[Dixielandjazz] Concerto for OKOM and Spare Parts?

[Stephen G Barbone]

Who said classical music is stuffy? Should OKOM bands try this  
approach to gain audience?  Or is it just fodder for the aesthetic  
fascists? <grin>

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

A Night for a Rhapsodic Violin And an Old Brake Drum
NY TIMES - OCT 9, 2010 - By ANTHONY TOMMASINI


On Thursday night, right behind my regular seat at Avery Fisher Hall  
for the New York Philharmonic, there was an ominous shiny steel tank  
labeled “Refrigerated Liquid Nitrogen.” Two full rows of seats behind  
mine had been removed to accommodate this (presumably empty) tank, a  
makeshift percussion instrument for the Philharmonic’s performance of  
Magnus Lindberg’s “Kraft,” in its New York premiere, conducted by Alan  
Gilbert.

“Kraft” (1983-85) is a sound barrage for large orchestra, with  
soloists playing amplified cello, clarinet, piano and percussion —  
including a motley collection of instruments like furniture legs,  
brake drums, bolts and what not. The performance of this lurching,  
intricate and sonically wondrous half-hour work was fascinating to  
hear and fun to watch.

At one point Carter Brey, the Philharmonic’s principal cellist, one of  
the informally dressed soloists, demonstrated both his musical  
versatility and his physical agility by leaping off the stage, dashing  
down the aisle in sneakers and manning the nitrogen tank, on which he  
played rat-a-tat volleys with metal sticks, alternated with  
reverberant bangs on a large gong. (Does the musicians’ union have to  
give an O.K. when a cellist plays percussion?)

The program opened with familiar works that were surprisingly  
complementary to “Kraft”: Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a  
Faun” and the Sibelius Violin Concerto in a rhapsodic performance  
withJoshua Bell as soloist.

For Mr. Lindberg, in his second and last season as the Philharmonic’s  
composer in residence, presenting “Kraft” was a major statement. The  
big publicity buildup was fully merited.

“Kraft” (German for “power”) is seldom performed, partly because it is  
so challenging, but also because Mr. Lindberg stipulates that the  
percussion resources of the orchestra be fortified with stuff  
collected from junkyards in the city where the piece is being played,  
to lend the music local flavor. Mr. Lindberg and the Philharmonic’s  
game percussionists recently made a fruitful scavenger trip to a  
junkyard on Staten Island.

Besides the usual assortment of gongs and drums, placed onstage and in  
stations all around the hall, there were helium tanks, table legs,  
plastic tubes and bowls filled with water (to make gurgling sounds),  
and a car hood advertising “Rapid Sewer Cleaning,” which, as Mr.  
Gilbert admitted in some helpful spoken comments before the  
performance, had no function in the piece. “We just liked it,” he said.

But all sorts of other car parts were conscripted for this elaborate  
performance: suspension coils, ventilator screens, cranks for tire  
pumps. Only a longtime auto mechanic could identify all these period  
instruments.

Though “Kraft” bustles with heady, impish music, it is a brilliant,  
serious-minded contemporary work. In the early 1980s Mr. Lindberg was  
a rising Finnish composer with a new-music pedigree from Darmstadt and  
other centers of the avant-garde. At the time, as he writes in a  
program note for “Kraft,” he was soaking up the new-music scene in  
Berlin, then hopping with postpunk and nontonal pop.

“I was jealous about the sound,” Mr. Lindberg writes.

In a way, he discovered that contemporary music could cook. In “Kraft”  
he has explored ways of using space, both in a rhythmic sense and  
literally — that is, by placing instruments spatially around the  
audience.

“Kraft” begins with spasms of thick chords that slowly disintegrate,  
until only scraggly lines for cello and clarinet are audible. The  
piece evolves in blocks of sound and constantly changing episodes. At  
one point there is a kind of fractured chorale, full of brassy slides  
and swelling strings. At another, the music erupts in slashing bursts  
that dissolve into gentle gong tones coming from all around the hall,  
almost like pagoda music.

People in the audience sat up for some of the particular sonic effects  
that Mr. Gilbert had prepped us for (by asking the orchestra to play  
excerpts), like a huge 72-note chord toward the beginning of the  
piece, in which the midrange pitches quickly evaporate, leaving a hole  
in the harmony; or soft squeaks, made by scratching the piano strings,  
that could have been the nervous chatter of R2D2. (Mr. Lindberg was  
the deft piano soloist.)

Though Mr. Lindberg devised the rhythmic relationships in “Kraft”  
through mathematical formulas, I could believe that he had written the  
piece intuitively, since it comes across as spontaneous and keeps you  
wondering what will happen next.

The ovation was long and enthusiastic. Just a handful of unhappy  
patrons headed to the doors during “Kraft,” and a couple of them had  
to dodge Philharmonic players racing down the aisles. Besides Mr. Brey  
and Mr. Lindberg, the excellent soloists were Chen Halevi,  
clarinetist; Markus Rhoten, timpanist; Christopher S. Lamb and Daniel  
Druckman, percussionists; Juhani Liimatainen, electronics; and Lou  
Mannarino, sound design.

Mr. Gilbert began by conducting a coolly beautiful performance of the  
Debussy, bringing out the thematic and harmonic intricacies he had  
highlighted in spoken comments from the stage, something he is expert  
at.

It was only last June that Mr. Gilbert conducted the Sibelius Violin  
Concerto, a superb performance with the violinist Lisa Batiashvili. On  
that program it was paired with Mr. Lindberg’s “Arena,” to call  
attention to the resonances between Mr. Lindberg’s score and the  
Sibelius masterpiece, “like mother’s milk for us Finns,” as Mr.  
Lindberg wrote. So it was not a terribly fresh idea to pair the  
concerto again with a Lindberg work. We have gotten the idea. Still,  
Mr. Bell played with lustrous tone, temperament and command.