Kent Devereaux

The Corigliano Quartet

Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, Washington

We hosted the Corigliano Quartet this last week in a residency designed to allow our student composers to work all week with a top-notch string quartet. Reports from the students, the Quartet, and from audiences in attendance at both Friday night's open reading of the eight new student works and at Saturday evening's culminating concert was that the Quartet's residency was an unqualified success.

The quality and variety of the eight student compositions premiered on Friday night was staggering. If one of the attributes of a good teacher is their ability to allow each student to develop their own individual style, then instructor and composer Janice Giteck is a great teacher: each of the eight student compositions developed its own compositional language, each different, one from the next.

On Saturday night, the Corigliano Quartet played with passion and verve in a program that included works by Mozart, Corigliano, Silverman, and Maggio.

Photo of the Corigliano Quartet courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts, Michelle Smith-Lewis, photographer.

Rudresh Mahanthappa

Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, Washington

Alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and his Indo-Pak Coalition, with Rez Abbasi on guitar and Dan Weiss on tablas and percussion, paid a visit to Cornish this past week, part of a two-day swing through town that saw them conduct workshops at Cornish on Thursday and Friday and perform at Kirkland Performance Center on Friday night. Few workshops this year have generated as much excitement in their wake.

That’s partly due to Rudresh’s music—an exciting hybrid that combines the traditional rhythmic and melodic organizing principles of Hindustani and Carnatic music with the contemporary, idiomatic instrumentation of jazz—but equally his adeptness at articulating what he’s attempting to do, that resonated so well with our students. Rudresh’s “project” is a conscious effort to define a personal as well as a musical identity. A hybrid music for a “post-racial” America, an America where by 2042, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, for the first time in our history America’s “minority” populations will become a majority of our nation.

There was a point in Friday’s workshop when Pakistani-American Rez Abbasi inadvertently referred to himself as an Indian-American—a gaffe that elicited a smirk from Rudresh. It was telling, because in Rez’s story relating how he’d grown up in the U.S. listening to Eddie Van Halen and Allan Holdsworth, such a distinction really didn’t matter—in a geographically challenged America the average citizen would be hard put to locate either India or Pakistan on a map. Yet both nations, borne out of a shared cultural history stretching back over 3,000 years, have been at the brink of war for almost as long as Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. Hence, the implied irony in the group’s name: the Indo-Pak Coalition.

Jazz, of course, is a product of this collision of cultures, one borne out of a history of forced migration and subjugation. However, today’s musical miscegenation arises out of different circumstances, a world where the Internet, and the rise of global communications over the past two decades, makes geography irrelevant. Music, after all, defies national borders.

Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts.

Heiner Goebbels

Songs of Wars I Have Seen

On the Boards, Seattle, Washington

Heiner Goebbels visited Cornish this week, in connection with the Seattle presentation of his work Songs of Wars I Have Seen, to share video excerpts of some of his past music-theater pieces and offer his thoughts on the future of theater.

Songs of Wars I Have Seen, presented in a double bill with Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi et Clorinda by On the Boards in collaboration with the Seattle Chamber Players and Pacific Musicworks, is one of Goebbels’ staged concert works. A music-theater sans actors, where the musicians embody the dramatis personae, delivering Gertrude Stein’s ironic text in a dry, uninflected tone, the “songs” spoken, not sung.

Wozzeck

Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco, California

One could easily make the case for Wozzeck as the first acknowledged masterpiece of 20th Century opera, a point of demarcation sandwiched between two World Wars, that embodies as much an abandonment of the Romanticism and verismo style that characterized opera in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as any heralding in of a new aesthetic, an aesthetic of gritty realism and social commentary that emerged in the 1920s, the frailties of the human condition confronted by the cruelties of an increasingly mechanized society—futurism turned on its head.

John Duykers as the Captain and Bojan Knezevic as Wozzeck; photo by Steve DiBartolomeo, courtesy of Ensemble Parallèle.

Wayne Horvitz

Nordstrom Recital Hall, Seattle, Washington

Wayne Horvitz forged his initial reputation as a composer and improviser in the downtown New York jazz scene of the 1980s, but for the better part of a decade now his compositions have explored ideas and instrumental forces more at home in contemporary chamber music. So, it was a wonderful treat to finally hear an entire evening devoted to Wayne’s chamber music at Benaroya Hall as part of this year’s Earshot Jazz Festival, music at once evocative of, and rooted in, an American tradition and shared sense of national identity, while not heeling to sentimentality or nostalgia.

John Gilbreath has characterized Wayne’s music as “rural classical” if only to distinguish it from its more urbane counterpart that refuses to acknowledge any legitimacy for “folk,” as if contemporary classical music owed no debt to rural traditions, or the deep agrarian roots of America’s musical heritage in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In many ways that’s a collective failure to recognize that innovations often happen at the edges—of society and geography—while simultaneously acknowledging the larger issue of musical modernism’s denial of the somatic, the sensual, the feminine in music—to acknowledge the beauty of the rough-hewn, as well as the well-made, melody.

Wayne, for his part, refuses to let himself or his music be pigeonholed into any tidy category. The “American-ness” in his music emanates from a distinct sense of place and purpose, a connectedness and identification with a collective people’s struggle, not any trivializing tropes. Wayne, and his lifelong partner Robin Holcomb, both craft music that borrows freely from all of the strands of the collective American experience: European classical, jazz, folk, hymns, fiddle music, rock, gospel, and R&B, all become colors in an expansive, if subdued, and at times somber, compositional palette. Wayne's music rarely plunges into the ecstatic, the celebratory; rather his palette tends toward the plaintive, angular melodies that express a sense of melancholy, longing, and loss.

For that reason, it’s no surprise then that Wayne has gravitated toward composing for string quartet. Both Mountain Language IV and These Hills of Glory, string quartets penned almost a decade apart, were featured prominently in the concert, each performed superbly by the odeonquartet (Gennady Filimonov, violin; Artur Girsky, violin; Heather Bentley, viola; and Hélène Ferret, cello), the latter featuring violin soloist Carla Kilhstedt. Wayne’s musical ideas and compositional technique have clearly developed in the more recent compositions. In the latter quartet, These Hills of Glory, the music more varied, more capable of transporting the listener, and in his most recent composition For Piano Alone in Four Parts, played beautifully by Christine Valdés in the work’s premiere, Wayne’s compositional language stretches out in entirely new and welcome directions, leaving the listener wondering just where he might go next.

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Photos by Daniel Sheehan courtesy of Earshot Jazz. Soloist Carla Kilhstedt, violin, and the odeonquartet (Gennady Filimonov, violin; Artur Girsky, violin; Hélène Ferret, cello; and Heather Bentley, viola).

Chicago Jazz Festival

This year saw native son Muhal Richard Abrams as artist-in-residence at the Festival, and what better shot in the arm for this sometimes inspired, but often uneven Festival could one ever imagine?

Sunday night's closing concert featured the Archie Shepp Quartet, a tribute to Art Tatum by Buddy DeFranco and pianist Johnny O'Neal, vocalist Dee Alexander, and the Arthur Doyle Free Jazz Soul Orchestra premiering a new work by Muhal featuring soloists George Lewis on trombone, Roscoe Mitchell on alto saxophone, Ari Brown on tenor saxophone, and Harrison Bankhead on bass. Doesn't get much better than that.

Owen Wingrave

Chicago Opera Theater, Chicago, Illinois

Under Brian Dickie’s leadership, Chicago Opera Theater has afforded Chicago audiences the rare opportunity to experience a wealth of Benjamin Britten’s works over the past seven years. Starting in 2002 with The Rape of Lucretia, and in subsequent years with The Turn of the Screw (2003), Death in Venice (2004), and A Midsummer Night's Dream (2005). In that time, Chicago Opera Theater (COT) has mounted more productions penned by Britten than any other composer save Mozart.

Dickie’s programming choices have made sense, given his previous experience at the Canadian Opera Company and Glyndebourne, and the company’s early history under the late Alan Stone; after all Chicago Opera Theater had established its reputation by carving out a niche producing “opera sung in English” while other companies insisted on presenting performances in their original language but had yet to adopt supertitles. With the widespread adoption of supertitles since by opera companies worldwide, Chicago Opera Theater under Dickie abandoned its “English-only” fiat, and sought instead to plow fertile new middle-ground with a flourishing of productions of seldom-staged works by Handel and Britten, and a clever re-contextualization of its original mission: who can accuse the company of abandoning its mission of presenting “opera sung in English” when over half the operas mounted by COT in the past decade were written in English?

Dickie’s strategy since assuming the helm at COT of programming seldom-performed works of modest scale plucked from Baroque and 20th Century repertoire has allowed the company to garner praise and create a new identity at the margins of what has traditionally defined the operatic repertoire in America. It has also permitted COT to successfully transition its legacy subscriber base, all the while engaging and growing a new audience for opera drawn more by a sense of adventure and curiosity than some elusive and ephemeral star-power exerted by the latest diva du jour.

In choosing to focus on Britten, Dickie has wisely eschewed the larger, well-known works like Billy Budd and Peter Grimes of a scale beyond the means of a small company like COT, and instead has focused on mounting Britten’s more modest, and in many ways, more accessible “chamber operas.” After staging five new productions of Britten’s chamber operas, I cannot imagine that plans aren’t already afoot to mount additional new productions in future years of Britten’s remaining works including Albert Herring, Curlew River, and the other church parables. 

Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave shares the somewhat odd distinction with Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors of being one of the few operas commissioned specifically for the medium of television. Menotti recast the Biblical story of the birth of the Christ child for NBC at the dawn of television in 1951; Britten, a lifelong committed pacifist, received his commission from the BBC in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, and saw in the Henry James story, set at the close of 19th Century at the height of British imperialism, a tale that resonated well with both his beliefs and the time. In short Britten wanted to make a political as well as artistic statement and television proved the perfect medium for that message.

Originally scored for full orchestra, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden working with Britten’s estate commissioned a reduced orchestration of Owen Wingrave completed by David Matthews in 2007. The reduced number of forces—only fourteen players—called for in this new orchestration allowed Chicago Opera Theater to mount this new production; then Dickie pulled off something of a coup in securing Steuart Bedford, the conductor at the opera’s premiere production at Aldeburgh in 1970, to pilot this new production.

The opening motif of Owen Wingrave portends the haunting tale about to unfold. Britten’s musical language in his later years combines the intense lyricism and gift for setting the English language with the probing angularity and unresolved nature of his expanded interest in twelve-tone methods. Reminiscent of Ives’ haunting trumpet motive from The Unanswered Question, Britten’s opening brass motif at once hints at the unsettling nature of the story, and the unresolved questions that defined the times.

Britten’s operas, large or small, exhibit that rare quality that allows a singer to soar or retreat based upon the demands of their character, not due to any need to engage with the orchestra in a struggle to be heard. The almost total absence of any consistent homophonic texture, the free interplay between support and counterpoint giving passage to voice, all make Britten’s music eminently singable and continually inventive in its orchestration. Britten introduces musical motifs in one context then skillfully reintroduces them at a later point in varied instrumentation for heightened effect or repeated emphasis—all skillfully articulated by Bedford and the excellent fourteen-member chamber ensemble.

Director Ken Cazan and scenic designer Peter Harrison have wisely chosen to steer clear of too literal an interpretation; James’ short story is marked by its own time, pregnant with allusions to ghostly hauntings—the unspeakable past casting a pallor over Paramore, the Wingrave family estate. Elements of set pieces and furniture roll into place, the stage largely a sea of darkness upon a black floor, the extreme social constraints and Owen’s isolation and alienation from his fragmented family accentuated by the stark lighting and physical stage separation. I don’t agree with all of Cazan’s choices—the rather glib direction of the “downstairs” house staff and the misguided attempt at humor and mimicry of the cavalry by the British soldiers entering and exiting the stage are just two obvious examples—but overall, it’s solid if not quite inspirational direction. Likewise, Harrison’s use of the grand staircase as a unifying scenic design element comes across more as labored theatrical conceit than inspired concept.

Musically, Dickie has assembled a wonderfully gifted cast of primarily young, relatively unknown singers who all turn in remarkable performances. The uniformly strong cast begins with baritone Matthew Worth as Owen Wingrave, tenor Brian Anderson as Lechmere and bass-baritone Matt Boehler as Mr. Coyle. Equally strong are Rebecca Caine as Mrs. Coyle, Jennifer Johnson as Kate Julian and the wonderful tenor Robin Leggate as Sir Philip Wingrave. What a joy to experience an opera that combines those rarest of elements: a composer like Britten with a mastery of setting text to music, and a cast able to deliver on what the composer intended as well as project in such a way to altogether obviate the need for supertitles. If only more opera could be as direct and as successful.

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Photos by Liz Lauren courtesy of Chicago Opera Theater. Top: Sir Philip Wingrave (Robin Leggate), Kate Julian (Jennifer Johnson), Miss Wingrave (Mary Jane Johnson), Mrs. Julian (Brenda Harris), Lechmere (Brian Anderson), Mrs. Coyle (Rebecca Caine), Spencer Coyle (Matt Boehler) and Owen Wingrave (Matthew Worth). Bottom: Boy (Mason Baker), father (Blake Montgomery), and Owen Wingrave (Matthew Worth).