Just like its eponymous month, March Music Moderne came in like a lion last night with the opening salvo (not including the first Thursday opening at Polish Hall) at the Community Music Center last night. This was the Bob Priest (festival organizer) produced Free Marz Trio concert that is often the highlight of each year’s festival. It was a concert on the longish side (close to 2 1/2 hours), especially given the density of the material, but it proved, even then, to be more than the sum of its parts, and infinitely rewarding.

If you attend a recital or concert with a musician, and you hear them remark at the close that they feel like going home to practice, then they were very inspired by what transpired during the concert. I felt like going home to practice, especially in light of Joël Belgique’s seemingly effortless traversals of two of Garth Knox’s Viola Spaces etudes for solo viola. The concert opened with the Viola Space #4, entitled Pizzicato: Nine Finger, a pizzicato tour de force of nearly unparalleled virtuosity. The audience was rapt as Belgique produced an incredible variety of tone colors, rhythms, and implied melodies using just eight fingers and a thumb, culminating at the end with both hands turned opposite their normal directions and strumming at the peg box end of the fingerboard. None of us could believe what we were seeing and hearing! The concert closed with Viola Space #8, entitled Bow Directions: “Up, down, sideways, round”. Whereas the first work of the evening was all about plucking the strings, this work was all about the use of the bow in just about every possible, but non-traditional, way. It was truly a frenzy of bowing possibilities. At times it was feared that the friction might cause a fire, boy scout style, but a blaze never materialized from this blazing performance. He earned the most hearty ovations of the evening.

Bob Priest commissioned 10 local composers to write 1 minute marches for string trio based upon whatever aspect of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring most spoke to them, in honor of the piece’s 100th anniversary. And indeed, there were 10 very different marches on display. The most memorable were those by Robert McBride, Michael Johanson, and Barbara Miksch, though all were expertly crafted and well written for the forces at their disposal. All were played with aplomb by the Free Marz String Trio, with some vocal utterances of exasperation after the particularly thorny work by Johanson.

MMM founder Bob Priest | Photo: Chris Leck Photography

The eight hundred pound gorilla of the evening was Witold Lutoslawski’s sole String Quartet (1964). Clocking in a nearly 25 minutes, it is a piece of astonishing breadth and power. It is unique in that it is one of the first works to combine notated music with aleatoric music, i.e., music in which some of the elements of the music are left up to chance and the performers, with a framework provided by the composer. As Meyer-Eppler said at one of the infamous Darmstadt new music courses, ”a process is said to be aleatoric … if its course is determined in general but depends on chance in detail”. As Bob Priest noted in his brief remarks before the performance, this work perhaps represents an inner monologue of the Polish mind, having lived through the horrors of the Second World War and the subsequent horrors of the Soviet regime. It was given a towering performance by the members of the Free Marz Trio, joined by violinist and fEarNoMusic artistic director Paloma Griffin. As I tweeted right after the performance, I found myself “between loving and hating the piece, but with absolutely no ambivalence”.

Two brief works of Stravinsky received deft arrangements by Bob Priest and Jeff Winslow, and correspondingly deft performances.

Justin Kagan, cellist, was joined by Jeannie Baldwin for a lovely and impassioned performance of the Elegy movement from Elliot Carter’s Cello Sonata (1948). Kagan prefaced the performance by reading a letter from Carter to Kagan’s parents (his father, a cellist and his mother, a pianist), thanking them for performing his Sonata with such dedication.

Shostakovich’s youthful Piano Trio, Op. 8 was played by Inés Voglar Belgique, Kagan, and Baldwin. It is one of those works which could fool many in a blind hearing, or ‘drop the needle’ test, as it is unabashedly romantic in its outlook, and not at all containing any the sardonic wit or biting sarcasm that would soon creep into the composer’s works. It was given an assured and beautiful performance.

It was a highly rewarding evening that was very well attended, though there were few under the age of 50 to be found in the audience, which was a shame, since admission was free of charge. This was music that everyone should have the chance to hear.

In today’s New York Times Anthony Tommasini reviewed pianist Stephen Hough’s recital at Carnegie Hall. A major component of Hough’s recital was a piece of his own invention, his Piano Sonata No. 2 “Notturno Luminoso”.

My problem with this review is that there seems to be no critic alive (with the possible exceptions of Steven Smith and Alex Ross) who is not afraid of praising a work or a performance without also giving some sort of sly, backhanded dressing down of same. Here is what I mean:

At 51, Mr. Hough has established himself as an extraordinary pianist, a thinking person’s virtuoso. Whether he is a towering composer is another question. Music history usually takes some time to make those calls. And, from this one hearing, I cannot claim that Mr. Hough’s Second Sonata is destined for a slot in the repertory.

But it is an exhilarating and inventive piece, brilliantly conceived for the piano. Mr. Hough, a polymath who also conducts, paints and writes poetry, is a lively writer on music who contributes a blog to The Daily Telegraph in London that is essential reading. Not surprisingly, he wrote a vividly detailed program note for his sonata.

The title “Notturno Luminoso” is meant to suggest the experience of a fantasy on a sleepless night in a brash city setting. As the piece, loosely organized in three parts, opens, we hear steely chords thick with clusters, like Messiaen’s harmonies but with a touch of bracing Copland or early Carter.

Now, what was wrong with saying it was an ‘exhilarating and inventive piece, brilliantly conceived’ without saying that it also might not be ‘destined for a slot in the repertory’? Is it too much to simply enjoy a piece without also downgrading its chances at entering the repertory? How many of Liszt’s piano works were criticized at their premieres because the critics were concerned with whether any other pianists might not be up to their virtuoso challenges? I would guess that contemporary critics of Liszt were more concerned with the performance of the great pianist/composer, and with the novel techniques he may have introduced in his compositions, rather than if pianists would be playing his works fifty years hence.

Does this seem strange to anyone else but me?

The Arnica Quartet (of which I am the violist) is busily preparing for our March 15th concert at the Old Church in downtown Portland. It’s an ambitious program, but one that I think will go over well, especially as part of Bob Priest’s third annual March Music Moderne festival, which runs from March 7 – 23, 2013.

Concert details:

When: Friday, March 15, 2013 at 7:00 PM
Where: The Old Church (1422 SW 11th Ave, Portland, 97201) – map
Tickets: $10 at brownpapertickets, or at the door 30 minutes before the show.

Featured in the video above are excerpts from Saturday’s rehearsal of the String Quartet No. 1 (1909) of Béla Bartók. It is an ambitious work – written when the composer was just 28 years old – that clearly lays out where Bartók’s musical influences began (Beethoven, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Debussy), and where they would shortly go with a vengeance (folk music and its related idioms). It begins with a slow movement, quasi-fugato, which is an homage to Beethoven’s opening adagio fugue in his astonishing seven movement Op. 131 quartet. Overall, the work is a gradual accelerando, ending in a frenzied fugue and a climactic rush to the end that never fails to be exhilarating.

The other bookend of the concert couldn’t be much more different. It is Esa Pekka Salonen’s first work for string quartet, Homunculus, which was written for the Johannes Quartet in 2008. Whereas the Bartók begins slowly and ends quickly, Homunculus begins with the smallest and quickest note values (perhaps representing the apocryphal Homunculi that was once believed to have inhabited every sperm and which then grew into full-sized humans) and gradually expands into sustained tones that fade into the ether. We are scheduled to have a coaching with Maestro Salonen on March 6 via Skype, which I will write about in detail later this week. Here are a few bits of Homunculus from a recent rehearsal:

In between these two densely packed and intellectually rigorous works there are two works which forsake the cerebral and explore the spiritual aspects of humanity. The first is Tenebrae by the Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, written for the Kronos Quartet in 2002. Golijov writes:

“I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it “from afar”, the music would probably offer a “beautiful” surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin’s Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.”

The second piece is by the Estonian mystic composer Arvo Pärt. The work, Fratres, may be his most popular composition. Written in 1977 and revised in 1983, it has been arranged by the composer for the following forces:

Strings and percussion
Violin, strings and percussion
String quartet
Cello and piano
Four, eight, twelve… cellos
Wind octet and percussion
String quintet
Wind quintet
Violin and piano
Viola and Piano
Saxophone Quartet
Guitar, string orchestra and percussion

It is a simple work, consisting of nine chord sequences, beginning all in harmonics and moving to full voice as the piece evolves, with plucked drum strokes played by the cello over an open fifth drone in the second violin.

Esa Pekka Salonen – Photo: Katja Tähjä

Osvaldo Golijov in 2007. Photo Credit: Festival de Saint-Denis – Sébastien Chambert © 2007

Béla Bartók in 1927. Photo: WikiMedia Commons

Arvo Pärt in 2011.