Prepared Act III C and D of The Playboy of the Western World for publication, with particular emphasis on text underlay and staging -- essentially finishing the tome for the singer-actors, at least for now...
May 7 - Thrown for a Curve
Prepared Act III C and D of The Playboy of the Western World for publication, with particular emphasis on text underlay and staging -- essentially finishing the tome for the singer-actors, at least for now...
May 6 - What a Day!
Second staging rehearsal of Act I Waiting for Godot, playing Estragon, as Meghan was unable to attend (we'll catch up Wednesday). Poor Kat as Lucky had to spend a lot of time with a large orange extension chord around her neck, practicing comically/gracefully falling while holding a computer bag and a stool -- what we do for art.... Turns out Lucky's song can pretty much be done at the manic tempo, assuming we're not too fussy about diction (actually, more like downright cavalier)...
Lunch with Harriet at Connecticut Yankee, a cataloguing of music for the next SFCCO concert, then a GH board meeting casual enough that I could follow some of it lying down.
A walk-on-the-beach, just south of San Pedro Mountain, just like in the singles ads, then H and I had to pass up two restaurants before settling on a third
(Aperto, on this the anniversary of our first time out).
Finally, David Conte's America Tropical, with fine conducting from John Kendall Bailey and similar expertise from Keisuke Nakagoshi, who has been our Goat Hall pianist over seven years (including premieres of Henry Miller in Brooklyn, Animal Opera, Camino Real, Pied Piper, plus performances of Little Prince), and Jon, who we hope will have a piece ready for Composers Chamber Orchestra. Report will appear eventually here and in 21st-Century Music....
May 5 - Steps and Skips
Printed up some copies of Crystal Series and sent one out to Phil Freihofner, who requested it....
Prepared Act III A and B of The Playboy of the Western World for publication, also designed cover and table of contents -- third draft was a charm in pleasing Harriet......
May 4 - Lift Off
Wrote a new piece tonight, on text by astronaut Walter M. Schirra Jr., quoted in his obit today in the New York Times -- a little fugue, Mostly It's Lousy Out There, again mapped on the J.S. Bach Fugue No. 1 in C from The Well-Tempered Clavier (also used for Another Cognitive Disorder from 12 Preludes and Fugues ["Topical"], and, again as in ACD, in a key of four flats -- Bb Blues -- but vaguer, simpler, more stylized usage of received structure).
Part of a larger work, The Musical Orbital, Op. 147. Abstract vocal or instrumental lines, rather than necessarily keyboard...
Text slightly reorganized as below...
Mostly it's lousy out there.
It's a hostile 'vironment, and it's
Trying to kill you. The
Outside temp'rature goes from minus four fifty degrees to
Plus three hundred three hundred plus three hundred three degrees. You
Sit in a flying Thermos bottle.
Nice lunch with Kurt Erickson today -- he enjoyed the show, particularly William, Karl, Lisa M. in Orpheus; Suzanna's numbers; and my solo bits -- thinks I should send solo work to Charles Amirkanian, Kronos, connecting it with what Meredith Monk and Pamela Z do... We talked a bit of H.K. Gruber's chanonier work as well...
Video was taken of the Duckpond show -- need to get a hold of it and send it out variously....
May 2 - Strung Along
Waiting for Godot rehearsal at Eliza O'Malley's, for just Vladimir (Eliza) and Estragon (Meghan Dibble) -- sing-through of the end of Act II, then detailed musical and staging work for Act I, prior to Pozzo and Lucky's entrance. We will do only I, V, and XIV (corresponding roughy to Pages 1, 5, and 14 of the play) before the duet becomes a quartet in Act I for the Fresh Voices performances on the first weekend (June 15, 16) at Goat Hall (400 Missouri Street, SF), with excerpts from Act II on the second weekend (June 22, 24).
May 1 - Hair-Raising
Finished (for now, anyway) Music History: Volume Four, Late 20th- / 21st-Century Music and went to press.
Wrote up Marin Symphony for Commuter Times, but have given it over to Phillip George for 21st-Century Music, June 2007, below...
Three Strauss Moods
Alasdair Neale conducts the Marin Symphony in Richard Strauss's Wind Serenade, Ein Heldenleben, and Four Last Songs (with Rebecca Evans). Marin Veterans Auditorium, San Rafael, CA.
Aristotle thought, these days quite obviously, that everything had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And so it is with composers, many of whose life's works can be neatly divided into early, mid, and late periods. This was shown yet again on April 29, in a nice program on Richard Strauss, given by the Marin Symphony at Veterans Memorial Hall.
The stereotype is that an individual begins brash, reaches a pinnacle of excellence, and then tapers into an acceptance, mellowness, resignation vis-Ã -vis life, the universe, and everything. Strauss, like many of us, pretty much reflects this. His early Serenade for Winds in E-Flat Major, Opus 7, shows a promising young man poised for greatness, and here the 13 players, consisting of a pumped up "woodwind quintet" (i.e. flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and the interloping brass of French horns), enacted the work with requisite sparkle.
The main thrust of the evening's event was Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), which acknowledges that youthful arrogance was far from lost in mid-life. The composer, at the top of his game, brings us a now-classic soaring motif (for no less than nine hornists, in addition to cellos, appropriately rendered heroically in this performance) for "The Hero" -- pretty obviously himself. "The Hero's Adversaries," which follows directly in this six-movement symphonic poem (amounting to a symphony, really) played without pause, just as directly references Strauss's, by this point, many critics, who are Hector Berliozianly revenge-characterized by delightfully cackling woodwinds and stern (parallel fifth pedant!) low brass.
This was a performance that engaged the ear with every turn, and if Strauss gets a bit carried away in this Walt Whitmanesque celebration of self, Music Director Alasdair Neale and accomplices let him get away with it to the fullest. "The Hero's Companion" (a love song to Strauss's wife, Pauline de Anha) was tenderly caressed by solo violinist and concertmaster Jeremy Constant, and the offstage trumpeters made their telling effect in "The Hero's Battlefield." Both "The Hero's Works of Peace" and "The Hero's Escape from the World and his Fulfillment" contain references to our hero's earlier compositions, such as Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Death and Transfiguration, and Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra, with its well-known do-sol-do opening re-popularized in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey). This collage-like 1898 writing, along with the caterwauling chaos of the critics' music, which returns at several junctures, signals Strauss as a composer on the cusp of contemporary thought on the crisp of the last century.
Would it have been. Strauss's 20th-century work in opera, concerto, and art song remains brilliant. But the mellowing of age, which began at least in the neoclassicism of Der Rosenkavalier, is totally realized in the Four Last Songs, beautifully, glowingly, and sumptuously rendered in that good night by soprano Rebecca Evans. "Beim Schlafengehn" ("Going to Sleep") is the title of the third of three Herman Hesse poems, and perhaps some of us took that too literally, but by the final movement, on Joseph von Eichendorff's "Im Abendrot" ("In Evening"), who could resist the moving last quotation from Transfiguration in this transfigured night?
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