Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Olivier Messiaen

Mikis Theodorakis A Centenary of Zorba’s Composer

Why, it seems like only yesterday that Zorba’s composer danced his last. Mikis Theodorakis died in 2021 at the age of 96. One of Greece’s best-known musical exports, Theodorakis was world famous for his score to the film “Zorba the Greek” (1964). Now, wouldn’t you know it, it’s already his centenary!

As a former student of Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory, Theodorakis also composed dozens of concert and dramatic works, even as he continued to attract international attention with his more than one thousand songs. All the while, he remained politically active, variously jailed, exiled, and elected to the Greek Parliament.

Never afraid to speak his mind, Theodorakis was a controversial figure. No one can deny that he also brought a lot of beauty into the world.

He certainly did his best to live up to his surname. “Theodorakis” derives from the Ancient Greek “Theódōros,” composed of “theós” (divine, deity, god) and “dôron” (gift). Essentially, “God’s gift.” Unquestionably, he gave generously of himself.

Theodorakis may no longer be with us, but on the 100th anniversary of his birth, the dance goes on.

Theodorakis’ obituary from the BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58419832

The music that sealed Theodorakis’ immortality

His Symphony No. 2, with Cyprien Katsaris at the piano

“Honeymoon” (from the Michael Powell film)

Covered by The Beatles

The theme from “Z”

“Antonis,” on which it was based

As heard in the song cycle, “Mauthausen Trilogy,” on poems by Iakovos Kambanellis, survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp

Zorba flash mob

July 29, 2025
Pierre Boulez A Mad Genius at 100

“Blow the opera houses up!”

“All the art of the past should be destroyed!”

“A musician who has not experienced… the necessity for the dodecaphonic language is USELESS!”

“From Schoenberg’s pen flows a stream of infuriating clichés!”

“The Paris opera is full of dust and crap! Operatic tourists make me want to vomit!”

Pierre Boulez could be provocative and full of contradictions. Is it any wonder there’s been so much blowback against him and what he came to represent? This gadfly of the avant-garde was born 100 years ago today.

As a composer and polemicist, he was ever the rebel angel, the archnemesis of tonality and tradition. He studied under Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory, but in his advocacy of the abstruse, Boulez froze his teacher out. (Boulez characterized Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” as “brothel music.”) He idolized the Igor Stravinsky of “The Rite of Spring;” but in 1945, when Stravinsky unveiled his “Four Norwegian Moods,” a neoclassical pastiche in the style of Edvard Grieg, of all people, Boulez and his classmates booed vigorously.

As a conductor, he could be a persuasive interpreter of Mahler, Debussy, and Ravel. He enjoyed particular success with a landmark centenary production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” directed by Patrice Chéreau – a triumph scored in one of those very opera houses he was so eager to have destroyed. In his later years, he found value even in the music of Strauss and Bruckner.

But for the most part, the composers he championed were those who were perceived as revolutionary in their own time and who, as Liszt so memorably put it, had hurled their lances into the future.

In contemporary music, Boulez was a master. You’re on pretty safe ground if Boulez is conducting Webern, Xenakis, or himself. He even came around to grasping the value of his old mentor, Messiaen.

It’s as a composer that his reputation hangs in the balance. There’s been a lot of vituperation launched against Boulez’s aesthetic, but it’s hard to deny that he brought it on himself. Passionate acolytes remain, though they live like anchorites in the wilderness, in hovels and on barren cliff-faces, with no friends outside internet chat groups, or perhaps, depending on how closely they emulate the rhetoric of their idol, not even there.

Myself, I tend to be a little more moderate in my views, at least in this regard. Depending on my mood, I can put on a Boulez record and just go with it. His chamber cantata “Le Marteau sans maître” (1955), which I’ve played on the radio a few times over the years, is a good example of that. I understand what he’s up to, because I’ve done my homework, but it’s not to say I can hear everything any more than I can in any other serial score. But it sure does make some fascinating sounds. Actually, I find it his most approachable piece.

That’s about as good as it gets, folks. Later in life, when speaking of his “Structures, Book I” for two pianos (1951-52), Boulez described it as a work in which “the responsibility of the composer is practically absent. Had computers existed at that time I would have put the data through them and made the piece that way. But I did it by hand… It was a demonstration through the absurd.” Asked whether it should still be listened to as music, Boulez replied, “I am not terribly eager to listen to it. But for me it was an experiment that was absolutely necessary.”

Sometimes you have to push hard in order to find equilibrium. Ironically, Boulez makes such a show of breaking with tradition, yet he’s still caught within the tradition.

Boulez might not be to everyone’s taste, either as a composer or a conductor, but if he did one thing well it was to force everyone to think – about music, about progress, and about the reasons we value the things we hold sacred.

Boulez once proclaimed, “A civilization that conserves is one that will decay!” Even so, I’m glad we have his records.

Happy 100th, you mad prodigal.

Maurizio Pollini plays Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2 (1948)

Serial for breakfast: “Le Marteau sans maître” (1955)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljcDXPcWRvI

Boulez rehearsing “Structures” (Book I, 1952; Book II, 1961) with Messiaen’s second wife, Yvonne Loriod

Conducting Debussy’s “Images for Orchestra”

An early “The Rite of Spring”

Conducting Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 (live video)

“Das Rheingold,” from the Chéreau “Ring”

PHOTO: Put your hands up for Pierre Boulez

March 26, 2025
Barbara Hannigan: A Transformative Concert

I’ve seen so many concerts recently, I would have neither the time nor the energy to write about all of them. But Tuesday night’s appearance by Barbara Hannigan, at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts’ Perelman Theater (courtesy of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society), was extraordinary, astonishing, transformative. There really is no one else like her.

The program, presented without intermission, was bookended by two song cycles. Olivier Messiaen’s “Chants de Terre et de Ciel” (“Songs of Earth and Heaven”) of 1938 is a 30-minute confessional on poetic texts offering insights into the composer’s domestic love and Catholic faith. As much a method actor as she is a vocal artist, Hannigan projected herself right into the heart of this intimate score, assimilating its hopes, doubts, and moments of ecstasy.

In fact, she sang with such nuance and commitment, it had the paradoxical effect of lulling me into a kind of complacency, if such a thing is possible in the presence of artistry of this caliber, as I expected her usual high standards when she returned to perform John Zorn’s “Jumalattaret” of 2012. But she pulled the rug right out from under me, knocking me back on my heels, as she took things to a whole other, unanticipated level. I don’t know that I will witness a performance quite like it ever again.

“Jumalattaret,” inspired by “The Kalevala” (the Finnish national epic that informs so much of Sibelius’ music), praises nine goddesses out of Sámi shamanism: Päivätär, goddess of the sun; Vedenemo, mother of waters; Akka, queen of the ancient magic; Louhi, hostess of the underworld; Mielikki, the huntress; Kuu, moon goddess; Tellervo, forest spirit; Ilmatar, virgin spirit of the air; and Vellamo, goddess of the sea.

Hannigan delivered the opening invocation as almost a cooing sprechtstimme. As the cycle progressed, she also employed or engaged in birdlike vibrato, Queen of the Night scat-singing, diaphanous humming, and possessed laughter, all the while having to focus on clearing the work’s many polyrhythmic hurdles. I hasten to add, it was not all style over substance: with equal skill, she unfurled passages of ethereal beauty.

Yes, she smacked her palms, thudded her chest, and enacted what I can only compare to the once common practice among children of clapping their hands against their mouths in Indian “woo-woo” fashion. But these gestures transcended gimmicky and reached to the primordial roots of the source material. You can always count on Hannigan to bend and blend technique and effect to the service of storytelling. A passage in which she begins with a hush, her voice blossoming unhurriedly, so that you can feel every petal unfold, will gently hairpin into a controlled decrescendo al niente that is as seamlessly executed as it is mesmerizing.

In the program notes, she claims that the demands of the score initially stumped her. That’s saying something, for a singer who has seen and done it all. Not just done, mind you, but MASTERED. She reached out to Zorn to see if there might be some concessions they could make so that she might actually be able to perform his music. Somehow, he convinced her to just go for it. Hannigan shares some of their correspondence. Zorn wrote, “One cannot transcend anything by staying on safe ground. And it is in these intense moments that we can find deeper truths, bringing mind and heart together – and begin to understand the soul and its workings in that courageous moment of letting go and going for it, the music will become alive in a special way – a way that is beyond the notes on paper.”

As astonishing as her performance was, I find it even more so that she would even have to be told this, as Hannigan always goes for broke. The score must have seemed beyond human capability. All the same, on Tuesday, she walked the tightrope between laser-focus and hurling-herself-into-the-void abandon.

Certainly, Hannigan has had her forebears in avant-garde specialists like Cathy Berberian, Lucy Shelton, and Meredith Monk, all courageously exploring extended techniques, but I don’t know that any of them employed the entire tool kit with such facility. In uncanny precision and otherworldly beauty, Hannigan is like a human theremin.

The last time I saw her live was as Gepopo in György Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre,” with the New York Philharmonic in 2010. She has lost none of her voice, and if anything her technique is even more astonishing.

Zorn’s piano writing ranged wildly in its shifting time signatures from dissonant complexity to what I can only assume is meant to be folk-like simplicity. To me, it sounded like a cross between Vince Guaraldi and Mark Isham.

He also employs an arsenal of inside-the-piano effects pioneered by composers like Henry Cowell (stroking and plucking the strings, banging on the wood, and inserting objects) and George Crumb (the soprano singing into the strings). Toward the end of the cycle, Hannigan produced a tiny suspended cymbal from inside the piano and struck it with a minute stick.

Furthermore, Hannigan’s creative collaborator for the evening, Bertrand Chamayou, forwent the traditional music stand, preferring to read the scores from where he laid them open, also inside the piano, on the strings.

The two song cycles were separated by a pair of piano pieces by Alexander Scriabin: “Poème-nocturne” (“Night Poem”), Op. 61, of 1912, and “Vers la flamme” (“Towards the flame”), Op. 72, of 1914. These were no mere palate-cleansers. Rather than divert, they maintained the keen interest aroused by the Messiaen, and they were absorbingly presented.

Lights at the back of the stage emitted different colors during each of the pieces – red for Messiaen and blue for Zorn – not inappropriate for a program constructed on music by composers sensitive to the effects of synesthesia (a neurological phenomenon in which different tones trigger sensations of color).

Granted, it was a rainy, foggy Tuesday night, with accidents and traffic jams everywhere, and new music can be a hard sell, but I was flabbergasted that the hall was not packed. The downstairs was near-full, and the first balcony respectably so, but the seats around the back of the stage were empty, save for I think one person. Where I sat, on the second balcony, with all the lonely old men in beards, we were all involuntarily social distancing.

But it is still an intimate hall (of 650 seats), and Hannigan’s charisma, intensity, and daring sent electric shocks to the bleachers.

PHOTOS: The blurrier ones at the bottom are mine; the one at the top is an authorized photo taken at the Teatro di San Carlo by Luciano Romano

December 12, 2024
Alexander Goehr, Manchester Rebel, Dies at 92

Composer Alexander Goehr, the penultimate representative of the so-called Manchester School – that group of rebel angels that emerged from the Royal Manchester (now Northern) College of Music in the 1950s – has died at a venerable age.

The son of composer and conductor Walter Goehr, a Schoenberg pupil, Alexander was born in Berlin in 1932. The influence of Olivier Messiaen (his father conducted the U.K. premiere of Messiaen’s “Turangalila Symphony;” Alexander later studied with the composer) colored his own personal approach to the twelve-tone method.

Interestingly, Goehr’s first important, though likely least influential, teacher was Allan Gray (birth name Józef Żmigrod), also a Schoenberg disciple, who made his hay as a film composer. Schoenberg had already been rolling his eyes at Gray’s involvement in cabaret and theater. One can only assume what he made of this later development. (Of course, Schoenberg himself considered scoring “The Good Earth” in Hollywood, but priced himself out.) Gray would soon find employment providing music for Powell-Pressburger films like “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.” He also wrote the score for “The African Queen.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, his own experiences, Goehr’s father did not encourage his son’s pursuit of a musical career. He would have preferred him to study classics at Oxford.

At Manchester, Alexander fell in with angry young men Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Elgar Howarth, and John Ogdon. They may have presented a tough face, but after-hours, they would geek out talking about things like medieval modes. Together, they founded New Music Manchester. The works they championed were hardly easy listening.

Ogdon soon gained fame as a pianist, Howarth, now the group’s sole surviving member, kept bread on the table as a trumpeter and conductor, Maxwell Davies cannily developed a sideline of light music classics and was later appointed Master of the Queen’s Music, and Birtwistle, for all his notoriety, was regarded as one of the most important British composers of his generation.

While in Paris to study with Messiaen, Goehr became friends with Pierre Boulez, who served as a mentor in the late ‘50s. Eventually they parted ways, after Goehr became disenchanted with the strictures of serialism and craved greater artistic freedom, in regard to spontaneity and personal choice. Messiaen also sparked his interest in non-Western music, including Indian raga.

Questions of his personal evolution aside, in “Englands green & pleasant Land,” Goehr, in common with his classmates Maxwell Davies and especially Birtwistle, would continue to be regarded by casual concertgoers as an overgrown enfant terrible. At an age when many seriously begin to contemplate retirement, Goehr retained his influence and reputation as a prominent figure of the avant-garde. Yet in his later work, he seemed to step up his engagement with earlier historical styles and, as a result, wound up composing some of his most immediately appealing music.

I don’t claim to be a Goehr expert, nor should this post be taken as a comprehensive overview of his life or career. I suppose I know about as much about him as any fanatical classical music record collector might, but even a scroll through his Wikipedia page reveals that, for whatever effort I may have made here, I still have merely skimmed the surface.

Among other things I neglected to mention, he also held a number of prestigious academic posts, culminating in a professorship at Cambridge University from 1976 to 1999.

Goehr’s death at 92 was reported yesterday. I would have gotten this up sooner, but I spent this morning at the DMV!

Piano Concerto (1972), composed for Daniel Barenboim; played here by Peter Serkin

String Quartet No. 4 “In Memoriam John Ogdon” (1990)

“Metamorphosis/Dance,” inspired by Homer’s “The Odyssey”

“Fugue on the Notes of Psalm IV” (1976)

Interview with Alexander Goehr

PHOTOS:

Top, left to right: Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle, Audrey Crawford, formerly Goehr (front), John Ogdon (rear), Elgar Howarth, Peter Maxwell Davies, and John Dow in 1955;

Bottom: Goehr interviewed in 2014

August 27, 2024
Remembering Sir Andrew Davis: Champion of English Music

It is with sadness that I learn of the death of Sir Andrew Davis.

Although Davis had a vast repertoire spanning all eras, he was always a great champion of English music, including the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. At the time of his death, he was, in fact, president of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society.

I was lucky enough to have seen him in concert several times. Most memorably, he introduced and oversaw Olivier Messiaen’s reckless epic erotic mindblower, the “Turangalîla Symphony,” in Philadelphia. (What could be more erotic than the ondes Martenot?)

On a later visit, he brought more heavy-breathing – this time literally, as there is actual breathing in the score – in the form of Sir Michael Tippet’s Symphony No. 4.

Both works are rarely done – “Turangalîla,” a 20th century classic, because of its scale, and the Tippett, well, because it’s Tippett. (“Turangalîla” is programmed from time to time, but I never would have guessed that I would hear the Tippett a second time, years later, performed by the New Jersey Symphony!)

Over the course of his career, Davis served as principal conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1975-1988), the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (2013-2019), and Lyric Opera Chicago (2002-2021), and chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1989-2000) and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera (1988-2000). He was a regular presence at the BBC Proms.

He conducted Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony in Baltimore last year, but sadly I was already overbooked that weekend (with, among other things, another performance of Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony!).

Davis died yesterday in Chicago at the age of 80. He had been living with leukemia. His wife, American soprano Gianni Rolandi, predeceased him in 2021.

R.I.P.

Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 5

Elgar, “The Dream of Gerontius”

Walton, “Belshazzar’s Feast”

From Messiaen’s “Turangalîla Symphony,” “Joy of the Blood of the Stars”

Andrew Davis interviewed

PHOTO: At the Last Night of the Proms in 2000

April 21, 2024

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