Colburn School contender finishes fourth at Tchaikovsky Competition

Nigel Armstrong, a recent Colburn School graduate, finished fourth Friday in the violin category of the quadrennial Tchaikovsky Competition in Russia -- a category that had no winner.

As has happened on occasion in the past, judges declined to award a gold medal for first prize, instead choosing two silver medalists, Sergey Dogadin of Russia and Itamar Zorman of Israel. South Korean's Jehye Lee, the lone female violin finalist, came in third, and American Eric Silberger finished fifth.

Armstrong's 5,000 euro prize is worth about $7,300.

The 21-year-old from Sonoma smiled and bowed after accepting a bouquet and a plaque during the ceremonies webcast from Moscow's Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. The violin field was winnowed over two weeks of competition in St. Petersburg from 24 contenders to the final five.

Narek Hakhnazaryan of Armenia won the gold medal for cello, and piano honors went to Daniil Trifonov of Russia.

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Photo: Nigel Armstrong. Credit: Philip Pirolo/Colburn School

Colburn School violinist makes finals of Russia's Tchaikovsky Competition

This post has been corrected. Please see note at bottom for details.

Word has come from the Colburn School in downtown L.A. that a recent graduate, 21-year-old violinist Nigel Armstrong, has made the finals of the International Tchaikovsky Competition, a quadrennial event for young musicians being staged in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The field of 24 violinists has been winnowed to five after three competitive cuts, and two of them are Americans -- the other, Eric Silberger, 22, is in a joint studies program at New York's Columbia University and the Juilliard School. Their competition consists of Russian and Israeli men and a South Korean woman.

No American has won the violin competition outright, although in 1978 American Elmar Olveira and Ilya Grubert of the USSR shared first prize. Van Cliburn famously triumphed on piano in 1958, the first running of the Tchaikovsky Competition; cellist Nathaniel Rosen won in 1978; and Jane Marsh and Deborah Voigt won the female voice category in 1966 and 1990, respectively. Also credited as an American winner on the competition's website is Korean-born Hans Choi, who was living in New York when he won for male voice in 1990.

Like the Anaheim-raised Voigt, Armstrong is a Californian, hailing from Sonoma. He already has won a preliminary prize -- an award of 2,000 euros, or about $2,900  -- for delivering what was judged the best performance of one of the compulsory pieces, "Stomp," a new violin solo work by American composer John Corigliano that was commissioned for the competition. The violin champ will get 20,000 euros (about $28,600) and have a chance for the 50% bonus that goes to the best performer overall.

The violin finals continue Tuesday and Wednesday from 7:45 a.m. to 11 a.m., Pacific time, and can be viewed in a webcast on the Tchaikovsky Competition's website. Tuesday's performances begin at 8 a.m., with Silberger at 8 a.m. Armstrong 8:40 a.m. and Dogadin 9:40 a.m..

For the full story, click here.

 

[For the record, 12:00 p.m., June 28: A previous version of this post incorrectly said that no American violinist had received first prize in the Tchaikovsky Competition.]

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 Photo: Nigel Armstrong. Credit: Philip Pirolo/Colburn School

Music review: Hans Abrahamsen's 'Schnee' at Monday Evening Concerts in Zipper Concert Hall

For Monday Evening Concerts –- snug and comfy in its splendid current digs, the Colburn School’s Zipper Concert Hall -– its season ended Monday with what looked on paper to be a chilly evening of music.  The sole piece on the program was “Schnee” (“Snow”), the magnum opus of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, once a proponent of what the Danes called their “New Simplicity” movement (which arrived at roughly the same time as minimalism did here).

A snowy day is mostly a silent experience; you can’t hear snow falling, only the occasional rustle of accumulated frozen crystals falling off a tree branch or the howl of the wind.  With that in mind, “Schnee” made its strongest impression not as a winter landscape but as something closer to Abrahamsen’s original vision –- how time seems to speed up as one gets older.

Grasping the structure is the key to unlocking this extraordinary piece. There are 10 canonic movements distributed in pairs, each pair shorter in duration than its predecessor, with the second canon in each coupling elaborating on the first one. In between are three intermezzos in which the strings and winds play sustained microtones; they sound like they are tuning up.

The first canon seems to go on endlessly in light, spare scrapings and tinklings -– more icy than snowy -–  but stay with it, and you are rewarded with more and more content and activity. With its shaking of bells and swooping glides, the fourth pair of canons produces a welter of color reminiscent of Boulez’s later works (ironic since the “New Simplicity” was a rebellion against Boulezian complexity), and the tiny final canons, with dripping piano notes, form a touching wintry epilogue. The further you go in the piece, the more it tightens its grip.

The nine-piece ensemble, led by Michel Galante, took nearly 68 minutes to play the piece (there is a YouTube performance that lasts 59 minutes), reveling in Zipper Hall’s ability to project slow, growling bass notes from the pianos and delicate swishing rhythms from Amy Knoles’ percussion setup. 

“Schnee” was preceded by Rick Bahto’s silent film for three Super 8 projectors, “Cave Creek. Winter Canon. 2011”; alas, only two of the projectors were operating, so one must forgo comment.

-– Richard S. Ginell

Photo: Hans Abrahamsen. Credit: Tine Harden.

 

Music review: Tokyo String Quartet and Dilijan turn to Beethoven for healing

Beethoven finished his String Quartet No. 15, Opus 132, in A Minor, the summer of 1725, after enduring, for a month, such abdominal agony that he was sure that he would die. Well again, if only temporarily (he died less than two years later), he made the center of his new quartet a hymn to healing.

He titled the movement a “Holy Song of Thanks from a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode.” The musicologist Joseph Kerman has written that the quartet maps a psychological progress “perhaps more arresting than in any other work.” And at its core is this movement that tricks triumph from tragedy, that unites body and soul, that makes the divided self once more whole.

Opus 132 had two performances this week, both with the implication that Beethoven could provide essential spiritual succor. Dilijan, the Armenian-themed chamber music series at Zipper Hall of the Colburn School, ended its season Sunday afternoon with Opus 132 for its annual concert “In Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide.”

Tuesday night, the quartet closed the final music event of the JapanOC Festival with an appearance by the Tokyo String Quartet, presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County in the small Samueli Theater. No mention was made in the program of the travails by the Japanese in the wake of their devastating earthquake. But in the lobby of the adjoining Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, schoolchildren were fashioning origami cranes as a fundraiser to help the people of Japan.

Music review: Mark Robson in recital at Piano Spheres

The heart of Mark Robson’s touching Piano Spheres recital on Tuesday at Zipper Hall at the Colburn School came in the first half when he performed Bartók’s "Four Dirges" interwoven with seven memorial pieces from György Kurtág’s multi-volume “Játékok” (“Games”).

Robson dedicated the two sets to composer Daniel Catán, who died suddenly over the weekend at age 62, and with whom he had worked. “I have not fully absorbed it yet,” he told the audience. “Daniel’s warmth, the positive nature of his work and his engagement with society were extremely valuable to Los Angeles' audiences.”

The specific tributes in Kurtág’s signature fragmentary style had titles that suggested a heavy night -– “Farewell, S.W.,” “The very last conversation with László Dörnyei” -– but in Robson’s clear-eyed and moving accounts, they never became lugubrious or even solemn. And in “Organ and bells in memory of Doctor László Dobszay,” Robson demonstrated the death-defying power of memory transmuted into art. 

The recital opened with a sparkling account of Salvatore Sciarrino’s Prelude. Robson’s secure touch was also on display in Anders Brodsgaard’s brightly lit “Pyro-Mani” and in Philippe Bodin’s hypnotic etude “Pools.”

After intermission, Robson offered Vera Ivanova’s “Aftertouch,” a striking exploration of the piano’s endless capacity for producing short and sustained sounds. Ivanova, born in 1977, appeared for a congratulatory handshake with the pianist.

Robson’s premiere of his own “dolcissimo” conjured a nocturnal dreamscape, ending magically when he brushed the treble strings inside the keyboard. Even without hummable tunes, Charles Wuorinen’s suite “The Haroun Piano Book,” in Robson’s hands, was subtly shaped and rhythmically vital.

The recital concluded with Sciarrino’s “Anamorfosi,” masterfully combining two of the most life-affirming scores from the last century: Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau,” dreamily played in the right hand, and Nacio Herb Brown’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” played in the left. Engaging and beautiful, the piece seemed a portrait in sound of the man Robson described in his remarks -- Catán himself.

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Photo: Mark Robson in 2009. Credit: Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times

Scene & Heard: A fundraiser for the Colburn School

What would a fund-raising evening called “Celebrate Colburn” be without students performing onstage? Tuesday's annual Colburn School gala for the arts academy featured an eclectic mix of dancers, choral singers and musicians who played jazz, classical music and pop tunes, and in one case on bottles (pictured below).

Awards were also on the program. School President Sel Kardan and “Lost” executive producer Carlton Cuse presented the Colburn Prize to Michael Giacchino, the Oscar-, Grammy- and Emmy-winning composer whose credits include scores for television's "Lost," Alias" and "Fringe;" the films "Star Trek," "Ratatouille" and "Up;" video games "Medal of Honor," "Call of Duty" and "Jurassic Park;" and more.

Music director Yehuda Gilad and Carol Colburn Hogel gave the Richard D. Colburn Award to Toby Mayman, the school's founding executive director. Both the award and the school were named for Hogel's father. 

Click here for the full story.

--  Ellen Olivier

Photos of the Colburn gala by Howard Pasamanick

Music review: Rolf Riehm's 'Hawking' gets U.S. premiere at Monday Evening Concert

The Monday Evening Concert at Zipper Concert Hall of the Colburn School had the title “St. John Passion.” There were two pieces, each lasting 35 minutes. The second was Heinrich Schütz’s unadorned, a cappella, startlingly severe and uncomforting setting of the Gospel text. On the first half of the program came a piece written by Rolf Riehm 333 years after Schütz’s and unrelated in every way other than its unsettling severity of sound. You might call that one a passion for St. Stephen.

Riehm called it “Hawking.” The German composer, born in 1937 and little known in the U.S., wrote in a program note that his inspiration was a photograph of the famous physicist paralyzed in his wheelchair, framed by a gigantic picture of the starry night sky. For Riehm, Stephen Hawking serves as a “metaphor for the ceaseless extension of limits.”

This was the U.S. premiere of “Hawking.” It is an incredible piece.

The image of Hawking in zero-gravity suspension has inspired other composers. Hawking floats in his wheelchair in Philip Glass’ 1992 opera about Columbus and about discovery, “The Voyage.” A new opera by Osvaldo Golijov for the Metropolitan Opera in 2014 will be based on Hawking’s bestselling “A Brief History of Time.”

A physicist grappling with both physical limitations and the mysteries of the universe is, obviously, a strong subject for music. Riehm pushes limits by pushing his ensemble to the edges of the concert hall. A piano was alone on stage. Behind the audience in Zipper Monday was a menacing bass drum. On the side balconies were oboe, violin, viola, cello and –- for the extremes of range -– small piccolo and the convoluted, huge contrabass clarinet.

Music review: Southwest Chamber Music begins John Cage 2012

John Cage was born Sept. 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital on Wilshire Boulevard. Today the neighborhood is booming. The Wilshire Grand project, a couple of blocks away at Figueroa Street, proposes flashy skyscrapers with Asian-style neon advertising. But so far there isn’t even a Cage plaque to mark the spot where one of the 20th century’s most influential and innovative artists began the revolution.

Maybe next year. What the Cage centennial will bring is yet to be revealed. But Southwest Chamber Music has gotten the jump. It kicked off a two-year festival, Cage 2012, Saturday night at the Colburn School, a mile north of Good Samaritan. In a pre-concert talk the ensemble’s conductor and artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt noted that were L.A. a European music capital, Grand Avenue -- the address of Colburn, the Music Center and MOCA -- would be Cage Street, just as the swank Mahlerstrasse leads to the Vienna State Opera.

Southwest Chamber Music’s demanding first concert (three more programs the second weekend in April at the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts conclude the first season of the festival) pulled no punches. It began with Cage’s Sixteen Dances, a seldom performed but seminal 50-minute score in which Cage first began to seriously experiment with chance elements in composition.

After intermission, four percussionists gave a rare performance of the austere “Four⁴,” which lasts exactly 72 minutes and in which very little happens. The program ended with “4’33”,” Cage’s famous silent piece in which nothing at all happens. The progress of the long, impressive evening was from something to nothing.

Music review: The JACK Quartet at Chamber Music in Historic Sites and Monday Evening Concerts

The members of an extraordinary string quartet are so in sync that it sometimes feels as if they could play well together even in the dark -- which is exactly what the JACK Quartet did last April, performing a 68-minute Georg Friedrich Haas piece for Monday Evening Concerts.

On Sunday and Monday, the young New York-based quartet returned to Los Angeles for two very different, well-attended and astonishing concerts. The first was the group’s debut for the Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites series, at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), the other, a return engagement for Monday Evening Concerts at the Colburn School's Zipper Hall that included three premieres.

In case you were wondering, the first initials of the quartet members -– Ari Streisfeld and Christopher Otto, alternating first violins; Kevin McFarland, cello, and John Pickford Richards, viola –- spell JACK.

The SCI-Arc concert began with three forward-looking vocal pieces by the late medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut, imaginatively arranged for string quartet by Streisfeld. Here the JACK’s vibrato-less sonority, balance and intonation were as natural as breathing. And in Philip Glass’ lovely String Quartet No. 5, the ensemble caught the intense ebb and flow of its deeply romantic poetry and drama.

Music review: Rare Morton Feldman piece at Piano Spheres

Exactly 25 years and four weeks after its world premiere in Los Angeles, Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet came home. It is a very slow piece, a very long piece and a very, very quiet piece. And like all late Feldman scores, every performance is a special event.

Part of New Music America ’85 (a once-roving festival that landed in L.A. that year), Feldman composed the score for pianist Aki Takahashi and the Kronos Quartet, who played it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (once a historically hospitable home for new music).

On Tuesday night, as part of Piano Spheres in Zipper Hall at the Colburn School, Vicki Ray and the Eclipse Quartet were responsible for a spellbinding performance.

"Spellbinding" is practically an instruction to the players. There are essentially two aspects to the score: arpeggios (mostly in the piano) and sustained, mysterious chords (usually played by the strings). The dynamic remains pianissimo. A listener rocks on water watching the reflections or floats on a kite merging with the clouds, or … pick your own trippy metaphor. The British composer Howard Skempton describes the experience as time slipping through your fingers.