Oregon ArtsWatch

ArtsWatch Archive


Review: Seattle Symphony, Portland Baroque Orchestra: New sounds from Seattle

By Brett Campbell
April 6, 2014
Music
Ludovic Morlot conducted the Seattle Symphony in Portland Sunday.

Ludovic Morlot conducted the Seattle Symphony in Portland Sunday.

Last week, visitors from Seattle brought a refreshing blast of artistic energy to Oregon classical music institutions. Yet both performances also reaffirmed the value of Portland’s own performers. And they demonstrated that, when a music director — regardless of city — has earned the audience’s trust with astute programming and committed performances, they’ll take a chance on new sounds.

A few years ago, the Seattle Chamber Players sponsored a kind of smackdown between East and West Coast composers, co-curated by New Yorker writer Alex Ross. As the concert coincided with a SCP performance of music by mid century American composer Morton Feldman, I asked the composers in a panel discussion how big an influence Feldman’s music exerted on their work. All nodded or exclaimed affirmatively — none more enthusiastically than John Luther Adams.

Feldman’s influence reverberates through Become Ocean, the major (45 minutes or so) new orchestral work by the Northwest’s greatest living composer, whose music has so long evoked the bleakly beautiful Alaskan landscapes he’s called home for decades. Adams titled his orchestral evocation of the sea after a quote from Feldman’s mentor and friend John Cage — yet Cage was referring not to Feldman, but instead to Cage’s earlier friend and musical partner, Portland born Lou Harrison. Judging by the Seattle Symphony’s performance at Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall last weekend, Become Ocean (like Adams’s heartfelt chamber orchestra tribute to the late maverick, and his own great mentor, For Lou Harrison) owes much less to Harrison’s Asian and Baroque-fueled esthetic than to Feldman’s gravid atmospherics, the related work of Adams’s teacher James Tenney, and the repetitive structures of American minimalism.

Become Ocean is by any measure, including Ross’s (he called it “the loveliest apocalypse in musical history” in his New Yorker review of last year’s world premiere), a major 21st century orchestral creation, clearly descended from other recent repetitive atmospheric Adams works like For Lou Harrison. It also continues another long-running Adams trope: using music to evoke nature, as in his earlier epic performed in Portland last year by Third Angle New Music, Earth and the Great Weather, and the “sonic geography” of the percussion-propelled outdoor works Strange and Sacred Noise (inspired by the complex fractal patterns of nature) and songbirdsongs, both played last summer at last summer’s Ojai Festival in California, the latter on a mountaintop, where it sometimes proved difficult to distinguish Adams’s percussion translation/evocation (not literal imitation) of various species of birdsong from the real thing.

By gradually and constantly altering the musical relationships between three different sub-aggregations of the orchestra (strings, brass, winds, each augmented by piano, harp and/or percussion), Become Ocean almost does just what its title commands. “Each ensemble plays consistently at its own speed throughout the piece, with slowly changing chords sustained by the winds, and rapidly undulating, rhythmically unchanging, repetitive figures for the other instruments,” according Paul Schiavo’s informative program notes. “The combination of these events, unfolding in their respective tempi, produces a pulsating field of sound, complemented by the visual field of the lighting. Those fields change color, aurally and visually, as different instruments are deployed and the range of notes they sound expands and contracts. Moreover, the music of each ensemble follows different dynamic arcs, crescendoing or fading at its own speed, thereby forming long, slow waves of changing volume. The interaction of those dynamic waves continually alters the composite music’s predominant timbre. Occasionally, the waves crest together, creating powerful climaxes.”

Listeners not attuned to the minimalist esthetic (and who therefore focus on the similarities rather than the changes illuminated amid the repetitive structures) might have found it tedious, especially stretched over three quarters of an hour. I felt that way during For Lou Harrison (which also juxtaposes several different tempo layers and harmonies) at last summer’s Ojai. “The formal structures of the composition recur throughout the score, but the sound of the music is always changing,” Adams wrote about that 2003 piece for string quartet, string orchestra, and two pianos, but for all its sonic attractions, my interest in those changes ultimately couldn’t endure its hour-plus length.

Happily, Become Ocean had the advantage of a much larger and more varied palette, though it still requires looking for different colors than usual. It worked for me … but I confess, I can walk along the beach for an hour, gazing out at the ever changing sea, which is always the same yet never the same, transfixed by the subtle, ever changing frolic of light and shadow, spray and splash. When I contemplate the ocean, I’m not expecting a narrative but rather a feeling. Similarly, Become Ocean generates fascination not via the linear progressions (melodic or harmonic) of conventional Western music, but from its swirling sonorities, and Adams’s clever and constant changes in the way the music of each of the three sub-ensembles splashes up against the others, paradoxically producing a constantly changing portrait of the same scene, a kind of moving still-life — just like the ocean itself.

The earliest approximation of Adams’s intentions in Western classical music is, of course, Claude Debussy’s The Sea, which closed the orchestra’s program (after the drier interpolation of Edgard Varese’s Deserts). Debussy’s 1905 tone poem adopted an impressionistic rather than evocative perspective, which the Seattlites communicated with admirable clarity, cohesiveness, and conviction, one of the better performances I’ve heard at the Schnitzer Concert Hall in recent years, though the venue’s well-documented sonic limitations (and the orchestra’s consequent adjustments to their usual sound) no doubt undermined the impact the concert would have had in their hometown’s acoustically superior Benaroya Hall, or at this month’s Carnegie Hall performances. However, it sounded no more compelling to my ears than several recent performances by Oregon’s own flagship orchestra. Until the next Timbers-Sounders game, or Portland receives a major league baseball or NFL franchise (or Seattle regains its Supersonics), we’ll have to call this latest Northwest smackdown a delightful draw.

If only our orchestra’s stodgy programming could similarly approach its northern counterpart’s artistic ambition, as evidenced by its commission of Adams’s brilliant new composition. “The Seattle Symphony, under leadership of Ludovic Morlot, is a revitalized orchestra, avid for new music and offbeat programming,” Ross wrote.

Contrary to Oregon orchestra managers’ evident supposition (judging by our orchestra’s far less abundant 20th and 21st music) that listeners prefer to look back rather than forward, Seattle audiences have responded enthusiastically. “What we have noticed over the past three years since Ludovic’s arrival is that the orchestra has been drawing a more diverse and curious set of audiences of all ages, including younger patrons,” wrote SSO spokesperson You You Xia. “This is a result of Ludo’s efforts to make the orchestra more accessible to the public, and a vision to present programs which have artistic significance. We have not only performed and commissioned a lot more new music, but have also programed rarely heard gems from past decades. While these are not always the biggest draw from a ticket sales perspective, our community has followed and embraced our transformation over the years and we can see this in our attendance and sales numbers overall.”

The SSO’s novel program proved a sell out in Portland, too. Are Oregon listeners really more close-minded than our northern neighbors? If Seattle’s orchestra can win new audiences and invigorate old ones by looking forward, why can’t Oregon’s?

Sweet and Lowdown Sounds

This weekend, Portland welcomed another recent Seattle arrival — or rather returnee, as lute master Stephen Stubbs returned to his hometown in 2006 after three decades building a reputation as one of the stars of the early music movement with his ensemble Tragicomedia and others. Now director of Pacific MusicWorks (along with co-directing Boston’s famous early music festival), which Portland Baroque Orchestra hosted here last year, Stubbs has enhanced Seattle’s and the Northwest’s already thriving Baroque music scene. He served as guest artist (and gave the pre-concert talk) for this weekend’s PBO concerts, which, like the SSO’s, violated the rule of timid, unimaginative arts organizations by asking its audiences to take a chance on almost entirely unfamiliar repertoire.

Again, Portland audiences responded — by nearly filling First Baptist Church for these rarely performed 17th century works. Clearly, PBO listeners trust its visionary artistic director, Monica Huggett like Seattle audiences trust Morlot (and, to use an earlier Oregon example, Eugene audiences trusted its symphony’s Conductor Laureate Marin Alsop) to bring them rewarding if unfamiliar music. Their faith was repaid by sterling small-group performances of music by obscure composers like Bruhns, Nicolai, and Weichlein as well as more familiar (yet still not so widely known) names Buxtehude, Biber and Bach — not THAT Bach but an earlier member of that vast tribe of music masters.

Monica Huggett (l), Harry van der Kamp (c) and Stephen Stubbs (far right) starred in Portland Baroque Orchestra's concerts.

Monica Huggett (l), Harry van der Kamp (c) and Stephen Stubbs (far right) starred in Portland Baroque Orchestra’s concerts. Photo: Laurel Degutis, PBO.

Not surprisingly, most of the best music turned out to be by the recognizable composers, and despite the excellence of Stubbs (playing a chitarrone, a long-necked lute that’s usually confined to a relatively reticent accompanying role) and the remarkable bass soloist Harry van der Kamp, the star turned out to be a familiar figure: Huggett herself. The violinist drew the loudest applause of the night for her bravura performance of one of Heinrich Biber’s great Mystery (or Rosary) Sonatas, based on a Biblical story of Mary’s annunciation featuring the winged angel Gabriel, which therefore teemed with what she called “all kinds of fluttery things,” brilliantly evoked in her solos. In the one revelatory discovery on the program, Austrian composer and Biber disciple Romanus Weichlein’s Sonata op. 1 no. 3, she and veteran PBO fiddler Carla Moore also got all high and flightly in call and response passages soaring over the simple hum and strum of lower pitched instruments.

In fact, the very dominance of all those lowdown sounds emanating from Stubbs’s chitarrone, PBO stalwart Curtis Daily’s violone (stand-up acoustic bass), Jillon Stoppels Dupree’s portative organ, and no fewer than three violas da gamba (which must be some kind of a record) and of course van der Kamp’s Johnny Cash-ranged vocals served to place the violins in greater relief. Huggett’s palpable chemistry with the Dutch singer (and long-time friend) in their duet provided the major interest in Biber’s otherwise forgettable (and long forgotten) Nisi Dominus, one of several so called “vocal concertos” that placed van der Kamp in the solo role that in later Baroque compositions would be assumed by instruments like violins and keyboards. Despite almost being covered at times by the occasionally boomy organ, the singer was somehow able to negotiate what seemed an impossibly low range with the facility of a tenor. His relatively rhetorical, even conversational style seldom sounded blurry or overly stentorian, blending nicely with the small ensembles. In Johann Christoph Bach’s closing cantata, Why Are You Then, O God, Inflamed with Wrath Against Me?, he sounded a note so low (accompanying the text’s nadir of despair) that I feared seismic consequences.

Ending a concert with such a bummer of a piece violated another rule: leave ’em smiling. Yet despite the downbeat spirit and ending, the audience heartily cheered the performance.

Another valuable musical guest, gambist Josh Lee, excelled in one of the other highlights of this concert that alternated accompanied vocals with instrumental-only pieces: a sonata by Buxtehude, the north German eminence whom J.S. Bach himself reputedly walked 250 miles from his home town to hear play the organ. But despite his and van der Kamp’s and Stubbs’s skillful performances in this Baroque geekfest, what really rose above was Huggett’s energetic performance — and her audience’s trust that she’ll present music they’ll likely enjoy despite, or even because of, its unfamiliarity. Seattle has its stars, but Huggett’s an Oregon music treasure.

At this writing, some seats are still available for Portland Baroque Orchestra’s encore performance of its Vocal Concerto concert this Saturday, April 5.

Want to read more about Oregon classical music? Support Oregon ArtsWatch!<

Want to learn more about contemporary Oregon classical music? Check out Oregon ComposersWatch.

Oregon ArtsWatch Archives