And We Like Sheep

We heard Louis Andreissen's "Die Materie", as staged by Heiner Goebbels in the Park Avenue Armory.  "Die Materie" was written in the mid 1980's, and is a kind of symphony/oratorio/opera hybrid, originally conceived in collaboration with Robert Wilson.   The subject, "matter" in English, is varied and complex, with texts ranging from the diaries of Marie Curie to ship building manuals.   What Goebbels has done, however, is a kind of transformation of Andreissen's  original musical conception into a spectacular event for arena-sized spaces, like the Park Avenue Armory. (It was originally commissioned for a very large space at a festival in Germany.)   Which means, of course, that everything is amplified through loudspeakers.   The famous introduction to the piece, when a very loud chord is repeated 144 times, was striking; you could hear the reverberation of the single chords echoing across the vast space.   The amplification was superbly done, but, at the same time, I found myself wondering what the piece really sounded like.   But the big excitement, though, and what the sellout crowds came for, was the spectacle of the staging.  (It goes without saying that, had the NY Philharmonic put on a concert performance of the piece, no one would have come.)   It was indeed an extraordinary spectacle, and an event I will never forget.   The most spectacular part was the fourth moment, when Goebbels brought 100 live sheep into the arena, while  illuminated zeppelins floated through the space above them.   What it actually had to do with the music I have no idea, but the effect was extraordinary, especially once the sheep stopped humping each other and the audience giggles receded .    The occasional "baa" blended in nicely with the music, and eventually the smell of the sheep wafted in our direction.  It was fascinating to watch the both the predictability of the sheep movements (they do like to be a herd) and the actual unpredictability of individual movements, as individuals would sometimes detach themselves and start a sudden quick movement in a different direction.  But ultimately, it was one of those image/music moments that resist easy explanation but somehow grip you.

Images from the web:

Another movement focused on Piet Mondrian, with a kind of Boogie-woogie music representing Mondrian's late infatuation with that music in New York.   At a certain point, the orchestra, which had been in the middle of the audience sitting in the bleachers, began to slowly move on a platform to the center of the hall. It made for an interesting acoustic phenomenon, as the direct sound of the orchestra began to compete with the amplified sound from the speakers.   And there were these extraordinary giant moving pendulums, gyrating constantly, all illuminated in Mondrian colors.

The opening scene appears with tents, illuminated from within; the tents presumably containing ship builders.

A choir of 17th century Dutch men (actually half of them were women)

And much, much more....

We were very lucky to have been able to see and hear this event.  It was clear the the organizers were extremely well prepared, and obviously no expense was spared.  (There were many articles in the media about the efforts involved in staging with 100 sheep, and the inevitable comparison with opera singers.) It also made me want to sit down and hear an actual performance of the music with a live orchestra in a concert hall.



We also heard a performance of Hans Abrahamsen's "Schee" (snow in German), done at Miller Theater's composer portrait series.   I had greatly admired Abrahamsen's piece with Barbara Hannigan and the Cleveland orchestra in January, and was eager to hear another piece.  It was for nine instruments: three strings, three winds, two pianos and percussion.   The piece is about an hour long, and all of it is written in canons.   As a whole, the piece was too minimal and spartan for my ears, at least at the moment of this concert.   Though I can certainly imagine hearing it at another time when I might be more receptive.   I also probably missed the voice of Barbra Hannigan; "Schnee" has much in common with the piece she sang in January, but the addition of a human voice to the music makes a great deal of difference.

More Wanderings

Sometimes I take shorter walks, sometimes very long ones.   I might see something interesting, or sometimes not.   Here are a few things I have seen.

There is an interesting new residential building on 57th Street and the Hudson River by the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels.   It is a startling sight, especially in New York where so much of the architecture is pretty straight forward.   It looks like this:

People leave bottles just anywhere in New York..

Would I want to live in it? I don't know. It apparently has an interior courtyard, but it is pretty much at the edge of things at the end of 57th Street.


Riverside Drive and Riverside Park never cease to amaze me.   The section north of 96th Street has some beautiful old mansions on it, and eventually you get to the area around Grant's Tomb, Riverside Cathedral, which really starts to feel almost Parisian, with its green spaces and churches, etc.   And ornamentation abounds.

Who was it that was buried here?

At the end at 125th Street you descend to see great views of the Riverside Viaduct, an engineering masterpiece from around 1900.  At the moment it seems to have some kind of a diaper which looks like it is meant to keep parts of it from falling on the street below.

The new train station at the World Trade Center designed by Santiago Calatrava has partially opened to the public, and we went to see it.   The original intention behind the design was to create a great public space.   Rather than create a routine, pedestrian type of station, the idea was to create something along the lines of Grand Central Station.   As in the case of many such enterprises, by the time the bureaucrats and the security people and the politicians got through with it, the design was compromised, and the costs way, way over budget.  But the results are certainly exciting, if you don't think about the costs.  And it will continue to cost, if they try to keep all that white clean.  And there is a lot more that is yet to be finished, so I await the final version.

Some pictures:

A Short Trip to a Sewage Plant

I have wanted to go for a walk in New York's Greenpoint neighborhood for a long time.   Green point is known as the center of New York's Polish community.   Sure enough, as soon as I emerged from the G train (immortalized in Mingus's tune) stop, there were signs in Polish, and little shops piled high with every form of sausage you can think of.    Greenpoint is isolated in some ways, and although gentrification is certainly under way, it has nowhere near the hipster cachet of other gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods.  It has a historic district, and it also has a lot of old housing which has been updated with what the AIA guide calls "Archie Bunker" improvements.   And, as yet, its waterfront is not overcome with high-rise condos.

Part of a local church:

A house:

An old bank building:

Not everyone is Polish:

Old warehouses:

Some of the architecture is less distinguished:

The waterfront in Greenpoint is still undeveloped:

The other thing to see in Greenpoint is the Newtown Creek sewage plant, a massive new sewage treatment plant designed by the Polshak architectural firm.  It is quite a stunning building.   It borders on Newtown Creek, which is one of the most polluted waterways in the country and is a EPA Superfund site.    The whole area has been devastated by industrial pollution, dating back to oil refineries in the 19th century.   The designers of the sewage plant, though, even managed to include a "nature walk" which borders the sewage plant and runs along Newtown Creek.  Only in New York could you have a nature walk which has a sewage plant on one side and an EPA Superfund site on the other other side. But it is beautifully done, with a relatively narrow, planted path along the water.   Needless to say, there were only two other people there the whole time I was there; it was peaceful and quiet.

The sewage plant:

The nature walk begins like this:

The path along the water, bordering on "Whale Creek".   No whales to be seen...

Views across Newtown Creek from the nature walk:

The area around the sewage plant is industrial, with a lot of metal scrapyards and the occasional movie making facility.

I am always looking for color and geometry.

Mondrian lives in Brooklyn (actually, he is buried in Brooklyn).

Orchestral Concerts and Very Large Orchestras

In March, it was back to going to orchestral concerts again.    We heard the Minnesota Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in an all Sibelius concert, conducted by Osmo Vänskä .   It was Symphonies 1 and 3, plus the Violin Concerto.   Though the concert was well played, and Vänskä is considered the best Sibelius conductor around, I have to confess that I can't find my way into liking the early symphonies of Sibelius.   I find his melodies lacking in rhythmic variety, and there are what seems to be endless repetitive harmonic sequences.   I am sure there are musical pleasures in the music that many others have found, but I don't hear them.

The NY Philharmonic performed the Brahms Requiem, with the octogenarian Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting.   It was a beautifully paced and moving performance.  I am happy to listen to Brahms any time.

The most extraordinary thing I have heard in a long time was a performance of Messiaen's "Turangalila Symphony".   This is a ten movement symphony, written in 1949, written for a huge orchestra, featuring no less than ten percussionists, along with piano solo, ondes martinot, and celesta and every other pitched percussion instrument you can think of.  Essa-Pekka Salonen conducted the NY Philharmonic, and the performance was a knockout.   I actually attended a rehearsal, along with the performance, so I got to hear it twice.  Salonen's spoken introduction was good.  He connected the piece to such works as Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" and Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde"; the point being that Turangalila is a delirious piece, moving into the realm of the improbable.   Ecstatic indeed!  There are wonderful clashing dissonances; not dissonances of torment and expressionism, but rather of cosmic splendor.  It sometimes seems as if Messiaen is writing music from a different planet.   I had trouble sleeping the night after the performance, with Messiaen's music echoing in my head. It was a truly unforgettable experience.

Two days after the Messiaen, we heard yet another gigantic symphony, Mahler's Third, with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic.   It was also an extraordinary performance.   Though I must confess that the Third is not my favorite Mahler symphony; it clocks in on the average at about 105 minutes (the longest of Mahler's symphonies).   The last movement seemingly goes on forever in a very slow fashion.  But still, it was an amazing experience.

Two days later, I heard a rehearsal of the Montreal Symphony in Carnegie Hall.  It was a pleasure to hear Ravel's "La Valse" and Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto.   After days of hearing large scale romantic and modern orchestral works, it was very refreshing to hear Beethoven.   The orchestra was also rehearsing Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring", but they only ran through spots, clearly saving their energy for that evening's performance.   It was just as well, as what I heard did not come up the the high standards of the NY Philharmonic's recent performance.

And two days later, it was back to the NY Philharmonic to hear a rehearsal of a new piece by Essa-Pekka Salonen, entitled "Karawane".  Conducted by Alan Gilbert, it was a work for chorus and orchestra, based on the eponymous text of the Dadaist Hugo Ball.  "Karawane" is sound poetry, and has no literal meaning.   The piece opened with 60's Ligeti style whispering voices. Most, if not all, of the choral writing is homophonic.   Salonen's notes described the Balinese "monkey chant" as an influence.   To me it sounded like Carmina Burana outtakes.   There were intriguing harmonic and orchestral textures, catchy little melodic motives, and at times strong propulsive rhythms.   So why didn't I like it very much?  Mostly because it all felt very bland and generic.   For a work that professed to be invoking "Dada", there was nothing at all unsettling or bizarre in the overt sense; everything moved along in a very straightforward  and routine kind of way.   Perhaps further hearings would uncover more subtle juxtapositions, but to my ears on a first hearing, it was a kind of generic, crowd-pleasing work of the 21st century.
The rehearsal also included a performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, with violinist Leonidas Kavakos.   It was an intriguing and at times quite idiosyncratic performance; I found it much more interesting than the Minnesota Orchestra performance I heard with Hillary Hahn a few weeks earlier.

Attending rehearsals at the NY Philharmonic is a great way to hear the music.  The ones I have been to have essentially been dress rehearsals; they run through the entire movements, and then at the end of the movement, they touch up spots before moving to the next movement.

Serenades

I went to hear the Met Chamber Ensemble perform two Serenades, Schoenberg's Op. 24 and Mozart's "Gran Partita".   It was a wonderful concert.   Schoenberg's "Serenade" is one of my favorite Schoenberg pieces.  Written in the early 1920's, it is filled with jittery, quirky neoclassical phrases.  It's one of the pieces Schoenberg wrote as he was moving towards the twelve tone method.  It is typically dense, filled with overlapping and juxtaposed phrases, and clashing neoclassical rhythms.   The guitar and mandolin give it a special flavor, and the overall feel is a kind of light expressionism.   The performance was vigorous if not always precise.   The second piece on the program was Mozart's "Gran Partita" Serenade, a work lasting about 55 minutes (Mozart's longest instrumental work?) and scored for two oboes, two bassoons, two basset horns, two clarinets, four French horns, and bass.   It is one of Mozart's truly amazing works; more symphonic than serenade-like, and containing some exquisite writing for winds.  Heard in the intimate and clear sound of Weill Recital Hall, it was a delight.
The concert was conducted by James Levine, whose failing health has been much in the news of late.   While his beat in the Schoenberg was fairly clear most of the time, for most of the time in the Mozart he seemed to have little control over his body, his arms (and feet) waving around expressively, but with little connection to the tempo of the music.  It's a miracle that the musicians could stay together.   It was very sad to see Levine in such poor condition; you could clearly see how intensely he was involved in the music, while having very little control over his body.   I don't see how he can continue doing this for much longer.  I am sure that he can do wonderful things in rehearsals, but unless he gets better very soon, I think his live conducting career will end very soon.  It's a sad moment for a great musician.

The Brooklyn Waterfront

I decided to take a long walk on the Brooklyn waterfront, starting in Williamsburg and heading towards Dumbo and the Brooklyn Bridge area.  It's a truly fascinating walk, passing through all different kinds of views, ranging from desolate industrial wastelands to new and bland high rise condos.  The whole area is a work in progress, as all of it gradually transitions from industrial waterfront to residential.   Williamsburg itself is rapidly changing. You notice this as you walk by new imitation loft style condos juxtaposed with old industrial buildings repurposed as stores, restaurants, and clubs.   On of the first things I saw, though, was this magnificent Russian Orthodox Church, painted in Winter Palace yellow.

Then, this building, with its adventures in wiring, a renovation in progress?

Somehow this building looks like something from the former Soviet Union:

A lot of the northern Williamsburg waterfront has huge high-rise waterfront condos, with some parks, new grocery stores, and Montessori schools, etc.   In fact, it very much looks like

Vancouver.....

And the big high-rises often abut empty spaces:

But you can lie in the sand on the beach if you want:

And there are still the occasional older buildings, in various states of decay and abandonment:

Further south, you come upon the remains of the Domino Sugar factory complex, which will eventually be turned into more high-rise condos.  But, in the meantime, the wonderful principal building remains, along with an impromptu park which will eventually disappear.

Bits of the old structures still remain, and you can see the Williamsburg bridge:

Next, you go under the Williamsburg bridge.

And a nice view from the waterfront park a bit further on:

Further south, you approach the former Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is now gradually being transformed by the city into industrial and office areas.   Most of it is still wasteland, though.

There are more buildings and construction sites along the way:

And colorful bits of detritus:

And this odd vision in black and white:

Opposite the former navy yard are the beginnings of the Orthodox Jewish community of South Williamsburg, which I will visit on another trip.   Passing through the edge of the former navy yards (which is mostly off limits to the public) you can see the decaying ruins of what was once called "Admiral's Row".   It's amazing to see these ruins in the middle of New York City, all overgrown with trees and plants.