By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • September 26, 2011

The Washington Bach Consort has been putting on not-to-be-missed performances of baroque music here for decades; little wonder that its large and devoted audience turned out in droves on Sunday for the opening of the group’s 34th season, packing the National Presbyterian Church to its sleekly modernist gills. And as expected, Music Director J. Reilly Lewis put together an insightful program, starring a little-known Mass by Domenico Scarlatti that turned out to be one of those where-have-you-been-all-my-life gems.

J. Reilly LewisThe drawbacks of the huge space, alas, quickly became apparent. The consort is an almost intimate group that plays on quiet, rather delicate period instruments, and as Bach’s Concerto in C Minor for Oboe and Violin began — with oboist Geoffrey Burgess and violinist Andrew Fouts in the key roles — the players were swallowed whole by the church’s cavernous acoustics. Burgess and Fouts fought gamely, but Bach’s crisp and detailed counterpoint deliquesced into a soggy wash of pastels — not unpleasant, but probably not the effect the ensemble was after, either.

The acoustics proved a bit more more forgiving with vocal music, and Bach’s Cantata “Aus der Tiefe rufe ich” received a moving and often dramatic performance, thanks in large part to baritone Richard Giarusso, whose expressive and perfectly controlled voice was focused to a laserlike sharpness. A powerful account of Handel’s stately “Dixit Dominus” closed the program, providing the meatiest fare of the afternoon, with the honey-voiced lyric soprano Rebecca Kellerman Petretta providing ethereal touches.

The most seductive music of the day, though, may have been the “Missa Breve, La Stella” by Scarlatti, a composer known for his hundreds of short and often edgy keyboard sonatas. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful work, full of emotional subtleties, and it was clear from his reading of it that Lewis loves this music deeply; it was a performance so tender you never wanted it to end.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • September 23, 2011

The PostClassical Ensemble never met a musical convention it didn’t want to smash, which is why its concerts tend to be the most adventurous in town. It wasn’t too surprising, then, that the ensemble abandoned its usual classical venues Thursday night for the dim and hobbit-scaled Bohemian Cavern, a jazz club in the 11th Street corridor, to present the quintessentially American music of George Gershwin — as interpreted by a classically trained Russian pianist who oozes Rachmaninoff from every pore.

Genadi ZagorIt was a bit of a reprise for Genadi Zagor, who last September wowed audiences at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland with a lush, big-boned account of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

But Thursday’s solo setting allowed Zagor to improvise expansively — and much more intimately — on some of the composer’s best-known music, including the iconic “Rhapsody” itself. And Zagor’s take on this music is intriguing: Gershwin filtered through last-gasp Romanticism.

This was not some radically postmodern take on Gershwin — as, say, his countryman Alfred Schnittke might have done — but an unabashedly heartfelt homage that looked to the past rather than the future. That’s not meant as criticism; Zagor speaks Gershwin fluently, and his thoughtful, extended improvisations on the “Three Preludes” were genuinely moving, while his earth-shaking transcription of “Rhapsody” was spectacular and far more detailed than last year’s full-orchestra performance.

For better or worse, though, these were very much “classical” improvisations: virtuosic, seamless, beautifully constructed but also rather safe, lacking the edge and excitement of a genuinely risk-taking jazz performance.  Zagor is a hugely gifted musician who has Gershwin in his blood; it would be fascinating to hear him push out the boundaries of this music with more daring, and reinvent it for our 21st century ears.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • September 19, 2011

The Verge Ensemble, one of the region’s most eclectic new-music groups, took a slight, um, verge away from its usual multi-instrumental, multimedia programs on Sunday afternoon to focus only on piano music. Maybe the idea was inevitable: Verge, after all, includes not just one but three top-notch pianists, each with a distinctive and highly developed musical personality, and it was illuminating to hear them side-by-side.

Jenny LinBut the program also underscored how diverse the piano music of the past half-century has been, from the mathematical rigor of Karlheinz Stockhausen to the evocative tone-painting of Canadian composer Andrew MacDonald. The concert (held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where Verge is in residence) was bookended with contemporary arrangements of Bach, and there were a few masterworks of contemporary music.

Stockhausen’s dauntingly detailed “Klavierstucke IX” was given a reading by Jenny Lin so precise and nuanced it seemed to extend the capabilities of the piano itself, and Lin was joined by the equally virtuosic Lura Johnson for the gorgeously enigmatic “Jatekok” by Gyorgy Kurtag. But equally intriguing music came from lesser-known composers.

Jeffrey Mumford wrote his “of ringing and layered space” with specific pianists — including Lin and Johnson — in mind for each of its five sections. The title seemed to apply particularly to Lin’s movement; with its complex array of melodic lines over a wash of pedaled strings, it had the quality of an insistent dream. Johnson’s movement was earthier and more extroverted, with even a hint of barrelhouse here and there; both were fine, satisfying works.

Johnson also turned in a hugely entertaining account of Derek Bermel’s “Turning,” a freewheeling, anything-goes set of variations on what the composer calls a “made-up Protestant hymn,” that drew on everything from African village songs to swooping romanticism. It was a little cartoonish at times and not entirely cliche-free, but that was part of the fun. And despite its title, MacDonald’s “After Dark” was no dreamy nocturne; this was a wild romp through an imagined world that comes alive in the moonlight, given a spectacular reading by Audrey Andrist.


By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • September 15, 2011

Baltimore’s Mobtown Modern Music Series has presented some of the area’s most provocative new-music concerts for several years now, and to judge by this season’s packed opening concert Wednesday at that city’s 2640 Space — the complete string quartets of Iannis Xenakis, played by the JACK Quartet — it’s becoming downright essential. Xenakis is, of course, one of the great musical minds of the late 20th century, but his quartets languished in semi-obscurity until recently, when the young JACK players took them up. Their high-octane performances of these works are absolutely sensational — and have become an event in every sense.

Iannis XenakisXenakis isn’t for everyone, of course. Forget the intimate poetics of much of the quartet genre; these four quartets are almost physical in their violence and undiluted power, and owe more to the natural world than to the evanescent fluctuations of the psyche. Rooted in mathematics and game theory, they explore sound in brilliantly innovative (if sometimes almost overpowering) ways.

But the JACK players brought Xenakis’s quartets into perfect focus, alternating the early, relatively accessible quartets with the weightier and more difficult works written toward the end of the composer’s life. There’s a kind of life-and-death urgency about the late quartets; “Tetora,” from 1990, packs sound so densely that it becomes almost solid, moving forward with the elemental implacability of tectonic plates. “Ergma,” written four years later, is even more brutal and uncompromising, using sustained dissonances to batter its way into a new musical universe. Neither work is pretty. But both have the kind of savage beauty that comes with utter honesty. This is music written for keeps.

The quartet played both pieces fearlessly, but their virtuosity really shone in the two earlier quartets. “ST-4/1, 080262” was a vivid, brilliantly colored and hugely enjoyable work from 1956-62, but it was 1983’s “Tetras” that really stole the show. Almost symphonic in its range of sonorities and absolutely exhilarating from beginning to end, this may be one of the great quartets of the 20th century.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • August 8, 2011

Ah, tragic love. Wolf Trap was awash in it — not to mention aerial sword fights, blood-soaked revenge, thundering armies on horseback and all that other irresistible stuff — on Friday night, when composer Tan Dun brought his hot-off-the-presses “Martial Arts Trilogy” to the Filene Center stage.

Dun, of course, is the Chinese composer who burst into the mainstream after winning an Oscar for his score to the 2000 blockbuster “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” famous for its balletic, gravity-defying martial arts. He went on to score two similar films — “The Banquet” and “Hero” — and in this new work he has reconfigured all of that music into a set of interlocking concertos that follow the sacrifices, passions and billowing dresses of the female leads, as scenes from the movies unfold overhead.

As you’d expect, this was an epic, multimedia production, full of big-screen emotions and unabashed melodrama; Beijing Opera meets Hollywood, more or less. Dun’s melodies soared and swooped through the air — like the actors, they were borne aloft on gusts of wind — and he generally steered clear of the avant-garde territory found in much of his other music. But that’s hardly a complaint. This was movie music and proud of it, as voluptuous and stylized as the cinematography of the films, designed to draw you into a weightless fantasy world where raindrops fall in slow motion and the light is always golden and death is rather pretty if you just choreograph it properly. Sure, there was more surface than depth; but it’s summer, and anyway — what a surface it was.

The theme of tragic love tied everything together, and the opening “Hero” concerto followed the story of a woman who sacrificed love to defend her country. Violinist Heather LeDoux Green turned in a fine, full-bodied performance, capturing the sweeping emotions of the work without tugging the heartstrings too obviously.

The “Crouching Tiger” concerto that followed was the most musically interesting of the three, and James Lee gave a passionate account on cello; his intimate, beautifully calibrated solo was a highlight of the evening. The concert built to a rambunctious close with the “Banquet” concerto (about sacrificing love for power), played by the always exciting pianist Lisa Emenheiser.

The narrative behind all this was a bit hard to follow if you didn’t already know the films, but it made for an entertaining and enjoyable evening nonetheless. Tan Dun himself led the National Symphony Orchestra, and, while it’s interesting to hear a composer conduct his own music, it’s the rare one who can really do it well. Dun seemed ill at ease at the podium, and, honestly, generated about as much electricity as a sack of laundry; kudos to the NSO players for bringing the score to life as well as they did.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • August 2, 2011

Summer music festivals should start with a bang, and the fine young pianist Adam Golka was suitably explosive on Sunday night, launching the third annual Washington International Piano Festival with a combination of brilliant technique and real emotional depth. It wasn’t a particularly adventurous program — Golka stuck to the well-trod path of Beethoven, Brahms and Liszt — but it allowed the 23-year-old to show just how deeply he could plunge into familiar waters and find new wonders there.

Adam Golka (photo by Paul Sanchez)Performing at Catholic University’s Ward Hall, Golka opened with Beethoven’s Sonata No. 6 in F, Op. 10, No. 2, playing well but distantly until spectacularly catching fire in the brilliant Presto.  But Golka began to reveal himself and display his most impressive powers in Brahms’s Three Intermezzi, Op. 117. These were absolutely stunning performances — luminous, probing, deeply personal and drawn with unerring emotional accuracy.

This being a piano festival, Franz Liszt was naturally invited, and Golka turned in a fine, ultra-precise reading of the popular Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S. 514. It’s a work that, to some of us, sounds like clever but meretricious gas-baggery, though Golka made it bearable enough.

Infinitely more engaging was Beethoven’s Sonata No. 29 in B-flat, Op. 106 — the “Hammerklavier” — which closed the program. This titanic work seemed to push Golka to the edge of his technique, and you could hear the strain at times. But his reading of the Adagio sostenuto movement was almost overwhelming in its honesty, insight and power.

The festival is well worth exploring for any piano-lover; concerts and master classes continue through August 6, with daily recitals (some of them free) at Ward Hall and the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • July 12, 2011

To hear either Lura Johnson or Jenny Lin play the piano is one of life’s great pleasures, and when they perform together — as they did Sunday afternoon at the Smithsonian American Art Museum — it’s an event not to be missed. 

Jenny LinThe two are members of the new-music ensemble Verge, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that they put together a high-powered traversal of the 20th century, touching on everything from early atonality and tone clusters to Gershwin-flavored lyricism and thorny modernist etudes. And, as you’d expect, the virtuosity was stunning; but even more impressive was how the two drew a range of highly disparate works into a coherent, fascinating whole.

Seated together at the museum’s newly refurbished Steinway grand piano, the two opened with three gentle Bach transcriptions by the Hungarian Gyorgy Kurtag; a quiet meditation to settle the ears. But Johnson quickly kicked the 20th century into gear with Arnold Schoenberg’s Sechs Kleine Klavierstucke, Op. 19 — aphoristic miniatures from 1913 that leave tonality in the dust with almost effortless grace — and Lin raised the stakes with a scorching, absolutely bravura performance of the Danse Infernale from Stravinsky’s “Firebird.”

Lura JohnsonThe pianists traded back and forth all afternoon; Johnson played four of Curtis Curtis-Smith’s lyrical, engaging Twelve Etudes for Piano (2000) and two of Henry Cowell’s early tone-cluster pieces (profoundly gentle and introspective, despite being played with the forearms), while Lin turned in incisive readings of three of Gyorgy Ligeti’s piano etudes. The Ligeti works are absolute masterpieces, and Lin’s powerful, precise technique more than did them justice.

But it may have been Kurtag’s 1975 “Jatekok/Games” (Book IV), which Lin and Johnson played together, that really stole the show. Ostensibly written for children, these beguiling and elegantly distilled works are adult in every way: the intimate thoughts of one of the century’s most intriguing musical minds.