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Dan Coren
Weekend with Coltrane and Boulez:
'Expressiveness' is the word
DAN COREN
How often can you hear a jazz combo led by a woman who is not a singer? How often can you hear a jazz quintet featuring lead soloists who are siblings? How often can you hear top-rate jazz in a beautifully conceived dinner theater for a reasonable price?
Quite unexpectedly, I found myself enjoying all those benefits at WXPN’s World Café Live on Thursday, January 24, listening to a quintet featuring the sister and brother team of Anat & Avishai Cohen (she plays tenor sax and, more often, clarinet; he plays trumpet) close out last week’s Israeli Jazz Festival 2008.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d never set foot in this spectacularly successful venue before, but you can bet that I’ll be back many times. This wonderful group played a wide range of material, much of it composed by group members, much of it under the spell of John Coltrane, all of it played with passion and exuberance.
How many classical musicians, no matter how gifted, can, on the spot and in public, simultaneously compose and satisfy the communal demands of chamber music? Not even all jazz musicians can do that; you can tell when somebody is faking and playing canned riffs. Not this group. While they obviously knew each other’s moves, and while they certainly had a game plan (especially in what for me was the high point of the evening, a multi-sectional meditation on Coltrane’s ballad, Lonnie’s Lament), the creative spark that makes jazz improvisation such a tightrope act was unmistakably present.
When jazz makes classical seem dreary…
It had been a long time– far too long– since I’d last heard live jazz. And, not for the first time, I found myself thinking how often jazz can make the next classical concert I attend seem dreary and staid. As luck would have it, I found the perfect antidote for this malaise on Saturday night at the Independence Seaport Museum, where Orchestra 2001, under the direction of James Freeman, played Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau Sans Maitre (“The Hammer Without a Master”).
The work was bracketed by two much more recent works, both beautifully performed and very warmly received: a Suite for Viola and Piano (1998) performed by its composer, Kenyi Bunch, and pianist Marcantonio Barone; and Alan Krantz’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” (2005-2007), essentially a guitar concerto featuring soloist Jason Vieaux.
A performance of Le Marteau is a big deal, as David Patrick Stearns made abundantly clear in his Inquirer article of January 24. Freeman, as is his usual practice at Orchestra 2001 concerts, spoke about the music beforehand, of the trepidation and awe with which he and his colleagues approached Le Marteau and of how they came not only to understand the work but, somewhat to their surprise, to actually love it.
A couple of Norman Rockwell kids
At the break—which, oddly, came after the fifth of Boulez’s nine sections—I turned behind me and saw Allison Herz, Orchestra 2001’s clarinetist and marketing director (Le Marteau has no clarinet part), sitting with Marcantonio Barone, the two of them looking like Norman Rockwell kids who’d just seen Santa Claus come down the chimney. And indeed, it was a wonderful revelation to find that after all this buildup, after all the terrible tales about this monster of a piece, the music that upset so many people in 1955 now sounds like what it is: music written half a century ago.
Amazingly, any composer writing in this style today would seem old-fashioned. We are, after all, now as far removed from the premiere of Le Marteau as Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht was from Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony.
Here are two excerpts from Le Marteau played by the Ensemble InterContemporain under Boulez’s direction. The mezzo-soprano is Hilary Summers. The mezzo-soprano at Saturday’s performance, Freda Herseth, has a much lighter voice, but she, like Summers --in fact, like everyone in the ensemble --performed with the same technical perfection and expressiveness.
Needless to say, defanged as the terrors of the avant-garde may be, this is not music to everybody’s taste. Indeed, the Port of History Museum auditorium was barely half-full. But for me, “expressiveness” is the right word. As I’ve said elsewhere, I—and, I believe, many in the audience—found Le Marteau Sans Maitre to be simply a gorgeous work.
'Expressiveness' is the word
DAN COREN
How often can you hear a jazz combo led by a woman who is not a singer? How often can you hear a jazz quintet featuring lead soloists who are siblings? How often can you hear top-rate jazz in a beautifully conceived dinner theater for a reasonable price?
Quite unexpectedly, I found myself enjoying all those benefits at WXPN’s World Café Live on Thursday, January 24, listening to a quintet featuring the sister and brother team of Anat & Avishai Cohen (she plays tenor sax and, more often, clarinet; he plays trumpet) close out last week’s Israeli Jazz Festival 2008.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d never set foot in this spectacularly successful venue before, but you can bet that I’ll be back many times. This wonderful group played a wide range of material, much of it composed by group members, much of it under the spell of John Coltrane, all of it played with passion and exuberance.
How many classical musicians, no matter how gifted, can, on the spot and in public, simultaneously compose and satisfy the communal demands of chamber music? Not even all jazz musicians can do that; you can tell when somebody is faking and playing canned riffs. Not this group. While they obviously knew each other’s moves, and while they certainly had a game plan (especially in what for me was the high point of the evening, a multi-sectional meditation on Coltrane’s ballad, Lonnie’s Lament), the creative spark that makes jazz improvisation such a tightrope act was unmistakably present.
When jazz makes classical seem dreary…
It had been a long time– far too long– since I’d last heard live jazz. And, not for the first time, I found myself thinking how often jazz can make the next classical concert I attend seem dreary and staid. As luck would have it, I found the perfect antidote for this malaise on Saturday night at the Independence Seaport Museum, where Orchestra 2001, under the direction of James Freeman, played Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau Sans Maitre (“The Hammer Without a Master”).
The work was bracketed by two much more recent works, both beautifully performed and very warmly received: a Suite for Viola and Piano (1998) performed by its composer, Kenyi Bunch, and pianist Marcantonio Barone; and Alan Krantz’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” (2005-2007), essentially a guitar concerto featuring soloist Jason Vieaux.
A performance of Le Marteau is a big deal, as David Patrick Stearns made abundantly clear in his Inquirer article of January 24. Freeman, as is his usual practice at Orchestra 2001 concerts, spoke about the music beforehand, of the trepidation and awe with which he and his colleagues approached Le Marteau and of how they came not only to understand the work but, somewhat to their surprise, to actually love it.
A couple of Norman Rockwell kids
At the break—which, oddly, came after the fifth of Boulez’s nine sections—I turned behind me and saw Allison Herz, Orchestra 2001’s clarinetist and marketing director (Le Marteau has no clarinet part), sitting with Marcantonio Barone, the two of them looking like Norman Rockwell kids who’d just seen Santa Claus come down the chimney. And indeed, it was a wonderful revelation to find that after all this buildup, after all the terrible tales about this monster of a piece, the music that upset so many people in 1955 now sounds like what it is: music written half a century ago.
Amazingly, any composer writing in this style today would seem old-fashioned. We are, after all, now as far removed from the premiere of Le Marteau as Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht was from Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony.
Here are two excerpts from Le Marteau played by the Ensemble InterContemporain under Boulez’s direction. The mezzo-soprano is Hilary Summers. The mezzo-soprano at Saturday’s performance, Freda Herseth, has a much lighter voice, but she, like Summers --in fact, like everyone in the ensemble --performed with the same technical perfection and expressiveness.
Needless to say, defanged as the terrors of the avant-garde may be, this is not music to everybody’s taste. Indeed, the Port of History Museum auditorium was barely half-full. But for me, “expressiveness” is the right word. As I’ve said elsewhere, I—and, I believe, many in the audience—found Le Marteau Sans Maitre to be simply a gorgeous work.
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