The Post-Classical: No Coats, Ties or Stuffed Shirts
By Stephen Brookes
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 14, 2007; M05
Listen closely to the average symphony orchestra, and you can almost hear it lumbering into extinction. Large-bodied, slow-moving and frighteningly expensive, classical music's most important institutions seem increasingly like relics of a distant age, kept alive by an audience that gets grayer every year. Most younger listeners are oblivious -- they give classical music the same respect they hold for the periwig and pince-nez -- but few orchestras are doing much to draw them in, huddling around formulas that haven't worked for years: formal concerts, disdain for contemporary culture and a numbing attachment to the music of 19th-century Germany.
"There's a need for fundamental change -- the format and the repertoire of the concert needs to be completely rethought," says Joseph Horowitz, author of the groundbreaking book "Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall." Conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez agrees: "We cannot do music in the same way, because humanity has changed."
But Horowitz and Gil-Ordóñez aren't just criticizing -- they're charging the ramparts. Four years ago they launched an unusual D.C.-based group called the Post-Classical Ensemble as a sort of working laboratory for new ideas. And they've turned the traditional model on its head: Unlike traditional orchestras, the ensemble has no fixed size (it's made up of freelancers hired for specific programs), no fixed home (it's played everywhere from the Library of Congress to Strathmore), a minuscule budget and complete freedom to take risks.
The bold approach is part of a wider movement to shake the classical world out of its torpor and to drag it -- kicking and screaming, if necessary -- into the 21st century. Innovative groups such as Cleveland's Red (an orchestra) and New York's Wordless Music-- which pairs rock and classical performers together onstage -- are using flexible ensembles and uninhibited approaches to both music and performance. They're throwing out staid conventions and dated repertoire -- even the term "classical" itself -- and reinventing the classical concert from the ground up.
The Post-Classical Ensemble, for instance, has brought life-size puppets to the Kennedy Center, juxtaposed Mexican folk songs with edgy new orchestral works and even shared the stage with a gypsy band from Budapest. And the ensemble's fifth season -- which opens this afternoon at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center with a live performance of Aaron Copland's score for the 1939 documentary "The City" -- is just as unconventional. There's a program on the first African American opera company in the United States (complete with the operetta performed), a concert devoted to the brilliant, little-known Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas and a provocative look at how exile in the United States affected the immigrant composers Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg.
But it isn't just eclecticism for its own sake. Each Post-Classical Ensemble performance focuses on a single idea -- often a single piece of music -- then explores it by drawing freely on film, theater, dance, poetry or anything else to provide context or insight. If, for example, it's illuminating to pair Mahler's "The Song of the Earth" with traditional Chinese pipa music and a contemporary work from a Chinese American composer (which, remarkably enough, it is), then the ensemble will do it.
"It's a broader exercise than just presenting music in live performance," says Horowitz. "We insist on moving outside the parameters of classical music."
The result: unpredictable, idea-rich concerts designed to challenge the audience. Post-Classical is still well off the beaten path, but audiences are starting to grow -- and they're as diverse, says Horowitz, as the music itself.
A longtime music critic, Horowitz, 59, honed his ideas while serving as executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1990s, where he was tasked with halting a precipitous drop in attendance. He threw out the old subscription template, developed themed, interdisciplinary concerts, got rid of celebrity performers -- and turned the group around in just a few seasons.
While Horowitz takes an analytical approach to the topic (he's written eight books on music and tends to speak in long, perfectly manicured paragraphs), Gil-Ordóñez, 50, addresses it almost physically. A conductor who spent many years with the National Symphony Orchestra of Spain, he's a kinetic performer onstage, using his entire body to guide the ensemble. His conversation is just as animated. Ask him a question and 20 ideas spill out in a headlong rush -- illustrated with shouts, snippets of a song, dramatic whispers and the occasional groan, all inflamed with revolutionary passion.
Almost everything about the classical world lights his fuse: the isolation of the concert hall, the stuffy, outdated rituals. "Everything is so artificial!" he says, clenching his fists in frustration. "The performers in black: 'Okay, we will allow you, the audience, to be here.' The person who says 'shhhh!' if you want to applaud between movements. Really -- why would you want to go to that?"
Instead, he says, classical music needs to recover the freewheeling atmosphere it had before it became, well, classical. "When you went to a concert 200 years ago, it was the event of the week. You were there to meet your friends, to talk -- even during performances! At the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth, people jumped up shouting in the second movement: Aarrgghhhh! Like Mick Jagger!
"And this is the key: We have to recover this sense of spontaneity. I am still hoping somebody in the audience will just sing aloud some of the music while I'm conducting."
But the primary focus, both he and Horowitz agree, is moving beyond the mainstream repertoire.
"I use the term 'post-classical' to identify what's going on at the borders, whether it's the border between China and the U.S., or gamelan and the symphonic orchestra, or West African drumming and jazz," says Horowitz. "And the most interesting composers -- people like Zhou Long, Lou Harrison and Steve Reich -- are all post-classical."
The strategy makes sense, because modern audiences are post-classical, too. Raised on a global diet of music -- everything from salsa to grunge rock to Japanese gagaku -- younger listeners can hardly be blamed for finding the traditional European repertoire narrow and Dead-White-Male-ish.
But that doesn't mean they're not interested in serious music; they just want it performed for 21st-century ears.
"One failing in the classical world is not really understanding the audience," says critic Greg Sandow, who teaches a course at Juilliard on the future of music. "Maybe the most important thing now is a real knowledge of pop culture and the world in which your music is going to be received. People who watch 'The Sopranos' -- as I do! -- are going to be a little restless listening to 'Tosca,' " he says, laughing.
In the end, according to several observers, the classical world may have no choice but to change. Bureaucracy-heavy institutions like the National Symphony Orchestra (with its $29 million budget) are competing for the next generation against more adventurous groups like the Post-Classical Ensemble -- whose lean, $400,000 annual operation gives it the flexibility to take risks.
"Symphony orchestras," Gil-Ordóñez says flatly, "are going to disappear."
Sandow won't go that far but pronounces the situation "fairly dire." The age of the mainstream classical audience has been rising for 50 years; ticket sales have been dropping for the past 20, he notes. "Orchestras are finding it very restricting to keep 80 musicians under contract for 52 weeks, and that model is not really sustainable. The future may belong to smaller, more nimble organizations. We're still learning what works."
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Monday, March 19, 2007; Page C05
Post-Classical Ensemble
The Post-Classical Ensemble may be the most thought-provoking music group in town. It's certainly one of the most innovative, using its concerts as laboratories for musical thought experiments. Often focusing on a single piece -- or even a single movement from a single piece -- the group probes a work's cultural "back story," pulling away layer after layer of context to expose its innermost core. Their performances can be demanding -- but they're invariably beautiful, and never dull.
That was the case Friday night at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, when the ensemble focused on the "The Farewell" -- the final movement of Mahler's song-symphony "Song of the Earth." Based on translations of three 8th-century Chinese poems, the work is redolent of Eastern influences, and the evening opened by going directly to the roots: traditional Chinese music, followed by a reading (in Chinese) of the original poems that inspired the composer.
Those same poems were also the basis of the next work on the program, a new "Farewell" by composer Zhou Long. It was a masterly work -- atmospheric, finely wrought music that captured the delicate melancholy of the poems without ever descending into sentimentality. Long speaks a thoroughly modern language and has one of the most striking sonic imaginations of any composer around, but it was the sheer grace of this music that lingered in the ears.
Barely pausing for breath, conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez led the ensemble into the Mahler -- a chamber version for 13 instruments, reduced from the vast orchestral original. And it was a revelatory performance: Pared down to its essentials, "The Farewell" gained in clarity what it lost in mass, and mezzo Delores Ziegler was able to take an intimate approach that brought out all the elusive beauty of the Chinese poems.
On DVD, American Propaganda's High-Water Mark
Pare Lorentz’s “River” and “Plow”: The high art of propaganda
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 28, 2007; Page N02
At the 1938 Venice Film Festival, Pare Lorentz's "The River" won best documentary for his New Deal film about the flooding and "taming" of the Mississippi River, beating Leni Riefenstahl's far more ambitious "Olympia," a visual symphony shot at Hitler's 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Riefenstahl's celebration of athletic competition had strong Nazi undertones, but it was Lorentz's Mississippi film that was the more forthright exercise in propaganda. It was bought and paid for by the U.S. government, an effort to convince the public that Roosevelt-era projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, would make the United States a more fair, livable and humane society.
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It is such good propaganda that watching it 70 years later on a new Naxos DVD feels a little creepy. "The River" was one of two major projects that Lorentz filmed with music commissioned from composer and famous music critic Virgil Thomson, and the DVD includes vibrant new recordings of the soundtracks by the D.C.-based Post-Classical Ensemble. Thomson's music, combined with the Whitmanesque torrents of poetry in Lorentz's script and powerful images of natural grandeur and squalid poverty, makes "The River" and the earlier "The Plow That Broke the Plains" disturbing examples of what a full-fledged American propaganda machine might produce. There are moments, especially involving tractors (the great fetish object of 20th-century propagandists), when you are certain that this film could have been produced in one of the political film mills of the totalitarian states of Europe.
Courtesy Of Naxos Of America
The music draws on Thomson's study and appreciation of cowboy ditties, church hymns and other folk melodies, all of which have such deep and far-reaching associations that few Americans will fail to find something that is both familiar and unconsciously haunting. Lorentz was smart enough to recognize great music when he heard it, and he cut his films to fit Thomson's scores when necessary. The result is a quasi-operatic film that comes as close as anything this country produced to the great collaborations between Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev in the Soviet Union.
Although Thomson recycled his music into popular concert suites, hearing it in its original context is revelatory. He was taking film music in a very different direction from the composers who took root in Hollywood in the mid-1930s (Max Steiner, Franz Waxman), who were working in a lush, heavily orchestrated, post-Wagnerian vein. Often described as "deceptively simple," Thomson's music was leaner and more transparent, but filled with little flourishes, such as fugal passages, that set it far above the hackwork that accompanied so many commercial films. He followed the progress of the film's editing closely, and his music is always in subtle dialogue with what one sees on-screen.
Given the state of camera technology at the time, it was prohibitively expensive, and unwieldy, to film outdoors with sound for a low-budget documentary. So Lorentz's original soundtrack was made mostly in the studio, with Thomson's music, a Voice of God narration and the occasional bit of "diegetic" sound (whistles, explosions, etc.) added when the visuals demanded it. That made it easy to rerecord the entire soundtrack from scratch for the DVD -- which puts these often difficult-to-find films into general circulation again. The DVD also includes an option to play the film with the original, rather tinny sound, but most viewers will be far more satisfied with the new version, including the voice-over (by Shakespeare Theatre favorite Floyd King) that miraculously captures the orotund and overheated rhetorical style of the original.
The DVD also includes commentary from George Stoney, who showed "The River" often while he worked at the Farm Security Administration. Stoney's observation that the film is structured like "an evangelical sermon" nails it. Both films build from a loving description of the landscape and then introduce the depredations of man into this state of innocence. The land is overtaxed, man has squandered his inheritance, nature takes its revenge. But through the benign grace of your government, help is on the way. If you've never teared up at the sight of a reforestation project or a new hydroelectric dam, well, maybe you haven't seen Lorentz's work.
Perhaps the most haunting images here are flooding scenes on the Mississippi. As Lorentz was finishing up "The River," a huge flood overwhelmed the vast Mississippi system -- and Lorentz sent his cameramen to capture the devastation. The film offers the hope that the river might one day be tamed, from the Gulf of Mexico to its farthest reaches into the continent. That was a false hope and now, after Hurricane Katrina, we know just how false. But the power of propaganda overwhelms any nagging questions raised by our sense of historical hindsight. Even if the idea of the government's funding these films is abhorrent to you, even if the message they offer was premised on questionable land management ideas, cinematically they still work.
The propaganda impulse would move, in the 1940s, to Hollywood, as the major studios got behind the war effort. But mostly, American artists have shunned the idea of "Show Business for Uncle Sam," as Thomson titled the chapter in his biography that covered his work with Lorentz. That doesn't mean we don't get plenty of propaganda -- presidential photo ops, "video news releases" that masquerade as local television reporting -- but we have not, very often, had propaganda of this quality and mastery and detail. These films are a lot of fun, but you'll leave relieved there weren't more of them.
November's Best Classical Concerts
By Tim Page
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, November 3, 2006
The Post Classical Ensemble has brightened Washington's musical world with several programs since its founding four years ago. On Nov. 19, you might as well move into the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center for the day, as the group presents "Beyond Flamenco, Finding Spain in Music." The program will consist of a piano concert (Albeniz's "Iberia"), multimedia presentations and an evening of music by Manuel de Falla. Angel Gil-Ordóñez is the music director, with artistic direction by Joseph Horowitz.
Arts & Life
Music
Post-Classical, Performing Some Very Good Works
Thursday, March 16, 2006; Page C04
Classical music may be dying a slow death, but not if Joseph Horowitz has anything to say about it. Author of the essential "Classical Music in America," executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and founder (with Angel Gil-Ordonez) of the Post Classical Ensemble, Horowitz has been dragging classical music out of its High Culture sickbed and giving it a series of healthy kicks.
And on Tuesday night the Ensemble did just that, in a bold concert at the Virginia Theological Seminary titled "Manuel de Falla and the Music of Faith."
The concert focused on a single movement of a single piece -- the 1926 Concerto for Keyboard -- which many Falla lovers tend to view with distrust or outright hate.
And it was brilliant. The program explored the deep Spanish roots of this remarkable work, which resonates with everything from Renaissance polyphony to 18th-century keyboard works to the toe-curling, 16th-century erotic-mystical poetry of John of the Cross -- all in a thoroughly modernist style.
Gil-Ordonez opened with three early choral works -- Thomas Aquinas's "Pange Lingua Gloriosi" and two sublime works by the 16th-century Tomas Luis de Victoria -- before pianist Pedro Carbone and the five members of the ensemble unleashed the Falla concerto. The piece is instantly compelling; it opens and closes with two colorful, biting and Stravinsky-flavored movements, each providing delight for the ear and sustenance for the brain.
But it was the slow and thoroughly magnificent middle movement that was the epicenter of the evening.
Radiant and austere, exalting and almost hymnlike, it shimmers with light, with vastness. As it unfolds, you think: This is what God listens to on a Sunday afternoon.
-- Stephen Brookes
November's Best Classical Concerts
By Tim Page
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Friday, October 28, 2005
The Post-Classical Ensemble has added a new and engaging dimension to our musical life in the years since it was founded -- all of its programs are of both musical and intellectual interest. On Nov. 19 at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, the group will present Manuel de Falla's "Master Peter's Puppet Show," a 30-minute opera performed by life-size puppets, as well as Ravel's "Don Quixote" songs and another song cycle based on Cervantes by Jacques Ibert.
Pare Lorentz's American Beauties
By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 11, 2005; Page C01
The term "silent film" is a convenient but slippery catchphrase to describe movies that were made in the years before Warner Bros. introduced spoken dialogue in the late 1920s. In fact, early films were rarely silent, but accompanied by music of considerable sophistication, played on the piano or organ or by full orchestra. No less distinguished a musician than Camille Saint-Saens wrote for the "silent" film; so did composers Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Dmitri Shostakovich.
The two short documentaries by the late poet, critic and filmmaker Pare Lorentz -- "The Plow That Broke the Plains" (1936) and "The River" (1938) -- which the American Film Institute will present today and tomorrow at its AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, are not technically silent films, as both feature narration and some sound effects, dubbed in after the fact. And yet their idiosyncratic twinning of music and image, combined with their lack of dialogue, infuses them with the spirit of both the silent film and the spectacular, plotless avant-garde syntheses that composer Philip Glass and filmmaker Godfrey Reggio would explore in works such as "Koyaanisqatsi" (1983) and "Powaqqatsi" (1988) half a century later.
"The River" is a tale of the Mississippi that ends with the birth of the Tennessee Valley Authority. (American Film Institute)
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It was Lorentz's decision to collaborate with the American composer Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) that elevated these films from visually arresting but decidedly of-its-time documentary realism into the realm of totemic American art. Thomson took Lorentz's images and set them to music that was both accessible and sophisticated, combining cowboy songs, bugle calls, Baptist hymns, hints of jazz and tangy dissonance, and then setting them all for saxophone, banjo, harmonium and orchestra. For these AFI performances, Thomson's scores will be performed live by a 40-piece orchestra, the Post-Classical Ensemble, under the musical direction of Angel Gil-Ordoñez, and the narration will be read by local actor Floyd King. Immediately after the showings, there will be an onstage discussion of the Lorentz-Thomson partnership, featuring Andy Trudeau from National Public Radio, composer Charles Fussell, filmmaker George Stoney and Post-Classical Ensemble Artistic Director Joseph Horowitz.
It was the U.S. government itself that sponsored these two films -- $6,000 from the Department of Agriculture for "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and, after "Plow" had been released and admired, a full $50,000 for "The River" (the latter sum raised by undersecretary Rexford Tugwell in a half-hour, through a phone call to President Franklin D. Roosevelt).
To call "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and "The River" propaganda is to belabor the obvious. Both were lyrical exaltations of the New Deal, paid for by the New Deal -- the first a plea for desperate farmers and their families in the Great Plains, the latter a history of the Mississippi River culminating in the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. They serve an agenda and serve it well but will seem to many rather starry-eyed and promotional to count as successful history (although the Baltimore Sun said "Plow" included "more serious drama in this truthful record of the soil than in all the 'Covered Wagons' and 'Big Trails' produced by the commercial cinema").
Judged on their artistic merits, the films make a far stronger impression. Thomson's music is wonderfully fluid and expressive, and the images Lorentz presents -- whether the Mississippi roaring along from Minnesota to New Orleans or miles upon miles of parched desert grasses -- are hauntingly evocative. (How strange to see a paddle-wheel riverboat as a form of serious transportation, rather than a day-tripper's excuse for some gambling and beer.) The texts, by Lorentz himself, combine Gertrude Stein-ian reiteration with exuberant list-making in the manner of Walt Whitman (although one of these, which refers, in stentorian fashion, to "the Wachita, the Wichita, the Red and the Yazoo" rivers sounds more like a declamation from Groucho Marx).
Thomson has left a detailed description of the working method he evolved with Lorentz. "I played to Pare on the piano all the material that I planned to use and got his acceptance of it before composing with it," he told Robert L. Snyder, who was then a professor at Kansas State University, in 1961. "After Pare had cut his film, I composed my musical sections in accordance with his timing and played them for him on the piano in front of a projection of the film. After acceptance by him in this form, I orchestrated the complete music and it was recorded.
"At this point arrived the event which Pare had been working toward and waiting for all the time. He likes to cut his film to an existing musical background. But since a background cannot be composed, orchestrated and recorded until the film has been cut and the lengths of the shots and sequences fixed, Pare has to go through a cutting for the visual narrative, but his heart is not fully in it. When he gets the final recorded music track, then he goes back to the cutting room, finds inspiration for expressive visual narration through the musical detail, and wholly recuts his film."
In short, the film fed the music and the music fed the film -- a true collaboration.
Lorentz went on to make several more films, but none was as powerful and influential as these first ventures. Upon Lorentz's death in March 1992, the radical historian Patrick Renshaw, writing in the London newspaper the Independent, noted that "no other filmmaker has been able to secure such a high international reputation as Pare Lorentz did on the strength of just two films.
"Since first seeing them 40 years ago at the Walthamstow Film Society I have been haunted by their images of the devastation caused by natural calamities, and the heroic efforts made during the New Deal to provide answers," Renshaw continued. "Generations of my students watch them enthralled. Other feature films -- John Ford's version of Steinbeck's novel 'The Grapes of Wrath,' or Elia Kazan's 'Wild River' -- help us to understand the same issues. But neither does so with such imagination and economy."
As for Thomson, he went on to compose for another half-century, while distinguishing himself as perhaps America's wittiest and most perceptive homegrown music critic during his tenure at the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954. In 1948, for the first and only time in the history of the Pulitzer Prize, the composition award went to a film score -- Robert J. Flaherty's "Louisiana Story," with music by Virgil Thomson.
The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River will be presented by the Post-Classical Ensemble today and tomorrow at 3 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. Call 301-495-6720 or visit http://www.AFI.com/Silver . Tickets are $25 and available online.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Friday, March 18, 2005; Page C03
Post-Classical Ensemble
Gustav Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" ("The Song of the Earth") presents a curious combination of late romantic German sensibility in its music and Chinese poetry of the 8th century in the original source of its texts. Its final segment, "Der Abschied" ("The Farewell"), is particularly notable; it describes two friends saying goodbye, perhaps forever, and many admirers have considered it a farewell to life by Mahler, who was suffering from heart disease and nearing death when he composed it.
No single performance can explore all the dimensions of "Der Abschied," but the interpretation by the Post-Classical Ensemble, Wednesday night at the Austrian Embassy, came brilliantly close. The ensemble, directed by Angel Gil-Ordoñez with a precise sense of idiom and style, used the chamber music reduction by Arnold Schoenberg, which requires only 13 players and preserves all the music's subtly varied colors. Mezzo-soprano Delores Ziegler sang the text, with a haunting treatment of the final words, "ewig . . . ewig" ("forever . . . forever") that lingered in memory long after the music had faded to silence.
That ended the program. What came before it was equally fascinating. First a solo on the erhu, a two-stringed fiddle, by Wang Guowei, an extraordinary performer; then an exotically evocative piece, "Moonlit River in Spring," played on Chinese instruments by four members of the Music From China ensemble.
In a brief introduction, Joseph Horowitz, the artistic director of the Post-Classical Ensemble, said that crossing boundaries is what this group is about and may be a key to the future of classical music. This program showed exactly what he meant.
-- Joseph McLellan
Lifting Revueltas Out of Obscurity
By Daniel Ginsberg
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, May 3, 2003; Page C05
For its inaugural concert, the Post-Classical Ensemble could not leave well enough alone. When it came to performing the music of the obscure, early-20th-century Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas at Lisner Auditorium on Thursday evening, a sparkling reading by the chamber orchestra of this subtly crafted music just would not do. No, this group had to go after its audience with a relentless zeal, hurling a dazzling array of information about the music and its composer.
This included not just traditional program notes but also lectures, poetry, movies and popular song -- all in a burst of three hours. Even the date -- May Day -- was selected to add meaning to the music of a composer fired by the idea of socialist revolution. The evening was clearly the brainchild of the ensemble's artistic adviser, Joseph Horowitz, a prolific writer and former director of the forward-leaning Brooklyn Philharmonic, who has made a career of these intense, multimedia festivals. If this evening was any indication, Horowitz's group is a welcome, edgy addition to the musical life of Washington.
Joseph Horowitz and the Post-Classical Ensemble set out to dazzle the Lisner audience. (Post-classical Ensemble) |
The centerpiece of the performance was a screening of the film "Redes," which coincided with Filmfest DC. Under the skillful Spanish conductor Angel Gil-Ordoñez, the Post-Classical Ensemble performed Revueltas's score in live accompaniment to this hour-long 1936 film about village fishermen struggling against the power of a monopoly. The orchestra gave a wonderfully lucid account of the score. The phrasing, dynamics and general sound were alive to the evolving sense of desperation, anger and empowerment expressed in the film.
Revueltas's dirge-like music for the scene in which the hero must bury his son who died after the local overlord refused to pay for medical treatment was heart-rending yet strong. Passages for woodwind, low strings and brass were carefully crafted but not overwrought. Gil-Ordoñez kept everything moving apace and always synced with the images on-screen.
To build up to the tempestuous mood of the film, the concert began with a subtle weaving of popular folk songs from the Mexican Revolution and the composer's pieces for smaller ensembles. Any skepticism of this merger of popular and art music vanished with the soulful singing of Lila Downs, who appeared in and sang on the soundtrack of "Frida," the recent film about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
Whether conveying the zeal of a revolutionary in "Soy Zapatista del Estado Morelos" or the story of an uncommonly brave and beautiful fighter in "La Adelita," Downs immersed herself in the music, applying a flexible sound and sensitivity to the text. Saxophonist Paul Cohen, harpist Celso Duarte and chekere player Yunior Terry Cabrera skillfully supported Downs.
Unfortunately, Lisner's cavernous acoustics sometimes swallowed the ensemble's account of Revueltas's "8 x radio," which suffered from awkward balances and problems of ensemble. Sparks flew, however, in a sizzling account of "Sensemaya," where short melodic figures were treated to coruscating orchestration and rhythmic invention to create a sonic chant against an evil snake. Downs read the original folk poem with a manic verve.
The locally based Sunrise Quartet gave a fine prelude concert of Revueltas's String Quartet No. 4. Violinists Teri Lazar and Claudia Chudacoff brought a sweetness of tone that matched the precision of violist Osman Kivrak and cellist Marion Baker.
Bringing Revueltas Back to Life
Post-Classical Ensemble Gives Colorful Composer A Long-Overdue Salute
By Tim Page
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2003; Page N01
Composer Silvestre Revueltas -- born on the last day of the 1800s, dead from alcoholism at 40 -- was obviously the sort of person around whom legends will grow. During his scantily documented existence, Revueltas distinguished himself as a child prodigy in his native Mexico; studied violin and composition in gangster-era Chicago; served as concertmaster for something called the Aztec Theater Orchestra in San Antonio; fought alongside the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War; returned to Mexico, where he drifted in and out of mental hospitals; lived poor; died young.
It is the sort of life that seems glamorous to those youthful, privileged romantics who will never have to experience anything like it. In fact, the world must have been sheer hell for Revueltas. Still, as was once said of Malcolm Lowry -- who was living in Mexico during the same time Revueltas was writing his last works and whose novel "Under the Volcano" has the same manic, mercurial, quasi-hallucinatory qualities we associate with the composer's best music -- Revueltas did not return from Hell with empty hands. Such works as "La Noche de los Mayas" (which was presented by Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra two years ago), "Sensemaya" and "Homenaje a Garcia Lorca" are great music by anybody's standards -- colorful, convulsive and unfailingly original.
Silvestre Revueltas, who died of alcoholism at the age of 40, imbued his music with quasi-hallucinatory qualities. (Peermusic Classical) |
Thursday night, a new group called the Post-Classical Ensemble will present an evening devoted to Revueltas and his world at Lisner Auditorium.
The program includes a chamber version of "Sensemaya," an octet written specifically for radio play (titled, appropriately, "Ocho por Radio") and a sampling of Mexican revolutionary songs, in performances by Lila Downs. A highlight will be a rare screening of the first of 10 films scored by Revueltas -- "Redes" (1936), co-directed by Emilio Gomez Muriel and a young Austrian emigre named Fred Zinnemann, who would go on to make such esteemed works as "High Noon" and "A Man for All Seasons."
The program will be conducted by Angel Gil-Ordoñez, music director of the Post-Classical Ensemble. Gil-Ordoñez, a former associate conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Spain, is the founder and director of Musica Aperta Washington and the director of orchestral studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
"What attracts me to Revueltas, first of all, is that he is so Mexican, so completely local," Gil-Ordoñez said. "When you listen to Revueltas, you smell the marketplace and taste the tamales. You are in a cantina -- a piano bar -- drinking tequila. And you are in a culture saturated with music, with marimbas and mariachis.
"Music is a continuous component of Mexican life," he continued. "The young men of Mexico actually still serenade their girlfriends with trumpets, violins and guitars. In Mexico, the Plaza de Garibaldi is filled with mariachis all playing at the same time; you go there to hire a band." The sound is sometimes raucous and out of tune -- "clarinets clashing with tubas," as Gil-Ordoñez puts it. "This is the sound of Revueltas. It also suggests something common to Charles Ives -- the clash of simultaneous bands -- or to Mahler's imitations of street musicians."
Aaron Copland, one of Revueltas's early admirers, likened him to Franz Schubert for his seemingly effortless production.
"His music is a spontaneous outpouring, a strong expression of his inner emotions," Copland said. "When seized with the creative urge, he has been known to spend days on end without food or sleep until the piece was finished."
And yet it goes too far to represent Revueltas as a sporadically inspired primitive. A work such as "Sensemaya," for all of its seismic power, is constructed with extraordinary rhythmic subtlety, and "Ocho por Radio" invents and perfects a sort of modernist Mexican chamber music that is absolutely of its time and place.
Gil-Ordoñez formed the Post-Classical Ensemble in tandem with Joseph Horowitz, a Manhattan-based author, musical historian and artistic adviser to various American orchestras who has created more than two dozen interdisciplinary festivals over the past 20 years. While serving as executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, Horowitz produced series devoted to "The Russian Stravinsky" and "American Transcendentalists" that explored the folk roots of concert music and won national attention. He hopes to forge similar paths with the Post-Classical Ensemble.
"I think of these events as ways to break out of the classical music ghetto, which is necessary if classical music is to continue to flourish in the 21st century," Horowitz said in an interview last week. "If you can juxtapose concert works with some of the popular and vernacular music that helped produce them, you wind up with something that is both engaging and intellectually provocative."
Horowitz insists that this has nothing to do with what has come to be known as "crossover" music. "That's a marketing ploy, a calculated attempt to reach as wide an audience as possible without any respect for the integrity of the music. We're not putting Revueltas on the same program as Mexican revolutionary songs just out of the blue -- we're putting the two together because they fit. Our context tells you something very real about Revueltas and may help a listener hear new elements in his music."
The title "Redes" refers to fishing nets. Horowitz calls the 60-minute film "a story of poor fishermen victimized by monopoly control of their market." The cinematographer was Paul Strand, once described by Susan Sontag as "the biggest, widest, most commanding talent in the history of American photography."
"Visually, 'Redes' is a poem of stark light and shadow, of clouds and sea, palm fronds and thatched huts, with Strand's camera often tipped toward the abstract sky," Horowitz said. "Curiously, the spoken word is almost never back-scored -- the music speaks when the actors don't, and vice versa. And yet the contributions of Strand and Revueltas are indelible -- and indelibly conjoined."
Indeed, "Redes" might be considered a forerunner to composer Virgil Thomson's two documentaries with Pare Lorentz, "The Plow That Broke the Plains" (1936) and "The River" (1937) as well as his much later collaboration with Robert Flaherty, "Louisiana Story" (1948), for which Thomson won what is still the only Pulitzer Prize for Music ever awarded to a film score.
The current concert -- titled "Viva la Revolucion!" and set just in time for May Day -- was produced in association with Lisner Auditorium and the Washington, D.C., International Film Festival. Future programs will include an examination of Spanish mysticism (with the participation of the Sephardic singer Flory Jagoda), the overtly Hungarian-inspired music by Brahms and Bartok (with the Gazsa Band of Budapest) and another look at Stravinsky's Russian roots (with the Pokrovsky Folk Ensemble of Moscow).
Indeed, Horowitz said that he already has many more programs planned than he can possibly mount. "Right now, the important thing is to find a viable board of directors for the Post-Classical Ensemble," he said. "But there are a number of things working in our favor. We have a distinctive mission, Angel is a wonderful conductor, and he has been presenting concerts in Washington for five years without sinking into debt, so I have a feeling we're going to do fine."
At the very least, this initial concert will help introduce the music of Revueltas to a wider audience. To date, there is no biography of the composer and, appallingly, the 29-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians accords Revueltas only about 500 words -- fewer than it gives to Madonna, for example. The best -- indeed, almost the only -- study of Revueltas in English was written by the composer Peter Garland and published by Soundings Press as "In Search of Silvestre Revueltas." In Garland's opinion, the strongest of Revueltas's work "totally obliterates the boundaries of classical and popular musics."
Which suits Horowitz fine. "He exceptionally embodies fusion with the vernacular," he said. "His musical language is a churning kaleidoscope . . . bristling with the grit and energy of Mexican streets, streaming with poetic folklore and song."
Garland concluded his pioneering essay with a plea: "Can we hope that by the centennial of the composer's birth, on the eve of the twenty-first century (Dec. 31, 1999) we will at last know the work of one of the most important composers of the first half of the twentieth?" That centennial has come and gone, but Mexico's greatest composer may be finally on the verge of winning the following he so deserves.
The concert will begin at 8 p.m. Thursday at Lisner Auditorium, 21st and H streets NW. A discussion and presentation of a Revueltas string quartet will take place at 7. Tickets are $15 and $25. For more information, call 301-808-6900.
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