A roundup of several performing arts events this month in Salt Lake City:
NOVA Chamber Music Series: Musical Marriages
Two musical marriages — one from the 19th century and the other from current times — made for a splendid NOVA Chamber Music Series concert earlier this month. The first half was dedicated to Anthony Cheung and Wang Lu, husband-and-wife composers who are on the music faculty at Brown University.
Cheung’s chamber trio Flyway Detour, which premiered in 2006, is a musical interpretation in three sections of bird migration patterns and sometimes how natural elements and logic-defying behavior alter them. Pianist Mitchell Giambalvo effectively anchored the work’s harmonic foundations which were either reiterated or challenged by the two string players (Claude Halter, violin and Anne Lee, cello). With a kaleidoscopic score that periodically hints at the likes of Ligeti and the French avant-gardists of the 1970s, the musicians effectively clarified the sonic palette Cheung offered them, which imagined how these migratory patterns evolve and respond to natural elements that birds confront.
Wang Lu’s Like Clockwork, scored for violin, viola, cello, percussion and piano, was just as clarifying in its aesthetic imagery suggested by its creative brief. A 2020 work inspired by the pandemic disruptions and necessity of social distancing, Like Clockwork, which was commissioned and premiered by the Seattle Modern Orchestra, is steeped in guided improvisation. When concerts and events came to a ground stop, many organizations scrapped their plans to mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth (which happened in 2020).:Wang created a score that gave the five musicians who eventually premiered it (and who were at their respective homes during the shutdown) plenty of liberty to share their experiences of how Beethoven’s music figured in their lives. Thus, the piece moves like a tick-tock clockwork mechanism. Throughout the work, one could easily pick up snipped quotations of familiar Beethoven music.
All eyes were on percussionist Eric Hopkins who literally brought a small shed full of instruments to the stage, and whose clockwork duties were assisted by Kimi Kawashima, NOVA’s artistic director, at the keyboard. Rising successfully to the unique improvisational demands of the work were the trio of string players: Alex Martin, violin; Joel Gibbs, viola, and Lauren Posey, cello.
With sumptuous performances, the second half was devoted to Robert and Clara Schumann, the epitome of musical marriages in classical music. With Halter on violin and Frank Weinstock on piano, Clara Schumann’s Three Romances for Violin, Op. 22 manifested the sense of true love the Schumanns shared. Clara, in fact, quotes music from Robert’s first violin sonata. Likewise, with Weinstock again on keyboard, soprano Melissa Heath demonstrated compellingly how that love was reciprocated through Robert’s set of 12 short songs, Liederkreis, Op. 39.
Indeed, in both halves of the concert, there were juxtapositions and interminglings of distancing, loneliness and deep connections, showing that in every turn, the opportunities to flourish and thrive musically are omnipresent.
NOVA will return Jan, 12 with Stops and Starts: Bach Cantatas and Organ Works, which will delight audience members who have been waiting patiently for the Lbby Gardner Hall organ to fill the space with its glorious sounds. Haruhito Miyagi, who is on The University of Utah music faculty and performed in the September opener of NOVA’s Gallery Series, will perform Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in C major, BWV 545, followed by a world premiere of his Transfigured Permutation for organ. He also will perform on the harpsichord for the two Bach cantatas in the concert: Ich habe genung, BWV 82 (I Have Enough) and the Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, BWV 202 (Wedding Cantata). An ideal contemporary companion piece to Bach’s Wedding Cantata will be Commitment Bed (2015) by Viet Cuong, which will feature the Utah Symphony’s Fremont String Quartet.
Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation: Carter Johnson, The Four B’s
Just four and a half months after he won the silver medal at this year’s Gina Bachauer International Artists Competition, Carter Johnson returned to Salt Lake City and performed one of the most refreshing curated offerings in recent memory for the Bachauer concert series.
While Johnson did not immediately have in mind the theme of the Four B’s when he selected the music he would perform for this recital, the concert popped perfectly with the hook that Bachauer staff had dubbed his program of works. The first half featured Brahms’ 8 Klavierstücke, op. 76, a work from the composer that is not played as extensively as the later piano works (Op. 116-119) and Piano Sonata No. 2 by Grażyna Bacewicz, a 20th century Polish composer and violinist, who died in 1969 and whose work is enjoying a nice resurgence.
From the start of the program, Johnson’s playing immediately brought to mind the outstanding performances he offered during last summer’s competition. Johnson always extrudes the intellectual underpinnings of the music he performs, paying not only homage to the composer but also to the music’s stylistic and architectural elements. He brought lucidity to Brahm’s musical gifts without ever sounding pedantic or pompous and likewise he whetted the appetite to discover more of Bacewicz’s catalog of music, which bridges the classical era to the 20th century gusty and muscular compositional nature of Central and Eastern European composers.
The second half clinched the programming objective just as strongly, with his performances of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 13 in E-flat Major, op. 27, no. 1, and a fabulous closer, Bartók’s only sonata for piano (Sz. 80), With an entertaining heap of snappy confidence spiced with a sassy touch, Johnson also spoke about why he chose each piece, which was immediately followed by a performance that evoked his immense respect and love for that specific composition. And, for those wondering why he did not select Bach for the pantheon of the B’s, he performed one encore: an Allemande from one of the Bach partitas, rendered with the same grace and clear-headed execution that propelled the entire recital.
Flamenco del Lago: Why are the women weeping?
Katie Sheen-Abbott’s immersion into the art of flamenco has ripened very nicely, since she established Flamenco del Lago nearly a decade ago. In a recent concert, Why Are The Women Weeping?, Sheen-Abbott; her husband, Jake Abbott (guitarist and singer) and guitarist Sandy Meek gave an excellent sampling of the variety of songs and footwork in one of the world’s most captivating languages of emotional expression. The mix of old and contemporary songs stood out, including selections from Rosalia, Fernando de la Morena and even Nick Cave.
It was an edifying evening. Flamenco is complex for how it invigorates the senses, juxtaposing melancholy, torment, unattainable love and betrayal with the bittersweet flavors of unconditional love, resilience, sacrifice and vindication. The first half opened with fandangos and cañas, which dates to the early 1800s (among the oldest forms of flamenco songs), and fine examples of Sheen-Abbott’s footwork which grew organically in tension and tempo to majestic displays.
As noted previously in The Utah Review, in 2014, she went to Seville, an urban center for the heart and soul of flamenco, to study the dance art for a year. When she returned to the U.S., she established Flamenco del Lago, a professional trio that specializes in traditional and innovative dance and music forms associated with the art.
The breadth of flamenco the trio of artists shared was appreciated. The first half continued with guajiras, a curious form where the music originated in Cuba and has been incorporated into Spain’s flamenco language. There is a sensation of tropical languor, imbued with plenty of flirtation, in these songs, which emanate through the music and dance. The first half concluded with caracoles, a 12-count form. The narratives in these songs are rooted in the characters of street vendors (caracoleros sell snails, for example; and in this instance, the song asked, ‘Why are you out here selling roasted chestnuts in the cold?’).
“As the dancer you’re the percussionist as much as you are the dancer,” Sheen-Abbott explained in a 2023 interview with The Utah Review. In flamenco, which has perhaps its deepest musical roots in Moorish musical styles, the rhythmic patterns are known as compás, which are built as recurring patterns of betas and accents and which become the basis of various forms known as toques. Indeed, as Sheen-Abbott explained at the time, the rhythmic patterns can become extremely complicated. For example, the seminal form known as cante jondo is a 12-count, with accents on the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 10th and 12th beats. These were demonstrated throughout the show.
Songs are built from melodic phrases (falsetas) with the rhythms based on the song form. Think of the delicate hand movements, the speedy footwork and the use of castanets. And, the theatrical elements that appear, which include mantón (shawl) and the fan to signify specific emotions in various songs. In Spain, she studied with some of Flamenco’s best known artists including Luisa Palacio, Angel Atienza, El Choro and Milagros Mengibar. Her favorite props are the mantón and the Bata de Cola, the dress with a long ruffled train. Sheen-Abbott offered just as varied a cultural fashion show of flamenco as she did with the footwork and music.
The second half produced the most interesting examples of the evening, opening with the frequent dramatic swings of the Farruca, where Sheen-Abbott did some of her best aggressive footwork. Farruca is an interesting slang term often heard in Andalucía and Latin America, which references someone who is faraway from their home in Galicia. This was followed by some of the most sentimental moments of the evening with a petenera (‘They should have named you the undoing of men.’).
It was at this point when Sheen-Abbott and the two guitarists put on a convincing case for the unique cosmopolitan interpretation of flamenco’s capacity for universally familiar emotional expression. First up was The Weeping Song, which gave the program its title, referring to the 1990s hit that Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds recorded when they were living in Brazil. The second stanza of lyrics, for instance reads: “Father, why are all the women weeping/They are weeping for their men/Then why are all the men there weeping?/They are weeping back at them.”
In the 1930s, Federico García Lorca, the great Spanish poet, gave a now-famous lecture on the theory and art of duende, an emotional force best explained by the people of Andalusia. He said, “Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’” In fact, Cave quoted Lorca when he wrote his own essay (in 1999) about the emotional power of flamenco and how it captures love like no other song form could match.
It was the most intriguing pivot for the performers through the remainder of the program, who absorbed us with displays of what many have described the duende-rich provenance of flamenco as “tragedy-inspired ecstasy.” Indeed, the roots of songs from El Levante, Spain’s Mediterranean coastline, Rosalia and the master of bulerias, the late Fernando de la Morena, consoled the people at the end of yet another day of hardships, who had worked long hours barely eking out a living to keep them from starving. Flamenco del Lago’s concert forged a surprisingly resonant and relevant emotional connection for us Americans to the mysteriously illuminating powers of flamenco’s sincerest expressions of our complex human condition. The relevance to our current sociopolitical and sociocultural landscape is illuminating.