News Coverage

Fanfare readers have met Mathew Rosenblum in reviews by Robert Kirzinger in 23:5 and Robert Carl, who covered a New World disc of several works about a year ago, in 36:3. Both of my colleagues liked his music a great deal, and so do I. Rosenblum has forged a unique compositional voice, in part from the tuning and temperament that he employs in his music. The 21-tone and 19-tone scales that permit intervals in just intonation are among the tools in his toolbox.

As a graduate student I remember Arthur Berger's music being described in the halls as "white-note Webern." In fact, as Rodney Lister's notes clarify for me, it was Milton Babbitt, who, in a 1950 article, described the music as "diatonic Webern," a moniker that apparently stuck the same way to Berger as the notorious "Who Cares If You Listen?" stuck to Babbitt (incidentally not that composer's title).

The January program in the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s season almost always emphasizes Boston-based composers of the present day or recent past. On Friday night Gil Rose led the group in three world premieres by composers of whom two still live and work in the area, while the third studied and taught here before moving elsewhere. The three pieces were very different in character, all worth hearing, and all extremely well played.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project gave world premieres by three of its veteran composer colleagues Friday night at Jordan Hall.

The sonic worlds explored in the works by Elena Ruehr, David Rakowski, and Ken Ueno covered a wide range of what is meant by “new music” today. The first two recast familiar idioms in bracing new ways. The latter explored more ear-bending sonorities. For each, Gil Rose and the BMOP orchestra provided bold advocacy.

In the early 90s, I sang a small role in Jacob Druckman’s opera Medea in the Juilliard Opera Center’s semi-staged production of it. I was struck by its synthesis of old and new, and demanding yet felicitous writing for the voice. Later I worked with Druckman at the Aspen Music Festival and saw him again in a masterclass at Boston University. At the latter he seemed unwell, but retained his charisma and sense of humor. Little did I know that he was terminally ill with cancer; he passed away some months later. Although my contacts with Druckman were brief, I miss him.

History is a relentless homogenizer. What begins life as a blooming, buzzing confusion, continuously evolving in manifold and unpredictable directions, once passed through the coarse sieve of history, becomes calcified, reified, downgraded from a vital, animate organism into an abject fossil. Time as one part petrification, one part putrefaction. Take the great late Renaissance polyphonists, Lassus, Palestrina, and Victoria.

On Saturday the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) presented a concert performance of Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1928) in Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory.

Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts plays upon theatrical conventions, beginning with its title. Four sixteenth-century saints—St. Ignatius, St. Chavez, St. Settlement, and St. Teresa (split into two roles)—stand out from a sea of about twenty others. The singers explicitly cue the scenes, sometimes out of order, in each directionless act. And by the way, there are actually four of them.

Jacob Druckman (1928-1996) was one of greatest orchestral composers – if not the finest – of the 20th century. Though his music adhered to a sometimes-difficult aesthetic, Druckman, like his great contemporary, György Ligeti, had such a command of instrumentation that he could simply draw in listeners through the engaging peculiarity of his sound world. That reality is demonstrated powerfully in BMOP’s new album, Lamia, which documents music Druckman composed or arranged over the last decade of his life.