Best of 2009: New, Old and Otherwise
So who is that January guy? The one with the two faces, one looking forward and the other looking backward?
The answer is Janus, Ancient Roman god of doors, opposites, beginnings and endings.
This is how I feel looking back on music in Cincinnati in 2009.
Most of the concerts that stood out for me involved new or early music (new meaning contemporary music, early meaning music written before approximately 1750).
There were, of course, fine concerts of more traditional repertoire, multi-media events and inventive programs of other kinds.
With these criteria in mind, here’s a rundown:
New music.
The Vocal Arts Ensemble was a prime destination for new music in 2009, beginning March 22 with a concert led by VAE music director emeritus Earl Rivers at Memorial Hall downtown and at Anderson Center in Anderson Township. This folk music-themed program included the world premiere of a VAE commission, William Hawley’s “Three American Folk Hymns” for chorus and string orchestra, and “Kentucky Psalms” by Alice Parker based on early 19th-century shape note song books. Both composers were present.
When incoming VAE music director Donald Nally arrived to lead his inaugural program November 17 at St. Peter in Chains cathedral downtown, he gave notice that new music was going to be the focus of the ensemble. That concert (reviewed for MusicinCincinnati.com by Thom Mariner) featured Scottish composer James MacMillan's powerful "Cantos Sagrados" ("Sacred Songs") and works by Kaija Saariaho, John Tavener, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Steven Stucky and David Lang.
Nally, who is also chorus master for Lyric Opera of Chicago and music director of The Crossing, a highly-regarded chamber choir in Philadelphia, remained true to his word for the VAE Christmas concert in December at North Presbyterian Church in Northside. The program comprised all 20th and 21st-century music, including a world premiere, Benjamin C.S. Boyle's "Down with the Rosemary," written for the VAE. The 30-year-old composer was in attendance. With traditional carols all over the airwaves elsewhere, Nally and the VAE performed a contemporary encore, too (by Jonathan Varcoe). It was a total immersion filled with revelation and beauty.
The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra did not ignore new music in 2009. Far from it, there were some notable events:
Guest conductor James Gaffigan led Jennifer Higdon's exhilarating Percussion Concerto (performed by Colin Currie) and Jeffrey Mumford's evocative "...and symphonies of deepening light...expanding...ever cavernous" March 28 at Music Hall. The latter was commissioned for the CSO by Ann and Harry Santen.
CSO music director Paavo Järvi conducted a Hungarian-themed program March 14 at Music Hall, including Gyorgy Ligeti's Concert romanescu. Ligeti’s 7-minute work was the "sleeper" on the program, which was headlined by Bartok's "Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta." (Sadly, both pieces were to be by Telarc after the concert, but all CSO recording activities were discontinued earlier in the season.)
Järvi opened the CSO’s 2009-2010 season September 25 at Music Hall with the U.S. premiere of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Symphony No. 7, “Pietas,” featuring the May Festival Chorus. Commissioned by the CSO and the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra (of which Järvi is also music director), it is a powerful, 40-minute choral/orchestral symphony on texts dealing with compassion (“pietas”) by Buddha, Gandhi, Mother Teresa and others. Closely integrated, colorfully orchestrated and challenging, it rewards repeated hearings and deserves a fine recording. (Since the Frankfurt Orchestra is still in the recording game, perhaps they will oblige.)
Guest conductor Kristjan Järvi (brother of Paavo) went neuva and latina for his October 2 CSO subscription concert debut at Music Hall. One of the highlights of the year, his program was all CSO premieres, including Astor Piazzolla’s Concerto for Bandoneon with guest artist Carel Kraayenhof, Silvestre Revueltas' percussion-rich “La Noche de los Mayas" ("The Night of the Mayas"),” which had the audience drumming along, and selections from Alberto Ginastera's gaucho ballet "Estancia."
The chamber group concert:nova followed suit with its own innovative, all-Latin program October 4 at the Contemporary Arts Center. This delicious concert included selections from Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Spain by Piazzolla, Ginastera, Manuel de Falla, Joaquin Rodrigo, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Radames Gnatali, Eduardo Arolas and others. Dancers from Cincinnati's Tango del Barrio tangoed right along with tangos by Piazzolla, soprano Ellen Wieser sang, guest bandoneonist Ben Bogart and guitarist Richard Goering played, and there was a rose in the scroll of Tatiana Berman's violin.
Cincinnati Opera was in the Spanish mode for all four of its season operas, including Osvaldo Golijov's 2003 "Ainadamar" July 9 at Music Hall. This lovely, haunting work about the death of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (reviewed on this site by composer Antoine Lopez) starred soprano Dawn Upshaw and was conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya. It was a less-is-more venture that had the CSO onstage with the singers in a closely coordinated performance that, for emotive power, ceded nothing to fully staged opera. (The other three operas were Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," Bizet's "Carmen" and Verdi's "Don Carlo").
The opera department at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music is good at making do with less, as they demonstrated in a pair of 2009 Opera Studio performances. Director/CCM artist in residence Nicholas Muni directed an amazingly effective “Ariadne auf Naxos” by Richard Strauss March 7 in Cohen Family Theater with little more than a bare floor, chalk, a pair of projection screens and two pianos.
Opera Studio’s “Mamelles de Tiresias” by Poulenc in Patricia Corbett theater November 6 enjoyed similar but more “colorful” treatment, with onstage orchestra, balloons, quirky costumes and a few well-chosen props, including a chamber pot. CCM's new opera department chair Robin Guarino directed.
The Vogler Quartet from Berlin brought music eclipsed by the Holocaust to light November 17 for Chamber Music Cincinnati in Corbett Auditorium. Erwin Schulhoff’s String Quartet No. 1 (1924) spoke with full power and authority to a later generation in this definitive performance by the German ensemble, which spent part of its training with CCM’s LaSalle Quartet.
Early music.
The purest examples of early music (roughly defined as up to 1750) were by Cincinnati’s award-winning Catacoustic Consort, an early music group headed by artistic director Annalisa Pappano. There was an all-viola da gamba concert November 14 at North Presbyterian Church in Northside (J.S. Bach, Orlando Gibbons, Tarquinio Merula, Heinrich Isaac, Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Pres, Samuel Scheidt, etc.) and "A Christmas Fanfare" December 19, also at North Presbyterian.
Catacoustic’s Christmas concert was a real beauty, with guest artists Bruce Dickey and Kiri Tollaksen on cornetto. Heard was music from the time of Monteverdi, including motets and sonatas by Girolama Frescobaldi, Giuseppe Scarani and Lodovico da Viadana, plus music by a pair of cloistered nuns (not such a rarity as one might think, considering the female talent that was sequestered in convents). One of them, Chiara Cozzolani , was published in her lifetime, though the Roman Catholic hierarchy officially disapproved of such activity by nuns.
On April 21 in Werner Recital Hall at CCM, Chamber Music Cincinnati presented the Geringas Baryton Trio in works for baryton, viola and cello. That’s baryton as in bowed, not sung, with six bowed and up to 40 "sympathetic" strings behind the fingerboard (12 on Geringas' instrument). There was music by Haydn, Luigi Tomasini, Beethoven, Rossini and, a rare piece of new music on an old instrument, Latvian composer Peteris Vask's 1978 "Gramata Cellam" ("The Book") in honor of La Salle Quartet violinist Henry Meyer, who died in 2006.
The CSO put itself firmly into the “historically informed performance practice” camp (before 1750 or after) December 17-21 at Music Hall with guest conductor/baroque performance expert Nicholas McGegan in Handel’s “Messiah.” It was like washing the grime from an Old Master to hear the 1742 oratorio (trimmed by about a half-hour) played by a 37-piece orchestra and 75-voice (May Festival) chorus, a far cry from the bloated performances that long were in style.
The CSO enlisted Mozart guru Sir Roger Norrington to lead an all-Mozart concert January 29 at Music Hall, including the Symphonies No. 33 and 36, Concerto for Horn No. 4 in a fine performance by CSO principal hornist Elizabeth Freimuth, and Masonic Funeral Music, K.479a. Norrington’s “classic,” nimble, “informed” Mozart (vibrato-less strings, clean, pointed articulation) caused the CSO audience to sit up and take notice.
In a similar vein, Cincinnati Opera called upon Norrington to conduct Mozart's“Marriage of Figaro” June 11 at Music Hall. With a luxury cast including baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes as the Count and soprano Nicole Cabell as the Countess, bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu as Figaro and insouciant mezzo Marie Lenormand as Cherubino, it made for a “Figaro” of renewed vibrancy and charm.
Of course, there were wonderful concerts of more traditional repertoire during the year. My favorites were:
Paavo Järvi and the CSO in Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 6 April 30 at Music Hall. This was a discerning performance that vividly conveyed the composer’s struggles after returning to the Soviet Union following his early triumphs in the West. Also on the program was Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 performed by Cincinnati native Nicholas Angelich and, another CSO premiere, Benjamin Britten’s little known (even Britten forgot he wrote it) “American Overture.”
Guest artist Christian Tetzlaff in a melting performance of Brahms’ Violin Concerto with the CSO led by Järvi on April 17 at Music Hall. This attractive program also included orchestral excerpts from Berlioz’ dramatic “Romeo and Juliet Symphony” and Mauricio Kagel’s 1997, tongue-in-cheek Etude No. 3.
The May Festival led by music director James Conlon May 29 and 30 at Music Hall. The May 30 program highlighted (for a change) the pagan origins of our May celebrations. Speaking for the druids was the May Festival Chorus in Mendelssohn’s cantata “Die Erste Walpurgisnacht” about pagans determined to scare the pants off their Christian neighbors with their May’s Eve festivities. Pagans aside, Conlon celebrated his 30th anniversary as May Festival music director with Symphony No. 8 (“Symphony of a Thousand”) in a powerful performance May 30 tailor made for the over-sized hall.
Cincinnati Opera’s “Don Carlo” by Verdi June 25 at Music Hall. This was the season’s best for Cincinnati Opera. The opulent production had big voices to match, including bass James Morris at Philip II, soprano Angela Brown as Elizabeth, mezzo-soprano Michelle De Young as Princess Eboli, baritone Marco Caria as Rodrigo, bass Morris Robinson as the Grand Inquisitor and -- a real find -- tenor Frank Porretta as Carlo.
CCM Opera’s “Barber of Seville” by Rossini February 13 in Patricia Corbett Theater. For pure vocal and dramatic excellence, this was a matchless performance with a cast of superb young singing actors and direction by Karen Coe Miller closely calibrated with the music.
Pianist Sergei Polusmiak May 7 in Northern Kentucky University’s Greaves Concert Hall. This was an incendiary recital by NKU’s distinguished artist-in-residence. An exponent of the Russian romantic school who studied with Vladimir Horowitz’ sister Regina in Kiev, Polusmiak lit up the hall with Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata, Etudes tableaux by Rachmaninoff and especially the Sonata No. 7 by Prokofiev.
In the multi-media department, two concerts stood out in 2009:
Concert:nova’s “De-mystifying Arnold Schoenberg” in collaboration with the CCM drama department April 5 in C:N Garden on Reading Road downtown. Michael Burnham, professor of drama at CCM, portrayed the misunderstood composer with sympathy and conviction in words. C:n musicians joined by soprano Meng-Chun Lin, pianist/Schoenberg scholar Steven Cahn and conductor Kenneth Lam brought him to life in music spanning his stylistic development. It was a performance they could take on the road.
The Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra in collaboration with Madcap Puppet Theater and the theater department of Bowling Green University June 7 in Corbett Auditorium at CCM. This was an event not to be surpassed any time soon, even in arts-rich Cincinnati. Featured work was Manuel de Falla’s “Master Peter’s Puppet Show” in its Cincinnati premiere. CCO music director Mischa Santora conducted, with giant puppets performing in their own theater adjacent to the orchestra on the Corbett Auditorium stage.
Finally, remembering Janus, who represented polarities like peace and war and good and evil along with his other attributes, the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra led by music director James R. Cassidy contrasted heaven and hell November 23 at the Cathedral Basilica in Covington. Gazing heavenward was Durufle’s sublime Requiem with the KSO Chorale. Looking the other way was Franz Liszt’s “Totentanz” (“Dance of Death”) with powerhouse pianist Michael Chertock.