Tag: Juhi Bansal

  • L’heure bleue at the Villa Aurora:  Mark Robson —The Debussy Project

    L’heure bleue at the Villa Aurora: Mark Robson —The Debussy Project

    There is probably no pianist still breathing who hasn’t been fascinated (and perhaps frustrated) by the 1915 Études of Claude Debussy. It’s a foundational suite in several senses. Students of the instrument may initially approach them (or at least the first couple pages of the first) anticipating a witty and scintillating take on the technical exercise studies of Czerny and Cramer that every student of classical piano takes up at one point or another. (The first is subtitled (Pour les “cinq doigts,” d’après M. Czerny.) A number of pianist-composers through the 19th and into the 20th centuries took spirited revenge at this constant bane of the classical piano student. Chopin’s own celebrated Études are the epitome of the form—technical exercises elaborated into brilliant concert show pieces. Debussy’s unfold from a different place and mood—foundational certainly; but technically daunting (crushing for the less accomplished!) flights into a compositional and harmonic domain entirely Debussy’s own, and anticipating flights yet to come through the 20th century and into the 21st—which is where pianist Mark Robson has picked up the thread.

    Robson’s idea for his Debussy Project concerts was to take the Debussy Études and, starting from a fresh re-examination (a ‘read-through’ as only a pianist of Robson’s virtuosity can deliver it), propose to 11 of his pianist-composer colleagues, a re-examination and re-working of Debussy’s harmonic, modal, melodic, thematic ideas through their own fresh variations and reimagining.

    The resulting variations, ‘chords’, ‘nocturnes’, ‘calligrammes’, ‘confidences’, and, well, études, are as intriguing, probing, brilliant, and sheerly entertaining as one might expect, given the company Robson keeps: e.g., Vicki Ray (herself a local legend amongst contemporary pianist-composers), Thomas Kotcheff, Karl Kohn (on familiar turf in this domain), Nick Norton and Anne LeBaron (of Crescent City fame, among other works for voice and instrumental ensemble).

    Robson also treated the audience (I was in the last audience for this concert at the Villa Aurora) to an introduction to these fresh departures, as well as re-introduction to the original Debussy Études that beautifully contextualized the work in the contemporary moment. 2018 marks the centenary of Debussy’s death; but the context Robson addressed here—and this was all about context (as opposed to the much-abused term, ‘concept’)—is much larger than simply a date, the end of one era or beginning of the next. Robson addressed the period of Debussy’s life in which the Études were written: he was dying (or soon to be dying) from cancer. He withdrew to an oceanside retreat in Normandy for his fresh take on so many of the ideas he had already developed through his career. (Water and nature were always inspirations for Debussy—and one of the treatments here makes reference to that fascination.) It was also, historically, the climax and culmination of World War I, which took so many French lives (and not very far from the place where he was composing). He was surrounded by death in a moment he was reimagining a musical ‘birth’—his own and ideas that would take 20th century music far beyond it.

    All of this is tremendously resonant in a moment when both human civilization and all of nature seem to hang in the balance. We’re returning to foundations and fundamentals; starting over.

    Some of the freshly commissioned works involved preparation or special handling of the piano, minor electronica, or even a second piano or voice (on this evening, Robson had to fill the shoes of his original second pianist, Vicki Ray). Daniel Rothman’s Calligramme acoustique: hommage à Apollinaire (effectively a double-homage) required an altered ‘E’ with a 12th interval resonance—but went far beyond the ‘after-Czerny’ five-finger template to continue building double and triple harmonic layers. Juhi Bansal’s offering, inspired by the 8th étude, went far beyond Debussy’s intended ‘ornamental’ parameters to build hypnotic ostinatos of chords modulating up and down the scales. It could be said that the original goes well beyond the ‘intended’ scope, too; but this was just gorgeous. Nick Norton, too, went beyond Debussy’s notional repeated notes and figures (from the 9th étude) in an Étude avant l’arrêt du temps originally arranged for Robson and a second piano ideally to be played by Vicki Ray, to plunge into the modal harmonic and seemingly rhythmically expressed temporal leaps of the Debussy to build a something closer to a cathédrale engloutie.

    The Debussy 10th is where we have a real sense of that ‘engloutie’—already pushing that envelope of harmonic abstraction (with its deliberately opposed sonorities). Here Anne LeBaron has simultaneously complicated and streamlined that harmonic conversation by way of the human voice—the soloist’s own and an ‘interlocutor’ (voiced by Lynda Sue Marks-Guarnieri), who engaged Robson at intervals with a kind of Proust Questionnaire. Robson played—and sang—his responses and declarations with an air of surprise, serendipity, and occasionally irony (his favorite writers being Poe, Baudelaire and Flaubert). It played off as a kind of restatement of the Debussy mission (as if voiced by Debussy himself), seemingly restating musical ideas that morphed in others’ hands (e.g., Ravel, Chabrier, and later Stravinsky, Milhaud, etc.).

    Robson’s own variation (on Étude 7), Les débris d’un rêve, featured an electronic track, and between the recorded track and the piano swept up many of these ideas between glissandos, raspy inhalations and exhalations, swelling, tenebrous chords and bass notes, trills that were like glassware shaking on a table in an earthquake (and a hint of the Jeux—and maybe even a sidelong wink at Ravel’s Jeux d’eau). Robson used the track to enhance those hints and echoes, effectively creating a sense of spatial zones—foreground, middle-ground background.

    The final ‘trio’ of fresh commissions brought us back to that familiar watery domain with Sarah Gibson’s Our eyes once watered (after the second ‘thirds’ étude), though there were plenty of fifths and octaves in this treatment, and ethereal gong and gamelan harmonics. Robert Gates’ Water Music was as richly arpeggiated and romantic as its 11th étude template, evoking something of the Giverny nymphéas of Debussy’s visual contemporary, Monet. The evening came to a fitting climax with Vicki Ray’s brilliant update on the 12th Étude, which was as much an hommage to Debussy’s 20th (and in her capable hands, 21st) century legacies as it was to Robson himself, by way of a ‘tour’ through some of the chords frequently ‘visited’ and clearly savored throughout Robson’s formidable 20th century repertoire—from Stravinsky to Messiaen to Janáček (and probably Robson himself).

    I’m guessing the audience felt pulled in many different directions by the close of this dazzling evening. The works commissioned did not necessarily break new ground—but through this Debussy-inflected perspective, we could see/hear the directions being contemplated in new music. Consider (trying to look at our dark place optimistically right now) that we’re in a place where we can hear Debussy’s (and I suppose Stravinsky’s and so many others’) influence in the contemporary pop world. The Études take us to a place where we can re-position ourselves—and proceed unhesitantly into a musical domain as infinitely mysterious and chromatic as the planet’s northern and southern-most magnetic fields, as the cosmos itself.

  • A Little Night Music:  21c Liederabend, Op. L.A.

    A Little Night Music: 21c Liederabend, Op. L.A.

    So much of contemporary art and music is preoccupied with a space, both physical and cerebral, between layers, liminal boundaries – the space between potential and actuality; the ‘what-if’ imponderables of what-was, what-might-have-been, and what-might-be. It’s both archaeological and futuristic. We’re peeling away layers of (terrestrial) crust, even as we’re reaching for a future (and stars) that might not be there.

    I came away with something like this threshold sense from Disney Hall’s 21c Liederabend, Op. L.A., a co-production of Beth Morrison Projects and Paola Prestini’s VisionIntoArt, presented under the auspices of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series – with John Adams both conducting the Philharmonic’s New Music ensemble and contributing excerpts from his own I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky. Like the John Adams songs, much of the programming was excerpted from more extensive song-cycles or quasi-operatic or theatrical works in progress, with visual (mostly video) elements that, with only one or two exceptions also appeared to be works in progress – some of them rough approximations of what they might evolve into. Others just plain rough. The video was projected onto a four-screen array – one large square screen above three smaller rectangles – which in at least one instance (the Hubble Cantata) spilled over beautifully into the Gehry ‘french-fries’ organ installation and surrounding space. There was a certain amount of frictive buzz about the video at intermission with a number of vocal complaints about the quality, or even the need for it – especially when the music itself was so new and the focus was clearly on the musicians and vocalists. It was hard to argue the point when – with musicians like Vicki Ray, the brilliant L.A. Phil woodwind crew, vocalists like Peabody Southwell, Nathan Gunn and Cedric Barry, the incomparable Timur and his genius Dime Museum, Jessica Rivera (and I won’t go on) – music and lyrics were in fact more than enough. For the moment….

    There were no supertitles because of the video installation, so I (and most of the audience I have to guess) really were focused on the songs by themselves. But I could understand the impulse to give a kind of storyboard glimpse into the stories and production ideas that fed into them as parts of longer song cycles or full-blown opera or theatrical productions. Even if it only worked as an adjunct to the (at moments) brilliant live performances, it never seriously intruded, while giving a hint (or more) of where such performances might ultimately be taken.

    The video was also used for introductions to the songs/selections by the composers themselves. This was both slightly offputting and bemusing. Did I really need to hear this? I wondered; yet it was undeniably arresting. Then half the time I found myself still more surprised by the music that had actually been composed. The evening was fully of these little starts and jumps. Straightaway I was surprised (pleasantly) by Adams’ distinctly non-Minimalist I Was Looking…. Complex and multi-layered, heavily jazz-inflected especially in the brass and winds, yet steadily driving through the polyrhythmic textures, the songs evoked different moods to match their episodes: a cop self-righteously arresting an innocent bystander, the carnival of confusion (and still more self-justification) that follows; and an epiphanal moment in the somewhat delayed (non-)resolution.

    Without addressing the totality of the Adams songs or their success (I liked what I heard), the moment of ‘non-resolved epiphany’ set the tone for an evening that was continuously taking us by surprise in ways we could scarcely define. Listening to David T. Little’s less-than-promising description of his project for Timur and the Dime Museum, I steeled myself for disappointment – it sounded like such a mashed rehash of ideas overworked to death by everyone from Reich to Ashley to Chris & Cosey of Throbbing Gristle – to, I don’t know, Brion Gysin??? The title alone plunged me into despair (‘Artaud in the Black Lodge??’ – I have my apartment for that….) Well, maybe it was that ‘I don’t know’ factor (then too, the texts by Anne Waldman date back to that period) – but, what poured forth from Timur and his genius mates (including Daniel Corral, genius in his own right), was dark, steely (yes, a little ‘industrial,’ too), also chromatic, slashing, soaring and brilliant. It didn’t hurt that Timur was in especially fine voice – taking the near baritone-lows and soaring mezzo/soprano highs with unsurpassed clarity and brilliance.

    The dark cathode-ray industrialism of Little’s Artaud (the video projections were by S. Katy Tucker) were a stunning contrast to the white light/sand/snow imagery of the Jacob Cooper/Greg Alan Brownderville songs that preceded it, from Ripple the Sky (an L.A. Phil commission), in which the video was by Cooper himself. Here, the largely high-register, microtonal music seemed almost overwhelmed by the alternately desert/alpine imagery – blinding white sand/snow/salt – appropriate for an elegy to a desertified planet – fading out into lights and monitors; but leaving the audience without any real ‘shards of song’ to hold onto.

    Leaha Maria Villareal’s Never Not – with its Beckett-ian text by Adara Meyers – might have adopted a comparable white-out aesthetic, but worked with a slightly more chromatic palette drawn from nature (or at least viewed through a time-lapse lens); also more musically chromatic and beautifully textured with string quintet, keyboards, woodwinds, chimes, and most importantly Peabody Southwell’s sharp, emphatically phrased vocal. Ted Hearne’s when you hear, taken from his Sound From the Bench, with a text by Jena Osman, made reference to a line sampled from a text on ventriloquism by Charles Henry Olin, “when you hear that distant sounding drone, / you know you have your mouth as it should be,” but its successfully imparted sense of displacement relied heavily – not only on the supple, jazz-inflected musicianship (cf., Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman – with a touch of digital delay) of Taylor Levine and James Moore and their New Music cohorts – but on the robust choral tapestry of the Los Robles Master Chorale (under Lesley Leighton’s. direction). (The video – a grid that morphed from curtain walls to a matrix of spinning ventriloquist dummies was serviceable – but nothing as breathtaking as the music.)

    Paola Prestini’s excerpts from The Hubble Cantata – inspired by the work of Mario Livio on the Hubble Space Telescope – could not help being the high point of the evening visually as well as musically – with its spectacular Hubble telescope photography of galaxies, nebulae and supernovae in deep space spilling over the screens and into the vaults of Disney Hall. But notwithstanding the ‘Champagne supernova’ of the L.A. Phil musicians, the sonorous Los Robles Master Chorale, and the visuals, I wondered if it were simply Mario Livio’s own words – spoken by Livio himself – that were its most inspiring aspect. It brought the evening beautifully full circle: the species that rarely seems capable of seeing beyond its own ceilings found a moment of cold comfort staring into the cosmos. We’ll be joining those bright and dark stars soon enough.