Posts Tagged ‘Radialsystem’

Radiale Vokalnacht

Friday, December 13th, 2013

my_brightest_diamond[1]By Rebecca Schmid

Vocal music, in all its forms of expression and social relevance, was the subject of a Radiale Vokalnacht at the Radialsystem on Dec.7. It was an opportunity to catch the vocalist-instrumentalist-composer Shara Worden, otherwise known as My Brightest Diamond, who performed with drummer Earl Harvin and accompaniment from BerlinJazzVocals. After the a cappella ensemble opened the evening in the main hall with an Australian polyphonic number, Worden appeared in one of her most successful songs, “We added it up,” strumming an amplified ukulele in a fitted white blazer and signature poof-hairstyle.

A trained opera singer, she was in top form as she crooned about the attraction of opposites—a trite sentiment that she manages to give depth with clever lyrics and catchy but deceptively simple tunes. The replacement of her original orchestration with BerlinJazzVocals was not entirely convincing but created an organic continuity as the audience joined, with few tone-deaf contributions, for the refrain “love binds the world.”

Her choral work “The Pleiades,” about a Native Indian rite involving the constellation, emerged with soothing harmonies but not the most inspired lyrics— “How many stars can you see in the Pleiades,” sang the chorus. The song “That point when,” to dreamy synthesizer and lulling percussion, had more dramatic impact. Worden tuned up an electric guitar for the ethereal, poetic final number, “From the Top of the World,” with sensitive rhythm from Harvin and not so subtle serenading from the JazzVocals.

The rotating program followed with the choice of three different events. On the top-floor dance studio, a Pecha Kucha Night unexpectedly presented a series of lectures. A social scientist touched on the benefits and dark sides of community singing. The presenter of a public choral concert in Germany, Brussels, Norway and England touted his event’s goal of breaking walls “both visible and invisible.” More convincing were the founders of Kiezoper Berlin, a grassroots organization which has staged operas in clubs and industrial spaces with the aim of making the art form more accessible.

If one was left wondering about the purpose of the ad hoc mini-conference, the following act in the main hall provided some food for thought—although no conclusions. The all-female Carmina Slovenica deals, in the words of event curator Laura Berman, with the “abuse of religion” and how its structures “ultimately topple.” The all-female chorus, in its Berlin premiere, performed works from Jacob Cooper to Rachmaninoff to Sirian orthodox chant in choreographed situations that merge spiritual transcendence with a heavy metal aesthetic and abstract theater.

While the performance had moving moments—such as in the earnest, military execution of Boaz Avni’s “Kyrie”—the girls should have perhaps ended the show after they all fell to the ground, presumably under the weight of societal oppression. The buckets of clementines which subsequently scattered across the stage did little to emphasize the narrative about subjugation and the will for freedom.

The evening further included a vocal workshop with Christina Wheeler called Your Voice is Your Oyster and the performance Glacial Revisited with Audrey Chen on cello, voice and electronic. At that point, my head was reeling.

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

Feldman’s ‘Neither’ gets a Virtual Orchestra; A l’Arme! Festival for Contemporary Jazz

Friday, July 20th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

In an age of pervasive digital technology and avatars, it was only a matter of time before virtual experience infiltrated the concert hall. No handmade reeds, no tailcoats. Instead, over 70 synthesized speakers encircling the audience. The Berlin-based ensemble phase7, for a new production of Morton Feldman’s opera Neither, has replaced the live orchestra with 3D surround sound created through the spatial audio production procedure of wave field synthesis. The soprano Eir Inderhaug, trapped in a cage of light beams, provides the only human presence. The production premiered at the Festspielhaus Hellerau in Dresden last March before coming to the Radialsystem this month as part of the festival “The Art of Listening,” which included a conference chaired by the University of Potsdam.

A panel discussion following the concert, seen June 13, concluded that new formats were instrumental in preserving the classical tradition as it struggles to assert its value in today’s society, emphasizing that individuals’ different ways of listening must be addressed both in education and in the concert hall. The Radialsystem, founded in 2006 as a creative arts space, champions experimental modes of presentation such as late-night listening in which audience members can stretch out on yoga mats and musical wine tasting. As a positive sign for the future—even for those who prefer certain formalities of the concert hall—the Kreuzberg venue also attracts listeners who do not constitute a regular following for Berlin’s mainstream classical institutions.

A casually-dressed crowd filled the small back space of the Radialsystem’s main concert hall for Neither, given a clubby atmosphere with the help of smoke machines. Whirring surround sound amplified the static, high-pitched tones of Feldman’s opening bars as the first beams of light broke through the darkness. Inderhaug, a very pregnant figure dressed in all white, crouched silently on her platform at the center of the room. Yet the screeching faded mysteriously after about five minutes. A woman in a backpack emerged matter-of-factly to inform the audience: “as you know, there is a small technical problem,” as if such occurrences were par for the course. “Where is my conductor when I need him?” Inderhaug joked to the audience.

The experience was slightly demystified as the opera recommenced a few minutes later, this time traveling through churning industrial sounds and what sounded like a giant percussion set before yielding to the soprano’s existentially unresolved opening line, “to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow.” Neither, true to its name, is a negation of operatic convention and emerged after Feldman and Samuel Beckett discovered a mutual distaste for the genre upon meeting at Berlin’s Schiller Theater in 1976. Shortly thereafter, Feldman received a postcard with an 87-word verse that would provide the libretto for his monodrama, which premiered at Rome Opera the following year. Feldman’s economic, or minimalist, use of material—unsettling atmospheric drones, spiraling melodic figures, cavernous echoes—found an outlet in Beckett’s terse yet open-ended poetry.

As an “anti-opera,” the approximately 50-minute work lends itself well to phase7’s forward-looking concept, and yet the digitally-generated orchestra rarely proved its advantages over the more visceral experience of hearing live music. The metallic timbre of Feldman’s swelling chords, while often larger than life with this technology, took on a slightly digital quality that disengage the music’s emotional core, even as the sounds ricochet strategically from one speaker to the next. Visually, the isolation of the soprano, who hovers through an internal passage to an “unspeakable home,” is an effective dramaturgical solution to a work that does not lend itself easily to stage direction, yet holographic projections surrounding Inderhaug at times dehumanized the experience. On one occasion her stratospheric, incomprehensible tones made me think of the alien opera singer in The Fifth Element (vocal writing lies consistently above the treble clef, making it difficult to pronounce consonants, although a 1997 recording with Sarah Leonard and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra at least makes it clear throughout that she is singing in English).

It is a paradox that such events are touted as an innovative means of reviving classical music when orchestras throughout the western world are fighting to prove their raison d’être, and in some cases struggling to survive. As it happens, the same orchestral technology employed by phase7 was just on display at the Sydney Opera House for a production of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt. That classical formats must evolve along with certain contemporary social trends is without question—video projections, DJ shows, and some degree of genre-bending will likely become standard fare for orchestras in future decades—but digital technology is no replacement for a gathering of trained musicians who rely on their brains rather than a circuit board. It is of course counterproductive to fight a certain amount of inevitability: the iPod and internet aesthetics may have already influenced the way we experience all kinds of music. 3D surround sound could provide a myriad possibility of tools to composers and be combined with live orchestra to powerful effect, but as Leonard Bernstein once said, music is about “flesh and blood.”

A l’Arme!

Despite Berlin’s growing reputation as the European mecca of the avant-garde, a platform for contemporary jazz was nowhere to be found until A l’Arme!, or Alarm (July 18-21) debuted at the Radialsystem this week. Bringing together artists from the U.S., Asia and across Europe, the program boasts artists such as the singer Neneh Cherry, returning from a 16-year hiatus in a new collaboration with the Scandinavian quartet The Thing, and German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, something of a jazz icon on the continent. “There’s no better place than Berlin to burst open the cocoon of an entire scene whose self-absorbance is misunderstood as innovative,” state the program notes in a somewhat awkward translation. Indeed, it is no easy task to define free jazz. The movement emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to predetermined tonal structures, regulated timbres, and rhythmic conventions, eventually digging roots in Europe when the genre proved itself commercially untenable in the U.S.. Starting in the 70s, the term ‘avant-garde’ emerged as an alternative to describe this restless yet organized music, pioneered by figures such as John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman.

As evidenced by Alarm’s opening concert on July 18, a fine line often lies between what we call ‘new’ music in the classical realm and contemporary jazz. A trio formed by festival founder and pianist Louis Rastig with American clarinetist/saxophonist Ken Vandermark and Korean cellist Okkyung Lee opened with serialist patterns that were met with wild, meandering melodies and sawing, scampering motives. The musicians’ disparate improvisations managed to create a satisfying whole as frenetic, insistent patterns interwove with electric energy. A quieter middle section featured a repeated two-note figure in the piano, eventually picked up by a bass saxophone before Vandermark moved into squeaking slides and mechanical whirring. Rastig anchored the group with a charged physical awareness and strategic spontaneity, hitting across the keyboard with flat hands in child-like rebellion on more than one occasion, while Lee contributed a rumbling, shivering interlude that was sensitively echoed by Vandermark.

New York-based trumpeter Peter Evans opened the program with free improvisation demonstrating a virtuosic range of contemporary technique and multi-phonics. Muted trilling, wispy reverberations, exasperated blaring, raspberry blows—there is nothing Evans can’t create with his mouth and the valves of this instrument. The most impressive was his performance with a piccolo trumpet in which he broke out into traditional jazz melodies before reverting suddenly to gasping and sucking noises, creating an ironic halo of nostalgia around the sanguine 1950s style. His last act involved the simultaneous playing of a normal-sized trumpet against the piccolo, fluttering the valves of one instrument against the siren-like blare of the other. When Evans pushes through the call of the trumpet in full force, it is as if the instrument’s internal force has been stirring anxiously behind decades of experimentation.

The main hall of the Radialsystem spilled over with fans for The Cherry Thing, as one-time blockbuster Neneh Cherry dubbed her appearance the with The Thing in reference to their album which was released last month. The ensemble’s jazz-rock idiom is not an obvious match for Cherry’s smooth, hip-hop grooves, but she proved herself fearless enough to give a raspy (and slightly inaudible) scream over the cacophony of Mats Gustafsson’s indomitable saxophone, Paal Nilssen-Love’s across-the-board drums and the electric guitar of Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten in the opening number. The following song “Dream baby dream,” with its cooing vocals over saxophone and double bass in a unison melody that yielded to tonal counterpoint over soft drumming, proved a more effective blend. The Thing’s angry riffs lent themselves well to “Cashback:” you eat me for breakfast when you feed me… you spend me like money, sang Cherry over a catchy beat, her curls bouncing freely as she moved around stage in a black dress and sneakers. Ultimately it was unfortunate to experience this music in a seated hall; such danceable fare lends itself better to a small club, where listeners can chat quietly or sway with the music, and more vehement rock passages were too loud for the space. Still, it is exciting to have more intellectually challenging avant-garde fare combined with music of more popular appeal under one roof. A l’Arme has filled a niche that is likely to grow as jazz musicians of all breeds experiment with new outlets of expression.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

Bachfest Leipzig’s Musical Offerings; Radiale Nacht with Colin Jacobsen and Alisa Weilerstein

Friday, June 15th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

The motto of this year’s Bachfest Leipzig, “…ein neues Lied” (a new song), could not be a more fitting choice to honor J.S. Bach’s legacy in the city where he spent his final 27 years as cantor. Upon arriving in 1723, he set out to write a cantata every week, enlisting as scribes his second wife, Anna Magdalena, and students who were trained at the Schola Thomana. Now buried beneath a bronze plaque at the foot of the altar in the St. Thomas Church, Bach—or at least his presumed remains which were exhumed from a former cemetery and transported in 1949—continues to infuse local practices with his spirit. The St. Thomas Boys Choir, celebrating its 800th anniversary this year, has commissioned new music for six major religious occasions and included some of Europe’s most seminal contemporary composers: Hans Werner Henze, Heinz Holliger and Krzysztof Penderecki will have all premiered works in the church by January of next year.

At a concert yesterday, the Bachfest (June 7-17) reprised Easter music by St. Thomas Cantor Georg Christoph Biller and Henze’s Pentecost music alongside two Bach works from the Leipzig period. Pentecost, a holiday of tremendous weight for practicing Christians in Europe, officially took place late last month and celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. Henze, a self-avowed atheist, and his librettist Christian Lehnert take a spiritually inquisitive approach in An den Wind for chorus and orchestra. The chaos of unharnessed natural forces and human doubt yield to the promise of peace: “the dove will wake, its wings,/caught by the gusts, no longer will repose,” begins the final chorus after a solo violin emerges from the dust of a desert storm. Henze references Bach with a direct but unfinished quote “Jesu, meine Freu…” to ominous woodwinds and harp plucks in the first section, while wild counterpoint and a percussion interlude after Simon the Zealot’s proclamation of a burning wasteland recall the dramatic tension of his opera Phaedra (2007), another collaboration with Lehnert.

Henze often separates the high and low voices of the St. Thomas Choir and aligns them with according instrumentation: ethereal celeste, piano clusters and sustained chords accompany the pure timbre of boy sopranos while changed voices are underscored by low strings and woodwinds. Unaccompanied moments such as the Disciple’s urging to “call out…so softly that no one shall hear us but the wind” take on deceptively liturgical importance, yet the orchestra thwarts any sense of resolution, such as the gong crash after the mysterious harmonies of the chorus asking God for immortal strength or the rambling piano and bassoon blast following the sopranos’ quote from the Lutheran Bible, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you….” The Holy Ghost’s powers of salvation transcend earthly strife to restore the natural world—“a wing’s beat, a wind, a simple breath”—bringing the choir together against a billowing atmospheric chord. Biller led the choir and members of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in an intense, precise performance that clocked in at 20 minutes on the mark.

Biller conducting at the St. Thomas Church © Bach-Archiv Leipzig / Gert Mothes: Bachfest Leipzig 2012

The cantor, in his St.-Thomas-Ostermusik, takes a more pious approach, using light-dark imagery to represent the ascent of Christ with direct allusions to Bach’s Passions. Biller himself devised the text for his cantata (also 20 minutes) based on Bible passages and originally composed verse. The opening features a sustained Wagnerian-like minor chord that is punctuated by trombones, only to yield to serenading recorders before the chorus rejoices in this “Easter day! Away with care and sorrow!” Cluster harmonies reminiscent of modern American choral music bring a progressive, optimistic air, while a recurrent rising, whole-tone wind motive and quasi-liturgical structure ground the work in a decisively western European tradition. Some members of the audience sang the descant of the Bavarian/Austrian hymn “Christ is arisen” while the boy sopranos crooned into the stratosphere, a transcendent passage that culminated in the clang of trumpet and chimes. Although the work may have its hokey moments for non-church goers, Biller manages to straddle contemporary developments in religious music with a clear reverence for the St. Thomas tradition. Alongside the immaculately trained choir, tenor Martin Lattke gave a fervent performance as the Evangelist.

Between the two newly commissioned works, Bach’s Ascension Oratorio (BWV 11) transported the audience back to the heyday of cantatas as the Gewandhaus musicians and boys’ choir performed with irreproachable authenticity under Biller. As the program notes explain, the work was written only six months after the Christmas Oratorio and features liberal borrowing from Bach’s earlier works, yet any such knowledge hardly impedes upon the music’s fresh exuberance as the trumpets open the work with a life-affirming proclamation. The ensemble’s sense of pace was particularly striking in the cadence of the opening chorus “Lobet Gott in Seinen Reichen,” and the Gewandhaus players’ flowing but restrained body movement made it clear that they have this music in their bones. The fragile, glassy timbre of a boy soprano in the aria “Jesus, deine Gnadenblicke” further evoked the original spirit of the work while the woodwinds accompanied in sensitive counterpoint. Closing the program was the motet “Der Geist hilft under Schwachheit auf” (BWV 226), performed at the burial of a St. Thomas headmaster in 1729. The music does not mourn but expresses gratitude to “the Spirit” for helping mortals through their weakness. A quiet penitence prevailed beneath the painted vaults of the St. Thomas Church.

Note to interested listeners: the St. Thomas Choir, for its 800th anniversary, has released a compilation of live performances featuring works by Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn and others on the label Rondeau Productions.

Back on the (non-denominational) scene in Berlin…

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO) and the alternative arts space Radialsystem teamed up last weekend for their second Radiale Nacht, a rotating program of orchestral and chamber works featuring choreography by Sasha Waltz, live remixes and an after show. The format, scattered between the main hall, the lounge area, and the upstairs deck, exploits the ample space of the converted water pumping plant and creates a relaxed atmosphere in which musicians mingle casually with the audience. Guest artists Pablo Heras-Casado and Colin Jacobsen roamed between the bar and patio overlooking the Spree River before the concert, while one orchestral player dressed in black was mistaken for an onsite employee. The event was first launched in November with sponsorship by the pharmaceutical company Aventis in an effort to provide a Berlin base for the MCO, founded in 1997 as a touring ensemble with offices in the German capital. Radialsystem Intendant Jochen Sandig and MCO Intendant Andreas Richter hope to further cement the relationship despite the fact that they were denied city funding; Sandig reported in conversation that the local government is currently losing half a billion Euro over the delayed launch of the new airport.

Tense cultural politics aside, the energy was high as the youthful members of the MCO took the stage with Jacobsen as concert master under the direction of Heras-Casado. The mostly Russian program, seen June 9, opened in the main hall with Alisa Weilerstein in Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, a tour de force whose ferocity and emotional complexity the 30-year-old conveys with intuitive grace. She moved seamlessly between growling harmonics and whining melodies, shaping every passage with spontaneity and forward-moving inertia as she plunged into the depths of Shostakovich’s despair and rage. The cellist maintained irreproachable beauty of tone throughout the entire rage of her instrument in the Cadenza, which moves cautiously from a slow lament and into wild disillusion. She was matched well by the strings’ sinuous phrasing under Jacobsen and lean, buoyant textures that emerged through Heras-Casado’s economical but commanding gestures, although the tone could have been angrier in the final Allegro movement. As an encore, Weilerstein offered a fast movement from Bach’s Cello Suites, whose spritely baroque character was somewhat of a sudden palate cleanser to the edgy textures of the previous work.

Upstairs on the deck, she and Jacobsen joined with two members of the MCO for a very Berlinified rendition of Shostakovich’s Eight String Quartet featuring live remixes by the DJ Georg Conrad. Jacobsen’s bright, smooth tone led the group through the searing canonic development of the opening Largo—whose main theme is drawn from the First Cello Concerto, while Weilerstein’s fierce playing found a spotlight in the following Allegro molto. Then, in an unexpected twist, the musicians rested their bows as an interlude of house music whirred through the speakers. One can’t deny that the dance beats were well suited to the views of graffitied industrial buildings across the Spree, yet it was quite awkward to watch the quartet sit onstage without playing. While Jacobsen and other audience members started nodding their heads in rhythm, it might have been more organic to have the musicians improvise over the DJ: the connection to Shostakovich’s musical content was otherwise more than spurious. The effect was no less jarring when Conrad’s atmospheric grooves returned a second time after a violin solo during the penultimate Largo movement. The quartet otherwise formed a well-balanced whole, especially considering that they had only rehearsed the set-up that day.

The program retained its progressive flair with an excerpt from Sasha Waltz’s choreographed concert “gefaltet,” a Mozarteum commission originally unveiled earlier this season. The Divertimento in E-flat, as re-experienced at the Radiale Nacht, features a quartet of dancers in mock-ballet movements that range from sweeping, eloquently neo-baroque to angular, tick-like gestures while a trio plays at the corner of the stage. Waltz is strongest when she captures the sensuousness and symmetry of Mozart’s music, while less congruent attempts to stamp the music with a post-modern sensibility are less effective for this viewer. Sandig’s subsequent scenic arrangement of the Schnittke pastiche Moz-Art à la Haydn also incorporated dancers of Sasha Waltz & Guests in “structured improvisation” to mirror the aleatoric demands of the score, which riffs on a theme by Mozart into polytonal madness. In keeping with Schnittke’s original suggestions for blocking, the dancers begin in darkness along the aisles of the main hall before clustering with the dancers in a swarm onstage and running back to their original places. Heras-Casado was spotlighted toward the middle of a piece as a buffoon-like caricature of a conductor, waving his arms only for the sake of imposing control, only to be upstaged by a child dancer-turned-maestro with as commanding a head of curls.

Heras-Casado conducts the MCO (c) Holger Talinski

The official program closed with Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, considered the most neo-classical of his fifteen symphonies in its neat structure and cheerful character, although this is thoroughly tongue in cheek. The symphony was written at the end of World War Two in 1945, upon which Stalin accorded himself personal credit for the defeat of Germany. The dictator was not deaf to the satirical military allusions in this symphony, and announced soon thereafter that his regime could now find time to take appropriate measures toward art that so blatantly challenged his authority. The MCO’s spirited playing did full service to the music’s irony, knit together with fiery attacks under Heras-Casado, while wind solos emerged with confidence. Shostakovich’s writing for the bassoon is particularly prominent in this work, with its humorous melodies in final Allegretto that steer the orchestra away from triumph. The music continued in the lounge outside with Jacobsen’s chamber arrangements of works by Astrud Gilberto and others. The quintet, which included Weilerstein at the cello, was clearly having a great time jamming to samba and tango beats, and the audience rewarded them with wine-imbibed cheers.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed