Folks --
In case you didn't catch today's paper, I'd like to draw your notice to this, my first NY Times review!
Naomi Gurt Lind
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/arts/babbit-music-review.html
MUSIC REVIEW
'Works of Milton Babbitt': 5 Decades of a Composer's Challenges
By PAUL GRIFFITHS
One of the many things that make Milton Babbitt's music so thoroughly and delightfully old-fashioned is how it addresses the performer civilly as a colleague. For though a score of Mr. Babbitt's may look at first glance like a presumptive demand, full of awkward rhythmic turns, extreme oscillations of line and erratic dynamic markings, longer acquaintance reveals it as a set of proposals, even questions. How is this interval going to work at this point in the texture and continuity? Where is the accent in this figure and where the direction? What kinds of resemblance matter?
Most performers need help answering such questions, especially when they are fresh in their careers, which is why it was such a good idea for Musical Observations 2000 to arrange for a group of young professional musicians to have an introduction to Mr. Babbitt's music by being coached for a week by players of greater experience: Paul Zukofsky, Fred Sherry and Martin Goldray. At the end of the week, on Thursday evening, a short concert at the Henry Street Settlement turned into a warm and electrically alive celebration of Mr. Babbitt's active mind and of his stubborn determination to air that mind through more than half a century.
Set out chronologically the program began with one of his earliest pieces, the Composition for Four Instruments of 1947-48. This was partly a homage to his beloved Schoenberg -- then still living -- in that the four instruments are those of Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire," leaving out the piano. But what the work also characteristically leaves out is the post-Romantic rhetoric of expressive phrasing that had been essential to Schoenberg's style. Though full of incident the music is curiously and fascinatingly still.
It remains for the performers not so much to propel it as to make it glow, and that happened here, thanks to a careful attention to the dynamics, to a feeling of partnership within the ensemble, and to the players' maintaining their concentration right through to the closing section. There the tempo slackens, and the piece pauses briefly on the threshold of Aaron Copland's white-note music before finding its own close.
After that the soprano Naomi Gurt Lind and the pianist Anton Vishio brought the story forward to the early 1950's by presenting "The Widow's Lament in Springtime" and the compact connected cycle "Du." Once again there were connections with the wider musical world, for "The Widow's Lament" gives a hint of what a 12-tone Broadway show might have sounded like with lyrics, as here, by William Carlos Williams.
Ms. Lind responded beautifully to the exquisite vocal writing and conveyed a sense of both works as the reports of shocked, stunned survivors, capable of sudden flares. Mr. Vishio, while engagingly sensitive to her, showed that the piano accompaniments are as finely made as Mr. Babbitt's solo pieces, full of opportunities for grace and color.
Then, jumping four decades, came a piece and a half from 1993: the horn solo "Around the Horn," played by Gregory D. Evans, and the first half of the Sixth Quartet, performed by Harumi Rhodes, Aaron Boyd, James Hogg and Katherine Cherbas. The light in the quartet was particularly remarkable, and how the musicians disported themselves in the open and often high-lying counterpoint. Though by this point in his output there is very little obvious regularity in how Mr. Babbitt's music moves, the quartet seemed to dance.
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