Farallon

I'm at a gathering of early music fanatics, nerds, experts, amateurs, devotees. It's Amherst Early Music, going now for several decades, but not currently taking place in Amherst. We're at the beautiful campus of Connecticut College, overlooking Long Island Sound, and, yes, there is a nice breeze off the sound and the temperatures are pleasant.

I'm working on recorder techniques, some Renaissance music, some baroque, singing Schütz's incredible German Requiem (Deutsches Exequien). I did some English country dancing tonight, too, to get the feet moving as well as the fingers, the tongue, the diaphragm, and all the rest that you need to sing and play.

Tonight there was a concert by the Bay-area recorder quartet named Farallon. Since the theme of this workshop is German music, they played from about 8 centuries of German composers, from Hildegard to Bach (the art of the fugue). These four people must have played about 25 recorders total.

Most was played on Renaissance recorders, which have wider bores and much less dependable fingering and intonation than the more stable and standard Baroque recorder.

The Hildegard piece (their arrangement) took advantage of the rich, open, wide tone of that recorder, creating a mood of meditative chanting with octave drones while the wonderful melodies spun out.

Three pieces by the early 16th-century master Ludwig Senfl showed the intricacy and complexity that the Renaissance courts demanded (Senfl worked for the Emperor Maximilian): I got the sense that these courts (like the Tudors, about whom Hilary Mantel has just now been writing her dark novels) must have loved intrigue, political complications and machinations, if they loved this fascinating but often inscrutable music. You can hear Farallon play Senfl on YouTube. They also have a CD of Senfl.

Pieces from the anonymous anthology called the Glogauer Liederbuch (late 15th century) showed a remarkable modernity, if it is fair to use that term about something that of course owes no debt to our confused era. Their polyrhythms showed up beautifully on the clear recorder quartet. A little less successful to my taste was their transcription of an 18th-century orchestral suite: the obviously-written-for-strings gestures didn't translate terribly well. A very slinky version of "Bei mir bist du schön" was a great encore.

The dangers of a recorder quartet are many: two of the biggest are bad tuning and boring playing. The tuning was incredible here: octaves, fifths, and unisons stunningly clear. And the playing was exciting at all points: these are virtuosos, and they put to rest that old saw that the recorder is only good for playing "Hot Cross Buns."

Being at a lute recital is like going out of a noisy intersection to a path in the redwood forest: you hear differently. The amplification of motors, TVs, life, has to be, is ideally, pushed aside and an older acoustic takes over. It's older, and at the same time, newer: it opens up the ears instead of shutting them down. We lean forward, ask more of the ears and the eyes (the movement of the fingers on the strings cues us to what we are hearing). It's a world of spruce and gut, not Sony and gasoline.


Last weekend I went to Cleveland to hear the lutenist Paul O'Dette. My writeup from clevelandclassical.com is here:  http://www.clevelandclassical.com/062612olsadetterev

Music in Indianapolis

I'm in Indianapolis for a family graduation, but I got to attend the Indy Symphony Thursday matinee concert. I felt like a retiree, since grading is finished and I have some 'free' time.

This city is amazing, to support a beautiful downtown (canals, murals, plazas, and a renovated war memorial column smack in the middle of the city) and a full-time orchestra. The hall is right downtown, too.


Moreover, they dared to play Pendercki! The Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima sounded great in the hands of the new, young music director, Polish-born Krzysztof Urbański, who was in command not only of the 70-odd timed sections of the piece but also of the hundreds of entrances, swerves, flutters, thumps, barks and moans that the string players have in this complicated and intricate score. It's a sad and grieving piece, but strangely listening to it--or more accurately, feeling its soundscapes in my chest--I felt remarkably at peace.


The audience seemed to like it, not least because an unidentified but very articulate lecturer had spoken for 15 minutes before the concert about why the piece was important, how it was written (with projections of the score, and comparisons to a standard classical score). A great idea, turning a captive audience into a willing one.

They also stayed because the second piece was the Brahms violin concerto with Hoosier Josh Bell. Bell drove the orchestra, cajoled them, challenged them to faster bow speeds, in short, played chamber music with them. He was best in the third movement, where the hellacious passagework just flew off his fingers with gypsy nonchalance.


After the concert I got to meet principal violist Mike Strauss, who is coming to Oberlin as a faculty member this year. Oberlin's gain; Indy's loss. The violas sounded great in counterpoint with Josh Bell, but of course Brahms did know how to write for the viola!




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Mozart in Cleveland

My review of a wonderful concert -- Mozart, Uchida, the Cleveland Orchestra...


Thursday evening, while two miles west of Severance Hall another home team played (and lost) in a record-setting sixteen innings, the Cleveland Orchestra played and won.