It was in 1973 that Copi (Argentinean born playwright Raul Damonte Botana, 1939-1987) published his Les quatre jumelles (The Four Binoculars), a play which is, like its predecessors (La Journee d'une reveuse, Eva Peron, etc.), part of the legacy of the Theater of the Absurd, which first appeared in the 1950s with the plays of Adamov, Beckett and Ionesco. Indeed, all these works share in the rejection of realism, a lack of plot and their focus on tragicomedy. As for the basics of Les quatre jumelles: in an imaginary Alaskan town, the Goldwashing sisters, gold diggers in search of work, meet the Smith sisters, with whom begins a relentless fight to the death. In this closeted burlesque, dominated by the figure of a towering transvestite, Copi plays casually with transgressions (drugs, the most trivial insults, etc) as stereotypes of the most minor genres (the juvenile delinquent Goldwashing sisters are worthy of the most out of date soap opera). From this source, more than thirty years later, Regis Campo draws his comic opera in one act - what some have called "a genre which reinvents the current trend in contemporary French opera". Watch an excerpt from Regis Campo's Les Quatre Jumelles, with "sopranist" Fabrice di Falco and Ensemble TM+, Laurent Cuniot conducting . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Even if Luciano Berio's Circles (1960) - based on three poems by e. e. cummings - points to the major musical interests of its time, in particular the use of a text's phonetic traits, its truly innovative qualities lie in the way the study of simple development, based on a physical analogy between the phonetic and instrumental material, is carried out to the benefit of a deeper exploration of all aspects of linguistic and musical organization. In this sense, the text is a base line from which all else can be derived, and to which everything can be traced back. Circles is the result of a convergence between a type of literature that achieves a "musical" autonomy (Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one extreme case) and an explosion of traditional forms and a type of music which attempts, by means of the structures of spoken language, to win back the characteristics of all language, whether musical or linguistic [note thanks to Jacques Demierre]. Watch a performance of Berio's Circles, played by the Fredonia Retro Ensemble . . . it's our FEATURED SOUND ART for the week.

According to composer Nancy Bloomer Deussen, Carmel by-the Sea was originally the middle movement of a larger work entitled Rustic Sketches which was composed in 1987 for the Oakland Chamber Orchestra. Unfortunately, the Oakland Chamber Orchestra never actually performed the work, as the orchestra went bankrupt that same year, and eventually folded before the work's premiere. The Nova Vista Symphony, with conductor Emily Ray, gave the work its first performance in 1987. Deussen spent much time over her Rustic Sketches and eventually decided to revise its first and last movements. At the same time, she concluded that the middle movement was exactly right and could stand on its own as a separate orchestral work. Originally entitled At Water's Edge, she renamed it Carmel by-the Sea and added it to her works for orchestra. At its core, it is a musical watercolor that depicts the beautiful seaside town of Carmel by-the-Sea, California." Listen to a performance of Nancy Bloomer Deussen's Carmel by-the Sea . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

Iva Bittova is a Czech avant-garde violinist, singer and composer of Romani ethnicity. She began her career as an actress in the mid 1970s, appearing in several of Czech feature films, but switched to playing violin and singing in the early 1980s. She started recording in 1986, and by 1990 her unique
vocal and instrumental technique gained her international recognition. Since then, she has performed regularly all over Europe, the United States and Japan, and has made more than eight solo albums. In addition to her musical career, Bittova has continued acting and still occasionally appears in feature films. In 2003 she played the part of Zena in Zelary, a film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2004 Academy Awards. Critics from all over the world try, often unsuccessfully, to classify Bittova. Some say she is like Meredith Monk, others call up Laurie Anderson, or even Diamanda Galas. But Bittova - drawing from a well of pure natural talent and Gypsy-Jewish blood - is an individual, outstanding performer, composer and actress. "Though well-known from her entrancing recordings, Bittova is more of a marvel in person. Physically slight and wearing a red cocktail dress, she emits an incredibly improbable combination of sounds with pinpoint precision, as casually as most people would a folk song or nursery rhyme. Imagine Minnie Ripperton as a chattering fairy or Meredith Monk on helium gas. Always ... she seemed to operate from some musical ground zero - one that also puts you in touch with the most elemental purpose of music, and why you first came to love it" [notes thanks to The Philadelphia Inquirer]. Watch Iva Bittova perform her Divna Slecinka (A Strange Young Lady) (1996) with the Netherlands Wind Ensemble . . . it's this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Luciano Berio's work is characterized above all by his love of the theatrical, his fascination with the voice, and his constant willingness to engage with music of the past as well as of the present. Drawing on a range of influences that reaches from the poetry of Dante to the politics of Martin Luther King, and from the operas of Monteverdi to the sounds of modern jazz, his output has embraced all the major musical developments of its time, including electronic music, music theatre, and works using quotation and collage - hence one critic's description of him as an "omnivore". (The Rough Guide to Classical Music). See an example of Berio's omnivorous theatrical output in La vera storia (1981), prima parte . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

According to John Murphy at Bardolatry, "Harold Bloom called Macbeth Shakespeare’s most “expressionistic” play. It is only appropriate, then, that America’s most Expressionistic filmmaker, Orson Welles, settled on “The Scottish Play” as his first foray into Bard adaptation. Macbeth (1948) was an appropriate choice for the auteur, considering some kind of curse had apparently befallen the once wined-and-dined star of theatre, radio, and film. The film was produced on the relative cheap (about $500,000), filmed at a breakneck pace (about twenty days), and the result is a haggard, stylized tone poem. This is Shakespeare as lurid film noir. The messy quality somehow makes it more compelling, mostly because Welles’ unsurpassed visual imagination compensates for the low-end production values. See Welles' messy yet brilliant vision - with music by Jacques Ibert . . . it's this week's PYTHEAS SIGHTING.

Jacques Hétu's work, said the conductor Jacques Lacombe, "always bears a very personal signature". Singling out "his lyricism, his harmonic language, his sense of structure, the clarity of his orchestration", Lacombe describes Hétu as "a real musician who knew how to write for musicians, without laying traps for them – not that his music doesn't present challenges or difficulties for its performers. But ... he always wrote well for the orchestra and that is doubtless one of the reasons that orchestral musicians take so much pleasure in playing his music and that he is one of the Québecois and Canadian musicians most performed both at home and internationally." Hear a performance of Hétu's final work, the Symphony No. 5, "Liberté" (2009) . . . one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS.

"Gwyneth Walker work is characterized by a tremendous energy and a strong sense of humor. Even in her most calm and serene pieces, there is a constant undercurrent of energy -- a lifeblood that ties the music together. Many personal stylistic traits appear throughout her work including elements that have often been classified as characteristic of "American music" (including the strong rhythmic sense, open sonorities, and influences of rock, jazz, blues, and American folk music). She is strongly in the American tradition of composers such as Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein -- but is a slave to no compositional school or prescribed style. Her music is recognizably her own and thoroughly original" (Carson P. Cooman). Watch a performance of Walker's Don't Step On My Toes (1993) . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Composer Arnold Schoenberg was personally affected by Nazi policies of Kulturkampf and antisemitism. He was obliged to resign his position at the Prussian Academy of Arts shortly after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, and his music, branded "degenerate" and "Bolshevist," was banned throughout the Third Reich. That same year he left Germany forever; friends and family who stayed behind perished in killing centers. A prophet in the field of music, Schoenberg also turned a visionary eye toward the political scene. Of Europe's threatened Jewry he wrote in 1938: "Are they condemned to doom? Will they become extinct? Famished? Butchered? ...[T]he fate of the Austrian and Hungarian Jews was sealed years ago. And can a man with foresight deny that the Jews of Romania and Poland are in danger of a similar fate?" Schoenberg spent the war years in southern California, in reduced circumstances and ill-health, only rarely able to compose. On hearing a personal account of the Warsaw ghetto rebellion, however, he created A Survivor from Warsaw in a ten-day burst of inspiration, drawing the text almost directly from the survivor's words. The work received its premiere in 1947. A Survivor from Warsaw is in two short sections, played without pause. The first part, for speaker and chorus, consists of the survivor's account of his ordeal. The second part depicts a chorus of panic-stricken Jews en route to the gas chambers, where—to the survivor's amazement—they begin to intone the traditional confession of their faith, the Sh'ma Yisrael. Eyewitnesses affirm that such chanting did occur in Treblinka, Auschwitz, and other killing centers. Sh'ma Yisrael was by custom the final utterance of Jewish martyrs, sages, and others—a last profession of trust in divine will. In the face of an annihilation that promised to wipe out both the individual and the culture whose essence the prayer embodied, the act of reciting the ancient creed was more than a demonstration of faith or submission. As Schoenberg recognized, and as the music to A Survivor from Warsaw forcefully asserts, to pray Sh'ma Yisrael under such circumstances was also an act of defiance. Watch a stunning performance of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw by Hermann Prey and the Bamberger Symphoniker conducted by Horst Stein . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

About the Naxos Records recording Leroy Anderson - Orchestral Music, Volume One David Hurwitz (ClassicsToday) writes, "All in all, it's hard to deny this release the strongest possible recommendation. The music may be light, but the craftsmanship and standard of quality are second to none. It's a special mystery that Leroy Anderson was dissatisfied with the concerto, his only large-scale orchestral work, withholding its publication during his lifetime. We could use a "Gershwin alternative", and this piece is just the ticket. From the "Rachmaninov without the gloom" opening, to the Latin interludes in the Andante, to the finale's hoe-down reel of a main melody, this piece is a winner. Both Leonard Slatkin and pianist Jeffrey Biegel give the piece the royal treatment, playing with both passion and humor. You'll love it. And Biegel's rendition is the best on record. Check it all out . . . it's our current FEATURED RECORDING.

El signo de la muerte (The Sign of Death) is a curious film from 1939 made by prestigious Mexican collaborators: director Chano Urueta, comedian and actor Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes, known professionally as Cantinflas (a pioneer of the cinema of Mexico), and composer Silvestre Revueltas. According to Carlos Monsivais, "The plot promises much more than it deliver: Cantinflas is a "peladito" [a certain class of urban 'bum' in Mexico in the 1920's] employed in a museum who, quite by accident, discovers the clue to a series of crimes caused by the madness of an Aztec grand priest attempting to restore human sacrifice and Moctezuma's empire." Have a look and listen (sorry, it's in Spanish without subtitles) . . . it's this week's PYTHEAS SIGHTING.

Much of Luciano Berio's music, the Sequenzas included, inhabits a world of inner drama which interacts with the outside world in a surreal fashion. It's the kind of drama which confronts and subverts within the mind, entering and rummaging around in the subconscious and then rearing up in front of you like a giant balloon clown when you least expect it. The relationships of perspective between the player and his/her instrument, and between the player and the audience, are in state of constant distortion and flux. This is summed up in a way by that single word 'why' in Sequenza V (1966) for trombone. The 'wha' of the mute being moved over the bell of the instrument is given an added declamatory significance after that moment, and a musical conversation or monologue - real or imagined, ensues/Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International. Watch a performance of Berio's Sequenza V (1966) for trombone played by Dave Day . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Explore, Listen and Enjoy!
Vinny Fuerst
Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music