Concert Review(!): Hymn To The City

There was a sound. It was coming from over there, traveling through air to me, here. It was music and it was LIVE, being played right in front of me. The fact that it was a quintet made up of players from the New York Philharmonic and they were engaged in a delightful arrangement of Aaron Copland's Simple Gifts was almost immaterial. But it was the ideal way to begin my first live concert since March 2020, the light, lilting refrain giving voice to my gratitude for the opportunity to be there.

And where was there? We were in Green-Wood Cemetery, one of the jewels of Brooklyn on a guided musical tour arranged by the visionaries at Death Of Classical with the grand title of Hymn To The City. By the time we got to the Pilot's Monument, we had already been treated to a spirits tasting that included mezcal, whiskey, tequila, and gin along with some snacks, lending a convivial atmosphere even as we all sought to remain distanced and masked when not eating or drinking. It felt quite luxurious to be sipping on an extraordinary rye from Coppersea, a complex gin from Appalachian Gap, or Madre's full-bodied Mezcal while the sun set. Never let it be said that DOC doesn't know how to take care of people!

Death Of Classical's Andrew Ousley welcomes the audience.

Our next stop was the Brooklyn Theatre Fire Monument, where we were treated to a lovely reading by our tour guide of James Weldon Johnson's My City, a moment that also paid tribute to the first responders and health care heroes who are so critical to the life of the Big Apple. Then, we were off to hear music in a peripatetic journey through locations and styles. Scroll through the following commentary and pictures to get the flavor of the experience. 

The audience on the move.

Along with the sweet strains of Simple Gifts, we also heard a very brief arrangement of Sergio Ortega's El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido!, which increased the feeling that we were all in this together. 

On Battle Hill, near the grave of Leonard Bernstein, a brass quintet played selections from West Side Story. The setting and occasion thawed my antipathy to Bernstein slightly and I also enjoyed watching the audience take delight in the familiar tunes. 

The Hill Of Graves is Green-Wood's version of a potter's field, with many first-wave immigrants of no social standing buried there. It was a moving place to hear Paul Simon's American Tune, slightly dated though it is, and Marco Foster brought both restraint and open-hearted sincerity to his performance. 

Café Damas, commissioned by the NY Phil from composer Kinan Azmeh in 2019, is an intriguing piece, in a style that might be called "Silk Road Ensemble," with moods and methods of his native Syria blending with classical rigor. A dancer, who may have been costumed as a 19th century immigrant, lent atmosphere as the sun set.

The preceding rains had moved the next location from the Chauncey Family Mausoleum to this evocative spot, framed by weeping beech trees. The second movement of Florence Price's String Quartet in G Major was a lovely representation of her quintessentially American style and gorgeously played. Baritone Paul Grosvenor sang Over My Head, the traditional spiritual, a cappella, in a commanding if somewhat rhythmically rigid performance. It resonated nicely with Price's melodicism still hanging in the hair.

It was nearly full dark when we arrived at the entrance to The Catacombs, a sort of apartment house mausoleum for the middle class. 

Within was a long narrow corridor with folding chairs set up along its length. Once we were seated, Adam Tendler launched into his astonishing arrangement of George Gershwin's Cadenza on Rhapsody in Blue. He managed to encapsulate all that makes Gershwin's piece so compelling, while moving it firmly into the 21st century with some extended techniques. The man can PLAY and his piano sounded magnificent in the space. 

Next, Lucy Dhegrae, one of the great singers of our time, emerged from a side door to sing Sarah Kirkland Snider's How Graceful Some Things Are, Falling Apart, a rawly emotional homage to New York's resilience after 9/11. As Dhegrae's magisterial voice filled the space, I had a feeling of coming full circle, as she had sung at my last concert in 2020, a shattering U.S. premiere of Toshio Hosokawa's Futari Shizuka with the Talea Ensemble. It seemed only right that she would be a part of my road back to live music 16 months later. The Catalyst Quartet emerged next and played Credo, a piece by Kevin Puts that seemed to put the world right as it stacked consonance upon consonance, building something of limpid beauty in the air. By this point, I really felt I was at a concert and it was glorious. Pure cake icing arrived in the performance of Goin' Home, the song by William Arms Fisher with a melody from Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony. In the arrangement by Noah Luna, with quartet, piano, and Dhegrae all shooting for the stars, it was a masterstroke to end the evening. 

There was still the walk back to the entrance, with iPhone flashlights flickering along the path, which was a nice opportunity to chat with one of my neighbors and contemplate all I had seen and heard. 

With Hymn To The City, Death Of Classical once again proved what an incredible asset they are to the musical life of our city, employing a touch of theater and a sure curatorial touch to put together a truly memorable experience. If you're looking to ease back into concert going, their upcoming events could be just the thing. Long may they reign!

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Best Of 2018: Three Concerts

Three Portraits: Cheung-Trapani-Du Yun

Albums by ensembles featuring multiple composers are a great way to focus on a group’s skills, both as curators and players. But the “portrait album” is another thing, giving listeners a valuable opportunity to focus on a range of works by one artist. Here are three of the best from recent months. 

Anthony Cheung - Cycles and Arrows One common criticism of post-modernism when it first became widely known in the 80’s was that it was a movement based on superficialities. For example, when an architect used some vestige of a Greek column in their work it was just there because it looked good or called up certain associations. There was seemingly no reference or understanding about why the ancients might have developed such a form or what mathematical principles lay behind its visual perfection. 

The music of Anthony Cheung is a firm rebuttal to that line of thinking. When you read his program notes for this, his third portrait album, you quickly realize that any echo of past forms or other compositions comes from a place of deep scholarship and musical understanding. Combined with a sureness of orchestration that feels natural and intuitive but is surely the product of much study and experimentation, the result is a delightful array of compositions from the last five years. Take the opening work, written for flute and string quartet and cheekily entitled The Real Book Of Fake Tunes. Over five short movements, the dialogue between the players unfurls with such wit and elegance you almost forget there are five people working together to produce the sounds. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the players are the genius flautist Claire Chase and the excellent Spektral Quartet, who also appear on the angular Bagatelles with pianist Winston Choi. 

So it goes throughout the album, whether combining Chinese instruments with Western ones in More Marginalia (played by the astonishing Atlas Ensemble) or composing for solo oboe in Après Une Lecture, which is cleverly based on notated speech patterns Cheung saw in the notebooks of Leos Janacek and played to perfection by Ernest Rombaut. The International Contemporary Ensemble appears on two pieces, the swaggering Assumed Roles with violist Maiya Papach, and Times Vestiges, which ends the album with a sense of unresolved mystery, like a flashlight’s beam being swallowed by tunnel. Cycles And Arrows is, like Dystemporal from 2016, further proof that Cheung is one of the finest composers of our time. 

Christopher Trapani - Waterlines While it’s usually terrible when visa problems derail a concert, it was actually to my benefit when Talea Ensemble had to shift gears for their slot at last month’s Resonant Bodies festival. Instead of playing a world premiere by a European composer, the group decided to revisit Trapani’s Waterlines. As a board member of Talea, I saw this happening in real time but still had no idea what to expect as I had missed a previous performance of the piece. 

“Home is the pull of a tonic chord,” Trapani writes in his liner notes for Waterlines, “Home is the warm glow of consonance, radiating through a hissing layer of noise.” He then goes on to describe the gestation of the piece, from being in Paris and watching Katrina hit his home city, to seeking solace in the old country and Delta blues records that animate this five-song cycle, especially ones about the great flood of 1927, to finding parallels between those old shellacs and the spectral music of Gerard Grisey and others.

I felt that pull and warmth right from the first strummed dulcimer chords that open the first song, Can’t Feel At Home, a feeling that only increased when Lucy Dhegrae began singing with the perfect combination of real feeling, theatricality and classical control. Waterlines brought me back to the first time I heard Barstow by Harry Partch, to that feeling like it had been with me all my life. All five songs in Waterlines were riveting and I marveled at the fractured vernacular, the lean orchestration, which has a few unusual instruments (fretless Turkish banjo) but no gimmicks, the quotes from Mahler and others that somehow fit just right...before it was over I knew I was in the presence of an instant classic. Dhegrae was fantastic throughout and Talea's playing, led by conductor James Baker, was intricate, powerful, and immaculately balanced. And now we have this recording featuring the same forces and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

There are four other excellent works here as well. Passing Through, Staying Put is a tart piano trio stylishly played by Longleash, who put such a stamp of greatness on Scott Wollschleger's Soft Aberration last year. The JACK Quartet takes on Visions And Revisions, elucidating its harmonic and melodic ties to Dylan's Visions Of Johanna with what sounds like great affinity for the music. There's further magic in the way Marilyn Nonken's sparkling piano in The Silence Falling Star Lights Up A Purple Sky segues into the final work, Cognitive Consonance.

The longest piece on the album, it consists of two long movements for stringed instruments bookending a brief electronic interlude. Talea Ensemble also contributes here and the electronics were crafted at IRCAM, the electronic music incubator founded by Pierre Boulez. The first part, Disorientation, uses a specially modified qanun (a kind of zither), played with extraordinary facility by Didem Basar, to explore a tactile landscape of immersive microtonality. I hung on every pluck and sweep of the strings, taking great pleasure from the way they interacted with the electronic textures. The second part, Westering, is played by Trapani himself on a hexaphonic electric guitar, which has transposition controls for each string, each of which is amplified by its own pickup, allowing for great control of pitch, timbre, etc. But you won't need to think about any of that as you listen - just enjoy the journey, which has no shortage of mystery.

While Trapani's music has been played by many distinguished performers over the years, and included on some fine albums, Waterlines is the first album devoted solely to his work and its display of his scholarship, emotional depth and originality could not be more successful or musically satisfying. I can only imagine what he will do next.

Du Yun - Dinosaur Scar I'm one of those slightly clueless types who actually needed Du Yun to win the Pulitzer Prize (as she did last year for Angel's Bone, her second opera) for me to become fully aware of her music. Seeing her furious concentration as a performer at the MATA Festival last spring was only a reiteration of her talents. Now we have this album, which is probably the most complete overview of her shorter works to date. I could be churlish and point out that six of the ten tracks have been in the can since 2009 - almost a decade, which is far too long for an artist as protean as Du Yun. 

But there are many wonders within Dinosaur Scar, such as Air Glow, which combines five brass players with electric guitar and bass for a sinuous, atmospheric experience that goes on for nearly 11 glorious minutes. The performers are all from the International Contemporary Ensemble, a testament to their 20-year working relationship with Du Yun and an assurance that they are all at the top of their field. Special note must by paid to guitarist Dan Lippel, whose does stunning work all over the record. Claire Chase is also here and in full effect on Run in a Graveyard, which she first included on her debut solo album in 2011. Pitting her alto flute against Du Yun's gnarly electronics creates a unique blend indeed, its strong narrative drive keeping you in suspense throughout.

The title track is the oldest piece, written for solo saxophone in 1999 when Du Yun was a sophomore in college, and played like it was hot off the sheet music by Ryan Muncy. This well-rounded collection also includes two scintillating improvisations, one which features Du Yun on kazoo, toy harmonica and phone, showing her humor. The electrifying and episodic by, of...Lethean ends the album, effectively soundtracking a movie I made up in my mind as I listened. What stories will Du Yun tell you? 

P.S. A number of the works on Dinosaur Scar will be performed as part of Du Yun's Composer Portrait at the Miller Theater on November 15th. Perhaps I will see you there!

Find tracks from all of these albums and other notable classical releases from 2018 in this playlist - and, as always, tell me what I'm missing.

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Best Of 2017: Classical