Adams and Glass

Minimalism Jukebox
Adams and Glass

John Adams, the chief curator of the “Minimalism Jukebox” concerts at the LA Phil during March, was in town over the weekend to conduct his “Harmonielehre” and excerpts from Philip Glass’s opera “Akhnaten”. The LA Master Chorale performed with the orchestra. My God the Master Chorale sounded great. Grant Gershon, their director, had thoroughly prepared them. Sadly, the opera excerpts seemed like a waste of outstanding resources. The piece sounded like it could work as a film track to Stargate. (I love that movie!) but it didn’t hold much interest as concert performance of opera music. That’s a problematic proposition anyway, but it can work. Take the LA Phil concert performances of Tristan last year.
But the Glass - how many times can you hear two chords moving by third relations before you want to crawl out of your skin? Inside my head I was pleading, OK, I get it, give me a surprise or two. There was a counter-tenor solo that was the most successful piece of the excerpts, sung beautifully by Daniel Bubeck (Akhnaten) and played with finesse. But the rest was either silly or self-conscious or both. Yet the Master Chorale sounded great singing it and the orchestra played well. It just didn’t add up to much.
I like Glass’s film scores to “Koyaanisqatsi”, “Kundun”, “The Thin Blue Line” and “The Hours”. Akhenaton is dull.
Glass has a great quote in the program notes. He says, “I sometimes say that, for a composer, the first thing to do is to find your voice and the second is to get rid of it. Mostly I try to get rid of it.”
Yet, as substantial as this quote is, I just couldn’t buy into it after hearing “Akhnaten”. It sounds like so many other Glass pieces. He is repeating formulaic musical elements. The piece hangs on to tired stylistic mannerisms associated with his established ‘voice’.
The Glass excerpts came off the worse next to the Adams. The pairing of them showed just how pallid the material of the Glass is compared with the material of Harmonielehre. The latter has more reach and depth, colorful use of the orchestra, a sense of big form, finer detail.
I realize that Glass is writing theatrical music and that this is music meant for the stage. I appreciate that there is a difference between theatrical and dramatic music. But sadly Glass’s music fell short on both counts.
In his program note to Harmonielehre, Adams refers to his attempt to wed minimalism with late Romanticism as a “conceit that could only be attempted once”. That comment distances him from this “strange work” (his quote) since he feels the need to make a mild apology for its sentiments and ambition. He also places it within a post-modern contextual reaction to Schoenberg et al but without any self-conscious irony (as for example we hear in Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles for example, though Adams doesn’t mention that work).
I remember when I first heard the work many years ago I did not like it because of its non-purist minimalist aesthetic and its obvious Mahler/Sibelius connections. Now I like it for those reasons. But at the concert I was nagged by a persistent thought as I was listening. The piece invited me to reflect on those great works to which it owes so much, Mahler 10, Sibelius 4 for example. It was a kind of lens through which I could hear those works in a contemporary context, but Adam’s piece simply didn’t have the direct punch that those works have. It has a kind of indirect, slightly diluted punch, and as much as it tries to be comfortable with fin de siecle gesture and harmony, it never quite transcends. That’s what was nagging me – as a work it establishes its referential sources, shares in their symphonic glory, and develops itself with craft and skill. But it doesn’t transcend. It doesn’t propel itself into a self-sustained orbit as promised by the dream that was behind those opening chords of the piece.
It is certainly an ambitious, smart and expressive piece. He goes for the bold gesture, the long line, the big climax. I am a huge fan of Adams and his music. But this particular piece is - in the end - like a big beautiful breath of life support into a patient on the table rather than a birth of something new and original.

LA Phil all-Steve Reich concert

Minimalism Jukebox
Steve Reich

The all Steve Reich concert at Disney Hall featured Synergy Vocals singing Tehillim with members of the LA Phil on strings, winds, percussion. Who are Synergy Vocals I wondered? They have a web site and hail from the UK from what I can tell. From the looks of it, they have a pretty heady endorsement from Steve Reich too. So I was all the more surprised when I heard their unstable, sometimes sloppy, and sloooow rendition of Tehillim with the LA Phil. More on that later.
I love “Tehillim”. It is a masterpiece. There just doesn’t seem to be one false step in it. I feel the same about his “Sextet” and “Music for 18 Musicians”. “Tehillim” is very hard to perform, particularly for the singers and I would venture to say, the maraca player. And it’s worth every ounce of effort. I have conducted a performance of it myself a few years back. Confession: in every rehearsal and even in the performance, I would zone out at some place in the score – never the same place twice – because of its sheer beauty. Of course when it happened a sudden thought would jolt me out of it: “danger, where am I?” Now I don’t mean to sound cavalier about this because it is a serious matter when it happens, particularly when you have performers watching you with that look in their eye that says “you’d better cue me or …” – and especially if this performer is one of the sopranos who happens to be your wife (yes, this did happen!). Fortunately during the performance, it didn’t derail because my friend for life who was playing clarinet came in when he was supposed to and all was set right! Thank you forever, J.
No amount of score preparation and practice could prepare me for the fact that this would happen at least once in every performance or reading but never predictably in the same place. Since then, I have heard the piece performed a couple of times and have spoken to the conductors. They related the same story to me – that they too had zoned out. So we commiserated.
But this conductor, Stefan Asbury – also hailing from the UK - who led the Reich concert had no such propensity for zoning out. He was impressive though he gave a rather slow and relaxed rendition of the score, perhaps too sluggish in the end. Still, he embodied the score, giving cues and shaping phrases while keeping the continuously shifting metrical patterns clear. I know – this is the job of any good conductor, but this piece presents special challenges. There simply isn’t any place in the score where your concentration can let up for a nanosecond. And things move quickly most of the time though in Asbury’s performance things moved much less urgently.
The Synergy Vocals singers were surprisingly unstable at the outset. There were a few tuning issues here and also elsewhere in the performance. They weren’t at all helped, in fact terribly harmed, by the abysmal sound reinforcement. Who in the world does the sound at Disney Hall? They should seriously consider getting another sound engineer in there or at least hiring a consultant to work with the sound engineer. The score calls for amplification, but the balances were terrible. The second soprano who opens the piece was way over-amplified while the first soprano was barely audible. In fact at the opening of the piece it seemed like the sound engineer was still dialing in folks and didn’t have a clue as to balances. It didn’t sound like the strings and winds were amplified at all. So not only were the balances terrible among the vocal quartet, they were non-existent among the vocalists and instrumentalists. And I spoke with a friend after the concert who sat behind the orchestra and he said the same thing about the balances. Apparently it wasn’t a function of where I was sitting in the hall – the balcony in the center.
The problem is that the terrible sound engineering made the piece very difficult to discern. You could barely hear the strings and winds when they played alone. And the quality of the singing was not at a musical level one would expect of the LA Philharmonic with the possible exception of the duet between soprano 2 and 4 in Part III. At the climax in Part IV the high soprano was out of gas and catastrophically missed her highest note in the piece. This was a disappointing performance compounded by the really poor sound design work.
At the beginning, before the concert, the general manager of the LA Phil came out on stage and told us that the concert was being recorded directly for Apple iTunes store downloading – the first collaboration of its kind between any orchestra and Apple. This is cool. The audience was very cooperative, holding its applause and listening raptly. There wasn’t the kind of jump out of your skin enthusiasm as there had been for the Riley “In C” performance a few days earlier, probably because we were told to behave, but it was a respectful and supportive crowd. The problem is - who would want to download this performance with the disabling sound problems? On second thought, I’d be curious about that download. Maybe the LA Phil post-produced and pitch corrected and balanced it. There’s no way I could imagine the LA Phil would want to release this performance for the iTunes store without some serious post-production work.
Update – I went to the Apple iTunes store and there it is. You can link to it from the la phil website too.
I listened to a few of the excerpts from “Tehillim” and this is a very different mix than I heard live. But the tuning issues and sluggishness are still there. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Riley - Minimalism Jukebox at Los Angeles Philharmonic

Los Angeles Philharmonic "Minimalism Jukebox", March '06
“In C”

I went to several of the Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts at Disney Hall for the Minimalism Jukebox festival. First of all, congratulations and thank you to the LA Phil for having the courage to throw their weight behind the idea and get John Adams here to curate it.
I absolutely loved the performance of Terry Riley's minimalist landmark "In C", where there were 80-100 musicians on the stage – 2 grand pianos, 4 uprights, many synthesizers, guitars, lots of percussion including timpani, saxes, a chorus, and of course a host of strings, winds and brass. The only thing missing was the Disney Hall organ. And when the timpani came in, around module 15, it caused a ripple of excitement among audience members where I was sitting, myself included. How many times do you get to hear a performance of “In C” with timpani?!
The piece filled the hall. And the performance was not only well played, but also planned out with a trajectory that was more than just about everyone getting softer then louder then softer then louder.... The performance was organized around numbered flash cards corresponding to the module numbers that were signaled from the podium. Players entered pretty much on cue, but with some give and take as to timing decisions. One can infer from Riley’s instructions in the score that such an interpretation would be welcome. The piece took on a scale and scope and shape that was truly symphonic and took advantage of the colors of this massive orchestra. And it sounded and looked like it was just a lot of fun to play.
It was especially surprising to me how well some of the modules worked with full-on brass – sounding absolutely Bruckner-esque in places! Who would have thought that? But then, Bruckner sometimes sounds like a proto-minimalist to me, the guy who took all that E-flat pedal at the beginning of Das Rheingold to heart and ran with it. After the performance, audience members not only gave it a standing ovation, but I noticed several of them near the front jumping up and down with glee, barely able to hold in their enthusiasm. I felt refreshed and joyful after the performance, and thankful too. Thank you Terry Riley. This piece has survived well and has the rare chameleon-like ability to actually pull off its own reinvention and shape-shift itself with every performance in any given context. I’ve heard it many times, though this is the first symphony hall version I have ever heard. Each time is a revelation to me. CalArts School of Music Dean, David Rosenboom (himself a fascinating composer and one of the original performers at the premiere of “In C” in 1964) led the performance from the podium on violin, and fellow CalArts students and faculty made up the outstanding orchestra. Thank you to them too.
The piece by Terry Jennings that preceded this was tedious. It reminded me of that Saturday Night Live skit from the first season with the dead string quartet, the difference being that the skit was really funny. In the skit there’s a string quartet and each player is dead, having been propped up by a stage hand, with bows placed across the strings. All is still, and then the first violinist starts to teeter, in slow motion, and eventually crashes into the second violinist. The fall causes the bow to drag across a string in the process. And this causes a chain reaction where the second violinist, then violist, and finally cellist go through the same motion, like dominoes. It’s hilarious. Each dead player produces one note before crashing into the next player. It’s conceptual and minimal art and it’s smart and funny! (This reminds me, check out the Peter Fischli and David Weiss film The Way Things Go.
The string quartet by Jennings, a protégé of LaMonte Young in the 60’s, however, lacked the humor certainly. It wasn’t meant to be funny. Although it shares in the early ground breaking purist drone long-tone brand of minimalism propounded by Young, I found it excruciatingly dull. It was so quiet that I could hear people’s stomachs roaring a few aisles down from me. And to add to my own misery I had one of those nightmare scenarios where as soon as the lights went down and the musicians’ bows were drawn and about to produce the very first note of the piece, right on cue I got a powerful tickle in the back of my throat and unbelievably strong urge to cough. Anyone who knows Disney Hall realizes that the slightest noise is amplified through the whole building; and in a piece this quiet, it would be all the more disturbing. So I spent the next 30 minutes of the piece controlling this urge. I couldn’t just get up and leave because I was in the middle of the aisle and there’s no room to squeeze by anyone. Everyone would have had to get up to let me by, causing a loud stir just as the piece was getting underway. It was quite a predicament. I suppose looking at it another way it was good practice for me in controlling coughing urges. The piece went on and on for 40 minutes, all of it pppp to pp dynamic, long drawn out notes and plenty of silence. Granted, my reaction to the piece was colored by my miserable condition. But I also think that the piece contributed substantially to it.
Oh by the way, my seat was in row ‘C’ in section ‘E’ on the house right side of the hall. The first 2 notes of the first module of “In C” are C-E. I did get some goofy delight out of that little coincidence.