Moonstrung Air - Gregory Brown

Moonstrung Air - music by Gregory W Brown; New York Polyphony, The Crossing, Donald Nally, Eric Dudley; Navona Records
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on Feb 13 2015
Star rating: 4.0
Contemporary vocal music which showcases the intriguing and intelligent work by this American composer

I first came across Greg Brown's music when reviewing New York Polyphony's recording of his Missa Charles Darwin on Navona Records. Both the work and the music intrigued me, and I ended up helping to facilitate (and taking part in) the UK premiere of Missa Charles Darwin in a new version for mixed choir in a performance given by London Concord Singers and the late Malcolm Cottle. Now Navona Records has issued a complete disc of Brown's music so that New York Polyphony's recording of Missa Charles Darwin and Three American Folk Hymns has been teamed up with more of Brown's intriguing music, with The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally, performing Five Women Bathing by Moonlight, Vidi Aquam, and Entrai Pastores Entrai along with a recording of Spring conducted by Eric Dudley.

Gregory W Brown

Gregory W. Brown lives and works in Western Massachusetts. He studied at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music (University of Georgia), Westminster Choir College and Amherst College, where he studied with Lewis Spratlan. His music is essentially tonal, and he writes sympathetically for the voice but that does not mean that he writes down or that his music is not complex. I know from my experience of singing Missa Charles Darwin that his style is in fact highly complex, whilst remaining tricky but achievable for an amateur group like London Concord Singers. Listening to the wider selection of Brown's music on this disc, you sense that he is familiar with and sympathetic to the style of well-made Renaissance polyphony beloved of many choristers. Brown also has an interesting view of what constitutes a settable subject and text, so that the works on this disc challenge in a number of very satisfying ways. 

Five women bathing by moonlight is a setting of a poem by Richard Wilbur, depicting a seaside party in the 1940's. The poet renders the real event as dreamlike and timeless, and it is these elements that Brown's setting picks up on. There is a lovely clarity to the sound of the choir, The Crossing which is a 24 member professional choir, but there is a clarity to the texture of Brown's writing too. His impulse is essentially lyric, but with passing dissonances and a feeling of well wrought polyphony. The piece is dreamlike, in a way which is sober and grave.

Missa Charles Darwin

As a contemporary composer who also sings a lot of Renaissance polyphony I find the intersection between polyphony and the modern composing idiom very fascinating. Composer Gregory W. Brown has created a modern mass, Missa Charles Darwin, in the unaccompanied polyphonic idiom for four voices, which has been recorded by the men of New York Polyphony (the four-man vocal ensemble with a counter-tenor on the top line). But Brown has gone one better and created a modern version of the texts. Here the Latin of the ordinary of the mass has been largely replaced by the words of Charles Darwin. Brown is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, who studied with amongst others the 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner Lewis Spratlan.

The idea and the initial draft of the libretto came from Craig Phillips, bass in Neew York Polyphony. The mass is laid out with the traditional movements, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei with the addition of a couple of extras.

London Concord Singers starting 2014 with a bang

The choir in which I sing, London Concord Singers, is starting 2014 with a bang. They have commissioned a new piece from Judith Bingham; the new work, which sets words from Alice in Wonderland and from the novels of Charles Dickens, will be premiered by them in July 2014. And in April 2014 The choir will also be giving the European premiere of the Missa Charles Darwin by American composer Gregory W Brown (brother of the author Dan Brown).

Dan Brown's Wild Symphony

Dan Brown, the author of the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, has a new book out later this year. Not, perhaps, a project that might be mentioned on a classical music blog, but Brown's new book is slightly different, Wild Symphony is a picture-book for children (produced with illustrator Susan Batori) and it comes complete with music which has been written by Brown himself. And when people buy the book they get an app, so that they can listen to the music as well.

The music for the project was recorded in Zagreb, and the concert premiere of Brown's Wild Symphony is planned for 10 October 2020, with the American premiere planned for November in Portsmouth, Connecticut with the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra, though given the current situation the record company, Parma Recordings, is not certain what form these will take. Stay tuned.

Inspired by classics such as Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals, Brown's Wild Symphony, his first work for orchestra, features twenty-one musical portraits drawn from the animal kingdom.

On a personal note, Dan Brown's younger brother Gregory W. Brown is composer based in New England, and I took part in the UK premiere of his Missa Charles Darwin, which uses the structure of the mass but with texts taken from Charles Darwin; it was also the European premiere of a new version of the work for mixed chorus it having originally been written for the all-male group New York Polyphony.

Further details from the Wild Symphony website, where there will be a list of live performances of the new work.

Dan Brown's Wild Symphony! from Peter Vandall on Vimeo.

Rights and wrongs - copyright frustration

Words can be an endless source of delight and frustration to a composer. You need a supply of them, if you are to write songs and choral music, but the text needs to match your ideas for the musical piece. This is particularly true, for me, of songs (for choral music I tend to raid the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer) as I find that it is contemporary writers that appeal the most and here the vexed question of copyright raises its head. My most recent set of songs involve the text of a living writer, Joan Didion, and my attempts to get permission have led to frustration.

Not every writer appreciates having their text mauled about in a musical setting, especially as the composer can entirely alter the meaning of the song simply by surrounding the text with extra musical ideas - a prelude or a postlude in the accompaniment can be devastating. A.E. Housman was notoriously grumpy at his songs being set, especially when composers like Vaughan Williams

Hitting the high notes - Arias for Caffarelli

In 1733 Handel's leading man, the castrato Senesino, left his company having created 17 leading roles. Operatic convention of the time demanded a castrato, so Handel replaced Senesino, with a succession of other castratos, first with Carestini (for whom he wrote Ariodante) and subsequently Conti, Andreoni and Caffarelli. Caffarelli would sing for Handel in the 1737/38 season creating roles in Handel's Faramondo and the title role in Serse. Whereas Senesino had an alto voice, Andreoni was soprano and the others were mezzo-sopranos. But there is one castrato missing, Farinelli the greatest of the age; though he worked in London he never sang for Handel. His closest rival was perhaps Caffarelli, and in fact Caffarelli's period in London was not greatly successful.

Caffarelli was a student of the composer Nicola Porpora (as was Farinelli) and much associated with the music of Hasse and the Naples school. These composers wrote brilliantly, almost instrumentally, for the voice giving the castratos the sort of coloratura showpieces at which they excelled. So quite what Caffarelli made of the rather satirical title role in Handel's Serse I don't know!.

Present day counter-tenors find that the roles written for the alto castratos like Senesino fall comfortably into their tessitura. But the mezzo-soprano castrato roles have traditionally been taken by women in modern revivals, but this is something which is changing, as a generation of counter-tenors develops for whom the higher tessitura holds fewer terrors. Now counter-tenor Franco Fagioli is joining the ranks, releasing a disc on naive of arias written for Caffarelli.

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra's 2013/14 season

The BBC Philharmonic Orchestra's 2013/14 season at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall includes two world premieres, by Emily Howard and Gary Carpenter, along with an impressive series of concerts based on Richard Strauss's song, plus a series celebrating Manchester's musical heritage.

Emily Howard's Axon (commissioned by Radio 3) is premiered on 1 November 2013 at a concert conducted by the BBC Philharmonic's chief conductor, Juanjo Mena. The concert is part of a series of concerts celebrating Manchester's musical heritage.

Unsettling and distinctive: Gregory Brown's new work for vocal sextet and electronics, Fall and Decline

Gregory Brown Fall and Decline; Variant 6; Navona Records
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 1 September 2021 Star rating: 3.5 (★★★½)
A contemporary vocal work that marries lessons from history with contemporary vocal techniques to striking effect

Variant 6 is an American vocal sextet whose work involves commissioning new pieces, and collaborating with a range of artists from composers to dancers to visual artists. On Fall and Decline, on Navona Records, American composer Gregory Brown has written a work for Variant 6, Fall and Decline for vocal sextet and electronics.

Variant 6 comprises six young singers, sopranos Jessica Beebee and Rebecca Myers, mezzo-soprano Elisa Sutherland, tenors Steven Bradshaw and James Reese, and bass Daniel Schwartz, who perform with other leading American ensembles from Trinity Wall Street to Apollo's Fire to The Crossing.

Gregory Brown's new work for them continues his exploration of complex contemporary polyphony which will be familiar to anyone who knows his 2011 Missa Charles Darwin, written for the all-male ensemble New York Polyphony. This new piece continues the vein of complex modern polyphonic textures, but adds microtones and other vocal techniques and interweaves them with electronics.

Temple Music new season

The Temple Music Foundation runs a concert season each year with concerts two historic venues, Middle Temple Hall and Temple Church. The Foundation was established to support and promote music in the Temple and to contribute resources when possible towards the education of the Temple Church’s choristers. They are known for their Temple Song series, directed by Julius Drake, but in fact the present quite a wide range of concerts. They have just released their Autumn/Winter programme which includes recitals from Annette Dasch and Roderick Williams with Julius Drake, plus visits from the Sixteen, Endymion, the Sacconi String Quartet, the Wallfisch/York Duo, Nicholas Daniel and the Aurora Orchestra. The music of this years centenarians, Britten, Wagner and Verdi makes a significant contribution to the series. But there is also the chance to see a silent film with improvised accompaniment from organist David Briggs, and to hear the Sixteen in music written for the Tudors.

Recording ups and downs

There have been a few ups and downs in the record industry. In a move which seems to be the way most ensembles are going, the Academy of Ancient Music has announced that it is developing its own record label, with four double albums promised for this year ranging from the birth of the symphony to Bach passions. But a number of distributors across the globe have been going into administration, reflecting the down turn in the sales of CD's.

London Philharmonic Orchestra's 2013/14 season

The first half of the London Philharmonic Orchestra's 2013/14 season at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank, sees the orchestra completing their contribution to the South Bank Centre's The Rest is Noise festival with concerts celebrating Britten's centenary as well as performing music by his friends and contemporaries such as Poulenc, Shostakovich, Ligeti Schnittke and Dutilleux. Moving further ahead in time they explore Messian, Gubadulina and Part before giving us some key British works from the 1990's by MacMillan and Ades.

Rachmaninov and Shostakovich sonatas

This new disc on Onyx Classics from the young London-based German cellist Leonard Elschenbroich, accompanied by Alexei Grynyuk on piano, gives us a pair of sonatas by Russian composers. Sergei Rachmaninov's Cello Sonata, the last of his chamber music, was written in 1901 and Dmitri Shostakovich's Viola Sonata (in an arrangement for violoncello and piano by Daniil Shafran), the composer's last completed work. The two could not be more different, the sonata by the young Rachmaninov (aged 28) is imbued with the singing romance we know from the piano concertos, whereas Shostakovich's late work is bleak and enigmatic, full of quotations from his own work and other composers.

Debussy's La Mer from Les Siecles

Period instrument ensembles are continuing the discovery of late 19th and 20th century music, showing what revelations the changes in timbres and performing styles can bring. The French group Les Siecles, conductor Francois-Xavier Roth, who will be appearing at the Proms on Sunday 14 July 2013 playing Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, have a new disc out exploring the music of Debussy. Recorded live, the disc pairs Debussy's early Premiere Suite in its first ever recording, with his orchestral masterpiece La Mer.

Debussy's Premiere Suite was written whilst the composer was studying at the Paris Conservatoire in Ernest Guiraud's composition class. (Guiraud, incidentally, was the friend of Bizet who was responsible for writing the recitative in Carmen after Bizet's death). Debussy's Premiere Suite was writte in 1882-84 but only came to light in the 1970's. The work exists in a piano duet form and in a fully orchestrated form.

The piano duet version was premiered in 2008 and the orchestral version in 2012. The work is in four movements, Fete, Ballet, Reves, Cortege et Bacchanale. The orchestration to the third movement, Reves, has been lost and on this disc the movement has been orchestrated by Philippe Manoury.

Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale

Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale is a compact piece, deliberately so. The work was written when Stravinsky was marooned in Switzerland during World War One and uses just seven instrumentalists and three actors, plus dancers to tell the story. It was conceived by Stravinsky and the Swiss writer CF Ramuz, based on a Russian folk-tale and was premiered in Lausanne in 1918 with Ernest Ansermet conducting. As part of the International Youth Arts Festival in Kingston-upon-Thames, the Constella Ballet and Orchestra mounted a production of the Soldier's Tale at the Rose Theatre on 15 July 2013 with choreography by Jaered Glavin.

The Constella Orchestra was founded by conductor/composer Leo Geyer and clarinettist Henry Clay as a student run ensemble featuring players from many of the UK universities and conservatoires. Since their founding in 2011 their impressive programme has encompassed Beethoven's Violin Concerto with Simon Standage, Stravinsky's Pulcinella and Clay's own opera The Mermaid of Zennor.

This new venture, a fully staged version of the Soldier's Tale was choreographed by Jaered Glavin who studied with the Royal Ballet School and danced with the Royal New Zealand Ballet from 2008 to 2012. Glavin's production used a black stage with just a table and chair stage left and the instrumental ensemble stage right. The narrator was Saul Boyer, a young actor, writer and director who is currently studying at Cambridge. He was placed standing next to the ensemble and was the only one of the actors to be amplified.

Schumann and Dvorak piano concertos

The young Swiss-Italian pianist Francesco Piemontesi has teamed up with Jiri Belohlavek and the BBC Symphony Orchestra for a disc of piano concertos, pairing a live recording of Schumann's Piano Concerto with a studio recording of the rather rarer Dvorak Piano Concerto in its original published version from 1883. 

Schumann's Piano Concerto was written for his wife Clara to play and the work is strongly associated with her style of playing. As a teacher, Clara's emphasis was on legato line and singing tone, on touch. According to her pupil Franklin Taylor ‘the peculiarly beautiful quality of tone she produced ... was obtained by pressure with the fingers rather than by percussion ... The fingers were kept close to the keys and squeezed instead of striking them’.

Many years ago there was a boxed set of vinyl discs issued devoted to the recordings of pupil's of Clara Schumann, including a recording of the Schumann Piano Concerto by Clara Schumann's pupil Fanny Davies. I'm not sure whether this recording is currently available but you can download extracts from YouTube. I bring this up, because Fanny Davies' performance is notable for its lack of bravura, its evenness of tone and sense of legato. I bring this up because listening to Piemontesi playing the Schumann Piano Concerto on this new disc brought back memories of Fanny Davies, though I'd hesitate to compare them directly.

Okeanos Ensemble travels the Tokaido Road

Okeanos is a rather distinctive instrumental ensemble which mixes traditional Japanese instruments with western ones, so that they mix koto and sho with clarinet, viola and oboe (The full ensemble is mezzo-soprano, koto, sho, shakuhachi, harp, clarinets, oboe/oboe d'amore, viola). But in fact, the group's primary focus is as a new music ensemble. They were founded around 10 years ago by Jinny Shaw (who plays oboe and oboe d'amore) and I caught up with another founder member, clarinettist Kate Romano, to talk about the group's plans.

The group came about because Shaw and Romano decided to collaborate on a new music group. At the initial stage the group was simply a new music group, but a visit to a Japanese textile exhibition gave the idea of commissioning a group of Japanese composer. Those who wrote for the group included Dai Fujikura who has gone on to write a number of pieces for Okeanos.

Genesis Sixteen in concert

Genesis Sixteen, the Sixteen's young artists programme, is in it second year and the second cohort gave a lunchtime concert at St Martin's in the Fields on Saturday 20 July 2013. To a packed church the 22 young singers, conducted by Harry Christophers and by Eamonn Dougan, performed a programme which mixed Britten Five Flower Songs and Tippett's Five Spirituals from A Child of Our Time with motets by Victoria and Anerio, plus music by Weelkes, Ramsey and Tomkins sung by smaller consort groups.

The young singers must be aged between 18 and 23 when they apply for the scheme and a new group of singers is taken each year. The scheme is sponsored by the Genesis Foundation so that not only is tuition free but the singers receive a bursary to cover costs.

The programme split up the Britten and the Tippett interleaving the movements with other works through the programme in groups, starting and finishing with the Britten.

Jung Soo Yun - Richard Tauber Prize recital

The Korean tenor Jung Soo Yun won the 2010 Richard Tauber Prize which is awarded by the Anglo-Austrian Music Society, and his recital at the Wigmore Hall on Monday 15 July 2013 was part of the prize. Accompanied by Joseph Middleton, himself the recipient of the 2010 Ferdinant Rauter Memorial Prize for accompanists awarded by the society, Jung Soo Yun sang three songs from Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, Richard Strauss' Acht Gedichte Opus 10, three songs by Paolo Tosti, arias by Gounod and Tchaikovsky and two songs from his native Korea.

Jung Soo Yun trained in Korea, and at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and the International Academy of Voice at Cardiff University. He is currently singing Nadir in Les pecheurs de perles at Opera Holland Park and recently understudied Faust at Opera North and Werther at Scottish Opera.

Jung Soo Yun has a richly vibrant, well produced voice with quite an Italianate timbre. It is evenly produced throughout the range, but he has a relatively low centre of gravity. He used full voiced high notes relatively sparingly throughout the concert. He also has a lovely mezza-voce and a great willingness to use it. What was also impressive was, given the style of his voice with its burnished tones and very full climaxes at the top, he did not try and grand stand, everything was carefully and intelligently thought out.

Don Pasquale at Glyndebourne

Alessandro Corbelli as Don Pasquale
(c) Clive Parda

Mariame Clement's production of Donizetti's Don Pasquale was first produced by Glyndebourne on Tour in 2011 and has now reached the main house at Glyndebourne Opera, the first time the piece has been performed at the Glyndebourne Festival since 1938.. Refreshingly the production, designed by Julia Hansen, was set in the 18th century albeit with quirky modern detailing, rather than following the trend to update the work. On  a very warm summer evening, we caught the opening performance (18 July 2013) with Alessandro Corbelli in the title role, Danielle de Niese as Norina and Nikolay Borchev making his Glyndebourne debut as Dr Malatesta. Alek Shrader, who was due to sing Ernesto, was ill and the role was sung by Enea Scala who had sung the role with Glyndebourne on Tour. Enrique Mazzola conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The whole production was based around a revolve, displaying three different rooms and during the overture we saw Nikolay Borchev's Malatesta walking through each. Don Pasquale (Alessandro Corbelli) was asleep on the settee in his drawing room, his housekeeper keeping watch, Ernesto (Enea Scala) was asleep in his bedroom and Norina (Danielle de Niese) asleep at her dressing table. In each of the rooms Borchev examined everything, establishing his character's highly manipulative quality. Hansen's sets had a plain elegance about them, with the interiors very spare, but each was full of quirky detailing and as Borchev moved from room to room he did not always exit via the door.

There were other quirky details to the production. Don Pasquale's rejoicing at the idea of children in the first scene was indicated by his acquiring a toy rocking horse which he carried about with him. He had a single servant/housekeeper (Anna-Marie Sullivan) and when Malatesta appeared with 'Sofronia' the housekeeper clearly thought she recognised 'Sofronia' and Malatesta shut the housekeeper in the cupboard.

Fortunio at Grange Park Opera

End of Act 1, Messager's Fortunio at
Grange Park Opera, 2013,
© Robert Workman www.robertworkman.demon.co.uk

Sentimental French comedy is doing rather well at the opera this year. Following on from the Buxton Festival's double bill of Saint-Saens' La Princesse Jaune and Gounod's La Colombe comes Grange Park Opera's production of Messager's Fortunio. Messager was from the next generation, he was a pupil of Saint-Saens and of Faure, and conducted the premiere of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande in 1902. Messager's Fortunio premiered in 1907, it is a through composed opera rather than using spoken dialogue, but in subject matter it is far closer to the sentimental operas comiques of Saint-Saens and Gounod than Debussy. Having heard La Princesse Jaune last week, and admired both Saint-Saens melodic felicity and the way he pushed the opera comique genre including a long through-composed section, then his pupil's work in Fortunio seems a logical conclusion.  I caught the second of Grange Park Opera's performances of Fortunio on 13 July 2013 given by their Rising Stars with a cast including Alex Vearey-Roberts, Ilona Domnich, Timothy Dawkins, Quirijn de Lang, Tristan Stocks, Mark Cunningham, Bragi Jonsson, Joe Morgan, Johnny Herford, Sylvie Beouelle and Caia Moreso, directed by Daniel Slater, designed by Francis O'Connor and conducted by Toby Purser.