Primosch, not Primrosch

Hey, I’m in the New York Times!

Or at least some guy with a very similar name is.

Back in 1993, Alex Ross gave me a favorable review in the Times – and spelled my name Primrosch.

Today, Steve Smith gave me a positive review in the Times – and spelled my name Primrosch. (Update: the Steve Smith review has been corrected – thank you for arranging this, Steve. I’ve also inquired about the 1993 error.)

Over the years, I have cashed checks made out to Primrosch, Primrose, and Primosh, among others. I am told the name was probably originally Hungarian, and would have been spelled Primocz, Primosch being a Germanization. I have also been told more than once that the “primocz” is the first violinist in a gypsy band, though you can’t find evidence of that on Google. I once had a driver’s license with the name Prbdsch. It did not go well when I explained to a traffic cop “oh, that’s not really my name”.

In case it is too much effort to click the link above, here is the relevant portion of today’s review:

The Prism Quartet — the saxophonists Timothy McAllister, Zachary Shemon, Matthew Levy and Taimur Sullivan — focused on music from a newly released Innova CD, “Dedication.” Initially envisioned as a collection of 20 one-minute pieces to mark the group’s 20th anniversary in 2004, the project overflowed its boundaries: the CD offers 25 pieces by 23 composers. The concert, around an hour long, included 24 works, mostly complete.

Given the intended format, most of the pieces were clever bagatelles based on a single notion: rhythmic intricacy, smooth blend, extended vocabulary and so on. Still, you were repeatedly surprised by just how much personality could be expressed in a few deft strokes, through the lush harmonies of Greg Osby’s “Prism #1 (Refraction)”; the 24-tone giddiness of Frank J. Oteri’s “Fair and Balanced”; the crabby grandeur of Tim Berne’s “Brokelyn”; and the jazzy swagger of James Primrosch’s “Straight Up,” to name just four examples from a consistently engaging program.

Prism Quartet performs again Friday at Leonard Nimoy Thalia, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street; (212) 864-5400, symphonyspace.org.

Tuesday morning miscellany

- audio of music by Pultizer finalist Fred Lerdahl here; video of music by finalist Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon here.

-Alex Ross podcasting about  Wagner.

-I plan to catch a couple of performances in Boston when I visit for the premiere of my new motet. Dawn Upshaw sings at Jordan Hall on Friday, April 29; her unusually varied program is here. (I count 22 composers on that list.) Brandeis is holding its annual electronic music marathon the next day, again, lots of variety as lined up by curator and superb electronic (and acoustic) composer Eric Chasalow; excellent performers as well.

Saturday Doubleheader

It was a musical doubleheader in New York for me last Saturday as I attended both the Met matinee and the NY Phil in the evening.

I am not a big Puccini fan, (even though I cry at Bohème) but I was very impressed by Fanciulla, the last performance of the run at the Met. This was a strong cast, especially Deborah Voigt.  She sounded great, singing with both power and beauty of sound. The range of expressive types Minnie has to project is remarkable: she is playful, steely, vulnerable, kind, heroic, and Voigt conveyed them all. The theme of the piece is Wagnerian – a man redeemed through a woman’s love – but this time the woman survives to get her man, not just redeem him. Alex Ross smartly observes how Minnie beats the men in the piece at their own games (both literally – a poker game – and figuratively) “and then breaks down their macho codes”. The first and third acts end in a remarkably low key manner, with the ambiguities of the final curtain nicely summarized in the figure of the sheriff, left alone on stage, handling a gun, still wanting to kill the tenor, but unable to move. Ross found fault with the production, and it is on the literal side, at once a bit stiff and very busy. Voigt remarks in an interview how she has to handle tons of props in this staging. She seems to spend a long time in the first act putting away whiskey glasses. I suppose this is necessary given the amount of drinking that goes on – per capita at about at the level of an Albee play.

In the evening I heard two men named Thomas – Hampson’s Kindertotenlieder was deeply affecting, and Adés played his piano concerto with video, a collaboration with Tal Rosner. I am an Adés fan, but I was not consistently held by this piece. Anthony Tommasini’s review makes the music sound much more varied than it seemed to me. Too much of the work involved streams of regular durations, often layered against similar streams moving at slightly different speeds, but still lacking in sufficiently characterized rhythmic profile. Still, there was much to admire when the rhythms were less static. I found the video was at its most compelling when most dense, with various geometric patterns intricately overlaid. However, there were also brief moments that were dangerously close to screensaver images, or the visualizer in iTunes, or even the abstractions that accompany the Bach toccata and fugue in Disney’s Fantasia.  I appreciated the fact that the music and image were closely coordinated. I always hated the way the jump cuts from frantic activity to stasis in the Godfrey Reggio/Philip Glass collaboration Koyaanisqatsi are not quite in sync, but that is not the case here.

Update: hear the Adés on Instant Encore here.

You Should Take Voice Lessons

If you like this on Alex Ross’s site, then you will probably like this:

(with thanks to Marcy Richardson for the movie and Tony Solitro for the link)

Bartok in NYC and Philadelphia

Thanks to Alex Ross, and via Opera Chic, I checked out the video where Esa-Pekka explains the story of Bluebeard’s Castle to the L.A. Phil. But I want to call your attention to one of the videos that came up when the Bluebeard one was over – Esa-Pekka on Bartok in NYC. Very moving. He visits Columbia U. to check out Bartok’s papers which they have thanks to his ethnomusicological work there.

I recall there being a bust of Bartok in the Columbia Music Library on the top floor of Dodge Hall. My understanding is that Jack Beeson was a pupil of Bartok – the only American to study with him. I wish I had talked to Jack about this.

There are more Bartok papers here in Philly. The U of PA library has the papers of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, and Bartok’s 3rd Quartet won a composition contest the Society sponsored. Consequently, Penn has an autograph of the Bartok 3rd. Bartok shared the prize with… Alfredo Casella.

Listen to this, listen to that

I am almost finished reading Alex Ross’s new book, Listen to This. It is great to have his larger New Yorker pieces between hard covers, as well as the new material. He is our most important public intellectual for music, and because of his importance everyone who reads his work is dismayed that Alex’s interests do not precisely correspond with his or her own. After all, my interests are smack in the middle of the mainstream, right? ”Too USA-centric!” “Why would he spend a whole chapter on Dylan?” (Well, yes, why would he?) “Not enough about _____ (fill in country/style/composer of choice).”

My own complaint is that Alex seems insufficiently interested in that broad range of musics that  I suppose one could call “midtown” – John Harbison and Steven Stucky, Stephen Hartke and Melinda Wagner; Augusta Read Thomas and Eric Chasalow; Steve Mackey and Chris Rouse… (Check the right hand column for more names.) It’s the composers I have elsewhere called the “merely excellent” – there is nothing newsworthy about them, no catchy journalistic label (“midtown” is nearly meaningless) – just compelling music.

Nevertheless, you have to be grateful for the remarkable breadth that Alex’s writing does encompass.

Don’t forget to check out the supplemental material for the book here.

Learning this cursed role

Two footnotes to Alex Ross’s post about a chord progression accompanying operatic curses in Wagner and Strauss:

- to me, the rising arpeggiation of both examples cited by Ross recalls the similar gesture in the fourth scene of Rheingold when Alberich puts a curse on the ring – though in that example the melody falls at the end of the phrase.

- Ross points toward an online archive with images of the parts for Die Feen, Wagner’s first opera. See an example here. What startled me about this was that the singers learned their parts not from a vocal score as we would understand it – an arrangement of the orchestral accompaniment for piano – but just a bass line along with their own vocal line. But for the lack of figures, it looks like a baroque aria. I don’t know Die Feen, but I doubt that the harmony is as tricky throughout as it is in the passage Ross cites. Still, it can’t have been easy for a singer to learn his or her part without knowing the details of what was going on harmonically in the accompaniment. Maybe scholars have already worked on this, but it seems to me this is an area of performance practice that merits further investigation. Can you imagine learning Tristan or Gurnemanz with only a bass line as reference? (Perhaps another reason the first Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr (I love that name) dropped dead shortly after the premiere.) On the other hand, while I assume there were piano rehearsals with a fuller accompaniment, can you imagine hand-copying the piano accompaniment for a Wagner opera for each soloist? Were there engraved performance materials for the first performances of the later Wagner operas?

Do the Noise

Time to visit Do the Math for an updated version of a post from a few years ago created to accompany readings/performances by Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson. The two are doing their show again, and Iverson has written fascinating stuff about a variety of 20th century repertoire that he will play. Important insights here for both jazz and classical practitioners.