Supported by
Music in Review
Steve Smith, James R. Oestreich and
THE KNIGHTS
Baryshnikov Arts Center
A large, lively audience braved a looming winter storm on Tuesday evening to hear the premiere of “New Ghetto Music” by Yotam Haber, presented by the Knights, a youthful, independent New York orchestra, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center During a 2008 residency at the American Academy in Rome, Mr. Haber uncovered a cache of tapes featuring Roman Jewish cantors recorded from the 1940s to the ’60s. For “New Ghetto Music” he drew on the penetrating emotional delivery he heard on the tapes, combining it with modern orchestral techniques and a bracing rawness inspired by tenores vocal traditions from Sardinia.
Featured in Mr. Haber’s piece was Christina Courtin, a Knights violinist and an admired indie-pop singer and songwriter, who sang her own lyrics and those of Barbara Ras, a contemporary poet. Ms. Courtin loosed her plaintive, affecting yelp in urgent, incantatory gushes over her frenetic fiddling. Behind her, vivacious, odd-metered dance rhythms paced a kaleidoscopic orchestral roil. The performance, ably conducted by Eric Jacobsen, had its rough spots, but intensity, exuberance and commitment more than compensated.
You could hardly imagine a more sympathetic context for “New Ghetto Music” than the program offered here. Gracious instrumental versions of two Schubert songs “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” orchestrated by Lev Zhurbin (known as Ljova); and “Des Baches Wiegenlied,” reworked by the violinist Colin Jacobsen (the conductor’s brother) preceded Mr. Haber’s work. After it, dance held sway in a pert account of Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” Suite and the intoxicating whirl of “Ascending Bird,” a Persian folk melody arranged by Colin Jacobsen and Siamak Aghaei. STEVE SMITH
A FAR CRY
Merkin Concert Hall
The program of the conductorless string orchestra A Far Cry on Tuesday afternoon was to end with Bartok’s folk-infused Divertimento, so you knew you were headed for Hungary. You just didn’t expect to arrive so soon: in the first half of the program, with Mozart’s “Serenata Notturna.”
A Far Cry, founded in 2007 and based in Boston, consisted here of 19 young Criers, as they call themselves, 18 string players and a percussionist (bells in Arvo Pärt’s moving “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten,” timpani in the Mozart). The orchestra brims with personality or, better, personalities, many and varied.
Four in particular Jennifer Curtis and Miki-Sophia Cloud, violinists; Jason Fisher, violist; and Tony Flynt, double bassist delightfully upstaged one another in the Mozart finale, supplying flourishes and cadenzas full of Gypsy swoons and swirls.
Jesse Irons, the violinist leading the Bartok, was similarly insinuating in the rollicking outer movements. But the spirited players were equally persuasive in the somber, war-shadowed adagio of this conflicted work from 1939.
For lack of a keyboard in Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 3, three cellists and a bassist furnished a rich, throbbing continuo line. Amid music of such urgency and performances of such passionate involvement, Elgar’s Serenade for Strings proved the real divertimento, and a lovely one.
The encore was a fiery arrangement of “Turceasca,” said to be the signature piece of the Roma band Taraf de Haidouks and attributed to Sapo Perapaskero. In a sensational jam worthy of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, it was everyone for him- or herself. JAMES R. OESTREICH
NEIL ROLNICK
Le Poisson Rouge
Neil Rolnick’s new recording, “Extended Family” (Innova), brings together three 2009 works that touch on potentially fraught subjects, including the partial loss of the composer’s hearing, his mother’s death and meditations on the nature of faith. But though you might reasonably expect this music to register high on the angst meter, it is generally occasional introspection aside energetic, optimistic, even joyful. And when Mr. Rolnick celebrated the disc’s release with a concert at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday evening, the mood was upbeat.
Mr. Rolnick and strings from ACME (American Contemporary Music Ensemble) opened the program with “Release,” a short, bright-edged movement from “Shadow Quartet” (2005), in which lively string lines are driven by Minimalist repetition and expansion, and the computer (overseen by the composer) works almost as a continuo instrument.
Mr. Rolnick’s “MONO Prelude,” inspired by his sudden loss of hearing in his left ear, is the seed of a larger work in progress about sensory deprivation. It uses electronic sound both to capture the ringing and noise of tinnitus and to counter the desperation it creates described by Mr. Rolnick in a haunting spoken text, a diary of his visits to specialists with driven, vital music that conveys his determination to overcome the challenge.
“Faith,” a free-spirited concerto for piano and computer, was composed for Bob Gluck, a rabbi who gave up his pulpit and become an accomplished jazz pianist. Mr. Gluck performed it with virtuosic fluidity and maintained a lively give-and-take with Mr. Rolnick’s tactile, almost orchestral computer part.
ACME closed the concert with a deeply felt, richly played account of “Extended Family,” a colorful evocation of the life cycle and complexities of family relationships. ALLAN KOZINN
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