By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • May 23, 2006
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The Contemporary Music Forum abandoned their usual lair at the Corcoran Gallery to perform at the Phillips Collection on Sunday, where they blew away the Music Room’s old-world gloom with some of the most provocative and colorful new music heard yet this year.


Douglas BoyceFour of the Forum’s member composers were on the program, including Jeffrey Mumford, whose earnestly pedantic titles often belie the radiant beauty of his music.  His intricate “a focused expanse of evolving experience” was a perfect example – a sort of heroic mini-concerto for flute, whose complex structure was put completely to the service of its emotional logic. (Eloquent playing by David Whiteside didn’t hurt, either.)

Tenor Robert Baker delivered two songs from Douglas Boyce’s “A Book of Songs” that can only be described as drop-dead beautiful. Easily the most captivating works on the program, these songs of love and death are extraordinarily well-written, with moments of toe-curling beauty and genuine insight. And Boyce could hardly ask for a finer interpreter than Baker, accompanied by the brilliant Lura Johnson-Lee on piano.

Percussionist Barry Dove brought wit and impressive voltage to Toshimitsu Tanaka’s 1965 classic “Two Movements for Marimba”, which still sounds so  fresh it could have been written tomorrow.  But Frederick Weck’s new “Video VI” for violin and marimba, with its stale vocabulary and light-show of geometric shapes, felt mired in some bygone avant-garde decade. Steve Antosca’s “for two” for flute and viola got a lively and unpredictable performance, though, and Eric Moe’s “riprap” was a feast of musical imagination – a fine work from one of America’s most gifted young composers.

May 21, 2006
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Let Us Open Our Ears to the Glorious Triumphs of the State: the North Korean Friendship Association has a sing-along version of the dictatorship's National Defence Song, complete with stirring photos of military hardware and soldiers at sunset. And you thought they didn't know how to have fun.

Go here, click on the star, then sit back and follow the bouncing ball. (Via WFMU's Beware of the Blog).

May 19, 2006
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The Washington Post 5/19/06:  The Haydn Trio Eisenstadt are renowned for their performances of  (surprise!) Joseph Haydn, and it would have been a treat to hear some at their recital on Wednesday at the Embassy of Austria.  But the program was full of  other pleasures, not the least of which were the US premieres of two thought-provoking new works by American composers.

Mozart was on the program, of course  (it’s apparently illegal this year not to include him in every recital) and the ensemble opened with his Piano Trio in B Flat Major K. 502.  It’s a gracious piece, light and easily digestible, and the Haydn gave it a smart and civilized reading.  Too civilized, perhaps.  In this (and the Beethoven Trio in E Flat Major which came later) everything was buttoned down so tightly that no pulse could race, and no sweat could bead upon the brow. Violinist Verena Stourzh brought smarts and testosterone to the playing, but Hannes Gradwohl’s cello-playing often felt bloodless, and pianist Harald Kosik took a drown-them-in-legato approach that drenched everything in a  shimmering sameness.

Things got more interesting in the two new pieces. Jeffrey Mumford’s “in the community of encompassing hours” is a dark work full of edgy dissonances and slow, lush shifts of tonal color -- involving, explains the composer, “elongations of motives earlier introduced as faster moving entities.” While everybody loves a good entity, the piece ultimately came off as ponderous and not a little forlorn.  But the ideas flew faster and more furiously in David Froom’s Piano Trio No. 2 “Grenzen” (Borders).  The piece is a delight – intellectually engaging, explosive with imagination, with a satisfying visceral power.

May 15, 2006
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The Washington Post 5/15/06:  The Daedalus Quartet flew into town this weekend on wings of so…  no, that’s not right. Waxy feathers?  More like jet-propelled rockets of blistering virtuosity. Since bursting on the scene six years ago, this young ensemble has been making a name for itself as one of the hottest new quartets around --  and on Friday night at the Corcoran Gallery, they showed why.

The program opened with the first of Mendelssohn’s string quartets, Op. 44, No.1 in D Major. It’s a light work that critics love to dismiss; and sure, the drama gets a little high sometimes, the gestures a little too sweeping.  But there’s so much pure pleasure in it that you forgive the indulgences and beg for more, and the Daedalus gave it a heady reading: The Allegro exploded out of the gate, the Menuetto ached with bittersweet longing, and the Presto con brio – well, refer back to those “rockets of blistering virtuosity.”

While Mendelssohn sweeps you off your feet, Bela Bartok would rather just pull the rug out from under you – and then hit you with it. His Quartet No. 3 is a wild and unfettered masterpiece, a raging brain-storm of ear-bending sonorities and inventive, edgy rhythms.  The Daedalus dove into it with fearless abandon; the music rang into the heavens; and the audience emerged stunned, grateful and alive.

But that was mere prelude to Mozart’s String Quintet in E-flat Major, K.614, which the Daedalus (joined by Roger Tapping on viola) gave a full-blooded, magnificent reading -- so hot you could almost smell wax in the air. In all, a brilliant performance.

May 13, 2006
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The Washington Post 5/13/06: Ukrainian pianist Vitaly Samoshko had to run a gauntlet of terrors on Thursday night. First there was the packed audience at the Embassy of Poland, freshly drenched from the downpours outside. Then there was the scary portrait of piano god (and former Prime Minister) Ignace Jan Paderewski glowering sternly over the Steinway. And finally –most terrible of all! – there was Samoshko’s discovery that he’d neglected to pack a tie to go with his formal tails -- and would have to perform en deshabille.

But challenges are there to overcome, and Samoshko did so with aplomb. The opening was a bit ordinary -- Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 27 (the “Moonlight) is so wearyingly familiar that even the dewiest ears glaze over at its opening notes. Samoshko dispatched it without undue fuss, and moved on to Claude Debussy’s charming, chimerical Suite Bergamasque. He took a different approach from the shimmering, gossamer-light readings we’re used to; there’s remarkable solidity and power in Samoshko’s playing, and he focused on the dance-like aspects of the four movements more than on Debussy’s delicate ambiguities.

But it was only in the second half of the recital (the Russian half, natch) that Samoshko really set the furniture on fire. He brought blinding virtuosity to five of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Etudes-Tableaux – complex, volcanic performances that made every cell in your body stand up and listen. And there was barely time to recover before he unleashed Sergei Prokofiev’s astonishing Sonata No. 7. Elegant, anguished, tumultuous, beautiful – to hear Samoshko play it was like looking straight into the tormented heart of the 20th Century itself.

(George Pieler reviewed the concert for ionarts; read it here. )

May 11, 2006
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Mozart the fugue-writer
The Washington Post 5/11/06:  If you like your music passionate to the point of incandescence, you belonged at the Freer Gallery on Tuesday night for the last of this season’s three “Musicians from Marlboro” concerts.  The program  opened with Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546 for string quartet, and the Adagio has all the pretty, gracile wit you expect from Mozart -- so let’s just move impatiently to the astounding fugue that follows. It may have been written as an exercise, but the Marlboro players built it into a white-hot juggernaut of relentless power, magnificent in its disdain for mere melody, and almost too vast and pitiless to be contained in the human head.

Once the stage cooled, the fine young baritone Charles Mays, Jr. delivered a fresh and colorful account of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe song-cycle, op. 48, bringing a finely tuned sense of irony to this often over-dramatized work. Good as he was, though, Mays was nearly upstaged by accompanist Ieva Jokubaviciute, who nailed every note with coiled, razor-sharp intelligence and wit.

But the best was saved for last. Before he was crowned the Darth Vader of modern music, Arnold Schoenberg was a full-fledged Romantic, and his string sextet known as Verklarte Nacht has at least one foot firmly in the 19th Century. Its lush emotional landscape can be suffocating in the wrong hands, but the Marlboro players, led by the prodigiously-talented violinist Susie Park, gave a reading of it that was so detailed, so passionate and so convincing that it left the audience gasping helplessly for breath – a superb performance in every way.

May 9, 2006
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On Sunday afternoon we cast off our foolish idleness and went to church. For music; not the other stuff. The WWC was premiering a work they'd commissioned from composer-organist Katherine Dienes, a young New Zealander. Music director Donald Paul Richardson had heard one of her pieces somewhere, liked it, and tracked her down in England. He'd been thinking for some time about a work based on "A Song of Hannah" and when he proposed it to Dienes, she was astonished -- and acepted immediately. It turns out her own daughter, named Hannah, had just been born.

Here's the review:

The Washington Post 5/9/06: As all right-thinking people agree, there are few things in life as beautiful as the female voice -- and if one is good, more are even better. For proof, just turn your ears toward the Washington Women’s Chorus, which since 1996 has been bringing everything from medieval chant to ultra-modern new vocal works to the DC area.

Composer Katherine DienesThe Chorus celebrated its tenth anniversary at the National Presbyterian Church on Sunday, in a concert featuring “Hannah’s Song”, a new work by New Zealand composer Katherine Dienes. Commissioned by the Chorus, it’s based on Hebrew texts from the Book of Samuel, and embodies, in the composer’s words, “a jump for joy, a dance of glee.”

Joy and glee, of course, can be subjective. The Hannah texts are pretty severe; there’s a lot of “the wicked shall be put to silence in darkness,” and “they that strive with the Lord shall be broken in pieces.” But Dienes’ music itself was luminous, with insistent rhythms and an almost ancient, incantatory feel. Riding on a percussion section featuring marimba, hand-clapping and drums, with dark melodic lines carved out by cello and saxophone, the Chorus (under the excellent direction of Donald Paul Richardson) wove a complex and often exalting tapestry of sound. Mezzo Grace Gori and soprano Maryann East both turned in superb solos, and brought the whole work into vivid focus.

The second half of the program was devoted to lighter fare: standards and show tunes designed to showcase the Chorus and give its members a chance to solo – and everyone a chance to just have fun.