As previously mentioned here, Joseph Castaldo was my undergraduate composition teacher for four years. He and Seán Deibler were both tremendous personal and musical influences on me. As I also mentioned here in the past, Seán passed away last year, and this Choral Arts concert is being presented in his memory.

If you can spare 7 minutes, please watch the video below, where you can hear some excerpts of the work, and find out something about the two special musicians who brought it about in 1990.

The concerts are on March 13, 2010 at 8 pm (Paoli, PA) and March 14 at 6 pm (Philadelphia Cathedral). Visit www.ChoralArts.com for details.

Years ago I used to spend hours with this score, so it’s kind of like an old friend. Right now I don’t really have time to play with it, so it’s just sitting there staring at me all day. Funny thing though: since I’ve had it out, I’ve completed two Eros at Breakfast songs, and I’m now closing in on a third. Normally I’m a hopeless slowpoke. I think on some level I know the score is watching me, and I don’t want to let it down.

Let’s call it “The Sweeney Effect”

A few weeks ago, I got a new mobile phone that functions as a music player (not an iPhone, but I love it anyway). I’m still in the wide-eyed amusement phase over the fact that I can copy music files to it from my computer via Bluetooth, so just for the heck of it I copied a few favorite pieces over to see how that worked.

The first thing I had copied to my phone was a recording of Kodály’s brilliant little choral gem Esti Dal (“Evening Song”, pronounced ESHtee dawl), which I’ve been intimate with for over 20 years. In fact, it’s known to Philo too, as I’ve been singing it to him at bedtime for a long time now. So, one night I thought it would be interesting for Philo to hear the song in its true choral form. He was absolutely captivated, and I was encouraged to load some more choral music onto my phone for him.

Esti Dal is a very short and simple piece that offers its lovely melody three times. The first and third statements are given by the sopranos, accompanied by sustained humming from the lower parts. The middle statement blossoms with majestic counterpoint, and during this part Philo moves his hands expressively, much as a conductor does, and visibly moved by the slight ritard at the end of the verse. I, of course, am thrilled.

Here’s what that middle section sounds like:

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Other choral music on my phone for Philo includes “Trois Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis” from Ravel’s Trois Chansons, which has to be some of the most beautiful music on the planet. Philo doesn’t say much about this one, but he listens to it very quietly and I can tell he is fascinated. I was lucky enough to learn this piece in my choral singing days, and it’s been a favorite ever since. In case you don’t know it, have a listen. You’ll plotz.

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Another piece I’m lucky enough to have performed is Hindemith’s luminous Six Chansons, which is disappointingly not as well known as it should be. These songs offer lyricism and beauty not typically associated with old Paul, whom I feel is widely misunderstood. I gravitated to his music when I discovered it as a college freshman transitioning from Sondheim wannabe to, well, whatever I am now, and I’m still very fond particularly of his vocal music. Here’s a bit of the first of the Six Chansons.

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Finally, and inevitably, there’s Bartók. Philo has been treated to several excerpts from Bartók’s Twenty-seven Choruses for women’s or children’s voices. I blogged about this piece around two years ago. It almost hurts to have to choose one of the 27 pieces, but here’s Ne Menj El (Don’t Go Away).

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The first one that jumped out at me was this performance of “Cool” with the original cast of West Side Story on Ed Sullivan in 1959 or so. The Jerome Robbins choreography, as I’d seen it in the film version, always seemed kind of goofy to me, but now seeing it on a stage, I can sort of imagine how effective it must have been live in its time.

And speaking of Leonard Bernstein musicals, here’s Carol Channing on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1953 doing “100 Ways to Lose A Man” from the Bernstein/Comden/Green show Wonderful Town. Mainly, I love this for the awkward, contrived setup that Ed concocted. Notice how Carol is barely able to play along.

I enjoy these clips for their historical interest as much as anything else. Here’s the 1968 cast of Hair, again on Ed Sullivan. If you watch to the end, you can see them file into the frightened and bewildered audience, and then attack a frightened and bewildered Ed with flowers.

Many more fascinating original cast excerpts, some fairly obscure, are found at Blue Gobo. My thanks to Charles Gilbert for the discovery.

This song was recorded by Gene Pitney for a movie in 1965, but some sort of business mix-up between Burt’s and Gene’s people resulted in the end of the singer’s working relationship with Bacharach and the song was not used for the film.

Here’s the song, accompanied by a weird montage of Gene Pitney album covers. (It’s all I could find. Oh, well.)

Now, it’s no secret that I didn’t care for the opera as an opera, but I did think the music would be worthy of a concert version. So, let’s find out!

Not only that, but Steven and Slovene composer Urška Pompe have a delightful daughter just about Philo’s age, and it was great to see them become friends.

This town we were in is about forty minutes north of the capital city Ljubljana at the edge of the mountains and near much natural splendor, such as Lake Bled.

Ljubljana itself is a very charming city I would like to see more of. I had an unexpected opportunity to walk around for about two hours…

…because we stayed an extra day so that I could go see Steven conduct a concert of new music presented by the new music ensemble MD7. This is an interesting ensemble indeed, founded by Slovene composer Pavel Mihelčič. They only play music written expressly for them, and the instrumentation is as follows: flute, clarinet, trombone, percussion, piano, viola, cello. It’s actually a pretty good combination. A little weird, but not bad. I wonder about the trombone, but it worked well in the pieces on this concert. Highlights were “Pas de Sept – Hommage à Stravinsky” by Belarus composer Dmitri Lybin and particularly for me, “The Team from the Flower Shop” by Slovene composer David Beovič.

Whether or not you have any interest at all in the harp as an intstrument, this is a worthwhile thing to read. It’s a great example of how a smart composer starts a new project by asking questions. Mark’s approach here reminds me of thorough advance work he puts into his stage works. (More on that here.)

1.) Since the harp is, by design, more impressive spelling out harmony than theme—but I want a theme with a real authority on which to organize the piece—can I come up with a melody that’s all harmony and all line at the same time, and yet is still versatile enough to express whatever I need?

2.) Are there unusual technical or timbral resources the harp can muster that are theatrical (read: loud) enough to hold their own in an orchestral texture? Can I design a movement to ask a question to which these timbres would be the answer?

3.) And how do I make this piece not just an orchestra score which happens to have a very large harp part, but a true concerto: one which sounds as if all of its gestures and materials are generated by the soloist? In other words, how do I keep the orchestra, with its limitless melodic potential, from upstaging the harp?

Mark’s Four Angels will receive its premiere at the Kennedy Center on June 7 – 9, 2007 performed by Dotian Levalier and the National Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, conductor.

Years ago, during a very short stint as the vocal director of a folk ensemble, I had the pleasure of preparing that first song in the video, which is called “Ergen Deda”. The rhythm of the piece is a fast 7/8 Šopska dance (from the Šop region of Bulgaria; Šopska is also a tasty salad).

These 7/8 dances are so fast that the notion of “7/8″ fails to really capture it. It’s really just a matter of “short-short-long”. In Bulgarian (and Greek and other Balkan) music all kinds of interesting combinations of “short” and “long” are used, and we’re forced to notate them with awkward 11′s and 13′s.

See if you can figure this one out:

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You can see why I love this stuff, right? If you listen to the end, it gets faster and becomes increasingly difficult to turn off.

Here’s a great trove of other examples you can hear online.

To really appreciate this music, you need to see it danced. Found this for you. If you don’t watch the whole thing, at least let it load and skip to the end. There’s always a wild finish in these presentations.

P.S. – Poking around on YouTube for Bulgarian stuff, I found this [dcs_lb_link url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC5HZ00MgkU"]travel pitch for Bulgaria[/dcs_lb_link], which despite the lady’s weird Bulgaro-Surrey accent has me contemplating summer vacation 2008.

P.P.S. – I managed to sneak a Bulgarian(ish) 7/8 into the coda of Letter To Hungary (try excerpt #2), but it’s all right; sometimes Hungarian music gets into this rhythmic territory.

This is a beautiful and admirable work, and it’s the first of John Adams’ theatrical works that actually “works”. I think the reason must be that this is the first one that has, you know, a plot. The music is rich and colorful, and chock full of delicious Adamsy goodness. The music is so effective, and yes, dramatic, that I wasn’t nearly as irritated by Peter Sellars’ staging as I would have been otherwise. Much has been made, with good reason, of Adams’ musical depiction of the main character’s transformation into a tree, which occurs four times in the opera. In each case, the context is different, and Adams paints each transformation in a different way, the final one being a literally spectacular payoff at the very end of the piece.

Painting. This is what Adams is extraordinarily good at in his operas. The final tree transformation joins the hair-raising arrival of Air Force One in Nixon in China, The “gymnopedie” depicting Klinghoffer’s slow-motion descent in The Death of Klinghoffer and the final moment of Doctor Atomic as great examples of how Adams’ can create music that, when combined with staging and lighting, tells a story that words cannot.

Again, this was a “semi-staged” production. About a third of the stage in Davies Symphony Hall was dedicated to staging, with a platform cleverly placed above the orchestra for some of the action. The staging used an interesting, and sometimes very moving, convention of having a dancer shadow each of the characters. Unfortunately, there are several long orchestral and choral passages that were, I guess, unstageable. During these passages we’d have the singers standing or sitting motionless and the dancers doing very little. It’s still unclear to me what the significance of some of these passages is in terms of the storytelling.

A Flowering Tree also makes use of a narrator, which can be problematic when it comes to staging. What do the characters do while the narrator is singing? Like Doctor Atomic, whose libretto was slapped together from “found materials”, this suggests some sort of fear of having to actually write for the characters, which I find puzzling and disappointing. But in this case, Sellars handled this fairly well, I thought. I guess there was so little happening anyway, so the narrator fit in somewhat naturally.

The use of a narrator and the many how-on-Earth-do-I-stage-this moments had me thinking that this might be a better oratorio than opera, but in the second act as the story unfolded I became increasingly convinced. Whereas Doctor Atomic had no plot to speak of, and we never heard from the characters in their own words, this piece has an appropriately simple plot. We understand what the characters want, and we’re routing for them. Given this foundation for the first time, Adams shows what he can do dramatically.