LA TIMES  Music review: Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra opens season

September 26, 2011 |  3:15 pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"....That’s one side of Kahane. There are others. Like the fact that he played guitar in a rock band as a kid growing up in L.A. in the ‘60s. And on the first half of the program, Kahane conducted the West Coast premiere of Derek Bermel’s Ritornello, which the composer describes as a “concerto grosso” for electric guitar and orchestra. This -- along with the West Coast premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s short “Sidereus” -- was the news of the night.

Inviting a rock instrument into a classical ensemble is anything but newfangled. Stockhausen did it in the ‘50s. Boulez joined the bandwagon in the ‘60s. At the time Kahane was a teen rocker, Frank Zappa could be found jamming (however uncomfortably) with Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Last spring, around the same time Ritornello was given its world premiere by the Albany Symphony in New York, the L.A. Philharmonic performed Steve Mackey’s double concerto for electric guitar and violin. Last month, the Cabrillo Festival presented Michael Daugherty’s “Gee’s Bend,” an electric guitar concerto.

But electric guitar concertos have, for the most part, remained self-conscious novelty works; that is certainly true of the nostalgic and trite “Gee’s Bend.” Ritornello, written for Wiek Hijmans, is different. The Dutch guitarist is certainly capable of conveying his instrument’s ecstatic wail and earthy distorted grunge. But he also produces an exceedingly beautiful tone on the same model guitar, he mentioned in a preconcert talk, George Harrison played on “Beatles for Sale.”

Bermel, who has been LACO’s most successful composer-in-residence (more evidence of a golden age), has an alluringly easy way with mixing genres. What is surprising here, however, is how readily King Crimson and the French Baroque can appear kissing cousins.

The ritornello, or repeated section, of the concerto is guitar bopping in broken triplets, the meter constantly changing, a homage perhaps to Fred Frith. But it also hints at Bermel’s recent Brazilian infatuation. A largo, with the dotted rhythms of Lully, breaks the sway and sets Hijmans off in the direction of heavy metal and a spellbindingly Clapton-esque improvised cadenza.

Ritornello is the real thing, an authentic electronic guitar concerto true to many musical spirits..... "

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 -- Mark Swed

Credit: Guitarist Wiek Hijmans is soloist in Derek Bermel's Ritornello, conducted by Jeffrey Kahane Sunday night. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times.

 

 

Classic Electric - solo CD

review by Mike Heffley 

18 April 2005

Solo guitar music is primevally prototypical. Wind-blown brass and reeds are pretty much what they’ve always been, putting aside their obvious technical improvements and genealogy of players—but the stretched string is at the heart of war (the bow), mathematics, science, and music (the Pythagorean monochord, the first solo polyphonic lyre, the keyboard as composer’s tool). Solo music itself is foundational to all made by two or more. Amplified in the 1930s, the guitar broke the conceptual and sonic ground of the electronic music to follow. It covers the aesthetic spectrum from the most amateur populist/improvisational to (as lute and classical acoustic) most composed and refined.

Wiek Hijmans brings new meaning to all these truisms, both with the material he chose and with the way he chose to present it here. Scratch the seamless surface of each track, and you get a layer or two to match those of the instrument’s own deep history. Five contemporary composers each wrote a piece for Hijman’s airy-resonant, big-bodied Gretsch. To their offerings Hijman added two more from history—Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” and Dutch Baroque composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s “Volte”—and one of his own. The effect of this collection’s concept is the impression that the solo electric guitar is reciting its own personal pearls of classical canon wisdom, right up there with the solo acoustic, piano, cello, or violin.

Theo Loevendie’s “Scan” opens the disk in the rather conventional academic vocabulary of yesteryear’s avant-garde art music, with its hints of jazz chords and spare lines and counterpoint. As it unfolds, however, its rhythm’s accents, its use of the delay, its rougher-to-loopier excursions into block-chord motion, bass against high strings, and its rubato time all slice into a wider and deeper musical world (of the guitar’s Turkish cousin, the oud, and of the new-and-improvised music scene’s beginnings) Loevendie has inhabited long and well.

Likewise, Maarten van Regteren Altena’s “Album III” welds the carefully constructed world of serial music with the amateur thrash and warp of I-IV-V chords coming from the garage. Another one of those Dutch composer/string-players with more axe to grind than meets the eye. “Laser-like” and “structure, vitality, and mystery, the three pre-eminent qualities that make good music”; so Altena describes his own intentions, in Anthony Fiumara’s lucid, informative liner notes (to which Hijman adds a few choice paragraphs about the project).De

 

Altena’s is the first piece, some 30 minutes into the CD, that sounds rough and dirty, like a rock guitar. Preceding it are 15 minutes of Steve Reich and nine of Christian Wolff, both glassy smooth and sweet in their different ways. Reich’s New Agey minimalism finds a happy match in the electric guitar’s sound and the times tables of overdub, here as in other pieces. Its surface hangs in the air and ear like a pool in need of no reflection... but reflection pays off, nonetheless. “Electric Counterpoint” plays the guitar against itself over eleven studio tracks, effecting, again, a canon (in the word’s other sense). Underlying the thoroughly modern composerly thought (some of which echoes Wayne Shorter’s tune “Armageddon” here) is something archaic.

One aspect of Reich’s famously multifaceted musical passion is for African traditions, mostly drum ensembles. His most developed musical thought recalls the vocal music of some of the peoples thought to have the oldest continuous cultures, such as the San and Pygmy. It is a breathtakingly beautiful kind of group hocketing built out of equal parts individual and collective genius and sensibility. Reich mirrors its way of unscripted turning on a sonic dime—something akin to the way birds turn as a flock in flight—with the various organic devices he sets up to make the music move and change from one shimmering stasis to another.

Wolff’s ethereality suggests his own different brand of minimalism, an early-1950s prototype, an aesthetic most classically electrified by the music of Morton Feldman (who also wrote “the first composition for electric guitar”, says Fiumara): electrified acoustically, by making sounds with as little attack as possible, to float in and out of existence like photons do. Wolff’s music, though, has another, less serene side, which goes back to ancient Greece (his extra-musical passion) in the same way Reich goes back to ancient Africa. His aesthetic is as thisworldly as Feldman’s was otherworldly, and born in the polis and populus as much as the ivory tower and maverick mind.

The high point of the CD for me is Paul Termos’ “E Dominio”. Read more