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An Evening of George Perle, a Practitioner of the Rigidly RandomBy ALLAN KOZINN With Elliott Carter, at 96, getting so many performances of his works these days, some of his equally deserving junior colleagues have been overlooked. The Da Capo Chamber Players took a step toward remedying that on Monday evening at Merkin Concert Hall, with a program largely devoted to the music of George Perle, whose 90th birthday is on May 6. Mr. Perle, like many of his generation's most serious composers, saw an irresistible logic in serialism -- a style in which works are created from predetermined series of pitches, rhythms and other elements -- and he used its techniques to drive his own works. He also wrote several useful books on the subject, and on the music of Alban Berg, one of its principal early practitioners. So it was fitting that the rest of the Da Capo program was devoted to music of Schoenberg, who invented serialism although all the Schoenberg the group played predated that revolution. One thing that separated Mr. Perle from so much of the serialist pack was that his music, whether serial or not, is driven by a deeply expressive and often lyrical impulse. Curiously and, as it turned out, interestingly the Da Capo players avoided works in which Mr. Perle's lyricism was especially evident. Instead, they illuminated his humorous, playful side in performances that were consistently agile and transparent. His ''Critical Moments'' (1996) and ''Critical Moments 2'' (2001), are collections of aphoristic movements in which flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion exchange piquant thematic fragments. The most striking thing about these sets (the first includes six movements, the second has nine) is the economy with which Mr. Perle uses timbre and gesture to create distinct characterizations. A flute or clarinet line may scamper over a piano ostinato until a brief percussion figure acts as a punctuation mark. The sharp sound of the marimba is offset by the gentler tone of the vibraphone. A toneless burst of wind, in a flute line, alternates with a waltzy figure in the other instruments. Mr. Perle used similar animation techniques, but couched in grander gestures, in his Sonata for Cello and Piano (1985), to which André Emilianoff, the cellist, and Blair McMillen, the pianist, gave a deft, spirited reading. The gestures of the cello line often seem like those of an actor: they describe both attitude and action. They also meet more standard expectations -- clarity of form, for one, and instrumental virtuosity. Two of Mr. Perle's early vocal works, settings of Rilke's ''Du meine heilige Einsamkeit'' and ''Der Bach hat leise Melodien'' (1941), were set beside a group of Schoenberg's turn-of-the-century songs. Lucy Shelton sang them all with a warmth that bridged the nearly half a century between them. And on the second half of the program, Ms. Shelton and the Da Capo musicians gave a hair-raising, theatrical account of Schoenberg's ''Pierrot Lunaire.''
New York Times
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Ups and Downs of Romance
By ALLAN KOZINN
Instrumental works framed the program by the Da Capo Chamber Players at Merkin Concert Hall on Tuesday evening, and in some ways those pieces gave the performance grit and ballast. But vocal works - song cycles by Aaron Jay Kernis and Sir Harrison Birtwistle, for soprano and cello, and André Previn's "Vocalise," for soprano, cello and piano - were the heart of the program.
These days, barely a week goes by without one of Mr. Kernis's works turning up on a program somewhere. Performers are mining his backlist, bringing some rarely heard but worthy scores into the spotlight. In some cases performers can capitalize on having spotted him way back: his expansive "Love Scenes" cycle 1987) was written for André Emelianoff, the cellist in the Da Capo ensemble, when Mr. Kernis was 27. Its text is a set of 11 poems by Anna Swir about the course of a romance, from bliss to failure, a range that gives a composer plenty to work with, even when confined, as in this case, to two melody lines without the harmonic support usually provided in a piano part. Mr. Kernis treated the voice and the cello equally, exploring in each the range from graceful lyricism to explosive histrionics. Mr. Emelianoff and the soprano Lucy Shelton met the work's challenges eloquently.
They also made a strong case for Sir Harrison's "Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker" (2000), a cryptic group of pointillistic miniatures, and with Lisa Moore at the piano they settled comfortably into Mr. Previn's attractive "Vocalise."
The Da Capo Players opened the concert with a revival of Joseph Schwantner's "Wind, Willow, Whisper ...," a work written for the group's 10th anniversary in 1980. Scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, it skirts tonality to create a magical atmosphere through which themes emerge from a mist and fade away just as quickly. The players -- Patricia Spencer, flutist; Jo-Ann Sternberg; clarinetist, Renee Jolles; violinist, with Mr. Emelianoff and Ms. Moore -- gave the piece a fluid, inviting reading.
Elliott Carter's "Esprit rude/Esprit doux" (1985), for flute and clarinet, is more elemental, and Ms. Spencer and Ms. Sternberg played it with spirited virtuosity. Ms. Spencer, Ms. Moore and Meghan Stoops closed the program with Jonathan Harvey's "Riot" (1993), a rugged, high-energy piece in which broad dynamics and startling gestures create the contours of an animated conversation, if not necessarily a riot.
New York Times Arts & Ideas,
Saturday, June 9, 2001
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Whimsy , Humor and Heft Toast a Group's 30 Years
By ALLAN KOZINN
New-music groups flourish in New York, and quite a few of them have shown remarkable staying power, even
if individual members come and go. The Da Capo Chamber Players have been exploring and helping create the modern repertory for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano for the last 30 years, although only its flutist, Patricia Spencer, remains from the earliest days.
To celebrate the ensemble's threedecade history, Ms. Spencer and her current colleagues - Jo-Ann Sternberg, clarinetist; Eva Gruesser, violinist; Andre Emelianoff, cellist; and Lisa Moore, pianist - along with a handful of guest musicians, offered a retrospective at Merkin Concert Hall on Tuesday evening.
The program did not include anything as old as the group itself: the earliest offering was "Petroushskates" (1980), written for Da Capo's 10th-anniversary season by Joan Tower, who was the quintet's pianist for its first 15 years.
["Petroushskates" is]a vivid, high-energy score that alludes slyly to the textures and harmonic shimmer of Stravinsky's "Petrushka" but is its own work. [Tower] performed with Ms. Gruesser and Mr. Emelianoff in her piano trio, "Big Sky" (2000), a brief but emotionally hefty work in which intricate piano figuration is set against beautifully shaped string lines. Ms. Tower's works closed the concert, but the contrasts between the whimsical "Petroushskates" and the more sober "Big Sky" mirrored the spirit of the program as a whole. On the lighter side, Bruce Adolphe's "Machaut Is My Beginning" (1989) strips Machaut's "Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement" of its antiquity and reconstructs it as a neo-Romantic, often Coplandesque fantasy. And Alla Borzova's song cycle, "Mother Said" (1997), takes a mostly humorous look at relationships between parents and children and insecure lovers. Ms. Borzova's work, the most expansively scored on the program, calls for a large ensemble including cimbalom. horn, shofar, a trap set and a Chinese flute, and illustrates
A former member returns to play her piano works.
its texts by touching on traditional and popular styles, from klezmer and a Chinese pastiche to jazz and rap. Paul Sperry was the tenor soloist, and Ms. Borzova conducted.
The program's weightier side included Shulamit Ran's "Mirage" (1990), a thorny work for the core Da Capo instrumentation that offered a good deal of graceful interplay between the instruments at its heart.
Included as well was Giya Kancheli's "Night Prayers" (1992), a string quartet (written for the Kronos), a work of considerable intensity and passion.
The New York Times, August 13, 1999:
Da Capo's recording of "Pierrot lunaire", with soprano Lucy Shelton, was listed by Allan Kozinn as a favorite in a recent New York Times article about Arnold Schoenberg ("Finding the Saint in a Musical Devil", Friday August 13, 1999). Commenting that "central to Schoenberg's style was his belief that the music must actively illuminate the text's underlying spirit", he goes on to say "Nowhere is this clearer than in "Pierrot lunaire", a magical work that is central to the modern canon. Lucy Shelton's recording includes two remarkably expressive performances: one in the original German, the other in Andrew Porter's English translation, which keeps the relationship between music and text in high relief."
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The New York Times,
Monday, November 17, 1997
When the Musician Is the Drama, Working Magic Onstage
By PAUL GRIFFITHS
Instrumental music is irredeemably real. Singers, actors or dancers can disappear entirely into imaginary worlds onstage, but instrumentalists are always doing something earthbound and actual, their attention devoted to a physical machine for making sounds in the here and now. It becomes hard, therefore, to believe in an instrumentalist as a character in a drama. Instrumental performance is a drama all of its own, and it is happening now, before us, not in some make-believe action.
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The works of Karlheinz Stockhausen of the last quarter-century have been bold attempts to create, nevertheless, dramas for instrumentalists, though he has had to accept the reality of instrumental performance by devising his dramas so that the role the player enacts is that of a player. A singer can be a Roman painter, a Cretan king or a Moorish general, but a flutist is always a flutist, and so she remains in Mr, Stockhausen's "Kathinka's Chant als Lucifer's Requiem," for amplified flute with recorded sounds, which Patricia Spencer played as part of the Sonic Boom festival at the Miller Theater on Thursday.
Music examples, the kernels of the 24 "exercises for listening" that make up the main body of the piece, bedeck the stage and the player represents a magician: costumed as a catwoman, she is part underworld divinity, part nightclub hostess. But the magic she exerts is music. As she steps around the stage so, figuratively, she steps around her melody, playing fragments over and over, exploring single notes. Most of the part is delivered sotto voce, and in this universe of faltering tone Mr. Stockhausen is able to concentrate on fine nuances: on tones admixed with breath, or with song, and on microtones and glides.
Ms. Spencer was in full command of this virtuosity at a whisper, and of the score, which, of necessity, she played from memory. If she was not also convincingly in her role, that might be because she shares the feeling that Mr. Stockhausen's drama is far less credible than his music. We do not see a sibyl leading prayers for the dead; we see - and saw - an expert musician.
In the rest of this program of theater music, Lisa Moore gave a startlingly good performance of Frederic Rzewski's "De Profundis" for speaking pianist: she was lustrous at the keyboard, and at once engaging and challenging in her delivery of the text, from Oscar Wilde's prison memoir. Finally there was a new production of Peter Maxwell Davies's "Vesalii Icones," where the Stations of the Cross are danced and musically meditated upon. André Emelianoff was the eloquent cello soloist, and there was powerful playing too from Jo-Ann Sternberg on clarinet. David Gilbert conducted and Rebecca Stenn resolutely executed her own choreography.
From The Music Connoisseur -- The magazine devoted to the contemporary music scene. Vol. 4, No. 4, Year-end 1996:
"SONIC BOOM IV." Elliott Carter: Esprit rude / esprit doux (1984) for Pierre Boulez; Sonata for Cello & Piano (1948); Enchanted Preludes; Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord (1952) -- Henry Cowell: Quartet for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord (1954) -- Goffredo Petrassi: Tre per sette (1967). Da Capo Chamber Players. Miller Theater, Nov. 17, 1996,
For its fourth concert in the Sonic Boom series, Da Capo focused on the music of Elliott Carter, choosing two works from the period in which he first formulated his ideas and two of the works be bas written recently. In addition, the program included two pieces by composers who had a certain connection with Mr. Carter. Thus the concert gave us some perspective on the composer's historical position and helped us understand his musical intentions.
In the first work, the solo sonata, we hear Mr. Carter beginning to work with the ideas of independent characters and rhythms, as well as the procedure known as "metrical modulation," although the important thing isn't that the meter modulates (changes) but rather that the tempo does. That is intended to unify the music by relating all tempi to one basic tempo. The procedures are further developed in the sonata for four instruments, which has won its way into the 20th century repertory. Both of these compositions are adventurous, expansive and fairly long.
By contrast, the two duos are miracles of compression, saying all they have to say -- a good deal -- in about four minutes. Characteristics noted in the earlier works are fully developed in the later ones, and there is a sense of overall mastery that, I suppose, is to be found only in the late works of a great composer.
The program notes by Mr. Carter include a clear statement of his way of thinking about music and composition and should be required reading for anyone interested in the contemporary scene. Fortunately, they are readily available as the liner notes for two recent recordings.
The discussion at intermission, brought up an important issue. Mr. Carter stated that, as he saw it, the forms of nature appear simple on the surface but show much complexity when studied closely, giving a leaf as one example. His intention, he said, is to present that complexity in his music. But if the analogy is to be pursued closely, why not write music that seems simple or, at least. straightforward and direct on the surface behind which their's considerable complexity? How much complexity can be meaningfully perceived as music moves through time at its own speed? To be sure, a simple surface without any complexity behind it is simplistic, and we've had enough of that, But I wonder if it fits the way the human mind works to present great complexity on the surface and expect the listener to grasp that -- in real time.
Mr. Cowell's 1954 quartet is unpretentious and delightful, and its inclusion on the program shows another aspect of American music, contemporaneous with the two earlier Carter works. The Petrassi shows a keen ear for sonorities and considerable ingenuity in getting a variety of tonal colors from three players by having them play seven different instruments during the course of a fairly short piece.
The brilliant players of Da Capo have probably reached the point where there are few challenges left for them, and they took up this difficult music with zest. I've often thought that there's more virtuosity to be found in modern music concerts than in the commercial concert halls and this concert was a good example.
The regulars of Da Capo -- Patricia Spencer, flute; André Emellanoff, cello; Lisa Moore, piano -- were joined by guest artists Ronald Roseman, oboe and Jo-Ann Sternberg, clarinet.
L.K.
Village Voice, December 3, 1996
The intense musicians here were Da Capo Chamber Players Patricia Spencer (flute) and Lisa Moore (piano), plus guests Jayn Rosenfeld (flute), Jean Kopperud (clarinet, and Ms. Jolles (violin.)....
At Da Capo's tribute to Elliott Carter November 17, the emphasis was not on new or recent music. The evening's big pieces were nearly 50 years old, dating from the time the brightly developing Carter started becoming the groundbreaking-and-shaking Carter who even now, at 87, won't stop composing revolutions. Just a week previous to the concert, he finished his first clarinet concerto for a world premiere to be conducted in Paris in January by Pierre Boulez. Daniel Barenboim's company in Berlin has asked him for an opera, but he can't find a subject. That's a problem also blocking the nearly two-decades-younger Boulez.
Headlining the Sonic Boom concert were the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948) and the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord (1952). In the first, cellist André Emelianoff, pitted his entrance of lyrical phrases in free rubato against the sternly regular piano pacings of Lisa Moore. From then on, they hauled in their abundant piles of jazz references and their eager-to-deceive metric modulations (the slight-of-hand that Carter invented to gradually change tempi behind the listener's perceptions). What really mattered was not the methods but the sweepingly outgoing musical messages and this particular expressive deep-digging performance. Just as remarkable were the ensemble precision, lyrical nuances, and generous brio that Emelianoff, Moor, flutist Patricia Spencer, and oboist Ronald Roseman brought to the other sonata.
In briefer Carter pieces, Spencer and Emelianoff also deftly tossed back and forth the fast swirls of Enchanted Preludes (1988) and then mixed them together smoothly. There was a fine balance between rough and smooth in the playing by Spencer and clarinetist Jo-Ann Sternberg of Esprit rude / Esprit doux (1985). In the part of the program devoted to composers Carter knew as friends, Goffredo Petrassi's Tre per sette (1967) was well worth hearing for its clever juxtaposition of peppery flights and dives and for the performances of Spencer, Roseman and Sternberg. But Henry Cowell's Quartet for the same instruments used by Carter in his 1952 Sonata was at best harmless in its melodically and harmonically trivial pursuit of rhythmic innovation. Put the gentleman's ghost back on those banshee-sounding piano strings, and I'll follow. There was some bright talk onstage among Carter, Emelianoff, and Spencer, but there were also clips from a Dutch-made documentary blemished by an almost incomprehensible soundtrack. However, Conlon Nancarrow could be heard asking Carter who invented the term "metric modulation." Carter's answer? "Some critic." Oh well...
Leighton Kerner, "The New York Music Season Gets a Sonic Boost"
The New York Times, Thursday November 9, 1995
With a World Premiere, A Composer at Age 90
Da Capo Ensemble
Miller Theater
In a program of works by Louise Talma, George Perle and Pierre Boulez on Monday night, the Da Capo Ensemble gave pride of place to the 90-year-old Ms. Talma. Her trademark blend of lyricism and austere textures could be savored in Keats and Landor settings from the song cycle "Lengthening Shadows," given an expressive world premiere by the soprano Rosalind Rees. "Ambient Air," a suite of nature sketches written for Da Capo in 1988, preserved the composer's marvelously lucid language without a clear tonal base.
Mr. Perle's "Night Song" (1990) makes highly imaginative use of Da Capo's blend of violin, cello, flute, clarinet and piano. Rich, distantly tonal harmony hovers in wide intervals; the formal structure is a single- Movement, elegant twilight fade. "Sonata a Cinque," in which the place of the flute is unexpectedly taken by David Taylor's bass trombone, is a more lively and contrasted affair, shot through with slithery chromaticism.
The second half was nothing but Boulez, "Le Marteau sans Maitre" is considered by connoisseurs to be one of the composer's most rigorous and profound; despite Julia Bentley's poetic singing, I still find it a static, overfastidious Webern homage, Klangfarbenmelodie without the tunes. "Derive," on the other hand, is a sensuous triumph of untrammeled Impressionism, Like everything else in the program, it received a sensitive, exact performance from the Da Capo players.
ALEX ROSS
THE NEW YORK TIMES, November 7, 1994
Even Elliott Carter's ."Enchanted Preludes" had a lighthearted air, offering exquisite conversation between Patricia Spencer's flute and André Emelianoff's Cello...
Bernard Holland
Music in Concert, January / February 1995
The Da Capo Chamber Players celebrated "A Triple Anniversary" in an
adventuresome November 6 program at Columbia University's Kathryn Bache Miller Theatre, saluting Pierre Boulez in his 70th year, George Perle in his 80th, and Louise Talma in her 90th. It was a nice poetic twist that the oldest work on the program was by the youngest of the Composers, and vice versa: Boulez's Marteau sans Maitre was completed in 1955, Talma's The Lengthening Shadows is a 1995 song cycle still in progress. She. was on hand (as was Perle) to say that she planned a total of nine songs based on English poets; we heard two, to texts by Walter Savage Landor and John Keats. (John Donne just missed the boat, she said, because she hadn't had time to get the parts copied.) lt. could not escape notice that in an age of abstract compositional methods, all three composers anchored themselves to literary references or suggestions: even Perle's "Sonata a cinque," though bearing no title, had descriptive headings for each of its movements.
Taima's own leaning toward the picturesque was evident in her "Ambient Air" (1983) for flute, violin. cello, and piano. Its four movements, "Echo Chamber ... Driving Rain ... Creeping Fog ... Shifting Winds" were nicely caught in music that was by turns fragile and translucent or abrupt and episodic. The two songs of the ongoing cycle sung by soprano Rosalind Rees, were spare and set to pleasantly lean accompaniments.
Perle's instrumental "Night Song," too, explored a meticulous fragility, marked by brief phrases and a sense of distilled concentration. The "Sonata a cinque" was written for trombonist David Taylor, who took the base trombone part here; he generated an appropriate pounding pace in the second movement ("Perpetual motion") of this quite witty work and demonstrated a fine, quick agility. A base clarinet added depth to the solemnity of the third movement, "Chorales and Diversions," and the final "Dance" moved energetically in fits and starts. It is a bright, alluring work.
The intense glitter and mercurial flickerings of Boulez's 1984 "Derive" for chamber ensemble still strike the ear as fresh and challenging. As for "Le Marteau sans Maitre," a classic now 40 years old, it continues to offer enough adventure to keep any musical explorer busy through many hearings. Conductor David Gilbert led Da Capo and its guest artists through the work's spiky, brittle, splintered, erupting textures with a sure hand, and mezzo soprano Julia Bentley handled the serpentine vocal part beautifully. Da Capo's artistic directors, flutist Patricia Spencer and cellist André Emelianoff, who have been creating stimulating concerts for a quarter of a century, deserve a special hand for this one.
SHIRLEY FLEMING
