By Stephen Brookes
The Washington Post • October 15, 2007

It would be hard to overstate the influence of Ravi Shankar on music in the late 20th Century.  The sitar virtuoso brought the classical music of India to Western audiences virtually single-handedly, becoming – in George Harrison’s famous phrase – “the godfather of world music.”  But clearly he’s not quite done.  Still touring at the venerable age of 87, Shankar came to the Kennedy Center on Saturday afternoon and displayed much of the insight and profound musicianship that have made him a legend.
 
Accompanied by his 26-year-old daughter Anoushka and a small ensemble, Shankar performed two rarely-heard ‘afternoon’ ragas – “Bhimpalasi” and “Pancham Se Gara” – playing on a small, amplified sitar. It was an astonishing performance for a man his age, with moments of great beauty, and his focus never flagged throughout the afternoon. But he’s undeniably frail, now, and it showed; the fingers no longer move with the graceful fluidity of his youth, and his playing felt strained and effortful, with only traces of the explosive vitality he once brought to the sitar.
 

Anoushka ShankarBut as Shankar nears the end of his career, his youngest daughter Anoushka is just beginning hers.  One of the leaders of the emerging "second generation" of Indian musicians, she’s been pushing out the boundaries of Indian music, integrating it with electronica and pop.  But she showed herself on Saturday to be a master of the classical sitar as well, taking a deferential approach to her father but outplaying him at every turn. Marrying a sinuous, electrifying technique with a profound sense of conviction, it was clear she is her father’s daughter in every way; it would have been gratifying if he'd let her play more.
 
Tanmoy Bose provided able, low-key accompaniment on tabla with Ravichandra Kulur on the south Indian drum called the kanjira, while Kenji Ota and Dave Cipriani played the tanpura.
 

By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • October 14, 2007
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Listen closely to the average symphony orchestra, and you can almost hear it lumbering into extinction.

Large-bodied, slow-moving and frighteningly expensive, classical music's most important institutions seem increasingly like relics of a distant age, kept alive by an audience that gets grayer every year. Most younger listeners are oblivious -- they give classical music the same respect they hold for the periwig and pince-nez -- but few orchestras are doing much to draw them in, huddling around formulas that haven't worked for years: formal concerts, disdain for contemporary culture and a numbing attachment to the music of 19th-century Germany.

"There's a need for fundamental change -- the format and the repertoire of the concert needs to be completely rethought," says Joseph Horowitz, author of the groundbreaking book "Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall." Conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez agrees: "We cannot do music in the same way, because humanity has changed."

But Horowitz and Gil-Ordonez aren't just criticizing -- they're charging the ramparts. Four years ago they launched an unusual D.C.-based group called the Post-Classical Ensemble as a sort of working laboratory for new ideas. And they've turned the traditional model on its head: Unlike traditional orchestras, the ensemble has no fixed size (it's made up of freelancers hired for specific programs), no fixed home (it's played everywhere from the Library of Congress to Strathmore), a minuscule budget and complete freedom to take risks.

Joseph HorowitzThe bold approach is part of a wider movement to shake the classical world out of its torpor and to drag it -- kicking and screaming, if necessary -- into the 21st century. Innovative groups such as Cleveland's Red {an orchestra} and New York's Wordless Music-- which pairs rock and classical performers together onstage -- are using flexible ensembles and uninhibited approaches to both music and performance. They're throwing out staid conventions and dated repertoire -- even the term "classical" itself -- and reinventing the classical concert from the ground up.

The Post-Classical Ensemble, for instance, has brought life-size puppets to the Kennedy Center, juxtaposed Mexican folk songs with edgy new orchestral works and even shared the stage with a gypsy band from Budapest. And the ensemble's fifth season -- which opens this afternoon at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center with a live performance of Aaron Copland's score for the 1939 documentary "The City" -- is just as unconventional. There's a program on the first African American opera company in the United States (complete with the operetta performed), a concert devoted to the brilliant, little-known Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas and a provocative look at how exile in the United States affected the immigrant composers Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg.

But it isn't just eclecticism for its own sake. Each Post-Classical Ensemble performance focuses on a single idea -- often a single piece of music -- then explores it by drawing freely on film, theater, dance, poetry or anything else to provide context or insight. If, for example, it's illuminating to pair Mahler's "The Song of the Earth" with traditional Chinese pipa music and a contemporary work from a Chinese American composer (which, remarkably enough, it is), then the ensemble will do it.

"It's a broader exercise than just presenting music in live performance," says Horowitz. "We insist on moving outside the parameters of classical music."

The result: unpredictable, idea-rich concerts designed to challenge the audience. And, while the ensemble is still well off the beaten path, audiences are starting to grow -- and they're as diverse, says Horowitz, as the music itself.

A longtime music critic, Horowitz, 59, honed his ideas while serving as executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1990s, where he was tasked with halting a precipitous drop in attendance. He threw out the old subscription template, developed themed, interdisciplinary concerts, got rid of celebrity performers -- and turned the group around in just a few seasons.

While Horowitz takes an analytical approach to the crisis (he's written eight books on music and tends to speak in long, perfectly manicured paragraphs), Gil-Ordonez, 50, addresses it almost physically. A conductor who spent many years with the National Symphony Orchestra of Spain, he's a kinetic performer onstage, using his entire body to guide the ensemble, and his conversation is just as animated. Ask him a question and 20 ideas spill out in a headlong rush -- illustrated with shouts, snippets of song, dramatic whispers and the occasional groan, all inflamed with revolutionary passion.

And almost everything about the classical world lights his fuse -- particularly the isolation of the concert hall and the stuffy, outdated rituals. "Everything is so artificial!" he says, clenching his fists in frustration. "The performers in black: 'Okay, we will allow you, the audience, to be here.' The person who says 'shhhh!' if you want to applaud between movements. Really -- why would you want to go to that?"

Instead, he says, classical music needs to recover the freewheeling atmosphere it had before it became, well, classical.

"When you went to a concert 200 years ago, it was the event of the week. You were there to meet your friends, to talk -- even during performances! At the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth, people jumped up shouting in the second movement: aarrgghhhh! Like Mick Jagger!  And this is the key: We have to recover this sense of spontaneity. I am still hoping somebody in the audience will just sing aloud some of the music while I'm conducting."

But the primary focus, both he and Horowitz agree, is moving beyond the mainstream repertoire.

"I use the term 'post-classical' to identify what's going on at the borders, whether it's the border between China and the U.S., or gamelan and the symphonic orchestra, or West African drumming and jazz," says Horowitz. "And the most interesting composers -- people like Zhou Long, Lou Harrison and Steve Reich -- are all post-classical."

The strategy makes sense -- because modern audiences are post-classical, too. Raised on a global diet of music -- everything from salsa to grunge rock to Japanese gagaku -- younger listeners can hardly be blamed for finding the traditional European repertoire narrow and oppressively Dead-White-Male-ish.  But that doesn't mean they're not interested in serious music; they just want it performed for 21st-century ears.

"One failing in the classical world is not really understanding the audience," says critic Greg Sandow, who teaches a course at Juilliard on the future of music.

"Maybe the most important thing now is a real knowledge of pop culture and the world in which your music is going to be received. People who watch 'The Sopranos' -- as I do! -- are going to be a little restless listening to 'Tosca,' " he says, laughing.

In the end, say many observers, the classical world may have no choice but to change. Bureaucracy-heavy institutions like the National Symphony Orchestra (with its $29 million budget) are competing for the next generation against more adventurous groups like the Post-Classical Ensemble -- whose lean, $400,000 annual operation gives it the flexibility to take risks.

"Symphony orchestras," Gil-Ordonez says flatly, "are going to disappear."

Sandow won't go that far, but pronounces the situation "fairly dire," since the age of the mainstream classical audience has been rising for 50 years, while ticket sales have been dropping for the past 20.

"Orchestras are finding it very restricting to keep 80 musicians under contract for 52 weeks, and that model is not really sustainable, " he says. "The future may belong to smaller, more nimble organizations. We're still learning what works."

••• 

 
For more on the Post-Classical Ensemble and its current season, click here.

To watch Angel Gil-Ordonez talking about music on The Washington Post's website, click here.

For more information on Joseph Horowitz, click here.

By Stephen Brookes
The Washington Post •  October 13, 2007

George Enescu What’s it take to get a little George Enescu around here? The Romanian composer wrote some of the most lyrical, richly evocative music of the early twentieth century, but is woefully little heard here these days. So you’d think that a recital by one of Romania’s most promising young musicians, given at the residence of the Romanian ambassador, would be a chance to flood your ears with this rare and wonderful stuff.

Sadly, you’d only be partly right.  Pianist Andrei Licaret did play a bit of Enescu on Wednesday night:  just two movements from the Piano Suite Op. 10.  And they were, as you’d expect, rhapsodic essays of the most elegant kind, full of translucent harmonies and imaginative writing. Licaret played them naturally, poetically and with extraordinary attention to detail; a tantalizing glimpse that left you wanting more.


At 25, Licaret is still so baby-faced that he set off waves of maternal cooing when he sat down at the piano. But he displayed a powerful technique in the rest of the program, which included Schumann’s Kreisleriana Op. 16, Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30 Op. 109, and three devilish little sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti.

They’re all challenging works, and the Beethoven is one of those daunting, late-period enigmas that few pianists can really make work.  Licaret played them all with ample technique and often a strong lyric sense, especially in the radiant second movement of the Schumann.  But as often as not he seemed impatient -- dispatching the pieces rather than sinking deeply into them -- and didn’t always show a distinctive, developed personality behind the virtuosic fingerwork.

By Stephen Brookes
The Washington Post • October 9, 2007

The world of baroque music is, of course, a volatile, action-packed place, rife with subversive ideas and aggressive, hard-driving players. You were thinking periwigs and dainty little minuets? Not anymore. Over the past two decades, a new generation of musicians has been pumping blood back into the veins of the baroque -- unleashing music that, it turns out, can be almost shockingly fierce.

One of the best new groups is the New York-based Rebel (emphasis on the second syllable) Baroque Orchestra, which put on a fast, furiousconcert at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center Sunday night. Building around two of the twelve remarkable concertos by Vivaldi known as "L'Estro Armonico," the group explored the work of several lesser known composers, including Angelo Ragazzi, Giuseppe Valentini and Alessandro Stradella, and found some intriguing connections among them.

But it was the playing -- fiery, alive and beautifully controlled -- that made the evening. The ensemble's leaders, violinists Jorg-Michael Schwarz and Karen Marie Marmer, set the tone, paring ornamentation to a minimum and letting the raw power of the music emerge. The ensemble work was impressively tight -- things can get a bit messy when you're playing with this much passion -- and many of the 11 players turned in eloquent solos. Schwarz's handling of Telemann's "Concerto in D" had a gripping, almost savage edge, while violinist Christoph Timpe gave an intensely personal account of Ragazzi's "Sonata XII in G." And it was a rare treat to hear David Kjar on the valveless "natural" trumpet, bringing a singing tone and impressive virtuosity to this diabolically difficult instrument.

By Stephen Brookes
The Washington Post • October 8, 2007

Has it really been three decades since Christopher Kendall and Robert Eisenstein launched the Folger Consort? Little matter. As they showed Friday night at the Shakespeare Library during the opening concert of their 31st season, the venerable ensemble is as lively and engaging as ever.

Rosa LamoreauxThe concert, dubbed "Groves of Antiquity," was a particular pleasure, showcasing the extraordinary soprano Rosa Lamoreaux in a program centered around three early 18th-century cantatas. The small scale of the works -- Rameau's "Le Bergere Fidele," Vivaldi's "All'Ombra di Sospetto" and Pergolesi's "Orfeo" -- allowed Lamoreaux to bring a subtle, delicately calibrated sense of drama to each, and her singing -- as always -- was riveting.

The purely instrumental works on the program didn't fare quite as well. Harpsichordist Webb Wiggins got off to an interesting start in Forqueray's "Cinquieme Suite" before things got away from him in the third movement, and baroque flutist Colin St. Martin's tone was so soft in Telemann's Quartet in A Minor that a couple of medium-size butterflies could have drowned him out. Perhaps the most satisfying playing of the evening came from violinist Linda Quan, who led an account of Jean-Marie Leclair's Trio Sonata in D that was both authentic and strikingly eloquent -- enhanced by the razor-sharp interplay with Eisenstein on the viol.

By Stephen Brookes
The Washington Post • October 3, 2007

Is it possible to be too refined, too polite, too well-bred when playing French woodwind music? Well -- possibly not. But at Shriver Hall on Sunday, the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet put the question to the test.

Over the past two decades, the group has carved out a commanding presence in the world of chamber music, with insightful interpretations, precise ensemble playing and a feel for blending wind sonorities that has rarely been matched. There was much to admire in Sunday's program, which focused on some of the most colorful and charismatic French music of the last century, from familiar works like Jean Francaix's playful Quintet No. 1 to little-known gems; Paul Taffanel's quietly tempestuous Quintet in G Minor in particular was a true delight, with much credit going to Michael Hasel on the wooden flute. The ensemble turned in a richly atmospheric reading of Samuel Barber's "Summer Music" (another mainstay of the repertoire, and the only non-French work on the program), while Darius Milhaud's "La Cheminee du Roi Rene" unfolded with subtle wit and almost obsessive attention to detail.

And yet, for all its elegance -- or maybe because of it -- the evening never really quite took off. Chamber music is so appealing partly because its small size allows for a sense of spontaneity and individual personality; the best performances can sound almost improvised. But the Berliners seemed to glide along efficiently on familiar, well-oiled rails, delivering a performance that was perfect down to its molecules, yet oddly lacking in the most important thing of all: life.

By Stephen Brookes
The Washington Post • October 2, 2007

Fusion's back. And back with a vengeance, if John McLaughlin has anything to say about it. The jazz-rock pioneer has grayed a bit since the days when fusion was sort of hip (no, really -- it was!), but at 65 he's still one of the most gifted guitarists on the planet and a force to be reckoned with. And he's determined that fusion will not die -- at least, not on his watch.

That was clear on Friday night, when McLaughlin and his new band, the Fourth Dimension, put on a driving, supercharged show at Lisner Auditorium. This is McLaughlin's first fusion tour in nearly a decade, but he proved he's lost virtually none of the jaw-dropping virtuosity that marked his work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the 1970s and Miles Davis before that. The playing blazed, the riffs soared and the effect was of an unstoppable juggernaut -- out to crush nonbelievers beneath its wheels.

And for the first hour, it was pure exhilaration. McLaughlin has put together a ferociously talented band, including Gary Husband on keyboards, Mark Mondesir on drums and the young Frenchman Hadrien Feraud on bass. Husband kicked in some spectacularly off-the-map synth playing, generating warbling flutes, wailing guitars and instruments not yet dreamed of, while Mondesir provided solid, low-key percussion. But the real news of the evening was the 23-year-old Feraud, whose supple, inventive and blindingly fast playing nearly stole the show from McLaughlin himself -- no easy feat.

Yet for all its brilliance, the band finally fell victim to its own unrelenting power. McLaughlin seemed out to overwhelm rather than seduce, and it was only rarely -- as in the moving ballad he played as an encore -- that his lyrical side came to the surface. A shame:  McLaughlin's depths may not be as flashy as his pyrotechnics, but they're far more interesting.