George Lewis, a pivotal figure in early twenty-first century American music, is spending the academic year in Berlin, on a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg. He will be completing his new chamber opera Comet/Poppea, a hybrid work combining a setting of W. E. B. Du Bois's sci-fi story "The Comet" with an adaptation of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea. Yuval Sharon will direct the inaugural production in New York and Long Beach in June 2021. While in Europe, Lewis will be collaborating with two renowned ensembles: first, the London Sinfonietta, for which he has co-curated — with Elaine Mitchener — a program of Jason Yarde, Leila Adu-Gilmore, Hannah Kendall, Tania León, Courtney Bryan, and Lewis himself (Oct. 28); and the Ensemble Modern, for which he has assembled an "Afro-Modernism" lineup of Alvin Singleton, Jessie Cox, Daniel Kidane, Andile Khumalo, and Kendall and León again (Nov. 7 in Essen, Nov. 13 in Frankfurt). The Sinfonietta concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3; whether any of the Modern material will travel the airwaves is unclear. If you want a marvelous survey of Lewis's musical world-view, watch the Spektral Quartet's Floating Lounge session with the composer, with a playlist ranging from Coltrane to Czernowin.
Wagnerism
Love in the time of COVID
The LA Phil has released the first video in its SOUND/STAGE series, drawing on performances that were filmed at the Hollywood Bowl in early August. I attended a couple of the recording sessions and wrote about them in The New Yorker this week. I'm struck again by the bittersweet atmosphere, the tinge of melancholy, which hangs over the lovely musicmaking. That tinge strikes me as an honest and necessary. To spout clichés about "reimagining" concert formats, to issue boilerplate language about resilience and resourcefulness, ignores the elemental struggles that so many musicians are undergoing, not to mention the grief that has invaded so many lives.
The conjunction of Peter Lieberson's "Amor mio, si muero y tú no mueres" ("My love, if I die and you don't") with the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony brings to mind a personal memory. In college, I took a theory class with Lieberson, and one day he detoured from a close reading of Schubert's "Erlkönig" into a rhapsody over the Adagietto. I recall him listening along to Bernstein's DG recording, his eyes closed in bliss, the rigors of harmonic analysis momentarily forgotten.
Previously: Fervor, For Peter Lieberson.
A Harold Shapero moment
From a fascinating new disc of Shapero's orchestral music by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Of course this music is very heavily reminiscent of Stravinsky, but some passages are startlingly original, such as this recurring texture of shrill, spiraling winds and droning brass (matching 6:45 in the video):
