Red Poppy Music Home

Michael Gordon

House Music premiere featured in NY Times

Ashley Bathgate

When a Critic Hosts the Premiere
[link to article]

Zachary Woolfe
February 14, 2020

“Please silence your cellphones.”

There are few phrases I hear more often in my life as a music critic. But it was strange — like a child playing dress-up — to speak the sentence myself, and in the incongruous setting of my own living room on a rainy evening earlier this week.

A few months ago, I got an email from the publicist for Michael Gordon, one of the Bang on a Can trio of composers who, since the 1980s, have infused into classical styles a wry and rebellious rock sensibility.

She said that Mr. Gordon, celebrated for his stylishly aggressive treatment of acoustic instruments, had written a piece called “House Music,” an hourlong solo cello work with a single requirement: It had to be played in a domestic space, not a concert hall. Did I want to present the New York premiere at my apartment in Brooklyn?

I’ll admit it was an appealing prospect. For someone who’s never grown quite used to my late-night subway journey home after an opera, it was hard to turn down a performance that would take place a few steps from bed.

So 20 friends showed up on Monday just before 8 p.m., drank a little wine, and gathered close around Ashley Bathgate, a cellist closely associated with the Bang on a Can circle. The music was less than two years old, but the spirit was retro. Before the rise of the urban bourgeoisie and then recordings, and the concomitant decline of amateur performance, this was how music lived: in homes, in front of small groups. No stage, no dimmed lights, nowhere to hide for anyone.

The practice hasn’t died out completely. The company Groupmuse has made a specialty of providing small ensembles that arrive at your place to play Mozart or Brahms. And people who fund artists often host them, too: I once heard a quartet by Andrew Norman in the Dumbo loft of new-music patrons.

But “House Music,” conceived for this and only this situation, particularly calls into question the conventions of place and etiquette that classical music largely takes for granted. For me, who hadn’t played impresario since putting on nursery-school puppet shows for my parents, it brought up the logistical, ethical, even emotional demands that arise from presenting while writing. (Throwing a party always provokes anxiety, doesn’t it?)

Like any journalist, but even more so, critics balance learning about their subjects with remaining well apart from them. It’s a profession that thrives on a kind of passionate distance. It can be hard enough to feel comfortable reviewing an artist after an interview on neutral ground. So to let one into my home?

And would I, someone asked a few days before the big night, pay Ms. Bathgate? I was embarrassed that the question hadn’t even occurred to me. With complimentary press tickets a given, a critic’s existence is almost entirely free of financial transactions. The performer and I both just show up; this magical ease elides the reality that each of our activities translates to real currency for the other.

Ms. Bathgate is a freelancer; for years, I was one, too, making decisions about gigs based on a rough calculus of money, exposure and artistic fulfillment. She — and Mr. Gordon, with whom she’s agreed to split fees for “House Music” — would likely ask thousands of dollars from a random person interested in hosting. But she said that on this occasion she’d be willing to perform the piece, which she was eager to play and eager for people to learn about, without charge.

After consulting my editors, I offered an honorarium of a few hundred dollars, less than her time and talent deserved, but symbolic of what “House Music” came to mean for me: a reminder of dynamics in my job that I’m often able and willing to forget.

This went for the experience of listening, too. Concert-going is usually the easy comfort of disappearing into the dark. At Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center, critics are just like everyone else in the audience: empowered by anonymity, as harsh light shines on the vulnerable artist. Not so much in my living room. I had planned to place Ms. Bathgate in a spot that would spread my friends throughout my apartment, letting restless people wander a little. But she gently corrected me; she wanted to have everyone almost literally within reach.

Of course, she was right. My arrangement, I realized, had aimed to spare myself and the rest of my little audience the full exposure demanded by “House Music.” It’s not always pleasant. Accounts of Groupmuse events that I’ve read tend to focus on how much more comfortable they are than traditional concerts. But I was surprised to feel so awkward sitting on my own couch: the setting familiar, yet not for this purpose, and the behavior imported from another context. (It was still a tiny cataclysm when someone dropped a cup during a soft passage.)

To be two or three feet from the performer, the listeners in full view of one another, makes far more explicit than usual what is tacit in a concert hall: The audience is performing, too, both accepting and feeding energy, watched as it watches.

The unshakable sense that I owned this performance — the way people own paintings and hang them in their homes — prevented me from reviewing it, in my usual sense. It had become part of my furniture; it was, I couldn’t help but feel, mine. But I can describe it, and its effect on me. “House Music” is divided into eight sections, and Ms. Bathgate wisely spoke briefly before each. (Given the intensity of the surroundings, a collection of separate pieces felt very different than an unbroken 60-minute span would have.)

In true Gordon style, the music tends violently percussive and extreme, relentless in its industrial repetitions, but with stark exceptions: a section of glassy harmonics, another of keening, drooping melancholy gestures. By the end, Ms. Bathgate was practically sawing at a string while twisting the cello’s peg and painfully contorting its pitch, the classical equivalent of smashing a guitar against the stage.

Yet I was most shocked, almost to tears, by the far more restrained fourth piece. Ms. Bathgate, playing soft double stops, suddenly began to quietly sing the doleful words of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” in an ethereal voice, unhurriedly rising to a intimately piercing wail.

While I’m often delighted during performances, and I don’t infrequently get goose bumps and shivers, true musical surprises are few and far between. Would this song have had the same impact had I been sitting 50 feet away, with a few hundred strangers? Not a chance.

David Lang

'the little match girl passion': Best of 21st Century

The Guardian UK has listed David Lang's the little match girl passion as one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st Century. The composition received a Pulitzer Prize, the recording won a Grammy Award, and the score has since become one of the most performed new works in the world.

the little match girl passion has been staged by Glimmerglass Opera and Portland Opera, choreographed by the Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Swedish Ballet, with theatrical productions in Moscow, London, Edinburgh, and Sydney. Since its premiere by the Theatre of Voices at New York City's Carnegie Hall in 2007 the work has been performed over 450 times across 36 countries.

This season alone there are more than 25 global performances — concerts in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Netherlands, New Zealand and across the United States.

Over the past 12 years, the little match girl passion has joined the repertoire as a chamber work, a staged production, a work for full chorus, and a featured event on Christmas and Easter concerts around the world. Indeed, it has become a contemporary choral classic.

On December 21, the little match girl passion's 8th annual performance at the MET Museum features The Crossing (Donald Nally, conductor) at The Cloisters, the MET's museum of mediaeval art.

After the Museum's 2012 concert, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times hoped that having the little match girl passion would "become a Met Museum holiday tradition" — and it has. This is the eighth holiday performance at The Met: “I cannot imagine a more appropriate occasion and setting to hear this poignant and, by the end, consoling piece,” Tommasini added.

In 2016, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and conductor Grant Gershon released the premiere recording of the choral version of the little match girl passion along with Lang's new work the national anthems.

With a text that Lang himself wrote — based on Hans Christian Andersen's tale, the Gospel According to St. Matthew, and passages from Bach's St. Matthew Passion — the little match girl passion tells the story of a young girl who is forced to sell matches on the street and freezes to death. The recording of the little match girl passion by Paul Hillier's group Theatre of Voices on Harmonium Mundi received the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance.

Lang describes the work:

I wanted to tell a story. A particular story — in fact, the story of The Little Match Girl by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. The original is ostensibly for children, and it has that shocking combination of danger and morality that many famous children's stories do. A poor young girl, whose father beats her, tries unsuccessfully to sell matches on the street, is ignored, and freezes to death. Through it all she somehow retains her Christian purity of spirit, but it is not a pretty story.

What drew me to The Little Match Girl is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts—the horror and the beauty—are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope.

There are many ways to tell this story. One could convincingly tell it as a story about faith or as an allegory about poverty. What has always interested me, however, is that Andersen tells this story as a kind of parable, drawing a religious and moral equivalency between the suffering of the poor girl and the suffering of Jesus. The girl suffers, is scorned by the crowd, dies, and is transfigured. I started wondering what secrets could be unlocked from this story if one took its Christian nature to its conclusion and unfolded it, as Christian composers have traditionally done in musical settings of the Passion of Jesus.

The most interesting thing about how the Passion story is told is that it can include texts other than the story itself. These texts are the reactions of the crowd, penitential thoughts, statements of general sorrow, shock, or remorse. These are devotional guideposts, the markers for our own responses to the story, and they have the effect of making the audience more than spectators to the sorrowful events onstage. These responses can have a huge range—in Bach's "Saint Matthew Passion," these extra texts range from famous chorales that his congregation was expected to sing along with to completely invented characters, such as the "Daughter of Zion" and the "Chorus of Believers." The Passion format—the telling of a story while simultaneously commenting upon it—has the effect of placing us in the middle of the action, and it gives the narrative a powerful inevitability.

My piece is called the little match girl passion and it sets Hans Christian Andersen's story The Little Match Girl in the format of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, interspersing Andersen's narrative with my versions of the crowd and character responses from Bach's Passion. The text is by me, after texts by Han Christian Andersen, H. P. Paulli (the first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion), and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The word "passion" comes from the Latin word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus—rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus's, elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane.

For more information about the little match girl passion, please don't hesitate to write us at info [at] redpoppymusic [dot] com or visit us at www.redpoppymusic.com

Julia Wolfe

Fire in my mouth nominated for 2 Grammy awards

Fire in my mouth, conducted by Music Director Jaap van Zweden, is nominated for two Grammy awards:

Best Contemporary Classical Composition (Julia Wolfe)

Best Engineered Album, Classical (Bob Hanlon and Lawrence Rock, engineers; Ian Good and Lawrence Rock, mastering engineers). Lawrence Rock is Audio Director of the New York Philharmonic; Ian Good is Assistant, Digital Platforms & Experience at the New York Philharmonic.

Fire in my mouth, co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, is a searingly vivid evocation of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The World Premiere performances, this past January, capped New York Stories: Threads of Our City, our exploration of New York’s roots as a city of immigrants.