Boulez at the Armory and More

I went with our friend David M. to hear Pierre Boulez's "Repons" at the Park Avenue Armory.   It was a truly memorable concert.   Repons is composed for an orchestra of 24 musicians, located in the center of the performing space, and six soloists (2 pianos, vibraphone, marimba, harp, and cimbalom) stationed at the perimeters of the performing space.   The music of the soloists is amplified and sonically transformed through the use of computer electronics, and then redistributed in varying ways through the space via a number of speakers hanging in the air.   In other words, it is a hugely complex enterprise, and rarely done.  (I actually heard the US premiere in 1986 in the Columbia University Gymnasium, whose acoustics and ambience left a great deal to be desired.)  The people at the Armory, though, apparently have a lot of money, and the set up and the execution of the piece were first class.   What you hear in the piece to a certain extent depends on where you are sitting, since all the soloist's sounds are moving around in space.   The Armory people had a brilliant idea; they performed the 50 minute piece twice, and everyone in the audience sat in a different seat for the second performance.   (I had anticipated that this would be a rather complex maneuver to execute, but the solution was quite simple.  Everyone sat in the same named seat (Section B, Row F, Seat 9), but at intermission they moved all the section labels around.   I was extremely grateful for the second performance.  In a work of such dazzling complexity, things which seemed like chaos on first hearing suddenly seemed lucid on the second hearing.
But the work is an extremely dense and intricate web of sounds; there are short moments of sustained clarity which are suddenly interrupted by violent swarms of notes, ricocheting around the hall.   Boulez thinks not just in terms of notes, but rather gestures and bursts of activity in sudden transformations.  He aims for a kind of unpredictability.  The spatial element is crucial; you really perceive the whole space as one giant resonating instrument.  This was one case when the gigantic space of the Armory was wonderful.   This cannot be experienced on YouTube, thank you.   Afterwards, thinking about the piece, I remembered the young Boulez's famous statement in the late 1940's to the effect that the past must be destroyed and music reinvented from scratch.   That he actually did that and remained consistently devoted to that aesthetic throughout is career is amazing; his music really doesn't sound like anything that came before it.  (Though you certainly can hear traces of Debussy and Stravinsky if you really try hard.)

Here are some pictures of the stage setup in the Armory, courtesy of their Facebook page.
As you can see, the lighting design was amazing.

Wow!

(It is worth noting that as of a week after this concert, the New York Times has yet to review it.   They do have space on their on line music pages, though, for an article about the sale of Jennifer Lopez's penthouse apartment. Enough said.)


The night before, David and I heard a concert of the music of another great 1950's modernist, Thelonius Monk.   The concert was performed by the "Artist's Diploma Ensemble" at Juilliard, six young men from assorted countries around the world.   The performers had arranged the music themselves, and the selections were from lesser known areas of the Monk repertoire, such as "Brake's Sake" and "Boo Boo's Birthday".   The tune "Stuffy Turkey" was listed in the program, but I don't know if they played it.   The concert was excellent; the ensemble had made some very unusual arrangements, frequently complex, and played them flawlessly.   For example, the melody in "Ruby My Dear" was at times played by a bowed bass.   At no times, though, did I feel they were violating the spirit of Monk.  On the contrary, I think Monk's compositions benefitted from the arrangements.   The pianist Addison Frei was consistently brilliant, channeling Monk's piano style, while also making it his own.  His solos were always interesting.   The bass player and the drummer were equally excellent.  I loved how the drummer consistently played with the rhythm and kept things together while the pianist and others were venturing into contrarian rhythmic territories.

At the end of the concert, I did reflect on how the music composed by an African-American composer in the middle of the twentieth century was now being transformed by six young white men (from 5 different countries) enrolled at a prestigious school of music.   I don't have the time or inclination to fully explore what this means, I mention it only in passing as something to contemplate.   (This year is the centenary of Monk's birth, so we are hearing lots of Monk's music, played by virtually every instrumental combination imaginable.   Well, maybe not a Japanese koto ensemble, though I could be wrong.)


A few days later, I went to see and hear the New York City Ballet in a program of three violin concertos.  I went primarily because NYC Ballet is not doing their usual Stravinsky-Balanchine "Black and White" programs this fall.  (I need my "Agon"!)   The Balachine/Stravinsky "Violin Concerto" was on the program, and I was curious to see what Jerome Robbins had made out of the Berg Violin Concerto.  The program began, however, with a ballet by Peter Martins, set to John Corigliano's violin concerto, based on his score for the movie "The Red Violin".   The piece is mostly neo-romantic mush.  Corigliano does write very effectively for orchestra, and parts of the scherzo were interesting, but on the whole, I disliked the music.   And the choreography by Martins was mostly anodyne.   The violin soloist, however, was excellent.

The second piece was choreographed by Jerome Robbins and set to Berg's wonderful Violin Concerto.   Berg wrote the concerto after the death of young Manon Gropius, and is dedicated "to the memory of an angel".   The performance of the music was quite good, and I was very happy to hear it performed live.  The choreography took the implied musical program seriously, and there was a very moving pas de deux where the angel dances with death.   I was impressed.
But the Balanchine/Stravinsky Violin Concerto was a knockout.   Seeing Balanchine's choreography after others was like a breath of fresh air; such inventiveness, such musicality!   Balanchine frequently referred to this piece as one of his favorites, and you can see and hear why.  Like most of Balanchine's work with Stravinsky, the piece gets better and better the more you see it.   It is at times very witty was well as being very moving.   My only complaint about the performance would be that of the violin soloist, the NYC Ballet Orchestra's concertmaster, whose playing is really substandard.  You would think with all the incredible young violin talent out there in the world, they could find someone better.

(It should also be noted that the downward spiral of the New York Times cultural coverage continues, as this fall's NYC Ballet performances were sketchily reviewed in one single wrap-up, rather than individually as has been the case in the past.)


I finished up a busy week of performances by going with David to hear the Juilliard Big Band Jazz Orchestra perform arrangements by Fletcher Henderson, Eddie Durham, and Bill Chalis.   It was conducted by Vince Giordano, who may know more about 1920's and 1930's swing music the anyone else on the planet.   It is a sheer delight to hear the meticulously recreated sound of the big band orchestras of that period played live.   (The transcriptions were done by some people with very good ears who painstakingly listen to the recordings, as there is very little surviving written material from this period.)  The sheer inventiveness of the arrangements is wonderful; all of the ideas are compressed, as the pieces were all about three minutes long, owing to the length restrictions of the 78 rpm recordings of the time.   The quality of the music itself was not as high as that of a similar concert we heard last year of Ellington's music.   Though I did enjoy an arrangement of Ravel's "Bolero", which lasted three minutes and which I think I prefer to original version.   (It was often the case that an arranger would be asked to create a big band version of a popular song or melody that had nothing of a "swing" sound to it.   The arrangers would always oblige.)