Music - George Hunka

Dufourt / Nonken

Hitting the streets tomorrow, Hugues Dufourt: L’Origine du monde, a new album of piano and percussion works by the French composer, is already garnering rave reviews. In the March issue of Gramophone, Arnold Whittall calls the performance of the title work, inspired by Gustave Courbet’s controversial 1866 painting now at the Musée d’Orsay, “an exceptionally assured and spellbinding demonstration of Dufourt’s uncompromising creative ambitions. … While Marilyn Nonken is the tirelessly resourceful pianist throughout, there are also vital contributions from the New York University Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Jonathan Haas.” Andy Hamilton in the British music magazine The Wire called it “a superb release. … In the works assembled here, physicality of performance is inseparable from musical sensuousness.”

Divine Art’s release completes Marilyn’s informal, indeed unintended, trilogy of spectral music for piano, following her 2005 double-CD Tristan Murail: The Complete Piano Music and her 2012 Voix Voilées (this latter also includes her extraordinary performance of Dufourt’s Erlkönig), all of which garnered top-flight reviews. After all, she did write the book on the subject. The CD booklet contains an excellent essay by Will Mason on this music to get you up to speed, and the album will be available tomorrow on CD from Amazon, as well as streaming on a variety of outlets, including Apple Classical. Bon appétit!

Sunday CD: Seelentrost

Among my recent enthusiasms has been the music of Heinrich Schütz, a prolific composer of primarily church music who flourished in German lands in the 17th century, during and just after the Thirty Years’ War. (As his career progressed, he was forced to compose for smaller and smaller ensembles — the result of the war’s decimation of the local population.)

There’s no shortage of recordings of his work, despite his relative marginalization anywhere but in early music circles. But in its February issue Gramophone bestows a laurel or two on Seelentrost (Perfect Noise), the debut album by soprano Isabel Schicketanz. Subtitled “The sound of inner life in Heinrich Schütz’ time,” her program features work not only by Schütz but also by many of his students, including the recovery of some fine work by Sophie Elisabeth (1613-1676).

Schicketanz plumbs the spiritual depths exemplified by these composers’ immersion in the Christian religion and in early Baroque practice with intent and unerring focus and power (as products of a Protestant theology, the language here is a Lutheran German rather than a Catholic Latin — without this, no German Enlightenment as I described the other day); her coda in the final minute of Adam Krueger’s “Der Liebe Macht herrscht Tag und Nacht” sends shivers down my spine. Her accompanists are themselves subtle and precise, and Dr. Oliver Geisler’s liner notes provide an incisive and informative introduction to this obscure work:

Speaking of programme conception: with the works on this recording, Isabel Schicketanz takes a path that first leads us listeners into darkness, letting us explore the shadow regions of the soul. A second group of works, from Heinrich Schütz’s “Ich harrete des Herren” (“I waited patiently for the Lord”), portrays a person who lives and loves, who has tasted all aspects of life and can pass on these experiences (of life and faith). The third and final part begins with Heinrich Alberts “Dass alle Menschen sterben” (“That all people die”). The certainty of death is expressed, however, with the promise of coming salvation. A certain serenity can be heard, an inner smile and light that is built on deeper insights into life and the soul.

You can listen to the album through many streaming services, including Apple Classical; you can also hear it on YouTube, but for cryin’ out loud, the delicate work of Schicketanz and her colleagues demands better reproduction than your MacBook will provide. The CD is available from Challenge Records or perhaps an e-tailer near you.

For a deeper dive, the New York Times‘ Anthony Rommasini has more on Schütz here.

Sound all around

This Friday night, November 15, at 7:30 pm, my lovely wife Marilyn Nonken will take to the stage at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music and present Piano 360, a program of new and recent immersive musical works “surrounding the audience with a spatial audio ring of speakers,” according to the DiMenna Center’s page for this event. On the program are new compositions by Elizabeth Hoffman (which includes a few texts by yours truly), Ellen Fishman, and Natasha Barrett, as well as contemporary masterpieces by Alvin Lucier, Hugues Dufourt, and Jonathan Harvey.

Tickets for this event are available here; the DiMenna Center is at 450 West 37th Street here in New York. We’ll hope to see you there.

A toast to … Arnold Schönberg

Today marks the 150th anniversary of Arnold Schönberg’s birth, and the Austrian Cultural Forum here in New York will celebrate next week on Friday, September 19, with the opening of Arnold Schönberg: 150 Years, an exhibition running through November 8 devoted to the life and work of the modernist composer, a collaboration with Vienna’s Arnold Schönberg Center. The celebration will get under way next Friday with a concert from Trio Callas, which will be performing the composer’s Verklärte Nacht and Charles Ives’s Piano Trio, following opening remarks from Dr. Ulrike Anton, the newish director of the Schönberg Center. This event is sold out, alas, but I’ll look forward to the exhibition itself.

As I raise my glass of Moric’s Haus Marke Red tonight, I’ll be listening to Hilary Hahn’s splendid rendition of Schönberg’s violin concerto, accompanied by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen. While the actual Deutsche Grammophon CD release is to be preferred, here’s the YouTube version — better than nothing — for all you cheapskates out there. And really, if you’re going to listen to this music, get yourself a real stereo system whydon’tcha.

From chaos to order and back again

Wilhelm Gauseː Court Ball in Vienna (1900).

In his study of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Carl Schorske turned not to Schoenberg, Berg, or Webern to introduce his themes, but to Maurice Ravel’s 1920 La valse. “I feel this work a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, linked in my mind with the impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny,” Ravel said, and Schorske wrote:

Ravel’s musical parable of a modern cultural crisis, whether or not he knew it, posed the problem in much the same way as it was felt and seen by the Austrian intelligensia of the fin-de-siècle. How had their world fallen into chaos? Was it because the individuals (in Ravel, the musical themes) contained in their own psyches some characteristics fundamentally incompatible with the social whole? Or was it the whole as such that distorted, paralyzed, and destroyed the individuals who composed it? … These questions are not new to humankind, but to Vienna’s fin-de-siècle intelligentsia they became central. Not only Vienna’s finest writers, but its painters and psychologists, even its art historians, were preoccupied with the nature of the individual in a disintegrating society.

As, I would add, am I. It is small comfort to realize that we’ve been here before, but we must take our comforts as they come.

To while away a few minutes today, you may wish to hear La valse itself. I’m quite fond of eccentrics; they are the spice of society, so long as they don’t shade into sociopaths, which they too often do. Below you’ll find Glenn Gould’s re-arrangement of Ravel’s solo piano arrangement of La valse in his 1974 series for the CBC, Music in Our Time. His introductory remarks are of interest as well.