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From:  Naomi Gurt Lind <omigurt@s...>
Date:  Tue Sep 5, 2000  12:05 am
Subject:  my first NY times review! : )


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.




  Replies Name/Email Yahoo! ID Date Size
3967 Re: my first NY times review! : ) Scott Drackley   Tue  9/5/2000   2 KB
3969 Re: my first NY times review! : ) David Grogan   Tue  9/5/2000   5 KB
3990 Re: my first NY times review! : ) Bobby Kravitz   Tue  9/5/2000   2 KB
3991 Re: my first NY times review! : ) Howitt123@a...   Tue  9/5/2000   1 KB
4006 Re: my first NY times review! : ) Linda Fox   Tue  9/5/2000   2 KB

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