One of the best things that Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra does is their Sound Investment program which provides a commission and a tryout period for composers to work on a new composition and for investors to watch the creative process. Previous participants have included Matthew Aucoin, Sarah Gibson, Shelley Washington, Juan Pablo Contreras and Marc Lowenstein. Let me introduce you to this year’s composer: Nina Shekhar.

Shekhar is a first-generation Indian-American composer. Her most performed work to date is Lumina. Her music has been performed by most of the major orchestras in this country including LACO.

For her Sound Investment composition she has written a piece entitled Glitter Monster. The world premiere will be Friday, May 24th at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa. There is a second concert on Saturday, May 25th at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. Both programs also include Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor and Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C Major.

Glitter Monster is a work she wrote without any real rules. She let her imagination roam freely. This was part of what I learned in a recent conversation with Shekhar. What follows are excerpts from my interview with her. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: Matthew Aucoin called the Sound Investment program “very Bernie Sanders” and that it seemed “deeply Los Angeles specific” and that “there are a lot of supporters, not all stereotypically super rich, who want to support music.” How does his perspective align or not, with your own experience?

I think that the Sound Investment program is a really unique opportunity. On the composer’s side we rarely get a chance to workshop a piece or try ideas out. Usually we write a piece for an orchestra and then the orchestra rehearses it, performs it, and it’s very quick and you kind of turn around.

But in this case, we actually get the opportunity to workshop things and we get to have some contact with the performers in advance. We get to try things in a chamber setting and then have a reading of our piece in advance and the donors get to be part of that experience. They also get to sit in on all of these rehearsals. They get to hear what the piece is about. They get to offer ideas. I think it’s a really fun communal experience for everybody.

With so many people offering opinions, how do you distill what are good ideas, what are bad ideas? How much do you want to just remain faithful to what your vision is for a given composition?

Much of what my practice is as an artist is about my own voice; my own experiences and channeling that. That’s part of the reason I became a composer in the first place. I think of music as almost like my diary. I can really share a lot of my experiences [and] get to really understand myself better in that process.

But at the same time, I think a lot of composers forget that music is a communal experience. It’s not just my identity that’s being reflected in a work. It’s also performer’s identity. Everybody in the orchestra is interpreting the work. Also really importantly, it’s the audience’s identity that they’re putting into hearing the work and receiving it. That’s really important to acknowledge.

So in creating this, getting to hear some sort of feedback from the donors and having them say how they received the work or how it made them feel, definitely gives me a sense of how others are going to receive the work. It’s helpful for me to know that when creating a piece.

How important is how an audience responds to it? I think of countless composers, if they relied on audience response, would be grossly disappointed. Take, for example, Philip Glass. People didn’t understand his music until much later. Is the audience that important when writing music?

This piece, Glitter Monster, I felt a freeness in writing this piece that I usually don’t feel. I really took a lot of risks. I really just wanted to write something fun. Partly for myself, partly for the orchestra. In that sense it didn’t really matter what anybody else thought. But on the other hand, I do think it is important, just as an artist, to understand the perspectives of others and understand how others are going to receive your work.

This piece really builds a really, expansive sound world that I think many people can find different things in different kinds of meaning in the sound world that I’ve created. I’m glad that sometimes an audience member might receive something differently than I do. Even if my piece isn’t necessarily about what somebody else thought it was, that’s okay. 

Was this particular work that became Glitter Monster something you had been thinking about in advance of this Sound Investment commission or did it did it come about specifically because of the commission? 

I started brainstorming the piece after I received the commission. I had known I was going to be a Sound Investment composer in advance for a little bit. I’d been thinking about it, but I think really this past fall is when I started brainstorming the piece. The themes in it are about reclaiming femininity, but also as something that could be powerful, or it could be scary, or it could be angry. You know, rather than thinking of feminism as this dainty thing. So the title Glitter Monster came out of that.

I was thinking about this idea of glitter, which is so stereotypically feminine, and thinking about how can I harness that into something that could be maybe scary or angry. And thinking about my own self as a woman who is conditioned to take up less space, to be submissive and realizing, wait a minute, I have my own feelings too. Sometimes I get angry too. That’s how the title came out and then eventually morphed into this really subversive, or surrealist, psychedelic kind of piece, that moved beyond that initial theme.

Coming at this from a male, non-composer point of view, I’m thinking of glitter as shiny and sparkly. But when you combine it with the word monster that could mean any number of things. Does it have more than one meeting to you as a title?

It morphed into being a creature that I’ve created. There’s parts of the piece that sound underwater, there’s parts of the piece that sound like in outer space. It’s like this really large creature that I’ve created that is moving through all these different spaces, and it feels very expansive.

In writing this piece, part of the fun I had was creating this really surreal creature that didn’t exist and creating something that is unexpected. I mean, nobody would think of a glitter monster. For that reason it can mean many different things. Even in the course of writing it, it moved from this one idea to something much larger.

Glitter Monster is going to have its world premiere on a program with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 and Schubert’s last symphony. Do you see a through line from your work through those other two works?

As a composer who’s pretty active in the orchestra world, I’ve been thinking about the pieces that I’ve been paired with. I grew up playing a lot of Bach on the piano. I was a flutist also. I grew up playing a lot of Beethoven. Growing up, I think I did have a love for classical music. I still do. That’s part of the reason I work in that space. And I think that all of those elements have still influenced my music.

I think that my music has a strong sense of counterpoint, which I think comes from that classical world. There’s a lot of rhythmic, intricate details. Some of that comes from that world. I think with Mozart, there’s a clarity in his music and I try to aim for that in my music. In that sense, there is a through line. Although I do think that this piece is pretty shocking compared to those other pieces. But I think that’s great.

Schubert is quoted as having said, “The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention.” Do you agree with him? What role, if any, does convention play in your life and work?

As an artist we often are trying to make something that is reflective of ourselves. In that sense we’re all unique and we do break convention in that way – by presenting a new point of view. At the same time, though, I think that we are part of a larger network of artists. We are part of this lineage. Even pop artists today have been influenced by artists that came hundreds of years ago.

My work is also influenced by Indian traditional music and Hindustani traditional music. That’s thousands of years old. And in that sense, I think that we are a part of convention, but at the same time we can break convention. I’m embracing convention, but I’m not totally following it. I am breaking it in some ways – in a way that feels right to me. There’s no rule that says you can’t do this. This tradition has evolved over time because of that.

If audiences are familiar with any one of your works, it’s probably Lumina, which is getting a lot of play. But you have other compositions that are not getting as much attention. How do you deal with that?

We often say getting the second performance of a piece is probably the hardest thing. There’s so much allure around a premiere. Everybody wants to be the first one to perform something, or the first one who commissioned something and give the premiere. But I think that part of the challenge, and why it’s difficult to get second performances of orchestra works in particular, is because of recordings. With Lumina I had a recording that is publicly available because the first orchestra that played it was a university orchestra. A lot of this has to do with players unions and things like that. 

I’ve been lucky as several of my other orchestral works have been performed more often recently because Lumina got my name out more and people were more interested in performing other works of mine. With chamber music, it’s kind of a different thing because recordings are more available. So it’s much easier for me to have chamber works performed frequently. But I think with orchestras, that’s probably the biggest challenge that composers face.

Homer wrote,”…like that star of the waning summer, who, beyond all stars, rises, bathed in the ocean stream, to glitter in brilliance.” What is the stream to glitter you would like to see in your professional life in the next ten years?

In writing Glitter Monster I’m really learning to trust myself in my work. We talked about the role of the audience and all of this. But I think ultimately, as artists, it’s really important that we have faith in ourselves and that we are willing to take risks and try new things. I think that’s something that I’m hoping I carry going forward. With this piece I kind of threw all caution to the wind and said I’m just going to write whatever I want. I wrote something that was very out of the norm. Kind of campy, kind of 80s, larger-than-life, psychedelic, very unusual. But at the same time, it felt like me.

I realize that now going forward I’m writing more works that mean something really important to me. I feel like I want to continue that going forward. So for me, the glitter that I’m hoping that will shine through my life is that I continue to be on a path and continue to just take risks and explore who I am as a person in my work and really be confident in myself.

To see the full interview with Nina Shekhar, please go here.

Main Photo: Composer Nina Shekhar (Photo by Shervin Lainez/Courtesy Nina Shekhar)

The post Composer Nina Shekhar Offers You Her Glitter Monster appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

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

The post Bo23: Víkingur Ólafsson And the Final Four appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

My top pick this week is a charmingly idiosyncratic celebration of an icon of New York City.

TOP PICK:  CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL:  SONGS AND SYMPHONIQUES: THE MUSIC OF MOONDOG– Ghost Train Orchestra and Kronos Quartet – Catanaloupe Music

Composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich referred to Moondog (Louis Hardin) as “the godfather of minimalism.” But do you know Moondog? If you lived in Manhattan in the mid 20^th-century you might have seen a blind musician dressed like a Viking who would sing his music, sell sheet music of those songs and read poetry. He was the type of cultural icon best found in New York City.

His music is celebrated in this collaboration between these two incredible ensembles. But they don’t do it alone. They are joined by Sam Amidon; Brian Carpenter; Jarvis Cocker; Petra Haden;  Joan As Police Woman; Karen Mantler; Marisa Nadler; Aoife O’Donovan and Rufus Wainwright.

Some of this music exudes such joy you might be tempted to replay individual songs before moving onto the next tracks. It’s a richly rewarding album worthy of your time.

The rest of New In Music This Week: September 29^th are:

CLASSICAL: MOZART: THE VIOLIN CONCERTOS – Renaud Capuçon/Orchestre de Chambre De Lausanne – Deutsche Grammophon

Violinist Capuçon is an avid supporter of chamber music. He first released a recording of Mozart’s Violin Concertos 1 & 3 in 2009. But what instrumentalist does only one recording of the great works?

For this recording he’s doing all five of the composer’s violin concertos. The first was composed in 1773 and the other four were composed two years later. Added to this release are Mozart’s Rondo in C Major, J. 373from 1781 and the Adagio in E Major, K. 261 from 1776.

Fans of Mozart won’t want to miss this recording filled with 2 hours of beautiful music.

CLASSICAL: FANTASIA – Igor Levit – Sony Classical

Nearly two hundred years of classical music are covered in this 2-disc set of solo piano perforamnces by Levit. The album begins with three works by Bach (including the very well-known Suite for String Orchestra No. 3 in D Major – arranged by Alexander Siloti).

The first disc continues with the Piano Sonata in B minor by Franz Liszt and the composer’s Der Doppelgänger. Disc two features Alban Berg’s Klavierstück in B Minor and Piano Sonata op. 1. Levitt concludes the recording with Ferruccio Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica  and Nuit de Noël.

The simplicity of the opening Bach track is built on and challenged throughout this incredible recording.

CLASSICAL: DIABELLI VARIATIONS – Shai Wosner– Onyx Classics

Maybe you prefer Beethoven more than Mozart (not that one has to choose). If you do, you will enjoy this recording of the 33 variations Beethoven wrote based on a waltz by Anton Diabelli. By the time you get to Variation 3 you will recognize immediately the brilliance of Beethoven’s writing.

Wosner makes the recording an enjoyable one and does not approach it from a scholarly point of view as to take the life out of these variations. This recording is full of life and consideration.

Trivia: these 33 Variations inspired playwright/director Moisés Kaufman to write his play of the same name which opened on Broadway in 2009 with Jane Fonda in the lead role.

JAZZ: BLOODY BELLY COMB JELLY – Andrew Krasilnikov – Rainy Day Records

I didn’t know Krasilnikov before listening to this album which sounds like it was timed for Halloween. There’s nothing scary about this large ensemble recording. It has one foot firmly planted in the future and the other keeping track of all that came before him.

There are seven tracks (including the title track) with most of them composed by Krasilinkov. A couple tracks were composed by Alexey Bekker, a core member of his quartet who plays piano and Rhodes on the album.

Making the album particularly interesting is the varying uses of woodwind instruments, brass and marimba. Regardless of the title, this album is all treat, no trick.

JAZZ (adjacent): AJA  – Steely Dan – GEFFEN/Ume

Anyone familiar with Steely Dan (Walter Becker and Donald Fagen) will know how much jazz influenced their sound. Yes, they were considered a rock band, but they fused jazz with rock in a way that was all their own.

This vinyl release (the first time since its original release in 1977) is probably best known for the opening track, Black Cow and the hit song Peg.

UK’s New Musical Express called the album “simply the most sophisticated and intelligent rock album to be released this year.” Rolling Stone’s Michael Duffy said, “By returning to swing and early be-bop for inspiration – before jazz diverged totally from establish conventions of pop-song structure – Fagen and Becker have overcome the amorphous quality that has plagued most other jazz-rock fusion attempts.

MUSICALS: THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE THE MUSICAL – Original Cast Recording – Sony Masterworks Broadway

On November 1^st the world premiere of this musical based on Audrey Niffenegger’s novel will have its official world premiere at the Apollo Theatre in London. The score and lyrics were composed by Joss Stone (whose early 2000s albums are amongst my favorite) and Dave Stewart (he of the Eurythmics). It should be noted that the musical is also inspired by the 2009 film.

As in the novel, the musical tells the story of Clare, a sculptor and Henry, a time traveler. Their relationship is more give and take than most because little of their love story happens in a linear fashion. They remain in love, but time gets in the way. Can they find a way to each other? (Of course they can, it’s a musical.)

For tickets and more information for the West End production, please go here.

OPERA: THE GREAT PUCCINI – Jonathan Tetelman/Prague Philharmonia/Carlo Rizzi – Deutsche Grammophon

When one thinks of Chilean tenors Ramón Vinay is probably the first tenor that comes to mind.  With this collection of, shall we say, some of the greatest hits of opera, Tetelman’s name is going to quickly gain on Vinay.

Tetelman makes his Metropolitan Opera debut in two productions next spring:  as Ruggerro in Puccini’s La Rondine beginning in late March and assuming the role of Pinkerton in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in April.

You get a preview of those two operas along with Tosca, Manon Lescaut, Turnadot and more in this crowd-pleasing recording that heralds the arrival of an opera star.

That’s our list of New In Music This Week: September 29th.

Enjoy the music. Enjoy your weekend.

The post NEW IN MUSIC THIS WEEK: September 29th appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Which explains Lauritzen’s participation in this Sunday’s Music Box 2023 which is presented by Chamber Music LA at Zipper Hall at The Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles. The concert will showcase four different chamber music ensembles (Jacaranda Music, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Colburn School’s Chamber Ensemble-In-Residence Quartet Integra and Salastina) performing string quartets written by Felix Mendelssohn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schubert and a composer yet to be identified.

That last composer whose identity is being kept under wraps is where Lauritzen comes in. He has selected a piece of music and removed all details leaving it up to the musicians (Salastina’s Meredith Crawford, Kevin Kumar, Yoshida Masada and Maia Jasper White) and the audience to try to figure out who the composer is. This part of the program is called Sounds Mysterious.

Earlier this week I spoke with Lauritzen about his puzzle, Music Box 2023 and the start of the arts, not just in Los Angeles, but around the world. 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.

What excites you most about Music Box 2023 and and how do you think that excitement will translate to audiences who will be there?

The thing that really excites me about this particular program is that it’s about the string quartet, which is to chamber music, what the symphony is to orchestral music. It’s the pinnacle of what chamber music is. Every composer who tried to write seriously for chamber music wrote a string quartet. Generally you find in their string quartets some of their most serious, thoughtful, probing, artistic music within that structure. So to explore different styles of the string quartet, I think, is the thing that I’m most looking forward to.

Let’s take the Mozart, which opens the program. If all of four ensembles that are playing play that same Mozart, would a casual listener be able to discern a difference between how each one of them played that piece of music?

I love this question because it speaks to an element of virtuosity that is, I think, not talked about all that often. So what is virtuosity? We think about virtuosity as someone gets up in front of an audience and does something on a violin or a cello or whatever that seems humanly impossible. That’s one element of virtuosity. Another element of virtuosity is an interpretive element. This would be a cool thing for chamber music to do sometime is everybody plays the same piece. Then you can find out. I think even the casual listener would notice a difference and it might be something that you see, even if maybe they couldn’t put words on it.

What’s the criteria you use in selecting that that mystery piece of music?

I’ve done a couple of different options in the past [with Salastina] where I’m interested in both an unknown piece of music by a famous composer and a really awesome piece by an unknown composer. Those are the two extremes of the spectrum. I’m looking for music that structurally hangs together. I’m looking for music that we can hear it and we can identify things about this music that might give us a clue to what it is. I’m not really super trying to trip people up. I’m not trying to find a piece that makes you think it’s by someone and then it’s actually something else. 

What do you feel the state of classical music is in Los Angeles right now?

I think it’s a vibrant scene. We’ve got our really wonderful large companies doing amazing things. And, of course, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is – just ask the New York Times – the most important orchestra in the United States. That’s not just because of Gustavo, although Gustavo is awesome. From the largest company in the city, all the way down to the smallest chamber music organization, we’ve got some of the best musicians on planet Earth here in Los Angeles.

We have to because of the dominant industry that runs this town – the film industry. The music that’s written for film and television demands greatness from the musicians and they deliver every single time. I’m in awe of the incredible artistry of the amazing musicians of this town. It comes down to the musicians. If the music making wasn’t great, then the organizations wouldn’t work out. 

But, you know organizations of all sizes, whether it’s in Los Angeles or across the country and across the world, are having a hard time getting audiences to come back. Even one of the one of the ensembles that’s playing as part of Music Box, Jacaranda Music, is not going to be in existence at the end of this upcoming season. The million dollar question is what will it take to get audiences back? What will it take for people to embrace the collective experience of hearing music together?

You’re right, it’s the million dollar question. It’s so sad. I’ve been a Jacaranda fan for as long as I’ve lived here in Los Angeles. I was just reading yesterday about the Philadelphia Orchestra musicians. They’ve authorized the strike for various reasons. Part of the reason that management has said we can’t raise your pay is that audience levels are at 64%. Before the pandemic they were at 75%. So something has to change to bring those audience levels back. You hit on a key component of it: community.

What did we miss the most when we were all at home isolating from one another? We missed that collective experience. The joy of getting in the same space together and experiencing music There’s great resources online and yes, we can watch anything that we want to watch and listen to anything that we want to listen to. But there’s that electric experience that you’re sharing this space with your friends and neighbors and people that you don’t know that you might get to know afterwards.

The other component for me is storytelling. Classical music is complicated. Classical music is complex. Classical music has a high entry point and I don’t believe that it should. Who I am in the world of classical music is someone who says you may think that it’s a difficult entry point, but here’s how it’s easy. Here’s how this thing that Beethoven did that we think is this grand and glorious thing – yes, it is this grand and glorious thing – but it also relates to what we experience everyday in our world. It’s a combination of reminding folks how incredibly joyful a concert experience is, and then, once they get there, giving them the context and relevance and the kind of emotional experience of what a classical music concert can be. 

Since Schoenberg’s music is the penultimate work on this program and the first work is Mozart, I found this quote from him particularly appropriate. He said, “The way in which I write for string quartet, none can deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart.” We have a through line in this concert that is going to confirm Schoenberg’s quote. Looking forward, what do you think the through line will be? Schoenberg died in 1951, so he’s been gone for quite a while. What do you think the through line as a sequel to this would be, 25, 50 years in the future if we continued forward? 

Classical music should always be looking forward. Classical music should always be creating something new while looking back to the past and not dishonoring the past. What do we love about the great composers in history? We love Beethoven because Beethoven changed everything. We love Mahler because Mahler said everyone’s done everything with symphonies except this thing. And then Mahler blew everything up and created symphonies that no one had created before. So classical music is at its best when it’s looking forward. When it’s looking to what hasn’t been done yet, while still recognizing that there is this rich tradition and history. That as a composer or a musician you’re part of this thing that’s bigger than yourself.

To watch the full interview with Brian Lauritzen, please go here.

Main Photo: Brian Lauritzen (Courtesy Brian Lauritzen)

The post Brian Lauritzen Makes Classical Music Easy appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Our top choice this week is:

CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL: A LEFT COAST – Tyler Duncan and Erika Switzer  (Bridge Records)

What do you know about classical music from British Columbia? Exactly as much as I do. Which is why this album featuring baritone Duncan and pianist Switzer is such a wonderful discovery.

The music they perform comes from those they met at the School of Music at the University of British Columbia. This includes Stephen Chatman, Jean Coulthard, Iman Habibi, Melissa Hui, Jocelyn Morlock, Jeffrey Ryan and Leslie Uyeda.

The last four tracks truly stand out to me. They are from Ryan’s Everything Already Lost. With titles like Bill Evans: Alone, Autumn Again, Night Music and Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 17 meant I skipped ahead to her them first. And I was richly rewarded with thoughtful works beautifully performed. Then I went back and listened to the entire 64 minutes and realized there are treasures all the way through.

Here are the rest of what’s New In Music This Week: June 23^rd that I particularly liked:

CLASSICAL: FLORENCE PRICE – Chineke! Orchestra – (Decca Classics)

In 2015 Chi-chi Nwanoku founded the Chineke! Orchestra. The mission was the assemble an orchestra comprised of Black and ethnically diverse musicians from the UK and Europe. 

In celebration of the 70^th anniversary of composer Florence Price’s death, the orchestra has released a recording filled with two more familiar works with a final composition that was only rediscovered in 2009. 

The album opens with Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement with Jeneba Kanneh-Mason on piano and conducted by Leslie Suganandarajah. That is followed by Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E Minor which is conducted by Roderick Cox. The discovery is His Resignation and Faith from Prce’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America.

On September 30^th the Chineke! Orchestra will release an album of works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

CLASSICAL: MOZART: SONATAS FOR PIANO & VIOLIN – Renaud Capuçon & Kit Armstrong (Deutsche Grammophon)

If you love Mozart, the piano and the violin, you’ll love this collection of performances of his sonatas for the two instruments. With 92 tracks lasting 4 hours and 15 minutes, this is nirvana for those who love this work. There are 16 sonatas on this recording available digitally or in a 4-CD set. 

Pianist Armstrong has been in the public eye for 20 years. Capuçon is a passionate advocate of chamber music and has performed with the likes of Martha Argerich, Daniel Trifonov and Yuja Wang.

In Los Angeles our classical music station, KUSC,  plays Mozart in the Morning. This fine collection will get you through half your day!

CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL: SHATTER – Verona Quartet  (Bright Shiny Things)

Cellist Jonathan Dormand, violinists Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro and violist Abigail Rojansky make up this fine quartet. Shatter is their second album and it offers three incredible compositions by contemporary American composers.

The album opens with the first-ever recording of Reena Esmail’s String Quartet (Ragamala). Joining the quartet for this work is Hundustani vocalist Saili Oak. Julia Adolphe’s Star-Crossed Signals follows and the album concludes with Michael Gilbertson’s Quartet.

Verona Quartet commissions Gilbertson’s work which was a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

JAZZ:  STANDARDS – Noah Haidu (Sunnyside Records)

Pianist Keith Jarrett collaborated with drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Gary Peacock for the 1983 album Standards, Vol. 1. At the same sessions for that album enough music was recorded to release Changes in 1984 and Standards, Vol. 2 in 1985.

Pianist Haidu celebrates the 40^th anniversary of that first album with his own standards album. Wisely he’s not re-recording the tracks from those albums, though the selections are part of Jarrett/Peacock/DeJohnette repertoire. He has his own combination of songs that are performed with drummer Lewis Nash, bassists Peter Washington and Buster Williams. Saxophonist Steve Wilson is a guest on the album as well.

The album concludes with the originals Last Dance I and Last Dance II. Don’t expect Donna Summer. This is a beautiful conclusion to this beautiful album.

JAZZ: THE ANCESTRAL CALL – José Soto

This fascinating album from pianist/composer Soto combines a jazz ensemble with a string quartet to explore Costa Rica’s Bribri community, its survival of colonization and its resilience in still being around.

Amongst the artists joining Soto on this album are Milena Cassado, George Garzone and Francisco Mela. 

You think you know what to expect with a strong quartet and with a jazz ensemble. But by throwing them together and including improvisation in the music, Soto has come up with an album that deserves multiple listenings.

JAZZ: GO WEST!: THE CONTEMPORARY RECORDS ALBUMS – Sonny Rollins (Craft Recordings)

Saxophonist Sonny Rollins was only 26 when he recorded Way Out West. The album found him recording six tracks with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne. 

One year later he released Sonny Rollins and The Contemporary Leaders which featured 8 tracks recorded with Hampton Hawes on piano, Manne on drums, Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Barney Wessel on guitar. 

This three LP box set (plus digital and CD release) combines both these albums along with a third album of six alternate takes from both recording sessions.

This is early Rollins and such great music to listen to. If I had the vinyl set it would be played repeatedly!

MUSICALS: OPERATION MINCEMEAT – Original Cast Recording  (Sony Masterworks Broadway)

What began as a show at a fringe festival four years ago has turned into the smash hit musical comedy on the West End in London right now. The musical takes place in 1943 and centers on the role a stolen corpse plays in turning the tide during World War II.

It sounds like a Monty Python skit, but this really took place in April of 1943. The British fooled Hitler’s army into believing that the Allies would be invading Greece and Sardinia. The end result was the liberation of Sicily.

The team of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts are responsible for the Book, Music and Lyrics. Starring in the musical are Geri Allan, Christian Andrews, Seán Carey, David Cumming, Claire-Marie Hall, Hodgson, Jak Malone, Roberts and Holly Sumpton.

Listening to this album made me want to book a trip to London to see this show.

That’s all I have for you of New In Music This Week: June 23rd.

Enjoy the music and enjoy the weekend.

Main Photo: Art from Chineke! Orchestra’s Florence Price album

The post New In Music This Week: June 23rd appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

My top choice doesn’t easily fit into any genre, but it’s an oldie that you’ll either love or hate:

TUBULAR BELLS – Mike Oldfield (Universal Music Group)

It’s hard to believe that Tubular Bells came out 50 years ago. But here we are. This is a special 50th Anniversary Edition on vinyl of the music that many people associate with its use in the film The Exorcist (which is also 50 years old this year.) It’s hard to get that haunting melody out of your head.

In addition to the two suites found not he original album, a second record contains a demo for Tubular Bells 4, the music as used in the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, a remix, the original single and more.

Here are the rest of this week’s picks of New In Music This Week: May 26th:

CLASSICAL: INFINITE BACH – Maya Beiser (Islandia Music Records)

Cellist Maya Beiser not only explores Johann Sebastian Bach’s Solo Cello Suites, she explores the sound that can be created in both the recording process and the listening process. Infinite Bach will be released in different ways: on Apple Music you can get it digitally in Dolby Atmos spatial audio. Other platforms will have the album in what’s described as an “immersive binaural mix.” Having heard Infinite Bach it’s not a traditional recording of these cherished works, but it is certainly a fascinating one. Audiophiles will want to take Beiser’s journey into Infinite Bach.

CLASSICAL: CHILDHOOD TALES – Isata Kanneh-Mason (Decca Classics)

There are 46 tracks on this album from pianist Kanneh-Mason. They range in length from 24 seconds to 4 minutes and 21 seconds. They are predominantly miniature works. Childhood Tales begins with Mozart’s Ah! Vous diary-je, mama performed as a theme and 12 variations. You might not recognize the name, but you’ll know the melody instantaneously as we refer to it as Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

In addition to Mozart, Kanneh-Mason performs works by Claude Debussy (Children’s Corner) and Robert Schumann (Kinderszenen, Op. 15). Don’t be fooled…there’s nothing childish about her performances of these pieces. They might be short, but don’t think they come without challenges.

CLASSICAL: FROM AFAR: REWORKS – Various Artists and Vikingur Ólafsson – Deutsche Grammophon

If you read our recent interview with pianist Ólafsson, you’ll have seen that he talked about this album of remixes of his recordings from his 2022 album From Afar as “basically reversing the creative process.” Six different contemporary composers have written new material to accompany some or all Ólafsson’s original recordings. Those composers are Christian Badzura, Álfheiður Guðmundsdóttir, Snorri Hallgrímsson, Helgi Jonsson, Michael A. Muller, and Herdís Stefánsdóttir. Don’t expect to be dancing across your living room listening to these works. Do expect to get into a very peaceful and contemplative state instead.

JAZZ: SHE SEES – Erik Friedlander (Skipstone Records)

Cellist Friedlander is not going to let anything get in the way of making joyous music. Friedlander was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2016. Last summer he had Deep Brain Stimulation Surgery. This album, filled with titles like Baskets, Biscuits, Rain; Soak! Soak! and Wit & Whimsy showcase an enthusiasm for living life.

Joining Friedlander on this record are Diego Espinosa on percussion, Ava Mendoza on guitar and Stomu Takeishi on bass. Espinosa and Mendoza played in Friedlander’s 2020 album Sentinel.

JAZZ: AFTER|LIFE – Brian McCarthy (Truth Evolution Recording Collective)

Saxophonist/composer McCarthy is definitely ambitious. His most 2017 album The Better Angels of Our Nature used music old and new to explore the Civil War. On this follow-up album he’s going boldly to where no man has gone before: to the stars. There are eight tracks on this record with the three-movement suite After Life anchoring the recording. It closes with a song entitled Lucy, but she’s not in the sky with diamonds.

His nine piece band, featured on Better Angels, is almost entirely reunited for this record. They are: bassist Matt Aronoff, saxophonist Andrew Gutauskas, pianist Justin Kauflin, saxophonist Stantawn Kendrick, trombonist Cameron McManus, trumpeter Bill Mobley, drummer Jared Shooing and saxophonist Daniel Ian Smith. This is a cool record!

Those are my selections of the best of what’s New In Music This Week: May 26th. What are you listening to? Drop us a line in the comments. Enjoy the music and enjoy your weekend!

Main Photo: Part of the album art for Tubular Bells

The post New In Music This Week: May 26th appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

On Tuesday she’ll be combining classical music and film as she is the featured soloist for Amadeus Live in Concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The 1984 film, based on Peter Shaffer’s play, won 8 Academy Awards including Best Actor for F. Murray Abraham, best director for Milos Forman and Best Picture.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic has already had live music screenings for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and also the original Back to the Future film.

But Amadeus is a completely different beast as I learned when I spoke earlier this week with Martin via Zoom. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. If you want to see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Mozart said, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” What role does silence play in your appreciation of music and in the music you appreciate? 

Wow. A very interesting opening statement because that’s a big thing of mine. You can’t even begin to appreciate the notes or digest them properly without the silence. This is something that I tell students when I’m coaching or doing masterclasses.

We’re in this world of overload. Everything is overload. I think when you hear young players sometimes right now, they don’t think about the rests as much as some of us used to. It’s something that I find important to pass on. For instance, in a cadenza, which is supposed to sound improvised in the first place, how can you ignore rests when you’re trying to be someone who is having a new thought in the moment? So that’s got to take a nanosecond. And for the listener to sit back and not only get ready for what’s coming next, but be able to digest what just happened. Music is just not as powerful without the silences in between.

The complete soundtrack for Amadeus, and I don’t know if this is fully reflective of what will be performed, shows the third movement of the Concerto for Two Pianos, the third movement of the Piano Concerto in E Flat, and the first and third movements of the Piano Concerto in D Minor. Does that accurately reflect what you’ll be performing? 

Yes, there are parts of all of those things in the movie, but the emphasis is on the word parts. The biggest chunk would be in the middle movement of the big D minor that is the majority of the end credits of the film, ironically. But almost the entire development is cut out of it. You know, things that one has to do when they’re creating this cinematic experience. 

If you don’t get to develop it the way you would if you were actually playing the piece in its totality, what are the challenges in being able to just jump into a section without what precedes it? 

That’s a great question because as I was preparing for this, and I’m continuing to prepare the next few days, I suddenly started realizing that the experience of preparing to jump in like that and play these little snippets, it was exactly like preparing for my orchestral audition for the L.A. Phil.

It’s a strange kind of energy that’s different from what we’re used to, particularly as pianists, because we’re kind of presenting often these big works where it’s only us and we are in complete control of the structure of what happens and the pacing. So to suddenly have these constrictions takes a different kind of mental discipline. 

In looking at whose recordings were used in the film, the piano soloists were Christian Zacharias, Ivan Moravec and there were two women who did the Concerto for Two Pianos. When you’re playing to a film, there is a certain pace at which those performances were done. How much you have to match that to stay in sync with the film?

You have to match it a lot with great precision in some places because in this film, quite a few times, the video will cut to Mozart’s hands at a piano. There’s a part in the E-flat Concerto last movement where it’s a little funny. I have to kind of fool around with it in a way rhythmically that I absolutely would not if I was playing the piece for real. When it comes to the recap there are Mozart’s hands on the screen. So it’s got to be dialed in exactly there. This is one of the things that our conductor, Sarah Hicks, and I were just discussing – moments like that and how to handle it.

Are there moments when guest artists come through either the Walt Disney Concert Hall or the Hollywood Bowl as soloists where you think I could do that?

I don’t know about I could do that. I mean, technically, I could do that or some of it or a lot of it, whatever you want to say. That’s how every player feels, I think, when someone comes. Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side. But no, I can’t say I even have great envy or feeling like that. We get to have world-class artists. When Martha Argerich came and played with us I could barely even speak. I have a great job. That’s what it comes down to.

Yuja, Wang is doing what I think is crazy in February, doing two cycles of all three Rachmaninoff piano concerti. As a pianist you must be thinking who in their right mind is going to do all three of those in three consecutive nights, over two weeks.

Yuja Wang, that’s who. It’s not going to be difficult for her. She’s insanely talented and I absolutely can see her doing this. It’ll be great. 

Speaking of musicians like Martha Argerich and Yuja Wang. Artists like that are held up as examples for young music students to look at and be told if you practice hard enough, you could do that. It’s possible, but it’s unlikely. That’s like winning the lottery on a certain level. What I love about what you do is that seems tangible for people that you could potentially be good enough to be the keyboardist with a performing orchestra. What would you tell parents and students to sort of manage expectations and tell them are the best things about what you do and why that is something they should aspire to just as much as trying to travel the world and be Lang Lang?

That’s also a great question. Yes, we start out and maybe our parents say things like if you work hard, you can be Martha Argerich or Yuja Wang and you can get there. When I do masterclasses and talk to young people, one of the things that I say is all young pianists, we spend a lot of time in a room alone working hard on our scales and arpeggios that our teachers give us. We don’t do a lot of interacting, at least for a while, with other musicians. 

What I like to stress is be open, be open to everything and anything musical and be open to other things in life that you think maybe you wouldn’t be doing. I’m talking mostly about genres of music.

Little did I know, for instance, playing things other than classical music with my older brother, who was a drummer, that was kind of like metronome work. I think because of that I have a pretty decent sense of rhythm. At the time I wouldn’t have thought this is helpful for when I auditioned to play with a major symphony orchestra. I never thought I’d be doing the job that I have now.

As the years went by I started to love chamber music and playing with others. While you’re playing you’re listening as much as you’re playing. You’re listening to how they breathe, how they phrase, comparing it to what you do yourself, reacting with what you do directly to them. All of those things are preparation to being a good all-around musician. I don’t care if you’re a soloist or a player in an orchestra like I am, being an all-around good musician is a very, very valuable thing. The most important thing you can do is to always be learning, always be listening, always be open to what’s out there, to round you out as a musician.

The late pianist Leon Fleisher said “Growing as a pianist gets more difficult every day.” Do you agree with him? And if you do, is there a way of overcoming that or is overcoming it a necessity?

I think overcoming the negative aspects of that is a necessity. I’m not sure if I’m interpreting it the way he meant it, but it’s easy to get inside your head a little too much as a performer. You get older and you start getting wiser. For me, I enjoy performing. I’m not going to say that I don’t get nervous. What I say is that I have a healthy dose of adrenaline when I perform. So I’m blessed to not have any kind of serious problem with nerves. I’m sympathetic to those who do, but I get excited. As I get older I learn different ways to manage my excitement. 

But I the older I get, the more I find that every day is is a gift. In life in general it’s a real gift. So I try to look at music and life that way. Always open to learning. For me, I can’t say that gets harder. It gets more interesting. I just kind of take that day by day. But the bigger picture for me is that I’m grateful that I’m able to do it and I love it and can’t imagine my life without it.

To see our full interview with Joanne Pearce Martin, please go here.

Main Photo: Joanne Pearce Martin (Courtesy Los Angeles Philharmonic Association)

The post LA Phil’s Joanne Pearce Martin Gets in Synch with Amadeus appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

“The most amazing artistic moments of my life,” she said last week during a Zoom interview, “have happened in a live performance where you feel the silence, the absence of noise. I mean all of those everyday things that we all carry around every single day of our lives. They go away in the concert hall because it is so magical when that silence meets the music and people connect in a very deep way.”

That silence will return for Batjer and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra when they take to the Royce Hall stage at UCLA on Saturday for the first concert in the 2021-2022 season. Joining conductor and Music Director Jaime Martín is LACO’s former music director Jeffrey Kahane. The latter will be at the piano for a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat Major. Also on the program is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major also known as the Eroica.

Sitting downstage and to the left of Martín will be Batjer who has served as Concertmaster since 1998. She couldn’t be happier about the program that reunites the musicians with their audience.

“You want it to be warm and fuzzy. I’m in need of warm and fuzzy,” she revealed. “I don’t want to come back into the concert venue and be shocked. I want to enjoy the music. I think picking Mozart and Beethoven was really smart of [Jamie] to welcome our patrons back who’ve waited so long for that experience.”

Kahane’s return Saturday to play Mozart speaks to Batjer about life pre-pandemic and what life will be like post-pandemic.

“I experienced those twenty-plus Mozart concertos with Jeffrey over that 18-month period so long ago. We always look forward to playing Mozart with Jeff. Through COVID the combination of the past and present became really important. It’s almost like it erases what happened between before COVID and post-COVID. Now we put [Jeff and Jaime] together and it reminds us of the past, but it’s a real look into the future. I’m excited to see them on the stage together.”

During our conversation Batjer remarked that after all these years playing music by the masters it has never become boring for her.

“Mozart, Beethoven, Bach – these kinds of major geniuses, even at my age, continue to be astonishing to me how fresh their music is.”

It was a lesson she learned from pianist Rudolf Serkin who was considered one of the foremost interpreters of Beethoven in the last century. She recounts an encounter she had with him at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.

“I saw him in the morning and he was so nervous. He was always kind of a little nervous anyway, but he was especially nervous. I said to him, ‘Mr. Serkin, you seem a little nervous. How could you be nervous tonight? You must have played this Beethoven concerto a thousand times in your life.’ And he said, ‘My dear, the day you stop being nervous is the day you need to stop being a musician.’ That taught me that there’s always something new.”

In addition to her role as concertmaster, Batjer is curating the December 4^th Baroque Chamber Music concert LACO members will give at The Huntington. She is also leading the January 8^th Strings for the Ages concert at The Broad Stage. 

Batjer was able to continue teaching during the last 18 months. As part of her teaching philosophy at the USC Thornton School of Music she says, “My goal as a teacher is to pass along all that I have had the privilege to learn throughout my life as a musician.”

As she sees it, there’s still time for more learning and, by extension, more teaching.

“I feel like I learn every day that I teach. I learn from my students. When you teach it forces you to be able to articulate your beliefs about music. That’s something that a lot of performers do instinctively, but they don’t have to intellectualize it. They don’t have to be able to articulate it in words.”

Nor are there necessarily absolutes in how Batjer approaches music and teaching.

“Every time a student comes to me with a Bach sonata my students laugh at me because I’ll say, ‘How could you do that? You have to do this. You have to do this articulation or this dynamic.’ They say, ‘Last week you told me the opposite.’ I did because last week I felt that way and this week I feel this way. I’m constantly questioning and growing and trying to figure it out. I think that’s why I love being a musician – because I don’t know it all. I’m still growing. I’m never satisfied.”

At this point in our conversation Batjer expressed confidence as she looks forward to the rest of her career.

“I hope for the rest of my performing life that I continue to grow as a musician by being curious. The most important quality of being a musician is to be curious and to never feel like we have it. I understand Mozart. I understand Beethoven. We don’t. There’s always more to learn.”

Photo of Margaret Batjer courtesy Margaret Batjer and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

The post Violinist Margaret Batjer Needs Warm and Fuzzy appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

“Lots of things draw me back,” he said last week during our conversation. “There is something very interesting, I think, about how we work and where we work. If you work at the Metropolitan Opera, which I’m very lucky enough to do every year, I walk down to Lincoln Center and I go in a back door. Then I go down three floors into the subterranean basement where there is no natural light, where the air is of dubious quality and you rehearse in these boxy rooms all day. Just the difference between that and driving up to the opera in the morning under a crystal blue sky and rehearsing outdoors. We have hummingbirds flying behind us, we occasionally have to sweep snakes off the campus when we come in, the flowers. It sounds like nothing, but, particularly this year after having all the traumas of lockdown, if you can get people before they even arrive for work to have their hearts filled with a positive spirit and a happiness, half your work is done.”

And he has a lot of work this year. He’s conducting productions of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The former is one of the most regularly performed works and the latter a much less well-known opera.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

Is there such a thing as a perfect opera and do you think The Marriage of Figaro is that opera?

I think it is pretty close. It think it is the perfect marriage, pardon the pun, of music, libretto and voice and production and orchestra in the performance at least. It is very hard to find that sweet spot where everything is so completely unified. You’re not aware of the libretto being one thing and the music being something else. It’s just a complete fusion and I think that’s what Mozart and [librettist] Da Ponte achieved with Figaro.

As popular as it is, you’ve conducted it countless times. Are new discoveries still there to be found for you in this opera?

I think that as a conductor one thing you should do is also see what your orchestras and cast bring to the table. In that sense every time I do it is different. Working with the director also has to be added to the mix. So one has to be a bit of a chameleon, but then one also has to be very respectful of Mozart and of the music. It’s sort of a balancing act, but because of that I think every time I conduct the piece it’s slightly different and you want to find different ideas and different colors.

In 1948 a scholar Hans Keller, made the argument that there were many parallels between Mozart and Britten, notably in their “exaggerated importance attached to historical perspectives.” What, if any, similarities do you find?

That’s such a tough question. Because also I think that for Britten a lot of stuff was quite personal as a gay man at a time when it was illegal. It was also historical perspective for him. In all of the operas there’s a sense of this outsider and a person who is not proselytizing or complaining about the situation, but is clearly referencing it. You see that in Peter Grimes, you certainly see that in Billy Budd and to a certain extent there is an element of that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The whole wedding thing – in the play they kind of all do get married at the end. And in the opera that whole thing is kind of mysteriously swept under the carpet perhaps because Britten and Peter Pears couldn’t get married. I don’t know. I don’t want to read too much into that.

For Mozart it was a similar thing. He was writing in the 1780s and there was the US revolution, the whole French situation, the situation in Vienna. I think that had to be something that influenced him every day of his life.

What surprises you most about the way Britten set Shakespeare’s play with his music?

It doesn’t surprise me that it’s brilliantly set. Most composers would really shy away from setting very very high end poetry because you’re on a losing wicket. How can you ever dare to aspire musically to the kind of quality of the text. Even Verdi when he was writing his Shakespeare operas he didn’t dare actually take on Shakespeare’s text. Britten is one of the few people in history that actually set Shakespeare’s text and all but one sentence is the original Shakespeare.

Britten told Joan Peyser of New York Times in a 1969 interview that “it is better to be a bad composer writing for society than to be a good composer writing against it. At least your work can be of some use.” Wasn’t Britten actually being both a good composer and writing for society at the same time?

I don’t think it is necessarily an either or. I think it’s kind of a both and. But I think Britten did feel very strongly obviously about so many things. He was a conscientious objector during the war. The War Requiem is very clearly expressing a moral outrage about the senselessness of war. Not a political thing, but a human response to that. I think certainly the theme through his pieces is just about how we treat people in society who don’t necessarily fit in. He was obviously quite bitter about it, but also realized as an artist he was in a unique position to actually talk about it in a way that wasn’t offensive. He was provocative and allowed people to be challenged. Not in a threatening way, but in a way which hopefully caused conversation and then many years later actually caused something to be done about that.

For tickets to The Marriage of Figaro please go here. There are performances on August 3rd, 10th, 14th, 18th, 21st, 24th and 27th.

For tickets to A Midsummer Night’s Dream please go here. There are performances on August 4th, 13th, 19th and 25th.

This is the second of our week-long series of interviews with artists participating in this year’s Santa Fe Opera season. Check back on Wednesday for our interview with counter tenor Iestyn Davies who sings the role of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Main Photo: Conductor Harry Bicket (Courtesy Santa Fe Opera)

The post Conductor Harry Bicket On the Perfect Opera appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

The German-born Reinhardt, who has conducted with orchestras around the world, got her Master’s Degree in conducting from Juilliard. She had conducting fellowships with the Boston and Seattle symphonies before being named a [Gustavo] Dudamel Conducting Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic during the 2017-2018 season.

I was hoping to speak with Reinhardt about the concert, but vocal issues meant we had to correspond via e-mail instead. Here’s our exchange:

When Leginska conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1925, Isabel Morse Jones said in her review for the Los Angeles Times that the conductor was “a master of music, not men.” Has the classical music world opened up as much as you’d like for conductors who happen to be women?

The classical music world has clearly opened up a lot in the past century. But the fact that we still talk this much about being a woman in this field means that’s apparently still “a thing” to be female conductor. It’s not normal yet. True equality will be reached on the general of a conduct will be as trivial as the color of that person’s hair.

It should be noted here that in Bachtrack‘s annual survey of classical music for the year 2019 (the most recent one completed due to the pandemic), only eight women appeared in the ranks of the top 100 conductors. That is up from one woman in 2013.

When you conduct a piece as widely performed as the Mozart piano concerto, knowing that not only did the composer play it, but Beethoven, Brahms, Clara Schumann and others have, how do you go about finding new revelations in the score and how often do you make such discoveries? How does that translate to the performance the orchestra and soloist will give?

In general I treat every piece of music the same – no matter if ten famous people have played it or no one. My job as conductor is always the same: to analyze the piece, find out what it is about and try to bring that out together with the orchestra. I also feel that music is truly about the time that the performer and audience members live in; the performance is informed by the circumstances one lives in and is an interaction or dialogue.

Young musicians face enormous pressure to make it big quickly and to brand themselves. When you’re working with someone like Eric Lu, who is only 21 years old, what do you think are amongst the most important things someone like him can do to create a long career?

I don’t really feel in any position to give Eric any advice, particularly since he’s doing so well. But I guess every musician, no matter how old or young, needs to figure out what kind of events/projects make them happy and what repertoire suits them and they can easily turn into a success.

The concert opens with the Hebrides Overture by Mendelssohn. The composer suffered from severe seasickness on his journey to Scotland. Yet in spite of that illness, he was inspired to begin composing immediately the opening them of the work. Have you experienced anything in your own life where it was abysmal to get through, but ultimately yielded something beautiful?

I, too, have been quite seasick and I feel with Mendelssohn. So if I had to compose something right after I would have been very quick, too.

He described his 4th Symphony* that is also on the program as “the jolliest piece I have written…and the most mature thing I have ever done.” What, then, do you make of his constant revisions of the work that continued right up until his death in 1847?

We often view Mendelssohn as this happy composer, to whom success and everything else came easily and early, but we shouldn’t forget that he was also extremely self-critical. He revised most of his orchestral works, some even more than once and was also about the 4th symphony at first very unsure. He wrote to a friend, to whom he sent the score for a performance, that he “isn’t quite sure if this is any good at all.” I find it rather sympathetic that a composer of such incredible ability was still self-critical and always trying to aim for yet a higher level! 

What faith do you have in the system that the opportunities you and other women conductors have right now will be long-term and sustaining and not just a reaction to #MeToo and other issues?

I believe that in the longterm quality will prevail, no matter what the gender, race, faith or color of skin. I am glad to see increasing attention being paid to inclusiveness in the classical music scene and elsewhere. Of course bias still exists, it’s simply an unfortunate reality of the world, but you can’t let that hold you back. I don’t think gender is relevant in the assessment of a conductor, who is ultimately measured and evaluated by his or her skills and abilities to interpret the music,  an orchestra, and know all the things that a conductor must know to do the job effectively, and I believe that’s what it comes down to.

You were bitten by the classical music but as a 9-year-old performing Verdi’s Otello was a choir member. How would the 9-year-old version of yourself respond to whom you have become today?

I guess the 9-year-old version of me would be in a bit of disbelief. But probably I would also ask, what one could possibly find interesting about waving a stick around, rather than [having] a career as a singer or actor.

For tickets to Tuesday night’s concert, please go here.

*Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 is nicknamed Italian. Anyone who knows the film Breaking Away will immediately recognize the music.

All photos of Ruth Reinhardt courtesy Ruth-Reinhardt.com. Main photo by Jessica Schaefer.

The post Conductor Ruth Reinhardt Let’s the Music Do the Talking appeared first on Cultural Attaché.