ANOTHER GREAT LIEDERABEND AT JUILLIARD

Richard Fu and Michelle Geffner

We alway enjoy a liederabend at Juilliard because we get exposed to a variety of material sung by different students of the Juilliard Vocal Arts Department.

This was the first time we heard Mishael Eusebio who sang Beethoven with a lovely easy tonal quality, impressive for its tenderness.  No pushing here! The vibrato varied from the enthusiastic "Adelaide" to the melancholy An die ferne Geliebte, showing sensitivity to the text and plenty of vocal and facial expressiveness that would benefit from some gestural expression..

An die ferne Geliebte amounts to a song cycle about longing, text by Alois Jeitteles. The sorrow comes not from rejection but from physical distance and this longing was beautifully expressed by Mr. Eusebio in excellent German, and by Richard Fu's collaborative piano. It was unutterably sad.

Joseph Marx composed songs in the early 20th c. and we are always happy to see them on a program. Like those of Hugo Wolf they require repetitive hearing; they are less accessible than the lieder of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Beethoven.

Katerina Burton has an ample soprano that we think would be perfect for Strauss. She and piano partner Seoyon MacDonald performed five of Marx's lieder; our favorite was the sensual "Selige Nacht" (text by Otto Erich Hartleben), the sensuality of which was matched by our two artists. 

Shelby Cox was listed on the program as a mezzo-soprano but we did not hear any mezzo quality to her voice which was nevertheless quite lovely. She made sense out of three selections from Aaron Copland's settings of text by Emily Dickinson. We enjoyed Tomomi Sato's piano in "Going to Heaven". In "The Chariot", Ms. Cox spun out the end like a fine silken thread.

All singers love a mad scene and that of Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet was set by contemporary composer Benjamin C.S. Boyle. Now what's a mad scene without some coloratura fireworks? You will have to ask Mr. Boyle! We didn't find that his music added anything to Shakespeare's words. Still, Ms. Cox and Ms. Sato gave it a fine performance.

Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is taken from James Agee's prose, later used as a preamble to his  book A Death in the Family. It was composed in 1947 for soprano and orchestra but was here performed by soprano Michelle Geffner and pianist Richard Fu. Clearly Ms. Geffner loves this work and, we learned later, read the book; this explains the clarity with which she painted a picture of life a century ago. We have not read the book and cannot claim to be enthralled by the work but we were drawn in by Ms. Geffner's involvement with the text which she communicated effectively in clear English.

(c) meche kroop

BANGING AND BOWING

Juilliard Percussion Ensemble at Alice Tully Hall

Last night we stepped way out of our usual territory to review some exciting new works for percussion by faculty members and graduate students from Princeton University, a leading incubator of compositional talent in the United States. Whilst we have found contemporary vocal compositions to be largely boring, contemporary percussion compositions we found to be rather exciting, as they created an exotic soundscape.

We heard six works and weren't bored for a minute. The opening work Four for Flexatones by Juri Seo captured our attention not only because of the originality of the handheld instruments but because of the aspect of body movement. The four musicians walked around the stage and tossed the sounds around as if they were balls. It was a playful dance in which the musicians became dancers accompanying themselves. At one moment, they simultaneously drew bows from their backpacks and appeared like samurai.

Steven Mackey's Madrigal, conducted by Daniel Druckman, created a pleasing sound world in which the female voice was just another component. Soprano Michelle Geffner has a lovely voice but, unfortunately, the text she sang was incomprehensible. We are not even sure it was English. But it didn't matter. It was the texture of the voice melded with a variety of percussion instruments that was so pleasurable to the ear.

We loved Donnacha Dennehy's Surface Tension in which the percussionists produced waves of sound, rising and falling with varying dynamics. The idea was to let the drums sing on various pitches, manipulating the tone by means of blowing air through a tube into the side of the drum. Various other techniques were seen.  For example, the keys of the vibraphone and the marimba were sometimes bowed instead of struck, producing interesting timbres.

Oscar Bettison's Four Drums for Dresden was the least interesting of the six pieces, relying more on a theoretical concept than on a compelling result. The idea was to get live percussion to imitate electronic dance music. To our ears, it sounded a lot like noise, although we did enjoy the syncopated central section.

Far more interesting was Caroline Shaw's taxidermy in which the musicians played on flower pots. This sounded original and was especially pleasing when they were played in intervals of a minor third. We thought of the glass harmonica and how simple household objects are worth exploring for their unusual voices. The spoken text at the conclusion of the piece added nothing of value. The music spoke for itself.

In Pillar IV, Andy Akiho used a variety of experimental techniques to produce a collection of odd sounds. There were some highly pitched sounds punctuated by the forceful bass drum. Conventional percussion instruments were played in unorthodox manners, reminding us very much of children at play who don't follow the rules. It was a freeing experience watching drums being beaten on their frames and vibraphones being struck on the tubes instead of the keys.

Let's have a big round of applause for innovation and experimentation! The Juilliard musicians were Omar El-Abidin, Simon Herron, Euijin Jung, Yoon Jun Kim, Benjamin Cornavaca, Toby Grace, Joseph Bricker, Tyler Cunningham, Stella Perlic, Yibing Wang, Jacob Borden, Harrison Honor, Mizuki Morimoto, and Leo Simon.

(c) meche kroop