Category: Classical music

Concerts of contemporary music have a tendency to be obsessed with presenting premières, yet it’s all too common for those performances to be dazzling one-offs that are all too soon lost to oblivion. So there’s some serious kudos due to NMC for saving two such performances, both electroacoustic, both showcasing British-Iranian composer-performer Shiva Feshareki, and both among the more interesting world premières to have been featured at the Proms in recent years.

The first, Feshareki’s Aetherworld, is from the 2021 Proms, bringing together the BBC Singers, the Royal Albert Hall organ and Feshareki’s turntables for a response to Josquin des Prez’s 16th century vocal work Qui habitat in adiutorio altissimi. In my original in-depth exploration of the piece, i noted how the music works “on a meditative level, not actively seeking attention the whole time but allowing its ideas to sit and / or drift”. This remains one of the predominant characteristics of Aetherworld with the role of the voices often resembling the effect of Josquin’s music being massively time-stretched in the background, its chord progressions not only elongated but smearing into one another. As such, the piece in part takes on a dronal quality, in which tiny electronic details become embellishments that dance over and glance against the ongoing vocal suspension.

One of the aspects that lifts the piece from being just another meditative drone piece are the occasions when the voices become more demonstrative, unleashing a variety of sounds and whooping cries that project an entirely different kind of energy. More significantly, though, is the way the music develops from around halfway through. Initially it’s just a harmonic shift, after which there’s a sense of increasing activity going on behind, emerging from and receding into shadow. But it soon expands beyond this, the voices, organ and turntables combining to create a mesmeric, slowly-forming climax. The continual flux of emphasis between the intensity of the singers, the persistent weight of the organ and the electronic sounds penetrating through both makes it a genuinely other-worldly experience, and a fitting tribute to Josquin’s strikingly hypnotic music.

The main work on the disc is Still Point by electronic pioneer Daphne Oram which, having been lost, rediscovered and reconstructed, was finally premièred at the 2018 Proms, nearly 70 years after it was originally composed. Feshareki was one of the team involved in the reconstruction, most obviously in the extensive turntable part prominent in the middle movement (performed by Feshareki), which she painstakingly created according to Oram’s instructions, even using period-appropriate machines to cut the records. As a mid-20th century work combining a double orchestra – one “dry”, muted with baffles, the other “wet”, allowed to reverberate – with turntables as a means to manipulate sound in real-time, Still Point is radically innovative.

When writing about the piece following its première i highlighted what i felt to be a problematic aspect, specifically the disjunct between its radical conception and the somewhat less forward-looking approach taken in the orchestral writing. Specifically, i remarked how Oram’s musical language “though often very attractive – indeed, achingly poignant at certain points – is nonetheless rooted in a soundworld that seems to combine aspects of film soundtrack and light music.” Revisiting the work again now, that disjunct still makes its presence felt, though it doesn’t in any way diminish the emotive power and potential of Still Point.

Apropos: i wrote previously about the work’s “hauntological presence”, and this is what the music projects more than anything else. In this regard, the post-Romantic noodling into which the orchestra periodically lapses becomes akin to a protrusion into a modern context of something from history, reinforced by the turntables’ surface noise coating the music with vinyl crackle. This is given added weight by the meditative tone of its lyricality. If the first movement is a little disarming in its mix of old and new elements, this is soon forgotten in the mesmerising accumulative effect of what follows. The short central movement is spectacular, its melodic material sounding as if through a dense smog, laden with reverb, echoes and locked grooves. Feshareki imbues her part with a wonderfully physical tactility (bringing to mind Philippe Petit’s superlative Needles in Pain)

The 24-minute finale extends this at length, creating a synthesis of sorts from its stylistically disjunct elements. The two start to merge completely, the music’s Romanticisms sounding even more as if they’re memories resurfacing from a long-last past, given a lush gloss due to their at times filmic character. Oram pushes her luck a bit in the latter stages of the movement, lingering on the orchestral material to the point that it starts to sound almost trivial in this context, but this is militated against by a subsequent tilt into a more thoughtful, spacious environment, beginning a journey into ever more vague and elusive territory. Still Point concludes, via a climactic melodic sequence, in an atmosphere of introspection – bringing back the beautiful clarinet tune from the first movement – still caked in ancient surface crackle – before dissolving in wind, reverb and shimmers. Flawed it may be in some respects, yet Daphne Oram’s Still Point nonetheless remains a staggeringly ingenious experiment in the integration of acoustic and electronic sound sources, and it’s entirely fitting that its greatly belated first performance should be preserved in this excellent recording.

Released earlier this year by NMC, Turning World is available on CD and download.

To celebrate composition across genres, the week will mark the 20th anniversary of the academy’s composer awards, beginning November 14, 2022

For over 75 years, the Ivors Academy has been the UK’s independent professional association for music creators. Its annual Ivors Composer Awards — also known as the British Composer Awards — awards top works in classical, jazz, and sound art for two decades. 

In celebration of the Awards, the organization’s first Ivors Composer Week will run from November 14–20, 2022, where composers will be celebrated in various events providing many with the chance to connect and discuss topics impacting composers. 

The week will open with a reception at the House of Commons. Hosted by Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Music Kevin Brennan MP and sponsored by PRS for Music, this invite-only ceremony will feature the ORA Singers of “Ave Verum Corpus Re-imagined,” composed by past Ivor’s winner Roderick Williams.

The winners of the 2022 Ivors Composer Awards will be announced at a ceremony on November 15, hosted live and later broadcast by BBC Radio 3. This year’s nominees include over 40 composers. To attend the awards, click here.

On November 16, Ivors’ Meet The Commissioners panel will see members of Spitalfields Music, Wise Music Groups, and Riot Ensemble discuss the changing classical commissioning landscape at St Martin’s in the Fields. Tickets to this event can be booked here. 

On November 17, panel discussions will include a livestream of David Ferguson’s lecture “Classical Beyond the Concert Hall,” exploring the impact of new technologies on creating and strengthening human connections. He will be joined by composer Heloise Werner and technology strategy professional Tiago Correia. Register for this public event here.

The week closes with The Ivors Academy Jazz Reception in collaboration with EFG London Jazz Festival at the Barbican on November 20. This reception is for members only, who can book their places here.

“As we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of The Ivors Composer Awards it is important that we look ahead to the next twenty years,” said composer and The Ivors Academy’s Classical Council Chair, Lloyd Coleman.

“As composers, we are affected by problems with touring, under-investment in state school music education, and financial pressures facing cultural institutions and venues,” Coleman added. “But the talent of composers in the UK, innovations in technology and the importance of music and culture to Britain’s place in the world mean that with the right support and funding, there are good reasons to be optimistic.”

During the composer week, the Academy will also launch a new conversation and campaign. Titled “Composers Under Pressure?” it will “explore the challenges and opportunities facing composers today and how we can ensure a bright future,” Coleman said.

The Ivors Composers Week also supports The Ivors Academy Trust, which provides a platform for composers and songwriters to receive mentoring, creative support, leadership development, and education from fellow industry professionals.

On a cold, dark, winter’s evening, set the scene with the perfect classical Halloween soundtrack. We’ve unearthed the top 20 totally terrifying pieces from the darkest, grisliest corners of the classical canon. Scroll down to discover our selection of the best classical music masterpieces for Halloween – if you dare!

Listen to Halloween Classics on Spotify and scroll down to discover our selection of the best classical music for Halloween.

20: Prokofiev: ‘Montagues and Capulets’ from Romeo and Juliet

Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet is a dramatic musical interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. The well-known theme from ‘Montagues and Capulets’ depicts the dreadful conflict between these families, which, as we all know, has lethal consequences. The music is driven by an imposing brass section, which marches slowly and somberly, whilst gravelly strings and military-like percussion add a grim sense of foreboding. This piece is also guaranteed to strike terror into the hearts of prospective business partners (as it’s famously used as the theme tune for the BBC show The Apprentice).

19: Dvořák: The Water Goblin

The Water Goblin, an impish symphonic poem, makes for ideal Halloween listening. Dvořák was inspired by this malicious creature of European folklore, said to be responsible for drownings in his watery kingdom, and in particular a poem by Karel Erben. In Erben’s telling of the tale, the goblin kills his own child as punishment for his wife, who escaped him. Dvořák’s characterful score features skittish strings, which creep and leap about, underpinned by harmonic clashes and cruelly-intended brass.

18: Purcell: ‘When I am Laid in Earth’ from Dido and Aeneas

A haunting meditation on the inevitability of death. Having resolved to end her own life, this aria, known as ‘Dido’s Lament’, is an outpouring of grief. The angelic soprano floats hopelessly over a slowly chromatically descending ground bass. The poignant phrase, “remember me” is repeated throughout, etching itself into the memory and returning to haunt the listener from beyond Dido’s grave.

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17: Ravel: Gaspard de la Nuit

Ravel’s devilishly beautiful, daringly difficult, piece for solo piano is based on a set of poems and drawings by Aloysius Bertrand, where ‘Gaspard’ is a moniker for Satan. The first movement, Ondine, musically describes a water nymph’s attempts to seduce a man; the second, Le Gibet, depicts the corpse of a dead man hanging on a gibbet; and finally, Scarbo, is about an evil goblin who torments his victims with terrible tricks. In the composer’s own words: “Gaspard has been a devil in coming, but that is only logical since it was he who is the author of the poems.”

16: Shostakovich: ‘Allegro’ from Symphony No. 10

Shostakovich is renowned for his experimentalist, modernistic idiom, as the third movement of his epic tenth symphony attests. A nightmarish headache for performers, this piece is a swirling cacophony of freakish noises: manic strings, shrieking woodwind, grating percussion, angular brass and a whirlwind of uncomfortably unresolved harmonic progressions. Guaranteed to add drama and theatre to your Halloween.

15: Ligeti: Atmosphères

Ever the modernist, Ligeti’s Atmosphères tears up the rule book and is perhaps more of a foray into sound design than a piece of classical music. Dense, scraping textures, experiments with timbre and harmonic clusters make for a chilling, nails-down-a-blackboard feel to the piece, with no sense of rhythm or metre to guide the lost, vulnerable listener. Perfect for spooky scene-setting – indeed Atmosphères famously featured in Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey – and one of the best pieces of classical music for Halloween.

14: Schubert: Der Erlkönig

Der Erlkönig is one of Schubert’s grislier lieder. The text of Johann van Goethe’s poem tells a tale of a child and his father, pursued by a supernatural being, the Erlking. Schubert paints Goethe’s text vividly: the notoriously fiendish piano part depicts the relentless beating of horse’s hooves, whilst the voice captures increasingly frantic cries from the child and the sweet luring tones of the Erlking, who eventually claims the boy’s life.

13: Rachmaninov: Isle Of The Dead

In this ghostly symphonic poem, one of the best pieces of classical music for Halloween, Rachmaninov creates a stunning yet desolate sonic landscape through masterful use of instrumentation and musical symbolism. Swelling lower strings, irregular surges in the 5/8 time signature and deep, shadowy brass depict oars dragging a small boat through the waters surrounding the Isle Of The Dead. The unnervingly quiet introduction is followed by a quotation of the Dies Irae (meaning ‘Day of Wrath’) plainchant, evoking a sense of hopelessness that this journey will inevitably end in a watery grave.

12: Wagner: Concert Highlights from Götterdämmerung

Götterdämmerung (‘Twilight of the Gods’) from Wagner’s monstrous Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, is the ideal soundtrack for a spooky Halloween eve. The concert orchestral version is a wicked delight, with Wagner’s complex and twisted compositional idiom showcased in a disturbingly dark orchestral palette. The score is so heavy and dense, with its epic brass section and brusque lower strings, that it barely lets in the light of day.

11: Bach: Toccata And Fugue In D Minor

Something about the opening notes of Bach’s Toccata And Fugue In D Minor instantly strikes fear in the listener. Perhaps it’s the blazing pipes of the Draculean organ, or the eerie silences between phrases. Perhaps it’s the villainous semitonal melody, or the rumbling bass pedals beneath, that will raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Beyond this infamously bloodcurdling theme, Bach composes a dramatic and powerful toccata and fugue, which must be executed with demonic virtuosity.

10: Holst: ‘Mars – The Bringer of War’ From The Planets

Holst’s musical characterisation of the Red Planet is as dramatic and powerful as it is chilling. Holst builds suspense with brittle chugging col legno strings, undulating woodwind, vast crescendi, violent percussion and awesome lower brass. The distinct lack of regular pulse, obscured by the jagged 5/4 metre, leaves the listener feeling insignificant and lost in an orchestral cacophony.

9: Liszt: Totentanz

Meaning ‘Dance of Death’, Totentanz is one of many pieces in Liszt’s oeuvre that points to his fascination with mortality, the afterlife, and the dichotomy of heaven and hell. Totentanz is an unapologetically virtuosic piece for piano with accompanying orchestra, based on the Dies Irae plainchant in 6 variations. In the unrelenting piano part, Liszt plays with light and shade: raging, almost violent passages, with harsh harmonic progressions, are contrasted with lighter, even beautiful, moments.

8: Grieg: ‘In The Hall Of The Mountain King’ From Peer Gynt

The epic finale to Grieg’s ‘In The Hall Of The Mountain King’ is one epic crescendo. The musical narrative follows Peer Gynt on his adventure through the Kingdom of the Trolls. Tiptoeing pizzicato strings introduce the well-known main theme to one of the best pieces of classical music for Halloween. This theme is repeated through and endlessly builds, intensifies, quickens and crescendos through the orchestra into an almighty frenetic climax. Finally, the choir enter as the Peer is carried away by a malevolent king, echoing the words: “Slay him! Slay him!”

7: Chopin: Piano Sonata No.2 In Bb Minor

The third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No.2 In Bb Minor, or as it is better known, The Funeral March is inextricably linked to mortality. The somber, heavy footsteps of the mourners in the bass of the piano are both heart-breaking and blood-freezing: a sound that has become synonymous with death. This cold, jarring theme is developed throughout the movement, momentarily contrasted with a pastoral trio section, before the funeral theme returns, signifying the omnipresent inevitability of death. This is one of the best pieces of classical music for Halloween and one of the darkest Chopin ever wrote: it was also played at the composer’s own funeral.

6: Mozart: ‘Dies Irae’ from Requiem in D minor

Mozart’s Requiem was the last piece he ever wrote: he fell ill during its composition and died before its completion. In a grim, self-fulfilled prophecy, he even commented, “I am writing my own funeral music. I must not leave it unfinished.” This ‘Dies Irae’ is a solemn but mighty setting of the Catholic liturgy, with massive choral forces darkened by intense strings, dense brass and rumbling percussion.

5: Berlioz: ‘Dream Of A Witches’ Sabbath’ From Symphonie Fantastique

Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is a programmatic masterpiece, based on the warped, supernatural fantastical imaginings of a mysterious protagonist. The fourth movement, ‘March To The Scaffold’, portrays the protagonist marching to his execution for the murder of his lover – complete with pizzicato bass solo representative of his decapitated head bouncing to the ground. For the finale, ‘Dream Of A Witches’ Sabbath’, Berlioz wrote in the score, “He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts.”
As the bells strike midnight, these grotesque otherworldly represented by wailing Eb clarinet solo and ominous lower brass theme. That this bizarre narrative is said to be autobiographical makes Berlioz’s narcissistic symphony, which is one of the best pieces of classical music for Halloween, all the more grotesque.

4: Orff: ‘O Fortuna’ From Carmina Burana

‘O Fortuna’ is the immense opening and closing movement of Orff’s cantata Carmina Burana. The theatricality of this piece is what creates the unbearable tension: the quiet, frantic strings, the cold, barely whispering choir, the massive force of the orchestra, but most significantly the sudden eruptions into fortissimo with wailing sopranos and crashing percussion. Used widely in popular culture, perhaps most famously as the soundtrack to the film The Omen, this is as much a piece of production music as it is a classical tour de force.

3: Mussorgsky: Night On The Bare Mountain

Another superbly fantastical narrative, Mussorgsky’s Night On The Bare Mountain is a realist piece that paints a musical pictures of a witches’ sabbath on St John’s Eve. Mussorgsky writes crude harmonies, wild, frenzied strings, bold orchestral effects, and satanic themes that Mussorgsky himself described as “barbarous and filthy”. After a night of chaos, the sunrises over Bare Mountain and the witches vanish, leaving only an eerily tranquil flute solo to end Mussorgsky’s masterpiece.

2: Verdi: ‘Dies Irae’ from Messa di Requiem

This is an utterly petrifying choral masterpiece: few pieces have as an iconic an opening as the ‘Dies Irae’ from Verdi’s Requiem. The unmistakable orchestral stabs and cascade of shrieking voices unleash a musical hellfire upon the listener. A torrent of voices warn of judgement, reckoning and eternal damnation, whilst the orchestra, dominated by trumpets and percussion, hammers home the punishment of eternal damnation for unrepentant souls. Pure Halloween drama.

1: Saint-Saens: Danse Macabre

Saint-Saens explores the supernatural macabre in his chilling orchestral waltz Danse Macabre, one of the best pieces of classical music for Halloween. The soothing chimes of a bell tolling midnight lulls the listener into a false sense of security, until the infamous violin solo. The sole use of the violin’s open strings creates a bare, jarring quality, illustrating the rising of the ghouls from their graves, before morbid frivolities ensue. An enchanting, yet terrifying, Halloween masterpiece.

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Let’s begin the story with a confession: I am not really a gamer. That said, I am enchanted by some of the wonderful orchestral and art music that’s been composed for video games along with the many greats of the classical canon that have been repurposed into their scores. And, just as we all remember the themes to our favourite movies, game music is now the soundtrack of their lives for many people.

I vividly remember hearing the music from Halo 3 – the main theme was spine-tinglingly good and had me turning up the volume. This began a quest to explore the genre more deeply. The two albums of Greatest Video Game Music recorded by the London Philharmonic offered an overview of the range and beauty of games music. Here was everything from Super Mario to Angry Birds and World of Warcraft, all in wonderful orchestral colour, with arrangements by British composer and conductor Andrew Skeet. And yes, Sonic the Hedgehog gets the full London Phil treatment too.

Read: How game scores scored in Australia’s Classic 100 ranking

Closer to home, I began listening to the weekly Game Show on ABC Classic FM hosted by Meena Shamaly, who is a passionate game composer, session musician, songwriter and poet.

‘The capabilities of modern game systems mean that anything you imagine can become a video game soundtrack. There are no limitations on sound and style, so you’re just as likely to hear metal, hip hop and EDM, as you might a fully orchestrated, classically inspired score, with everything in between,’ he says.

Shamaly points to a few new games released this year that highlight the breadth of game composition and vast range of musical possibilities.

‘Elden Ring, for example, calls to mind the influence of Romantic era composers, coupled with both classic and modern film scores. Compare that with Trek to Yomi, strictly featuring instruments authentic to the Edo era of Japanese history. There is also the hybrid approach of combining cultural influences with electronic textures in Horizon Forbidden West, and fully electronic scores like those of smash hit games Stray and Cult of the Lamb.’

Read: Vocalist Julie Elven is the unsung hero of Horizon Forbidden West

Music lives on off-screen

A lot of game music does go on to have a life of its own outside the game-play experience.

‘Every single track in the soundtrack album from The Last of Us, one of the most popular games in the world, has several million plays on Spotify,’ says Shamaly. The title track alone has over 45 million plays and growing. 

And just as I discovered games through the music, so these complex and beautiful soundtracks can introduce vast new audiences to the delights of orchestral and classical music. All those little children you see playing games on mum’s iPad are absorbing this huge range of diverse music from a very young age.

‘It’s not hard to imagine that a love of video game music can lead fans to finding a love for orchestra, choir, and chamber music in its more traditional forms, such as baroque, classical and Romantic era composers,’ says Shamaly.

Orchestras around the world now regularly program concerts of game music alongside traditional programming and more populist special events, such as movies with live music and tribute concerts. These events also attract new and younger audiences into the concert hall to experience orchestral music live on stage.

Fans of The Evil Within will recognise Claude Debussy’s beautiful Clair de lune, composed in 1890; players of Grand Theft Auto 3 hear famous operatic arias by Verdi, Puccini and others; and the game Eternal Sonata is actually inspired by the life and work of the great composer Frédéric Chopin and features his music throughout. And what would Ludwig van Beethoven think now that one of his piano sonatas is embodied by a worm in Earthworm Jim? Many Beethoven scholars say he had a great sense of humour, so perhaps he would be delighted.

Following a dream

Games composer Starling Tan is a classically trained musician with a master’s degree in oboe performance from the Melbourne Conservatorium. She has recorded a multi-instrument cover album of video game music, composed music for a suite of indie games and was part of the team behind the Sound Byte 2022 festival – a sold-out celebration of Australian video game music.

Read: Australian video game composers celebrated at Sound Byte

‘Music for games is often composed in a classical style, and many game composers come from classical backgrounds,’ explains Tan. ‘Even Nobuo Uematsu, the self-taught main composer for the music of the acclaimed Final Fantasy series, has often said that Tchaikovsky was highly influential in his work.’

Tan says the classical music education system used to discourage musicians from thinking seriously about game music because it was perceived as being somehow inferior to Western art music.

‘As a classically trained musician who was raised on Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Vaughan Williams – my favourite composer – I always thought game music wasn’t something I should aspire to write. For one thing, all my favourite game soundtracks were Japanese, and I wasn’t. And you couldn’t really hear them on the radio or in most concert halls.’ 

Despite these reservations, Tan had a dream to write and play game music. ‘This was the music I loved to listen to, both in-game and in everyday life, so it was music worth writing, at least equally as much, if not more so, than the concert or art music that I grew up performing.’ 

Tan says part of the immense appeal of game music is its ability to form an emotional link with the game player that goes beyond just listening to a piece of music.

‘Part of what makes game music so compelling is the immersive aspect of it. Having experienced and formed an emotional link with the same tracks looped for hours in their favourite game, that music can take on a deeper significance for them than it might hold on its own. And many games are played alone, or at least without others physically present, which means their enjoyment of the music is a very personal thing,’ she says. 

For 11-year-old gamer Blake, this immersive aspect is all important. ‘I’ve got my headphones on and it’s just me and the game. The music can pump me up and make me go faster; it can also give me time to pause and relax and see what’s going on.’ 

Read: Composer Stephanie Economou on scoring Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok

New experiences and musical forms

Tan believes that live performances of the music that gamers know and love offers them a whole new listening experience. 

‘They then have the opportunity to bring their personal experience of the music and have it transformed into a collective emotional experience, creating a sense of community and warmth,’ says Tan.

This emotional connection is deeply felt because the music is so powerful in creating the atmosphere of the imaginary world of the game. 

‘Many games bring with them an entirely new world, that is both similar and different to the world we experience on a daily basis. The music, alongside art, characterisation, written lore and other elements, bears a large part of the responsibility for creating that world. I think it’s a unique and powerful thing to create a world through sound, and the subtle ways in which game music can do that are fascinating to me’.

Tan acknowledges that music educators are now more open to game music and says the perceived prejudice is dying out. Game music composition is now taught at many music schools and conservatoriums, and features in many prestigious international music competitions and awards.

Read: The High Score conference is building game audio from the ground up

Meghann O’Neill is a Lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; one of her subjects is a video game composition unit that she developed. ‘Game music encompasses all genres,’ she says. ‘So this is a great opportunity to teach art music styles with a structural focus. I’ve found that students are particularly inspired by minimalism and aleatoric music.’ 

O’Neill encourages her students to explore new ideas and experiment with new musical forms.

‘I love the breadth of ideas my students present via interactive structures. Many experiment within electronic styles, or with retro-aesthetics, like chiptunes; others build art music pieces, for video game implementation.  One of my favourite student games, in recent years, cast the player as a curious explorer in a forest, set to an orchestral palette with voices weaved into the texture as you approach an unexpected colony of tiny people, living under mushrooms.’

It is this ability of the video game music to bring to life imaginary worlds that makes it so intrinsic to the game experience and composer Starling Tan says she is fascinated by the ways in which that game music can create a world through sound. 

‘The emotional aspects of game music are particularly poignant due to their ability to heighten the impact of a story, whether through recurring or transformed leitmotifs, careful selection of instrumentation, or textures, just to name a few. I find that giving a piece of music a purpose in that way, and seeing, or experiencing, how well it’s achieved, is particularly compelling.’ 

This article originally appeared on ArtsHub.

Lee University’s School of Music will present Chamber Music Showcase on Thursday, Nov. 10, at 4:15 p.m. in Squires Recital Hall. The event will be co-directed by Dr. Gloria Chien, artist-in-residence at Lee, and Dr. ChoEun Lee, assistant professor of collaborative piano and vocal coaching at Lee.

“We are very excited to share a delightful program of chamber music with the Cleveland community and Lee family,” said Dr. Lee.

The showcase will include a diverse combination of instruments, from flute-marimba duo, horn-voice-piano trio to saxophone-voice-piano trio, as well as repertoires sung in German, French, and Russian. The concert will feature works by Nathan Daughtrey, Joaquín Nin, Richard Strauss, and Tchaikovsky, among others. 

Student instrumentalists include Laurie Alltop, flute; Allison Dupree, piano; Lynnae Eades, piano; Madeline Fowler, marimba; Sydney Gobble, horn; Jose Hairston, alto saxophone; and Ye Eun Kim, piano.

Student vocalists include Sophia McCosh, mezzo-soprano; Amanda Phillips, mezzo-soprano; Anaka Schmitt, mezzo-soprano; and Alleigh Watson, mezzo-soprano.

Lee University’s School of Music’s chamber music program focuses on classical music performed by small ensembles. The participating students audition and are placed into duos, trios, or other groupings. Throughout the semester, these ensembles meet with faculty members from Lee’s School of Music each week for coaching and critique. The Chamber Music Showcase highlights the achievements the chamber ensembles have made throughout the semester.

Dr. Chien is the co-artistic director of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon, as well as the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival in Burlington, Vermont, along with her husband, violinist Soovin Kim. In the fall of 2009, she launched String Theory at The Hunter, a chamber music series at the Hunter Museum of American Art in downtown Chattanooga, as its founder and artistic director. For the last decade, Dr. Chien was the director of the Chamber Music Institute at Music@Menlo. She frequently appears with the Chamber Music Society and is a Steinway Artist.

Faculty at Lee since 2016, ChoEun has given numerous performances across the world in major venues including Carnegie Hall, Ozawa Hall (Tanglewood Music Center), and Harris Concert Hall (Aspen Music Festival). She was twice invited to the Tanglewood Music Festival and was named a recipient of the Grace B. Jackson Prize. She has been invited as a repetitor to the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz and most recently, she world-premiered a co-commissioned vocal chamber music for soprano, saxophone, and piano by Lori Laitman in the National Opera Center in New York City.

This free concert is non-ticketed and open to the public.

Livestream viewing will be available at leeu.live/.

For more information about this performance or upcoming events, contact the School of Music at 614-8240, or visit leeumusicconnect.com.

ChoEun Lee

Scariness is always appropriate for the advent of Halloween, but it comes in different varieties. In addition to the obvious sort of chills and thrills that are the province of ghost stories or slasher flicks, there’s the eerie unease that comes when things are just a little bit off.

That brand of spookiness is the province of “Frankenstein!!,” the wonderfully oddball cabaret entertainment by the Austrian composer HK Gruber that served as the headline attraction of the San Francisco Symphony’s concert in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, Oct. 27. The piece doesn’t trade in obvious chills, but it gets under your skin in a way that’s both unsettling and hilarious.

“Frankenstein!!” is a 30-minute suite of numbers for orchestra with a singing, speaking and caterwauling vocal soloist (Gruber prefers the term “chansonnier”). Written in 1977 and performed frequently ever since, it features a series of verses by the Austrian poet HC Artmann, done in English translation.

The title character is mentioned prominently, but so are a host of other familiar names from the pop-cultural imagination of a midcentury child. Some are straight out of the monster pantheon: a werewolf, a baby vampire, the gender-bending “Miss Dracula.” But also on hand are Batman and Robin, John Wayne, Goldfinger and his pal “Jimmy Bond.”

As for what these Halloween archetypes actually do, your guess is as good as mine. Artmann’s poems are singsong doggerel, cast in short rhyming lines, and they pursue a fantasy logic that is as hard to fully grasp as it is to resist.

Monster races down the stairs
Grubby hands, disheveled hair
So that’s why he never lingers
There’s blood on his dainty fingers

What makes the piece so delightful is Gruber’s musical setting, which matches the text whim for whim. The score is full of instrumental foibles — penny whistles, whirling plastic tubes, a percussionist inflating and popping paper bags as a rhythmic device. At one point, Gruber writes an extended, beautiful duet for kazoo and trombone.

Between the puckish musical effects and the parade of characters trooping through the text, “Frankenstein!!” has the effect of a Halloween tea party for some slightly bloodthirsty dolls. It’s like a Tim Burton remake of “Toy Story.”

Why is scary music so effective? It’s speaking to our subconscious

Beneath the childish surface, though, there’s some kind of emotional turmoil that’s all the more effective for being so elusive. The versions of Superman and Lois Lane who are mentioned here aren’t anyone we know; they’re not even Halloween-costume riffs on themselves. The verses date from the tumultuous year 1968, and Gruber claims that the piece boasts a hidden political undercurrent, so that may be what sets the piece so convincingly off-kilter.

Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen and the orchestra played with pointed clarity, but the chief thrill of the performance came from the British baritone Christopher Purves, who delivered the solo part in a burst of droll virtuosity.

The only other time the Symphony has played “Frankenstein!!” was in 2006, when Gruber himself was the soloist and infused the piece with an air of genial menace. Purves, his head largely buried in the score, didn’t quite exhibit the same level of interpretive freedom, but his blend of robust operatic singing and insinuating bedtime-story recitations made a formidable combination.

In one movement, Gruber conjures up a dialogue between a man and a woman, the one deep in the bass register and the other crooning in a wheedling falsetto. Purves rendered it flawlessly.

The evening marked the Symphony’s second consecutive week of roughly Halloween-themed programming, following last week’s death-haunted collection of music by Mussorgsky, Liszt and Berlioz. For the first half, Salonen led the orchestra’s strings in Bernard Herrmann’s music for “Psycho,” and the suite from Bartók’s 1919 ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin.”

Both pieces lean rather heavily on their plots for real scariness, and contemporary audiences are more likely to be conversant with “Psycho” than “Mandarin.” (In Hermann’s piece, the sudden arrival of the shrieking string effects that accompany the film’s famous shower scene prompted chuckles of familiarity from the audience.)

There was little to complain about in the performances, but both works include some long, rather flaccid stretches alongside passages of genuine excitement. It wasn’t until after intermission that the evening — now plunged into chilling darkness — truly came alive.

San Francisco Symphony: 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Oct. 28-29. $35-$165. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000. www.sfsymphony.org

In the agenda according to the UCSB Arts & Lectures’ Hear and Now series, rising young classical phenoms and fresh “now-ish” ideas are granted a spotlight in the warming ambience of Hahn Hall on the Music Academy’s Montecito campus. That general agenda gets twisted only slightly with the arrival of much-acclaimed young harpsichordist Jean Rondeau, on Friday, November 4.

For the evening’s entertainment, the keyboardist dips back into 18th-century baroque annals and presents the complete Goldberg Variations of J.S. Bach. The principal difference here is his period-correct use of the proper tool — the harpsichord of Bach’s day, versus the piano version made famous in the 20th century by Glenn Gould and other grand pianists.

Something of a charismatic figure and radical virtuoso well-known for his dynamic live performances, the 31-year-old Frenchman is one of the current bright lights of the global harpsichord scene. He has recorded several albums, including a recent, meticulously faithful rendition of the Goldberg Variations on the Erato label, met with critical hosannas; and 2017’s Bach Dynasty. He has ventured into contemporary music, as well, giving the 2018 world premiere of the solo harpsichord piece Furakèla by the fascinating French keyboardist-composer Eve Risser, whose music deftly cross-talks between classical and jazz.

The iconic Goldberg opus has very much been in Rondeau’s hands and on his mind lately. In the wake of the album’s release, his Santa Barbara debut on Friday is part of a busy U.S. tour with the Variations as his sole focus, culminating in an appearance in the midtown Manhattan classical music temple and proving ground that is Carnegie Hall. 

Last June, Rondeau presented the world premiere of the two-piano and percussionist piece UNDR, co-composed by himself and percussionist Tancrède Kummer, drawing direct inspiration from the Goldberg Variations.

Never mind that a harpsichord recital in Santa Barbara is, in itself, an all-too-rare occasion. The chance to audience with one of the great living practitioners on the instrument, on the theme of one of the premiere jewels from J.S. Bach’s repertoire, no less, is an opportunity not to be missed.

The 7 p.m. event at Hahn Hall also includes a pre-concert talk by Derek Katz, UCSB Associate Professor of Musicology, at 6 p.m. (free to event ticket holders).

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When visitors came to see the composer William Alwyn at his home in Blythburgh in Suffolk, they were always greeted by his wife, Mary.

Their house was silent, almost eerily so. Mary kept it that way so nothing would disturb William as he composed. She was completely dedicated to William and his work – guests remembered her as quiet and unassuming, and terrible at making tea.

Few realised that Mary Alwyn had once been a famous composer herself, and a quite different woman altogether. Born Doreen Mary Carwithen, she changed her name after she and William eloped to Suffolk in 1961, eventually becoming his wife in 1975. It’s at least partly because of this relationship that Carwithen’s name is still relatively unfamiliar today. She put her career aside to promote his.

It was only after William died in 1985 that she allowed herself a small re-emergence as a composer, and in the 1990s oversaw the recording of her string quartets, Violin Sonata and some of her orchestral works. Carwithen’s fame has been slowly growing since then, and her centenary this year has been celebrated with the first ever festival dedicated to her, and country-wide performances including at the BBC Proms.

It’s unsurprising that Carwithen’s music is enjoying a renaissance. Her style is utterly captivating. She can just as easily write energetic, rhythmically driven music as she can intimate, introspective pieces built on luminous harmonies and lingering chords. And shining through in all her works is a pure, unadulterated love of melody. She never embraced atonality or experimentalism – she belongs to the same brand of 20th-century British composition as William Walton, Grace Williams and Benjamin Britten.

Carwithen received her first musical training from her mother, Dulcie. She had wanted to be a concert pianist herself, and gave music lessons to her two daughters, Doreen and Barbara. Both went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music, where Doreen started out as a pianist and cellist in 1941. Judging by her works that feature the cello and piano, she was clearly an accomplished performer on both instruments, but it was at the Academy that she began the harmony lessons that would change the direction of her life.

It was these classes that ultimately resulted in her shift of focus to composition – and they were also where she first met William Alwyn. He was assigned as her harmony tutor, and even though he was already married, the two began a passionate relationship that would be conducted in secret for nearly 20 years.

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Presumably, at least part of what attracted Alwyn to Carwithen was her obvious compositional talent. He recognised her abilities from the songs that she brought to her first lessons, and encouraged her to continue writing larger works. Much of her student pieces have been lost, but those which survive show that Carwithen had a remarkably assured, original voice from very early on. The 1943 Nocturne and Humoresque for cello and piano already have many of the trademarks of her later works – bold rhythms are mixed with piquant harmonies, always with an eye for virtuosic flair.

The most remarkable work of these years is perhaps the Piano Sonatina (1945-6). This is very much a pianist’s piece; its sprightly outer movements that whizz and snap along like firecrackers demand a formidable technique, but they are balanced by a meditative second movement that is so economically constructed that it allows the performer a real interpretative flexibility. The Sonatina was premiered by Carwithen’s classmate and lifelong friend, pianist Violet Graham. She was an important interpreter of Carwithen’s early works, and also premiered some of Carwithen’s songs with the soprano Elizabeth Cooper.

The Serenade for Voice and Piano (1945), and Three Songs to Poems by Walter de la Mare (1946) show quite a different side to Carwithen’s compositional personality. They are whimsical, romantic pieces, and bear the influence of Vaughan Williams more than anything else in Carwithen’s output. They are the closest she ever got to musical declarations of love – the Serenade was privately dedicated to Alwyn, the text proclaiming that ‘My true love hath my heart and I have his’.

After only three years of composing, Carwithen claimed the prestigious Alfred J. Clements Chamber Music Prize with her String Quartet No. 1 (1945). Her String Quartet No. 2 (1950) followed in its footsteps, awarded a Cobbett Prize in 1952. Carwithen considered the quartet to be ‘the most perfect of mediums’, and it shows in her writing. The quartets are among her most powerful works, exploring a more experimental harmonic and timbral palette than in her other chamber music. She began composing a third quartet in her final years, but sadly never lived to complete it. Who knows in what directions this ‘most perfect of mediums’ might have taken the older Carwithen, tempting her back to composition after nearly 15 years of silence?

Where Carwithen really made her name, though, was as a film composer. In 1947 she became both the first woman and the first student from the Royal Academy to be selected for the J Arthur Rank Apprenticeship Scheme, which trained composers to write for cinema. The Rank Organisation was Britain’s largest production company, producing such greats as Brief Encounter and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V.

Carwithen couldn’t have hoped for a better platform in the film industry, and she received her first solo credit in 1948 for a short drama called To The Public Danger, about the perils of drink-driving. She went on to score diverse features ranging from the borstal drama Boys in Brown (1949) starring Richard Attenborough and Dirk Bogarde, to the swashbuckling adventure movie Men of Sherwood Forest (1954). And in 1953 she was also selected to score Pathé’s film about Elizabeth II’s coronation, Elizabeth is Queen, which was awarded a BAFTA Certificate of Merit.

As one of the first women in the UK to score films (her contemporaries included Elisabeth Lutyens and Grace Williams), Carwithen was certainly a pioneer, but this also meant that she had to navigate considerable prejudice in a male-dominated industry. Despite her work on Elizabeth is Queen, for example, she was listed not as the composer but as the conductor Adrian Boult’s assistant. And she found it impossible to get an agent to represent her, which resulted in her having to work harder for lower pay than her male counterparts. But when she tried to raise the issue of equal pay after discovering she was being paid less than men for the same amount of work, she was simply told ‘Don’t you think you’re doing very well for a woman?’ Her commission was not increased.

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that one of her most creatively fruitful collaborations was with the female director Wendy Toye. Not only did Toye treat Carwithen fairly as a professional, but music was integral to her movies. Usually, composers were brought in at the last moment once the edit was complete. But Toye worked with composers from the outset, carefully choreographing sound and visuals. This resulted in some of Carwithen’s favourite films, including The Stranger Left No Card (1952), Three Cases of Murder (1955) and On the Twelfth Day (1955).

Carwithen’s prowess as a film composer is evident in her orchestral music for the concert hall. She composes pictorially, almost narratively, producing scores so vivid that it sometimes seems as though you are hearing a sequence of audible scenes passing before your ears. She burst onto London’s concert scene in 1947 with her overture ODTAA (One Damned Thing After Another), which caused a storm when it was performed by Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Reviewers loved her ‘genuine melodic invention and … feeling for bright and forceful rhythms and brilliantly effective orchestration’.

This critical enthusiasm stretched into the 1950s, with her 1952 overture Bishop Rock receiving similarly warm reviews when it premiered at the Birmingham Proms. Inspired by the lighthouse on the westernmost point of the Isles of Scilly, Bishop Rock is an unashamedly theatrical piece. It opens mid-tempest with a repeated horn motif that symbolises the lighthouse beam blazing out over the Atlantic, complemented by imaginative orchestration that evokes the waves crashing against the rocks. Again, reviewers sang the praises of Carwithen’s ‘vivid and original’ score.

By all accounts, Carwithen was flourishing as a composer in the 1950s. She had regular film commissions, her work was well received, and her pieces were winning awards. And yet she began to step back from composition in the latter half of the decade. Her relationship with Alwyn had finally taken its toll on her career. Trying to live a double life was intensely stressful for both of them: Alwyn drank heavily and Carwithen chain-smoked to get through the day, often forgetting to eat.

They had to avoid one another at the film studios where they both worked, and they lived in fear of colleagues finding out about the affair and ostracising them. So they made the decision to escape to Suffolk, where Doreen Carwithen became Mary Alwyn. With her support, Alwyn went on to compose major works including two operas. She penned just two more pieces – the 1964 Suffolk Suite, and Seascapes for cello and piano in the 1970s.

Carwithen’s output may not have been large, but as the performances this centenary years are showing, what she did write was exceptional. As her music becomes better known, perhaps Mary Alwyn can once more be known first and foremost as Doreen Carwithen, a formidable composer in her own right.

Pandemics and peak experiences aren’t usually mentioned in the same breath. But I had something resembling one in May 2021 when I attended a concert at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s stately home in Lenox, Massachusetts. The performers were Soprano Sonja Tengblad and contralto Emily Marvosh, with Joseph Turvessi on the piano.

All three were returning to the live stage after a Covid-forced hiatus of many months. They called their show a “climate cabaret” and offered an audience of no more than a couple of dozen people — outdoors and face-masked, of course — an early evening celebration of the natural world, as well as musical warnings about the perils of a warming planet.

This “gratitude” concert was the brainchild of cellist Yehuda Hanani, the artistic director and founder of Close Encounters with Music, a long-running eclectic Berkshires chamber music series.

As Yehuda said on that limpid May evening, introducing the performers and treating the coronavirus as a pothole to be skirted around, “I can not think of a more inviting and celebratory way to start the summer together.” Then he broke into song in passable German, identifying the piece as by Robert Schumann based on a poem by Heinrich Heine. “In the lovely month of May,” Yehuda sang, “when all the buds opened, love unfolded in my heart.”

Close Encounters with Music kicks off its 31^st season, its indoor season that is, on November 6^th with one of its more ambitious concerts yet: the thrice Covid-delayed world premiere of Tamar Muscal’s “One Earth”. The performers include Christylez Bacon, a rapper/beatbox artist, a tabla player, a string quartet – with Yehuda on the cello, as he typically is – and, oh, the Mount Holyoke College Chamber Singers.

If you’re anything like me (and for your own sake I pray you’re not) your kneejerk reaction to modern music is probably something like: “Sounds interesting but I’ve got to feed the cat.”

Yehuda admitted: “The question always comes up, what are we going to do about the graying of the audience?” The answer was supplied by Paul Cohen, the son of Stanley Cohen, a Close Encounters supporter and a mutual friend. “Get some rappers,” Paul suggested. “So I thought,’” Yehuda went on, “‘What if we engage a wonderful composition to include a part for a rapper?”

“One Earth” is the result.

Yehuda Hanani’s musical talent was recognized by Leonard Bernstein and violinist Isaac Stern. At nineteen they brought him to the United States from Israel where was born and grew up. “I was ready to go to the army,” Yehuda remembers. “Bernstein said, “Don’t draft him. Let this boy go and achieve his potential.’” So the teenager moved to New York and studied at Juilliard with the likes of Pablo Casals.

Yehuda’s musical skills may be eclipsed only by his understanding of his audience, and its tolerance for novelty. One 2013 show featured a conversation between the cellist and former Yankees pitcher, bestselling “Ball Four” author, and Berkshires resident Jim Bouton. The subject was the similarities between playing a classical concert and pitching a major league ball game. The November 6^th show concludes, not with something challenging and atonal, but with Schubert’s splendid String Quintet in C Major.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Bernstein recognized showmanship in the teenager. Close Encounters’ performances reminds me of the Leonard Bernstein Young People’s Concerts that I attended as a child. I didn’t much enjoy having to wear a tie and jacket on a Saturday morning and walk down the West Side to Lincoln Center. But Bernstein had a genius for bringing classical music to life for children – Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Copland’s Billy the Kid – by sharing his visceral delight in sound and never talking down to his highly distractible audience.

I’ve only come to Close Encounters in the last several years and attended a handful of concerts. But the format goes something like this: Yehuda introduces the program with a cogent sketch of the work, including tangents that often involve the life and times, triumphs and disappointments, loves, maladies and occasional lapses into madness of the composer we’re about to hear.

In the same way that I harbor skepticism about contemporary music, I’d normally be reluctant to sit through a lecture on the subject. But Yehuda transmits a passion for his subject leavened by a comic’s sense of timing.

And something else that aligns nicely with the average, enlightened audience members that fill the seats at the Mahaiwe Theater in Great Barrington: a commitment to social justice that Yehuda shares with his wife Hannah, the vice president of Close Encounters’ board.

On the 100^th anniversary of the Suffrage Movement in 2017 and women getting the right to vote, Close Encounters threw a concert featuring women composers and called “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman”. And back in the late 1990’s they joined the successful fight against a multinational’s plan to build a huge cement plant in Hudson, NY with “Revolutionary Etudes, the Music of Political Protest.”

The pandemic concert I attended was both musical and gently militant. It included teenage climate activist’s Greta Thunberg emotional 2019 address to the United Nations set to music and a sly nod to a sweating planet with Cole Porter’s “Too Darn Hot.”

Through next June, Close Encounters hosts six concerts at the Mahaiwe following “One Earth” on November 6^th, with works by some of the composers I came to know and appreciate under the tutelage of maestro Bernstein. In the coming months you can take a metaphorical gallery stroll with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. And the 13-member Manhattan Chamber Orchestra makes its Close Encounters debut with the Brandenburg Concerto No.3 and Copeland’s Appalachian Spring.

The season culminates with Schubert’s joyous “Trout” Quintet. Knowing Yehuda, he’ll find some way to connect the work and trout fishing season in the Berkshires.

Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found at ralphgardner.com

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.