ASO Festival: The good, the bad and the long
Devoted and intrepid music lovers were kept busy last weekend with the Albany Symphony’s American Music Festival, which ran from Thursday through Sunday at venues in Troy and Cohoes. The capstone event was Saturday night at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, which I’ve already reviewed. I also attended three other concerts and here are some observations in reverse chronological order.
On Saturday afternoon Sandbox Percussion performed Andy Akiho’s “Seven Pillars,” a spellbinding 80-minute work presented at the AI Center of Excellence, a former Masonic lodge located at 19 Third St. in downtown Troy. The majority of square footage in the high ceilinged third-floor space became the stage for the four percussionists. They performed the entire piece from memory at stations of instruments that were periodically repositioned throughout the room.
Sometimes during their solos individual members were seen striking away at mallet keyboards (marimbas and vibraphones, mostly) that were simultaneously wheeled through the space by the other players.
This is the same quartet that debuted Viet Cuong ’s “Re(new) al” with the Dogs of Desire at the 2017 festival. With its clever bit of choreography, that piece showed that the members of Sandbox know how to circumnavigate and play at the same time.
“Seven Pillars” also included a lighting scheme by Michael Joseph McQuilken that the players cued with simple computer commands. As the audience took their seats, the back of the stage area was lined with seven upright white lights that resemble fluorescent tubes. During the performance, these freestanding units, each about 4 feet tall, changed colors and were regularly repositioned amid the instruments to redefine space or highlight individual players.
Apart from the space and decor, the music was engaging and repetitive but always full of
off-kilter accents and unexpected twists. The thrilling performance was clean and precise, both subtle and bravura all at once. One couldn’t help but laugh and cheer a couple of times when, in between beats, a performer would flip his sticks into the air and catch them in a split second before continuing on with the fast-moving score.
In an earlier era, percussion music usually involved a junkyard
of weird paraphernalia and formless passages of improvisation. The orderly minimalism of Steve Reich wiped all that away. Though it doesn’t sound minimalist, Akiho’s eleven-movement work, some eight years in the making, follows in Reich’s long wake. The piece was a finalist for the most recent Pulitzer Prize for music and the recording received two Grammy nominations.
Friday night in the Cohoes Music Hall the Dogs of Desire made its annual appearance with five brand new works. Have I ever used the terms “mutts” or “mongrels” before in covering this group? Most of these newborn pups had some redeeming quality but several quickly wore out their welcome.
Music director David Alan Miller, usually so positive-minded, twice used the word “long” in introducing some of the pieces. It came off as both a warning to the audience and a complaint to the composers. He also said, not for the first time, “Composers never listen to me.”
Each of the new Dogs pieces will receive a second performance at one of the ASO’s outdoor concerts coming up in six cities through July 3, a series dubbed TrailBlaze NY, celebrating the 750 miles of the Empire State Trail. Each composer was asked to take inspiration from one of those sites. In closely tying new music to regional history, Miller is continuing an ASO tradition that started more than 20 years ago with what became known as the Capital Heritage Concerts.
Maybe Miller needs to go
back to smaller topics, perhaps something like street corners or door fronts. When giving striving young composers themes like an entire city, or the Hudson River, or the Empire State Trail, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that they reach for the stars and deliver oversized pieces.
For her “Biking to Amsterdam, NY – Summer, 2022” Natalie Draper invited writer Anita Sanchez to contribute a poetic text that was read, at great length, as an introduction to each of the piece’s five movements. The writing explicated all the vivid things that the flaccid music should have given us on its own, like the feeling of fresh air and the sunshine, the effort of pedaling a bike, and the sound of the railroad. Also, too many historical facts were jammed in, making the words and music feel like the soundtrack to a tourist video rather than a standalone concert work.
Bobby Ge’s “In Search of Standard Time” was based on an observation that the railroad industry of Schenectady gave birth to the notion of time zones and the schedules that now rule our lives. He sought to bookend his piece (another one with five movements) with the pre-industrial laissez-faire toward time and the casual relaxation of
being on a hiking trail. In between would come the grids and strictures of modern life. If only the music lived up to this. The writing was thick, busy and full of activity, but nothing really seemed to happen except that it ate up a lot of time.
For Loren Loiacono’s “Empire Lines” only two out of the three movements were performed.
Her concept was to depict landmarks along the Hudson that are seen while riding Amtrak from New York City. Loiacono is no rookie with the ASO. Her writing is consistently appealing and there was no shortage of good material here, just too much of it for the occasion.
Andre Myers, another returning composer, got the balance of substance and form just right in “The New Colossus,” a setting of the Emma Lazarus sonnet enshrined at the Statue of Liberty. In his program note Myers shared thoughts on the current state of immigration and how the Empire State Trail metaphorically reaches far beyond the state borders. The music bore these concerns lightly.
The evening ended with Jack Ferer’s suite of arrangements of five light rock songs that were written and sung by Katie Hammon of the Troy-based band Bear Grass. Hammon’s material is thoughtful and pleasant and she has a fine voice. Maybe somebody thought this would add a pop culture pizzazz to the evening, but after all that transpired it just felt like an unimaginative coda. Speaking of pop music, does anybody else remember when the Dogs concerts consisted of mostly short, wry and punchy numbers?
The American Music Festival got started on Thursday evening in the Troy Music Hall with a recital by pianist Gloria Cheng, who was in town to perform the John Williams premiere on Saturday night. Cheng is an established talent with a devotion to contemporary works. Yet on this occasion, she failed to deliver a performance that had any feeling of progression or offer any crisp distinctions. Everything kind of sounded the same. That’s quite an achievement considering the many musical styles and languages she navigated.
Cheng showed only a mild and passing connection to the audience. She whispered lessons about the pieces and assumed that patrons were informed insiders to the contemporary music world. She also asked us to help her keep track of what she’d played by putting check marks in our programs, never realizing that we were sitting in the dark and unable to read a thing.
There were pieces by 11 composers and one of them, David Lang ’s “summer piano” was a world premiere. Lang ’s sweet and tonal cycles (a triple cannon, Cheng told us afterward) were an ideal match to her gentle sensibilities. The music brought to mind ambient electronic music composer/producer Brian Eno.
Another tender voiced highlight were the four miniatures from four different composers who wrote in memory of the late Steven Stucky. Played without pause, they were reverent, wistful and evocative.
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