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MUSIC
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MUSIC REVIEW
Visiting the Alps, With Liszt and Goats By CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
APRIL 28, 2014
The titles of David Lang’s compositions are written in lowercase. There’s a self-effacing quality to his work as composer in residence at Carnegie Hall this season, too; among the six concerts he is presenting at Zankel Hall under the title “collected stories,” only one work is by him. But when it comes to the music of composers he has studied, admired, mentored or championed, it’s a different story: Here Mr. Lang’s interests run wide and include the grandiose and the quirky, the sidesplittingly funny and the extremes of virtuosic self-indulgence. On Saturday evening the brilliant Canadian pianist Louis Lortie gave a marathon performance of Liszt’s complete “Années de Pèlerinage,” which represented the travel genre in Mr. Lang’s “collected stories.” On Sunday evening the outstanding new-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound headlined the program “(post)folk,” the highlight of which was Richard Ayres’s playful and hilarious “No. 42 In the Alps.” The Alps provide the starting point for Liszt’s three-book collection of virtuosic piano pieces assembled and edited over the course of nearly 50 years and based (loosely) on his travels through Switzerland and Italy. In his program notes, Mr. Lang makes a moving case for reading them as autobiography, with the third book chronicling Liszt’s decline in confidence, health and pianistic ability. While Mr. Lortie’s three-hour performance was impressive and shot through with sonic marvels, I was
not convinced that the arduous experience added up to a real journey. The Swiss scenes are vividly drawn, and Mr. Lortie powerfully conjured the terror of an Alpine storm or the motions of water in “Au Lac de Wallenstadt” and “Au Bord d’une Source” in the first book. But by the time Liszt reaches Italy, the music strikes an increasingly self-conscious pose in front of the country’s artistic treasures. Musically, the final pieces are the most interesting, darkened with astringent chromatic harmonies. A sequence of short chords in the second Threnody inspired by the Villa d’Este sounded brittle and dry in Mr. Lortie’s nuanced rendition. The theme of Sunday’s concert was folk stories and the folk idiom as reimagined by contemporary composers. The guitarist Kaki King joined Alarm Will Sound in her own “Other Education,” an engaging piece in which the guitarist, with simple impulses, sets off the other instrumentalists on an investigation into harmony, texture and rhythm. Texture is the focus of “The Art of Levitation” (like “Education,” a world premiere) by the Australian composer Kate Moore. The work begins with high singing lines in the violins, haloed by the warm glow of water glasses struck or rubbed by the percussionist Ian Ding. The work remains harmonically static as it gradually beefs up in both volume and timbral complexity until it crests in a giant tsunami of sound. Any relation to folk music or narrative traditions was not immediately obvious. By contrast, the fiercely dramatic folk cantata “Gra Agus Bas,” by Donnacha Dennehy, is firmly rooted in the folk traditions of his native Ireland. It sets the keening vocals of Iarla O Lionaird singing about the title’s “love and death” in Gaelic atop a multilayered instrumental score animated by complex cross rhythms and urgent arpeggios, and punctuated by powerful brass accents. The conductor Alan Pierson drew an exciting performance from the players. Mr. Ayres’s “No. 42 In the Alps” mixes folklore and mythology, animal sounds and lyricism, slapstick and pathos into a tour de force that had segments of the audience weak with laughter. Witty silent movie titles, projected above the performers, helped frame the story of an infant girl
stranded atop a high mountain and raised by goats. She grows up imitating the sounds of the animals around her, and eventually snippets of her song attract the attention of a mute village boy. The girl was sung by the flawless soprano Jennifer Zetlan, the boy — who grows up communicating only through a bugle — by the comically gifted trumpeter Jason Price. Zeus intervenes (accidentally), and all does not end well. The delightful score includes some vivid onomatopoeic writing for instruments, a dance number for self-flagellating Trappist monks and a vocal passage best described as coloratura zoologica, in which Ms. Zetlan yodeled, bleated and cooed. David Lang’s “collected stories” runs through Tuesday at Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall; 212-247-7800, carnegiehall.org. A version of this review appears in print on April 29, 2014, on page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Visiting the Alps, With Liszt and Goats.
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