From Music In Cincinnati (http://www.musicincincinnati.com)
concert:nova, dancers, actors in searing theater piece
Mary Ellyn Hutton
Posted: Dec 7, 2011
From “Sarcasms” to DSCH, the chamber ensemble concert:nova illuminated a painful period in history Tuesday night at the Know Theater.
It was the Soviet era, seen through the eyes – and music --- of two of Russia’s greatest composers, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich.
The multi-media production, “Pieces in the Key of Silence,” marked a new collaboration between c:n and Michael Burnham, professor of drama at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Burnham has worked with c:n on programs focusing on composers Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler. Assisted by CCM professor Steven Cahn, Burnham assembled the text from journalistic and biographical materials, as well as poetry by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Ossip Mandelstam, Anna Ahmatova, Sasha Cherny and others.
Performing the roles of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, respectively, were dancer/choreographers Stephen Jacobsen and Jimmy Cunningham. Both are members of the corps de ballet for Cincinnati Ballet and participated with c:n in the new Constella Festival of Music and Fine Arts in October. (Interestingly, Cunningham was Prokofiev on that occasion in the world premiere choreography of Prokofiev’s Quintet, Op. 39.)
The Know stage area was bare save for chairs, music stands and a piano. A drape lit with color (blue) provided the backdrop. A trio of Soviet apparatchiks -- actors Will Kiley, Ellie Jameson and Callie Schuttera, who also narrated and spoke the composers’ lines -- introduced Prokofiev. Kiley (in the words of Aaron Copland): “Prokofiev? He was friendly, but not an easy guy to talk to. He was boyish, easily bored, even impolite at times. He was very bright and outspoken.” Pianist Albert Mühlböck began the musical program with excerpts from Prokofiev’s “Sarcasms,” Op. 17 (1912-14), and “Visions Fugitives,” Op. 22 (1915-17).
Dating from Prokofiev’s early to mid-twenties, both works reflect the brash, bold young composer, who, flushed with success, could say (Jameson): “I care nothing for politics. I am a composer. Any government that lets me write my music in peace, publishes everything I compose . . . and performs every note that comes from my pen is all right with me.” Beginning with “Tempestoso” from “Sarcasms,” a percussive, polytonal movement, Mühlböck evoked the rebel not yet brought down by the system. As Prokofiev, Jacobsen danced with confidence, exertion and considerable flair (both dancers choreographed their parts).
The apparatchiks provided a recurring commentary on all that took place during the evening: “All in the name of progress. All just to make things better.”
It was Shostakovich’s turn next. Cunningham looked the part, up to the round, wire-rimmed glasses he wore, maintaining the tip-lipped seriousness associated with the composer and dancing with lightness and agility. The c:n quartet, violinists Anna Reider and Heidi Yenney, violist Joanne Wojtowicz and cellist Ted Nelson, performed the first movement (Moderato) of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 1, Op. 49 (1938), a conservative work in the Russian tradition, without the modernity exhibited by most of his earlier music.
Mühlböck closed the first half powerfully with the second and third movements of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 8. (1944). The scenario was now conflict, with the three apparatchiks surrounding Jacobsen, who pushed them away with a sneer on his face. Apparatchik (Kiley): “You are a brave man, they tell me.” Prokofiev (Schuttera): “I tried to say what I thought loud enough to be heard.” All: “A time will come to have done with those strange times when a man who was simply honest was called brave.”
The famous denunciation of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” followed intermission. In 1936, Pravda published a scathing review of the opera that put the composer on notice that his life could be in danger. (“This is a game of unintelligibility than can end in tears,” read the review.) Then, isolating Shostakovich further, his friend Ivan Sollertinsky died. To set the scene, Mühlböck, Reider and Nelson performed the Largo from Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor (1944). To make it even more poignant, Cunningham danced with Sollertinsky’s corpse (Jacobsen).
The stage lighting blazed red to illustrate the next blow for the composers, the 1948 decree by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, censuring them for “anti-revolutionary, anti-people formalism.” Prokofiev showed his coolness by talking during Andrei Zhdanov’s speech. Shostakovich wrote a letter of contrition, later telling his friends (Kiley): “I read like a wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-out paper doll hanging on a string.”
Then it was March 5, 1953, the day both Prokofiev and Stalin died (all attention was paid to Stalin). As a kind of latter-day tribute, Nelson and Mühlböck performed the melodic, cheerful Andante grave from the composer’s Cello Sonata in C Major, Op. 119 (1948). Jacobsen danced affectingly here, with some awe-inspiring spins and jumps, then was carried off in death by the three apparatchiks.
In 1960, Shostakovich was forced to join the Communist Party. The evening’s real threnody took place here, with the string quartet performing his Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 110 (1960). The work is pervaded by Shostakovich’s motto figure, DSCH (D, E-flat, C, B in German transliteration). According to his friend Lev Lebedinsky (Schuttera), Shostakovich intended it to be his final work and to kill himself after completing it.
Led with intensity by Reider, the quartet’s playing was touching, gripping and deeply felt, all reflected in Cunningham’s sensitive choreography. Both in struggling with the apparatchiks and solo, he seemed to be dancing himself to death. At one point, he made dramatic grasping motions, reaching out for something, then pulling it to his chest. The lights turned purple as the hammer blows of the fourth movement (Largo) began. During the poignant cello solo heard here (Nelson), he danced briefly with Schuttera (Shostakovich’s daughter?). As the Quartet came to its heartbreaking end, he took off his glasses and curled up on the floor in front of the musicians.
The apparatchiks had the last (rueful) word: “Let’s drink to this – that things don’t get any better.”
The next concert by concert:nova is “Shut Up and Play the Zappa,” an introduction to Frank Zappa the classical composer, January 22 at 8 p.m. at the 20th Century Theater in Oakley. Information at www.concertnova.com
From Music In Cincinnati (http://www.musicincincinnati.com)
Cincinnati Art Museum a Perfect Venue for concert:nova's baroque
November 6, 2010
by Mary Ellyn Hutton
The chamber ensemble concert:nova has performed in coffee shops, bars, restaurants, shopping malls and "found spaces" of all kinds.
November 2 they found space beneath the rotunda in the Great Hall of the Cincinnati Art Museum. And what a handsome spot to open their 2010-2011 season, especially with baroque music on tap. The program -- which spanned two evenings, with different repertoire November 3 -- was entitled "Two-Part Invention: A Festival of Baroque Music."
The Great Hall's double staircase framed members of c:n and guest artists, including harpsichordist Vivian Montgomery, who performed on a reproduction 17th-century Florentine instrument built by Douglas Sutherland of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Blue marble columns topped by Corinthian capitals rose from the galleries on the upper floor. Red and gold spotlights cast a soft, warm glow. Listeners sat in a semi-circle adjacent to the gallery housing the Museum's Ancient Egyptian exhibits. The floor was laid with carpet to absorb excess reverberation.
Read the full article HERE!
Schoenberg with a Heart
April 6, 2009
Posted in: Reviews
By Mary Ellyn Hutton
The most profound words heard Sunday evening at the concert:nova presentation "Demystifying Schoenberg" -- other than his music itself -- were these, uttered by actor Michael Burnham: "No one wanted to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me."
As Burnham explained -- in an astonishing performance as the composer who revolutionized music in the 20th century -- this is how Schoenberg answered an officer in the Austrian army in World War I who asked him if he were "this notorious Schoenberg." His reputation as the composer who had "emancipated dissonance" had preceded him.
The concert, held on the "garden" level ground floor of the Metaphor building on Reading Road in Over-the-Rhine, drew a capacity audience (well over 100 with extra chairs brought in). This is something of a feat for the still fear-inducing composer, especially on a rainy night with tornado warnings in effect.
Central to it was Burnham, whose German accent, wire-rimmed glasses poised on the end of his nose, and wry and often impassioned delivery imparted an unforgettable humanity to the composer. His lines were drawn from Schoenberg's writings and comments, tailored to the music on the concert. It was a tour de force that simply must become a permanent part of C:N's repertoire.
So why did somebody have to be the "notorious" Schoenberg?
When the Viennese composer (born 1874) came along, traditional harmony --i.e. key-centered music that sounds "good" to the ears -- had been stretched to the breaking point by composers like Mahler, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Scriabin, etc.
Now what? That was the question. Schoenberg did not shrink from seeking an answer. Free atonality (he preferred to call it "pantonality") was OK as far as it went, but it needed to have some kind of structure to build on. After much consideration (and vitriol for freeing "dissonance"), he invented one with what he defined as the "method of composing with 12 tones related only with one another."
So-called "12-tone" or serial music was born and with it, the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg and his pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg, as successors to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, or the First Viennese School).
The music on Sunday's program, performed by members of the chamber ensemble concert:nova with soprano Meng-Chun Lin, pianist/Schoenberg scholar Steven Cahn and conductor Kenneth Lam, spanned Schoenberg's stylistic development.
There were excerpts from his light-hearted, completely tonal Cabaret Songs (1901) to his Serenade, Op. 24 (1924), where the possibilities of 12-tone composition bloom artistically (not just intellectually). In between were selections from his Op, 23 Piano Pieces (1920-21), "Book of the Hanging Gardens" (1910) and expressionistic "Pierrot Lunaire" (1912). In "Pierrot," now one of his most often performed works, the "reciter" (singer) employs Sprechstimme or "speech-voice," where the voice falls away from sung pitches in speech-like fashion.
The concert ended with the 1909 Chamber Symphony No. 1, where Schoenberg's identity as an arch-romantic in the Strauss/Mahler tradition speaks loud and clear.
Meng-Chun Lin, a splendid soprano currently pursuing her doctor of musical arts degree at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, inhabited everything she sang, beginning with three of the Cabaret Songs, "Galathea," "Mahnung" ("Warning") and Aria from "The Mirror of Arcadia." All were delivered in a full, rich voice shaded with expression and enhanced with delightful stage acting. Cahn's accompaniment set the theatrical mood vividly.
Lin communicated stark seriousness, her gaze fixed forward, in numbers three, four and ten from "Book of the Hanging Gardens," a set of despairing love poetry for voice and piano completed during a marital crisis (Schoenberg's first wife Mathilde eloped briefly with a painter).
She handled her Sprechstimme to telling effect in three excerpts from "Pierrot" -- "Mondestrunken" ("Moondrunk"), "Valse de Chopin" (a horrific waltz) and "O Alter Duft" ("O Ancient Fragrance"), conveying well its sickly mix of madness and calculation. She was joined here by C:N members Heidi Yenney (violin/viola), Randolph Bowman (flute/piccolo), Ronald Aufmann (clarinet/bass clarinet) and Marcus Kuchle (piano), all keenly in tune with the bizarre melodrama.
Cahn, professor of theory at CCM who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Schoenberg, exemplified one of the composer's famous remarks in two of the Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23, "Sehr langsam" and "Sehr rasch" ("Very slowly" and "Very quickly"). These aphoristic works -- the two pieces are about three-minutes' total -- were among his first experiments with 12-tone writing and, as such, posed a challenge for its first listeners, including Berg. Said Schoenberg in effect: "My music is not bad, just performed badly." Cahn, who obviously "gets" this music, performed them commitedly and extremely well.
Following intermission -- a delicious few moments with complimentary wine and snacks for the crowd -- the concert concluded with two of the composer's works for larger ensemble.
Serenade, Op. 24, featured violinist Tatiana Berman, violist Yenney, cellist Christina Coletta, clarinetist Jonathan Gunn, bass clarinetist Aufmann, guitarist Richard Goering and Brian Deyo on mandolin. Lam conducted. The Serenade is, as Cahn put it, "one beautiful melody after another," and, though composed using Schoenberg's 12-tone method, it is. The contrast of instrumental colors contributes to the ear-pleasing effect, with guitar and mandolin against the bowed/plucked strings and woodwind timbres. Heard were "Lied" (a song without words) and "Tantzscene" ("Dance scene"). Berman's distinctively sweet tone illuminated "Lied," while "Tantzscene" manifested shape, regular rhythms and melody, including a charming clarinet solo with accompaniment. What more could anyone want?
If there were any doubts about the emotion in Schoenberg's music -- an object of the program was to dispel that notion, said artistic director/C:N clarinetist Ixi Chen -- they were dispelled with the concluding Chamber Symphony No. 1, led with considerable energy and insight by Lam.
The ensemble comprised violinists Mauricio Aguiar and Berman, violist Yenney, cellist Coletta, double bassist Owen Lee, flutist Bowman, clarinetists Jonathan Gunn, Chen and Aufmann, oboists Dwight Parry and Lon Bussell, bassoonists Hugh Michie and Jennifer Monroe and French hornists Elizabeth Freimuth and Lisa Conway. One would have thought an undiscovered work by Richard Strauss had just come to light, so filled with passion (and downright Straussian heroism) the music was.
The 20-minute work falls into several distinct sections, including a lovely slow "movement" introduced by double bass harmonics. At one point, there was a clue of the direction the composer was about to take with harmony in an upward succession of fourths. Tonal harmony is built on triads (thirds).
Freimuth and Conway soared at the end in a full-bodied conclusion that drew whoops from the crowd.
Look for C:N, which has performed in many different kinds of venues, including clubs, bars, restaurants and museums, to appear in local jazz clubs in the near future. Spotted in the crowd Sunday were prominent members of Cincinnati's jazz community.
© Copyright 2009 by Music in Cincinnati
