscape; here was another landscape, only it was in Bali and the solo piano was part of a gamelan. I was so interested in the music and the ensemble of sounds that after getting home I immediately downloaded one of the three sets available on iTunes.
While driving home after listening to Svrcek, my wife and I were talking about other possible interpretations of the music. The set I downloaded, by Giancarlo Cardini is markedly different. First of all, it is faster, taking 60 minutes while Svrcek took 72; the recording is more assertive, while Svrcek is much more lyrical, forming long lines that vary in dynamics with the repeats. The two prepared pianos sound very different, and not just from the close miking for the recording; Svrcek's program notes talks about the challenges of taking Cage's long set of preparation instructions and having to do some trial and error to have the alterations match the piano and still create the desired tones. She succeeded in her re-creation. I wish I had a recording of Susan Svrcek's performance last night; I'd buy several, and send some to friends and family. Well, in some future year, such a performance would be available a week later in a legal download.
Speaking of downloads, last week's concert of the LA Phil was recorded and will be available on iTunes next week. The program includes Lutoslawski's Fourth Symphony, another Phil centerpiece, a work written for the Philharmonic and Salonen. Salonen placed the Lutoslawski as the center of a Beethoven set, beginning with the Leonora and ending with the Fifth Symphony. If you haven't heard the Lutoslawski, this is the best opportunity around.
Posted by Jerry Zinser
MUSIC REVIEW
December 7, 2006
TRIPLE THREAT Thomas Adès - composer, conductor, pianist - took over the Walt Disney Concert Hall in February when he began a two-part residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The second half of that residency, extending beyond Disney and the Philharmonic's reach, began last month with a student performance of his hit opera, the R-rated (for explicit depictions of sexuality while singing) "Powder Her Face" at USC, and ended Sunday with Adès conducting the Philharmonic in his hit orchestra score, "Asyla."
But with Los Angeles eager to keep the young British composer around a bit longer, and Adès, apparently, eager to be kept, he stayed on a couple more days to make a guest appearance in a Piano Spheres recital at Zipper Concert Hall. The program was eccentric, including several quirky, dreamlike, slightly crazy miniatures.
For the first half, he began with five sketchy Janacek scores from early, middle and very late in the Czech composer's career. He continued with Janacek's shimmering suite "In the Midst" and ended the first half with two of his own early works, "Darknesse Visible" and "Traced Overhead." After intermission, Adès explored an idiosyncratic piano travelogue by the late avant-garde Italian composer and pedagogue, Niccolo Castiglioni, as well as offbeat Stravinsky and Conlon Nancarrow's player-piano-inspired, rhythmically-next-to-impossible "Three Canons for Ursula."
These are works that Adès has been playing for some time (many are on an EMI recital disc released in 2000) and quite a few have the quality of party pieces. But with a Berlin Philharmonic premiere of a major new orchestra work soon as well as festivals of his music in London and Paris early next year, Adès can hardly be expected to be learning new repertory. And who else plays such uncharacteristic and obscure Stravinsky as the Germanic ditty "Souvenir d'une Marche Boche," or the Frenchified "Valse pour les Enfants"?
In much of this program, Adès seemed to be interested in the ways composers catch a listener off guard. Castiglioni's eight-minute, 10-movement "How I Spent the Summer" begins with a startling ragtime and only sounds a little more characteristic during a musical description of ice, in which, after gleaming chords ring out loud and long, overtones slowly melt away over time.
The important works were Adès' own. "Darknesse Visible," from 1992, is a John Dowland song from the Renaissance mussed up with lacy tremolo passages and interrupted by punchy loud outbursts. "Traced Overhead," written four years later, is a Romantic flight of filigree fancy, all the keyboard used at once in glittery brilliance.
ALTHOUGH Adès' technique is big and bold, he loves misty sounds, especially in his own music. Oddly enough, though, Janacek's "In the Mist" was unusually (and maybe overly) dramatic. Still, Adès' musical range can be large and expressive, and elsewhere on the program he exhibited both a boyish sense of humor and an adult sense of irony.
He is even a master of the Chico Marx one-finger technique, which he used on one of Nancarrow's canons. Those canons are composed of erratic rhythms that must be maintained in jerky, mathematically complex meter ratios. They are hard enough for the ear to follow. How the fingers can manipulate them is a wonder. Adès' dazzling performance left one's head spinning in the best, most exhilarating sense.
The encore was Janacek's "The Golden Ring." It was said to be written as he lay dying, his final music. It lasted 10 seconds, gone before you knew it. This is not so much music as the spirit of music.
So if earlier Nancarrow had produced a music of the spheres, if Castiglioni had paraded a music of fun and games, or Adès had traced the past in the present, Janacek here simply vanished. But he left traces. And Adès has left traces. May he return soon and often.
http://www.calendarlive.com/music/cl-wk-ades7dec07,0,7002795.story
mark.swed@latimes.com
September 21, 2006
FOR the last dozen years, a small but devout band of piano fans in the know has known that there is no better concert deal in town than a $20 ticket for Piano Spheres. This collective of four pianists with inquiring minds, sensational fingers and sterling musicianship puts together smart, unusual programs full of discovery and satisfaction.
I have never left one of its concerts disappointed, nor have I known anyone who has. If there has ever been a bad Piano Spheres review, I've not seen it and probably wouldn't believe it.
But Tuesday night, when Gloria Cheng began a new season for the series in Zipper Hall, something had changed. The auditorium was nearly full. Piano Spheres is no longer one of the best-kept secrets in town. Also unusual were Cheng's invitations to four very different sorts of colleagues to share the stage with her.
Robert Winter, a well-known Beethoven scholar and music popularizer, joined in for the two-piano version of Beethoven's gargantuan "Grosse Fuge." Grant Gershon, the popular music director of the Master Chorale, sat at the second piano for "Hallelujah Junction," which John Adams wrote for him and Cheng in 1997. Another conductor, Neal Stulberg, currently visiting director of orchestral studies at UCLA, was her partner for Saint-Saëns' Variations on a Theme by Beethoven.
That was hardly all. On her own, Cheng played an early piece, "Still Sorrowing," by Thomas Adès - the young British composer, pianist and conductor who will be a special guest soloist in the series Dec. 5 - with crystalline beauty. She tackled persuasively two impressive post-Minimalist, post-Messiaen movements from Steven Taylor's "Seven Memorials," which she premiered two years ago.
And she was joined by a young soprano for another early Adès work, "Life Story," with a wistfully nasty text by Tennessee Williams. The young soprano was Angel Blue, who is in the graduate opera program at UCLA. She is also a beauty queen (a runner-up to Miss California). She wore stilettos, a short skirt and a big beauty pageant smile.
She also exhibited a very big talent. She began in a disarmingly breathy, jazzy tone, which she soon proved she could turn on and off at the drop of a hat. In fact, she made this short text about a one-night stand that ends with a cigarette after sex, drowsily dropped in a hotel bed, funny, sexy, disturbing and ultimately devastating. She has killer high notes and killer theatrical instincts.
Cheng, here, was a pianistic straight-woman, calm, collected, meticulous, judicious, insisting on ultimate respect for the score and the perfect support for Blue. Drama, yes; nonsense, no.
But with the "Grosse Fuge," Cheng had her work cut out for her, and not just in her commanding mastery of Beethoven's visionary fugue, written as the finale of a late string quartet and later arranged by the composer for two pianos. She had to be the rock on which Winter could rely. Once a formidable pianist, he has allowed his technique to lapse but remains an interesting musician.
No such problems with the conductors, both superb pianists. Saint-Saëns' variations are full of filigree, and Cheng and Stulberg made the trills and arpeggios not just enticing frosting on a Beethoven cake but almost as exciting as Adès' real-deal glitter.
Other pianists have taken up Adams' "Hallelujah Junction," a Minimalist romp. But Cheng and Gershon own it and understand exactly its mixture of dazzle and laid-back repetitions.
mark.swed@latimes.com
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Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
The crowd at Zipper Hall last Tuesday night, for the first of this season's "Piano Spheres" concerts, was one of those spectacles that renew your confidence in the future of energetic, serious musical programming. These concerts have been going on now for 12 years, and the audience has steadily increased while the programs themselves have become more and more adventurous - including not only great works of the piano repertory but some interesting wanderings afield. Last week's big work had begun life as part of a string quartet; another was built around the reading of a sad and sexy poem. I heard nobody complain that there wasn't enough piano.
That's because the pianist was Gloria Cheng, one of the series' great founding spirits and a superb adventurer on her own. The big work was the "Great Fugue" of Beethoven's Opus 130 String Quartet, bipolarity in music if anything ever was, in a keyboard transcription that Beethoven may or may not have had anything to do with. Robert Winter delivered some of his typical madcap program notes and joined Gloria in a two-piano reading of similar quality that had to put everything else on the program somewhat in the shade. "Everything else" included some rather harebrained Beethovenesque variations by Saint-Saëns and the delightfully footloose Hallelujah Junction by John Adams (both also for two pianos, with the two splendid conductors Neal Stulberg and Grant Gershon on the second), as well as some morose bits by Thomas Adès in anticipation of his full participation on the next "Spheres" program come December.
Two movements from Stephen Andrew Taylor's Seven Memorials made no stronger case for this composer than the complete performance had two years ago. Never mind: Overall, this was another cherishable concert, music for the thinking listener by the thinking musician. The season has begun.
People in Glass Houses ...
They built it, and we came.
Nonchalantly tripping over the TV cables in the plaza where the lima beans once grew, brushing away the cinders from the fireworks that hailed the inaugural of their new concert hall, the folk of County Orange cornered one another, and waylaid the visitors just in from I-405. Had their Millennium now truly dawned? they wondered; could the Boston Symphony, and Carnegie Hall, and those pretenders from beyond the mountains now truly eat their hearts out in sheer envy? "No, not yet," the answer seemed to resound, "but any day now."
The journalistic hoo-hah that greeted the unveiling of Costa Mesa's Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall was, of course, not a decibel less than the building's $200 million price tag merited. Read carefully some of the meticulous prose - Daniel J. Wakin in The New York Times, for example, or Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post - and the undertones begin to rise to the surface.
... Shouldn't Stow Thrones
"We're in complete control of our artistic destiny," Mr. Wakin has Henry Segerstrom, realtor, former bean farmer, telling his new tenant, the Orange County Pacific Symphony. "The hall can do anything you guys can do." That being so, I don't see much "destiny" in the freelance orchestra that shivered its way through a Mahler symphony on its first night in its new hall (a performance norm in recent years) and mounted three half-baked performances of Lou Harrison under the rubric of an "American Composer Festival" last spring (while the Los Angeles Philharmonic's "Minimalist Jukebox" festival, I might as well notice, was drawing worldwide notice and worldwide participation).
Mr. Kennicott, meanwhile, has our Gubernator Schwarzenegger, whose homeland offers such acoustic and architectural splendors as the Vienna Musikverein and that city's Philharmonic, pronouncing the Segerstrom masterpiece as "the best in the world," which ought to be of some use in the Angelides camp. Okay. So there were those pretty-good fireworks, a pretty-good sit-down dinner, and Pacific Symphony honcho John Forsyte (not so long ago of the Kalamazoo Symphony), now flashing his supersmile, mouthing off about comparisons with Boston and New York. The next few months at the new hall offer a few serious concerts, and lots of pop and ice shows. Next door, at the old hall, there is some opera, as usual.
The promotion circulating around Costa Mesa's new hall, in the reams of wastepaper that have landed on my doorstep in recent weeks and in the civic bluster at the ceremonies in recent weeks, might lead one to believe that the construction of this large bubble of glassy glitz signals some kind of much-needed cultural advance for its area. I wish I could believe that, because I do believe that a major musical force in Orange County, with genuine musical talent at its core and energetic, enterprising programming as its purpose, can succeed as well as anywhere else in this interesting nation. Unfortunately, in Orange County, perhaps more than elsewhere, a preponderance of overambitious, unrealistic leadership has gotten there first. What I would suggest, while there is still some land available down there, is for someone to plant a few lima beans, wait a couple of years and start all over again.
Impossible? Check out the history of "Piano Spheres" and ask yourself once more.
- MINIMALIST JUKEBOX - Walt Disney Concert Hall
Program
Thursday, March 30, 2006 at 8 PM Piano Spheres
Gloria Cheng, Vicki Ray, Mark Robson, Susan Svrcek, pianos Thomas Raney, percussion
REICH Four Organs
GLASS Opening and Wichita Vortex Sutra Ms. Ray
RILEY Ragtempus Fugatis Ms. Cheng
MCPHEE Balinese Ceremonial Music Mr. Robson, Ms. Svrcek
PÄRT Annum per annum Mr. Robson, organ
CAGE In a Landscape Ms. Svrcek
LANG Orpheus Over and Under Ms. Cheng, Ms. Ray
ANDRIESSEN Workers Union
October 6, 2005
For composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who can be very literal when he wants to be, the 1960s ended right on the button. In 1970 he gave up a years-long attempt to tap into the collective consciousness and returned - big time - to his own. No more group improvisations. A seer, a German with a dominant grandiosity gene, he decided that his special awareness could itself be, like that of any enlightened being, the collective consciousness. He determined to let his own personal mantra reverberate throughout the cosmos - and throughout history.
What changed everything was "Mantra" - composed for two pianos and electronics and premiered by brothers Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky on Oct. 18, 1970, in Donaueschingen, a new music center in southern Germany.
The work lasts slightly more than an hour. It was heralded as a masterpiece by those at the premiere. A recording by the Kontarskys, strictly (very strictly) supervised by Stockhausen, was heralded as a masterpiece by a lot of people. A classic had been born. New principles of writing music were revealed that would lead Stockhausen into creating "Licht," a seven-day (!) operatic cycle he began in 1977 and is just now completing.
That "Mantra" is a masterpiece I believed then and believe now. But at the moment, it is a little difficult to call it a classic.
Tuesday, to open this season's Piano Spheres series, Vicki Ray and Liam Viney presented a rare performance of "Mantra" in Zipper Hall at the Colburn School. Only a small audience showed up for this special event, even though Stockhausen remains a cult figure. Amoeba Records in Hollywood, Stockhausen headquarters in these parts, seems to have no trouble selling the composer's personally produced recordings, which cost about three times the price of a normal CD. But ever more out there, he no longer commands the attention he once did.
No matter. Tuesday's was a first-rate performance of music that, once it starts twirling around a "formula," just gets twirlier and twirlier. "Formula" is the composer's fancy name for a melody, if one with mantra-like aspirations. And, on a basic level, "Mantra" is no more than a traditional theme and variations. But Stockhausen creates an utterly distinct sound world, teeming with detail, that can trick the willing brain into thinking that inner and outer space conjoin.
The pianists have wood blocks and antique cymbals by their sides to tap on from time to time. Stockhausen directed that these textures be electronically mixed with those of the pianos, and with shortwave radio sounds, through a once-clumsy electronic device known as a ring modulator. At Zipper, Shaun Naidoo expertly ring-modulated with a laptop computer.
In the score, Stockhausen goes after his "formula" like a Zen priest meditating on a mantra to find its soul, like a physicist contemplating the quantum nature of matter, like a philosopher looking for the inner meaning of an utterance, like a mad surgeon cutting open living matter, yanking out organs and seeing how long he can keep them quivering.
Quiver they do. Trills become super-trills. Pitches are irradiated into the atmosphere as if each had a plutonium core. Where other composers mean an accent to show a player should emphasize a note and move on, Stockhausen aims to startle listeners out of themselves. Colors are new and brilliant; pianos never sounded like this before.
Stockhausen, of course, takes himself very seriously. The piano parts are exceptionally difficult, and when the Kontarskys played "Mantra," it was no laughing matter. I wonder what Stockhausen would have thought of Ray, a member of Piano Spheres, and Viney, a young Australian pianist on the CalArts faculty.
Their virtuosity went beyond technique (with which they are fully equipped). They added the element of joy, and even humor, as if to say that Stockhausen may be over the top but that "Mantra" is a great piece anyway. I thought they got it just right.
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Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
For one among the giants
The late Leonard Stein and his vision are honored as Piano Spheres opens its 11th season.
Oct 28 2004
There was a touch of melancholy in the air at Zipper Concert Hall on Tuesday night, for the founding father and kindly guiding light of Piano Spheres, Leonard Stein, was not in the house.
One of the last links to a now-distant era, when such giants as Stravinsky and Schoenberg lived and worked in Los Angeles, Stein died unexpectedly June 24 at the age of 87. Among other things, he was a baseball fan, and it seemed appropriate that the third game of a closely watched World Series was going on as his own innovative, intimate concert series opened its 11th season.
Fortunately, Stein appears to have left Piano Spheres in good shape, for plans are in place for this season and next, with guest pianists augmenting the resident lineup of Gloria Cheng, Vicki Ray, Mark Robson and Susan Svrcek.
Obviously, Cheng's opening program was going to be her memorial to Stein, yet above all it was a statement that the feisty mission of Piano Spheres - to present the new, the unusual and the overlooked - was still in play.
Cheng started with a tiny, mordant masterwork that Stein often performed himself, Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces, Opus 19; the results were heavily legato, with a nice flash of temperament in the fourth piece. A different kind of humor crept into the mix with Conlon Nancarrow's early Prelude and Blues, written before his epic series of player-piano studies yet infused with a similar jazzy, antic spirit.
Cheng tended to downplay the ragtime flair of the Prelude, but the Blues (not really a "blues" per se) received a slow, ambling, stone-faced treatment that heightened its humor.
Then Cheng unveiled something big and special: the first performance of Stephen Andrew Taylor's "Seven Memorials," a splendid sonic tour of natural phenomena all over the globe. The 32-minute piece is really a modern example of old-fashioned tone painting - cascading ripples depicting a Yellowstone geyser, icy struck chords in the treble clef evoking an Antarctic glacier, a pedal-induced haze of ascending and descending figures suggesting the thin atmosphere of a Tibetan plateau etc.
Here, Cheng ravishingly exploited not only Taylor's extraordinarily colorful writing but also the marvelous acoustics of Zipper Hall itself, especially during the resonant, thumping ostinatos of the prepared-piano episode depicting underwater lava flows.
There is also a composer named Stephen James Taylor, whose wanderings toward a volcanic peak - or pique - of rage in "Expressions" seemed like a succinct response to his near-namesake's expansiveness. The fourth movement from Harrison Birtwistle's "Harrison's Clocks," which bears a dedication to Stein, was a formless series of flourishes trailing off into nothing.
At Stein's request, Cheng also presented the West Coast premiere of George Benjamin's "Shadowlines" (it was scheduled for a recital he was forced to cancel last season). The work features tumbling dissonances in a legato cloud and a slow movement that gradually pulls itself together, but nothing as gripping as Benjamin's orchestral music.
Cheng topped off the evening with a melting performance of the slow movement from Ravel's Sonatine. It was the most touching Stein memorial of all.
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
Robson shows versatility
He sparkles with display of speed, control and delicacy as Piano Spheres opens season.
By Mark Swed
Mark Robson opened a new season of Piano Spheres on Tuesday night at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall with a display of dazzling speed, exquisite control and surprising delicacy for a player with his burly strength. The music was unusual, interesting and important. The audience was not large, but the atmosphere was that of a salon of connoisseurs. It was a terrific occasion.
Piano Spheres is a uniquely Los Angeles series. It was started 10 years ago by a local legend, Leonard Stein, as a way, the octogenarian pianist and former secretary to Arnold Schoenberg told Tuesday's audience, for him to keep playing. Gathering four impressive if considerably younger colleagues [Robson, Gloria Cheng, Vicki Ray and Susan Svrcek], he organized the annual programs, during which each pianist plays a recital of music not likely heard anywhere else. All are superb musicians who work gigs around town playing this and that; at Piano Spheres, they are themselves.
With a day job at Los Angeles Opera as assistant chorus master, Robson gets less exposure than some of his other colleagues. Yet he is a born soloist. With a cool manner and stunningly secure technique, he reminds me of a great old-school virtuoso such as the late Jorge Bolet. But his musical ideas are up-to-date. He is even a composer himself, and he included the premiere of a new piece on his program.
The big work of the evening was Busoni's Seven Elegies. Completed in 1907 and lasting nearly 40 minutes, these pieces do a remarkable job of capturing the mood of their musically transitional times. In them, Busoni, a great pianist himself, displayed his roots as a Lisztian virtuoso while at the same time pressing music forward into vague shifting tonalities. One elegy makes futuristic hay with Neopolitan folk tunes; another is a glitteringly impressionist arrangement of "Greensleeves." The best, though, are more somber in a moody, spiritual, Germanic manner.
Robson played all seven with an unfussy surety that, like Busoni's music, was able to communicate two things at once. His brilliant finger work commands its own kind of attention, but the probing seriousness of Robson's style easily took the ears much further than the eyes into the sonic depths of Busoni's mystical harmonies.
Robson's new piece "Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs" - its title taken from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" - displayed the pianist's attraction to other mystical music, especially that of Scriabin and Messiaen. A study in tremolo, it began with a long trill in the right hand, decorated by left-hand flourishes in the lower and upper parts of the keyboard, and it never stopped shimmering for its attractive seven minutes. From there, the transition was easy to the seductive, exotic harmonic language of Szymanowski's "Calypso" from his suite "Métopes."
The recital began with an intriguing rarity, Liszt's "Andante Amoroso," a kind of written-out improvisation on the motif that runs through Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique." The final work was Boulez' "Twelve Notations," 12-bar etudes written by the composer in 1945 that have proved to be the source of some of the French composer's most recent orchestral work.
Robson learned these technically demanding pieces in little time when he replaced an indisposed Mitsuko Uchida at the Ojai Festival in June. He played them impressively then. Now he has more fully absorbed them and he brought exciting character to each one.
Copyright 2003 - Los Angeles Times
October 23, 2003 Los Angeles Times Music Review
Pieces from the American masters
Gloria Cheng charms audiences with provocative and unusual choices.
By Daniel Cariaga
For the best part of a decade, the five brilliant pianists who make up the Piano Spheres team have delighted a sophisticated and growing audience with provocative programs of recent, unusual and neglected areas of the repertory.
At the second concert of the group's 10th season Tuesday night in Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School of Performing Arts, Gloria Cheng continued that tradition with a selection of music by American masters.
The most engaging and pianistically idiomatic works bookended the program: the late Jacob Druckman's "The Seven Deadly Sins" (1955) and William Kraft's "Translucences" (1979).
Both are transparently emotional essays in non-tonal style, and both were delineated by Cheng with force and sensitivity. In Druckman's suite of variations, "Pride" emerges with leonine dignity; "Envy" slithers deviously; "Anger" is not loud, but fast and skittish; and so forth. Kraft's cogent, nine-minute piece deals in multicolored expressivity and a playful serialism.
Kraft was in the audience, as was Steven Stucky, whose recent "Album Leaves," also nine minutes, promises much from a composer who has only lately begun writing for solo piano. It is attractive and idiomatic.
John Harbison's Sonata No. 1, multi-textured and virtuosic, deserves wider currency. Cheng played it, as all the rest of the demanding program, with an assurance and communicativeness that revealed its charms.
A longtime advocate of the thorny music of Elliott Carter, Cheng also played two recent caprices, "Retrouvailles" and "90+" - brief but dense pianistic essays - and the massive "Night Fantasies" (1980). The latter remains disturbing and challenging a quarter-century later.
Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times
on the occasion of the opening of Piano Spheres' 10th anniversary season, is pleased to present
Life Membership
for his extraordinary leadership as
Leonard Stein continues to make a unique and exemplary contribution to the exploration and understanding of new music. He has steadfastly encouraged the performance of new music through innovative presentations such as "Encounters", concerts and lectures at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, and Piano Spheres. He is a generous teacher and mentor, having brought many composers and musicians into the public eye. Through his performances and lectures of, writings about, and editorship of many written and musical works of Arnold Schoenberg he has proved to be a crucial interpreter of that composer's music and thought. Leonard Stein is a treasured friend of composers and their music the world over.
We, the community of Los Angeles composers, members of the American Composers Forum of Los Angeles, wish with this award to express our profound appreciation and gratitude to our friend Leonard Stein.
The Board of Directors
September 30, 2003 Los Angeles, California |