Juilliard’s Summergarden @ the Museum of Modern Art

[7/4]

String Quartet That Also Whistles, Whispers and Wails

By STEVE SMITH, NYTimes

Published: July 8, 2008

The only disappointment about the opening night of Summergarden at the Museum of Modern Art was that it never rained. This popular free concert series is normally held in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which has a capacity of around 600. But with gloomy skies threatening on Sunday, the event was moved to the entrance foyer, which seats only half as many.

Caution was understandable. Instruments and electrical equipment are susceptible to damage, and the Sculpture Garden also has to be emptied of patrons when it rains. For those who got in, quiet surroundings and air-conditioning were bonuses. But some 200 people were turned away, a museum representative said. You wanted it to rain for their sake, because the concert was, in a word, sensational.

As in recent seasons, the museum is presenting events programmed by the Juilliard School and by Jazz at Lincoln Center alternately. Sunday’s concert featured the Attacca Quartet, whose members — Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violinists; Gillian Gallagher, violist; and Andrew Yee, cellist — earned their master’s degrees at Juilliard in May. In another practice recently adopted at Summergarden, everything on the program received its New York premiere.

The first two pieces had something else in common: each called on performers to do more than just play. In a striking moment early in Huang Ruo’s “Three Tenses” (2005), Mr. Yee whistled a high, keening melody while playing a low drone. Moments later Ms. Schroeder simulated a gust of wind by blowing into her instrument.

The collision of past, present and future proposed in Mr. Huang’s program note wasn’t altogether evident, but the vivid, eventful music was no less effective for it. Melancholy smears and glassy whispers in the opening cede to a surging middle section, which ultimately closes with a sudden wilt, as if a plug were pulled. Near the end viola and cello offer a droning wail; the violins resist, fluttering like butterflies in a killing jar, then finally succumb.

“Spiral X: ‘In Memoriam’ ” (2007), by Chinary Ung, commemorates Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, including members of his family. The performers sing in Cambodian and Sanskrit, growl and shout while negotiating Mr. Ung’s meticulous bowing indications and dynamics. Even in the most violent and abrasive passages of this remarkable piece, a poignant melody hovers ghostlike. The Attacca players handled their roles with precision and passion, to deeply moving effect.

Folk themes in the Polish composer Joanna Bruzdowicz’s intense String Quartet No. 1 (“La Vita,” 1983), paid homage to Szymanowski, but her dense harmonies and indeterminate counterpoint had more in common with music of a later forebear, Lutoslawski. Matthew Hindson’s “Industrial Night Music: String Quartet No. 1” (2003) opened like a roller coaster with two gears: very fast and crazy fast. You could just about catch your breath during a twinkling interlude; then it was full speed ahead to the end.

Edited July 23, 2008 by 7/4

[7/4]

I used to go to a lot of concerts in the Sculpture Garden...I'd stand in line, wait for the doors to open, then get a seat down front, then read and listen to my Walkman until concert time. It's too much trouble to sit for that long now, but it was a great opportunity to check out a lot of modern music for free.

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[7/4]

July 22, 2008

Music Review | New Juilliard Ensemble

International Divertimenti for Sculpture and Traffic

By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER, NYT

There must scarcely be a country not represented in the United Nations of composers programmed by Joel Sachs in Juilliard’s annual Summergarden concerts at the Museum of Modern Art.

This series takes place in the museum’s Sculpture Garden on Sundays, alternating between concerts offered by Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School. This last weekend it was Juilliard’s turn. Argentina, Venezuela, Ukraine, Britain and the United States were represented with four New York premieres and one world premiere. All featured music performed by members of the New Juilliard Ensemble, with some combination of clarinet, violin, cello and piano.

Given the steady hum of traffic noise from West 54th Street, the subtleties of these diverse composers are often lost to the elements, sometimes rendering the most exuberant works the most successful. On Sunday the performers (and listeners) also had to battle the stupefying humidity.

The sometimes raucous debate of the British composer Daniel Giorgetti’s “Dialogue for Violin and Piano” (played in the second half of the program) penetrated through the heat and noise with a conversation in the highest register of the two instruments. With violin pizzicatos, piano staccatos and muted piano strings, it sometimes sounded like an angry couple shrieking and slamming doors, before a violin cadenza full of whining slides heralded a reconciliation.

Much of the one-movement Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano by Valentin Bibik, a Ukrainian composer who died in Israel in 2003, fared less well under the auditory circumstances. The work, played in the first half of the program, opened with a melancholy cello line, eventually building to an intense middle section before fading out to a (barely audible) introverted conclusion.

The program opened with the tango-inspired “Hipermilonga” for violin, clarinet and piano, by the Argentine-American composer Pablo Ortiz. Energetic, jazzy riffs alternated with sultry interludes, with soulful clarinet solos played elegantly by Sean Rice. The other performers on Sunday included Mr. Sachs on piano, the cellist Elizabeth Lara and the violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron, who all played with conviction.

The second half of the concert felt more convincing than the first. After Mr. Giorgetti’s “Dialogue” came the Venezuelan-American composer Ricardo Lorenz’s “Compass Points,” the most successful piece on Sunday’s program. Each of the work’s three sections was written in a different location and reflects the composer’s state of mind and circumstances at the time. The first movement, composed in Umbria, Italy, offered a sultry canvas with passionate violin interludes. The second — both melancholy and defiant, with languid clarinet riffs — was written in Bloomington, Ind., as a tribute to the pianist and composer Robert Avalon. The frenzied, driven dance rhythms of “Scherzarengue,” the last movement, evoke a busy period in the composer’s life when he moved to East Lansing, Mich.

The concert concluded with the world premiere of “Homage Leroy Jenkins” by the American composer Elliott Sharp, a rhythmically intense tribute to Mr. Jenkins, the jazz violinist who died last year, with a ragalike, hypnotic pulse.

Summergarden concerts continue on Sunday nights through Aug. 24 in the Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

[AllenLowe]

first concert I ever went to - Museum of Modern Art in the Garden, circa 1968 - saw James Moody with Dizzy's rhythm section - Candy Finch, forget the piano player's name, also forget the other guy's name- interestingly enough Moody, whom I love, did not play well that day -