Playlist

Live

March 12, 2016
Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle

Mary Stuart - Donizetti

Donizetti

After all these years I may finally be coming around to Italian opera that isn't by Mozart. In particular I have had problems with what seemed to me a mismatch between the affect (light and silly) and the dramatic moment (dire). But here the clarity of the accompaniment, be it ever so boom chick, can be heard as a constant surface of quiddity, beneath, above, and around which are spun melodies of extreme sophistication, and even within which unexpected transformations unfold. These are the grounds of the Berliozian affectual non sequitur. The ensembles are stunningly supple, and there was a moment in the big chorus just before Mary Stuart's last entrance where the choral writing opens into unexpected dimensions, as though we suddenly are aware of the abyss beneath us. Murderous power struggles should not be so timely, alas.

March 18,2016
Jeremy Denk - President's Piano Series
Meany Hall, Seattle

William Byrd

English Suite #3 in G minor, BWV 808 - J. S. Bach
Sunflower Slow Rag - Scott Hayden and Scott Joplin
Piano Rag Music - Stravinsky
Ninth Pavan and Galliard in D minor from Lady Nevell's Book - Byrd
Ragtime from 1922 - Hindemith
Graceful Ghost Rag - William Bolcom
Canon - Conlon Nancarrow
Pilgrim's Chorus from Tannhäuser - Donald Lambert
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 - J. S. Bach

Jeremy plays with such tender poetry and intricate clarity it seems bad form to quibble, but I do wish he would refrain from all the head wagging and foot kicking. I made the mistake of opening my eyes at the end of the Stravinsky, just in time to catch a flat falling winsome gesture. Please! But aside from my problems with ill-fitting showmanship this was a tremendous evening of fascinating music. His retrospective of crazy rhythms was spot on, though I'm sorry he didn't play Art Tatum's Tea for Two, which was in the program but not performed. The Goldberg Variations were ravishing.

Recorded

March 13, 2016
8 Lieder: Auf dem Kirchhofe, Op. 105 #4; Der Jäger, Op. 95 #4; Regenlied; Sapphische Ode Op. 94 #4; Ständchen, Op. 106 #1; Therese, Op. 86 #1; Vergebliches Ständchen, Op. 84 #4; Wie Melodien Zieht es mir, Op. 105 #1 - Brahms - Janet Baker, Andre Previn

When I ripped these from vinyl I made no attempt to number the tracks, so this mini-recital was reassembled in alphabetical order. Each song has a complete and ornate frame. When the song is done it stays done.

March 15, 2016
Das Lied von der Erde - Mahler - New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, Christa Ludwig, Fritz Wunderlich

The symphonic accompaniment plays the part of a cloud of familiars besetting the singer, echoing, mocking. An ever-renewing, inescapable farewell.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 14, 2016
Gradus 286 160314 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

In the first rung, among the As and Es up high all the C-sharps were gathered toward the bottom the keyboard, so that the whole came across as a big first-inversion triad.

In the second rung, two or many threads weave in gentle diagonals, ripples on a frictionless pond - or a diaphanous friction is intimated in the refraction of sound upon sound.

Playlist

Live

January 30, 2016
The Marriage of Figaro - Mozart
Seattle Opera - McCaw Hall

The stage set was cleverly designed, visually attractive, but not so fussy as to be distracting. The most interesting decision was to place Barbarina's cavatina about the pin at the edge of the stage, in front of the tall woodish panel wall that served as a curtain. Like setting Christ on a mountaintop, it forces attention: this is what it is all about - a lost trifle. Ironic, poignant, barbed. Something like the effect of the Holy Fool's plaint anchoring Boris Godunov.

Recorded

January 31, 2016
Merce grido piangendo - Gesualdo - Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley

Utterance is never simple, always at least a skein. The co-sounding harmonies are a metaphor of inflection, of placement of voice within the mouth. That particular upward chromatic shift is an eyebrow raised, a dubious query.

Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir BWV 228 - J.S. Bach - Concentus Musicus Wien, Bachchor Stockholm, Nikolaus Harnoncourt

The actual earth has dropped down half a frame and we hear the angelic chorale floating above. Meanwhile we mortals go chugging about our business.

Keyboard sonata in F Wq. 54 #1 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Single notes poke in here and there, laugh-in style. Toward the end of the 1st movement the harmony slows to an almost Beethovenian stillness.

Quartet in E op. 17 #1 Hob. III:25 - Haydn - Tatrai Quartet

A thought experiment: extract just the resolutions of each cadence and play only those, in sequence, in time. Then ask what the shape of each preceding and succeeding phrase does to change the sense of how that cadence sounds.

February 3, 2016
String Quartet in D K. 499 - Mozart - Juilliard String Quartet

It is lucid even when it gets gnarly.

February 4, 2016
String Quartet in F op. 59 #1 (#7) - Beethoven - Budapest Quartet

Entering the dark, overwhelming.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 1, 2016
Gradus 283 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

February 2, 2016
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 A
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 B
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 C

Ivan brought his alto sax and clarinet over to meet my piano. I for my part had a blast.

Playlist

Live

January 17, 2015
Tosca - Puccini - Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle

My new working theory of listening to Puccini: everything you hear is a cinematic close-up, hence the hothouse claustrophilia.

January 23, 2015

Karen in rock'n style

Dead Bars
Your Mother Should Know
Can You Imagine
Tom Price Desert Classic
Highline, Seattle

We'll start with the self descriptions:
Dead Bars: "distortion, melody, and playing fast"
Your Mother Should Know: "rock & roll dreamtime"
Can You Imagine: "anachronistic  new wave, girl-group pop and punk"
Tom Price Desert Classic: "pretty loud, w/yelling"

Aside from being a great line-up, this was the album release party for Your Mother Should Know's debut album Rocks and Glass ($7 to download at Bandcamp), and so a bit of history is in order. YMSK consists of my long-time collaborator and brother-in-law Neal Kosály-Meyer and his sister (and my spouse) Karen Eisenbrey. Neal met Steve Fisk (now the keyboard player of Can You Imagine, and well known in the music business as a producer) during his stint at Central many decades ago, at some point even convincing his other sister, Yvonne, to hire Steve's band to play the Bickleton HS prom. In the early '80s, at about the time I met Neal, he had joined forces with Karen and Yvonne to form a band, The PK's, that was all the rage of their living room (famous for sofas around!). Yes Neal, I have the recordings.

This is the second time that YMSK has followed Dead Bars on a bill. The first time being DB's first show at the Comet in March of 2013. This is also the second time they have been on a bill with Tom Price Desert Classic, having previously joined them at the High Dive last April.

Recorded

January 17, 2015
Night Music - Stan Brakhage

Each go-round, and it does go round, this 35 second film is a bit longer, a bit deeper, a bit more lovely. I watched it about six times.

Study 50 - Conlon Nancarrow [from Lost Works Last Works]

More and more I find that Nancarrow is less and less about sheer play-ability than about precision - about the exact color of when.

The juxtaposition of Brakhage and Nancarrow highlights a common element of their work. Each of them has endeavored to scrape the barnacles of collaboration from their respective medium, accepting a tedious work process as the price of liberation from compromise.

January 22, 2015
Wabi - Robert Morris - Margaret Kampmeier [from Open Space 14]

Waves of shifting and out-of-phase senses of momentum create interference patterns in a realm of perception otherwise unimagined. It is as though we are discovering a form of cognitive sub-harmonics. Any moment is believable as start, or midst, or end.

I had listened to this piece back in 2002, at which time I wrote in my journal: "texture is complex - as to rhythm and accent dynamic - but fairly uniform as to depth - i.e. - 1 to 4 or so notes at once - as simultaneity - or 0 to 4 - very clear pedalling - attack characteristics are echt Stravinskian - percussive, very clear as to - what? fingery rather than fisty. Treating piano as a tone(note?) producing body, rather than as a soundboard. articulate clarity."

Banned Rehearsal 596 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer - January 2001

In the film Little Big Man, Old Lodge Skins, upon finding himself still in this world, groans "Well, sometimes the magic works. Sometimes it doesn't." For my money, the magic was working the night we made this tape. Sax, cornet, and piano, neither quite duking it out. Percussion is the forest in which piano is the damp. Slipping easily from transparent sound to transparent sound, exploring the public of itself, dis-staged. Contiguities linger, but don't overstay. We enter of thickety meadow of ukuleles and zither.

Second Time Around - The Mexican Blackbirds [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

Song form subtly inflecting a noise thing.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 19, 2015
Deagan 150119
Deagan 150119 folded
Deagan 150119 folded rubbed - Keith Eisenbrey

This week I improvised on xylophone.

Banned Telepath 27 150119 Seattle
Banned Telepath 27 150119 Somerville
Banned Rehearsal 877 150119 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer (in Seattle); Aaron Keyt (in Somerville)

Aaron sent us his wash cycle.

Playlist

Live

August 4, 5, 7, and 9, 2013
Der Ring des Nibelungen - Wagner - Seattle Opera
Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle



Hoh Valley, Olympic National Park, 2010

Perhaps only the symphonies of Bruckner are more capable than the Ring of making it clear that hearing a recording, or seeing a film, is no substitute for the real thing, is a fundamentally different experience. As contingent and limiting as any production is (and this, though fine, was no exception) the relative scales of musical time, dramatic time, and real time, and the relative scales of tonal depth and musical dynamics to the dramatic space and to the real space, and of all the other relative scales of things to things to things to things one might posit, ignite together without precedent and without successor.

The world is once again safe for moss and lichen.

From the beginning we are set adrift without bound, illumined from within. the music billows with currents energized from nowhere, pouring from moment to moment and from scene to scene and from act to act and from evening to evening in river-like motions: rushing gliding slipping bending, pooling in lake and cranny, crashing through canyon and plunge  -  mighty and delicate, stagnant and torrent, in turns and at once. From the cartoon of Das Rheingold, painted in broad brush and bright colors, through the collapsing scaffold of Die Walküre and the dragon permeated forests of Siegfried, the leitmotifs and fragments of leitmotifs accumulate inflections and ramified associations to where, by the time we get to Gotterdammerung (sorry - I'm having a devil of a time getting umlauts to show up), where the musical fabric is stretched sheer and hollow, just a few notes sung in mid-dialogue can reverberate back across the entire cycle. Every most intimate tonal hint is a dialogue with the whole.

Recorded

August 8, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 44 - July 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Aaron and I started this session as a sectional, just the two of us watching slides and commenting. Neal was in the neighborhood canvassing for the Democrats and decided he was close enough to canvass me, so a knock on the door produced our third member. In order to get everybody involved he called Anna and she made her audio appearance over the phone.

Playlist

Live

March 9, 2013
La Bohème - Giacomo Puccini
Seattle Opera, McCaw Hall, Seattle

Puccini is hit or miss for me. La Bohème is one of the winners. As in Madama Butterfly, the story is human sized and the characters are as believable as those of late Mozart. But even more, I love the mix and trajectory of the different voices, from comic male quartet to intimate duet to raucus café and back again to the voices of Act 1 transmuted in sorrow. Act 3 (called Act 2 in the Seattle performance) is about as nice a dramatic composition as one could ask for.

Recorded

March 10, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 690 - (October 2005, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

A dog-whistle-high piercing pianissimo-to-mezzo forte feedback whine persists obstinately, flirting with discomfort. A percussion layer continues imperturbably, shifting color matter of factly, but otherwise immovably doing. A third layer interrupts or intercedes with radio scratch or guitar. Oddly it is the intercession that comes across as the context, the eventscape, within which the more continuous beings abide.

Banned Rehearsal 780 - (September 2010, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

Five years later, starting in combo mode of piano, drum, and cornet, I hear much the same character mix as in #690. It even ends with a high long-held harmonica, still and quiet, serendipitously reminiscent of the start of the earlier session just heard.

March 11, 2013
Blood/Candy - The Posies

The entire album could be heard as a set of loving recompositions of Savoy Truffle and Bohemian Rhapsody. The quicksilver arrangements hint at a Tatumesque sense that numerous songs lurk just below the surface and pop in whenever a crack opens up.

March 12, 2013
Suite in B flat Major - Sylvius Leopold Weiss - Lutz Kirchhof
Canon on "To Alexis" - Schumann - Peter Frankl
Tango - Stravinsky - Columbia Jazz Band, Igor Stravinsky

On the surface this performance comes across flat-footed and inelegant. But the square approach to rhythm throws the intricate particularities of the orchestration design into high relief.

March 14, 2013
Ebony Concerto - Stravinsky - Columbia Jazz Band, Igor Stravinsky, Benny Goodman

The science of chord voicing, both vertical and horizontal, aided and abetted by the in-your-face presence engineered into the recording. The grain of the HiFi sound approaches the surreal quality of the too-deep-too-bright focus of Bambi. I am torn between not wanting to hear page turns that perfectly imaged, and digging it.

First Part at Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels - Allen Ginsberg

A short poem that lives for its final lines. "And 4 police cars parked outside the painted / gate, red lights revolving in the leaves."

Jig Medley - John W. Summers [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording volume 1]

In Session At The Tintinabulary

March 11, 2013
Gradus 222 - Neal Meyer

Upcoming

Saturday May 4, 2013 at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey and Neal Meyer at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Music for solo piano:
Eisenbrey: Welcome to my planet. I come in peace.
Meyer: Cage - Solo for Piano

Playlist

Recorded

1/30/2011
Violin Concerto - Roger Sessions - Orchestre Philharmonique de l'Office de la Radio diffusion-Television Francais/Gunther Schuller/Paul Zukofsky

Robustly lyrical counterpoint.

Tango - Stravinsky - Noel Lee

tight as tight can make it

Mean To Me - Dizzy Gillespie & Orchestra/Sarah Vaughan

chromatically adept - a perfect picture of transparent subtlety.

Symphony #4 - Walter Piston - Seattle SO/Gerard Scwharz

The back ends of these movements sink down into some very interesting holes.

2/1/2011
The Sun Sessions - Elvis Presley

2/3/2/11
Perfidia - The Ventures
Love Is Strange (album) - Mickey & Sylvia

It is difficult to imagine a modern engineer allowing such a completely integrated sound, where every sound bleeds into every other. This pair was complete dynamite. The songs as songs vary in quality but the chemistry makes it impossible to really dislike anything about it.

Japan - Stockhausen

Live

1/29/2011
The Barber of Seville - Rossini - Seattle Opera/Dean Williamson - at McCaw Hall, Seattle

A wee bit of disclosure: Dean and I were high-school classmates, and used to play piano duets together (I remember mostly Ravel & Brahms). Since he is a foot or more taller than I am it was quite a sight.

A light farce, amazingly enjoyable after all these years. I had forgotten how few women's voices there are in the show. It portrays a society of men, in which women must scheme like the dickens to get what they want. This subversion is shared with Le Nozze de Figaro, although that story has subversion to spare.

1/31/2011
Gradus 186 - Neal Meyer