I spent much of last night cataloging videos that I shot during June, some of performances in Ojai and one of a performance at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in Michigan. Watching these gave me a strong feeling of nostalgia for what was probably the best summer, musically speaking, that I’ve yet experienced.
So here are some of my highlights.
The first two took place at Ojai: performing Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (as pianist/marimba-ist) and Louis Andriessen’s Worker’s Union (as screamingly loud piccolo-ist). These legendary pieces take very different approaches to the minimalist aesthetic, one pulsating with an almost comforting and uplifting radiance – very much art-for-art’s-sake (18); the other a punch-in-the-face of dissonant, unrelenting sheer bloody loudness, intended to start a socialist revolution (Worker’s, a piece that, in a case of very deep irony, costs a helluva lot of capitalist money to rent and perform). With an amazing cast of percussionists and other players, both pieces came together quickly and somewhat easily in rehearsal, given their difficulty and the intensity of concentration required to perform them. Watching the video of the Ojai Worker’s, which made a fitting conclusion to the festival, I was happy to find that my memories of the performance seemed to communicate to the “bowl”: the amazing rhythmic precision of some 40+ players giving blood, sweat and tears to create an obsessive, invigorating racket that teetered on the brink of all-out pandemonium. And when it was over, the audience just bloody went nuts. What a feeling. Below, a still from the video showing the final, chaotic release:
After Ojai we dragged our exhausted but happy selves to Michigan for the fabulous little-festival-that-could, Great Lakes. I was to play JS Bach’s B minor flute sonata with Jeremy Denk, a prospect that, to be honest, scared the living shit out of me. This fear was heightened when ThinkDenk told me that this was one of his favorite Bach works. Lacking adequate scheduled rehearsal time, we dragged the music out at a festival house-party and, with quite a few drinks in us, read through it together, generating a spontaneous, late-evening, slightly drunken soiree. Jeremy is a searching musician. Unable to rest on his laurels, every phrase and every note he plays is chock-a-block full of character, life and drama (shown in his facial expressions as much as the audible result), and even with some grog in him, he made a living, breathing piece of theater out of the Bach, a work that, in a poor performance, can sound similar to the experience of watching AstroTurf grow (the first movement is Bach’s longest chamber music movement). Watching the video of our performance last night, I observed myself playing with a confidence and sense of playfulness that can be absent in my too-often careful fluting (a Melbourne reviewer once described an interpretation of mine as “jog-trotting” through a piece). My sense is that I mostly succeeded in matching Jeremy’s abrupt shifts of color, dynamics and touch and, rarest of all, I actually enjoyed watching and listening to myself. Below, a still from the performance video:
Finally, and thanks to the recommendations of the Alb and the Mac, I filled in at the Cabrillo Festival of contemporary orchestral music in Santa Cruz, CA, in early August. Apart from the sheer joy of playing principal flute in a professional orchestra again (it had been three years), and the fact that two Aussie composer friends (Brett Dean and Matthew Hindson) were represented at the festival, I just loved working with the spectacular Marin Alsop. Maestra Alsop is “all that,” and then some. Cabrillo is clearly an orchestra that she loves (walking onto the podium at the first rehearsal she announced in a very no-nonsense way that it was great to be back with “my favorite orchestra”), and although the workload is heavy and schedule is quite brutal, every last member in the orchestra consistently and enthusiastically gave their all to realize her musical vision. It is, essentially, a grown up youth orchestra.
Highlights of the two-week festival? Brett Dean’s darkly humorous, hugely intense, dazzlingly orchestrated Moments of Bliss (bleeding chunks from Dean’s forthcoming opera based on Peter Carey’s first novel, Bliss) brought out the best in Marin. She was so no-nonsense during rehearsals that I was completely unprepared for the blindingly intense reading she gave of the work’s final, dramatic slow movement, a moving musical portrait of the complex but ultimately tragic wife of Bliss’ main “good bloke” protagonist. Even Brett was suitably impressed. Then there was Aaron Jay Kernis’ phenomenally difficult Invisible Mosaic III, surely the most difficult piece of orchestral music I’ve ever played. Despite a packed rehearsal schedule, Marin seemed determined to bring this wonderful, misshapen beast to heel, and during the work’s second performance, on the festival’s final evening, everything came together to make me realize that the piece really was more than the sum of its over-complex parts.
Below, two Aussies after the Grateful Dead Symphony performance at Cabrillo. L to R: Brett Dean, and some hippie, mountain man-type…
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