Ny phil biennial offers themes of mining and building nytimes

10/13/2014

NY Phil Biennial Offers Themes of Mining and Building - NYTimes.com

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MUSIC

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MUSIC REVIEW

For Ensembles and Singers, a Night of Backbreaking Labor

By CORINNA da FONSECA-­WOLLHEIM

JUNE 1, 2014

The NY Phil Biennial presented a diptych of New York premieres dedicated to manual labor on Friday evening at Avery Fisher Hall. Julia Wolfe’s “Anthracite Fields” (2014) commemorates the Pennsylvania coal miners whose work fueled the industrial revolution. Steven Mackey’s “Dreamhouse” (2003) examines the process of building a house. Both works feature singers and an ensemble mixing acoustic and amplified instruments; both express unease with the American culture of comfort and consumption.

“Anthracite Fields” contains a raw indictment of the exploitation of workers, particularly the children employed in the mines as breaker boys, sifting through coal and debris with bleeding fingers. Mr. Mackey’s work was written in the wake of Sept. 11 and hints at the hidden costs of domestic security: “I’ll build you a dream house, where you can live, where you’ll be safe,” runs one obsessively reiterated verse. “And we’ll put up the fence for nothing.”

But the many parallels only served to heighten the differences. In Ms. Wolfe’s polished and stylistically assured cantata, the overall coherence of the musical material helped her expressions of outrage to burn cleanly and brightly. But the supermarket of musical styles of “Dreamhouse” failed to deliver any emotion clearly, and Mr. Mackey’s own attitude toward his

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10/13/2014

NY Phil Biennial Offers Themes of Mining and Building - NYTimes.com

subject — the house as home as homeland — was too self-­consciously muddled to make for a compelling piece.

For “Anthracite Fields,” the meticulous Julian Wachner conducted the brilliant Bang on a Can All-­Stars and his own Choir of Trinity Wall Street.

Evocative, but sometimes didactic, video projections by Jeff Sugg (mostly black-­and-­white portraits of miners, diagrams and maps of Pennsylvania mining country) added visual interest. Occasionally, they displayed parts of the libretto, assembled from oral histories, local children’s rhymes and an index of Pennsylvania mining accidents, which provided the chillingly long litany of victims with the first name John that opened the work.

Repetition is also the foundation of Ms. Wolfe’s music, which was enlivened by her subtle writing for voices and the inventive ways she used the Bang on a Can players. The cellist Ashley Bathgate’s chanting of children’s ditties had an impish ferocity to it; the electric guitarist Mark Stewart turned a speech by the miners’ leader John L. Lewis into a rock anthem.

For “Dreamhouse,” the New York Philharmonic shared the stage with a fine quartet of singers from Synergy Vocals and the oddly low-­key Catch Electric Guitar Quartet from the Netherlands. Jayce Ogren ably conducted the hyperactive score, which toggled between musical styles with the manic speed of a slot machine. The blend of acoustic and amplified sounds was never ideal (an issue elegantly resolved in “Anthracite Fields.”)

The much-­needed focal point of the performance was the charismatic actor and vocalist Rinde Eckert, who had written the libretto with Mr. Mackey. Their text is an uninspiring collage of architectural jargon and brief instances of direct speech such as, “Hmmm the pool, so still so serene.” There were plenty of skillful touches in the orchestration: comic sound effects, vivid brass writing, a lusciously brooding orchestral interlude after the line “So draw your blinds and sleep.” But you had to rummage around to find them in this messy, crowded house.

NY Phil Biennial runs through June 7 at various locations; nyphil.org/biennial, 212-­875-­5656.

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10/13/2014

NY Phil Biennial Offers Themes of Mining and Building - NYTimes.com

A version of this review appears in print on June 2, 2014, on page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: For Ensembles and Singers, a Night of Backbreaking Labor.

Š 2014 The New York Times Company

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