I haven't been to a concert in a while, but there are a number of them on my calendar for November and December. Today's concert was part of a small festival of American music at the National Gallery. I heard about the concert from the listing of events on Steve Reich's website, because his composition "Different Trains" was on the program.
Four pieces were played:
- Pierre Jalbert's "Icefield Sonnets", inspired by a set of poems by Anthony Hawley, is a beautifully lean and cold set of three pieces. (I found an online excerpt from one of the poems, "Cold is a Cell".)
- Paul Moravec's "Vince and Jan: 1945" was inspired by a photo of the composer's parents taken during WW2. It's a sweet piece, alternately nervous and sentimental, at times reminiscent of 1940s-era movie music.
- John Corigliano's "Snapshot circa 1909" was also inspired by a photo, this time of the composer's father playing a violin as a boy, accompanied by an uncle on a guitar. The arrangement is interesting; the second violin plays a melody while the other three players strum chords. Then, after a while the first violin picks up another melody, and the two violins play together briefly before the strumming resumes.
- Finally, Steve Reich's "Different Trains". I've heard the recording lots of times but never seen it live, and the live performance greatly clarified the structure of the piece. There's a backing track of voice recordings, train whistles and sirens, and repetitive a string quartet. In the first and second movements, the cello and viola take turns doubling the recorded voices on the backing track while the violins slashingly underline the train whistles or pick up the pulsing string backdrop. In the third movement all the instruments begin to double the voices at times. The backing track was played quite loudly at this performance, which gave the whole piece an appropriately overwhelming and oppressive feel.
A first-rate performance. I liked all the pieces, but my two definite favorites were the Jalbert (not available on a recording yet, apparently) and of course "Different Trains".