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NY Times: "Powerful Account" of Reich's "Daniel Variations" Part of Bang on a Can Marathon Proceedings

This past weekend, the Bang on a Can Marathon took over the World Financial Center's Winter Garden for a 12-hour festival of works by composers ranging from Bang on a Can founders Michael Gordon and David Lang to Lennon and McCartney, and featuring performances of works by John Adams and Steve Reich. The New York Times's Steve Smith offers this:

The vibrant chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound kicked off the proceedings at 6 PM with a movement from John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony, and much later offered a staggeringly creative arrangement of the Beatles' abstract sound collage "Revolution 9," arranged by Matt Marks. Signal, a new chamber orchestra, made an auspicious New York debut at midnight with a powerful account of Steve Reichs' Daniel Variations.

To read the complete coverage in the Times, visit nytimes.com.

The Nonesuch Journal offers its own contribution in the form of the above photo of Alarm Will Sound artistic director Alan Pierson conducting the ensemble in Son of Chamber Symphony.

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Click here to add Steve Reich's Daniel Variations CD, plus free album MP3s, directly to your Shopping Cart for $14, along with the exclusive Nonesuch Store bonus download Dance Patterns.

Nonesuch Events This Weekend

Here is our weekly list of just some of the many events going on across the globe this weekend featuring Nonesuch artists:

As was reported earlier today, John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony will be performed by Alarm Will Sound as part of the free, 12-hour Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City's Winter Garden.

As was also reported earlier today, Wonders Are Many, the film documenting the creation of Adams's opera Doctor Atomic, makes its theatrical debut today, playing in theaters in New York City and Los Angeles. Read the Journal entry here.

Choreographer John Neumeier's Parzifal: Episodes and Echo, featuring Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Tromba Lontana, Christian Zeal and Activity, The Wound-Dresser, El Dorado, and The Dharma at Big Sur, and has been performed all this month by the Hamburg Ballet at the Staatsoper in Hamburg, continues this weekend with a performance on Saturday. Tickets: hamburgballet.de.

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David Byrne's site-specific sound installation, Playing the Building, opens tomorrow afternoon in New York's Battery Maritime Building. For the summer-long event, Byrne has turned the entire building into a working instrument that visitors can play. Admission is free, with an opening reception tomorrow evening at 6 PM. Information: creativetime.org. You can also read more about it and watch a short video of the installation in action at nytimes.com.

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Richard Goode's public role as Associate Artist in the Southbank Centre's 2007/08 artist-in-residence series concludes on Saturday in a two-piano performance with pianist Jonathan Biss at Queen Elizabeth Hall. The program includes Schubert's Allegro in A minor for piano duet, "Lebenssturme"; Schumann's Six Etudes en forme de canon, arranged by Debussy for two pianos; Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, arranged for piano duet; Stravinsky's Agon, arranged for two pianos; and Debussy's En blanc et noir for two pianos. Tickets: southbankcentre.co.uk.

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k.d. lang continues the Watershed tour north of the 49th parallel this weekend with a stop at Toronto's Massey Hall tomorrow night at 8 PM. Tickets: masseyhall.com.

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Punch Brothers' Chris Thile joins the Prairie Home Companion crew Saturday night, broadcasting live from the Pan American Center at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Chris last appeared on the show in early April during its stop in New York City. The show airs at 3 PM PT/6 PM ET; check here for local listings, or visit prairiehome.publicradio.org.

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Steve Reich's Daniel Variations will be performed by SIGNAL, conducted by Brad Lubman, in the aforementioned Bang on a Can Marathon Saturday, sometime after midnight.

Also this weekend, the composer's Three Movements will be performed twice, tonight and tomorrow night, by the Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, led by Michael Gohl, at the Theaterhaus in Stuttgart, Germany. Info: stuttgart.de/philharmoniker. And in Brisbane, Australia, Ba Da Boom Percussion performs Reich's Drumming in a free concert at the Turbine Platform of the Brisbane Powerhouse Arts center, tomorrow at 4 PM. Info: brisbanepowerhouse.org.
 

Adams, Reich Works in Bang on a Can NYC Marathon This Weekend

The Bang on a Can Marathon---which the New York Times calls "an annual orgy of new music," takes places this weekend, bringing 12 hours of free music to the World Financial Center's Winter Garden in downtown New York City. The event kicks off at 6 PM on Saturday evening with Alarm Will Sound's performance of the third movement to John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony. The San Francisco Chronicle calls it a "vivacious" piece that "bursts with the technical prowess and cogent wit of the composer's finest efforts," and said of Alarm Will Sound's premiere of the work last December that it was “delivered with verve and precision." Choreographer Mark Morris's setting of the piece in his Joyride at the San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival last month featured what the Chronicle called the epitome of "dazzlingly sophisticated musicality."

As the clock turns past midnight, Steve Reich's Daniel Variations is scheduled to be performed by SIGNAL, a new-music group featuring members of Alarm Will Sound and founded by Brad Lubman, who will conduct the performance in the 12-2 AM block.

The musical marathon continues into the wee hours of the morning, with works by such renowned  composers as Terry Riley, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Brian Eno, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and even an arrangement of The Beatles' Revolution #9, which Alarm Will Sound will play shortly after SIGNAL's Daniel Variations performance.

For more information and the complete schedule of events, visit bangonacan.org.

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Click here to add Steve Reich's Daniel Variations CD, plus free album MP3s, directly to your Shopping Cart for $14, along with the exclusive Nonesuch Store bonus download Dance Patterns.

SF Chronicle: Adams Piece "Lived Up to the Buzz" in Mark Morris Dance with "Dazzlingly Sophisticated Musicality"

The San Francisco Ballet celebrates its 75th anniversary season in 2008, and the final programs are anything but a look backwards. The season comes to a close with the forward-looking New Works Festival, which began on Tuesday of this week with the first of three programs to run through May 6.

Program A includes works by choreographers Paul Taylor, Christopher Wheeldon, and Yuri Possokhov, the last featuring the late Indian film composer Rahul Dev Burman's "Aaj Ki Raat" (Tonight's the Night) that Osvaldo Golijov arranged for Kronos Quartet's Caravan . The San Francisco Chronicle's dance correspondent Rachel Howard calls it the "improbable triumph of the evening," with Possokhov pulling a number disparate pieces together "with theatrical flair."

Program B debuted on Wednesday, with works by Stanton Welch, Julia Adam, James Kudelka, and Mark Morris. The last, titled Joyride, features John Adams's Son of a Chamber Symphony, co-commissioned by Morris and Alarm Will Sound, which gave the piece its premiere performance last fall. For this week's opening, the composer conducted, and, says the Chronicle's Rachel Howard, "it lived up to the buzz."
About Morris's piece, Howard writes:

if you appreciate a ballet that offers dazzlingly sophisticated musicality, that takes classical attention to form and channels it into a modern ethos---if you cherish a ballet sure to show you something new every time you see it---then you could hardly do better than Mark Morris' Joyride.

Summing up the evening's program as a whole, Howard finds that it "fulfilled the festival's larger potential: revealing the many faces of ballet today."

To read the full Chronicle review of Program A, click here, and of Program B, click here.

The festival's third program, Program C, premiered last night and includes Jorma Elo's Double Evil, set to Philip Glass's Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra and Vladimir Martynov's Come In!, the latter which Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica recorded on the album Silencio in 2000.

For complete program and schedule information, visit sfballet.org.

Steve Reich's "Daniel Variations" to Be Performed at 2008 Bang on a Can NY Marathon

Bang on a Can has announced the schedule for this year's Bang on a Can Marathon and a preliminary listing of the program. A performance of Steve Reich's Daniel Variations, by Signal ensemble, will be a highlight of the 12-hour event, to be held at New York's World Financial Center Winter Garden from 6 PM on May 31 though 6 AM on June 1. Also slated are works by John Adams, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, and many others, including Alarm Will Sound's take on the Beatles' Revolution No. 9. For more information, visit bangonacan.org.

To listen to the first movement off Daniel Variations, in stores now, visit nonesuch.com/stevereich.

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Click here to add the Daniel Variations CD directly to your Shopping Cart now for $14 with the album MP3s at no extra cost, along with the exclusive Nonesuch Store bonus download Dance Patterns.

Alarm Will Sound to Give NY Premiere of Adams Piece at Carnegie Hall

Alarm Will Sound, which gave the world premiere of John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony at Stanford University on November 30 of last year, will give the piece its New York premiere tonight in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall. You'll find reviews of the piece, which the Los Angeles Times's Mark Swed called "pure Adams," and the world premiere in the Nonesuch Journal archives by clicking here.

Tonight's concert, part of Carnegie's Fast Forward series, begins at 7:30 PM and will include works by Nancarrow, Ligeti, Josquin des Prez, and Aphex Twin, among others. For complete program and ticket information, visit carnegiehall.org.

John Adams's "Exhilarating" New Work Debuted by "Virtuosic" Alarm Will Sound

As we reported earlier this week, Alarm Will Sound gave the world premiere performance of John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony last weekend at Stanford University, and the reviews continue to roll in.

Joshua Kosman, music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, calls the new piece “vivacious,” writing that it “bursts with the technical prowess and cogent wit of the composer's finest efforts.” And according to Kosman, the piece was “delivered with verve and precision” by Alarm Will Sound under Alan Pierson’s lead, as part of a larger program “notable for its imagination and variety.”

Writing in the Financial Times, Allan Ulrich also points to the group's prowess in pulling off the "dangerously exhilarating" piece with aplomb. Referencing Adams's own description of the piece as "akin to 'shaving with a dull razor,'" Ulrich says the group "emerged from the encounter without scrapes or nicks" and, notable for its "insouciant virtuosity," remains "a force to reckon with in contemporary American music."

For the complete Financial Times review, visit ft.com.

Richard Scheinin of the San Jose Mercury News adds his own praise for "the crackerjack new-music ensemble, which has played Adams's music for a number of years and knows its language and tricks." This came particularly in handy given the Son of Chamber Symphony's ties to its predecessor and its links to other works in the Adams repertoire as well:

It feeds off the frenetic quality of the earlier piece ... but it has leaner, cleaner textures and gets funkier than the first Chamber Symphony, while also drawing on the gently strumming and thrumming effects (think Naive and Sentimental Music) and pulsing tonal dances (think The Chairman Dances and Nixon in China) of other Adams works ... [I]t's one of those solid Adams pieces (think John's Alleged Book of Dances or Scratchband) that are filled with humor and bite.

The program also included works by Nancarrow, Ligeti, Birtwistle ("the thorniest of modern rhythm-writers"); Josquin and Ciconia ("rhythm tricksters of the Renaissance"); and Aphex Twin and Mochipet ("ingeniously rearranged"). For Scheinin, the entire program was one of "rhythmic and coloristic virtuosity" by the "dazzlingly virtuosic group" and its artistic director, Pierson ("a wizard").

To read Scheinin's review, visit mercurynews.com.

LA Times: John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony "A Chip Off the Old Block"

This past Friday, John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony received its world premiere at Stanford University, and, writes Los Angeles Times staff writer Mark Swed, the piece is "a chip off the old block." The composer wrote his original Chamber Symphony in 1992 while studying Schoenberg and overhearing the Carl Stalling–penned score coming from the Looney Tunes cartoons his son was watching in the other room, but the new piece, writes Swed, "is pure Adams."

The composer's signature style "has never [been] done ... more engagingly" than in the new piece, "in which an ornate melody begun by flute and clarinet blooms into a complex, richly imagined hothouse orchard." But, reports Swed, the piece is "feisty" as well, perhaps, he posits, as a nod to Alarm Will Sound, the adventurous ensemble for whom it was written. The group, led by Alan Pierson, premiered the piece on Friday on a program that also featured electronica by Aphex Twin and works Nancarrow, Ligeti and Birtwistle.

The feistiness in Son of Chamber Symphony may also be manifested in the challenge it poses those playing it. The third movement is an orchestration of a piece Adams wrote for Kronos Quartet to play at Peter Sellars's 50th birthday earlier this year, and about the piece as a whole, Swed writes:

Son is as difficult as his original chamber symphony, if not more so. The first movement sets out to the accompaniment of a rhythmic motif lifted from the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, then nervously yet confidently scurries all over the place, changing meters all the time. Absorbing its interesting details will require many listenings. The last movement is one of those Adams bucking-bronco blastoffs, riveting and full of surprises.

Alarm Will Sound will give Son of Chamber Symphony its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on February 28, and a dance by Mark Morris set to the piece is in the works as well. "But even without such insurance," says Swed, "a kid with these goods should have no problem making his way in the world."

To read Swed's Los Angeles Times review, visit calendarlive.com.