A seasonal performance

Our first high cultural event of the season was last night at the University of Arizona's UAPresents, violinist Robert McDuffie and the Venice Baroque Orchestra playing the Seasons Project: Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons in the first half of the concert, and Philip Glass's second Violin Concerto, entitled The American Four Seasons. McDuffie commissioned the concerto with exactly this pairing in mind, but during the early sketches, McDuffie and Glass differed on which of the concerto's four movements corresponded to which season. Rather than make a statement in the titles, the movements are simply numbered one through four. McDuffie and the VBO are touring the US with this program through November 19, a great opportunity to hear Glass's new concerto in its intended context.

The Venice Baroque Orchestra consists of five first violins, four seconds, three violas and cellos, a double bass, a lutenist, and a keyboard player who played harpsichord in the Vivaldi and a Yamaha MO-8 synthesizer in the Glass. The string players all stand in a semi-circle (except for the cellists, the only ones seated), and there was no conductor for either piece. Everyone was dressed in black, very elegant. Seeing the entire ensemble standing piqued my curiosity and suggested that this concert would have more immediacy and excitement than I usually expect from a classical concert, that the performers approached this in the spirit of a pop concert.

I'm not familiar with the Vivaldi concertos, but the performance was beautiful and most likely a bit idiosyncratic. I thought it was a very romantic performance, more flexible tempi than I expected, even though the VBO is considered a period orchestra and probably plays with more rather than less historical information. It's a typical Baroque convention to mark piano and forte in the score, so perhaps the romantic swells in volume were a contemporary interpretation. The string writing for all parts was masterful, with the sections displacing and complementing each other. I especially liked the solo passages, where McDuffie would start by himself and then be joined by two or three other players. In one passage, the leaders of the first and second violin section seemed to echo McDuffie's melodic lines, slippery little fragments of sound whose shape and timbre seemed centuries ahead of their time.

One of the other common subgroups was a trio with the lute player and the lead cellist. The lutenist was seated front and center, much more prominent and audible from our seats than the harpsichord, so it played a more important role in the continuo, at least from our seats. The lutenist was really having fun, a joy that communicated through all the performers. One of the movements was a song for the lute and strings, and McDuffie pulled out a chair and sat down, stretched out his legs, and listened with a beatific smile on his face.

The individual movements were very dramatic, with the standing orchestra's rhythmic swaying keeping the overall mood light and upbeat. But a side effect was that they would finish a fast movement with a dramatic flourish, which elicited an enthusiastic round of applause. The program didn't break the concertos into movements (although I later gleaned from the notes that each concerto has three movements, fast-slow-fast), so I completely lost track of which concerto they were playing. I don't think it mattered to them, and contributed to the effect that this was more of a pop concert than a classical one.

If everybody was just out having a good time during the first half, the second half was more serious. Gone was the lutenist sidekick, leaving McDuffie alone on center stage. The auditorium did not use a spotlight, and since he was further forward as a soloist in the Glass work, his eyes were completely hidden in shade by the stage lights, which were all overhead. A tall man in black, with no eyes visible, suggestive of the uncanny in his Halloween evening performance! And even in his fast movements, Glass's music doesn't dance the same baroqueries, so the performers body language was more serious as well.

But as beautiful as the Glass concerto was, I missed a conductor, most noticeably during a fast passage in the first movement where the keyboard seemed a bit out of sync with the strings. The orchestra spent much more time making significant eye contact with each other than they did during the Vivaldi, which made me think they weren't entirely comfortable with the piece. Fortunately I never felt an uncertainty after the first movement, so maybe someone was having a bad night. The work is written for strings and synthesizer, but as far as I could tell the timbre of the synthesizer never changed. It sounded like an electric piano, and it was used for punctuation and rhythmic precision, the keyboard music that Glass has written since his earliest work.

Since the concerto has no cadenza per se, Glass wrote a prologue and three songs for solo violin, which can either stand alone or between each movement of the concerto. McDuffie has been playing this piece for a while, and his performance throughout had great depth and feeling. Glass has already released a recording of McDuffie and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop, who played the concerto's European premiere in April 2010. But this tour is a great chance to hear the work live, an unusual opportunity and a great concept. The remainder of the tour is on the US West Coast and then some dates in New England. I encourage anyone close to one of these shows to check it out.

Rich in Tucson

Tucson's Solar Culture Gallery had another great show last night, the ambient artist Robert Rich. He played a continuous 90-minute set with more rhythm than I typically associate with his music, many passages underpinned with a tribal beat, which must have been pre-programmed since I didn't see Rich make any action that would have produced drum sounds other than hitting a couple of keys on his laptop. His albums have often given me the feeling of a nocturnal jungle, with lots of small avian and insect sounds seething in the mix, and this feeling was enhanced by a bright green, continuously moving light show behind him. For the electronic part of his setup he had an analog synthesizer from Synthesis Technology, a couple of keyboards, a small Apple laptop, and a mixing board. He would use these instruments to set up different kinds of textures, which became the ground for his lead instruments: a variety of flutes (perhaps constructed from wood, but some of them looked like PVC pipe) and a pedal steel guitar, both plucked and played with an ebow. Having seen him perform, I can now recognize these instruments on his other live albums; they are all over the three-CD set of concert recordings Humidity, for example. On a couple of occasions, he played brief interludes on exotic percussion, including a waterphone. Solar Culture has a superb sound system, so the music was at the right volume, loud but not deafening. The gallery is in Tucson's warehouse district, with train tracks close by, and he even incorporated the train whistles into the set. He chatted around the merch table before the show and was happy to answer questions afterwards, very pleasant and easy conversations. This was a memorable concert, and 2010 is shaping up to be a great year for live music.

Post-rock night in Tucson

Last night we went to see a post-rock twin bill, Balmorhea (from Austin, Texas) opening for Mono (from Tokyo) at the local club Plush. In general I feel fortunate to find local concerts from groups I admire, and unfortunately last night there was a serious conflict. The Solar Culture Gallery had the drone rock group Growing, which I'm sure would have been great. But we picked the post-rockers, for which we have no regrets whatsoever.

Actually, it's almost a misnomer to call Balmorhea "post-rock," brought about in this case by their concert association with emblematic Japanese tour partners. Balmorhea's instrumentation, especially on their studio recordings, is nearly all acoustic, and their music would fit more comfortably with post-classic musicians like Max Richter or Nils Frahm (recent European tourmate). The two head men, Rob Lowe and Mike Muller, played acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards, banjo, percussion, with a three-piece string section (violin, cello, bass) and a drummer. I'm not familiar with enough of their music to say what they played, but the set was quite varied, from quiet acoustic fingerpicking to energetic, minimalist music with a strong rock beat. The strings provided a great set of drones, with the violinist arpeggiating the high overtones. There were still seats at the back of the bar when we arrived. But as the floor filled up our view was occasionally and variably blocked, so I'm not entirely sure what everyone was doing at any particular moment. We had a beer with Muller for a bit during the break between sets and talked about a wide range of topics, and of course I picked up their latest CD.

Mono, pictured above, took the stage with little fanfare or announcement, progressing from tentative melodies to a full onslaught of sound, immersiv, ecstatic, loud. We abandoned our seats back by the bar and came forward to the stage. The two guitarists sat on stools, so the only one moving was Tamaki, the slender bass player who eyed the audience deadpan, swaying gently with the music and in complete contrast to her increasingly frenzied partners. There were no vocal microphones on stage at all. The two guitarists had banks of foot pedals, set on a board in rows. The pieces seemed long, slowly building up tension and volume, layering melodies on top of shifting harmonic drones. When I thought that they had reached a maximum, they kept going deeper and louder, making them nearly cathartic. One of the pieces climaxed with one guitar in squalls of feedback, finally setting the guitar on the stage and manipulating the foot pedals manually. I have several Mono albums, but it's exhilarating to hear them at the proper volume.

Since this was our first visit to Plush, let me mention a quick endorsement for the club. Sometimes rock shows can be found in real dives, but Plush was classy, with a well-stocked bar, a couple of patios, and good parking. Mono was touring with Pelican the night we arrived in Tucson, nearly four years ago. I missed them that night, so I also get a certain symbolic grounding from last night's tremendous show. Now if only my ears would stop ringing….