SOMETIMES YOU DON'T GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR (10/15/2010)

I  decided to fork over a healthy chunk of money to attend what I hoped would be an exciting and stimulating concert of recent works for orchestra.  One of the soloists on the program would be Ursula Oppens, famous for her dynamic and artistic piano performances of recent art music.  Well, due to subway delays and a rather long wait in the ticket line I was late for the concert and missed the first work, The Light Within by John Luther Adams, an orchestra work performed with special lighting designed by Ji-Youn Chang.

The second work on the program, Nor Spell Nor Charm by Jacob Druckman was appropriately titled. The third work Lonely Child by Claude Vivier might have been much more successful has the soprano soloist projected better.  If the intent was for her not to stand out then she should not have been in front of the orchestra but part of the orchestra! The orchestra colors often evoked Messiaen and Boulez. 

Wang Jie is an up-and-coming Chinese-American composer.  Her opera From the Other Sky is, I think, intended to be performed as a concert work rather than staged.   All of the characters appeared with some costuming, mainly headgear.  While definitely a gifted composer with imagination and technical skill, the opera had a high school project feel about it.  The multimedia component of the work, PowerPoint slides, needed to be more developed and did not need to provide the text, which was in English. The story itself, concerned with mythical animal deities, was something a gifted high school student would come up with.  I felt that Wang was most successful when dealing with serious subjects (the middle portion of the work deals with misery on earth).  One important line from this portion, "For sale! Baby shoes, never worn," comes from Ernest Hemingway but she does not attribute this text to him.  I did think it was good to include a fresh new name in the roster of composers even though the composer does not appear to be ready for this level of venue. 

The final work of the evening BluesKonzert by Alvin Singleton was the work I probably anticipated hearing the most. Ursula Oppens performed admirably but the work, on first hearing, did not have much to offer.  I would like to hear it again and perhaps become more familiar with Mr. Singleton's sound world.

The  reviewer for the New York Times, dutifully summarized some aspects of the works but did not really provide a critique.

(This concert took place at Zankel Hall, part of the Carnegie Hall complex, on Friday, October 15, 2010.)