The Sky With All Its Stars
- On December 19, 2023
- By alzand@rice.edu
- In EVENTS, News
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A January 16th recital at the Shepherd School of Music features the premiere of several new song cycles for voice and piano performed by guest artists Aidan Soder (mezzo-soprano), Wesley Ducote (piano), Mark Diamond (baritone), Michael Clark (piano), Marcus DeLoach (baritone), Grant Loehnig (piano), and Shepherd School students James Palmer (piano), Caitlin Aloia (soprano), Julia Holoman (mezzo-soprano) and William Dopp (bass-baritone). The program includes selections from Tagore Love Songs, Orange Torches Against the Rain, and Two Songs on poems of Reg Huston and the world premiere of: Vespertine Songs, Four Not So Serious Songs, Unsentimental Love Songs and Your Letter Pleased Me Greatly.
Vespertine Songs are melodies of the night. Of an Evening is drawn from the descriptive prose of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), whose brooding evocation of a darkening city emphasizes a timeless, cyclic quality. Marina Tsvetaeva’s (1892–1941) Insomnia has us wandering with a sleepless night owl and finding no solace in the streets. In Points and Lines Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) paints a beautiful metaphor of a night sky, a summer lake and the revelatory wonder of stars. “Anne Knish” is a pseudonym of Arthur Davison Ficke (1883–1945), a conservative American poet whose many “spectralist” poems like Nocturne parodied the imagist movement. Poetic irony then, that these are the only verses for which he is remembered. Nocturne is a nighttime soundscape of sorts: the enveloping noises of the evening fade into the distance, replaced by something even more magical.
Four Not So Serious Songs comprise light-hearted settings of two poems by Robert Graves (1895–1985) and two by me. In This Song is Going to End our poor singer faces a looming existential crisis. An intemperate child protests his lot in Careers, a song which takes the form of a school-yard taunt. The nested structure of Warning to Children makes it a perfect poem for a patter song, its tripping rhythms spiraling down the page. So You Say is a gentle rebuke of melodramatic love songs, and a parody of their romantic tropes.
Unsentimental Love Songs are devoted to the quotidian side of love. The text of This is the Question is drawn from a page in Charles Darwin’s diary (above), when the famed scientist methodically weighs the pros and cons of his impending nuptials. His sensitive, if somewhat self-absorbed character comes across charmingly in his amorous analysis. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s (1892–1950) sonnet I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear is a classic unsentimental love poem, one of many to feature her delicate balance of scoffing wit and fragile sincerity.
Your Letter Pleased Me Greatly is based on text by Erasmus (1466–1536), from the Dutch theologian’s book on rhetoric, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (1512). In a virtuosic demonstration of prose embellishment, he famously provides 195 variations of the simple sentence “Tuae litterae me magnopere delectarunt” [Your letter pleased me greatly]—each variation bringing a very different sense and sentiment to the same basic point. Twenty variants are used in my piece for soprano and piano, and the work’s approach reflects the same conceit: each short “variation” uses similar musical material, but projected with a succession of different moods, characters, and structural forms.
Balourdet Quartet performs Strange Machines in Summer Season
- On June 28, 2023
- By alzand@rice.edu
- In EVENTS, News, Reviews/Press
- 0
The Balourdet Quartet will include Strange Machines in their summer season with performances at festivals including:
Taos School of Music Chamber Music Festival
Rockport Chamber Music Festival
Green Lake Festival of Music
Honest Brook Music Festival
Music Mountain Summer Festival
Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival
Nantucket Musical Arts Society
Portsmouth Athenaeum Chamber Music Series.
The Boston Musical Intelligencer reviewed their recent performance at Rockport.
Merz Trio premieres Lines in Motion at Chamber Music Columbus
- On May 08, 2023
- By alzand@rice.edu
- In EVENTS, News
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May 6th saw the Merz Trio premiere Lines in Motion at the concluding concert of Chamber Music Columbus‘ 75th anniversary season. Works by seven composers were commissioned by CMC over the course of their 2022-2023 season. (Lines in Motion was co-commissioned by Chamber Music Houston, where the work was played on January 17th.) The program, presented at the beautiful historic Southern Theatre, included works by Rachmaninov, Shostakovich and Schumann, and opened with a celebratory fanfare by Ching-chu Hu and poetry by poet laureate Jennifer Hambrick.
Strange Machines premiered in the UK and US
- On April 06, 2023
- By alzand@rice.edu
- In News
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Strange Machines (String Quartet No. 4) was premiered by the Balourdet Quartet in their UK tour this February. The work was given its US premiere at Merkin Hall, New York City on April 4th. Above, a film from the UK premiere: Wigmore Hall, February 7, 2023.
The Leader CD reviewed in Opera News
- On March 28, 2023
- By alzand@rice.edu
- In News, Reviews/Press
- 0
The recent CD release The Leader and other works (Navona Records NV6469) was reviewed by Joshua Rosenblum in the February 2023 issue of Opera News.
Canadian-American composer Karim Al-Zand demonstrates how relevant a one-act French political satire from 1953 can be. His short chamber opera The Leader is based on Eugène Ionesco’s Maître, in which, according to the notes, “The characters worship a buffoonish ‘great man.’” The play, we’re also told, is a “trenchant commentary on the casual rise of tyranny.” Ionesco’s pointed absurdities are surprisingly pertinent but also not nearly caustic enough to parody today’s America. But it’s clear why Al-Zand felt inspired to musicalize it.
Not much happens in the ten scenes of this thirty-five-minute work, which is partly the point. Most of the satire comes from the mindless repetition of certain phrases. “There he is! There he is! There he is! At the end of the street! There’s the Leader! He’s coming nearer, nearer, nearer,” sings the Announcer (Mark Diamond) at the beginning of the first track, “It’s Better If He Doesn’t See Us,” and then, at the end, “Hooray! The leader! Long live the leader! Too bad! He’s going away.” He’s joined in his sycophantic commentary by two Admirers amid a cheerfully pulsing musical texture, featuring a swirling figure for the solo woodwinds and a pungent, Poulenc-like harmonic language that proves a good match for Ionesco’s mocking aesthetic. Diamond is artfully unctuous in his grand, vacuous pronouncements; Megan Berti and Aidan Smerud echo him with pleasant (and alarming) brainlessness, particularly in the fourth track, in which their rapid-fire parroting of the Announcer’s phrases turns briefly into a laughing song.
Ionesco also provides a love story, in his characteristic absurdist fashion: the couple falls instantly in love after affirming that they don’t know each other and therefore have something in common. Al-Zand captures the deadpan drollery and gives it life with a fresh, piquant musical language and earnest, melismatic, self-mocking declamations. The short scene soars briefly into a lyrical love duet, allowing soprano Lindsay Russell Bowden and tenor Zach Averyt to flex their operatic chops while highlighting the silliness of love at first sight.
In later scenes, mini episodes are given over to the ridiculous: “They’ve given the leader’s trousers back! He puts them on!” and “The leader’s sucking his thumb!” This kind of thing could wear thin in less skilled hands, but Al-Zand provides continuous musical invention, including a fast, off-kilter jig in seven (2+2+3), breakneck orchestral skittering, a chorale with crunchy harmonies and a militaristic march that implies incipient creeping Fascism. The Leader had a full staging in February 2020, but it’s easy to imagine successful concert performances as well. The eleven-piece ensemble, led with precision by Eiki Isomura, gives a crackerjack rendering of the virtuoso score.
Also included here is Songs From the Post TruthEra,a setting of three poems combined into a single continuous piece,which promises more skewering of ripe targets, though it doesn’t draw quite as much blood as one might hope. The first poem, Charles Lamb’s “Incorrect Speaking” (1809), is an admonition to a young girl and contains lines such as “Study well the sense of each / Sentence, lest in any manner / It misrepresent the truth.” The second two poems are mashups of words and phrases from Lamb, a technique Al-Zand calls “vocabularyclept.” These fractured texts (intentionally) make less and less sense as they proceed, and Al-Zand accordingly puts soprano Alexandra Smither through vocal calisthenics of ever-increasing difficulty—all of which she aces—amid her character’s mounting hysteria. Bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward, the sole accompanist in this unusually scored piece, is an equal partner and matches Smither’s remarkable expressive prowess.
Three instrumental sets round out this impressive collection from a composer who deserves wider recognition—Six Bagatelles for piano trio, with color-oriented titles such as “Mezzotint in Indigo” and “Gauloises Bleues”; two of Al-Zand’s Capriccios for solo violin; and Stomping Grounds, a four-movement work for clarinet, violin and piano, whose jazzy and harmonically original last movement sounds like ragtime put through a blender. The two solo capriccios are challenging but idiomatic showpieces, with blistering performances by violinists Sonja Harasim and Matthew J. Detrick respectively, both delivered with considerable expertise and outstanding intonation. —Joshua Rosenblum
