Category Archives: opera

Salt, the Residue of Looking Back. Maya Beiser Casts Her Unique Gaze


Denise Burt’s beautiful design effectively encompasses the scope and meaning of this album in arresting images

Maya Beiser, cellist, Bang on a Can member, listener, composer, innovator, interpreter, and producer. Beiser’s hats are many and each new album traces the musings of a truly interesting artist, ever evolving, revisioning, thinking, growing. She cuts a singular, intelligent, and deeply felt path that is both monolithic and definitive.

Looking back and forward

This latest release on her own Islandia label is another exposition of a powerful musical mind bringing fascinating perspectives, the artist’s singular take on music spanning some 500 years. Beiser is not about “authentic” interpretation (mostly) but rather about lucidly sharing her perspective, her musical visions.

Previous releases gave us her take on living musical icons like Philip Glass and Terry Riley. She also dares to look back upon some of the “sacred cows” of the repertoire like the Bach Cello Suites and Riley’s seminal “In C” among others. Her revisionings are respectful homages and insightful performances that challenge and inform her listeners to maybe hear in a new way. As T.S. Eliot said,

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place (or the piece) for the first time”

So it is with the carefully curated selections on this disc. Beginning with a Missy Mazzoli composition featuring vocalist and performance artist Helga Davis (featured most visibly in the most recent iteration of Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach”). Her vocal skills drive these settings of texts by Erin Cressida Wilson. And this piece sets the tone for this album which is both lament and celebration for the experiences of women in history, mythology, and memory.

The first five tracks contain the bittersweet song cycle, Salt, from which the album takes its name. Here the listener is brought into the context of the Biblical story of Lot’s wife, forever imprisoned in a pillar of salt. But, rather than a pedestrian retelling of the tale, this cycle appropriates the context of the story to establish, with painful directness, the tone and direction of what will follow.

Helga Davis (photo from WNYC)

From her mineral prison, a mineral ironically known for its preserving properties, she sings of her crime of looking and remembering. She sings of pain, anger, and sadness, but never with remorse for her “crime”. It is an image that Beiser says lives powerfully in her personal memory. Mazzoli, Davis, and Beiser recontextualize the prisoner as victim, not criminal.

The ghostly images of the women we meet on this album are lamented as well as celebrated for their stories which burn deeply into our collective mythology, into our personal memories. Beiser lovingly dedicates this release first to her daughter, Aurielle Kaminsky, then to the principals whose creativity and energy pervade this album: Missy Mazzoli, Clarice Jensen, Meredith Monk, Erin Cressida Wilson, Helga Davis, Odeya Nani, Beth Morrison, and Christina Jensen.

In Lament to Phaedra, a work by the late British composer John Tavener is heard in an arrangement by Beiser. The 1995 work is sung by Phaedra’s sister Ariadne in response to Phaedra’s suicide by hanging. But here we have a wordless arrangement for cello and electronics that focuses on Tavener’s unique harmonic style and lyrical melodic construction. The result is effectively an affirmation of the lament for her fate.

Then we are treated to yet another transcription of a curiously difficult but very effective use of the early music concept of “hocket”, an interactive counterpoint of two voices. The eponymous Hocket, though vocal in its original form is, like much of Meredith Monk’s work, without a text. Monk’s work is about the voice, or the voices. And her revisioned operatic creations are fed by the mythological streams of women’s stories. This creative arrangement by this artist is an homage to Monk and, by extension, to the women she so beautifully celebrates in her work.

Meredith Monk with Allison Sniffin after a performance of Hocket at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco (copyright Allan J. Cronin)

Another arrangement follows. It is a Melody from Orfeo ed Euridice, from the late baroque opera by Christopher Willibald Gluck. It is, of course, another ill fated relationship ended by the same infraction of looking and remembering that sealed the fate of Lot’s wife. Here Beiser chooses the gorgeous “Dance of the Blessed Spirits”, another wordless homage that imprints on the listener most effectively.

Next up is yet another wordless work, this one by fellow cellist and composer, Clarice Jensen, whose work has graced these blog pages before in reviews of her singular, drone, minimalist, meditative albums. Whether you call her work “drone” or “minimalism” or whatever you choose, your ears will bask in her meditative sonic ministrations. Jensen’s work, while related by its medium (that of cello and electronics), is a distinctly different style, immersive, meditative, evocative, a sound bath for the listener.

Clarice Jensen (from Jensen Artists page)

From the 21st century we are now transported to 17th century Venice and the work of the early baroque master Claudio Monteverdi. In the only surviving music from his second opera, we hear Ariadne, sister of Phaedra, singing the lament for the sister who had taken her life in shame and sadness.

The penultimate track brings us to this artist’s cultural roots with a song by Yedidya Admon to lyrics by Yitzchak Shenhar.

My Field (Shedemati)

My field,
At dawn I sowed it in tears,
Let the prayer of the farmer be heard!
My field,
It is saturated with dew,
It is intoxicated by the light of the sun.
The grain bends low in front of the reaper.
The strides are long,
The burnished scythe is raised high.

Odeya Nini provides the voice in this “reimagining“ of this classic song of sadness and lament by the lowly farmer imagined by the poet.

Odeya Nini (unknown copyright)

Fittingly, this last track is about death, endings. It is Beiser’s arrangement of Henry Purcell’s “When I am laid in the earth” from his opera, Dido and Aeneas. The text:

When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

But forgetting is not allowed here. Beiser begs us to remember. And we cannot avert our ears or eyes.

Putting Schoenberg in Context: Harvey Sachs’ “Schoenberg, Why He Matters”


There is an aptness that accompanies the publication of my first blog of the new year. Much as we aspire to review our past year and resolve improvements for the next, this book effectively plays a similar role.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was born into tumultuous times. His life intersected with political change, social changes, two world wars, and huge changes in the way music would be written and heard. His life and the above mentioned changes in the world are the subjects of Harvey Sachs’ relatively brief review of Schoenberg’s life and career. But the relative brevity does not sacrifice the apparent aim of presenting this composer’s work in the context of the times thereby providing the reader/listener with a perspective that aids an understanding of the man, his music, and his (arguably still evolving) place in history.

“You can see it isn’t easy to get on with me. But don’t lose heart because of that.”- Arnold Schoenberg

At 272 pages this book wisely focuses on the composer’s published work and the drama of its performance along with critical and audience responses. This is not a comprehensive review of all things Schoenberg. While Sachs makes references to the composer’s earlier works, he focuses primarily on the published music and the responses of musicians, critics, and audiences. More importantly he focuses on the massive socio-political changes that paralleled the music thereby providing a useful context for future listeners and performers to better understand Schoenberg and his place in musical history.

Sachs places less emphasis on the composer’s paintings and even his writings. What the author achieves is a very readable and understandable essay that listeners (your humble reviewer included) can use to take another look/listen and to come to a new reckoning of Schoenberg and his place in the world. To, as the subtitle suggests, better understand, “Why he matters.”

I must admit that I did not understand and appreciate the music of Arnold Schoenberg immediately, and even when I ventured to read this volume, I found that my familiarity with this composer was limited primarily to “Transfigured Night”, “Pierrot Lunaire”, the “Second String Quartet”, Moses und Aron” (the Solti recording), Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, the String Trio, and a fleeting listen or two to the piano music.

The joy of this book was in its chronological exposition of all of the composer’s major works and their historical and political contexts. As a result I found myself listening for the first time (or at least the first in many years) to the two chamber symphonies, the other string quartets, etc. It was an opportunity to reset my perceptions/misperceptions and acquire a better understanding and appreciation of his oeuvre.

As Sachs concludes:

“There are cycles in the arts. Perhaps we have reached the end of one great, centuries long cycle of individualistic European Art Music and its global offshoots. We cannot know. But, in the unlikely case that the subspecies Homo Sapiens Sapiens doesn’t destroy itself in the meantime, there is good reason to expect that sooner or later a new cycle will begin. And, for now, we have an enormous treasure of outstanding creations that continue to speak to anyone who is willing to listen to them.”

Treemonisha Wasn’t the Only One, James P. Johnson’s Lost Operas.


Naxos 8.669041

Regular readers of this blog are doubtless aware of my “underdog” interests. Whether suppressed by fascist regime, (as in London Records “Entartete Musik” series and Chandos “ARC”ensemble recordings), or just somehow eclipsed by more “spectacular” (by which I mean, “producing a spectacle” like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring) but, as exemplified by Cedille Records’ “Avant L’ Orage”, music can be oppressed, disliked, or overlooked and such music, in my humble opinion, deserves another listen, a second chance. With this release, NAXOS puts forward a second chance on these stage works by a man better known for his stride piano and ragtime works. No, it’s not Scott Joplin. Guess again.

Esoteric as this my interests have ranged, I couldn’t have guessed that I refer here to James Price Johnson (1894-1955), so don’t feel bad if you guessed wrong. Johnson’s burial site is in Queens, New York. His grave, unmarked since his burial, didn’t get a headstone until 2009. And this is the man whose composition, “Charleston” (1923) became ubiquitous and emblematic of the so called “Jazz Age”.

Apparently Johnson had a fair amount of success as a composer of stage works. And he collaborated and/or influenced people like William Grant Still, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jelly Roll Morton, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Art Tatum, and Thelonius Monk, among many others. Fats Waller was one of his students.

Johnson is arguably an artistic descendant of Scott Joplin whose work Johnson both performed and recorded. And in addition to his solo piano work he apparently also wrote stage works. The works presented on this release are short operas, lovingly reconstructed by the late James Dapogny (1940-2019), a composer, pianist, and jazz musicologist. Dapogny provided an accounting of his work reviving these historically and culturally significant works that also happen to be well written and very entertaining.

The liner notes written by University of Michigan doctoral candidate Cody M. Jones provide a very useful context for understanding both the music and it’s unreasonable neglect. Jones identifies these works as part of the “shadow culture” (a concept made by opera historian Naomi André referring to art produced by black artists which was willfully neglected during the “Jim Crow” era).

Jones writes that these works may have been inspired by George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1936). It appears that The Dreamy Kid (1937) was Johnson’s first stage work and De Organizer (ca. 1938-9) was his second (and last) work for the stage.

The Dreamy Kid was written to an existing play by Eugene O’Neill but apparently was never completed. Its fragments were found during Dapogny’s research on De Organizer. So that makes this a world premiere recording of this piece.

Track listing

Two stage works with libretti, one by the estimable hero of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, and the other (actually a stage play, not a libretto) by Eugene O’Neill. These recordings owe a debt to the conductor Kenneth Kiesler (1953- ) and the late James Dapogny (1940-2019), composer, musicologist, and jazz musician. Dapogny and Kiesler also contribute the brief but useful program notes.

“De Organizer” (ca. 1930) received acclaimed revival performances in Michigan, New York, and Chicago in 2002. Both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune featured strongly positive reviews.

“De Organizer” is an apparently complete recording Its libretto was written by the Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967). The work received only one performance in Carnegie Hall in 1941 as a benefit for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. This work shares a similar fate with that of Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock” (1937), famously suppressed for its pro union themes.

The second work is a set of excerpts of an incomplete opera called, “The Dreamy Kid” based on a stage play by the great American playwright, Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) and its tale of racial violence at the hands of police is sadly a timely theme and a precursor of sorts for the politically infused operas of the Pulitzer Prize winning Anthony Davis.

Both works make use of jazz and blues forms (both distinctly African American art forms) and will remind the listener of Gershwin’s admiring appropriation of these forms. Jazz and Blues ubiquitously informed western classical worldwide as seen in the work of Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Maurice Ravel, among others so the reconstruction and revival of Johnson’s theater works fill a gap in the history of western music as a whole. This is a very entertaining recording of some truly substantial music that can now take its place with Joplin’s “Treemonisha” as great American music.