Here are my Best Bets: October 28th – November 3rd:

JOAN – South Coast Repertory – Costa Mesa, CA – Now – November 24^th

Playwright Daniel Goldstein’s play, having its world premiere at SCR, is about Joan Rivers. The play looks at both the professional and personal life of the woman who made outrageous jokes and suffered enormous tragedies.

Tessa Auberjonois, who has appeared in nearly a dozen other productions at South Coast Rep, takes on the dual roles of Joan and Mrs. Molinsky. Andrew Borba plays multiple roles including Dr. Molinsky, Edgar Rosenberg and Johnny Carson. Elinor Gunn plays Melissa (her daughter) and Young Joan. Zachary Prince plays at least five roles including Jimmy, Blake, Harold and Chet.

David Ivers directs. Opening night is November 1^st. The show is recommended for audiences age 16 and older.

For tickets and more information, please go here.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE – Frogtown area of Los Angeles – October 28^th – October 30^th/Venice, CA – November 1^st – November 3^rd

Tennessee Williams’ classic play has been performed more times around the world than one could possibly calculate. So there must be something unique about this production to warrant inclusion in our best bets. And there is.

Four actors, without a set or props, perform the unabridged text of A Streetcar Named Desire in unique locations. These are fully realized performances, not a reading. By all accounts of previous performances on the East Coast, this is a production not-to-be-missed.

Williams’ poetic language will be front and center in this production. Might it lead to a new understanding of Streetcar? There’s only one way to find out. 

Co-creator Lucy Owen plays Blanche DuBois. Brad Koed is Stanley Kowalski. Mallory Portnoy is Stella DuBois. James Russell plays Harold Mitchell. Co-creator Nick Westrate directs.

For tickets and more information for the Frogtown dates, please go here. For the Venice dates, please go here.

STRIKE UP THE BAND – MasterVoices – Carnegie Hall – New York, NY –  October 29^th

George and Ira Gershwin’s 1927 musical had a rocky start. It played in Philadelphia but didn’t make it to Broadway until 1930 when the original book, by George S. Kaufman, was revised by Morrie Ryskind. Many songs appear in both versions, but there are differences.

MasterVoices Artistic Director Ted Sperling has collaborated with writer Laurence Maslon to create a new version which combines “the best of the 1927 and 1930 version for the show.”

Joining MasterVoices are Shereen Ahmed, Phillip Attmore, Victoria Clark, Lissa deGuzman, Claybourne Elder, Christopher Fitzgerald, Bryce Pinkham and David Pittu.

This is precisely the kind of one night only events in New York that makes any serious fan of musical theater and/or the Gershwins wished they lived there.

For tickets and more information, please go here.

DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS WITH DUDAMEL – Walt Disney Concert Hall – Los Angeles, CA –  November 1^st – November 3^rd

Latin American music is on the program for these three concerts celebrating Día de Muertos. 

Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos’ Chôros No. 10, “Rasga o Coração” opens the concert. That is followed by Yanga by Gabriela Ortiz – a work that was commissioned by the LA Phil and had its world premiere performance in 2019.

The second half of the program, and my personal favorite, is La noche de los Mayas by Silvestre Revueltas.

Joining Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic are the Tambuco Percussion Ensemble and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

For tickets and more information, please go here.

LAND OF GOLD – PBS Great Performances – November 1^st (check local listings)

This is a behind-the-scenes documentary into the premiere of John Adams’ opera Girls of the Golden West which has a libretto by Peter Sellars. The premiere took place at San Francisco Opera in November 2017.

Appearing in this 90-minute documentary are Adams, Sellars and singers Paul Appleby, J’Nai Bridges and Julia Bullock.

The world premiere of any opera is a daunting task. This documentary allows viewers to get a sense of how demanding it is, particularly when you are putting a more honest spin on a part of history.

Check your local listings or go to PBS.org to watch Land of Gold.

That completes my Best Bets: October 28th – November 3rd. Enjoy your week!

Main Photo: Concept art for MasterVoices’ Strike Up the Band (Courtesy MasterVoices)

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Call it good timing or a lucky alignment of circumstances. But given that very little is just pure luck anymore, I’ll suggest that composer/pianist Timo Andres and his team knew exactly what they were doing when they lined up the release of a new album on Nonesuch Records, the world premiere of his fifth piano concerto, Made of Tunes, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and his perform with five other pianists at Walt Disney Concert Hall of the 20 etudes by Philip Glass. All in one week.

On March 19th, Andres joins fellow pianists Anton Batagov, Lara Downes, Jenny Lin and Maki Namekawa to perform Glass’ Etudes 1-20. On March 22nd, Nonesuch Records releases The Blind Banister. That’s Andres’ recording of his third piano concerto. it also includes his Colorful History and Upstate Obscura. That same day the Los Angeles Philharmonic will give the world premiere of Made of Tunes which Andres composed for pianist Aaron Diehl. John Adams conducts all three performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

That gave me plenty to discuss with Andres when we spoke last week. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To watch the full interview with Timo Andres, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: Made of Tunes was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and you composed it with Aaron Diehl in mind as the soloist. What are the qualities that Aaron Diehl possesses as a pianist that most influenced how and what you composed for him? 

That’s a great question. Whenever I write a piece for anyone, I’m trying to think of their specific qualities as a performer and how I can sort of highlight those and work with those and bring them out. In the case of Aaron, I’ve known him about a decade now. I’ve heard him play many, many times. His sound and his style was very much in my ear. And also his repertoire, because I think the music that he chooses to play and that he engages with has been as much a part of his voice as anything.

That really is kind of a broad history of American piano music going back to the earliest ragtime and the stuff that we would pinpoint as saying, this music sounds American for the first time as opposed to European. That whole tradition is very inspiring to me as well. I’ve always felt myself to be specifically an American composer.

On your website, you wrote that “Aaron’s part includes opportunities for improvisation, sections in which I pass him a tune or rhythm or harmony, and he responds with something I wouldn’t have thought of.” How much freedom does he have to improvise? Which I guess is in the tradition of cadenzas going back to Beethoven’s day.

What I’ve tried to do is a little bit trickier and a little bit, certainly rarer, in that I don’t actually have an improvised cadenza. The section that you would maybe call a cadenza is completely written out. And the improvised sections are actually playing with the orchestra. That, to me, was more interesting in a way, because it’s very much what one hears Aaron do when he’s playing with a singer or a trio or in an ensemble. It’s that responding to the other people. Not just responding to the musical cues, but responding to what else is going on in the room.

The orchestra part is totally written out. I had an idea that I would maybe be able to incorporate some improvised or aleatoric bits in the orchestra part, but it’s really just too risky in terms of portability.

The orchestra is remaining on course with the notated music. Then Aaron, I always pass him something, whether that’s a chord or a series of chords or a melodic motif or literally just verbal instructions. I’m always giving him something to go on and that is very much how improvisation typically works. It’s not this idea of total freedom. You’re using certain frameworks and then replacing the things on top of those frameworks with your own ideas. That’s the skill of a great jazz improviser and that’s what I wanted to give Aaron the opportunity to do. 

As you were composing the piece, were you allowing yourself to play with some improvisations you might come up with if you were the soloist? 

I’m not an improviser. I do improvise as part of my compositional process sometimes, but it’s not a huge part of it. I think that’s one of the things that fascinates me and that I’m slightly in awe of with Aaron and people who can who can really do that on such a high level.

Maybe one day down the road I will end up performing this piece myself. In that case, I’m not quite sure what I’ll do in those sections. I may give myself a little bit more of a written framework; leaving some flexibility for what may happen in performance. But I don’t have that kind of confidence to give myself that total freedom in front of other people.

Do you have the confidence to add sociopolitical statements in your work? The reason I ask is in the description of Made of Tunes on your website you talk about the second movement, American Nocturnal, having six variations of original theme. That was all taken from a mishmash of the notes used in “the hokey patriotic song America the Beautiful.” Is that something that allows you to hold a mirror up to who we are as a country, by taking those notes so closely associated with how we present ourselves patriotically?

It’s not something that I want to make explicit. I would say that the whole piece sounds very American to me. I think the way that the piece ends, perhaps, says more than I want to say in words about that. When you hear what happens in the end, you can draw your own conclusions. I think the final orchestral gesture basically feels apocalyptic.

I read an article an interview that you gave the L.A. Times in 2009 when the L.A. Philharmonic was giving the premiere of Nightjar. You mentioned that you were obsessed with John Adams. The title for Made of Tunes is derived from a lyric in a Charles Ives song (The Things Our Fathers Loved). Adams, who is conducting the premiere, wrote a piano concerto called Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? Is there a wink and a nod to John Adams built into the title? 

Absolutely. Of course, John has a piece called My Father Knew Charles Ives and I know [him] as an admirer of Ives’ songs. John’s music was, and is, a huge influence on me. We’ve both developed and changed so much as composers even over the past 15 years. I think there is an aspect that we share in this sense of Americanness and this sense of a fluidity between all of these different kinds of music that make up the American identity. I think maintaining that fluidity is very important to both of us. I think you’ll hear a kind of rhythmic drive, especially in the first movement, that I very much think of as being something I learned from John’s music.

As we’ve been working on the piece together he actually told me yesterday that there’s something in it that reminded him of a song of his called I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky. Which is a little bit of what you might call a cult classic among John’s works. 

I that same story in the LA Times you said about the LA Phil’s commission of Nightjar, “If you would ask me what my absolute dream commission would be, I probably would have said something along those lines. I mean, it’s Los Angeles. They’re pretty much where it’s at in terms of good music.” How has your perspective evolved since that time and where you are today with this new commission from the LA Phil?

It really feels like part of the same journey in a way. That Green Umbrella commission was one of my first commissions period – from anyone. It happened when I was still in grad school which was a vote of confidence in a way.

With everything that’s happened in the past few years, it seems like orchestras might be having a little bit of a tougher time. In general I see a kind of retrenchment into a kind of artistic conservatism.

For someone like me who’s a composer and an enthusiast of anything that’s new, that can be a little bit discouraging. But I do see the commission of this new concerto as kind of bucking that trend.

It’s actually my first subscription series appearance with the Phil. And my first piece that I’ve written for the full orchestra. It’s still a dream ensemble. They’re the the most new music friendly of the major American orchestras by far, and I think the most comfortable with a lot of the more demanding things that new music in general, and my piece particularly, asks of them.

Nonesuch Records is releasing your new album, The Blind Bannister on the same day that this concerto is having its world premiere. That’s a concerto that had its world premiere in 2016. How has your relationship with that piece evolved? How did that influence how you chose to perform it?

The Blind Banister is my third piano concerto and Made of Tunes is my fifth. So it’s kind of a week of piano concertos here. The Blind Banister was also a piece that was written specifically for Jonathan Bis. I think that piece has much more to do with a kind of classical romantic lineage and how I place myself in that as a 21st century American. I just performed the piece last month; four times in Oregon.

It’s still, I think, a piece where I figured out certain things compositionally that I can mark as a tent pole in my catalog in a way. I think formally I tried some things in that piece that I had never tried before. It’s this continuous 20 minute stretch of music, which I think at the time was the longest continuous stretch of music that I had attempted to write. I think, in general, it succeeds at articulating that amount of time in a way that’s compelling and that leads the listener through a kind of journey. It has its particular demands and difficulties and sections that are tricky to put together and balance. But the rhetoric of the piece and the formal journey of it kind of explain themselves.

During your recent NPR Tiny Desk concert of Philip Glass’ Etudes you performed etudes six and five in that order. On March 19th you’re going to be performing at Walt Disney Concert Hall as one of five pianists doing Philip Glass’ Complete Etudes 1 – 20. You edited the published edition that recently came out. When you’re working on something from an editorial perspective are there new discoveries that you were able to make, new understandings, that are separate from what you understand as you’re playing a piece of music?

I’m someone who’s very grounded in notation. I think already that puts me in the minority of musicians in the world. Most music is not made via notation. Notation is not only how I deal with music most of the time, but it’s inescapably how I think about it. Like when I hear music, I’d see notation and vice versa. All the music that I interface with I understand something more of it by seeing the notation. Very often, especially when I’m playing new work, I will actually go and re-notate certain things. Not because it’s notated wrong. It’s just there’s certain opinions that I hold, esthetically or taste wise, or just from a practicality standpoint that are sort of the differential between how a composer might think of a piece, might conceive music and then the ways that a pianist might approach that music. 

With Philip, I think his notation always has a wonderful kind of clarity to it. So it wasn’t so much about clarifying anything in particular. You can read these pieces off his hand-notated manuscripts, pretty much with no problem. This was more about meeting somewhere in the middle between a totally liberalized, typesetting of those manuscripts and then reading from the manuscripts. I think there are aspects of both documents that are useful.

You posted on your website on January 4th of 2023, “Thanks to all the artists and record labels who asked me to write about their recordings. Doing so always teaches me new ways to listen and think about music.” If we fast forward 30 or 40 years and somebody is editing your work or asking to comment on them, what would you like them most to know about who you were at this particular time in your life as a person, a composer and an artist?

I’m not really someone who likes to self-mythologize. I don’t think autobiographically. It’s not really a question I’m prepared to answer. And I don’t think it’s my job to answer it. I think of myself as someone who works very hard. My life is really about all the different aspects of the work that I do. Whether it’s writing a piano concerto or playing the work of another composer, or writing about the work of other musicians, arranging the work of other musicians. All of these different ways that I can get my hands dirty with music, so to speak. I’m up for it and I don’t stop to really interrogate what my project is in a sense for or even who I am. Do any of us really know who we are?

I think when you start to think about that, you’re becoming your own publicist. In a way you’re marketing yourself. Which is a necessity in the modern world of constant pressure to be sharing content and sharing yourself online and simultaneously the complete destruction of any kind of critical apparatus in the mainstream press or any real critical discourse that goes on in the mainstream. In the field that I work in it’s tempting to try to pick up the pieces and try to do it yourself. I have a website. I have Instagram. I have Twitter. I do all these things. But I also don’t know if they truly say anything about who I am as an artist. I think I would rather leave it to the professionals to come to their own conclusions. 

Or let the music speak for itself.

It’s a little bit cliche to say, I guess, but yeah, listen to the music. If you’re curious, it’s all in there. I don’t think it says particularly anything autobiographical. I’m not that kind of composer. But, I think you can connect the dots if you really listen.

To watch the full interview with Timo Andres, please go here.

Main Photo: Composer/Pianist Timo Andres (Courtesy Colbert Artists Management)

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On May 7th, Ólafsson will begin the final performances of this album at the Symphony Center in Chicago. This is followed by three additional performances in San Francisco (May 9th), Los Angeles (May 10th) and Santa Barbara (May 11th). He does not intend to perform this program again anywhere in the world.

A week before Ólafsson calls it a wrap on this project, we spoke about this program, his passion for Mozart and Bach and whether music being written today will be rediscovered the way he rediscovered Galuppi’s Piano Sonata No. 9 in F Minor or Cimarosa’s Sonata No. 55 in A Minor for Mozart & Contemporaries.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

In these final four concerts you will play an entire album from start to finish and ask the audience not to applaud. As if they are listening to the album live in front of them. What’s the logic behind that and how has your relationship to this work that was released almost two years ago evolved since that time? 

At this point, I don’t think of it as Mozart and Contemporaries, but rather Wolfie and Co. I love this program and those are actually the very last concerts I will ever play this anywhere. It’s just the end of a big project for me I’ve played throughout the whole world. The idea with the programing and the way it works from the first piece to the last, I ask people to go into this state of mind with me and allow one piece to speak to the other and merge into the next; melt together almost. It’s because I love to think of my albums and recital programs as a kind of a collage.

I’ve actually never in my life played an album like that from beginning to end without changing anything. When I was doing my Bach album, my Rameau album, my other albums, I’m usually playing one half the album with some sort of a compilation I create, and then I’ll do something completely different in the second half. But the Mozart, one I tried that. I couldn’t find what to erase from this program. It is really going from lights into the shadow. There’s a lot of playfulness and a playful exchange between Mozart and the other composers in the first part of the program. Then as it progresses, it gets darker and darker and more and more difficult, but also more romantic and denser and in a way greater.

You talk about how it gets darker and darker, but when you get to Liszt transcription of the Ave verum corpus at the end, it’s just heavenly. 

These are maybe the greatest 3 minutes ever composed. Mozart wrote this in an afternoon for a friend who was celebrating Corpus Christi somewhere in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Austria. He just threw it together in one afternoon. The funny thing about Mozart is that he was always so annoyed when people claimed that he had a divine sort of talent. He always maintained that he worked harder than everybody else. And that is true. Consensus said that he probably killed himself with overwork. But at the same time, however much you choose to work or spend time on your art, you can’t just then write Ave verum corpus once you passed your 100,000 hours. It doesn’t happen like that. That’s what makes Mozart Mozart.

31 years ago when you were tackling the Sonata in C Major at the age of eight, I have a feeling you didn’t quite think of him in such high regard.

I had a troubled relationship with Mozart. As I did with Bach, which is very funny because those are my two favorite composers to play. I still think they’re the most difficult ones to play, but maybe that’s why I love them and maybe that’s why I hated them when I was eight. [Mozart] was the first composer that made me realize that nothing is good enough from the piano when you play music with that status at that level. Any nuance has to almost match the nuance of the composition. That is, in itself, just an impossible task. You just can’t expect to reach that height of piano playing. No one will. But that’s somehow what Mozart seems to demand.

If you could go back in time or if you could bring to present day Mozart and Bach, what would you most want to know about why they wrote the way they did or about their work or who they were?

Good question. It’s an impossible question, of course. First of all, I would just try to go and hear them play. Hopefully the same music on two consecutive nights to get confirmation for what I’m absolutely certain is true. That they would never repeat themselves and play, let’s say the Goldberg Variations, twice the same or the same mindset. I’m not just talking about ornamentation or little things like that. I’m talking about actual tempos. I’m talking about phrasing and dynamics and the detail within the detail.

Second of all, I would just go up to them and ask them, How can I help you? Can I do your laundry? Do you need money? Can I just do something for you? Because those guys, they didn’t enjoy what they should have enjoyed in their life. They had a very difficult life when they had to work more than we probably understand and comprehend today. 

I would probably also ask Mozart what he wanted from his instrument because the instrument was changing so much. I feel in the C Minor Sonata, which is the biggest keyboard sonata and one of the biggest pieces he ever wrote in a way keyboard, I would ask him, are you content with the instrument? He seems to me to be, in the late works, pushing the boundaries of the instrument of the piano or whatever his instrument was at his disposal. He’s pushing it so far. I’d love his thoughts about the pros and cons of the piano of the day and how he would ideally have the piano developed.

If I would be back in Bach’s day, I would like to hear him play on the harpsichord. I would really want to hear him play the organ and hear how he would register the organ just to get a sense for his colors and what he would be going for. Then I would go back in the time machine and travel to 2023 and maybe try to recreate some of that on the on the piano, because I think the piano has that potential. But if I could bring a piano with me back in time to those guys, I think that would be the best present they would ever receive without being able to say that. But I think they would love the potential of it, the polyphony in the way you can differentiate the different voices.

On Mozart and Contemporaries I love that you introduce us to composers we probably have never heard of before. As somebody who believes that we’re in a golden age of classical music, do you think that in 100 or 200 years from now, some of the music that might get discarded presently can be rediscovered and will be rediscovered?

There’s sadly so much music being written today that deserves a platform that doesn’t get it for very different reasons. But that could be said about almost anything in the world presently, because we have never had anything like the kind of prosperity that we have today. Never before have so many people been able to do something that actually interests them out of passion. We’re not having a golden age only for classical music, but in terms of humanity the fact that people can develop, devote their time to doing something beautiful by necessity.

But a lot of that is unfortunately going to be forgotten and never heard. And that’s going to be difficult for people to admit. Things are probably going to be even more crowded or prosperous. So to have any time or any reason to seek out unknown people from the 21st century? I don’t know. It’s sort of sad, but it’s also very beautiful, because the process is, in the end, what matters. 

In 2017, you did a rapid fire interview for for a Deutsche Gramophone’s YouTube channel. You were asked to choose between original and remix. Your answer was original. Now you have other artists who are taking your work from From Afar and they are now reworking it. Has your perspective changed on original versus remix?

I think that I like to do the remakes myself. Even as a pianist, you’re kind of remixing if you’re an interpretive musician and you take your thing seriously. Rachmaninoff played Chopin – he’s effectively remixing it. It changes everything almost in the dynamics and he does it so freely. So if you just take it on a sort of broader scale, we are all remixers here in the classical world.

But I think I’ve come to appreciate this process of reversing the creative process, my creative process, which is to take the works of others and try to lend them my meaning and connect with my world and my experiences and bring that to the audience. Then to take art to the studio and then to actually take that and give that material to the composer. It’s basically reversing the creative process. Giving them my recordings or just prolonging the chain of creativity. It’s very interesting. It’s a little bit humbling for me to to do it because you have to just let loose and let go of your creations, which are my recordings, which are very dear to me and matter to me very much. That’s an interesting process for me. I can experiment in letting go of my ego. 

I feel like this is the 21st century answer to transcriptions. 

Yeah, you could say that. Usually it’s people that I’m taken with one way or another. It’s something about them that strikes me as interesting and brilliant. We’ve just had two new reworks released just in the last weeks: an amazingly beautiful lullaby by Icelandic singer Álfheiður Erla Guðmundsdóttir. She’s just written a lullaby with an Icelandic text for her young newborn son on top of material from Brahms’s Intermezzo Opus 116, Number Four, which is my favorite intermezzo. It’s my recording from my From Afar album. I think it’s magically beautiful. I’m absolutely in love with it. Of course, I’m very fortunate that anyone has an interest to do something like this with my material. So I’m going to continue with it.

A lot of people are eagerly anticipating your Goldberg Variations which I believe is coming down the pike sometime in the not-too-distant future. We’ve already talked about how important Bach is to you. He was asked about playing a musical instrument and he said, “There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right moment. The instrument plays itself.” That strikes me as a gross oversimplification of playing music, but is there any part of what Bach said that you could agree with, or is there truly something remarkable about playing music that you would say in response to him? 

You have to remember this is the greatest composer in the history of music. So for him the comparison between what I do, which is to play the music, and what he also did, which is to write the music and come up with the St. Matthew Passion. I can agree with him that in comparison what I do is pretty feeble. It’s not incredible, actually. Having said that, I actually think some of my favorite musicians of today are not necessarily composers, but rather some of the greatest performers alive who can bring new life to the music. Which can be more original than a new composition by a composer who doesn’t have a strikingly interesting point of view.

I agree with Bach. In his case that’s true. I love people who manage to bring something here and now. I would be interested to hear if this was actually what Bach thought. Of course, it would have been difficult to be him because he also suffered from lack of recognition. Here is history’s greatest, not even composer, I think greatest artist, everyone included, in my opinion. And yet he only had about four books published in his whole lifetime. He didn’t have any money. Much of his writing that we have is all about complaining about lack of salary or something like that. Who knows, maybe he had an off day. But I also believe he’s right. Compare those two facets of his life. Playing the music is nothing compared to writing it in his case.

I must say that some of my favorite performers in history approached the music from a composer’s standpoint. They’re so free with the music because they almost go to the source of most of the music. Seems to me that they almost understand how the music came to be and can then recreate it as if they had almost composed it. Rachmaninoff playing Chopin. This, I think, is the most authentic Chopin you can hear. But it’s also the one that strays, for the most part, furthest away from the score in terms of dynamics, in terms of so many things. He’s not afraid of changing things. He recomposed it like a rework almost, but it’s still so authentic. But it is a meeting between Rachmaninoff and Chopin. 

Ask John Adams or Thomas Adés if they always predicted everything. I don’t think the answer is going to be yes. I think that composer can very well not be aware of certain things about the music. The music has its own life somehow. It’s just like your children. I think for composers,you know your child better than everybody. You created it. It’s in your DNA. But the child still has facets that you don’t know and that will always be the case. 

To see the full interview with Víkingur Ólafsson, please go here.

All photos of Víkingur Ólafsson: ©Ari Magg/Courtesy Harrison Parrott

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An Alpine Symphony with Salonen – October 27^th – October 29^th

Any concert that offers a world premiere of a new composition by Esa-Pekka Salonen (particularly one he conducts) is definitely one to see.

Salonen’s Tiu opens the concert. It is then followed by Nico Muhly’s Shrink which is a 2019 violin concerto written for Pekka Kuusisto who performs it at these three concerts.

The program closes with Richard Strauss’ tone poem from 1915. It’s a very large work employing close to 125 musicians and runs 45-50 minutes.

Photo of Esa-Pekka Salonen by Andrew Eccles (Courtesy SF Symphony)

Dudamel Leads Khachaturian – November 4^th – November 5^th

The music of Aram Khachaturian doesn’t often get performed in concert halls. So this concert that features both his piano concerto (performed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet) and music from his ballet music for Spartacus is a welcome part of the season. 

The second half of the program includes Tower for Frank Gehry by Thomas Adés. (Much of the season is dedicated to Gehry.)

This will be the U.S. Premiere of Tower. The concert closes with Leos Janacek’s Sinfonietta.

Dudamel Leads Das Rheingold – January 18^th – January 21^st

Another program in this season’s celebration of Frank Gehry is this concert performance of the first opera in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. 

As with many concert performances of operas at the LA Phil, this will be more than just people standing up and singing. Gehry is the scenic designer for the concerts; Alberto Arvelo is the director and Cindy Figueroa is the costume designer.

The cast include Ryan Speedo Green as Wotan; Raehann Bryce-Davis as Fricka; Jochen Schmeckenbecher as Alberich; Simon O’Neill as Loge; Barry Banks as Mime and the always reliable and copelling Morris Robinson as Fasolt.

Last Days – February 6^th

The last days of Kurt Cobain, as loosely presented in Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film, are the focus of this opera by composer Oliver Leith and librettist Matt Copson (who co-directs and is the art director for this concert). 

Last Days received a 4-star review from Andrew Clements of The Guardian in October of 2022 upon its premiere at the Royal Opera House in London.

As with that production, Anna Morrisey is co-director here. Also cast members Agathe Rousselle, Mimi Doulton, Henry Jenkinson and Patricia Auchterlonie return to sing their roles of Blake, Delivery Driver and Housemate; Magician and Superfan, respectively.

Most excitingly, composer Thomas Adés conducts this one-night only performance.

Ravel and Adés – February 9^th – February 11^th

If you like Adés as much as I do, you will also want to attend one of these three concerts which finds the work of Maurice Ravel paired with two works by Adés.

The program opens with The Tempest Symphony which is a 22-minute piece he created based on music from his opera, The Tempest. The work had its world premiere in Dresden in June of 2022.

That is followed by Ravel’s Piano Concert for the Left Hand with Kirill Gerstein

The second half opens with the Concert for Piano and Orchestra by Ades also with Gerstein as the soloist. The concert closes with Ravel’s La valse. Best of all you get to hear Adés conduct his own music.

Mälkki Conducts Brahms – February 23^rd – February 25^th

Two of these three concerts will feature the U.S. Premiere of Fett by Enno Poppe (the “Casual Friday” concert does not include this work). Susanna Mälkki conducted the world premiere with the Helsinki Philharmonic in May of 2019. It’s a 25-minute work and is at the podium for these concerts.

Each program opens with the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms and it closes with the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with soloist Daniil Trifonov at the piano. (Reason enough to see this program if you ask me!)

Philip Glass: The Complete Etudes, 1-20 – March 19^th

Four pianists team up to perform all 20 etudes by composer Glass. They are Timo Andres, Anton Batagov, Jenny Lin and Maki Namekawa. What else do you need to know? 

John Adams’ City Noir – March 22^nd – March 24^th

John Adams will be leading the LA Phil in this concert that opens with Stravinsky’s Song of the Nightingaleand closes with Adams’ City Noir which was commissioned by the LA Phil. The 35-minute work had its world premiere with Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil on October 8, 2009.

In between these two pieces is the world premiere of a new piano concerto by Timo Andres. It was composed specifically for pianist Aaron Diehl.

This is certain to be a fascinating performance.

Recitals – various dates

Okay, so this is probably cheating a little bit. But there are three recitals (even though they are all good this year) well-worth your time and money.

James McVinnie, an amazingly talented musician, has a solo recital playing the organ and piano on November 12^th. He’ll be performing works by Bach, inti Figgis-Vizueta, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Nico Muhly and Gabriella Smith.

On May 1^st Víkingur Ólafsson will perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations. His long-anticipated recording of this work is being released on Deutsche Grammophon on Friday, October 6^th.

A solo recital by Yuja Wang is something I won’t miss and neither should you. She performs on May 12^th. The program hasn’t yet been announced.

Dudamel Leads Mozart and Strauss  – May 2^nd – May 5^th

These performances (except the Casual Friday date) begin with the world premiere of a new work by Andreia Pinto Correia. The concerts all feature pianist Maria João Pires performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9, “Jeunehomme.” Pires doesn’t often perform in Los Angeles, so this is a great opportunity to see one of the world’s best.

The last composition on the program in Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote. It’s a 40-minute work inspired by Miguel de Cervantes’ 17^th-century novel.

There’s plenty more to choose from throughout the season. These are my picks of the 10 LA Philharmonic concerts not to be miss during the 2023-2024 season.

Main Photo: Gustavo Dudamel (Photo ©Stephan Rabold/Courtesy Fidelio Arts)

The post 10 LA Philharmonic Concerts Not to Miss appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

To be fair, it is a little limiting to refer to Marc Lowenstein as just as composer. He’s also a music director (with The Industry and others) and conductor. He’s a singer and also an educator. But since we’re staying in the present, today we’ll talk about his work as a composer and also the most recent one to be a part of LACO’s Sound Investment Commission.

On Saturday, May 20th at the Alex Theatre in Glendale and Sunday, May 21st at UCLA’s Royce Hall, LACO will present the world premiere of HaZ’man HaZeh. I’ll allow Lowenstein to share details about the piece in the following excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview please go to our YouTube channel.

LACO’s Sound Investment Commission works a little bit differently than if you had gotten a commission from another performing arts organization in that the people who who donate into this program get to have a number of meetings with you, progress reports, hearing bits and pieces of a work in progress. I assume that’s very different than with any other institution.

It is very different. Although having said that, in my work in The Industry, we did do something similar in that we do workshops and we have our donors come to the workshops and we have meet and greets with them. But that’s not formalized in the way the Sound Investment program is. And it’s really formalized in a good sense: first I met and talked about my initial ideas, then I met and I had a small group of musicians play some excerpts just to check them out and to see if I could coerce one of the violinists into singing, which is a whole other issue. But I’ll tell you about that later. Then there’s one more meeting with donors right after one of the dress rehearsals. So they get to see the evolution from idea to piece and to performance.

One of the benefits of this program is the creation of modern classical works. If we don’t have contemporary works, how many Beethoven cycles can someone sit through? 

Oh, my goodness, no. I’m slightly older, shall we say. So I don’t I don’t think people realize what a renaissance of modern orchestral music there is going on now today, and such a broad array of composers, different styles. 30 years ago you just couldn’t get your music performed by any orchestra. Their idea of modern music was one piece by an extremely famous person and that would anchor the season. Now it seems like almost every concert by every major orchestra has a really interesting piece. Even if it’s not successful, it’s fabulous to hear. 

So I think we’re really in a tremendous renaissance of hearing a broad array of new voices of all ages and backgrounds and all musical styles. I think that’s crucial.

Of course, if we’re talking 30 years ago by one famous composer, it was either Philip Glass or John Adams.

I remember talking to my peers. All of us essentially made our own groups and our own orchestras to play the works. But there was still a barrier. It wasn’t necessarily a lack of awareness. It was sort of a blinkered mindset on the boards of all those institutions. The boards have changed and they realize that there’s all this great music out there. There’s a lot of great young composers out there.

I’m thrilled because the Sound Investment program isn’t just for young composers. I’m not exactly a young composer. I joke I’m sort of a mid-career despite my age, because of all these three different aspects that I do all the time. So I haven’t written as much as many other composers my age. But at the same time it’s refreshing that Sound Investment will have very young and untried composers with tremendous amount of promise and then somewhat older, more experienced ones. Just whoever they find interesting. 

What can you tell me about HaZ’man HaZeh?

It’s about the battle, the internal struggle, between nostalgia and sort of overt futurism. So I try to reach that through a dialectic between song and dance, and then something that’s neither song nor dance.

What inspired the work and its title?

I’m not that religious, but when I am, I feel marginally drawn to the sort of the Jewish mysticism tradition and where it intersects with Buddhism. It’s not very original of me, but it’s just sort of where I sit.

My roots, in terms of what I heard as a young person, [were] romantic chamber music and classical orchestra. Then I moved into jazz. So the beginning is sort of Schumann meets Sibelius meets Charles Mingus and this sort of wild party. Then I realized that in writing all these nostalgic styles, in some ways nostalgia is a beautiful thing. In another way, nostalgia is the enemy because you can drown in nostalgia unless you make something new out of nostalgia. It can really hold you back. 

Also I think if you worry too much about the future, you’re also holding yourself back. You’re not living in the present in that sense. So it’s this weird search for honesty between nostalgia and this sort of attempt to be new. I wanted to have some title that would evoke the present time, that overused word mindfulness of the present.

Then I realized there is something in the Jewish liturgy. There’s a very common prayer every time you reach a milestone, whether it’s just a happy day, a holiday, there’s a blessing. You thank God for bringing you the moment of this moment. And in Hebrew, the words are HaZ’man HaZeh, which literally means this time or the present time.

Where does a singing violinist fit into this picture?

I think one way to really live in the present is to dance. In all my music there is this binary between song and dance, and they sort of fuse together. There’s actually a song I had been working on at the same time. I didn’t think it was part of this piece. I had been setting this meditation on one of the Dalai Lama’s sayings, which is “My religion is kindness.” I’m working on the song. Can I take this block and just move it right here? 

I called up the orchestra manager and I said, “Is there someone in the violin section who wouldn’t mind just getting up doing this intonation, reciting?” At our last donor salon, one of the violinists, Sarah Thornblade, stood up and she just sang. She’s breathtakingly beautiful.

How important is it for an audience to understand what a composer is trying to get across versus just listening and enjoying it?

At its best there’s no difference. I think a lot of composers would say the same thing. We hope that there’s explanation beneath it, but we certainly hope that explanation is not necessary. Having said that, a certain amount of linguistic fluency helps, or familiarity, let me put it that way. 

Just as composers can get lost in the many styles that are around today, audiences, for their own good, might want to become a little fluent in things that they like. Which is just to say, if you like something, listen to it and try to figure it out. You might not. The first listen might not be as rewarding as the fourth or the fifth. Or maybe it’s not linear or something like that.

How much does working within an organization like The Industry, which has presented operas in a train station (Invisible Cities), in cars moving throughout the city (Hopscotch) and other unique locations, make you feel that we are moving in a direction where traditional expectations of how art is to be presented or consumed and genres are becoming passé? 

I would rephrase it slightly with your permission. I think they’re being expanded beyond that which is passé. Let’s talk about opera, not just symphonic music for a second. I want to look at traditional opera as sort of like those Civil War reenactments. There’s a place for it and people like that. It’s a history and a culture and it’s a deep part of us. It might be a little passé, but it’s deeply important. There’s a real place for the Met and for LA Opera and Chicago Lyric and all those places. At the same time, we can’t live in the past.

Whatever the words: problematize, interrogate, question the relationship between the audience member and the work. It’s very set. If you think about going into an opera house, you know what your relationship to the work is.

Yuval Sharon, Founder and Co-Artistic Director of The Industry told me that “The inner life of the piece of music has to be made manifest on a stage.” He was talking about Invisible Cities. Does that same thought process become part of what you think about when you’re composing something for a concert hall?

I love site specific concert music that doesn’t have voices. So I think there’s always going to be a home for these really beautifully acoustically tuned halls that allow you to immerse yourself in either electronic, acoustic or some kind of sound world so that you can project yourself into the sound. I think that’s fundamentally different than what happens in opera, where it’s a story and you project yourself into the story, the narrative or the scenario. Even with music that’s programmatic, I just think it’s a fundamental difference. So when you try to problematize the symphony hall, it’s going to be different.

I think you can listen to an opera in a recording, and I think you only really get it if you’ve seen it on the stage. But that’s not true of orchestra music. You can listen to wonderful orchestra music in a recording and really get it. And really get it in a way that you just can’t get up.

Almost anyone who listens to opera, which is probably not a lot of people, have almost always seen the work before. Or have seen a video of it. It’s always marketed with visuals in a way to bring you into that story. This isn’t arguing for one form over the other. I just think we have to recognize the fundamental difference, which, of course, will have blurred lines in between it. But I think they are different. And it was very challenging to me. 

I found a quote by Ray Bradbury where he said, “No sound, once made, is ever truly lost. In electric clouds, all are safely trapped, and with a touch, if we find them, we can recapture those echoes of sad, forgotten wars, long summers and sweet autumns.” How would you like your music, and this work in particular, once safely trapped, to help listeners recapture their own memories and experiences? 

I read Ray Bradbury obsessively when I was 14, and he’s definitely steeped in that same sort of nostalgia that I talked about. I don’t know. I don’t know that the music has a message that it wants to give out. I hope it’s successful on its own terms. I would almost unask that question. You tell me.

I’m much more interested in how other people react to it. I know what the sounds are. I know how it sounds. I cannot predict whether it’s even partially universal in expressing what I’m trying to express or if other people get other things from it. That’s always the case.

There have been many pieces that people interpret as one thing and that the composer meant something else. So I have no good answer. I hope it’s successful. I hope people hear it. I hope it’s successful on its own terms if that means something. I’m still kind of discovering what those own terms are.

Is this work finished in your heart and in your mind? 

Yes. I’m very good at saying, “Okay, let’s do the next best thing after that.” That is living in the present. The message of this piece is, in fact, to let it go and to just to do the next thing and to find your next mantra and to live in the next moment. Because that’s literally all that there is. It’s only by letting go and having a tremendous amount of throughput, I think, that you can really find the meaning in the moments.

To see the full interview with Marc Lowenstein, please go here.

Photo: Marc Lowenstein (Courtesy Marc Lowenstein and LACO)

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It goes without saying that we live in complicated times. At first impulse we probably want to ask ourselves why? Taking a different approach might be to look at the past as a way of understanding who we are today. Cellist Seth Parker Woods takes that concept one step further by exploring the past – and by extension his own identity – through the lens of predominantly modern classical composers on his album Difficult Grace, which is being released on April 15th by Cedille Records.

The album is a recording of much of the material that appeared in his stage show, also called Difficult Grace, which had its world premiere at the 92nd Street Y in New York in November of last year. In this project Woods performs works by Monty Adkins, Frederick Gifford, Ted Hearne, Nathalie Joachim, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson and Alvin Singleton.

On Difficult Grace Woods serves as narrator through stories about the Great Migration, selections from The Chicago Defender (an African-American newspaper launched in 1905) and poetry by Kemi Alabi and Dudley Randall.

It’s a massively ambitious and impressive project. In early March I spoke with Woods about the project, distilling a multi-media stage project into a recording and how he hopes to get audiences to embrace what he calls “modern classical music.” What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

In a story from late 2021 that was published at University of Buffalo you said, “I haven’t taken an easy route, but it has allowed me to tap into a wide variety of fields and areas that most people never get to because they stay siloed.” Is that diversity of fields you speak about crucial to how we look at music today, where traditional labels and definitions need to perhaps be relics of the past?

I think so. I don’t think there’s been as many artists that have truly lived or existed or created inside of a singular label. A&R people, how do they sell us as artists to the general public? And how does one talk about the art and the music we make? I don’t think it can be boiled down to just a singular label, a singular silo. Maybe it’s just easier to put it within that.

I try to think of it sometimes [as] modern classical music as we are living in the modern times. Not necessarily contemporary music, but just the modern times of creating this. I feel like they are possibly just relics of the past. But we, as I have said before, love to hold on and revel in that which has long gone and sometimes not necessarily support enough of what’s happening right now.

Difficult Grace is certainly a project that’s going to challenge us to move forward. It started as a multimedia project that you perform on stage with dancers and projections. What modifications did you have to make for this to become a recording that lived and breathed just by virtue of its sound?

There are so many visual components to the work. That was the hard part. For those that have never seen the live show Difficult Grace, how do I still convey that sense of vividness and adornments in a sonic format? How do we reposition it and allow it to kind of really soar and ride many waves in different formations was the trickiest part of putting it all together beyond how I sculpted it in the live show. Trying to use the live experience as a way of sharing it similarly to how I feel it when I’m doing it live. 

Having the liner notes also helps since we don’t get to see the words that were projected on you. The ability to see what’s being said certainly helps us fill in a few of the blanks as well.

This day and age so many people gravitate directly towards digital streaming downloads. I still love a CD. I still love an LP – the actual physical thing. So for those that do buy the physical album, you get to see a lot of the visuals of Barbara Earl Thomas, of Jacob Lawrence; the words and text of Dudley Randall and Kemi Alabi and the texts from The Chicago Defender as well. It’s all very much so woven inside of the actual album and the booklet that comes with it.

You were talking about this project with the Gothamist last year and you said that Difficult Grace examines, “stories that [the body] holds and it needs to tell.” As you prepare for the release of this album and you have future performances of this work, how has your need to tell these stories shifted? Do the different ways of telling this story in live performance versus recording allow for any form of catharsis or better understanding of why your body holds these stories? 

I guess in that way we are born – as we’re born – maybe questions come up along the way as we make our journeys. Maybe more questions that we still need to ask, but we don’t necessarily ask. So this is a way, through these people, through their narratives, especially with like the work, the race 1915 to embody these real live lines from journalism that were coming exclusively from The Chicago Defender.

These stories, these journeys, are so deeply connected to my family and my grandmother. My mother’s mother was making the journey just two decades after 1915. So it’s not autobiographical, but it’s kind of semi-autobiographical by lineage and connection to my grandmother in that way. So it felt so close to home to be feeling as if there was a deep importance for me to talk about it at this point.

It was a lot to to swallow. I remember the first live performance I did of it was February 9th, 2020, just before everything shut down. I was nervous because I made it a point that when I take on such performative works in this way I’m not just the cellist. I have to figure out what the characters are. What more are they trying to say beyond what’s just kind of topical. Same with music; reading between the lines.

There was so much heartache, but also there is so much perseverance. It’s not as if I was reading fiction. These are historical lines, historical documents, objects that are recounting times that were happening across the country in the beginning of the Great Migration. 

You’ve described yourself as a vessel for these people’s stories in Difficult Grace. How does being that vessel impact you physically and emotionally? 

I was shouldering a lot because I think this project is so personal and so special for me. When one is commissioning or one finds new work, old work, whatever it is, you don’t really know what it is until after you perform it. You may not know what it is for a few performances. There is a risk in even choosing. There’s even more risk in daring to perform. Do these works work together? What is their throughline? Even after the first performance I didn’t know. But I remember there being a sense of electricity that was going through me, but also because I was just trying to get this thing right.

Now I’m not so scared of the material. These works have changed me. I think it’s allowed me to show more of my humanity, even more of it, and more vulnerability on stage and to be okay with that and not feel overly perfect or have to search to find the perfect performance or deliver the perfect performance.

Composer John Adams and I discussed how much of the work that’s being created now is going to be remembered in the future. He said it was important to remember that Beethoven had a lot of contemporaries, but we don’t really hear a lot of the works they did because they just didn’t hold up. When you’re collaborating with as many composers as you are, do you ever have a sense of how history might look at these pieces or any belief that they are going to have a life span beyond this moment in time?

It’s hard to know. I don’t think there is a direct answer for that. Did Beethoven know symphony number five would be the biggest hit and would be played centuries later? No, he didn’t. You take a risk, but you’re also writing so much.

I don’t know if I have a direct answer as to whether the work I have been involved in creating or championing will stand the test of time. And I don’t know if I’m necessarily interested in that. What I am interested in is really trying to tell their stories now and doing the best I can to give them as many legs as possible. That it is beyond one performance. If I can get ten performances over a few years that says a lot. 

I think it’s at least important for me to be able to continue to broaden and widen your palette so you don’t stay closed off to the idea [of] this is what I really like and this is all there is out there and that’s all I’m going to ever pay attention to. There’s so much that’s being made daily and weekly. It’s just finding the sonorities, the storytelling, that really resonates with you. Which, I guess in some ways, is why I wasn’t one of those musicians that was trying to prove myself or push myself to learn every single piece in the canon.

When you’re talking about the canon you’re typically talking about the 5 to 10 pieces that everybody knows.

Exactly. But that, even of itself, is a gate-kept situation. I’ve prided myself and pushed myself to pull from the composers that I really love and the pieces that I really love from those composers and pair them alongside new works being created now. Or at least in the last 50-60 years that I find to be really powerful that can have conversations across timelines.

A composer like Ted Hearne, whose work I admire greatly, there are people who are going to say that work is too difficult for them. What are the challenges for you in hopefully winning over those skeptics who think that this is just an intellectual exercise and not an emotional one?

I think it’s important to talk to your audiences first and foremost. There was a time where I was coming up and I wasn’t taught how to engage audiences. The idea of engaging audiences was just playing to them – at them. I want to actually talk to them and guide them through what they’re going to experience and hear.

I think that’s always an issue when concertgoers are thinking about or going to concerts of contemporary music. They are not in the know; something’s being kept from them, hidden from them. They don’t know the formula or it’s not the formula that they’re used to experiencing.

I don’t really like program notes in that way. I would rather just talk from my heart about what this work is, what it means to me, connections to the composer – whether alive or dead – and where this work is now and and also how it links curatorially to the rest of the program. 

Artist Jacob Lawrence, whose 60-panel The Migration Series helped inspired Difficult Grace, said about his creativity, “If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man’s continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being.” How important is it for your work to do the same thing, and to what extent do you believe, or at least hope you’ve been successful in that effort?

Jacob Lawrence coming in heavy. Long ago my mother said to write your life in pencil. And I stand by those words. Those have been words that have guided me for all these decades because I truly believe in the idea of trying to be as open as possible. Have your your goal, your bucket list, your plan, but also be open to other things. Aligning with that or converging with that can expand or re-route what you thought you would ultimately only be doing, but may be this plus.

When people ask me would you describe yourself as a cellist I always say, cellist plus. Because I’ve taken on so many other things and things that I realized that I really do love or that I am really good at. For me it has been a grappling of how far do I want to take this career? How far do I really want to take myself? The cello, in and of itself as an expressive vehicle, has taken me around the world.

I have been in conflict with the idea of should I have just taken the easier route and just solely dedicated my life to just playing just classical music? Or at one point just doing only early music. Or have I done the right thing in choosing to do the old and also to do the new and find ways for them to talk to each other. Therefore, lifting myself further up and kind of immortalizing even more of my humanity and being able to be that vulnerable in front of so many others; if and only when it holds and leaves space for others to be vulnerable too.

It’s a gift to be an artist because we are of the few that really are mirrored reflections of society. We are the ones that set the trends. We are the ones that tell the stories that are hard to be told or that are hidden in many ways. It’s a privilege for me to have arrived where I am now. To be able to actively choose the stories, regardless of timeline that I want to, and to champion them in the best possible ways that I can. The ways in which I see those stories and the ways in which I see myself connected to them will evolve. I can keep practicing and continue to get better at telling those stories.

To watch our full interview with Seth Parker Woods, please go here.

The post Cellist Seth Parker Woods Storyteller appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

On Thursday, April 6th, he will present a recital at The Soraya in Northridge where he will show a through-line from Rachmaninoff to Art Tatum, Billy Strayhorn and Stephen Sondheim. How might he do that? That was just what I wanted to know when I spoke last week with Conrad for the first time since our 2019 interview.

Conrad Tao recorded some of Rachmaninoff’s Preludes for his 2013 album Voyages. He’s also a composer whose work appears on that album as well as on 2015’s Pictures and on 2012’s The Juilliard Sessions.

In our conversation we don’t just cover Rachmaninoff and Sondheim, I ask him an all-important question about one of his favorite shows: RuPaul‘s Drag Race and who he thought would win. Of note, this conversation took place before last Friday’s episode was aired. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Conrad, you’re someone who embraces a wide range of classical music, whether it is Mozart or contemporary classical music by composers like John Adams and David Lang. Since you’re also not just a musician, but you’re also a composer, what do you appreciate most as a listener and also as a composer and musician when you’re hearing or playing Rachmaninoff’s work? 

In some ways, all the same things that everyone else seems to get out of it. Which is, I think, that incredible melodic sensibility first and foremost. For me the two are pretty wrapped up in one another, especially when talking about someone like Rachmaninoff.

Actually the thing that I get excited by is the knowledge that Rachmaninoff himself played the instrument. I haven’t read up on whether or not Rachmaninoff liked to compose at the piano. But I can say, having played a lot of his music, that the music feels remarkably good to play at the instrument; which makes a lot of sense given his virtuosity at the instrument and his prolific reputation as a pianist. But it’s that intimacy, that feeling of connection to Rachmaninoff, potentially, the player has through his composition. Everything I love about the music is filtered through that. 

How difficult is Rachmaninoff’s music to play? 

It’s hard. I just did the Third Piano Concerto last November for the first time in a little while. There’s no getting around the fact that the piece is quite difficult. 

What I’m aspiring to play when I’m playing Rachmaninoff’s music is not really the surface notes at all. The surface notes are just the incidental result of all of the stuff that Rachmaninoff has constructed or is asking me to do, again from underneath. So the music is incredibly challenging because it is so dense, but all of that density actually emerges from a route. As the years have gone by, the challenges have changed. 

So what would be the challenge, say, if you were going to do all four of Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos and Variations on a Theme of Paganini all in one concert?

Well, you’ll notice that I was not the pianist doing this concert. My arms might fall off. It sounds kind of fun in the sense that I would love to hear that progression from 1 to 5, five being the Paganini Rhapsody. Unlike, say Beethoven, where all five piano concertos span a decent period, but they don’t span his entire life. The five Rachmaninoff piano and orchestra pieces do actually span his life and his entire career. You’d hear this interesting progression, especially four and five, which are after Rachmaninoff moves to the U.S. I suppose that’s the premise of my program.

The Soraya website says that you’re “speculating about Rachmaninoff in the United States.” How do you define what that statement means in relation to this concert?

Rachmaninoff moved to New York in 1918. Many of his most well-known works were written before then: the Third Piano Concerto; the Second Piano Concerto. Some of his most iconic themes had already been composed before he came to the U.S. We know that he was going to jazz clubs in New York; that he was participating in the musical culture in New York of the 1920s. So we can reasonably assume that he would have been hearing the American Songbook from that time.

We know that he was a fan of Art Tatum, who was early in his career in the twenties. Plus knowing some of the music that he wrote after he moved to the US, which to my ears very clearly evinces the influence of jazz. Although the Rachmaninoff is hardly alone being a composer influenced by jazz. But that was my starting point.

I wanted to explore through Rachmaninoff’s music, as well as music of those that he may have heard when he was in New York and future composers who we know were influenced by Rachmaninoff or may have been influenced by Rachmaninoff, what his influence may have been from and on American jazz and popular music and and songwriting.

What inspired this idea in the first place?

The ask for this program first came into my inbox last spring and I had just happened to see David Lean’s Brief Encounter for the first time with that beautiful Noël Coward script. I was totally unprepared for how beautiful and and formally inventive and emotional it was. The way that it uses Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto is so fantastic. It’s not quite diegetic, but not quite not diegetic. It’s in this beautiful middle zone where it represents this person’s subconscious in a way, or internal dialogue. It just lit my brain on fire.

Stephen Sondheim’s music is part of your program. You did a transcription of Move On for Anthony de Mare‘s continuing Liaisons project. Last year posted a solo piano version of Sunday [from Sunday in the Park with George] on your Instagram account. How does Sondheim’s work inspire you?

There are so many great things about Sondheim. That’s the wonderful gift that he left us with such a varied output that always has a rich consideration of every note and every word. The way that he’s able to use music to underscore or undercut the words that a character is singing is really like an age-old tradition. Mozart in opera does this as well. It’s just one of the great joys of writing theater music.

The song that’s on this program is In Buddy’s Eyes from Follies. By this point in the [musical], we have enough context to realize that Sally’s trying to console herself or she’s staring into the abyss as she says these words, while also knowing that there’s truth in what she’s singing, too. That complexity you can feel in the harmony, in the pungent chords that occasionally disrupt what is otherwise a placid surface. That’s just one of the great joys of that music.

I first did Sunday as a solo piano encore the night that he passed away. I happened to be working that night and it was really incredible to me how you can perceive all of this drama just in the music. Sondheim is almost a psychedelic experience because there is this endlessly unfolding layers of meaning. It’s addictive.

Since I know you’re a fan and we are down to the final four, who should win RuPaul’s Drag Race and who will win RuPaul’s Drag Race? 

I am rooting for Sasha Colby this year in general and I feel like she could comfortably slot into both the should win and will win spots. I have been following Sasha for a little while. I don’t know if you or anyone has seen her winning Miss Continental Talent performance from 2012 but it is fantastic. She’s got really good taste in music and it’s a great pick me up if you’re ever feeling unmotivated or down on yourself. So I love what Sasha is doing. I think she brings such a wonderful perspective to the show.

I also am obsessed with Anetra who is such a great performer. Part of that show is always the painful, honest stories about what it’s like to grow up queer or a queen or anything. Her story is one of the most horrifyingly raw and upsetting ones I’ve ever heard. It stuck with me ever since she told it. So those are my two.

Rachmaninoff said, “The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart, but from the head. Its composer thinks rather than feels. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt – they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.” If you could talk to him composer-to-composer, what would you tell Rachmaninoff about the “new kind of music” being done today?

You know, I have a feeling that we might not totally agree, but that we’d share the same values. I actually really agree that it’s so easy and common for composers to get lost in cleverness. This is actually something the late composer Frederick Rzewski once said. “I think that sometimes people don’t always write music that’s just like the melodies that are going through their heads. And I’m still trying to write the melodies that are going through my head.”

I relate to that. Whatever exalt means to someone, that goal, that desire to communicate something of ones feeling, one’s perspective on the world and one’s being, I suppose. At the risk of being a little fanciful, that is why I do it. So I think that we might have different tastes and I might try to persuade him some experimental work is gesturing towards exaltation as well. That’s what attracts me to various forms of music. What I’m looking for is that feeling of resonance; that feeling of being transported; that feeling of being transfixed. So perhaps exaltation as well.

To see the full interview with Conrad Tao, please go here.

All photos of Conrad Tao by Kevin Condon/Courtesy Unison Media

The post Conrad Tao Celebrates Rachmaninoff’s 150th appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

“I couldn’t imagine being just a composer and letting somebody else perform and never, ever being a performer myself. I love the thrill of walking on stage now and sort of getting nervous. It’s really wonderful.” That’s how composer (and obviously conductor) John Adams describes his ongoing relationship with his music.

It’s a relationship that he’s been cultivating for decades. Adams is a Pulitzer Prize winner (On the Transmigration of Souls), an Erasmus Prize winner and the recipient of five Grammy Awards.

For over a dozen years he’s held the position of Creative Chair with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

This weekend Adams will conduct the LA Phil in a concert version of his 2017 opera Girls of the Golden West. He collaborated with Peter Sellars on this opera that is set during the Gold Rush in California in the 1850s. Most of the cast that appeared in the opera’s world premiere at San Francisco Opera are returning for these two concerts. This includes Paul Appleby, Julia Bullock, Hye Jung Lee, Elliot Madore, Ryan McKinny and Davóne Tines.

Last week I spoke by phone with Adams about the opera, his career and the future of classical music. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

This area of California where the gold rush was centered was an area that resonated with you as soon as you came to California. How has your relationship with that area of the state where you live and its history evolved over that time? 

I’m an immigrant. Like all the people came out here looking for gold in the 1850s. I came out here in 1971. I suppose California was a sort of dream at the end of the rainbow for me. I was born in New England and actually had never been anywhere else. I didn’t expect to stay here, but I never went back. Not too long after I arrived I started going up to the Sierras and I eventually bought a cabin up there at about 6700 feet. So it’s pretty high up. I have a very deep feeling for the land.

I did not know a lot about the gold rush history until I started researching for this opera and these stories really became intensely important to me. Making this particular piece was very special. In some ways it’s the most personal piece of mine because of that resonance with the land and with the history.

After the premiere in San Francisco you reworked the opera and made some cuts. How much does this revised version, which I assume is the version that’s being performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, reflect a clarification of what you wanted to accomplish?

Well, it’s actually the third version of it. This particular version I had to prepare because I have this extraordinary opportunity to record it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And I can tell you for any composer alive to get the chance to get a good recording of an opera is extremely rare and I’m just very fortunate. But all of my operas have been recorded.

We had to squeeze it into a regular subscription week, which is very limited rehearsal time and the orchestra obviously has not seen it before. So I did have to make a compressed version of it. But I like this version because it’s focused very, very intensely on the narratives of the characters. The original version had a lot of songs, a lot of entertainment. Things that I’m sort of sorry to go, but really weren’t entirely germane to the story. It was really long.

I had no idea I’d written so much music. It was 600 pages of score. Even when it was revised for Amsterdam, it was still too long. Particularly my musical language, which is sort of wry and tight and economical – the way you might pack a backpack to go hiking in the Sierras. I really felt that this story needed to be told in a more compact, shorter version. 

I would assume that even squeezing in these performances as part of the season, it must be a blessing to have all but one of your original cast members back.

Of course. I don’t want to use the word squeezing it in. The Philharmonic has given me as much time as they can. I would say that of all the orchestras in the world, and I have conducted most of them, the LA Phil was the ideal orchestra for this because they have one of the fastest learning curves of any group of musicians in the world. And they know my music. They play it every year and I’ve been conducting them since the 1980s – back when they were at the Music Center. So this is the ideal situation if I’m going to work with an orchestra.

Grant Gershon conducted the premiere in San Francisco. How do you think your approach to this opera, from the conductor’s point of view, will differ from his? In what areas might it be the same?

You know, it’s not like [German conductor Wilhelm] Furtwängler versus [Italian conductor Arturo] Toscanini or something like that. Obviously when Grant conducted that he had singers on the stage and they were doing all kinds of physical activity. And they were singing off book, which puts such a huge responsibility on the conductor. Here I’ve asked the singers to use music because we just want to get it as good as it can. Obviously this is a concert performance with no action on stage. My goal is to just get as good a performance and tight of performance as much as possible. 

But do you feel that you conduct your music differently than others do?

Well, sure. I’m very, very lucky. I’ve had the best conductors on the planet doing my music. That’s a real luxury. But I stay in touch with all my pieces. I conduct them regularly and I think I’m a good conductor – at least for my own music. I work regularly with the best orchestras in the world. That’s a plus that most composers can’t do.

You know I saw Aaron Copland conduct when I was a kid. The Boston Symphony loved him, but he was barely able to conduct. It’s a rare group of people who can conduct and compose: [Leonard] Bernstein and [Pierre] Boulez and Esa-Pekka [Salonen]. But most composers just don’t have the experience.

By having that continued relationship with the vast number of your works that you conduct, how does that fuel your ideas for what you want to do moving forward?

Of course it does fuel it. When I do my pieces I really understand what is right about them and what’s not right. So I’ve had the benefit of doing various pieces many, many times. It’s interesting because I was having to make some programs this week for various orchestras because they’re all ready to announce their seasons. I was looking at scores of [composer] Charles Ives that in the past I’ve conducted. I think Ives, whom I love on a certain level as a wonderful human being and a kind of visionary, but there’s something very unsatisfying about most of his orchestral pieces. The reason is that he never heard them played. So they were all kind of speculative. Then you look at a composer like Ravel or Mahler or Richard Strauss who are just constantly sharing their pieces and refining them. The ideal is to have a hands-on experience with your work.

You and Peter Sellers did an interview at Guggenheim Works in Progress in September of 2017. He described the music that you wrote for Scene five of Act two as of Girls of the Golden West as being able to perfectly give voice to what was happening at the time and that historians will be able to look back at that music and see that you had “actually touched what’s going on.” When art and current events collide in the way that he’s describing, is there a part of it that feels like it’s perfect planning or is it the world working in mysterious ways? How do you view that kind of synchronicity? 

I think I’m more modest in my expectations. I mean, it really sounds great, very grandiose what he said. But I’m always a little skeptical of language like that. I think basically people have very intimate experiences with a work of art. They may be sitting in a big crowd with thousands of people. But how you respond to something is a very intimate experience. I don’t think you can really predict how people are going to react.

Even though a lot of my pieces deal with historical events, when I’m composing I never feel that I’m preaching to people. I never want to preach or think that I’m going to grab them by the lapel and give them a lecture.

You’re also heavily involved with L.A. Philharmonic’s New Music Group. You have a concert coming up with them in March. What gives you the most optimism about the contemporary classical music that we’re going to discover in the next few years? Do you think that there are composers who are on the cusp of having a breakthrough the way you did with Phrygian Gates?

I think it’s always been the case that there’s never been more than a handful of truly great composers at any particular time. If you look at the era of Beethoven there were all the other composers, his contemporaries, but we only listen to them out of historical curiosity. There was a period around the turn of the 20th century when there were an amazing number of really great composers all alive and working: Debussy, Stravinsky, Mahler, Strauss and Sibelius. But that was rare.

With that said, I think that this is a much healthier time to be a composer than when I was in my 20s or 30s. Back then that was what I call the bad old days of extremely obscure approaches to composition. Whether it was serialism or chance music, various systems that created a kind of music that was absolutely inaccessible to most listeners. I have no idea why it became so prestigious. But it did. When I was in college in the late sixties, early seventies, that’s the music that was treated seriously. And of course, one of the things that did was it frightened audiences away.

Even to this day I still suffer from that. If a piece of mine is on the program and your average concertgoer doesn’t know who John Adams is and looks at the program and sees Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Adams, the first thing they think is that it’s a new piece. It’s going to be unpleasant. That’s the long tail off of what happened back in the sixties and seventies. Now composers are not driven by style and they are very conscious about whom they’re writing for and what they’re writing about. 

I think there’s a lot of interest in encouraging young composers. Virtually every orchestra program I see these days, at least by American orchestras, has a piece by an emerging composer. It’s astonishing because you never saw that 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. So there is interest, but the issue is writing a piece that’s going to have legs that people want to hear. That other orchestras and performers and pianists want to share. That’s really where the dividing line is, because there are very, very few pieces that have legs. 

Do you think that that the world is is catching up to what you have been doing throughout your career?

Well, you know, I’m like any contemporary composer except maybe John Williams. I have a modest audience and I say modest compared to a pop musician. But I have what I think is a quality audience who appreciates deeply what I do and loves my work. The reason we call it classical is because we always feel what we’re doing is going to have a very long shelf life, hundreds of years. We’re making something that is not just for now, but for many, many generations ahead. 

Bachtrack had you as number three on the top ten contemporary composers whose works were performed last year. [Arvo Pärt and John Williams were in the first and second position.]

I guess maybe it’s just because I’m a Yankee at heart. I’m just very skeptical of grandiose language and things like that. But maybe that’s healthy because I still keep doing very original things. You know, I came back to this opera, The Girls of the Golden West, thinking it had been a failure. I hadn’t even listened to it or looked at the score in five years. [When I did] I thought, not bad.

Main Photo: John Adams (Photo ©Riccardo Musacchio/Courtesy John Adams)

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Reif, along with soprano Julia Bullock (the couple are together), have conceived of a one-hour version entitled El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered that will be performed on Wednesday by the America Modern Opera Company. This is his effort to make this nearly two-hour Nativity Oratorio from 1999 more accessible for a wide range of performing arts organizations and audiences alike. The performance will take place at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York.

Their revision was first performed in 2018 at The Cloisters in New York. As with that performance, Bullock will be joined by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and baritone Davóne Tines. Mezzo-soprano Rachael Wilson sings the role at this week’s performance that was previously sung by J’Nai Bridges.

Earlier this month I spoke with Reif about El Niño, how Bullock’s relationship with Adams made this project possible and about the miracle of birth. He and Bullock recently had their first child. What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

The year that El Niño premiere, John Adams gave an interview specifically about this work in which he said, “I want the work to be flexible and not tied to any one way of presenting it.” What were the conversations that you and Julia had when you came up with this revised version of presenting El Niño? 

Julia and I love the piece so much. It’s one of the great pieces of our times and it has this immediacy and this intensity. We wanted to focus on that intimacy and immediacy of the work which is reflected both in the subject matter, but also how we have decided to perform it. It’s so hard to cut anything of John’s music and the poetry, but we tried to focus on the relationship – the bond between mother and child.

It basically started with us believing that this piece needs to be heard by more people and be performed by more people. The original, which is so impactful and wonderful, is a big, big piece. It has a six soloists, three of them countertenors, a big orchestra, a big chorus and children. Not every ensemble, not every orchestra, not every chamber orchestra has the resources to perform it. John gave us the blessing for it.

I can’t imagine too many composers being open to having their works altered by other people.

I don’t know if this is just speculation, but if it was anyone else other than Julia Bullock asking John Adams, since they have such a wonderful close relationship, I’m not sure he would have been quite as happy or forthcoming. Julia approached him for her Met Museum residency and he was supportive of it. That was one iteration of it, but we there were several parameters during this presentation.

We played it at The Cloisters so it had to be a certain amount of people only. Also the length was an hour. So there were several restrictions that we wanted to break out a bit now for this iteration. I did a lot of arranging of it for the first one, but I didn’t start from scratch at that point. There was someone else. Now that we’re performing at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on December 21st, that is my arrangement and Julia’s concept.

For people who saw it at the Cloisters in 2018 what’s going to be fundamentally different about what’s getting performed this year?

It’s not fundamentally different. We have a 10-piece chamber choir which is one of the major changes. Also the instrumentation is different than we played it at The Cloisters. I added both the clarinet and the horn back into it. I went closer to John’s music, especially in El Niño, but also in The Gospel According to the Other Mary. In these two oratorios much the heart of the sound are the keyboards: it is piano, it’s sampler synthesizer and also harp guitar. Those are the heart of it.

In that same interview that I referenced at the beginning of our conversation John Adams said, “The piece is my way of trying to understand what is meant by a miracle.” How do you understand what is meant by a miracle? 

That’s a big question and I’m hoping I can answer it somewhat. John is a father and grandfather and now our son was born six weeks ago. That miracle, I think maybe that’s stereotypical or cheesy, but it is a miracle witnessing birth. Of course we know what is going on in the body and how it’s all happening. Julia and I researched a lot. But there’s something special having this miracle of birth and being so close to it. Obviously I didn’t give birth myself, but I was there every step of the way and that is a very special feeling. So I can only imagine that John was thinking a lot about his own family.

What is so fascinating to me is the selection of poems and poets that John and Peter Sellars collected for El Niño. It’s not, as usually is the case with a lot of Western European music, the birth is not presented through the lens of white men. Rosario Castellanos, an incredible poet, is featured very prominently in both the original and El Niño in our arrangement. It’s very important to us as well. It’s an incredible honor and privilege to raise a child. And I think that miracle is being brought through and shines through the whole piece. 

Do you feel like the piece is going to resonate differently with both of you now as a result of having given birth to a son? 

I think so, yes. Even just in these last few weeks, when I read the poetry and studied the music, it hits differently. It always impacted both of us in a very deep way. There’s something inexplicable when you read the beginning that talks about how this other being takes some room in the woman and suddenly your body is not your own anymore. You’re nurturing another human being. This is the only time you’ve been alone. Now you will never be alone anymore. That’s something that you grasp when you have given birth or as the father, the partner being right there. I think that’s something I wouldn’t have thought about too closely before.

Does the success of this version of John Adams’s work make an argument for truncation of larger works in a society that demands shorter pieces because of shortened attention spans?

I think being able to experience this work – it is only an hour long. I think it’s not too much task for anyone. If it was a Wagner opera of four or five hours, I understand that’s a daunting thought. But I think to sit one hour and experience a work like this and being able to really delve into it and let everything else go is good.

I think our generation right now wants that, too. They want to be able to let go as well as being impacted deeply. They want an experience. This is some of the most ferocious, most incredible and intense music and lyrics. At the same time, some of the most delicate and wondrous. So I think that is something that would speak to anyone.

And I know from many conversations with my family who have seen this or experienced the full original version, who might not be necessarily the most adventurous contemporary listeners, but were deeply impacted and and taken by this piece. I think this is a piece that people will be drawn to. 

You serve as conductor and pianist on Julia’s album, Walking in the Dark. It should be noted that Memorial de Tlateloloco from El Niño is one of the pieces you recorded for the album. What were the conversations that you and Julia had that led to works that were selected? 

It’s her album, but obviously since I’m conducting and also playing piano and her partner in life, we exchanged a lot of ideas and thoughts. I think it started with her conversation with Bob Hurwitz from Nonesuch Records who told her, “Don’t worry about what sells. Don’t worry if you can tour the album. Think about the time you live in right now. Think of what speaks to you the most. What do you want to say? The album should be a work of art.”

That really spoke to her. That speaks to me. She has an incredible gift for curation and that comes through in everything she does. She went through many different versions of different ideas of the album; what it might be, what it possibly could be. She asked me for my input with it. She started with talking and working on [Samuel] Barber and John Adams. We were traveling together performing Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Since we just are performing Barber, I thought, why don’t you think about anchoring the album with two bigger orchestral pieces.

I’m going to go one more time back to that John Adams interview from 2000, because I found it really intriguing. He said, “Entering into this myth, making art about it and finding your own voice to express it, can’t help but put you in a very humble position.” At this point in your career, whether it’s El Niño or Walking in the Dark, how does your work put you in a humble place and what realizations do you have as a result of that?

The act of conducting, being in connection with each other and with the musicians on stage, is very humbling. I never saw myself as the dictator on the podium. Sometimes I just listen and see what is being offered and make music in real time. It is a very humbling experience. The main thing as a conductor is just to bring everyone together and make sure that everyone can perform on the best level possible. And if you’re not humble in that, I don’t think you get that response from people.

As a father of a young boy, it’s humbling in a different way where I feel my whole being is in service to this young being. Everything else is taking a little bit of a backseat. At the same time I know when I’m on stage I am onstage fully present. There’s also nothing like it.

I did one gig in Colorado a few weeks ago. A sister was able to be here and help out, which was wonderful. I missed Lucas and Julia tremendously, but I was also able to just be with the musicians and be completely present and connect with them. That is a very humbling and very wonderful experience.

To see the full interview with Christian Reif, please go here.

Main photo: Christian Reif (Photo ©Simon Pauly/Courtesy ChristianReif.eu)

The post Christian Reif Reworks John Adams’s “El Niño” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

This year is going out with a bang for soprano Julia Bullock. She’s curated the Rock Your Soul Festival with the Los Angeles Philharmonic that starts in earnest on November 5th and runs through November 22nd. She has her first solo recording coming out from Nonesuch Records. It’s called Walking in the Dark. Finally she and pianist/conductor husband Christian Reif are expecting their first child any day now.

Rock Your Soul Festival was originally conceived by the LA Phil as a celebration of the work and friendship of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. The title harkens back to a spiritual (Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham) and a book by noted author and activist Bell Hooks (Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem).

Amongst the artists Bullock has assembled for the festival are soprano Michelle Bradley, mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, pianist Michelle Cann (look for our interview with her later this week), singer/composer Rhiannon Giddens, conductor Jeri Lynn Johnson, singer/songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello and mezzo-soprano Jasmine White.

Walking in the Dark finds Bullock performing works by John Adams, Samuel Barber, Oscar Brown Jr., Connie Converse and Sandy Denny. It’s a beautiful record that is set for release on December 9th. Reif plays piano on the recording and leads the Philharmonia Orchestra of London as well.

Bullock’s pregnancy precludes her from performing in Rock Your Soul Festival, but it did allow for other opportunities which she described in our conversation recently. What follows are excerpts from that conversation which have been edited for length and for clarity.

I want to start by asking you about something you told Zachary Wolff in the New York Times in 2019. It was advice your mother gave you: “Make sure that your work is making a difference for the betterment of the world.” You seem to have taken up that challenge and made it your mission. How do you think that has made your career different than others and, by extension, more fulfilling for you? 

Well, I don’t know if it’s made it so much different from other people’s. I think every artist has a call in one way or another to have a mission or have their their passion realized. I don’t have a casual relationship with music. In fact, my desire to sing and also share music is because I know the impact that it’s had on my life and also how it’s enriched my life and helps me feel more interconnected and engaged.

I guess I’m always looking for ways to deepen that exploration and enjoy it in the process. I find that most of the artists whose work I really love also have this sort of mission. They’re very much conscious of the world that was going on around them and trying to make sense of it or call out hypocrisies. I’m not sure if I feel it’s so different than what other artists are doing. I guess I’ve just given myself permission to expand that in as many directions as I can imagine.

I would assume that in doing that, when someone like Peter Sellars says “Her path is going to be our path,” that’s got to be both hugely flattering and also a bit of a mantle to take on on a certain level.

I truthfully don’t like to be positioned in any capacity. I appreciate that Peter feels that the way that I work, the reflections that I have, and just the fact that I’m really dedicated to my craft and my own development and learning, is something that he wants to celebrate. I guess I celebrate that, too. That would be part of why, in the performing arts in particular, I don’t take that pressure on because that’s just a projection of something. The work that I do is not trying to live into some projection of Julia. 

In the liner notes for Walking in the Dark you conclude your statements in the liner notes with “If our intentions are translated well enough and are clearly in focus, it may lead to some moments of illumination.” What has been the process of making your intentions perfectly clear with the Rock Your Soul Festival?

It was their idea, not the title or anything like that, but just the proposal to curate a program that was focusing on the relationship between Margaret Bonds and Florence Price. Other than their vocal music and really just their songs, I was not too familiar with a lot of their repertoire – the breadth of their repertoire. It was an opportunity for me to again delve into some research and take six, seven months to consider the work of composers that I had not had the time or had this opportunity to look at.

I was reading about their personal lives and also this relationship of mutual support. They had this teacher (Price)/ student (Bonds) relationship. When there were really troubling times for Florence Price in her personal life she went and lived with Margaret Bonds for a period of time. That really communicated this beautiful thing. It wasn’t just about their artistic output. It was also about nurturing and respecting each other as human beings and fully supporting each other that way. That was something I really wanted to celebrate and acknowledge besides just sharing their repertoire.

Every single artist that was invited into the festival there is this feeling of mutual support. Every single composer that I know, that I work with personally and also the composers that I either read their letters or biographies, they openly admit how influenced they are by the people who are around them. And they seek out guidance and advice. They are influenced by what’s going on socially, politically.

I think we can learn a lot from what Florence Price and Margaret Bonds did in terms of shared experiences as musicians and as human beings. Because it goes without saying that a lot of people care more about ideologies and less about each other as human beings right now. Perhaps the festival can find a way to bridge that divide.

It can be very closed and people can get very closed. Growing up listening to recordings, my family had vinyls or cassettes playing all the time. A lot of the time we listened to music together. Even if I was alone I was still playing music, not locked into an earphone or earbuds privately, it was something that was heard in the house – the shared space. I think music can foster some really beautiful acknowledgment of each other. It’s not just some theoretical exercise. It’s like actually putting it into practice. I think that’s probably what drove me and that’s what drives most musicians to make music. Because you’re wanting a shared experience and wanting to share your own experience as well. 

Once you became pregnant and knew that being here for the festival wasn’t going to be possible did that give you any opportunities to make changes or add other things that maybe couldn’t fit into the program because you were a part of it at one point and now you were not? 

I’m sad. I’m just not going to be there. Obviously I’m growing a human being. So that’s what it is. 

I was supposed to perform History’s Persistent Voice, which featured a lot of contemporary composers who are all Black women. That was an hour-and-a-half program. I decided to save this for another season and think about another program.

That was a great opportunity to perform one of Florence Price’ full symphonies. It was also an opportunity then for me to think about the composers who were associated with History’s Persistence Voice and look at some of their other pieces and see if there was a way to feature their work. 

I’m really excited Courtney Brian’s Sanctum is included. Her work is just super powerful and I’m so glad that that is going to have a premiere at the LA Phil. Valerie Coleman’s selections from her Phenomenal Women will be featured as well. It’s the first time that she will have anything performed at the Phil.

Your first album is going to be something that was to be considered carefully. Now that you’ve recorded it, and I know from earlier in this conversation you haven’t listened to it recently, but what would you like listeners to know about you from hearing the choices that you made for Walking in the Dark and the performances you give?

What do I want them to know about me? I really hope it is just an invitation. All of the music that’s on this is material I’ve lived with for honestly two decades and some of it I’ve performed for a decade. The chance to lay it down and be a part of a recording legacy of some of these pieces that have also been recorded by so many different artists was a rare and wonderful opportunity. It’s not one that I take for granted.

Walking in the Dark, I mean the title of it. I didn’t write this in the liner notes and I’ve only brought it up to a few people, but I want to make it very clear that darkness is not something that should have, in fact, any kind of negative association. I feel in some ways that darkness, or blackness even, has been conditioned in certain parts of societies or cultures to have negative connotations and somehow promotes the idea of a white supremacist ideology. That really is not something that I can tolerate.

I guess it’s been something I have grappled with – a collective question about identity or I have felt that I have had to question my identity for a very, very long time. I made a lot of peace with who I am and how I also am expanding in the various roles that I can take on and feel comfortable in.

James Agee, who probably needs no introduction to you since his poetry inspired Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915 (which Bullock performs on Walking in the Dark), is quoted as saying, “Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don’t.” I feel like in watching your career over the last number of years that you’re actively working through your art and through your activism to get the world to where you hope it will be. As a soon-to-be mother, what is the world you’d like to see your child living in and how do you think your art can pave a path for that to be a reality? 

Well, I hope that this child will feel safe. That the child will not be limited in anything that they want to invest in and enjoy. That there will be not be a lot of assumptions made or anticipated projections of this child and what they feel they have to represent so that they can just live their lives. But there’s something in safety that feels really important right now.

Photos of Julia Bullock (By Allison Michael Orenstein/Courtesy Askonas Holt)

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