| 18 April 2010
Joseph Lange's unfinished portrait of his brother-in-law, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
One of the more tantalizing aspects of the career of Mozart is his work in sacred music, and that’s primarily because it feels somewhat unfulfilled.
There is much great music in the Coronation Mass and even in the epistle sonatas, and choral ensembles across the land would be lost without the motet Ave verum corpus, but the finest of his sacred music was unfinished: The Mass in C minor, and the Requiem, left incomplete at his early death in 1791. Both works, as it happens, have been given contemporary completions by the formidable pianist and Mozart scholar Robert Levin.
The Master Chorale of South Florida has now performed both of these completions, the C minor mass a couple of seasons ago, and the Requiem this weekend. In concerts Friday, Saturday, and this afternoon, the chorus paired the Requiem with the early Te Deum (K. 141), written in 1769 when Mozart was only 13 and back in Salzburg, where he and his father Leopold were planning their next move.
Joined by the Boca Symphonia, chorale director Joshua Habermann led decent, unobjectionable readings of both these works Saturday night at the Boca Raton Community High School’s Lindgren Auditorium. The Levin completion is quite logical and also very modest; his major contribution is the Amen fugue at the end of the Sequence. Levin’s fugue is based on a Mozart sketch discovered in the 1960s, and it’s a very good one, persuasive, entirely plausible and suitably grand.
Assistant conductor Richard Skirpan led the chorale for the Te Deum, a brief work modeled (as is the opening of the Requiem) on a work by Michael Haydn. It’s well-written and appropriately joyous, and the chorus sounded strong in the first and third sections, and surprisingly soft in the middle for such a large group: the program roster lists 114 names.
While the sound was big and diction was clear, the blend of all those voices was somewhat ragged at the high and low ends, and the Symphonia, too, was not consistently smooth, which made the piece sound more unfocused than it really is. Skirpan’s tempos were good, and his direction clean and clear.
For the Requiem, the chorale and orchestra were joined by four soloists -- soprano Susan Williams, mezzo Misty Bermudez, tenor Tony Boutté and bass Teppei Kono. Williams has a sweet, smallish voice, as does Boutté, and both sang with professional polish. Kono has a bigger, rounder sound, and he sang well in the Tuba mirum, though the trombone soloist almost overwhelmed him at times. Bermudez, a familiar feature at Seraphic Fire concerts, has a lovely dark coloring to her voice that was especially compelling here.
Habermann evidently is a stickler for precision, and the chorale’s entrances were sharp and unhesitating. In the past, this has been a chorus with a weaker male contingent, but Saturday the men sounded a good bit stronger, and with the sole exception of some tenor softness in the higher registers here and there, the men held up their end of things with impressive solidity.
In general, this was a reading of the Requiem that was very much along traditional lines, with tempos on the slow side, and a very cautious approach to the music-making. The Dies irae, for example, started with a punch but ended up being large rather than violently dramatic, and while that section doesn’t have the gigantism of Romantic masses for the dead of Berlioz or Verdi, it does have something Cherubini mostly doesn’t, and that’s inner fire. The same goes for the Confutatis, which needed some more drive and vigor to make the right contrast with the passages beginning Voca me, in which the supplicant pleads for mercy as his life weighs in the balance between redemption and perdition.
Despite its incomplete nature, this is music that always makes a strong impression, and Levin’s additions are respectful enough not to detract from its essential power (and I would contend that the Amen fugue makes this completion to be preferred). We’ll never know what Mozart would have made of the work had he lived even a month or two longer, but the text itself, and the way the composer has set it already, should have led to a Master Chorale performance that was a little less solemn and careful, and a little more urgent, a little more vital.
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The Master Chorale of South Florida’s next season will contain two seminal masterworks. Haydn’s oratorio The Creation is scheduled for Nov. 19-21, and the Requiem of Verdi is set for March 25-27, 2011. For more information, call 954-418-6232.
| 13 April 2010
Madgalena Wór and Rafael Dávila in Carmen. (Photo by Alissa Dragun)
I’ve seen Georges Bizet’s Carmen many times, but the second cast of the recent Palm Beach Opera production offered even a veteran operagoer fresh delights.
Chief among them Saturday night was the Polish-born mezzo-soprano Magdalena Wór, who made a magnificent debut with this company, with her rich, seductive mezzo sound, perfectly suited to the role. And her acting as the sultry, sexy and fiery cigarette girl had just the right amount of intensity.
She commanded everyone’s attention when she was on stage, and it’s surprising that this was her first performance in this role. I would venture to say that from now on she will be in great demand as Carmen (she will, however, have to learn to play the castanets).
The Puerto Rican tenor Rafael Dávila, fresh from his triumph as King Charles VII in Sarasota Opera’s Giovanna d’Arco, an early Verdi work, was brilliant as Don José, the corporal who loves Carmen too deeply. His stentorian voice and commanding presence matched Wór’s Carmen, toe to toe.
Holding his own in Act II, he delivered a most beautiful Flower Song, in which he tells Carmen he saved the flower she threw at him when they first met. His is a very strong masculine tenor, and his appearance marked another excellent debut for Palm Beach Opera.
Nmon Ford and Rafael Dávila in Carmen. (Photo by Alissa Dragun)
Nmon Ford sang Escamillo, the bullfighter. The Panamanian-American singer brought daring and dignity to the role with a masterful baritone that thrilled the ladies as he sang the great Toreador Song. His lower register needs work, but his was a vital, athletic bullfighter, not your run-of-the-mill pot-bellied middle-aged baritone masquerading as such. Ford is another great talent to watch.
Soprano Georgia Jarman was a convincing Micaëla, the village girl Don José’s mother hopes he will marry. Her beautiful voice has a pure ringing timbre, crystal-clear and very distinctive, and she sounded wonderful in her final Act III aria. Director John Pascoe has her less the innocent and more the sophisticate, which I think worked very well in this production.
Korean bass Yoonsang Lee was excellent as Morales, and one wished he had more to sing. Five of Palm Beach Opera’s Young Artists made up the balance of the cast, and all were very good. Outstanding was Bradley Smoak as Zuniga, who has great acting chops and a chocolate-rich bass that was easy on the ear.
Debra Stanley’s Frasquita was beautifully sung -- hers is a sweet, light soprano voice – and Irene Roberts’ lovely mezzo stood out clearly as Mercédès. Jason Wickson’s tenor and Christopher Johnson’s baritone were strong mainstays in their vignettes as Remendado and El Dancaïro, respectively.
The orchestra under the baton of Frenchman Jean-Luc Tingaud played with gusto, this being music by “that vulgar French composer, Georges Bizet,” to quote the late upper-crust English writer, Dame Edith Sitwell. But even Dame Edith might have appreciated the way the ensemble played Saturday night, especially the horn section.
Tingaud has a lively beat, using expressive body movements to get his passion across in the pit, encouraging players to greater effort. He is assistant conductor at the Opéra-Comique in Paris where Bizet’s Carmen had its premiere in 1875.
In Carmen’s Act I Seguidilla, she entices Don Jose with visions of a carefree time at her friend Lillias Pastia’s café “close by the ramparts of Seville.” In this production the audience got ramparts in no small measure, as Pascoe placed huge arches around the stage that when manipulated, suggested a factory, a prison and even the great outdoors in the Gypsy encampment scene. Their best use came at the end as the stadium setting for the bullfight. Kudos to the local firm of Jupiter Scenic for their work on them, though I do wish they’d been scaled down a tad.
Pascoe’s many original ideas brought a welcome freshness to this familiar warhorse of an opera. I liked his use of the children’s chorus front and center, which was excellently sung by members of the Young Singers of the Palm Beaches, and of the death of Carmen, which was accomplished with a picador’s spear, not a hidden knife on Don José. And the murder was done in sight of the crowd watching the bullfight, when normally it occurs outside the ring or in a side alley, leaving the doomed lovers alone to their fate.
The climactic scene of Carmen, Act IV. (Photo by Alissa Dragun)
To fault such a daring design seems churlish, but the two sets of stairs or steps leading to the high ramparts were so enormous as to slow down the action in Act I. Accommodating two choruses, platoons of soldiers, scores of supernumeraries, townspeople and the mayor of Seville with his retinue as they negotiated the stairs, became a guessing game as to who could make it up and down within the musical time frame allotted. Reducing the ramparts and steps would have speeded up an unnecessarily slow first act.
Surely Tingaud understood the design was problematic, which is probably why he frantically made “speed up” gestures with his hands so often in Act I.
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Before the performance Friday and Saturday nights, company General Manager Daniel Biaggi announced that the troupe’s fund-raising goal of $500,000 to meet the conditions of a matching grant from local philanthropist Helen K. Persson had been surpassed. Biaggi also said ticket sales had begun for the 2010-11 season, which will open in December with Verdi’s Nabucco, to be followed by two semi-staged concert performances of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in January. Mozart’s Così fan Tutte in February concludes the Da Ponte-Mozart trilogy the opera has been presenting, and the season ends in late March with Puccini’s Tosca.
Rex Hearn, founder of the Berkshire Opera Company in Massachusetts, has covered opera in South Florida since 1995.
| 10 April 2010
Viktoria Vizin as Carmen at Palm Beach Opera. (Photo by Alissa Durgan)
It’s tough to bring something new to a work as well-known as Carmen, but the current Palm Beach Opera production of Georges Bizet’s classic, if not groundbreaking, fills out the opera’s promise with just plain good theater.
On Friday night, a stellar lead and a strong supporting cast, plus smart, interesting directing choices made this production, the last in the company’s season, absorbing in a work whose over-familiarity often blunts its impact.
Much credit for this goes to stage director John Pascoe, who clearly has given extensive thought to how he wants the people of this particular universe to make their impact, and it works. The chief personnel in this opera were distinguished by sharp characterizations that lent them an extra level of humanity.
Other credit goes to various principals. Viktoria Vizin, a Hungarian-born mezzo-soprano who has sung this role many times, including at the Metropolitan Opera in January, starred in Friday’s performance, and she is in every respect a first-rate Carmen. She has a smoky, attractive voice of great flexibility, and she knows every note of this score, which allows her to take the occasional liberty with strict tempo and make it sound entirely natural.
She also is a fine actress who knows how to use her body. Vizin is a tall woman with long legs, and she uses them as a major element of her portrayal, putting one foot on the thigh of a tied-up Zuniga, or perching them commandingly on the fountain in the Seville square as she sits down for a wash.
Some of her stage business was close to over-the-top: the orange that she turns into instant hair gel for Don José, the right hand that travels oh-so-close to her imminent paramour’s trouser-salute department, and the contemptuous grunt with which she hands back his ring in the final moments. But it never crossed the line into cartoon, and in the end Vizin’s expertly sung Carmen was forceful, believable and hugely watchable.
Viktoria Vizin and Andrea Care in Carmen.
As José, the young Italian tenor Andrea Carè came across more as conflicted than he did as a man driven to jealous rage, but he has a strong, often thrilling tenor in its higher registers, and it showed no sign of strain or wear. His La fleur que tu m’avais jetée in Act II was not fully inhabited, though it was sung well; as a key insight into José’s character, this aria needs to be sung with more nuance and a greater feeling of emotional turmoil.
The American soprano Georgia Jarman was Micaëla, and she, too, has an instrument of considerable strength. In its uppermost reaches, her voice was almost shrill, but it blended handsomely with that of Carè in the Act I duet (Parle-moi de ma mère). She was appropriately girlish in Act I and effective as someone who’s been burned in Act III, which she ended with a slap to José’s face.
As Escamillo, the Panamanian-American baritone Nmon Ford was self-confidence personified, and he has a beautiful voice to back it up. He sang very well, even if the always difficult lower reaches of Toreador, en garde in Act II were somewhat indistinct, and by the time of his Act III entrance (Je suis Escamillo), he was singing even better, dominating the scene.
Bradley Smoak was an excellent Zuniga, with a sharp-edged bass voice and good diction, and his fellow resident in the Young Artist program, baritone Christopher Johnson, brought the same kind of vocal distinction to his turn as El Dancairo. Soprano Debra Stanley and mezzo Irene Roberts made a good team as Frasquita and Mercédès, respectively, with Roberts in particular offering a voice of rich quality. Korean bass Yoongang Lee sang pleasantly in the minor role of Morales.
This is an opera with a lot of chorus work, and the Palm Beach Opera contingent did well, for the most part, with one exception of noticeable weakness in the men during the opening smugglers’ chorus of Act III. The children’s chorus was reasonably on point, but this group and the main chorus had some trouble keeping up with the often very speedy baton of conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud.
This was especially true during the Act II quintet of the Carmen and her companions, which was just too fast for comfort, and lost some of its charm thereby. Two other points of tempo were also somewhat destabilizing, such as the very opening of Act II, which was a bit too slow and too quiet, robbing the scene of its initial energy, and the Carmen-Escamillo duet in Act IV, which also was on the too-slow side, though apparently intentional for dramatic reasons.
In general, though, Tingaud conducted well, and the orchestra played admirably, with good horn work in the Micaëla music standing out.
The set, cannibalized from the Palm Beach Opera’s set for Fidelio, was simple but effective, especially in Act III, and Jeff Davis’ lighting design underlined Pascoe’s conceptions handily. And these were good ideas, too, by a director who knows how to entertain an audience and still have something to say.
His Act IV is quite unusual, with the second half of the act taking place in a slow-motion, blood-red dream world, in which the hands of the audience in the bullring can be seen moving at a quarter of the speed as the principals. The manner of Carmen’s death is much more violent than what you normally see, but it works, not least because of the expression of relief and joy on Vizin’s face as she adjusts her headdress and moves to rush into the stands.
Carmen is perhaps the most popular, best-known opera in the world, and productions of it are legion (this is one of three this season on area stages). Palm Beach Opera’s version demonstrates that even the most well-worn works can be as fresh as they were when new, if the right conceptual mindset is brought to bear, and the cast and crew are willing to do it.
Carmen can be seen at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Kravis Center with Vizin and Care, and at 2 p.m. Monday with Magdalena Wór as Carmen and Rafael Dávila as Don Jose. For tickets, call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org.
| 09 April 2010
Jens Kruger, Joel Landsberg and Uwe Kruger of The Kruger Brothers.
The decline of major recording labels may be the most famous byproduct of the online music retail and radio booms.
But another result has been the cross-pollination of genres, the categorical descriptions that were largely created for now-dwindling record stores and musical
airwaves in the first place.
A versatile case in point is the Kruger Brothers, a North Carolina-based band that blends bluegrass, country, blues, pop, classical and gospel into its own blend of new American music -- and all on its own, independent Double Time Music label.
But this group shows that the cross-pollination extends to international geographics. Its brand of roots music didn't originate in the Deep South or even the American West, but in Switzerland, where founding brothers Jens Kruger (banjo, vocals) and Uwe Kruger (lead vocals, guitar) were born and raised.
After playing throughout Europe for years as a duo, the siblings added American bassist/vocalist Joel Landsberg 15 years ago, and drummer/percussionist Josh Day for most shows since 2007. The quartet, with guest bluegrass fiddle ace Bobby Hicks, plays a special 3 p.m. matinee show on Sunday at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach.
"I'd moved to Switzerland in 1989," Landsberg says, "and the music scene was small enough there that it didn't take long for me to meet up with the Krugers. Jens and I were initially working in a dozen or so bands together as sidemen, and I soon developed a friendship and musical camaraderie with he and Uwe. And we all gave up our side gigs in 1995 to concentrate on this band."
He even moved to North Wilkesboro, N.C., with both Kruger brothers (Uwe is married to a U.S. citizen and has applied for a green card, something Jens already has received through his composition and musicianship) to prove it. Landsberg is essentially the band's publicist as well as bassist, a double-duty that also applies to the group's technical director, Philip Zanon.
"I'm basically the liaison between the press, promoters, organizers," Landsberg says, "plus I do the bookings and handle road management. Philip's the head of our record company as well as our technical director, and a dual citizen in Switzerland and the U.S. We all do what we can to make a living through music, which we're very fortunate to do."
The roots of the Kruger Brothers sprouted from the floor upward. That's where, as children in Switzerland, Uwe (now 48) and Jens (47) placed a guitar between them and each played three strings. Their father inspired the brothers' appreciation for roots music by returning from business trips to the United States with records by American artists.
But it was a trip to America that Jens took in 1982 that would solidify the Kruger Brothers' rootsy yet unorthodox musical mix. At age 20, he attended the Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival in Indiana. Now the annual Bill Monroe Memorial Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival, the event provided an opportunity to meet up with the since-deceased Monroe – and beyond. Jens actually stayed with the bluegrass icon during that summer.
"That was a real pivotal point for Jens," Landsberg says. "Bill really encouraged him to find his own voice and create his own music. Jens likes to tell the story where he's sitting in the kitchen late one night with Bill, just picking banjo and mandolin, eating ice cream, talking about God, the world and everything else. And Bill asks him, 'So Jens, what do you want to do with your life?' And Jens says, 'I want to be a bluegrass musician.' And Bill says, 'No, don't do that. You have to find your own voice. First of all, you're not from Kentucky. This is not what's inside you. You have to take what's inside you, and create your own sound.'"
"At first, Jens was taken aback by that," Landsberg continues. "But eventually it gave him the courage and impetus to go and create his own music. And I really think he's become one of the most prolific composers of our day. He's constantly coming up with new melodies and harmonic ideas, all with banjo as the lead instrument."
Fifteen years after Jens' discussion with Monroe, the Kruger Brothers made their U.S. debut at MerleFest (named for Doc Watson's deceased son, Merle Watson) in North Wilkesboro. They've performed not only with Monroe and Watson, but also artists like Willie Nelson, Bela Fleck, Ricky Skaggs, Nickel Creek, Vassar Clements, and Vince Gill.
"We were invited by Doc Watson to perform at MerleFest," Landsberg says. "And the folks here opened their hearts and their homes, and made us feel so comfortable that we eventually felt this was the logical place to set roots down."
The band tipped its hand on its future home with a three-CD set in 1999 called Carolina Scrapbook, and released a gospel edition under the same name in 2006. Its new CD, Forever and a Day, has just been released and features Day, the percussive new fourth member.
He first worked with the Kruger Brothers on the 2007 world premiere of Music From the Spring: A Romantic Serenade for Banjo, Guitar, Bass and Orchestra, performed with the Bangor Symphony Orchestra. With orchestral scores written by Jens, a live DVD of the performance might be the group's next release.
"We started working with percussionists during ‘Music From the Spring’ as a binding force between us and the conductor and symphony," Landsberg says. "Josh is a wonderful musician, and he's been with us ever since. He's helped give ‘Forever and a Day’ a bit more of a commercial, radio-friendly, updated Kruger Brothers sound."
That sound also features the natural bluegrass elements of Jens' banjo; the solid playing of Uwe and Landsberg, and the gospel-tinged three-part vocal harmonies by all three. Uwe's rich baritone leads the way, and without a trace of a European accent.
"Uwe's ex-wife's father was an English professor," Landsberg says. "He and Jens studied English, and learned American folk music out of Pete Seeger songbooks. Now that Uwe has a wife from North Carolina, he's even picking up the Southern slang."
Pressed to find a group akin to the Kruger Brothers, at least in Europe, Landsberg virtually draws a blank.
"Over there, things are more strictly traditional bluegrass, or folk, or whatever the local genre is," he says, "whether it's Bavarian, Czech or whatever else. I know there are Czech bands that play popular American folk and country music, but put Czech lyrics to it. But we're one of very few bands playing in Europe that do what we do regarding original material."
“We play American bluegrass festivals with great success," Landsberg continues, "even though we're not a traditional bluegrass band. We don't have mandolin or upright bass, and Uwe doesn't have that high, lonesome voice. And there are bluegrass purists who will walk out occasionally because we're not pure enough for them. It's just hard to put us in a genre, like it is for people like Bela Fleck and Mark O'Connor. The acoustic music scene in America has been fabulous and flourishing in recent years, so we're not unique in that aspect."
The Kruger Brothers' third and latest stop at the Society for the Four Arts comes on the heels of the band's latest European tour.
"It was exhausting, but wonderful," Landsberg says. "Lots of concerts … in not so many days, but for very responsive audiences. We've chosen not to go the route of a major record label, so our success has been slow and steady. We have a compact, devoted fan base, both here and overseas. It's hard to say it, since it's where the band originated, but Europe is like our second home now."
Bill Meredith is a freelance writer based in South Florida who has written extensively about jazz and popular music.
The Kruger Brothers appear at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Society of the Four Arts Esther B. O’Keeffe Gallery Building. Tickets: $10. Call 655-2776 or visit www.fourarts.org.
| 09 April 2010
Bruce Adolphe.
When Bruce Adolphe is in the middle of writing a batch of Piano Puzzlers for American Public Media’s Performance Today, he’s always listening for ideas.
One came along while the composer and his daughter Katja were watching a Fred Astaire film in which the song-and-dance legend was performing Irving Berlin’s Cheek to Cheek. Suddenly, Adolphe realized that part of the Berlin song had the same chord progression as a passage from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata.
“I ran out of the room and wrote down a few things so I would remember that I wanted to do that,” he said. “That one came easily.”
But aside from the Puzzlers, the clever meldings of popular tune and classical music (On Top of Old Smokey in the style of Igor Stravinsky, for instance) that have intrigued radio listeners and contestants for five years, Adolphe is a well-established composer of his own music. He also is an educator and concert organizer, and this week he’s in residence as the current Dorothy F. Schmidt scholar at Florida Atlantic University.
This Saturday night, he’ll be present for an entire concert of his works at FAU’s University Theatre in Boca Raton that will include the world premiere of Wakeup Call, a piece for one piano, four hands, that was commissioned by the school.
Adolphe, 54, said the inspiration for Wakeup Call came from previous week of work at FAU last September, when it took him a while to get adjusted to his surroundings and he kept waking up in his Boca Raton hotel room not quite knowing where he was.
“It’s not a narrative about being asleep and waking up. It’s all the different kinds of rhythms and sounds that were suggested to me by being sleepy, by being suddenly awake, having alarms go off,” he said. “And then I just structured a piece using all those things.”
That includes soft music suddenly interrupted by other sounds and fragments of tunes that might be heard on a cellphone going off while you’re waking up.
“It’s a really fun piece. It’s not a typical four-hand piece in that it’s not about the keyboard,” Adolphe said. “It’s really about this.”
Also on the program Saturday night are Thought Song, an early work for clarinet and piano (featuring clarinetist Paul Green and pianist Edward Turgeon); the song cycle A Thousand Years of Love, based on verse by poets such as Rumi (sung by Sandra McClain, soprano, with pianist Tim Peterson); parts of the orchestral piece Tyrannosaurus Sue (played by the FAU Symphony under Laura Joella); and Tough Turkey in the Big City, a Thanksgiving-themed sextet for chamber players.
A native of West Hempstead, Long Island, Adolphe studied at the Juilliard School, where he worked with composer Milton Babbitt, one of the deans of avant-garde music of an earlier generation. He has served for years as the resident lecturer and director of family programs at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and operates The Learning Maestros, a company that offers family-related music and scripts to help build educational concerts.
His long, extensive worklist includes many pieces for children, as well as operas on Jewish themes (Mikhoels the Wise, The False Messiah: The Story of Shabtai Zvi), four string quartets and other chamber works, vocal music and concerti, including one for violin.
Two years ago, he joined the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California as its composer-in-residence, a move that stems from his friendship of more than 15 years with the Portuguese neuroscientist and writer António Damásio (Descartes’ Error, Looking for Spinoza), who founded the institute along with his wife, Hanna.
Adolphe found himself inspired by Damásio’s work when he heard the scientist speak at an Aspen Institute conference on creativity at which Adolphe was also scheduled to speak, and for which he had prepared “an elaborate talk, just on composing.”
But before that, Damásio gave a talk about the material in Descartes’ Error, which had not yet been published, and Adolphe was in the audience.
“I was absolutely blown away by his discussion of memory, and how memory affects emotion and reason. And he talked about creativity a lot, which was the topic of the conference, but a lot of people didn’t. They talked about their work, but they didn’t necessarily talk about creativity with a capital C,” Adolphe said.
“And he really did. Everything he said rang true, and really got me thinking. So I went back to my hotel room and I rewrote my talk entirely,” he said.
Perhaps inevitably, the resulting friendship with Damásio resulted in music based on the neuroscientist’s concepts and named after them: Body Loops, a piano concerto, and Memories of a Possible Future, a piano quintet. That led to a collaboration with Damásio called Self Comes to Mind, a chamber work for solo cello and two percussionists based on a text Damásio wrote specifically for the piece.
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, a longtime friend of Adolphe, gave the premiere last May at Lincoln Center.
It’s the Puzzlers by which he is probably best known to audiences, and those were suggested to him by Anya Grundmann, executive producer for music at National Public Radio, he said. She heard a lecture Adolphe gave in which he combined the work of two classical composers as part of a demonstration, and called the composer asking if he could do the same thing with a pop tune for a radio feature.
Thus were born the Puzzlers, and Adolphe said he writes them during intense two-week periods in which he composes about 20 of them, a practice he finds more congenial than writing one a week. He said the practice has taught him a lot about the art of the composers, both classical and pop, that he imitates.
“One thing I noticed with every composer is that every aspect of what they do has its own set of details that you can’t ignore or you break the thread. Yes, you can do Beethoven by referring to a piece of his or doing some dramatic chords, but it’s never just that,” he said. “The details of the voice leading, the length of a phrase, how long something goes on before it modulates: All of these things, if you don’t pay attention to one of them, it doesn’t sound right.”
“The power of the personalities of the really great composers is extraordinary. In just a few phrases, you can tell whether it’s the real thing or not,” he said.
Last month, Adolphe’s newest work, Dell’Arte e Delle Cipolle: Omaggio a Bronzino (Of Art and Onions: Homage to Bronzino), a piece for choir and small ensemble inspired by the works of the 16th-century Italian painter Bronzino, was premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It has a European premiere scheduled for October.
He’s also working on a commission from the Brentano String Quartet, which has asked him and six other composers including Charles Wuorinen and Sofia Gubaidulina to write a piece based on an unfinished fragment by a great composer of the past. Adolphe’s assignment is a fragment for string quartet by Schubert.
Adolphe lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife, pianist Marija Stroke, and their daughter Katja, as well as their singing parrot, PollyRhythm. It’s a busy , productive life, one built by his facility and work ethic, both of which have helped him understand how to be a composer.
“I think it’s mostly by continuing to write, and hearing performances, and being excited by something or being embarrassed by something that sounds too much like somebody else, and just keeping going and not being discouraged by any of that,” Adolphe said. “It’s a slow process, but I think the important thing is not to be obsessed with that problem, because it stops you from working.”
A concert of music by Bruce Adolphe is set for 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the University Theatre on the grounds of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Admission is free, though a donation of $10 is suggested. Call 297-3820 for more information.
