GOING UNDERGROUND

 The Parker Quintet in the Crypt

(photo by Justin Buschardt)

As a group of us music lovers were led down dimly lit flights of stairs into the Neo-Gothic crypt of the Church of the Intercession , we had an interesting thought. Fans of Andrew Ousley and Death of Classical will follow him anywhere--not only to spooky crypts but to cemeteries (see our review of October 17th)--from lower Manhattan to Washington Heights to the farthest reaches of Brooklyn. 

We asked ourself "Why is this so?" It has something to do, of course, with the quality of the performances he curates, perhaps to the feeling of exclusivity the events produce, to the originality of the concept. One is not just going to Lincoln Center to sit with hundreds of other people shuffling programs and glancing at their cell phones. On the contrary, these events are always compelling, never boring.

So there we were following Mr. Ousley down into the crypt, phones stored off board, entering a small room lit only by candles  (lots of candles as you can see from the photo). We observed that the space has room for only a small audience of music worshippers, all of them quiet as mice and completely attentive to the excellent Parker Quartet. The group of musicians comprised violinists Daniel Chong and Ken Hamao, violist Jessica Bodner, and cellists Lee Hyun Kim and guest artist Jay Campbell.

This rather unusual quintet formation brought a different texture to the aural experience.  Although we are familiar with most of Schubert's six hundred (!) songs, we are far less familiar with his chamber music, much of it composed for the parlor. This work,  stood out because the presence of two celli  is uncommon. The work was finished two months before Schubert's untimely death and lay rather dormant for a quarter of a century!

There was something about the work that reminded us of Beethoven's late quartets. In spite of this String Quintet being composed in the key of C Major, there is little about it that is cheerful. Rather it is intense, profound, and often disorienting with many unusual changes of key.  We can scarcely recall the opening theme, since Schubert seems to have cast aside his gifts for melody and focused more on texture. So, we were relieved to hear the second more lyrical theme. We enjoyed the duet between the pair of celli.

It wasn't until the Adagio that we felt ourself to be on familiar territory; the gloriously melodic A section was interrupted by a contrasting fiery mid-section. We tried to remember where we had heard it before because the melody was memorable.

Our attention was captured often by pizzicati in the cello. Let us mention that Mr. Campbell was a guest artist for the night, playing usually with the JACK Quartet, regulars at The Crypt and the Catacombs of Greenwood Cemetery. 

We have never witnessed an audience so enraptured. No one moved for the entire hour. No one shifted in their seat. No one coughed. The music held everyone spellbound. As a matter of fact, audience members drifted off into the night in some kind of daze overwhelmed by the multi sensorial nature of the experience. We hope, Dear Reader, that you will soon attend one of the Death of Classical evenings and experience it for yourself.

© meche kroop

THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL PASSION

Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble at The Crypt

We give Andrew Ousley a great deal of credit for creating unusual and compelling evenings in his series Death of Classical. We cannot, however, give him credit for the boiler breakdown at The Church of the Intercession as we sat shivering in The Crypt. We will say this. The atmosphere added to our sympathy for "The Little Match Girl", who freezes to death on the street on the last night of the year whilst having visions of warmth and food.  According to the fairy tale recorded by the 19th c. Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, after envisioning her dear departed grandmother, she joins her in heaven.

Composer David Lang was given the commission for this piece by the National Chamber Choir of Ireland and the work premiered in 2008. It was written for four voices, percussion, and chamber choir. The version we saw last night omitted the choir; the four voices we heard brought the text to vivid life and the accompanying percussion went a long way toward amplifying the mood.

Mr. Lang followed the model of Bach's St. Matthew's Passion with the Andersen text interrupted by outpourings of grief, guilt, remorse, repentance, and cries for mercy. Most of these interpolations seemed to be  the voice of a mother who has wronged her daughter. We fantasized that perhaps it was the mother of the little girl sent out to sell matches on a cold wintry night. Personally, we would have been just as moved if the composer had simply  set the fairy tale. But Mr. Lang had something more spiritual in mind and evidently wanted to draw a connection with the Bach piece.

The story is heartbreaking and reminded us to not take our warm home and nourishing food for granted when refugees and hostages alike are suffering in the Middle East. We think of the approaching cold weather and the poor soldiers in Ukraine fighting for their freedom, as well as the Russian soldiers conscripted unwillingly. Yes, we do feel sorrow for them also and we feel sorrow for their wives, mothers, and children. The world is a cruel place for many but Andersen seems to imply that one can be hopeful nonetheless, as the little girl did when she hallucinated warmth and food and love by the light of her matches.

Now, what about the music?  Regular readers recall our distaste for contemporary music but let us mark this as an exception. This was our first time hearing the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble and we found them to be artistic and effective.The music is tied together by a recurring motif comprising an interval of a fourth followed by just a note or two or three of an ascending scale passage. This motif not only ties the work together but amplifies the chill of the score. Rarely do we hear a work in which the vocal line so well matches the text. No, it isn't at all lyrical but it serves the work well.

This motif is established and repeated by the alto part, strongly sung by Amber Evans who also made good use of the glockenspiel. The soprano part was sung by Charlotte Mundy, who also played the sleigh bells and scraped lightly on a disc called a break drum, which was new to us.  Also new to us were the crotales, small tuned cymbals. Tenor Tomás Cruz  took the tenor part and also played the glockenspiel and tubular bells. Bass Steve Hrycelak also played the bass drum. Each percussion instrument contributed a unique sound. The harmonies were interesting and appropriately chilling in effect, with great use of the dissonant second interval.  Maestro Jeffrey Gavett succeeded in keeping everything balanced and The Crypt was filled with pungent overtones. The overall effect was hypnotic.

We have never heard anything boring or commonplace at Death of Classical  and always eagerly await the announcement of the next adventure. Now we understand that these adventures will be expanding to other cities. We hope they find an audience as appreciative as the New York audience.

© meche kroop 

 

ON ARTISTS, MARRIAGE, AND CHILDREN

Irina and Lucas Meachem

Only fifty fortunate folk can be accommodated in the spooky subterranean Crypt of the Church of the Intercession. This makes every event there, produced by Andrew Ousley for Unison Media, a major exclusive event.

In the 1830's, poet Friedrich Rückert poured out his grief over the loss of two of his children in a massive way--over 400 songs which were never intended for publication. Fortunately, they were published posthumously; we say "fortunately" because his working through of grief may have helped countless grieving parents. In his day, children died of scarlet fever; today children die of cancer and accidents. The poems reveal anguish, despair,  perhaps even a touch of guilt, fantasies of restitution, and ultimately acceptance and peace.

Gustav Mahler selected five of the poems to set in the early 20th c. His wife Alma thought he was tempting fate, and, strangely, a few years later, he lost his beloved little daughter, also to scarlet fever. The songs are written in the late Romantic style, one which we love hearing.

The choice of Kindertotenlieder by baritone Lucas Meachem and his lovely and very pregnant wife seemed to us to be a form of what mental health people call "reaction formation"--flying in the face of fear. We cannot help but say reassuring things in our mind. We cannot help but wish well to this artistic couple before we even address the performances.

Mr. Meachem has a huge voice which was magnified by the acoustics of the Crypt, an appropriate venue for songs about death. He made no attempt to scale his voice to the size of the room and the audience faced the full force of these songs that one would never have experienced elsewhere.

Far more important than his enormous instrument is the artistry with which he employs it. Here's a man who sings from the heart; he knows just how to phrase and how to color and how to play with dynamics for maximum effect.

The program touched some unexpected bases. He opened with "La calme rentre dans mon coeur" from Act II of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, performed in finely flowing French with exquisite attention to line. It is almost a self generated lullaby sung by Orestes to himself.

Our favorite part of the program was Mr. Meachem's delivery of Onegin's response to Tatiana's letter from Act I of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. Lacking a Russian keyboard, we cannot give you the title. Nonetheless, we love this opera and loved Mr. Meachem's performance.

Before he sang "They Wish They Could Kill Me" from Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles, Mr. Meachem gave a few riffs from other iterations of Figaro by Rossini and Mozart. Truth to tell, we prefer the music of those titans to that of Corigliano but we did enjoy the baritone's characterization of Figaro, now aged.

Copeland's Old American Songs don't do much for us but they were engagingly performed. The folk song "Shenandoah" made much more of an impression on us and seemed to have a special meaning for Mr. Meachem.

His other encore surprised us!  Even after he announced that it was sung by a king, we didn't get the joke until the singing began.  Elvis Presley's 1969 hit "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" never sounded so good and did wonders for relieving our dark mood left over from the Kindertotenlieder.

His wife Irina is a gifted collaborative pianist and gave perfect support to the singing throughout the performances.  We wish she had had a solo!

Mr. Ousley always comes up with original ideas well suited to his available venues. Summer is a-comin' in and that means The Angel's Share series at Greenwood Cemetery. We ain't spillin' the beans unless you twist our arm!

(c) meche kroop

INTO THE CRYPT WITH SALLY HEMINGS

Michael Fennelly and Alyson Cambridge

There is something both grand and spooky about descending several flights of stairs to The Crypt Chapel of the Church of the Intercession.  The high-ceilinged and resonant space gives one a sense of the importance of what will take place there; indeed last night's performance fulfilled that expectation. Unison Media's Andrew Ousley always has something unique to offer in his Crypt Sessions!

What we experienced last night was a piece entitled From the Diary of Sally Hemings; Ms. Hemmings was a slave of our third POTUS Thomas Jefferson, a mulatto woman who became his common-law wife. The text by Sandra Seaton, a librettist and playwright, can be thought of almost as a work of historical fiction. Ms. Hemings may have been quite literate but she left no diary that historians know of. If she kept one it was destroyed.

So this is a work of imagination, not one of historical accuracy. It is Ms. Seaton's idea of what Ms. Hemings might have felt in her life journey, one of extraordinary privilege combined with slights and insults. She accompanied Jefferson to Paris and returned with him to Monticello. She bore him children, none of whom remained in slavery. She learned French and was dressed in high fashion.

What we didn't know was that she and Martha Wayles (Jefferson's beloved wife) were half-sisters! Martha's father John Wayles formed an alliance with his housekeeper Elizabeth after Martha's mother died.  Sally was a child of that union. Similarly, Jefferson formed an alliance with Sally after Martha died. 

We couldn't help wondering whether Jefferson fell in love with Sally because she reminded him of his late wife whom he adored. Reading the text we wondered whether Sally loved Jefferson or saw him only as a kind "Master" who gave her extraordinary privileges. It is almost impossible for a 21st c. person to imagine life on a slave holding plantation over two centuries ago.  We do not judge what we cannot understand.

There is something we do know (or think we know) that Ms. Seaton omitted from the story. She has claimed that Jefferson did not have any affairs or love any other women after his wife died. This would tend to put Sally on some kind of pedestal. But no mention was made of Maria Cosway!

Ms. Cosway was an unhappily married Italian woman living in London. She met Jefferson during his stay in Paris as United States Minister to France, whilst Sally was purported to be accompanying him. Jefferson and Cosway had an intense meeting of the minds and shared a love of the arts; it was a friendship that endured until his death but was expressed mainly through letters, which have been researched by historians. They were rarely alone and it is not known whether their love was consummated or not. But it is known that she, a composer, sent several of her compositions to Jefferson and they exchanged letters expressing deep devotion and encouragement.

It might have made an interesting addition to the story to speculate upon the effects that this relationship had on Ms. Hemings! Nonetheless, the absence of this piece of information did nothing to impair the effect of hearing this monodrama, with music by the highly eclectic composer William Bolcom. Our affection for Mr. Bolcom's music rests mainly on his "Song of Black Max", a cabaret song we have reviewed multiple times, most recently just five days ago at the Opera Index party.

But Mr. Bolcom writes with great eclecticism and we found his piano writing for this piece to be highly accessible and refined as performed by Michael Fennelly, one of our favorite pianists. The vocal lines?  Not so interesting.  As performed by the splendid soprano Alyson Cambridge, it was a deeply felt story in which her intense and appropriate dramatic gifts filled in the blanks of the elliptical text.

Ms. Cambridge is a stunning woman with great personal power and a voice that soared into the upper reaches of The Crypt. Her crisp enunciation made every word clear, which is a feature we never take for granted. Her apt phrasing and gestures transformed the spare words on the page to a fully realized portrait.

We first heard Ms. Cambridge a year ago at a New Amsterdam Opera Gala. We loved her "Song to the Moon" from Dvorak's Russalka and her Giulietta from Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffman. Last night we heard a different side of her eclectic talent.

With regard to the compelling setting for this work, Mr. Ousley donates the proceeds from ticket sales of his Crypt Sessions to The Church of the Intercession for the use and upkeep of The Crypt Chapel.

(c) meche kroop