By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • February 13, 2008
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Alvin Singleton                                             Photo: Martin PopeláøIt's not often that you get to hear the work of contemporary African American composers, so Sunday afternoon's concert by the Verge Ensemble at the Corcoran Gallery, devoted exclusively to such works, had the feeling of a real event, with an eclectic and well-chosen program.

Alvin Singleton's poignant "Fifty Times Around the Sun" contrasted blunt gestures in the piano with sustained, radiant tones on the clarinet, gradually bringing them together in a serene celestial dance before distancing them again. The young jazz musician Courtney Bryan offered up her feisty "Piano Etude No. 1," a quick-witted mash-up of Jamaican dance hall rhythms and mid-period Ligeti, while George Lewis's improvisatory piece "Artificial Life 2007" received a colorful and sensitive, if slightly tentative, interpretation from the Verge players.

Cellist Tobias Werner turned in a sweeping, full-blooded reading of Hale Smith's neo-romantic Sonata for Cello and Piano from 1955, and "Dance Africaine" by Ysaye Barnwell was a charmer; you could hear people humming its melody in the lobby after the concert.

But it may have been Michael Henderson's lively and relentlessly inventive "Emerald Run" that stole the show, in a bravura performance by violinist Lina Bahn.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • February 12, 2008
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Corey Harris                                                               Jennifer EsperanzaCorey Harris, the blues-singing, guitar-picking, MacArthur-certified genius of all styles, has spent his life exploring the world's music, soaking up everything from Cameroonian makossa to Texas blues and fusing it into his own distinctive, forward-looking style. With last year's "Zion Crossroads" he headed into roots reggae, and on Sunday night at Blues Alley he proved that this latest journey was well worth the trip: There's a political current running through his music now that gives it real power.

Playing hollow-bodied electric guitar and backed up by his 5x5 band, Harris devoted most of the set to songs from "Zion," including "No Peace for the Wicked," "In the Morning" and the driving "Ark of the Covenant." Harris's reggae is nuanced, message-heavy and relatively low-key -- more Burning Spear than Bob Marley -- and despite a put-on Jamaican accent it felt edgy and authentic; Harris may be eclectic, but he's no mere imitator.

The famously warm, growling voice was in fine form, set mostly on a slow burn but occasionally exploding with passion, and Harris displayed his legendary finger-picking skills in bluesy numbers such as "Mami Wata" (dedicated to the victims of Katrina), "More Precious Than Gold" and the makossa-inflected "Sister Rose." But some of the most memorable moments of the evening came when the band (including the fierce, funky Houston Ross on bass) left the stage and Harris played half a dozen acoustic numbers by himself. Spare and haunting, they had a quiet power that showed just how deep Harris's musical currents really run.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • February 12, 2008
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Ensemble Matheus Director  Jean-Christophe Spinosieorge Frideric Handel doesn't usually come across as particularly sexy. Stately, sure. Dignified, without a doubt. But in a fast-paced, edge-of-the-seat concert at the Library of Congress on Saturday night, mezzo Jennifer Larmore and the Ensemble Matheus brushed the dust off Handel and showed that there's more furious, passionate life in baroque music than you might suspect.

Superstar-in-training Larmore was, of course, the focus of the evening -- her many-splendored voice is a thing of beauty, and she dispatched arias by Handel, Vivaldi and Gluck with fearless grace. But the Ensemble Matheus was no mere backup orchestra. Its members may be renowned for their intensive scholarship, but there was nothing prissy or academic about their playing, which was aggressive, vibrant and focused to an absolutely electrifying pitch.

And musical wonders abounded: A performance of Telemann's Concerto in E Minor for flute and recorder (in which Jean-Marc Goujon turned in standard-setting playing on the one-keyed flute) built to such intensity that it ended with a powerful, foot-stamping close by all the players. But things got positively steamy in Vivaldi's Concerto in D for two violins, as violinists Jean-Christophe Spinosi and Laurence Paugam, standing face to face and only inches apart, twined their lines together, broke apart, then came together again, all with a heady intimacy too rarely heard in music.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • February 5, 2008 
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The Hugo Wolf QuartetIt's an age-old question: Why spend an evening listening to Schubert string quartets when you could be at a bar, screaming at the television? But for the thin crowd who skipped the Super Bowl on Sunday night and made it down to the Hugo Wolf Quartet's recital at the National Gallery of Art, the rewards were every bit as dramatic as the Giants' win.

This relatively young, Vienna-based quartet has been generating a lot of buzz lately for its intensely characterful performances of the standard and not-so-standard repertoire. The buzz seems warranted: Opening with Schubert's precocious Quartet in E-flat, D. 87 (written when he was all of 16), they dug into it with utter seriousness, revealing unsuspected gravity in a work that, to these ears, has always sounded distinctly callow.

The composer Hugo Wolf (for whom the group, obviously, is named) is best known for his moody songs, but the "Italian Serenade" from 1887 may be one of his most playful works, full of deft irony and subtle jokes. Oddly and a bit disappointingly, the Wolf Quartet gave it a dark, unsmiling reading -- beautifully executed (despite the detail-smearing acoustics of the West Garden Court), but rather low on charm.

It didn't matter; it was all prelude to the real event of the evening, Schubert's stupendous Quartet in G, D. 887, one of the great (but too rarely heard) works of the chamber music repertoire. Schubert wrote it near the end of his life, and it stares into his impending death with almost frightening intensity; there's an elemental, sweeping power to it that few quartets can handle. But the group played it magnificently -- a bold and gripping performance, led by the superb violinist Sebastian Gürtler.

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • February 3, 2008 
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Matmos' Schmidt (l) and Daniel                                           Photo: Lissa Ivy Tiegelt’s a packed night at the Red Room, the tiny, no-frills performance space in Baltimore where you go if you’re hunting for the music of the future. There’s barely room to move, but people keep squeezing in, navigating the tangle of wires that spreads across the floor, finding a seat wherever they can. A couple of guitars are tilted against the wall, and there’s a small arsenal of synthesizers, amplifiers, mixing boards, and MacBooks at one end of the room. But in a dim corner, two musicians are intently miking something that seems almost comically out of place:  four bouquets of roses.
 
Suddenly the lights dim, and two other musicians pick up the roses and start beating out a rhythm.  Petals fly through the air, and soon other noises join the fray: squawking geese, the clatter of human teeth, phrases from a tract by Ludwig Wittgenstein.  The sounds are all recognizable, but they’ve been electronically twisted into strange, wild new versions of themselves.  The sounds devolve into beats, then form into rhythms and build into a huge, driving torrent of music. And when the flowers are finally beaten to shreds, their rustling whispers reduced to a dry rattle of stems, the song quietly ends – leaving only the heady scent of roses in its wake.
 
The crowd roars – for this is Matmos, one of the most inventive, uninhibited and engaging electronic music groups on the planet. Made up of Drew Daniel, 36, and Martin Schmidt, 43, the duo has spent the last decade creating smart and oddly beguiling music from a range of improbable sources – liposuction surgery, slowed-down kisses, the uterus of a cow.  They’ve stuck their microphones into crayfish nerve tissue, recorded the sound of burning flesh, even worked with an Enigma code-breaking machine, sampling the sounds and building them into everything from surf rock party music to civil war ballads.  It’s vivid, witty and intensely physical music, and it’s giving the abstract and bloodless world of electronic music something it’s needed for a long time – a living pulse.
 
“The world of electronic music is sort of po-faced and self-serious,” says Daniel, “where people are prone to believing they’re exploring ‘form qua form’ and rehashing a lot of abstract gestures from the 1950’s.  But our songs are about something.  They’re about rhinoplasty, or the shape of a hurdy-gurdy – they’re about material things in the world.”

Matmos’ approach is quickly pushing them to the center of the experimental music world.  Straddling pop and “serious” electronica, they’ve toured and recorded with pop icon Bjork, performed in Lincoln Center and the Whitney Museum of Art, given seminars at Harvard and worked with some of the top musicians in the classical world. They’re collaborating with the Kronos Quartet and composer Terry Riley, the city of Verona commissioned a re-think of Verdi’s “Aida” from them last summer, and they’re now readying a new work for the prestigious Group de Recherches Musicales in Paris.
 
The performance in Paris will be especially significant, since it’s the “spiritual home,” as Daniel puts it, of 'musique concrète': music made from recorded sounds. Noise music dates back almost a hundred years -- – the futurist Luigi Russolo issued a manifesto called “The Art of Noises” in 1913 -- and in the 1950’s French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry pioneered the use of tape recorders in music. While ‘concrète’ thrived in the laboratory, though, it didn’t last long in the real world; abstracted and theorized to death, it left most listeners cold. But by grounding their music firmly in the everyday world, and using sound in ways as theatrical as they are musical, Matmos may be breathing fresh life into the genre.

“It’s fascinating, what they’re doing,” says David Harrington, founder and first violinist of the Kronos Quartet, who commissioned a piece from Matmos after hearing one of their early recordings. “They invent these incredibly beautiful, thought-provoking sounds, and bring them together in ways that seem totally unique and natural. And there’s nothing precious about it;  there’s a kind of openness about their music that attracted me immediately.”

Now based in Baltimore (where Daniel is an assistant professor of Renaissance literature at Johns Hopkins University), Matmos got its start in 1989 an unlikely place:  a gay bar in San Francisco called Club Uranus.  Daniel was a go-go dancer there, and an admiring Schmidt (then playing in a cult industrial band) offered to show him how to edit sound on a computer.  “Amazingly enough, I wasn’t met with total rejection,” laughs Schmidt. “Our musical and romantic tracks sort of dovetailed,” adds Daniel. “We’ve always been a couple making music together.”
 
Neither had much formal musical training. Growing up in Kentucky, Daniel played in punk bands and sang in a gospel choir (“I was the only chorister with green hair,” he says), while Schmidt took piano lessons to the ripe age of twelve.  But by the 1990’s, advances in technology had put sophisticated and powerful electronic music tools in the hands of anyone with a laptop, and the field was open. Noise music, industrial culture and techno were all starting to converge, and audiences were looking for something more sophisticated. “People were asking: ‘What is there that doesn’t just go boom, boom, boom?’” says Schmidt.
 
The two began hunting for new sounds, applying microphones to balloons, latex fetish clothing and whatever else wandered into earshot. Playing techno in clubs and scoring porn films and pinball machines to make money, in 1998 they released they released their first discs, ‘Matmos’ and ‘Quasi Objects.’ Only a thousand copies of each were made, and they prepared to watch them sink into obscurity. “I had come happily to the conclusion,” says Schmidt, “that no one would ever care.”
 
But by luck or fate, a copy of ‘Quasi Objects’ ended up in the hands of the Icelandic superstar Bjork, who’d been manning the bleeding edge of pop experimentation for years. Impressed, she enlisted them to tour with her in 2001 and to record on her albums ‘Vespertine’ and ‘Medulla,”  rocketing them into the pop stratosphere virtually overnight.  But it wasn’t an easy ride.
 
“Bjork likes the idea of ‘concrete’ sources for pop rhythms,” says Daniel, “and she liked the slapstick quality of what we do.  But we really had no familiarity with pop song form.  We weren’t used to structures that had choruses. Matmos songs are a kind of free-associative list -- one damn thing after another.  But our  music changed after working with Bjork.  It became more traditionally musical.”
 
It also became more daring. In 2001 they put out “A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure,” from sounds they’d recorded during surgery, including breaking bones and fat being suctioned out of the body. The result, strangely, is light, almost lyrical techno-pop that evokes a visceral response. “The body is such a rich source of sound,” says Daniel.  “And electronic music is usually taken as disembodied and abstract, so this seemed like a good way to bridge that gap -- by making electronic music entirely out of the body.”
 
But it was 2006’s “The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast,” that may be Matmos’ most accomplished work to date. It’s a series of portraits of ten gay icons they admired, from King Ludwig II of Bavaria to the punk rocker Darby Crash, built from sounds from objects associated with each of them.  A tour de force of esoterica -- snails are used at one point to manipulate a Theremin – it’s also moving and whimsical, and tied together with organic musical logic. Critics complained that it was unintelligible unless you studied the background materials, but Daniel insists that it’s only music itself that matters.
 
“Some people think it’s all about the liner notes for us, but that’s not true – the music really has to be compelling in the moment of performance,” he says. “The discourse can’t rescue boring sounds.”
 
Matmos have just finished recording their latest disc, an entirely synthesized recording that uses no real-life sounds at all.  “We wanted to tie our hands behind our back,” says Daniel, “and be forced to think about the basics of what electronic music is.”  But their most intriguing project may be yet to come: music written for the profoundly deaf, who can only hear with cochlear implants that stimulate the auditory nerve and create a simulacrum of sound.
 
“I’m fascinated with what people with cochlear implants ‘hear,’ since what they’re hearing is purely technological,” says Schmidt.  “We want to make a piece that’s played directly into the brain.”
 
“But we’ll never know what they hear,” says Daniel.
 
“No,” says Schmidt.  “But it could be amazing.”

 
Matmos will be performing at the Transmodern Fundraiser at Floristree in Baltimore on February 9 at 9 pm.  $10.
 
 

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • January 29, 2008
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Nurit Bar-JosefIt was Mozart's birthday this past weekend (he's 252, if you're keeping track), and though they hadn't planned it as such, more than a dozen virtuosos from the NSO gave him a rousing party at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on Sunday night. In fact, it was really more of a tribute to the classical ideal itself -- the precisely calibrated balance of idea, expression and structure that Mozart brought to perfection. And as if to make the point, the players paired Mozart with works by that progenitor and high priest of 20th-century neoclassicism, Igor Stravinsky.

It was an intriguing idea, and illustrated once again that when you catch the NSO players in chamber settings, they're usually up to something remarkable. The evening opened with Mozart's Sonata in G, K. 379, played by the orchestra's concertmaster, Nurit Bar-Josef, and pianist Lambert Orkis. These sonatas are sometimes dismissed as lesser works, but there's always a lot of "there" there when Bar-Josef picks up her fiddle; from the stormy Allegro to the infinitely shaded pizzicatos of the final variations, she played it with a slow-burning intensity that was never less than riveting.

Stravinsky's wildly colorful "Histoire du Soldat" Suite followed, with clarinetist Loren Kitt joining the fray. It's a rambunctious piece -- proof that the term "neoclassical" has little to do with minuets and powdered wigs -- and Kitt and Bar-Josef tore into it with satisfying bite. More Stravinsky followed, but his Octet for Winds (with its Haydn-inspired opening and variations that include everything from a cancan to a fugue) was marred, unfortunately, by overly enthusiastic brass players; the winds were often blown away.

But the evening closed with a sublime -- there is no other word -- account of Mozart's Serenade for Winds in C Minor, K. 388. Full of floating beauty and delicately nuanced pathos, it's a paragon of the classical ideal: mysteries wrapped not in enigmas but in utter transparency and grace.