Albany Symphony Orchestra Archives

The Last Of James Fennimore Cooper

The 19th Amendment

In due course, we’ll get to The Last Of James Fennimore Cooper (by a Mohican).

The next item at our Albany Symphony Orchestra’s American Musical Festival was the composer talk moderated by ASO conductor David Alan Miller on Saturday, June 8 at 6:30 pm. All four composers were present. It’s always entertaining.

In answer to a question from the audience, both of the women composers noted that they absolutely hate hearing their compositions the first time it’s being played. Until then, it’s all in their ears, in their heads. As they listen to more often, they think, “Well, maybe it’s not so bad. Perhaps I don’t have to change it substantially.” This was a fascinating glimpse into the minds of music creators.

At 7:30, the concert began with 1920/2019 by Joan Tower, who has had a sixty-year career. In the talk beforehand, in response to Miller’s emphasis on playing living composers, she joked about her mortality. When asked what the piece was about, she often quips, “About 15 minutes.”

1920 was the year of the 19th Amendment allowing women the right to vote. 2019 was amid the Me Too Movement. Here’s a recent recording of 1920/2019 by the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic, conducted by David Alan Miller.

Albany High, again

Michael Gilbertson created his Flute Concerto, a world premiere, based on the famous Rudyard Kipling poem If. The flutist was Brandon Patrick George, who was very good. Gilbertson worked with the Albany High School Chamber Choir, who were excellent.

A rant here: back when my daughter was entering school, someone I knew thought allowing her to attend Albany public schools was tantamount to child abuse. But many Albany High kids thrived, attending Ivy League schools, becoming name performers, et al. Earlier this month, the AHS band was the only US high school represented at D-Day+80.

After the intermission, the next piece was On the Bridge of the Eternal by Christopher Theofandis. This was his contemplation of time, impacted unsurprisingly by the pandemic. I thought the best part was the extraordinary vocalise section based on a short text from St. Augustine’s Confessions, performed by the Tantalus Chamber choir. The music followed from the vocal setup.

Finally, Brazilian-American Clarice Assad‘s world premiere of Flow, for she also played piano, a small percussion instrument, and even plucked the piano strings briefly. It may have been the most entertaining of the pieces.

Finally

On Sunday, June 9 at 4 pm, we went to the Sanctuary For Independent Media in Troy. It uses “art, science, and participatory action to promote social and environmental justice, and freedom of creative expression.” A lot of cool stuff is taking place there.

Brent Michael Davids “(Mohican/Munsee-Lenape) is an internationally celebrated Indigenous composer and music warrior for Native equity and parity.” He explained the complicated legacy of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, of which he is a member, as his ancestors were driven from their lands.

He read several sections of an essay that Mark Twain wrote about James Fenimore Cooper, including the paragraph starting with “Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment,” which discusses the dry twig ruse, ridiculously magical resourcefulness by the white settler, and the inane and physiologically impossible actions off the Indians.

Then, he narrated The Last Of James Fennimore Cooper (by a Mohican) as a string quartet played. It’s occasionally very funny. Here’s a performance with Davids from 2022.

A person from the Sanctuary interviewed Davids and David Alan Miller. Then guides conducted a tour of how the Sanctuary has helped the neighborhood to be revived. It was a VERY full weekend.

I must note that I saw at least two dozen people I knew at the various events over the three days, many of them more than once.

ASO American Music Festival 2024

Polish bisexual painter

Albany Symphony Orchestra Music Director David Alan Miller leads the Dogs of Desire during the Albany Symphony’s 2023 American Music Festival. Photo by Gary Gold. https://symphony.org/albany-symphonys-dogs-of-desire-new-music-ensemble-turns-30/

The Albany Symphony Orchestra has held the American Music Festival for several years. But my wife and I had never attended it before this year when my wife decided we should go. Then she couldn’t attend the first concert because she had a work conflict.

On Friday, June 7, my old work friend Mary and I went to EMPAC, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. It is a “multi-venue arts center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, which opened on October 3, 2008. “

The orchestra playing tonight was Dogs Of Desire. “Dedicated to exploring and celebrating the intersection between the raucous terrain of American popular culture, traditional Western instrumental music, and music traditions from around the world, the ASO’s 18-member new music ensemble… has commissioned and performed more than 200 new works by America’s most exciting emerging composers.”

This was true of this program. Refuge by Juhi Bansal, Crossway by Nicky Sohn, Memorial by Francisco del Pino, Underneath the Structure by JURAKHAN, and All On A Summer’s Day by Dai Wei were all world premieres. All except Bansal, who had been injured, were present.

The voice as an instrument

Performing in all of the songs were soprano Britt Hewitt and mezzo-soprano Devony Smoth. But mostly, their vocals were incorporated into the texture of the compositions. On Dei Wei’s composition, she joined Hewitt and Smith.

I enjoyed elements of all pieces, though I enjoyed the first and the last the most.

Interspersed between the new pieces were arrangements of hits by NY-born songwriters, including Just the Two of Us, a Dixieland-infused version of If I Had a Hammer, and more, arranged by long-time ASO collaborator Jack Frerer.

Because we were tired, we passed on the “late night lounge,” featuring the sultry Brazilian rhythms of the father/daughter duo of Sergio and Clarice Assad.

The next morning, my wife and I didn’t attend the 10:30 a.m. emerging composers hearing their compositions played for the first time.

Show tunes

My wife’s first music opportunity to attend was Great American Song! at 3 pm. It was at Bush Memorial Hall, but the GPS was sending us to the office address across the street. Fortunately, a security guard called to us and several others. Then a young woman asked if we were there for the music.

As it turned out, the woman was the singer Lauren Blackman. She started with The Sound of Music, and I feared it’d be too much the Great American Songbook. But her next song was a Rosemary Clooney song I didn’t know. She told stories about snowmobiling in Iceland with her competitive father. When she was a stand-in for the ill Sutton Foster on The Music Man, she filled in as Marian the librarian, and got to kiss Hugh Jackman.

A second singer was Nicholas Ward, who sang on his own and in a couple of duets. He had a deep voice, the type that could do justice to Ol’ Man River.

Art deco

Blackman and Ward met in a production of a Broadway musical called Lempicka, which had previously played in Williamstown, MA, where it went through several revisions, and La Jolla, CA.

The Broadway previews began with 27 previews starting on March 19. It officially opened on April 14 but closed on May 19 after 41 performances. I guess that a story about Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish bisexual painter of Art Deco portraits, didn’t sell well enough.

More likely, nine shows opened in April 2024, right before the Tony deadline, cut off the oxygen. Shows with more familiar elements, such as Hell’s Kitchen, featuring the music of Alicia Keys, and Suffs, with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Malala Yousafzai as producers, were released the same week.

Nevertheless, Lempicka was nominated for three Tonys: Best Performance By An Actress In A Leading Role In A Musical –Eden Espinosa; Best Performance By An Actress In A Featured Role In A Musical – Amber Iman; and Best Scenic Design Of A Musical – Scenic Design by Riccardo Hernández and Projection Design by Peter Nigrini. The Tonys will be on Sunday, June 16.

Blackman and Ward sang a couple of songs from Lempicka, which I enjoyed. The Original Cast album is being released on June 12, which I might purchase.

After the show, my wife and I went to a Korean restaurant with a woman whom we had just met named Zelda.

Simon + Rhapsody In Blue @ 100

AMEN! by Carlos Simon; Simon Says by Paul Frerer

On February 12, my wife and I attended an Albany Symphony Orchestra concert entitled Simon + Rhapsody In Blue @ 100, under the direction of David Alan Miller. It took place at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady and was the first time we had seen the Grammy Award-winning orchestra at the Electric City venue. Usually, we listen to the group at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall or Albany’s Palace Theatre.

Why Simon? Two reasons, the second of which I’ll note in due time. The first is that the initial piece was AMEN! by Carlos Simon. He “is a GRAMMY-nominated composer, curator, and activist. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, his compositions range from concert music for large and small ensembles to film scores with influences of jazz, gospel, and neo-romanticism. Simon is the Composer-in-Residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.”

My wife thought the piece was Gershwinesque, and I don’t think she’s wrong, but judge for yourself. Listen to the UMich Symphony Band (2017) and the Gateways Music Festival (2019).

Next was An American In Paris by George Gershwin. I traveled to France last year so I could write a blog post with that title. Here’s hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ Andrés Orozco-Estrada (2020).

Frerer

After the intermission came the second Simon. It was the world premiere of Simon Says, a concerto for Trombone and Orchestra by Jack Frerer (b. 1995). The music, as described by the composer, was a conversation between the music teacher (the trombone played by ASO’s Greg Spiridopolous) and the sometimes unwilling music students (the orchestra). That foreknowledge made the piece quite humorous, especially at the outset.

The grand piano was moved to center stage. Kevin Cole played a couple of medleys of Gershwin tunes, including Swanee, Fascinating Rhythm, But Not For Me, ‘S Wonderful, and Nice Work If You Can Get It, among others.

Centennial

The week before the concert, my wife had heard on the radio that George Gershwin had “forgotten” that he had agreed to write a piece for band leader Paul Whiteman. George’s brother Ira saw Whiteman’s January 1924 announcement in a newspaper of a new jazz concerto.

That latter part is genuine: the January 4 edition of the New York Tribune. But per both the ASO program and the Wikipedia piece, George had declined Whiteman’s request for such work because the Gershwin brothers were busy working on a new musical.

In a telephone conversation the following day, Whiteman informed George Gershwin, “Whiteman’s arch-rival Vincent Lopez planned to steal the idea of his experimental concert, and there was no time to lose. Whiteman thus finally persuaded Gershwin to compose the piece.” He did, but he improvised the various piano solos, writing them down afterward.

Here’s a tease of the Cole/ASO concert recorded a week before the show.

Rhapsody In Blue: Gershwin on piano; 1st RECORDING -Paul Whiteman Orch. & George Gershwin piano (1924 version); Columbia Symphony Orchestra · Leonard Bernstein (1959). Ira’s contribution to the work.

One last thing: we also went to the concert to see our churchmate Tom in his ASO debut, playing banjo.

Albany Symphony: two Russian composers

Hannah Kendall

The Albany Symphony held a concert at the Palace Theatre in the city on February 12, featuring two Russian composers. My friend Lee was supposed to go, but he and his spouse were out of town. He gave us their tickets, and my wife and I went in their stead. We attended the pre-concert talk with conductor David Alan Miller and piano soloist Wei Luo.

The first piece was the 10-minute piece The Spark Catchers by the non-Russian Hannah Kendall (b. 1984). It was inspired by Lemn Sissay’s poem of the same name. It concerned the Bow Matchwomen’s Strike in East London of the late 1880s. Kendall was struck by the linguistic parallel of striking a match and a worker cessation.

The Spark Catchers as performed by Chineke! Orchestra c. 2020

This was followed by the Concerto for Piano No. 3 by Sergei (1891-1953) from 1921. In the notes, the initial section shows “everything a pianist is done: cross-handed work… crashing chords, reaches to both ends of the keyboard and staccato playing.” No wonder Wei Luo, dressed in a very shiny red outfit, presumably for Valentine’s Day weekend, got an ovation after only the first movement.

Prokofiev died the same day as Joseph Stalin, two days before I was born. Thus the news of the composer’s death was somewhat muted in the Soviet press. Or maybe it was that the Communist Party had censured his work in 1948, seeking a “new style,” whatever that means. Possibly they thought it was his beautiful melodies that had “become distorted, and conventional tonality gives way to harmonic dissonance.”

Piano Concerto No. 3. Martha Argerich at the Singapore International Piano Festival 2018

And tell Tchaikovsky the news

Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was one of the first composers whose work I could identify, first the 1812 overture, then the Nutcracker. I’m sure I have at least one recording of his Symphony No. 6, “Pathetique.” I did not know that he died nine days after the symphony’s debut, which the composer conducted.

His brother Modest blamed Pytor’s death on the composer drinking unboiled water during a cholera epidemic. But David Alan Miller doesn’t buy it. Was it suicide? The man was old before his time.

The second movement is in the unusual 5/4 meter. The theme of the third movement appears very early and it is very familiar to me. But doesn’t reach its full vigor until relatively near the end. It sounds like the end of the piece, and many patrons at ASO applauded. No, there is a fourth, slow movement that “fades away into nothingness.”

Pathetique, Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with Yuri Temirkanov, conductor. Recorded in 1990

Normal-ish: Proctors, ASO, choir

No buffoon bassoon

Proctors In the past month, I had several days that I considered normal-ish. Familiar, though with a twist.

Th, 12/9: I went to the Proctors Theatre in nearby Schenectady. I’ve been going there to see for years to see touring musicals. Often I’ve had season tickets for the Thursday matinee because it’s the least expensive option. Indeed, I made that choice way back in the spring of 2019 for the 2019-2020 run. I saw three shows. and then…

I don’t even remember when Summer: The Donna Summer Story was supposed to take place initially, but I think it was rescheduled at least twice because of COVID. FINALLY, I got to take the bus to the old vaudeville venue. First, I was asked for my vaccine card, which I had on my phone. Then I could pick up my ticket at the will call.

As for the show itself, there were actually three women playing the disco queen at various stages of her life. One also played Donna’s mother and another Donna’s daughter. Oddly enough, this was not confusing. And all of them were very good.

I wasn’t a huge disco fan. But as I wrote about her three years ago, I had a lot of respect for Donna Summer: her look and especially her voice.

On The Radio

But as this review in the Chicago Tribune noted of the tour: “It is a very rough book.” Yeah, that was it. The show “carelessly abandon[s] most of its scenes in mid-flow for self-serving monologues. The story veers “back and forth between the personal and the professional” in an uneasy manner. The reviewer thinks those “behind-the-music-with-the-guys-in-suits stuff… so rarely works in these kinds of shows.” I’ve seen some that do work – Beautiful, for one – but this was not one of them.

This I didn’t remember: “Summer, of course, upset a lot of her gay fans with a homophobic remark at a Cleveland concert, at the height of the AIDS crisis to boot.” The story monologue disowning her previous statement was astonishingly clunky.

Ragnarok

Sa 12/11: Likewise, it was the first visit to the Albany Symphony Orchestra at the Palace Theatre, under the direction of David Alan Miller, since COVID. A church friend had tickets he could not use. Yes, proof of COVID vaccinations was needed.

The first piece was Don Juan by Richard Strauss. as the show notes suggest: Strauss “makes us see from the get-go the bravado of this libertine.”

The second and third pieces, one before the intermission and one after, were written by Christopher Rouse (1949-2019). The ASO, which Rouse visited frequently, was to record the compositions the following day.

From the composer’s notes about Heimdall’s Trumpet: his “blasts on his trumpet announce the onset of Ragnarok, the Norse equivalent of Armageddon.” He rightly notes “the title… refers properly to the finale… in a very short orchestral fortissimo outburst…” And it was so! Eric Berlin was the fine soloist.

Rouse’s bassoon concerto, with the virtuoso Peter Kolkay was a lot more fun, with Kolkay sometimes fading out, yet the orchestra’s other bassoons filling in. It was not buffoonish, though. Comedy is difficult to explain.

Finally, excerpts from The Nutcracker, not just the suite but about a third of the whole ballet.

Church

Su 12/12: Our choir has been rehearsing since October, with everyone with at least two shots. But the group, other than the section leaders, haven’t sung. That is until 11/27 when half the choir got to sing, masked. And no forte, because we’ve read that it is the volume of singing, or speaking, that has the greater chance to spread infection.

My half got to sing on 12/12. It was a little difficult because, being spread out, it was hard to hear the others in the bass section, let alone the other parts.

That said, it was GLORIOUS to be in the choir loft again. I’m not saying I got a little verklempt, but…

So normal-ish. Which is good enough for now.