alan gilbert – Likely Impossibilities

Written on Skin in NYC

August 18, 2015 3 Comments

Unusual for a new opera, George Benjamin’s Written on Skin arrived in New York with its reputation preceding it. It has been making the European rounds since 2012 and has been praised to the skies almost everywhere. Its three Lincoln Center Festival performances last week marked its untimely staged US debut.

And it’s hard to imagine that Written on Skin could have been developed and premiered by an American opera company. Certainly not, at least, by one of the behemoths. Martin Crimp’s libretto is a simple story which becomes complex in its telling; it doesn’t have a celebrity historical personality as its protagonist, isn’t based on a hit film or book, and makes no clear claim to cultural importance. The subject isn’t, like many American operas, aggressively checking off boxes like genres suggested by Netflix. (Cold Mountain? Hmmm, Literary Fiction Set in the Civil War With Strong Female Characters.)

Written on Skin is instead purposefully elliptical. It’s filled with symbols, fragmented narrative frames, and characters speaking in the third person. Its score is, though at times lyrical, rather thornier than the film music style which has become most popular in American premieres. It has also eclipsed most if not all of those works in its acclaim and popularity.

Review

Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero at the NY Phil

June 8, 2013 No Comments

I went to hear Il prigioniero with Gerald Finley and Patricia Racette as well as some Prokofiev with violinist Lisa Batiashvili at the New York Philharmonic and wrote about it for Bachtrack.

Alan Gilbert’s last few seasons at the New York Philharmonic have featured an opera in June. While previous efforts have featured elaborate staging, this year’s installment, Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, was performed in concert. For this particular work, which was written for radio broadcast, this seems only appropriate.

You can read the rest here. This was a performance I felt that I should have liked more than I actually did. Perhaps it takes a little more experience to get into Dallapiccola’s world, which I certainly don’t have much experience with. It’s a striking work with some vivid moments but somehow never stopped feeling externalized.

But I am happy the Philharmonic performed it–remember how Maazel was doing concert performances of Tosca a few years ago? I’m not often thrilled by Gilbert’s conducting, but his programming is fascinating (though too many guest conductors are leading only golden oldies). Keep it up.

photo copyright Chris Lee

Review

The NY Phil’s cabaret for the end of the world

December 19, 2011 3 Comments

Last night’s New York Philharmonic Contact new music concert conducted by Alan Gilbert at Symphony Space featured free beer and an alarming number of people under 35. I fit right in for once!

Composer HK Gruber introduced his greatest hit, Frankenstein!! (1979) saying he didn’t intend to write a party piece. Honestly it seems like that is sort of what he did, albeit a party for Weimar revivalists eager to witness Pierrot Lunaire as rewritten by Edward Gorey. It’s a setting of twisted children’s poems set for a wild array of orchestral and toy instruments including kazoos, hoses (spun over the head), and exploding paper bags. Above all this was Gruber’s own voice, a Sprechstimme “channsonier” reminiscent (at this advanced point in his career) of Ernst Busch, intoning in accented English about John Wayne or rats or whatever. It’s great surreal fun and has some lovely moments and some genuinely intense ones too, a cabaret for the end of the world. As the Zwölftöner assured me, it’s a piece you have to hear once. (Apparently Frankenstein!! will be on at the Konzerthaus in Vienna soon, too–auf Deutsch, natürlich. I imagine it is better that way, but it really does have to be in the language of its audience.)

In fact each piece was preceded by the composer saying something about it. This struck me as a good idea because it puts a face to the music and the composers, while a little awkward, seemed friendly. But this introduction is a powerful thing in directing your listening of the subsequent piece, particularly when you are only an occasional new music listener like me.

This was particularly notable in the first half. Brazilian composer Alexandre Lunsqui introduced his piece “Fibers, Yarn and Wire” (premiere) as inspired by two photographs and talked about ideas of handcraft and weaving. The subsequent piece somehow didn’t sound like what I expected (I didn’t expect the heavy use of pan flute-like whistles, for one thing), bu I was still hearing it in terms of these images. It’s an engaging quasi-minimalist journey with steady rhythmic pulse and vaguely jazzy tone and structure. The quiet (unraveling?) ending is surprisingly nice.

Magnus Lindberg introduced his Gran Duo (2000) in far more technical terms, describing metronome markings and contrasting material and transformation between the wind and brass sections. (It’s not a duo at all but written for the winds and brass sections of a large orchestra, and owes a debt to Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments.) I ended up listening to it wondering if this was the part he was talking about where fast music was played slowly and whether we’d gotten yet to the spot where the metronome markings stop increasing and start decreasing. The writing is well crafted and virtuosic but I ended up finding it very “PhD music” and not too interesting, or perhaps just too dense to appreciate on a single hearing. The Philharmonic brass sounded great, though.

New York Philharmonic, Contact! series at Symphony Space, 12/17/2011.