By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • June 8, 2012

Early music can be flavorful stuff, as L’Arabesque Baroque — a small ensemble of early-music specialists from the D.C. area — demonstrated Thursday night in a concert titled “Divine Earthly Passions: Roses and Coffee.” The roses came courtesy of Handel in his aria “Flammende Rose” HWV 210, while Bach brewed up the caffeine in “Ei! Wie Schmeckt der Coffee Susse,” from the much-loved Coffee Cantata, BMV 211. Both were delicious, but some of the most delicately seasoned music of the evening came from less familiar composers — including a fascinating set of variations for solo theorbo by the Italian composer Alessandro Piccinini.

The concert (the third in the ongoing Washington Early Music Festival, which continues through this month) opened with the Trio Sonata in D, Op. 7 No. 1, by Joseph Bodin de Boismortier. It’s a piece that overflows with lightness and wit, and it gave flutist Barbara Spicher a chance to display her playful, imaginative personality and impressive mastery of the one-keyed wooden flute — an almost impossible instrument to play, as anyone who has tried it will attest.

But it quickly became clear that the enormous Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle was a cruel venue for such a small group; every note reverberated in the cathedral’s cavernous maw, obliterating details and turning delicate harmonies to soup. The ensemble made the best of things; soprano Polly Edmonds Baldridge, who has a lovely voice, kept her singing small-scaled and engagingly natural so as not to overpower the ensemble, while William Simms on theorbo turned in a tightly focused reading of the Piccinini variations. The most absorbing moments of the evening, though, came in Marin Marais’s Suite in D Minor. Douglas Wolters on viola da gamba led the ensemble through a riveting account of this fascinating, introspective work, playing with exceptional eloquence and understanding.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • June 3, 2012

In a conversation a few years ago about the future of music, a composer friend bemoaned how tough it was to get new, large-scale works performed. “The economics of the symphony orchestra are against us,” he said. “We’re all just going to end up writing ‘L’Histoire du Soldat’ over and over again.”

That conversation came to mind Saturday night at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, as a high-powered new-music ensemble called the Deviant Septet — which mirrors the stripped-down chamber orchestra Igor Stravinsky devised for his iconic “L’Histoire” — showed that music for small groups can still pack an outsize punch.

Stravinsky’s influence was everywhere throughout the evening, which opened with an imaginative rethinking of “L’Histoire” by the six-man composers’ collective known as Sleeping Giant. The work — titled “Histories” — was a suite of personal responses to Stravinsky’s music, with each of the composers writing two or three short movements for the hour-long work.

That’s an approach that could easily result in Stravinsky Lite, but “Histories” turned out to be a fascinating, often compelling piece that captured much of the original’s energy and earthy flavor, with its demented little dances and dark, acerbic edge. Superb playing by all the Deviants added to the general happiness, with percussionist Shayna Dunkelman a particular delight.

It would have been unalloyed joy to hear the septet perform “Histories” and “L’Histoire” back to back, but the second half of the program was given over to a hip-hop version of Stravinsky’s 1951 opera “The Rake’s Progress,” which didn’t fare nearly as well. Written by Elliot Cole and the ensemble’s bassoonist, Brad Balliett, “The Rake” contained some terrific, wildly colorful music, but a relentlessly dense text delivered by Balliett and his brother Doug, the bass player, bogged it down.  The brothers are fine instrumentalists but unconvincing vocalists who couldn’t quite get the thing off the ground. Bring in a couple of powerful rappers, though, and “The Rake” might really take off.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • May 22, 2012

When it comes to Chopin, the Venezuelan American pianist Vanessa Perez doesn’t play nice. “The way I play this music may not be stereotypically ‘beautiful’ — it may be more raw than some,” she recently said of her new recording of the composer’s 24 Preludes, Op. 28. “I didn’t want pretty. I wanted honest.”

That’s an assertive way to look at these strange and atmospheric miniatures — many of which are less than a minute long, and range from quiet contemplation to torrents of barely-contained rage — and most pianists aim at drawing out their elusive, subtle poetry.

But in a stunning performance at the Embassy of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Hall on Thursday night, Perez dove into the Preludes as if discovering them for the first time, flinging them out into the hall with a kind of wild intensity that was often breathtaking, as if she were forcing these delicate hothouse flowers into the fresh air for the first time.

It didn’t always work; some of the more fragile preludes felt a bit overwhelmed, and Perez’s dry-eyed approach seemed to add a grain of impatience to tender works such as the beautiful No. 4 (Largo) and the No. 6 (Lento assai). But where fire was called for, Perez delivered. She brought off the near-impossible No. 8 (Molto agitato) with stormy bravura, always aiming for expressiveness over mere technical proficiency, and throughout the evening displayed an impressive range of ideas and originality. It was, perhaps, a particularly Ibero American approach to Chopin, weighted toward passion and sensuality rather than delicacy — and it underscored Perez’s growing reputation as a gifted pianist well worth keeping an eye on.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • April 23, 2012

Are conductors really necessary? They’re rather expensive to feed, after all, and while they can be useful for holding large orchestras together, some smaller groups might be better off just jettisoning them entirely.  That, at any rate, was the takeaway from a lively and impressively precise performance Sunday night at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown by A Far Cry, a young, Boston-based string orchestra whose 17 members call themselves a “collective” and take a democratic, guaranteed conductor-free approach to chamber music.

The group’s sense of freedom and enthusiasm was tangible in the opening work, the vivid “Battaglia” by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber. It’s a series of musical scenes meant to evoke wartime, and Biber lets his imagination loose, instructing the players to engage in all sorts of “extended techniques” — even sticking paper between the strings to produce a snare-drum effect. The wildest moments come in a short-but-sour movement, in which each of the musicians plays in a different key — think Charles Ives, with a 17th-century touch. The Criers brought the whole thing off with spirit and engaging wit.

But the group’s unusual take on Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 95 revealed some of the hazards of the leaderless approach. The Criers transcribed the work for string orchestra — quadrupling each of the parts, more or less — and though they handled the technical challenges well enough, it was never clear that adding more mass to the quartet really added to its power. The thing is all muscle and bone as it is; adding flesh only seemed to soften the edges and blur the details, where much of the interest lies. Despite fine ensemble work, you end up with the impression not of a riveting conversation among four individuals but, rather, almost of music by committee.

Osvaldo Golijov wrote that he wanted his “Tenebrae” to sound “as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground.” It does. This is music that floats in a netherworld of mist and shadow — it has the strange enchantment of falling into a dream — and the Criers’ collective approach produced a gorgeous, radiant reading. But it was in the much more complex “Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge,” by Benjamin Britten, that the ensemble showed just how skillfully they can navigate without a conductor.  This was a superb, perfectly calibrated performance, full of subtle nuances and real power. Conductors, watch out: The collective approach works.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • April 15, 2012

It takes a sly sense of humor to title a concert “Affirmations: A Musical Journey of Hope and Aspiration” — and then open it with Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to the sardonic, optimism-mocking “Candide.”  But the performance Friday night at the Kennedy Center by the National Symphony Orchestra (with the superb a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock) quickly reverted to warm sincerity, showcasing music by composers — mostly African Americans — chosen, as guest conductor Thomas Wilkins put it, as “a confirmation of truth; a giant ‘Yes,’ if you will."

Depending on your level of cynicism, that may sound like either a refreshing breath of air or a warning bell for smiley-faced banality. But Wilkins has a sure, imaginative touch at the podium and turned in sharp-edged readings of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s engaging “Danse Negre” and the radiantly beautiful “Adagio” movement from Adolphus Hailstork’s Symphony No.1.  Duke Ellington’s “King of the Magi” came off with fiery brilliance, while the fourth movement of William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1, titled “Aspiration,” was more meditative, embodying a sense of quiet, almost otherworldly calm.

The intriguing first half of the program, unfortunately, was not matched by the second half, which was devoted to the premiere of William C. Banfield’s Symphony No. 10: “Affirmations for a New World.” Written in collaboration with Sweet Honey in the Rock, it’s a display piece for that group’s extraordinary talents. But despite some fine singing, “Affirmations” never really took off. An odd muddle of jazz, oratorio and self-improvement book, it felt weighed down by musical cliches and lyrics so full of earnest, reach-for-the-stars vapidity they could have won a high school poetry contest. Does “affirmation” really have to be so blandly positive?  We went home, put on Eartha Kitt singing “I Want To Be Evil,” and felt much better.

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Note: Terry Ponick at The Washington Times also reviewed the concert and had much the same reaction, noting that Banfield's 'Affirmations' "didn't live up to expectations" and that both the music and lyrics of the piece "verged on the cliche."

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • April 11, 2012

The Arditti String Quartet is one of the most formidable new-music ensembles on the planet, and its appearance at the Library of Congress on Tuesday night was something of an event: a marathon, three-hour concert that ranged from an early modernist quartet by Alban Berg to a dazzling new piece by the 40-something British composer Thomas Ades. And given that the evening was part of this year’s John Cage Centennial (watch for a major festival of his work here in September), it made sense that violinist Irvine Arditti and pianist Stephen Drury would open with a spare, stunning and quintessentially “Cageian” work by the late American master.

Little actually happens, in the usual sense, in Cage’s “Two4.” Thin, sustained notes on the violin float quietly over distant chords on the piano, like cirrus clouds high over a vast and unending desert. But out of these slight materials Cage builds music of nearly unfathomable beauty; there’s a wonder-inducing sense of immensity to it, a sense of music that exists as part of the universe, infinitely serene and utterly indifferent to our little human dramas. The impact was unsettling, as if our minds had been scraped clean of everything nonessential. Arditti and Drury had to break for an intermission at the end, to let us all return to earth and resume our usual chatter.

Cage famously declared that “Beethoven was wrong,” so the Arditti’s members may have been winking a bit as they launched into Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, a piece as passionate as the Cage is serene. The quartet played it skillfully enough, but for a work that usually explodes out of the gate and thunders into the heavens, it came off with all the fire of a nice cup of tea. Alban Berg’s String Quartet, Op. 3, which followed, was a rich and ravishing thing, however, unfolding in a heady sweep of always-surprising ideas; a memorable and deeply satisfying performance in every way.

Bela Bartok’s Quartet No. 4 in C made a powerful close to the evening, but it was Ades’s less familiar “Four Quarters” that really made the ears stand up and jump around. A fascinating, virtuosic and spectacularly colorful journey through the course of a day, it’s a real gem — and proof, if any were needed, that the string quartet genre is still alive, well and inspiring brilliant new work.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • April 8, 2012

When Verdi’s opera “Nabucco” hits the Kennedy Center in a few weeks, you know it’s going to be Big. The thing is the very definition of grand opera: a lavish 19th-century warhorse that clomps along for nearly three hours, swarming with doomed lovers, a mad king, thunderbolts from heaven, armies of supernumeraries and enough bloodletting to satisfy a “Dexter” fan. There’s a quasi-comprehensible plot set a zillion years ago in ancient Babylon, and the whole farrago is sung in a language that — correct me if I’m wrong — you don’t even speak. But don’t worry! As long as you’re not in the cheap seats in the back (and you did spring for the $300 box seats, right?) you can read your way through the evening in surtitles and ponder such arias as “I am ready to ascend the bloodstained seat of the golden throne” and “Go, maid, go and conquer the palm of martyrdom.” “Nabucco” — it’s gorgeous, it’s over the top, and it has absolutely nothing to do with real life. In short: It’s everything you want an opera to be.

Unless, of course, it’s everything that makes you wonder whether the entire world of opera is ... um . . . maybe not quite right in the head — in which case, you might want to drop by Arlington later this week, where a feisty new company called UrbanArias is tossing out the antiquated conventions of Grand Opera and reinventing the form for 21st-century ears. Starting Friday, the group’s week-long festival at the Artisphere will showcase three new “mini-operas” by young composers that are about as far from “Nabucco” as you can get: short, fast-paced works that deal with modern life, are sung in English, and happily make do with minimal sets and costumes. They’re all being produced in the Artisphere’s intimate 125-seat Black Box Theater, and with seats priced only slightly higher than movie tickets, they’re starting to draw in an eclectic new audience — everyone from opera aficionados to people who wouldn’t sit through “Lohengrin” with a gun to their head.

“We need the big opera companies to be doing the things that only they can do, whether it’s preserving major productions of big works or commissioning $2 million productions of new operas,” says Robert Wood, the founder and all-purpose driving force behind UrbanArias. “But there’s another kind of work that cries out to be seen, and because we’re small, we have a lot of flexibility. We have room to say to our audience: ‘Trust us — and we’ll give you some really amazing stuff.’ ”

Take, for instance, “Positions 1956.” A new, 90-minute opera by composer Conrad Cummings and librettist Michael Korie, “Positions” is the centerpiece of this year’s festival, and with three singers, a bare-bones set and a text drawn largely from self-help manuals from the 1950s, it’s a textbook example of the small-is-beautiful approach. But despite — or maybe because of — its modest forces, “Positions” probes with almost painful intimacy into the social and sexual life of modern America, using a deft balance of drama and sly musical wit.

Forget the antique language of 19th-century opera: The R-rated arias in “Positions” range from the tender “Standing Position” (“Up against the wall/ Is difficult but fun”) to more, shall we say, probing arias whose lyrics have no place in a family newspaper. But the frank sexuality in the piece is handled with subtlety and humor — there’s even a bit of practical advice, sung in a lilting Handelian vein, on how to manage a public erection — and used to explore the complexity of human relationships.

But what makes “Positions 1956” (as well as the two other mini-operas in this year’s festival, “Before Breakfast” by Thomas Pasatieri and Frank Corsaro, and “The Filthy Habit” by Peter Hilliard and Matt Boresi) so compelling, says Wood, is not just the contemporary style, but the real issues that new opera is grappling with.

“These works aren’t strange, avant-garde things most of the time,” he says. “They’re just stories that are relevant to our lives.”

Robert WoodThe ideas behind UrbanArias began to percolate over the past decade, when Wood was working as a conductor and chorus master for several major American companies, including the San Francisco Opera and the Minnesota Opera. Opera is an absurdly expensive enterprise — high-priced superstars, big orchestras and elaborate sets can drain budgets mercilessly — and Wood saw how the costs made producers risk-averse, forcing them into a traditional, highly conservative repertoire. He also realized that audiences were put off by the length of many works (Wagner’s “Goetterdaemmerung,” to cite the usual suspect, clocks in at an ear-wilting five hours), by a repertoire that was largely in foreign languages, and by the often-stratospheric price of tickets.

A few companies, such as American Opera Projects and the American Lyric Theater, were starting to look for fresh approaches, and Wood was impressed by the way director Peter Brooks, back in the early 1980s, had streamlined Bizet’s four-act “Carmen” down to half its original length. But paring old behemoths to the bone was not really the answer. If opera was to grow as an art form, Wood realized, it needed new composers and new audiences — and that meant a whole new kind of opera that would last no longer than a feature film, and be relevant to 21st-century audiences.

“These two ideas — short and contemporary — were rattling around in my head,” he says. “And I thought, what if I just put them together?”

Wood began digging up neglected operas written in the past 40 years, formed UrbanArias in 2009, and last year launched the group’s first festival, showcasing Tom Cipullo’s opera “Glory Denied” and two works by Ricky Ian Gordon, “Orpheus and Euridice” and “Green Sneakers.” The event was wildly successful, and major companies are starting to pay close attention to the UrbanArias model. But for Wood, the most gratifying outcome was the new listeners who were drawn in, some who had never been to an opera in their lives but were willing to take a chance.

“We can say to people, just try it — if you don’t like it, it’ll be over before you know it!” he says, laughing. “But you might discover a real passion.”