Nathan Davis, Hagoromo, International Contemporary Ensemble, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, etc.

I tend to be reassured when certain configurations endure. Piano trios, string quartets, works for orchestra and choral units with soloists, operas, cantatas, etc., in other words the various em-parcelments, the various genres. They are like the fruit cake we received this time of the year from my aunt, em-parceled and delivered I think by United Parcel, with brown paper and tied with string as packages were then. It was reassuring, somehow. Not that I shy away from unusual alternate configurations like Henry Brandt's flute orchestra, but a little continuity can be a fine thing.

This morning I turn to such a grouping, an operatic work for the crack chamber outfit known as the International Contemporary Ensemble, plus the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, contralto Katalin Karolyi and tenor Peter Tantsits, under the direction of Nicholus DeMaison. All this for Nathan Davis' intriguing Neo-Quasi-Asian and Modernist resonance Hagoromo (Tundra-New Focus Recordings TUN009). The fact that it is an opera is reassuring, but then too it is innovative in what it does and how it transforms an unexpected source quite readily and absorbingly.

I covered Nathan Davis' music with ICE previously on these pages. See the posting from February 15, 2016. For additional International Contemporary Ensemble album discussions, see posts from September 1, 2015, February 27, 2017, April 15, 2017, August 3, 2018, and this just-passed December 14, 2018.

The work was recorded live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival.  It was commission by ICE and is designated a "dance opera." The performance situation calls for choreography for two dancers and puppetry. The libretto was written by Brendan Pelsue.

Hagoromo takes its name and story line from the 500-year-old Japanese Noh drama by the same name. It concerns a swan maiden and a fisherman. The latter finds the former's feathered cloak and wishes to keep it. Negotiations with the swan maiden ensue and in the end  there is the return of the raiment to the swan maiden and the subsequent rise of a mutual affection between them.

A lively vaguely Asian percussion singularity and an alto flute in harmonics mode begins the work mysteriously and the very pronounced resonance of the work is established. The work falls naturally into the performative of soloists and chorus and the instrumental parts too seem natural. Yet all of it has an almost ritual primality at times, as definite echoes of the Noh music from the original.  At the same time in varying degrees there is a High Modernity of harmonic-melodic intent. All this works quite well for a result very intriguing and worthwhile.

It all falls most nicely onto the ears. The youth chorus gives the sound quality a heightened mythical aura as does the orchestration as well. It is most lovely music! Nathan Davis is a natural! Brilliant!

Gene Pritsker, Manhattan in Charcoal, Libretto by Jacob Miller

Opera in new music echelons remains viable and most alive. Yet the expense of a production and the often conservative, museum-like attitude of opera goers are both sticking points that mean there are not as many operas created by new music composers than perhaps we might like. A wonderful exception is an opera by Gene Pritsker, newly available on CD, Manhattan in Charcoal (Composers Concordance 0021), with a poetic free-verse libretto by Jacob Miller.

This is an opera with a stark, noir feel to it. It is set in the Village in the early days of this century. An artist meets a woman and they fall in love. She moves into his Village studio. Poverty, art, romantic entanglements and the art world at large enter into the picture against a backdrop of the streets of lower Manhattan. The opera centers around his 10 x 10 work on paper, "Manhattan in Charcoal" and its fate, which is linked in a very concrete way to the fate of the protagonists.

A narrator introduces scenes and summarizes events that occur outside of the scenario. The artist and his Beatrice form the major characters, sung convincingly by Charles Coleman and Lynn Norris, with Jacob Miller taking on the role of narrator. There is a chorus that plays the parts of gallery owners and critics. A chamber orchestra forms an important part of the proceedings.

Since the entire opera enfolds in around an hour, there is a terse compactness to the plot, enriched by vibrant imagery of the city in various moods. You get a series of scenes, moments in time lived by the protagonists, in an expressionist-modernist framework that is as vividly black and white as the central artwork.

The libretto has a direct yet poetically astute quality. Pritsker's score pulls it all together with some excellent music in the Pritskerian style, modern and convincingly fashioned, adding jazz and rock elements subtly but effectively, filled with inventive music very well conceived and orchestrated. There are some mostly complex repetitions to be heard here and there; they do not qualify the music as minimalist but rather bring it a step beyond it. In all the music carries the day brilliantly. Pritsker has a natural ability to write music that is unselfconsciously original and absorbing in a way that resembles nobody else.

It takes a few listens to fully appreciate it all. Once you acclimate yourself to the opera's mood and the complexities of the score you are left with a new work of real importance, a chamber opera that stands out as exemplary for our times.

It's in its own way a triumph, an example of why Gene Pritsker is an outstandingly innovative voice on the current scene. Highly recommended!