In review: Sounds, Tears, and Skins

In a moment when our government seems to be doing all it can to sever ties of international solidarity, it’s reassuring to be reminded that there are many working to strengthen those ties. Such was the case with Ensemble Télémaque’s visit to the Bombyx Center for Arts and Equality in Florence on April 12, where the mixed ensemble premiered four new works by American composers written in conversation with literary figures connected to the group’s home in Marseille.

Kate Soper’s Antonin Artaud’s Drama of the Mind (featuring Paolo Uccello) kicked the afternoon off with gnashing cries and a discombobulated walking bass humorous in its bumbling inability to get anywhere. The work’s jittery, self-referential text — adapted by Soper from a 1925 Artaud play — defies narrative logic as it ricochets from an invented feud between Renaissance artists to acerbic quips about the creative process. Delivered, frequently in rhythmic unison, by a soprano and a speaking actor, the words themselves felt less important than the opportunity they provided for moments of fragile loveliness and ominous collapse.

Artaud was born in Marseille; other connections were less direct. The Imposter, with music by David Dominique and text by Dominique and Joseph Tepperman, centers on an invented character, Arnault Bantam, who interferes (convolutedly) with the affairs of two Harlem Renaissance writers, Arna Bontemps and Claude McKay, the latter having spent time in Marseille among many other international locations. The lilt of the gently rocking musical backdrop created an air of somnolent perplexity that left the work feeling like a prelude to some deeper mystery.^[1]

International travel took a more desperate form in John Aylward’s Between Heaven and Earth, which chronicles Franz Werfel’s flight from Nazi Germany in 1939 by stitching together various literary and personal documents. Queasy pointillistic textures and thwarted desperate strivings gestured towards the hunted claustrophobia of repeated escape attempts, though some of the effects (like the heavy-handed punctuation of each “STOP” in a telegram) slipped awkwardly towards comedy.

Yu-Hui Chang’s Accidental Hero closed the concert with the story of the radiator heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who used her fortune to help some two thousand Jewish refugees escape Vichy France. While the speaker and singer acted out an obscure drama of faked papers, the music ranged from breathy low-register piccolo writhings to obliterating police whistles, conjuring a dying world starting to rot.

In a pre-concert Q&A, ensemble director Raoul Lay translated Telemakhos as “far from the fight”. He meant this in an artistic sense, but ignoring petty aesthetic squabbles leaves more energy for other fights. If there were no overt references to the present in the concert itself, the parallels to concentration camps, armed agents of the state waging campaigns of racist terror in the streets, and the international solidarity necessary to shatter fascist states all but drew themselves. Whether we want to be or not, we’re in this fight for our lives.

In Brief

Ensemble Télémanque made heavy use of the accordion in their ensemble. I assume not every event at Bombyx does, but the all-star klezmer bill they presented on the 18^th certainly did: Ira Temple deployed the instrument to great effect alongside Michael Winograd’s raucous clarinet. Paired with Two Strings’ twangy cimbalom — a kind of naked piano played by hammering the strings with hand-held mallets — the joyous evening was a feast for the ears as well as the heart.

Last week’s post for $10+ subscribers featured a whole slew of dissonant pieces, ranging from ambient washes of sound to angular high-modernist snarls. Needless to say, there’s still plenty of ground I wasn’t able to cover, and I wanted to give a shout-out to one particular piece I had to cut from the list: David Baker’s pungent, propulsive Kosbro, which I fell in love with when it was played as part of the New York Philharmonic’s Afromodernism concert this past fall. Fellow fans of dissonance: What pieces have been in your ears of late?

In My Calendar

This set of listings is not comprehensive; it’s just what happens to be on my radar that I’m particularly excited about. If you are a performer, presenter, or publicist in the local classical music scene, please add me to your mailing list so I can keep an eye out for your offerings!

Entries marked with a ∅ are free and do not require advance registration.

• Ø April 21, 11:00am: The UMass music department^[1] presents a pre-lunch selection of madrigals ranging from the 1500s to the 20^th century. There will also be some helpful explanatory remarks and a chance for rising performers to do their best animal impressions.
• Ø April 22, 7:30pm: The Hartt School presents an evening of American recital songs. The details of the program are pretty sparse, but the recital song repertoire is rich and varied, so good odds that there will be something on there that strikes your fancy.
• Ø April 23, 7:30pm: Back at UMass, the percussion ensemble plays their spring concert. I know a few of these pieces and/or composers (the Torke especially catches my eye), but as ever, the ones I’m most excited about are the ones I don’t know at all.
• Ø April 24, 8:30pm: And then again back down at Hartt, there’s a queer composers concert that sounds like it will be very sweet. Many years ago, I remember Rachel Maddow joking about Northampton having to beat the rest of the world to the punch by having their pride parade in May every year; it looks like Hartt is trying to one up us!
• April 25, 8:00pm: A number of regional ensembles join forces to premiere a new cantata on the life of Frederick Douglass. I don’t know the composer in question, but I’ve heard some buzz about this from local musician friends, and it sounds like it has the potential to be something of an Event.
• April 26, 3:00pm: Hadley’s Wesley United Methodist Church presents a string quartet fundraiser for the Western Massachusetts Asylum Support Network. I’ve seen this listed in a couple different places with slightly different repertoire indications, but it’s a worthy cause whatever they wind up playing.
• Ø April 26, 7:00pm: Mount Holyoke’s percussion ensemble takes their turn in the spotlight. Repertoire not listed, but the guitar sounds fun.
• Ø April 28, 7:30pm: For those more to the northwest, the Williams College brass ensemble presents an evening of brass chamber music. It sounds like there will be many new arrangements, perhaps including some non-standard performing techniques.
• Ø May 2, 1:00pm: Continuing the run of end-of-semester offerings, Mount Holyoke’s student composers present an end-of-year showcase. I always find it heartening how many new voices there are working in this tradition and carrying it forward to the next generation.
• May 2, 7:00pm: Even further north, Castle of Our Skins presents music of the Great Migration at the Brattleboro Music Center. Castle of Our Skins have a reputation for matching incisive programming with top-notch musicianship; on the ticket page, it looks like they’re giving a pre-concert talk at 6:15.
• May 2, 7:30pm: The Springfield Symphony Orchestra ends their formal season with three hefty works, including a fairly recent violin concerto by Kris Bowers. (And even I am not totally immune to the buoyancy of the finale to Brahms 2...)
• Ø May 3, 3:00pm: The Holyoke Civic Symphony celebrates the country’s 250^th anniversary with a wide-ranging program that includes a few off-the-beaten-path options alongside the usual warhorses.
• May 3, 4:00pm: Der Tkhines Proyekt presents the work of their latest group of writers in a livestream-only concert. This perhaps strays a little from the core beat of this newsletter, but I was very moved the last time I caught one of their offerings and think they strike a beautiful balance between deeply rooted tradition and revolutionary innovation.