Jeffrey Hears Jupiter Ensemble At Princeton

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 5 April 2023. To see the article in full, click here.

The Jupiter Ensemble, photographed by Angeline Moizard

I recently had the great fortune to be invited back to Princeton University’s magnificent Alexander Hall to hear the Jupiter Ensemble perform a program of the music of the great 18th-Century Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi. I had only first heard of the Jupiter Ensemble about a month prior, and as I returned to the stately neo-Gothic campus, now dotted with daffodils and magnolia blossoms, I felt a keen sense of excitement to encounter this group of young musicians known for breathing fresh life into Baroque compositions.

When describing why he decided to form the Jupiter Ensemble, French lutenist and the ensemble’s artistic director Thomas Dunford said, “I wanted to bring together a group of exceptional musicians from the new generation, encountered while working with a large number of ensembles … It is now our responsibility, as a generation who grew up with this music, to continue bringing it alive, while making it more modern, showing just how accessible it can be, and how much it touches our hearts.”

The genuine passion for the music they play, along with their youthful vitality, was immediately apparent when Thomas, violinists Louise Ayrton and Augusta McKay Lodge, violist Manami Mizumoto, cellist Bruno Philippe, double bassist Douglas Balliett, harpsichordist Elliot Figg, and mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre came bounding onto the stage before launching into Vedrò con mio diletto from Vivaldi’s opera Il Giustino. From the start, it felt as if the entire ensemble was moving and breathing as one organism. Their synergy was astounding, with Lea’s delicate yet rich mezzo-soprano expertly weaving itself in and out between the strings in a way which made her sound as if she were an instrument herself as opposed to a voice floating somewhere above the ensemble.

Without giving the slightly stunned audience a moment to catch its collective breath, the ensemble dived into Armatae face et anguibus from Juditha triumphans devicta Holofernes barbarie – the only surviving of the four oratorios composed by Vivaldi. Lea’s expert coloratura was on full display in this piece, matched by the flying fingers of the rest of the members of the ensemble. By this point, there was no denying the incredibly high level of musicianship exhibited by each one of the performers onstage.

After a very cheerful Thomas welcomed us all to the evening’s performance and gave a short history of the Jupiter Ensemble and its love for the work of Vivaldi, we were treated to the composer’s Lute Concerto in C Major. This was Thomas’ moment to shine as he transported us all to the sun-drenched terrace of some Venetian palazzo with his gorgeously unobtrusive playing.

Lea then returned to the stage to sing Cum dederit from Nisi Dominus – the evening’s only sacred music offering. Not performed terribly often, it was an immense pleasure to hear this haunting piece with its ominously recurring ascending semitones performed so sensitively by such a masterful singer.

To close out the first half of the evening’s program, Thomas returned centerstage to give us Vivaldi’s slightly more famous Lute Concerto in D Major. Once again, we were back in that faraway city of winding canals, basking in the warm tones dripping like honey from his lute.

After a short interval, we were all in familiar territory with the Violin Concerto in F Minor, L’inverno (Winter) from The Four Seasons, showcasing the magnificent skill of violinist Louise Ayrton. This was immediately followed by the blood-chilling aria Gelido in ogni vena from Farnace, whose opening measures are strikingly similar to those of the first movement of L’inverno.

Equally dramatic yet noticeably more rousing was the aria Gelosia, tu già rendi l’alma mia from Ottone — once again, a chance to enjoy Lea’s exceptional coloratura and penchant for character embodiment. This was followed by Vivaldi’s Cello Concerto in G Minor featuring cellist Bruno Philippe. Bruno played with extraordinary flair and precision, garnering several cries of “Bravo!” from the audience after the Allegro.

The final two pieces in the evening’s program were from the opera Ercole su’l Termodonte. More than seven minutes in length, the ensemble’s performance of the pastoral aria Onde chiare che sussurrate was filled with an incredible amount of light and air, giving each of the musicians room to flourish. The violins playing in duet recalled images of flowers pushing through the still-cold earth in early spring, whilst the florid vocal line, which showcased Lea’s gorgeous instrument and improvisational skill perhaps more than any other piece in the concert, was reminiscent of a young river cascading down a mountainside. And just as we were all poised to erupt into applause, the ensemble plunged into the frantic 90-second aria Scenderò, volerò, griderò. The entire audience was brought to our feet at its conclusion.

Returning to the stage after two curtain calls, Thomas announced that for an encore, the ensemble would transition from performance mode to what he called “Jupiter Ensemble After-Hours”. We were treated to a piece recently composed by the ensemble called We Are the Ocean – a sort of mash-up of Baroque elegance and the sultry languidity of a late-night jazz bar. The entire ensemble, along with their tour manager, sang along on the infectious chorus which featured the lyrics: “We are the ocean, we are the ocean. Each one a drop, each one a drop.”

In the ocean that is the lauded tradition of Baroque music, each musician may only be but a drop. But I am quite certain that no drop from our era in that vast and shining sea is quite as pure or full of vivacious sweetness as that of the Jupiter Ensemble.

Jeffrey Experiences Joyce DiDonato: EDEN

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 21 February 2023. To see the article in full, click here.

Joyce DiDonato, photographed by Andrew Wilkinson

The year was 1890, and the College of New Jersey — now known as Princeton University — decided to build a hall big enough for its body of students. It would be named Alexander Hall, after its donor Harriet Crocker Alexander, and designed by architect William Appleton Potter.

One of the finest examples of High Victorian Gothic architecture in the region, this coalescence of curved lines, arched stained-glass windows, and granite towers overshadowed by stately sycamores was the perfect venue to host a performance of American Grammy- and Olivier Award-winning mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato’s EDEN.  

A concert extension of her 2022 album of the same name, Joyce describes EDEN as ‘an invitation to return to our roots and to explore whether or not we are connecting as profoundly as we can to the pure essence of our being, to create a new EDEN from within and plant seeds of hope for the future.’ Under the direction of Bulgarian conductor/violinist Zefira Valova, the superb 24-musician ensemble il Pomo d’Oro has accompanied Joyce on this musical journey, ranging stylistically from the Baroque to the contemporary, in venues across the globe.

As the musicians took their places and the lights dimmed inside Alexander Hall’s Richardson Auditorium, smoke began to swirl across the stage, making even more lifelike the hall’s beautiful mosaic depicting scenes from Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, and we heard the haunting opening strains of Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. Singing in straight tone the line usually assigned to a solo trumpet, Joyce’s voice was heard emanating from an unknown place in the back of the hall, causing a great deal of spine-tingling in several audience members, myself included, I’m sure. As the piece progressed, she continued to move about and sing from different places in the nearly black hall, making for a beautifully disorienting effect that really did have us all stepping out of time into this EDEN of her creation. 

As the next piece began, a new work from the British Academy Award-winning composer Rachel Portman called The First Morning of the World, we finally beheld the singer herself – punkish platinum blonde hair and shimmering silver dress reflecting the beautiful gold and blue light designed by John Torres now bathing the stage:

A musing on what the first morning of the world might have sounded like, the text by American poet Gene Scheer was powerfully sung by Joyce with her usual richness, warmth, and sensitivity to the words. 

The remainder of the concert found Joyce centerstage on a platform created by Escenografia Moia, featuring tubular pieces of metal that she gradually put into place to form two large concentric circles. Seated in the middle of the platform, she gave us Gustav Mahler’s Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft! from his Rückert-Lieder – a delicate ode to the fragrance of a lime tree. She then reclined on the platform to let il Pomo d’Oro build a bridge to the 17th-Century section of the concert with Marco Uccellini’s Sinfonia terza, Op. 7.

All was then plunged into red light as the pulsating first strums of Con le stelle in ciel che mai from Biagio Marini’s Scherzi e canzone, Op. 5 resounded through the hall. The metallic circles began to rotate around the platform as Joyce rose to her knees and banged her fists against it to keep time, reminding us that she is no stranger to the dramatic. The expert playing from il Pomo d’Oro paired with Joyce’s florid vocal dynamism made for one of the most memorable examples of Baroque musical mastery I have ever witnessed. This level of intense energy was matched in the next piece, Josef Mysliveček’s Toglierò le sponde al mare from Adamo ed Eva – an oratorio about the Biblical expulsion from Paradise.

From here on out, the program took a gentler turn, with selections from Aaron Copland’s 8 Poems of Emily Dickinson, Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto, and Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Ezio. Highlights from the second half of the concert included il Pomo d’Oro’s stirring rendition of the regal Sonata enharmonica by Giovanni Valentini and Joyce’s gorgeous take on the timeless As With Rosy Steps The Morn from George Frideric Handel’s Theodora – leaving the audience breathless with her gentle tone and effortlessly unobtrusive ornamentation. 

The culmination of this journey through EDEN came with Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, another selection from Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder. As she sang of being dead to the world’s tumult and resting in a quiet realm of love and song, Joyce took the final piece of metal left on stage and added it to complete the smaller of the two rotating circles, thus finishing the work of her creation.

At this point, Joyce addressed the audience for the first time, thanking us for joining her in her EDEN and letting us know that she would be sending us all home with chamomile seeds to plant in our own gardens. She then welcomed the local Princeton Girlchoir Semi-Tones onstage to join her in singing Seeds of Hope – a new piece based on song fragments composed by students she worked with at the Bishop Ramsey School in London. The choir then treated us to a Ukrainian lullaby before Joyce had them sit round her onstage while she spoke to them (and us all) about the importance of creative expression and the power of music. A scene that charmingly reminded me of something out of The Sound Of Music.

The final piece of the evening was the classic Ombra Mai Fu from Handel’s Serse, which Joyce sang while still seated, surrounded by her garden of children. “How could I give a concert about nature without singing about a tree?” she asked the girls before singing.

As I left Alexander Hall and gazed up at myriad stars in the cold, clear February sky, I noticed a quote from Lucretius inscribed on the side of the building: “There is no greater joy than to hold high aloft the serene abodes well bulwarked by the learning of the wise.” In that moment, I felt a profound sense of gratitude to everyone who contributed to the creation of that splendid hall and, of course, to Joyce for encouraging us to continue to learn about and find beauty in the world around us. I then turned to walk across the quiet Princeton University campus, chamomile seeds in hand. 

Eric Whitacre’s Touching Choral Work Is 'Not Sparkling, Not Epic, Just Real'

Jeffrey Charles Palmer ‘s interview with American composer and conductor Eric Whitacre was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 19 August 2022. To read the interview in full, click here.

Eric Whitacre and Charles Anthony Silvestri, photographed by Mar Royce

Grammy Award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre is one of today’s most popular and intriguing musicians. His acclaimed choral works have been programmed on stages worldwide, and his virtual choirs have brought together more than 100,000 singers from nearly 150 countries.

In this interview, I spoke with Eric about the story behind The Sacred Veil, his 12-movement choral work in collaboration with poet and lyricist Charles Anthony Silvestri (pictured above), and what it means to him to be bringing this work to the Sydney Opera House for the very first time.

Congratulations on the upcoming Australian debut of The Sacred Veil. This work was inspired by a poem written by your friend and collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri after losing his wife to cancer. When you first began to set this poem to music, were you immediately inspired to have it become part of such an epic choral work, or did the journey start as a more introspective exercise for you?

ERIC: Tony and I had been talking about the death of his wife Julie for close to 10 years at that point. I knew Julie really well. Tony, being my best friend, you can imagine how many conversations we had about her death and how difficult it was for Tony and what it meant to him.

I had suggested several times during those 10 years that Tony write about it, as a way to process it or purge it, or I don’t know what — just that I know for myself, the best way for me to find or create some clarity is to create something about it. Tony wasn’t sure he could do that. He wasn’t even sure where to start. And then one day out of the blue, he presented me with this poem, which is this very first movement, The Veil Opens. It started with this line: Whenever there is birth or death, the sacred veil between the worlds grows thin and opens slightly up.

He showed it to me not thinking that I would set it, just a thing that he had written, that first poem. And I was so moved by it. It’s exquisite poetry. And also, knowing Tony and knowing his journey, I think I could read between the lines very quickly and see the whole worldview that he had — the very personal worldview that was sort of embedded beneath the words.

I sat down and wrote the music really quickly. For me, it usually takes weeks or months to write something. And it was amazing that within a few hours, I’d written a big chunk of the piece, and also had the entire arc of it. I could see it in the poetry.

I should say as a side note, this is one of the things that Tony does better than any living poet I’ve seen, which is that the architecture for the music is built into the poem itself. As a composer, it’s a dream having that.

And so I showed him what I was writing, and that’s when we had the conversation: I said to him, ‘I think there might be more here if you’re ready’. We had a lot of conversations about that. Was he ready? And what would that mean? I think we both knew intuitively that if we were going to make this piece, we’d — especially Tony — really have to get our hands dirty. For the entire time that we’ve been making things together, we often talk that we’re getting progressively more and more introspective and honest with what we make together. And I think we both knew that, if we were going to do this, it was going to get close to the bone.

To his credit, Tony said, ‘Okay, let’s do this’.

We had no idea what we were making, what it would look like, how many movements, what those movements would be, what the structure was. We didn’t even know that what is now the first movement would be the first movement. We just knew that it was just a tiny strand of DNA that would help us build the rest of the piece.

In the opening movement The Veil Opens, that first lyric one hears is: “Whenever there is birth or death, the sacred veil between the worlds grows thin and opens slightly up.” A profound statement made even more powerful by the choir’s close harmonies and the haunting cello line. It seems as if the choir becomes the veil itself, and the cello is the soul, slipping from one side to the other. Was this your intention, and what was it about the cello that inspired you to use it so prominently in this work?

E: Thanks, Jeffrey. It’s really beautiful insight. It was funny, because the way commission typically works is that you get the group to agree on the commission. Basically, that means: here’s the general subject matter, here’s the general length of the piece, and here’s the forces that will be used. Not knowing any of this when it was commissioned by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, I just said I knew that it would be about Tony and his journey with his wife Julie, and that it would probably be somewhere between 50 and 90 minutes — I just took a wild guess — and that there would be 10 instruments plus choir. I think I said 10 instruments because I just wanted to cover my bets in case it needed that.

Also, of course, the subject matter is so big and so epic that initially I thought, okay, it needs real forces and lots of colour. Then what I found — as we started making the piece, and it got more and more honest, and Tony’s poetry was coming back unadorned and unbaroque — it was just very clear and precise and human. I could remember at one point I thought, ‘Okay, so we’ve just lost all the winds. So now it’s just strings and harp and piano and percussion’. And then at some point, ‘No, actually, percussion goes away and then harp goes away’. One by one, all the instruments in my mind were being taken away in an effort to get more and more honest. To have it not be dazzling, not sparkling, not epic, just be real.

Eventually, it ended up where it is now: piano, cello, and choir. The cello plays all of these different roles. Its first and most important role is that it presents the veil itself. For me, the veil is that middle C. It permeates the whole piece, and you very astutely talk about the cello slipping from one side to the other. In fact, the whole piece is about that. There’s key relationships that are above middle C, so kind of on the side of the living. Below middle C, the side of those who have passed. And this game is being played with all of the instruments, but especially the cello.

I was drawn to two things then, when I finally settled on the cello. One is that pragmatically, for that game that gets played, there’s really no other instrument that can so beautifully transverse that line of middle C, that you’ve got two octaves below with the cello and in theory, two octaves above. And so it can really dance around that middle C on either side of this veil.

And the other is that just the cello, to my ears, is far and away the most human sounding instrument. It sounds more like a voice than anything. I’m not sure that I ever ascribed to this idea that it is Tony, or is the veil, but more just that it sings in a way.

Years ago, I wrote a piece called When David Heard, and it begins with a prologue and a postlogue, I suppose. The idea was that the prologue would be this Greek chorus singing, which sets up the piece, and then the piece begins and we see the actual drama. And then the postlogue would be that it’s the Greek chorus that comes back and sings, but the story has been so moving and tragic that even the Greek chorus is moved to tears by what they’ve heard. I love the idea of applying that kind of metaphor to the cello here, where the cello in a way is the narrator. So, in a way, is dispassionate, or is looking at the story from a distance. It’s as if the narrator themselves is moved by the story of these two people.

With its cacophony of medical terminology, the sixth movement I’m Afraid so perfectly captures the devastation and confusion one experiences when first receiving a cancer diagnosis. And the stark reality of having to explain hair loss from cancer treatment to one’s child dealt with in the eighth movement Delicious Times is heartbreaking. Listening to this work has surely been very cathartic for so many of us who have lost loved ones to cancer. Have you had many people tell you that listening to The Sacred Veil has played a healing role in their own grief process?

E: Jeffrey, if you’ve lost someone to cancer, really, my deepest condolences. This is far and away the most unexpected part of writing this piece. I never could have guessed this, that people would respond to it the way they have. I think while we were making it, our north star the entire time was just be honest. And so what that meant was we stopped trying to generalise or try to paint a picture of universal grief or human grief. It was just tell the story between Tony and Julie. But now I know from experience that it’s actually the specificity of drama that makes it universal.

And the first responses we started getting were people that were, as you said, like with the medical terminology, that they literally recognised the terminology of their own cancer diagnosis or cancer diagnosis of loved ones in the lyrics. That they knew ‘that is the medicine that was prescribed to me’, or that was the diagnosis, the language of the diagnosis. That I wasn’t expecting, but of course, so many people have gone through this cancer journey. And the more we do it then people are writing to us saying even beyond cancer, it’s given them a way to grieve. Tony says this very beautifully — that in the West, we don’t grieve well, and everything is kind of at a distance.

I think oftentimes of Requiem Mass, which of course we perform all the time in classical music, these different requiems. And the Requiem Mass is very distant. It takes place sort of over there. And it’s not digging in the dirt the way Tony’s poetry does in The Sacred Veil where it’s saying: ‘This is what happened to me. This is the actual human experience of this happening.’ And I’d like to think that just saying it out loud gives people — people who’ve struggled with cancer for sure, but also just people who have grieved — the chance to voice that grief, or maybe just a little catharsis seeing that they’re not alone in that grief.

There is a lot of excitement around your bringing The Sacred Veil to Australia this September. What does it mean to you to have this work performed by the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs in your first return to the Sydney Opera House in nearly a decade?

E: It’s like, I can’t begin to tell you. I mean first, I love Australia. I have such a warm spot in my heart for it. And to be coming back already is a joy and a thrill, but then to be doing this piece, which means so, so, so much to me — and to be doing it with Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, which my experience last time was just that these are incredibly soulful singers. So I know already going in that they’re going to bring every ounce of themselves to the performance. I’m deeply humbled and honored by the chance to present this.

After performances in both Sydney and Melbourne, The Sacred Veil will receive its New Zealand debut later in September. Are there any plans to bring this work to other parts of the world in the future?

E: I’m now making a larger version for string orchestra and choir and piano. So it’ll be exactly the same piece, but just elevated a little bit. My idea is that it’ll be performed by slightly larger forces. So, that way we can really take advantage of a few of those moments that I think will benefit from a grander set of forces. There’s already plans to do that in Denver, United States in October, then I think in England next summer.

Then The Sacred Veil, the smaller version that we’re doing now in Sydney and New Zealand will be performed in the United States, and I’ve just recorded it with VOCES8 — and my God, is that a beautiful performance. That will be released next year, I believe, in 2023. So it’s kind of out there starting to find its little path.

In addition to The Sacred Veil and your groundbreaking work with virtual choirs, you have produced other acclaimed pieces inspired by everything from the Hubble Space Telescope to Renaissance poetry. Are there any hints as to what the source of inspiration for the next Eric Whitacre work might be?

E: Back in 2019, I wrote what is now the bones of a little chamber opera called The Gift of the Magi, which is a Christmas story that my father used to read to all of us kids every Christmas. I put it up and heard it was about 22 minutes’ worth of the music. But then over the past years during the pandemic, I’ve taken it down and torn it apart and rewrote a whole bunch of it, and added a bunch of new music — and now it’s this little 40-minute chamber opera. That’s what I’ll be working on over the next year, this little Christmas chamber opera…. I find the idea of a little Christmas opera so charming. And the piece that I’m writing is a little old fashioned, and kind of a Christmas that I used to think about and dream about when I was a kid.

So, that’s what I’m working on, and I think I’m also recording that next June… it’ll be up and on its feet within the year.

What It Feels Like To Perform Internationally After Two Years

Editor Stephanie Eslake interviewed Jeffrey about his upcoming performance at the Music in the Alps Festival for Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon. To read the interview in full, click here.

Jeffrey Charles Palmer, self-portrait

Back in 2019, Jeffrey Palmer wrote about the Music in the Alps Festival. This was before the pandemic brought international concert tours to a grinding halt.

Now, the Brooklyn-based countertenor is about to return to that Austrian festival once again — coming full circle in his performing arts career after a challenging few years for the industry.

In this interview, we sit down with this musician and CutCommon writer to learn about his musical life and how it changed during the pandemic. Jeffrey also sheds light on what it means to brave global travel for the sake of live performance, despite risking some setbacks along the way.

Jeffrey, you’re about to return to Europe to perform for the first time in more than two years. Of course, the past two years have been nightmarish when it comes to international touring. What does it mean to you that you can once again access the world’s stages?

JEFFREY: It’s quite difficult to express how incredibly exciting and meaningful it is that I am returning to Europe to perform for the first time since February of 2020. I wouldn’t say that I took international touring for granted before the onset of the pandemic, but it’s certainly something I never dreamt would be so dramatically interrupted.

Although I have done quite a bit of performing in New York and Connecticut over the past few months, there was a good year and a half where all the singing I did was in my home, or whilst taking long walks in the woods of Virginia, where I spent a good portion of 2020. During that time, I made peace with the fact that perhaps that was all the singing I’d be doing moving forward. In a way, there was something nice about stripping away the business side of music and getting back to the heart of why I sing – which is simply because I was made to do it!

Now that I am returning to the stage, I hope that I am able to carry some of that purity with me, and fully appreciate what a gift it is to be able to share music with an audience.

You last wrote about your Music in the Alps Festival experience back in 2019. While you haven’t been able to travel to Europe to perform in the past two years, how have you found the experience of living as a musician, in a pandemic, in America since that time?

J: It’s been very strange! It was amazing, in the most tragic of ways, to see how, in the blink of an eye, all the plans for concerts, operas, festivals, and so forth that I and all my colleagues had were completely swallowed into oblivion.

I was very fortunate to have a source of income that wasn’t tied to performing, but the lives of many of my musician friends in New York City were thrown into a complete state of chaos. But, as artists are wont to do, we still found ways to create despite what the world was throwing at us.

By the end of 2020, I had started performing in a few live-streamed concerts. While it was quite eerie performing in a hall or a church with no audience present, it was heartwarming to know that there were people from all around the world who were sharing that moment with me, albeit virtually.

It was very inspiring to see the new and unique ways that artists of all kinds were finding to share creative experiences with others, and I feel quite privileged that I was able to take part in some of them.

Your upcoming event is called The Circles That You Find. I feel like it’s fitting that you’ve come full circle, returning to the festival once again. But what was your intention behind the name?

J: At some point during the summer of 2020, pianist Irena Portenko, who is the founder and festival director of Music in the Alps, and I collaborated virtually on the song The Windmills Of Your Mind by Michel Legrand. She recorded the piano part from her home in New York, and I recorded the vocal line in Virginia. I was already a big fan of the song, but I was amazed at what a moving experience it was performing it with her, even though we were separated by hundreds of miles.

The haunting nature of the music and the enigmatically genius lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman seemed so fitting for the time. When I came back to New York later that year, we worked on it together in her living room and knew for sure that we had something special.

When we were thinking about our return to the festival this summer, we knew we had to include this song in our concert, and the line “the circles that you find” emerged from it as the perfect title. Returning to Austria this summer will most definitely be a full circle moment for the both of us, as it will be for many of the other musicians present.

Your program is varied — Handel to Ravel, Legrand to Gershwin, to name a few. On your website, you describe this as a collection of pieces that “reflects on the difficult times our world has faced in recent years”. How do you feel the works you’ve chosen achieve this — especially pieces that come from the past, which you’ve used to share stories of the present?

J: The repertoire we’ll be covering is very diverse, ranging from Baroque arias to jazz standards to a song by the early 1980s British band Monsoon. However, the program very much tells a story.

We’ve assembled the pieces in a way that first greets the audience with an atmosphere of ease and conviviality, which is quickly followed by a little chaos. That chaos leads to a place of despair and questioning, and from that questioning we are given a few answers and, ultimately, hope.

We were quite intentional about putting the pieces in an order, both in terms of musical mood and lyrics, that convey this story. And, while it may sound a bit abstract in theory, I think the audience will be quite aware of what we are doing! From the pandemic to the war in Ukraine to the dramatic shifts that people have gone through on a personal level, including the death of my own mother last year, Irena and I very much wanted to acknowledge the struggles that we have faced as individuals, communities, and as a planet over the past two years.

It’s important to remember that we are not alone, and that suffering is universal – as is the possibility of liberation from suffering. Music is timeless, so it was quite easy to find pieces that contributed to the story we are trying to tell from many different eras. 

We can’t ignore that while you are about to embark on a European concert from your home in the United States, which is a positive experience, there still exists the possibility that you may suffer a setback: sickness, travel delays, cancellations, or postponements. What approach do you bring to such a big international commitment, knowing you may still need some flexibility in the way it’s arranged?

J: I am constantly surrounded by stories of unexpected illness, flight delays, and various political situations that are causing trips of both musical and non-musical natures to be postponed or cancelled. While these setbacks are perhaps more likely to occur today than they were a few years ago, I feel it’s important to remember that nothing we plan in life ever has been or ever will be for certain. Remaining flexible and addressing challenges responsibly is key. Whether or not this trip goes exactly according to plan is not the most important thing, but rather that we remain attentive to the ways in which we can most safely and effectively bring this musical experience to our audience.

What advice would you give to other artists who are gradually returning to global travel for their work?

J: If there is one lesson we’ve learnt from world events over the past two years, it’s that we never know what tomorrow will bring. So, carpe diem! Of course, be responsible, stay safe, and take all necessary precautions, but also don’t be afraid to make plans to share your music with others – whether that be on the other side of the globe or in your own back garden. 

Jeffrey Goes to See Björk in San Francisco

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 16 February 2022. To see the article in full, click here.

Björk, photographed by Santiago Felipe

Björk is one of those artists who emerge once in a generation. Known for her sophisticated musicality, powerful vocals, and fiercely childlike demeanor, she has influenced an impressive number of musicians representing genres that span from classical to hip hop. Whether you love her or hate her, it cannot be denied that she is an artistic force to be reckoned with.

When I was given the opportunity to attend a performance of her lauded Cornucopia concert tour in San Francisco, I happily left the drear of Brooklyn in February and took a flight out west to the “City by the Bay” (which also happens to be the city in which I was born) without hesitation.

Björk’s Cornucopia era began before the COVID-19 pandemic with a residency at The Shed in New York City in the spring of 2019. Her most elaborate concert experience to date, Cornucopia draws heavily on material from her latest album, 2017’s Utopia, and features performances from the Icelandic flute septet Viibra, percussionist Manu Delago, harpist Katie Buckley, Bergur Þórisson on electronics, and an 18-person choir. Directed by Lucrecia Martel, Björk herself has described Cornucopia as “digital theatre” and a “sci-fi pop concert” with its use of stunning visual projections and elaborate staging.

To fully understand Cornucopia, one must have some understanding of Björk’s two most recent studio albums. 2015’s Vulnicura was a tragically beautiful ode to her break-up with her romantic partner Matthew Barney, with whom she shares a daughter. 2017’s Utopia shows a far more hopeful Björk painting a vision for the future that includes plant-bird hybrid creatures, a spiritual synchronicity between nature and technology, and a copious number of flutes. It is this journey from heartbreak and despair to the resolve to create a new and more beautiful world that Björk so masterfully highlights in Cornucopia.

All of this brings me to evening of 5 February 2022 at San Francisco’s beautiful new Chase Center in the Mission Bay neighbourhood. After a break due to the pandemic, Björk was fresh from her first Cornucopia performances in over two years at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The eclectic Bay Area crowd was poised to receive her with open arms and hearts.

As the stadium lights dimmed, the LA-based choir Tonality (all clad in white) filed on to the stage to open the concert with a vocalise arrangement that transitioned into a lament on humanity’s greed and disregard for the natural world. This led to a stunning visual projection of Björk draped across a boulder with a great gash in her chest singing the final portion of the song Family from Vulnicura. The gash was eventually transformed into a portal from which light and dazzling colour emerged, and we saw Björk herself walk slowly from behind the projection towards the front of the stage as she began to sing The Gate from Utopia. “My healed chest wound, transformed into a gate. Where I receive love from. Where I give love from.” The journey had commenced.

Dressed in a Noir Kei Ninomiya ensemble that resembled a beige and lavender body suit covered in giant cotton balls, Björk dazzled with her crystalline vocals, surrounded by visual projections resembling blossoming flowers, sea anemone, harp strings, and angelic beings. All the musicians on stage were in top form, and it was quite clear that this group had created a musical groove into which each member fit perfectly.

In addition to the elaborate opening number, highlights of the concert included a stripped-down version of Venus as a Boy from her 1993 album Debut, with only voice and flute; dynamic renditions of Hidden Place from 2001’s Vespertine, sung a cappella with Tonality; and Mouth’s Cradle from 2004’s Medúlla, featuring a virtuosic performance from Manu Delago on drums.

The audience was stirred into an ecstatic frenzy when the stage was flooded in green light as Björk sang her heart out during her much-beloved Isobel, an ode to a girl living alone in the forest “married to herself”, from her 1995 album Post; and Sue Me, a playful albeit dark track from Utopia basically telling Matthew Barney that he can sue her all he wants, but that she is still going to do what is best for their daughter.

A particularly special moment in the concert occurred during Blissing Me from Utopia, during which the entrancingly talented serpentwithfeet joined Björk on stage. The playful dynamic between these two was incredibly charming (with Björk even giggling a few times whilst singing), and the gorgeous harmony of their voices together was nothing short of earth-shattering.

Björk spoke little during the performance, with most of her comments coming right before her two encores. She remarked that she had many good memories of being in San Francisco and that she was a bit emotional being back here. Björk, now clad in another whimsical Noir Kei Ninomiya outfit that made her look like a cross between a valkyrie and a pixie, had us in the palm of her hand.

For her encores, she performed the gorgeously lullaby-like final track from Utopia entitled Future Forever, as well as the pulsating Notget from Vulnicura. A frenzy of beats and whirling visuals, the power and sincerity of Björk’s voice unequivocally remained the focal point throughout her final number.

Long after Björk left the stage, the final words of Notget, repeated like a mantra several times at the end of the song, remained with me as I walked the deserted streets of Mission Bay. I noticed the yellow crescent moon hanging low in the sky, and the slight scent of blossoms in the air as her words continued to swirl about in my mind. Even the darkest of nights will eventually give birth to a new day. “Love will keep us safe from death. Love will keep us safe from death.”

Jeffrey Sees Only an Octave Apart in NYC

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 7 October 2021. To see the article in full, click here.

Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond, photographed by Ruven Afanador

On a warm, clear Brooklyn evening, I made my way to St. Ann’s Warehouse – a former spice milling factory turned performing arts space in the borough’s waterside Dumbo neighbourhood – to witness one of the first live performances I’ve seen since New York City theatres began to re-open just a few weeks ago. The occasion was Only An Octave Apart – an evening with countertenor and Metropolitan Opera star Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond, the undeniable queen of downtown cabaret. With such an unusual pairing, I was quite excited to see what exactly this evening would entail.

Even in the venue’s lobby, the audience’s excitement was palpable. We were all over the moon to simply be back in a theatre! Soon after we – the vaccinated, masked patrons – had settled into our seats, show director and co-creator Zack Winokur made an appearance in front of the blue satin curtains to offer his emotional and heartfelt thanks to the sold-out crowd for supporting this show, and New York City theatre in general, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first standing ovation of the evening. And with that, the lights dimmed, the music swelled, and our stars emerged in matching asymmetrical velvet gowns.

The rapport between these two was undeniable. Both performers beamed from ear to ear whilst engaging in some extremely personable and humourous banter before launching into their first number, Only An Octave Apart from the famous 1976 television special starring Carol Burnett and Beverly Sills. Justin Vivian’s brassy baritone stood in stark contrast to Anthony’s crystalline countertenor, but the energy and fun these two exuded completely eclipsed any misgivings one might have had about this unusual vocal pairing.

In the next segment, Justin Vivian gave a dramatic performance of the 1927 song Me And My Shadow, with Anthony providing trumpet-like accompaniment with his voice, before the two launched into a mash-up (the first of many) of an aria from Henry Purcell’s 1692 opera The Fairy-Queen with Beatrice Lillie’s There Are Fairies At The Bottom Of My Garden from 1934. A great illuminated moon was hoisted over the stage, and faux flowers were copiously strewn about whilst the two playfully competed for the spotlight. Vaudeville camp meets Baroque opera.

Several duets followed, with one particular highlight being the 1954 jazz standard Autumn Leaves / Les feuilles mortes by Joseph Kosma, which was inspired by Poème d’octobre by Jules Massenet. After Anthony shared a short history of the song during its introduction, Justin Vivian gave us one of the evening’s most memorable one-liners – “I don’t do Massenets. Only evening performances”.

Another wildly entertaining number was the ‘Habanera’ from Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera Carmen, performed in the style of Debbie Reynolds and Jean Hagen in the film Singin’ In The Rain. Anthony took the Debbie role and stood behind the curtain to sing whilst Justin Vivian gave a spot-on impersonation of Jean’s silent film star character Lina Lamont and lip-synced along. The room was in stitches.

The performance was not without its tender moments, one of which was Anthony’s chill-inducing performance of Franz Liszt’s setting of Wandrers Nachtlied II by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – arguably considered the most perfect lyric in the German language. This was followed shortly thereafter by a haunting rendition by Justin Vivian, backlit in a purple sequined dress, of the Broadway showtune I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.

But perhaps the most poignant moment of all came in the pair’s performance of the 1986 duet Don’t Give Up by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. With stellar vocal performances and beautiful choreography, the two singers embodied the song’s message of despair, hope, and unwavering acceptance. Following this song, Justin Vivian spoke about the importance of showing kindness to all despite our perceived differences, and Anthony shared how he had never felt more like himself than when performing in this show.

The set was brought to a close with rousing renditions of Stars by disco sensation Sylvester, and Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie. And after three or four curtain calls, our beloved stars agreed to treat us to two encores. The first was a surprisingly moving performance of Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s 1689 opera Dido and Aeneas with elements of White Flag by English pop singer Dido mixed in. This mash-up of the Didos proved to be perhaps my favourite moment of the evening! And to top it all off, Justin Vivian sang Walk Like An Egyptian by The Bangles whilst Anthony showed us how to do so by re-creating the staircase ascent he made famous in the 2019 Metropolitan Opera production of Akhnaten by Philip Glass. Who could ask for anything more from these two?

As the audience streamed out of the warehouse towards the East River and the shimmering Manhattan skyline, I experienced once again that magical sense of joy that one only gets after seeing a live performance of this caliber. What Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond gave us that evening was far more than just a great performance – they gave us laughter, hope, and an undeniable sense of appreciation for the arts. May we never, ever, ever take live performance for granted again. And may we always keep chasing rainbows.

My Carnegie Hall Debut

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 18 March 2020. To see the article in full, and read the entirety of print issue #3 of the magazine digitally, click here. A good thing to do whilst self-isolating!

Jeffrey Palmer, Irena Portenko and Zachary Hoffman at Carnegie Hall, photographed by Geraldine Petrovic

On a frigid January night in New York, pianist Irena Portenko and I stepped onto the stage of the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall to wrap our audience in the spirit of hygge – a Nordic term for the feeling of cosiness, conviviality and contentment. Featuring arias and songs by the likes of Handel, Debussy, Schubert, Sondheim and (in true Nordic fashion) Björk, the idea for this program originally stemmed from the planning of concerts that Irena and I will be giving together this February in Ukraine and at the winter session of her Music in the Alps Festival in Austria. As temperatures tend to plummet to Alpine depths in New York during this time of year, we thought a concert at Carnegie Hall would be an auspicious way to premiere this concept, and leapt at the opportunity when it was presented to us.

In addition to the eclectic countertenor and piano fare we performed together, Irena graced the packed house with a few solo works, including Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 and the New York premiere of Nine Portraits for Piano Solo by her incredibly accomplished student, 17-year old Benjamin Araujo. The audience was enraptured by these poignant sonic portraits of important figures in the young composer’s life, and ecstatic to find out that he was present amongst them that evening.

We were also honoured to have Irena’s former student Zachary Hoffman join us onstage at a second piano to treat the audience to some Rachmaninoff and Piazzolla for four hands, followed by his glorious solo rendition of Chaminade’s Arabesque No. 1, Op. 61. Along with being an exceptional pianist, Zach has continued his passion for music education through his work as Board Chair of the Inez S. Bull Foundation, which graciously sponsored our performance.

“I have always been passionate about music, as both a musician and an advocate. As a friend to the late Dr. Bull, my involvement with the Inez S. Bull Foundation provides me with the opportunity to support performing arts throughout central Pennsylvania and beyond.” – Zachary Hoffman

As this performance served as my Carnegie Hall debut, it will undoubtedly go down as one of the most memorable evenings of my life. However, what really made the evening magical had less to do with the propitiousness of the venue and more to do with my fellow artists. Having the chance to perform with Irena and witness her teacher-student relationships with Zach and Benjamin come full circle was an experience truly humbling, heartwarming and undeniably hygge.

Jeffrey Goes to See Tales of Hopper in NYC

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 12 March 2020. To see the article in full, click here.

Elly Toyoda, Lisa Moore and Ashley Bathgate, photographed by Charles Roussel

American realist painter Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) was a master of capturing the distinct mood of ordinary nights in New York City – perhaps more so than any other known artist. It was on such an ordinary, misty New York Tuesday night that I made my way to the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen to see Tales of Hopper, a new theatre-dance work inspired by Hopper’s paintings, presented by Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance.

I’ve been a fan of Edward Hopper for most of my life, even visiting his childhood home-turned-museum just up the Hudson River in Nyack, New York on several occasions. Since moving to New York City 10 years ago, I cannot count the number of times I’ve turned a Greenwich Village corner, noticed the perfection of the pink and orange light bathing a red brick townhouse or the forest green casing of a mid-century diner, and felt as if I’ve just walked into one of his paintings. Hopper’s work oozes the very life of New York City, and so brilliantly captures the moods of its inhabitants in a subtle gesture or glance.

For this reason, I was quite eager to see how Cherylyn Lavagnino had breathed new life into his work through the movement of her dancers.

As the lights went down and the audience fell silent, Lavagnino herself took the stage to thunderous applause. She explained that this work pushed her dancers into the realm of acting more than ever, as she cast them as figures plucked from eight of Hopper’s paintings. The transparent set pieces would reference Hopper’s environments in each of the vignettes, with Martin Bresnick’s original composition for piano, cello, and violin supporting the dancers in bringing the characters’ emotional undercurrents to the surface.

We began with a short Prologue; during which the entire company gave glimpses of the eight vignettes we would be seeing that evening. The first was inspired by Morning Sun from 1952, depicting a young woman perched on her bed, bathed in sunlight, gazing wistfully out her apartment window. Dancer Sharon Milanese began the sequence in the exact same pose, lit perfectly by lighting designer Frank DenDanto III. Her slow, waking movements were perfectly aligned with the Bresnick’s sunny yet melancholy composition, capturing that feeling of not wanting to get out of bed and face the day. The mood changed suddenly, though, with the dancer moving at a much more fitful way, seemingly fighting with herself as to whether she face the inevitable, perhaps undesirable, challenges of the day before her or not. This was the first example of Lavagnino’s drawing on the subtext of the paintings and weaving her own vision of the inner life of their subjects.

We then moved through some of Hopper’s other well-known works, including People in the Sun (1960), featuring cat-like sunbathers constantly moving their chairs to better catch the light, the hints of an illicit workplace affair in Office at Night (1940), and the playful interpretation of Gas (1940), in which dancer Justin Faircloth portrayed a bored petrol station worker waiting to wash his patron’s cars and pump their petrol.

The real tour-de-force performance came during NY Movie (1939), during which dancer Kristen Foote played a lonely usherette in a 1930s movie house who slips into fantasy as she watches the film, standing at the back of the cinema. Bresnick’s lush, cinematic score — played brilliantly by pianist Lisa Moore, violinist Elly Toyoda, and cellist Ashley Bathgate — swept over the audience as we watched the usherette begin to dance with her imaginary leading man who eventually emerged from the shadows, as danced by Malcom Miles Young. The two engage in a beautifully choreographed sequence before he slips back into the shadows on the other side of the transparent screen, and then into her imagination.

The final three vignettes, inspired by Hopper’s Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958), Nighthawks (1942), and Automat (1927) — three of his most famous works — were linked together as a sort of trilogy. In the Cafeteria sequence, we see the classic story of boy (Justin Faircloth) meets girl (Claire Westby), as the girl coquettishly drops a glove to be retrieved by the boy. In Nighthawks, we are introduced to whom we would interpret as the boy’s existing girlfriend (Corinne Hart) in the iconic setting of Hopper’s all-night diner. The three dancers performed an expertly choreographed love triangle sequence, resulting in the girl we met in the cafeteria being left alone. In Automat, we see her reflecting quietly on all that has transpired over a cup of coffee, before the music swells and all the dancers return to the stage for a final tableau.

After a brief interval, the company came back onstage to perform two of their repertory works. The first was an excerpt from Triptych (2012), featuring the entire company drawing upon themes of the religious ecstasy of the Baroque period, set to Francois Couperin’s transcendent Troisième leçon de  Ténèbres à deux voix, followed by Veiled (2016), a work for the women members of the company which explores the enactment of physical and internal grace in the face of oppression, set to a solo violin score by Bresnick. Both pieces were expertly danced, and provided a fascinating look into the breadth of Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance’s repertoire, but felt a bit disjointed coming right after Tales of Hopper; very different in mood and style.

It takes a lot of courage to present something new inspired by work as iconic as that of Edward Hopper. Lavagnino, Bresnick, and the wonderful dancers and musicians not only did that successfully, but in a way that will add a deeper level of awareness the next time I gaze upon a Hopper painting.

When the Music Industry Doesn’t Understand Your Voice

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 6 March 2020. To see the article in full, click here.

Jeffrey Palmer at Carnegie Hall, photographed by Geraldine Petrovic

I’ve always known that I could sing. Ever since I began spinning around the living room singing along to Handel’s Messiah at the age of three or four, people seemed to take note.

Like many young boys, my voice was rather high, soaring to heights well beyond the soprano high C. However, I found what made me slightly different from other children was my capacity to match pitch, memorise more complex melodies, and achieve a strength and clarity within the sound I produced – all of which laid the foundations for the career path I would one day pursue.

Shortly after I began formally studying voice around the age of nine, my teacher brought me in to sing the Pie Jesu as part of a performance of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem mass. Any nerves I felt leading up to the performance melted away as soon as the first few notes escaped my lips. I was home, and the reaction of all those listening made it even more apparent to me that this is what I was meant to be doing.

A few short years later, however, another theme emerged to combat the praise for the height and “sweet” timbre of my voice to which I had become accustomed: I was suddenly being questioned as to why I chose to “sing like a girl”, not only by my peers at school, but by adults.

I was completely caught off guard. Not only had my voice not gone through any sort of a change yet, but in no way did I feel that what I was doing had anything to do with alignment with a specific gender. I simply felt I was using whatever gift I had been given, in the purest and most authentic way.

In my early teens, the confusion and occasional bullying that my voice elicited from some, including individuals I loved and respected, caused me a great deal of inner turmoil. Why was doing something that felt so natural causing others to spout off such vitriol? Why were some deeming it better for me to sing in a way that was uncomfortable, and at times even painful, in order to better blend in with the boys?

I’m incredibly grateful that, for whatever reason, I never wavered in my inner belief that I was doing the right thing, but that certainly didn’t make handling the criticism easy. I started to wait, with a strange mix of apprehension and longing, for the day my voice would change. I would certainly mourn the loss of my soprano, but at least I would no longer stand out so much as something “unnatural”.

Little did I know, my voice had other plans.

Unlike most adolescent boys, my voice never broke. During my teen years, my voice gradually deepened and took on a richer tone, but no morning ever dawned when I woke up to find my voice had dropped by two octaves. At 18, that soprano high C was still there.

During this period, I studied with some truly fantastic teachers who encouraged me to take advantage of the fact that the transition into my adult voice was so seamless, and to continue to use my upper register. And thus, a countertenor was born.

The confusion my voice had caused certainly didn’t evaporate as I got older, but the vast majority of audiences I sang for continued to resonate with what I was doing. This was in part, I’m quite sure, due to my assuredness in that what I was doing was right.

I’ve found that people, no matter their background or experience, tend to respond to truth, whether they fully understand what they’re witnessing or not.

By the time I moved from Virginia to England in 2006 to study music at university, I had fully embraced the countertenor identity. The wonderful music faculty at Bath Spa University allowed me to sing with the sopranos in the choir, at my request, and did all they could to help me more deeply explore the countertenor repertoire, which I found exhilarating.

However, that exhilaration soon began to diminish as I discovered that what was deemed “appropriate” for countertenors to sing was rather limited in scope.

I have been fortunate in more recent years to collaborate with composers writing exciting new works for countertenor, as well as curate my own series of recitals around the world full of music I simply love to sing. In addition to the masterfully crafted works by Handel, Purcell, and Britten in the countertenor canon, I have peppered my repertoire with everything from romantic pieces for mezzo-soprano, to Irish folk music, to songs by Björk.

I know where my voice shines, and it is far more important for me to sing pieces that allow it to do so than to worry about fitting into any sort of box.

While being a countertenor does perhaps allow one to stand out a bit more than other singers, one is easily attacked from both sides, as it were. On the one hand, the classical purists may scoff at a countertenor who sings anything outside of the traditional repertoire, while the outside world questions why a man would choose to sing in such a “feminised, unnatural” way.

I’ve been asked if I’d been castrated, if I take hormonal supplements, and have had endured countless assumptions made about my sexuality and lifestyle simply because of how I sing.

Yet, the simple fact that, after hearing me sing, so many individuals who were self-proclaimed “countertenor un-enthusiasts” have had their opinion on the matter turned upside down completely outweighs any negativity I’ve encountered. From the mountains of Tennessee, to the streets of Ukraine, to Carnegie Hall, the overall reaction to what I am doing remains largely the same. When I sing and truly believe in what I am singing, it resonates with people.

Music, and particularly the human voice, has a way of transcending culture, time, national boundary, and political ideology. The music one chooses to sing, whatever it may be, should be used as a vehicle for one’s voice to touch human hearts in the most authentic way possible. That is the point of art.

So, the next time you hear someone singing in a way not exactly expected, don’t be too hasty to dismiss it. If you really listen with an open mind and open heart, after a moment or two, you’ll know if what you are hearing is the truth.

And if it is, let it be.

Jeffrey Sees The Merz Trio (With Wine)

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 3 October 2019. To see the article in full, click here.

The Merz Trio, photographed by Melanie Griesemer

On a deliciously warm, early Autumn evening in New York, I had the pleasure of making my way downtown to the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture for an evening with the Merz Trio. After disembarking the 6 train and walking down tree-lined Bleecker Street, I met my friend Karen at the door and headed inside to the main stage – the Loreto Theatre.

Upon entering the theatre, we were given programs and instructed by the staff to take our seats…onstage.

Throwing off the formality of having the audience in its proper place, with the musicians holding court from above, I was delighted to find that we, the audience, would be seated round the musicians in a salon-like setting, together bathed in the warmth of the stage lights.

I was also delighted to find out that the evening’s performance would have a wine tasting woven throughout, to add to the intimate, friendly atmosphere.

The Merz Trio, formed in 2017, is made up of pianist Lee Dionne, violinist Brigid Coleridge and cellist Julia Yang. Currently the Graduate Trio in Residence at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts, the group took its name from the early 20th-Century Merz style of German visual artist Kurt Schwitters. In a style often referred to as “psychological collage”, Schwitters created his Merz pictures in an attempt to make a coherent aesthetic sense of the world around him, often using fragments of found objects. In a similar vein, the Merz Trio focuses on projects that promote connection between music, texts, and other art forms (in this case, wine) to create a uniquely beautiful experience for their audiences.

After a brief introduction from Sheen Center managing director Andrew Levine, staff came onto the stage with our first tasting, an Anna de Codorniu Cava Brut Rosé from Penedes, Spain. The three members of the Merz Trio quickly followed. As we sipped our sparkling rosé, we were treated to the Allegro moderato and Allegretto from Joseph Haydn’s Piano Trio No. 44 in E Major. The first Haydn selection particularly is all celebration, bubbling fountains and floral scents, perfectly matching the light exuberance of the wine. The musicians themselves immediately impressed me with their level of connectivity – breathing, moving, and playing as one. In between the two movements, violinist Brigid Coleridge, a Melbourne native, and almost Victorian vision in coral, treated us to the first of several short literary pieces dotted throughout the program – this one about the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, whose words complemented beautifully the tone of the Haydn and the taste of the wine.

From this bright, sparkling beginning, we moved on to darker themes with an oaky Zolo Malbec and the Traumgekrönt from the Sieben Frühe Lieder by Alban Berg, followed by the Modéré from Maurice Ravel’s Trio in A Minor for piano, violin and cello. Expertly paired and immediately changing the mood, the trio continued to impress us with its virtuosity and sensitivity in choosing repertoire. We were next given a Zolo Sauvignon Blanc from Argentina to match Ravel’s Pantoum: Assez vif, also from the Trio in A Minor. A refreshing palate-cleanser for both tongue and ear.

Ravel’s Trio in A Minor continued to reign as we moved into the following section of the program, featuring the Passacaille: Très large and Final – Animé. Pianist Lee Dionne shared some thoughts on Ravel’s sensitive approach to incorporating “orientalism” into his music, and how the melodies we were about to hear would be complemented by the evening’s next wine offering, an unusual and exotic-tasting Bodegas Vegamar Crianza. Perhaps my favourite part of the concert, all three members of the trio effortlessly surrendered themselves to the beauty of the music – delicately and harmoniously in the first movement, building to a frenzied passion in the second. Despite the slight intoxication I was beginning to feel at this point, due to the generous pour of the rich, dark wine that I had received, my appreciation for the impressive musical skill before me was as sharp and present as ever.

For our sweet send-off, we were given our final tasting, a Zolo Signature White with a slight frizzante, and treated to Franz Schubert’s Notturno. Having sung quite a bit of Schubert myself in Austria this past summer, the sweetness of the wine and the gorgeous passages emanating from piano, violin, and cello transported me right back to that magnificent country. And if that wasn’t enough, we were all invited to a post-concert reception in the Sheen Center’s lovely Gallery, with food prepared by Sous-chef Alberto of the restaurant Halifax in Hoboken, New Jersey. I shall certainly be crossing the Hudson to pay that restaurant a visit soon, as I shall also be attentively following the career of the incredibly gifted, innovative, and charming Merz Trio. Truly, these are artists in the deepest sense of the word.

Making Music in the Ridiculously Beautiful Austrian Alps

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 1 8 September 2019. To see the article in full, click here.

Jeffrey Palmer at Großglockner, photographed by Sergei Kvitko

On a bright August morning, I awoke in my hotel room to the distant, pulsing sound of rushing water. I threw back the curtains and looked out the window to behold the village of Bad Gastein and the glory of the Austrian Alps beyond. I had arrived by train from Bavaria late the night before, shrouded in darkness, navigating my luggage down the steep streets from the station to the hotel. While I was somewhat conscious of the ever-present sound of the iconic waterfall, which cuts straight through the middle of town, I was rather oblivious to the natural beauty of my surroundings. In the clear light of morning, that had certainly changed.

I was fortunate enough to be asked by concert pianist and festival director Dr Irena Portenko to participate in the 2019 Music in the Alps Festival – a gathering of professional musicians and students from across Europe and North America, who come together in the idyllic Austrian spa town of Bad Gastein to learn, perform, and participate in collaborative music-making. I had met Irena earlier in the year in New York, where both of us spend the majority of our time. To say there was an immediate connection is a bit of an understatement, and before I knew it, I was making plans to join her and her merry troupe of musicians in the Austrian Alps.

Founded in 2013, Music in the Alps has grown from a small meeting of classical musicians in Bad Gastein into a robust program of lectures, lessons, masterclasses, and concerts – including a jazz component – that extend out to Innsbruck, Salzburg, and the neighboring villages. I arrived about halfway through the festival for the Bad Gastein portion and set up camp there for a week. Most activity was centered around the stately Grand Hotel de l’Europe in the heart of Bad Gastein, where we would gather for lessons and to hear student and faculty concerts each afternoon and evening respectively in the hotel’s elegant Wienersaal.

I was thrilled to put together my own recital in the Wienersaal, accompanied by Irena Portenko on the Imperial Bösendorfer. As a countertenor, I decided to sing a diverse selection of music I love, ranging from Handel arias, to Debussy and Schumann songs, to Irish folk music, to pieces by Björk and Stephen Sondheim. I also included a selection of songs by Franz Schubert, as he is known as to have spent a good amount of time himself in Bad Gastein. Having the freedom to put together such an eclectic program, and meeting and inviting oboist Amari Barash and cellist Nargiza Yusupova to play on several pieces with me, was a sheer joy and a testament to the bond of music-making across language and cultures.

Something that makes this festival so special is the diversity in its participants and the freedom and encouragement to collaborate and explore. While everyone’s technique and level of musicianship were extremely high, our differences in style and background made for a rich blend of programming. Having the opportunity to work with the talented students – including the chance to perform with a fantastic young countertenor, and my fellow esteemed faculty – was incredibly inspiring and enriching.

Bad Gastein itself, nestled in the back of an Alpine valley, served as a womb of creativity, protecting us from the cares of the outside world and allowing us to fully focus on our musical explorations. It was easy to lose track of what time or even day it was, as we all surrendered to the deliciousness of uninterrupted music-making and the inspiration of the surrounding natural beauty. However, having the chance to leave our haven of creativity and venture into Salzburg to perform a group concert in the famed Mirabell Palace’s Marmorsaal, where Mozart himself played for the imperial family, was also welcome. Hikes were part of our routine as well, including one up Austria’s highest peak, the stunning Großglockner, as were evenings spent at the local Betty’s Bar (run by a New Zealander!) for wine and flatbread after the concerts.

Having a host of talented, innovative, open-minded individuals thrust together in a place that might be as close to heaven on earth as one can get, unsurprisingly, yields some wonderful results. Dr Portenko has created a supportive atmosphere in which teachers and students share the same goal of creating something extraordinarily beautiful in an extraordinarily beautiful space. The residents of Bad Gastein are also extremely engaged, with many of them regularly coming to each performance. This festival really does feel like a community, thanks to the wonderful people that make it possible, and, I suspect, the loving embrace of the Austrian Alps.

International Concert Singer from Brooklyn in Lohr

During his stay in Germany after participating in the Music in the Alps Festival in Austria, Henrietta Hartl of the Main-Echo interviewed Jeffrey Charles Palmer and Nina Pearson about their performance in St Michael’s Church and their artistic backgrounds. To read the interview in the original German, click here.

Nina Pearson and Jeffrey Charles Palmer in St Michael’s Church, Lohr am Main, photographed by Henrietta Hartl

The international concert singer Jeffrey Palmer is in Europe to sing at a classical music festival in Bad Gastein and Salzburg, Austria. But in Brooklyn, he has a friend whom he met singing in the same choir: Nina Pearson. She comes from Lohr, and moved to New York with her American husband ten years ago, visiting her parents in Wombach every summer.

And because for an American Wombach is practically around the corner from Salzburg, Palmer came after his performances in Austria to visit Lohr. Pearson has been an avid singer since the days when she sang in the choir at the Lohrer Gymnasium. She is also a dedicated Christian and suggested to priest Sven Johannsen that Palmer and she could sing the Ave Maria at the High Mass of the Assumption. Johannsen gratefully accepted this and added a few more pieces to the vocal program.

The performance was very well received, and Mrs Pearson and Mr Palmer came again the next day to St Michael's Church for a conversation. The interview was in English, as Palmer does not speak German, and the countertenor spoke in detail about his somewhat unusual career.

The now 31-year-old started singing in choirs at his home in Virginia in the southeastern United States at the age of seven. At the age of nine, he performed as a soloist for the first time, and singing became his vocation. His parents were not musicians themselves, he says, but they love music and theatre and have always supported him in his artistic ambitions. Palmer took singing, dancing and acting lessons and later studied music at Bath Spa University in England.

"Like many boy sopranos, I was so scared of my voice changing and that I might not be able to sing after," he recalls. But a dramatic voice change never came, as his voice just slowly deepened. From his teachers, he learned the special techniques that a countertenor needs to remain singing high. Meanwhile, Palmer has had many appearances in America, Asia and Europe.

In contrast to other classical vocal registers, the repertoire of original compositions for countertenors is somewhat limited, says Palmer. He sees advantages in that, because one is so much freer to do things for oneself. He sings some of the music written for other voice types as they are, and for others he also gets special arrangements.

He has contacts with contemporary composers who have written for him. He has also worked together with the composer Huang Ruo from Beijing, whom he met at an event in New York. With pianist Riko Higuma, Palmer recently released an album, Beauty, with pieces from several time periods and continents.

In addition to music, Palmer also works as a public relations manager for a New York health network. He often participates in their fundraising benefits, and his company is supportive of his musical career, including his recent concerts in Europe.

As for musical styles outside of classical music, Palmer is open. He also likes to sing folk and jazz and says with a smile, "If a famous rock band wants me, I will not say no." As a devout Christian, church music always matters - whether in the church choir in his community in Brooklyn or as a soloist in the fair city of Lohr parish church.

Jeffrey Sees Yann Tiersen

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 31 May 2019. To see the article in full, click here.

Yann Tiersen at the Beacon Theatre, New York City

Known largely for his compositions for cinema, namely the whimsical film Amélie, Yann Tiersen is a composer whose music conjures dramatic visual imagery paired with a sensitive introspection. It gives the listener an ephemeral glimpse into the mind and heart of its creator.

Having felt this way about Yann’s music since the ‘90s, I jumped on the opportunity to see the composer in the flesh and in concert at New York City’s Beacon Theatre on a perfect, late-spring evening. What would this prolific, enigmatic composer be like in person, and playing his own music? Well, the experience exceeded my expectations.

Upon entering the gorgeous, neo-Grecian-style Beacon Theatre, dating from 1926, I wasn’t surprised to stumble upon a chic, predominantly European crowd whose mix of languages in quiet conversation paired nicely with the pre-concert playlist, featuring the Cocteau Twins (whose silver-throated lead singer Elizabeth Fraser collaborated with Yann on his 2005 album Les Retrouvailles), and other similarly dreamy music.

Just a little after 8pm, the theatre was plunged into darkness as a melodic, Northern English-accented voice soliloquised from the speakers about the dance between the hunter and the hunted, namely the wolf and the deer, that exists in nature. Man’s thought is to kill off the predator, tame nature, and afterwards exist in peace and comfort. Yet, that very action leads to an imbalance in the natural order, thus creating long-lasting chaos. The only real peace, beauty, and balance lies in the wild. This would be a theme harkened back to again and again in the concert.

Yann emerged alone from the wings, clad in casual black, waved at the audience, and seated himself behind the grand piano on stage. Lit by a single spotlight, the music began to pour from his fingers, entrancing the audience and suggesting images of sunny Paris streets. After two short songs, he pointed to a tape recorder in the centre of the stage, and told a charming story about meeting said tape recorder drunk in a pub in England. The tape recorder had been depressed after being forced to play the most horrid of pop music all its life, so Yann took pity on him, brought him on tour, and allowed him to play only nature sounds. The tape recorder soon lit up and begin to whir as the sounds of birds, laughter, and wind were issued from it, and Yann launched into Tempelhof, the first track off his most recent album All. And yes, this song was inspired by the Berlin airport of its namesake.

Before we knew it, Yann was joined on stage by three other musicians who quickly took their positions at soundboard, keyboard, and drums to finish the song. The audience was then thrown into a bath of white light and shimmering imagery of the sea, which was projected onto the screen behind the musicians as Yann took us through several songs from his new album. Now would be a good time to point out that All is very much inspired by Yann’s native Brittany, a region in the northwest of France with strong Celtic roots and its own native language, Breton. Most of the vocals in the concert were sung in Breton, and were rendered beautifully by the female and two male musicians onstage, with Yann himself joining in from time to time. To say the set was ethereal would be an understatement. The wash of sound produced by Yann and his clan – paired with the expert lighting design and projected images of sea, rock, and forest – truly made one feel as if one had gone back in time and discovered Celtic Brittany in its pure, original state. To hear words sung in an ancient language, only presently spoken by around 200,000 people, set to music so expertly crafted by one of the region’s native sons is an experience divine and powerful.

As the concert continued, Yann showed off his musical prowess by performing on piano, toy piano, harpsichord, glockenspiel, and violin. I had no idea he played the violin so magnificently! The concert was also dotted with short anecdotes, including one story about the song Usal Road, inspired by the time Yann was chased by a mountain lion during a bike ride in California.

After nearly two hours, it was all over too soon. But the crowd rose to its feet, clamouring and whistling for more. After what felt like an eternity in the dark, the crowd erupted in even greater joy as Yann and his three companions took the stage once more for the encores. The final three pieces were indeed special, with the first being inspired by Brooklyn (just over the East River from the theatre), the second being a new piece not featured on the album and sung beautifully in Breton, and the third bringing the concert full circle to the opening monologue.

Throughout the concert, we experienced Yann’s mastery, an accomplished classical musician who uses inspiration from the natural world to create a refined, graceful musical offering. But in the final song, featuring Yann on screaming violin, we were thrown into a frenzy of clashing sounds, strobe lights, and deep vibrations. It felt as though we were touching on the very primal heart of Nature herself. It was a beautiful reminder that all civilization, all culture, all art is dependent on and a reflection of the untamable power of the universe.

Needless to say, Yann reflects it very, very well.

This New EP Aims To Stimulate Your Pineal Gland

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 28 May 2019. To see the article in full, click here.

Arwork for Akasha by Amit Slathia

Neal Anand is one of those artists you simply don’t come across every day.

Originally hailing from Northern California, Neal is now making waves in the New York City music scene with the release of his debut EP Akasha.

And, when I say he is making waves, I am referring specifically to those that fall into the brain category.

Neal’s first solo music offering was composed to stimulate the listener’s pineal gland – the part of the brain that produces melatonin to regulate circadian rhythm. Essentially, his music was engineered to heal and relax the mind of the listener.

I first listened to Akasha’s shimmery lead single She on a southward train journey through New York’s Hudson Valley. I almost felt as if I was transported into another dimension as the soothing, pulsating sounds of piano and synth washed over me whilst I watched the sunlight play on the waves of the Hudson River.

His engineering seemed to work!

This serene, unique experience brought several questions to mind, which I felt quite grateful I had the opportunity to ask the composer himself.

Akasha is released on the composer’s own record label Pineal Labs, which is “dedicated to enhancing pineal gland activity through music”.

Neal Anand talks about his (brain) stimulating new release.

Neal, congratulations on the release of your EP! How did this fascinating project first come about?

Thank you very much. I was inspired by my meditation practice. I saw that mindfulness was becoming more important to balance our fast-paced lifestyles, yet many people find it difficult to get into meditation. So, I thought, what if I composed music that would help people relax in a similar way? That was a couple years ago, and I’ve been exploring the concept ever since.

The fact that you composed these songs with the specific purpose to calm the listener through the stimulation of the pineal gland is not only fascinating, but quite a feat. What scientific research did you conduct to learn how to do this?

Science has proven that the pineal gland detects light and produces melatonin, which governs our circadian rhythms. But some recent studies have suggested that it’s capable of much more. Eastern spiritualism and Western philosophy believe it to be the “third eye” [of spiritual perception].

We’re just starting to monitor listeners’ brainwaves through a portable EEG to see if our music emits alpha waves, or a relaxed state of mind.

I’m not claiming that anything we are doing is backed by science, but I’m definitely curious, and I’d like to learn more.

Even though there is this scientific undercurrent to your music, it is still quite accessible and likely to appeal to listeners who might have no idea you are literally getting into their heads! How did you balance this purpose with the aesthetic beauty of the music?

I didn’t think about isochronic tones or solfeggio frequencies. I just made music that was personal to me, that helped bring me to a state of calm, and I hope that listeners feel the same.

You worked with some rather impressive people on this project, including Grammy-winning engineer Warren Riker and Grammy-nominated engineer Justin Shturtz. How was it working with such world-class professionals?

I’ve been working with Warren and Justin for a while, and they’re part of the team. They’re immensely talented and experienced, and it’s always fun bringing projects to life together.

The beautiful artwork for the EP is by Amit Slathia, who hails from Jammu, India. Did your own Indian heritage influence how you approached this project in any way?

It did not, but I discovered Amit’s work at a gallery in New Delhi a few years ago and was totally taken aback. I’d never seen art like his come out of India. I reached out to see if he’d be interested in designing the artwork, and he agreed. After listening to the EP a few times, he created it, and I could not be happier with the result.

There is a large interest in the relationship between music and the mind at the moment, from music therapy and childhood education, to studying how music can even alter the brain. Is this a subject that you would like to further explore?

Absolutely. I’ve always believed music is healing, and I would love to learn more about how it can help people and society. I find it so interesting how we’ve been conditioned to primarily see music as a means of entertainment, when really, it is so much more than that.

What is your vision and hope for how people around the world will listen to and engage with Akasha?

I hope that it makes people relax!

Jeffrey Palmer and Riko Higuma Release an Album Dedicated to Beauty

Editor Stephanie Eslake interviewed Jeffrey and Riko about their new album for Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon. To read the interview in full, click here.

Jeffrey Palmer and Riko Higuma, photographed by Geraldine Petrovic

It mightn’t come as a surprise to you that many of the familiar faces on the CutCommon team are also forging their own careers in the music industry. I had the pleasure of being introduced to United States music critic Jeffrey Palmer not so long ago and, since he’s started writing stories for you to enjoy. I’ve also been made aware of the truly beautiful path he’s following in music as a countertenor. And I wanted to learn more about it.

When I say ‘beautiful’, I do mean it quite specifically, too: Jeffrey has partnered with pianist Riko Higuma for an album titled, and encompassing, Beauty 美.

Though we each possess our own understandings of the concept of beauty, I nevertheless found myself startled by its quality in this release. It’s an enigmatic and complex form of beauty, emanating from works spanning Handel to Purcell, Huang Ruo to Andrew List.

Brooklyn-based Jeffrey has practised his art since his performance debut as a 9-year-old, and has since travelled the US, Europe, and Asia with his remarkable voice; also forming collaborations with visual artists and fashion designers along the way.

His duo partner in Beauty 美 is Riko, who is a staff pianist and coach at the Manhattan School of Music, and has toured festivals the world over (including a South American recital tour with Ray Chen, among other collaborations with artists such as Dmitry Sitkovetsky and Alan Gilbert).

So when it comes down to it, how do you collaborate with a musician to make an album beautiful? And what does beauty even mean on an aesthetic and musical level?

We ask these two musicians in light of the first album they’ve released together. (And you might just win a copy for yourself, too. Read on.)

Jeffrey and Riko, it’s lovely to learn about your first album. Congratulations! Why did you want to release a CD together? 

RIKO: Jeffrey and I had the opportunity to perform in Hefei, China together back in 2013 with a mutual friend of ours, violinist Yijia Zhang. Since then, we’ve had several occasions to work together, and also have become really good friends! 

Last year, we both agreed that it really felt like the right time for the two of us to do our very own project together. I had previously worked with producer Sergei Kvitko, who founded Blue Griffin Records, on two album projects with my trio (Zodiac Trio), and I had a feeling that the combination of the three of us working on an album together would be the perfect fit.

A first album is quite a big deal, and for yours you’ve chosen the theme of beauty. Why is this a theme you were so interested in exploring together through music?

JEFFREY: After we decided to record an album together and started thinking about repertoire, the idea of simply performing music that we found very beautiful really excited and resonated with the both of us.

Essentially, this album is a collection of incredibly diverse works, both old and new, that show different facets of the concept of beauty, and that have touched us both personally at different points in life.

The very idea of beauty today is so fluid. What does beauty mean on an aesthetic level? 

R: Jeffrey and I have been inspired by many different concerts and other arts events that we’ve attended together over the past few years in New York, where we both live. I think we both agree that beauty is something that transcends culture, language, and artistic expression.

We agreed on the repertoire for the album very easily, which was just one of the many reasons why I had no hesitation in making this album and calling it Beauty.

J: Yes, fortunately we find a similar thing beautiful! I do think that, when it comes down to it, something that is beautiful — music or otherwise — is both true to itself and inherently good. And we think the pieces on this album really fit that description.

Riko and Jeffrey, you each have such impressive backgrounds, having collaborated with many of the world’s great artists in your music careers. In such a competitive industry, what do you think is the relationship between a musician and a desire to generate ‘beauty’ in their own sound? 

R: Having grown up in Japan training to be a pianist, acquiring technical perfection was one of the most important aspects of the process.  But now, after years of performing professionally, even though it is necessary to have as much perfect technique as possible, it is crucial to understand that at the end of the day, instrumental or vocal technique is only one of the tools necessary to communicate and produce beauty when the music calls for it. It’s not the endgame in and of itself. At the end of the day, art is expression, and technical perfection is only one part of it.  

J: Music is all about connecting with an audience. That should always be the main focus. And when done in a clear, effective, sensitive way, that is truly beautiful.

Moving to the practical side of your album, what did you each expect (or demand!) of each other as professional artists through this recording process?

R: I expected perfection from Jeffrey, as I always do from him!

J: And I succeeded, right?

R: In all honesty, I’ve worked with many vocal students who sometimes don’t put enough thought into meaning behind the words they’re singing. It’s not just a sound job, it’s a communications job. But with Jeffrey, I had no worries in that department!

J: One of the many reasons why I absolutely love working with Riko is that she consistently plays to perfection and is an extremely sensitive pianist. As a singer, working with a pianist like that is such a joy. So, I don’t know if we had any grand expectations of each other for this album project specifically, other than just enjoying the process of making music together as much as we always do.

What sort of feedback did you give and receive through the collaboration, which you weren’t expecting?

R: I don’t think there was anything unexpected between the two of us, but Sergei Kvitko, the producer, who is a brilliant pianist himself, really helped guide us and lent a fresh perspective.

J: It was wonderful having someone so accomplished there to shepherd us through the recording process and offer ideas along the way. He definitely pushed us a few times to try things in different ways, which resulted in some takes that were much better and quite different than what we had originally planned.

How would you encourage people to listen to your album, uniting the theme with what you’ve created musically?

J: This album really deserves to be listened to from start to finish in its entirety. Not just because of my voice or Riko’s playing, but because the beauty and depth of feeling in the music that we selected really warrant it. It’s not exactly background music!

R: I think our album is a great escape from the noise of everyday life. It would make me very happy to know that we could transport you somewhere else just by listening to our album. And I think we do a pretty good job in making that possible!

Jeffrey Listens to Gernot Wolfgang's New Release

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 3 April 2019. To see the article in full, click here.

Vienna and the West by Gernot Wolfgang

Gernot Wolfgang is one of those contemporary chamber music composers that pushes musical boundaries while simultaneously keeping his audience incredibly engaged and entertained. Gernot is originally from Bad Gastein, Austria, but has been based in Los Angeles for the past 23 years. His latest album for Albany Records Vienna and the West is a collection of works that touch on the composer’s connection to both the high-brow musical ingenuity of early 20th-Century Vienna and the free expansiveness of the American West. Gernot assembled some of LA’s top classical musicians to bring these pieces to life – some of which are Grammy nominees and winners; others who perform with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and more. Together, they pay masterful tribute to both Gernot’s native land and current home.

From the first bars of the album’s opening track Road Signs, I was immediately struck by the effortless grace with which the composer wove the soaring bassoon line through the rhythmic jazz chords of the piano. It felt like a dance, sailing along, pausing, and then picking up again to take me around another musical bend.

I later came to find out this piece was about navigating LA traffic. Perfection.

The album continues to impress with pieces that very clearly demonstrate Californian and Viennese influences in ways that surprisingly complement each other. Standouts include Passage to Vienna for piano trio, in which the composer takes us from contemporary America back to early 1900s Vienna (think Schoenberg and Webern) and back again; and the epic Impressions for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Upon first hearing the three movements of the latter piece called Carnival in Venice, Dream and Country Road, the composer somehow managed to take me from a heady night at a carnival (it could have been in either Italy or Venice Beach, LA), to a smoky Viennese salon, to racing down the Ventura Freeway with the wind blowing through my hair.

Don’t believe me? Have a listen.

The album ends with the beautiful, Mahler-inspired From Vienna with Love. Touching on the brilliance of early 20th-century Austrian composition, the exciting influences of Eastern European music on Vienna, and the American jazz that has so influenced the composer, this piece serves as the perfect conclusion to a musical testament to the greatness that is Gernot Wolfgang.

In short, Gernot is proud of both his Austrian and American ties, and both nations should be equally proud of him.

Jeffrey Goes To The Living Dying Opera

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 6 March 2019. To see the article in full, click here.

Juecheng Chen, photographed by Peichao Lin

Upon entering the dimly lit Underground Theatre of the Abrons Arts Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the audience members who had drifted in to see The Living Dying Opera were greeted with the booming question, “What is opera?”. American electronic composer and performer Hwarg (Howie Kenty), donning a tuxedo, was already at his station onstage behind laptop and mixing board causing this inquisitive cacophony of questioning voices to waft from the large speakers. While at first making everyone laugh nervously, giggles soon shifted to audience members posing this same question to each other.

As the room was plunged into complete darkness, voices gave way to a synthesized organ playing the opening strains of the famous aria Ombra Mai Fu from Handel’s 1738 opera Serse. There was Chinese countertenor Ju-eh (Juecheng Chen), dressed in a white Western shirt and traditional black Hanfu skirt, basking in the spotlight and descending the concrete staircase for what he would later in the event describe as “The Descent of the Goddess”. Upon finishing the aria, Ju-eh immediately entered into a monologue, first praising his own success as a singer, then questioning it. This led to a series of vignettes, beautifully enhanced by the masterful work of French lighting designer François-Thibaut Pencenat, that gave a very intimate look into the mind of a young man trying to make it as an opera star today. From dragging audience members onstage and directing them to behave in certain ways, to soliloquising about singing naked in the bathroom as a teenager, to leading everyone in a guided meditation, the audience was shown different sides of the singer’s complex, fierce, and sometimes fragile persona. By far, one of the most moving scenes in the piece was when, standing back-to-back with Ju-eh, Hwarg read aloud several rejection letters from various music conservatories and programs that Ju-eh had received while Ju-eh himself sang the devastating In Darkness Let Me Dwell by English Renaissance composer John Dowland.

The Living Dying Opera artfully sums up the great paradox that many classical singers face today: they have dedicated their entire lives to mastering an art form that the world largely considers to be dying, while routinely submitting themselves to rejections from those mighty few tasked with preserving that same art form. Yet, through it all, they retain a sense of determination, and often spiritual vocation, knowing that to be a singer is why they were born.

Questions of identity around being Chinese while studying in the West, and not being accepted by schoolmates or others in the classical world, were expertly woven into the piece. Focus was also given to the mysterious role that countertenors play in classical music today.

Ju-eh and Hwarg have created a uniquely 21st Century operatic experience that pushes boundaries while getting to the core of what opera is all about. The flexibility and crystalline qualities of Ju-eh’s voice, Hwarg’s stark and sometimes jarring electronic accompaniment, and the vast amounts of room for improvisation make this opera quite accessible to a contemporary audience, just as 17th and 18th Century operas strived to be in their own days. Thanks to these two young artists and others like them, perhaps our world will be reminded that opera is nothing more than an honest expression of the joy and suffering of the human condition in the highest artistic form of its age. Therefore, opera never really dies, but rather lives on in new incarnations.

Discovering an Australian Composer in New York

This article by Jeffrey Charles Palmer was published by Australian classical and new music magazine CutCommon on 8 February 2019. To see the article in full, click here.

Michael Grebla, self-portrait

On a chilly Saturday night in January, an eclectic mix of Australians, new music lovers, and curious neighbourhood locals gathered in a church in Manhattan’s West Village for an Australia Day Concert. It was host to an array of new works by some of Australia’s best and brightest composers. 

One of these composers, Michael Grebla, happened to be present that evening.

I was fortunate enough to meet Michael for the first time just a few months ago at a New York concert given by the critically acclaimed Zodiac Trio – true champions of new and innovative chamber music. Michael was selected to attend the trio’s annual festival in the South of France in 2018, where he won the prize for Most Outstanding New Work.

A native of Perth and a graduate of the University of Western Australia, Michael first came to the United States to study at Boston’s New England Conservatory; last year completing a Master of Music with Honours. I had heard great things about him from the Zodiac Trio members themselves and was very keen to hear some of his compositions, to which he graciously sent me links. I was immediately taken with his lush, almost cinematic orchestrations, and asked that he let me know when one of his pieces would next be performed in New York; which brings us back to that church in the West Village. When he invited me to write about the experience of listening to his music, I welcomed the challenge.

Nestled in between pieces by fellow Australian composers Jodie O’Regan, Chrstopher Healey, Jakob Bragg, Josephine Jin, Isabella Gerometta, and Peter Martin was Michael’s new work Sympathy. Written for voice and cello, the piece is a setting of the poem of the same name by Paul Laurence Dunbar, a freed slave from Kentucky who became one of the first influential black poets in the United States. Like nearly every other American who studied poetry in high school, I was very familiar with this poem, but had never heard it set to music. I settled in for what was I felt to be a rare treat.

Michael immediately sets the mood with the cello’s chilling opening line, giving way to Brisbane soprano Amber Evans’ voice – low, almost chant-like, singing the famous words: “I know how the caged bird feels, alas!”. I was immediately hit by the powerful pang of sorrow encapsulated in these words. The piece continued to build beautifully into the middle section, climaxing on the line: “And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars; and they pulse again with a keener sting. I know why he beats his wing!”. The juxtaposition of the soaring vocal line with the cello’s churning triplets perfectly reflected the poet’s beautifully crafted words of longing.

I found Michael’s work to be a particularly refreshing take on a piece of classic American poetry; perhaps because it was composed by someone who wasn’t as familiar with its history, coming at it with fresh eyes and ears. There have been many instances when a piece of art deemed as a national treasure was created by someone with diverse heritage. El Greco (The Greek) became one of the greatest artists of the Spanish Renaissance. Many of the most popular Christmas songs of the 20th Century were written by Jewish composers. Even Australia’s own national anthem was Scot Of course, the evil of slavery taints the history of both the United States and Australia. When listening to the lines in Michael’s work, “When the sun is bright on the upland slopes; When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass”, one could just as easily imagine the sugar can plantations of Queensland as the cotton fields of Kentucky. This is what makes Michael’s Sympathy not only a prime example of the many fine works that young Australians are contributing to America’s new music scene, but also a testament to the universal strength and endurance of the human spirit.

Like many others in his generation, Michael is one of many young Australians making his mark on new American music and contributing greatly to this important art form. I can only hope that he will continue to lend his musicality to classic pieces of American poetry in the future and help Australia Fair advance to greater success in the halls of American music.