Saturday on DPR

I just heard that Dancing Solo for Clarinet, chamber music by Libby Larsen, will be broadcast on next week's Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (WDPR Sundays at 6 p.m.). The full program:

• Sebastian Currier: Night Time for Violin and Harp (Yura Lee, violin; Bridget Kibbey, harp)
• Libby Larsen: Dancing Solo for Clarinet (Romie de Guise Langlois, clarinet)
• David Bruce: The North Wind was a Woman for Soprano and Ensemble (Dawn Upshaw, soprano; Avi Avital, mandolin; Bridget Kibbey, harp; Arnaud Sussmann & Todd Phillips, violins; Paul Neubauer, viola; Kurt Muroki, double bass; Andres Diaz, cello; Tara Helen O'Connor, flute; Todd Palmer & Alexander Fiterstein, clarinets; Ayano Kataoka, percussion)

Next up: information on Sebastian Currier and David Bruce.

New arrival

The postal service delivered the CD of four pieces by Libby Larsen yesterday, and I was looking forward to getting to my computer for three first hearings and a chance to hear Parachute Dances again (and again). Here are my first-out impressions.


Symphony #1: Water Music (1984). 1. Fresh Breeze; 2. Hot, Still; 3. Wafting; 4. Gale.

• The first movement starts as a fanfare, with a flourish of trumpets and trilling strings and woodwinds. It's a bright, welcoming sunlight of a movement, ending with chimes and bells.
• The second movement might be compared to a mysterious, hidden glen with woodwind calls into the morning haze. Then a stillness, a langour takes over for the remainder of the movement.
• The third movement has a jocular, active passing of short motifs that ends before much gets explored; it is an extremely short movement.
• The fourth movement has tone painting at a fine point, though the music is a bit trite with ripping flute-piccolo above rumbling tympani. Here for once the earbuds are clearly not up to the sonic test. A good speaker system or an in-person acoustic experience should bring forth the power called for from the score.

Overall, this symphony feels of a scope and weight more like a lesser-known contemporary of Mozart. The movements do not exhibit a strong symphonic drive, nor do they explore the motifs and textures in a definitive way. These four movements total 18.5 minutes, and the texture might be better served in a live rendition rather than earbuds or lower quality speakers. I listened to the work again away from the computer and felt more aware of the textures and qualities of the music.

Overture: Parachute Dancing (1983)

The CD-earbud experience is a pale imitation of the experience in the symphony hall. For example, the snap of strings on the fingerboard are almost unnoticeable, and the tympani are distant rumbles without great character. Nevertheless, the stereo effects are well separated, and the woodwinds and brass have greater presence.

Ring Of Fire (1995)

This work is a strong exhibit of Larsen's ability as a colorist, a balancer of orchestral forces that she places in juxtaposition to each other. Some 4 minutes in, the full-voice orchestra suddenly shifts to individual voices, starting with the oboe and bassoon and then gradually shifts back to full-voice utterances. Then again a couple minutes later, isolated voices echo each other, until one gets a sense of calls in a forest that move toward a momentary, constricted song from the violin. Toward the end, the orchestral forces again toss their motifs about in a building crescendo that ends inconclusively and quietly, as if the ring of fire has extinguished its fuel.

Symphony #3, "Lyric" (1995). 1. Deep Purple; 2. Quiet; 3. Since Armstrong

• The opening string choir of the first movement has a faint Gregorian-chant feel, tinged with Debussian voicing. Over these textures, various instruments add a commentary. The dark, deep-toned movement builds to a stretto that could be the equal of Schönberg as the lines break into battling chorused statements over a combative tympani presence and trembling strings.
• Over a chord that ever shifts its color between brass tones (think Elliott Carter's woodwind quintet) and barely noticed string and harp strikes, percussion and woodwind offer langourously moving phrases. The second movement closes with slowly uttered, plaintive chords over quiet tympani and xylophone.
• After an introductory alternation of chords between strings and tone choirs in the orchestra, the third movement features a repeated phrase for English horn and piano. The movement ends with a frenzy of low brass pitted against full orchestra.

Larsen has reached a more mature voice in this third symphony, having been written a decade later than the first symphony. Her palette of expressive color broadened in that decade, as had her command of exploring the subtleties of motivic structure. I look forward to hearing her symphonies #4 and #5 soon. Certainly, her work deserves more exploration than a single CD of orchestral music.

Larsen's catalog of works includes solo voice, opera, and solo instrument works that represent her work from 1984 to the present. And judging from the selections performed by the University of Dayton faculty in recital last week, the song cycles provide superb characterization and sensitive settings for the voice.

First hearings in the concert hall: Larsen's Parachute Dances

Libby Larsen is a great advocate of the "acoustic experience" that comes from a performance in the concert hall. At the same time, she celebrates the independence we now have from that four-wall access to music, which we have developed in the historical progress from radio, through phonograph, television, car stereo, and now via computer access.

Generally, I prefer the accessibility of iTunes and other online sources, since the programming is of my choice, usually free of interpretation by announcers and programmers. I recognize the trade-offs I make when I don the earbuds:

• The sonic range is limited by the device—by even the best headphones.
• Outside noise can affect the overall result—especialy with earbuds.
• Programming is still limited by the CDs and downloads that I've purchased—or taken as a loan from the public library—and by the limitations of the search algorithms installed in Amazon.com, iTunes' Ping, and other services related to what I purchase or listen to while online.

But I do indeed go to the concert hall when that is the only venue for a specific piece. Such was the case yesterday for a first hearing of Ms. Larsen's "Overture: Parachute Dances" as performed by the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra. (The DPO concert will be broadcast and webcast on WDPR on 2011.04.02 (2 April, 2011) at 10:00 a.m., Eastern time.) It was also the case earlier in the day for a new interpretation of John Adams' Nixon in China, as conducted by the composer in a worldwide broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera in HD.

Reporting a first hearing from the concert hall has its disadvantages.

• The performance and music must last in the memory and surpass the memories of other music heard in the same concert. The memory is truly dependent on the attitudes that inform the programmer, since often better memory occurs with either a fresh mind or with the latest impressions. Thus, the first and last pieces in a program have special prominence.
• Generally a concert listener is less aware of how long a new piece is. This lack of time sense means the listener can't use time to understand the piece and make it coherent  through gauging the present moment in comparison to the beginning and end. Thus, the logical unifying of sound through motif, simultaneity, similarity, and contrast becomes subservient to the moment and to what awareness the listener can muster to retain each moment that occurred before.
• The listening location in the hall affects aspects of the balance between each performer. Although the better halls tend to produce a good blend of all the instruments for most seats, especially so for those in the middle of the orchestra and fronts of the balconies, the experience of each listener is different.
• Each performance suffers from—and some would say benefits from—the John Cage effect, where the whole experience consists of all the sounds in the venue, including the music made, the rustle of pages turned by the performers, and the coughs and crackling of candy wrappers from the seat occupants next to you.
• Finally, the perception of a performance is informed by the audience as a whole. Tepid or enthusiastic applause builds and supports an overall consensus of the effect of a piece.

With all that in mind, and after a half day's settling in, I found the new work by Larsen exciting and enticing enough for acquiring a CD of the work.

The memory of "Overture: Parachute Dances" surpasses the hearings of the two later, larger parts of the program, Mozart's Symphony #39 and Strauss' "Ein Heldenleben." Though the length, breadth, and depth of Heldenleben might work against the memory of a lesser piece, Parachute Dancing holds its own indeed. The textures include polyphonic motif treatment—jumping from violins to cellos to brass and woodwinds, subtle and sometimes surprising utterances from a large percussion section—including superb moments for xylophone, and expanded timbres from the strings to include pizzicati and snapping the strings to the fingerboard. The piece lasts 6 minutes, give or take a bit, and every moment hangs on what has come before and informs later moments as they build toward culmination. I highly recommend buying one of the recorded performances of Parachute Dances, which is packaged as one of four works by Larsen or one of seven pieces by different composers.


For thoughts on Nixon in China,