Guest Author: Sophie Delphis

The May 9^th Osvaldo Golijov and Dawn Upshaw Young Artists Concert, the first of two showcasing eight young composers and their original commissions (unfortunately, I was unable to attend the second concert), was an experience that is seldom afforded to audiences. The atmosphere in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall was familiar and excited – here were rows of seats filled with the devotees of the composers and performers of the evening. We were all partners in crime.

Attending a concert of new music is a tricky affair and represents polar opposite possibilities: will the program be the discovery of an exciting new voice? Or… not. As I am used to new music evenings that are, at best, uneven in their ability to hold my interest, I was happily surprised to find that I was never bored by what I saw and heard before me — far from it, in fact. I was consistently curious to see what would unfold in each of the four pieces. Even in those instances when I did not like a compositional or interpretational decision, I remained connected. This is the testimony to the four works on the docket; if there was a theme in style for the evening, it was each composer’s compulsion to grab the audience. We were not alienated by artists too caught up in their ideology to care whether we were along for the ride or left on the doorsteps following the program notes to pass the time. Kudos to Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin for his Niña Dances, Paola Prestini for her Oceanic Verses, Matti Kovler for Here Comes Messiah!, and David T. Little for his Scenes from Dog Days. All four premières were supported all the more by strong performances from the vocalists as well as the workshop ensembles, and remarkably conducted by Alan Pierson.

Matti Kovler’s Here Comes Messiah! 

It is not surprising that I felt a particularly strong connection to Matti’s piece: I was there namely as part of his retinue. I am also familiar with his compositional idiom, and Here Comes Messiah! was clearly marked with the Kovler stamp. Matti’s instruments are not merely textural tools, but characters themselves. As the piece began, the breaths and physical movements of his solo singer, Tehila Goldstein (see picture with Matti), were echoed and magnified by the ensemble. From this point, there was no question that we were not watching a poem with orchestral accompaniment, but instead the group effort of a large cast of players – in which extraordinary poet-translator, Janice Silverman Rebibo unambiguously belongs. It was particularly in the second part of the piece that this group dynamic gained a strong hold over the audience’s attention. In the climax before the third and final part, the performers’ grip on the room was visceral, tangible, in a series of fortissimo pulses (labor pangs) from the instrumentalists, and exclamations from Tehila Goldstein. Here the expressivity she had already demonstrated earlier intensified exponentially, in her face, her stance, the timbre of her voice. Matti was at the piano, and he brilliantly made use of it in this passage, as both a harmonic and percussive instrument, driving the sound of the others around him. 

Although his part in Here Comes Messiah! is less central than in his Cokboy (performed earlier this year in Boston), and the work revolves around a woman’s experience in child birth, it is, nonetheless, entirely an extension of Matti himself. He is wholly present in his music, and not simply because of his compositional language or aesthetic. The audience does not need to be introduced to the composer, or his thought process, to become privy to his internal world – he wills us to come in. 

Additional information

Lev Zhurbin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Zhurbin

Paola Prestini: http://www.paolaprestini.com/

Matti Kovler: http://mattikovler.com/. My mother and I also wrote a post about Cokboy last January: http://delbourg-delphis.com/2009/01/matti-kovler-artist-entrepreneur-great-products-always-carry-a-great-vision/

David T. Little: http://www.davidtlittle.com/

Janice Silverman Rebibo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janice_Rebibo

Tehila Nini Goldstein: http://www.meitar.net/bio_En.pdf

Alan Pierson: http://www.alliedartists.co.uk/artist_page.php?tid=1&aid=103

A Jew Among the Indians: this year’s BMOP’s winning composition: The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), a major orchestra dedicated exclusively to performing, commissioning, and recording new music, presented its 11th annual Boston ConNECtion concert on January 17th at Jordan Hall (Gil Rose, conductor) featuring works by William Thomas McKinley, Michael Gandolfi, Peter Maxwell Davies, John Heiss, Kati Agócs, and Matti Kovler’s Cokboy – A Jew Among the Indians. Right after she saw this final version of Matti’s piece, my daughter, Sophie Delphis, sent me an enthusiastic email, of which this is an abstract:  “I have seen Matti’s piece in a number of transformations this past year: with piano, with a small group of non-classical musicians, and now with an orchestra. In this third version, the wider palette of sounds available to him has apotheosized his vision. The reaction I hear from the majority of people about him, and specifically this piece, is their surprise at the broad range of sources that find themselves into his music. It is certainly not every young, contemporary composer who has the knowledge and the courage to explore both “schmaltzy” and abstract motives, and incorporate them so easily into the same piece. It is only fitting then, perhaps, for Matti to work with a large ensemble, wherein the breadth of soundscape can corroborate the breadth of his material. Cokboy is in many ways an epitome of Matti, the man: sensitive, Romantic, part mystical, part comical.”

Meet with Matti Kovler: Matti Kovler, 28, was born in the Soviet Union and
 spent his childhood in Moscow, where he started to play the piano and write small
 pieces. When he was 10, 
his family emigrated to Jerusalem and he encountered the Hungarian-born composer Andre
 Hajdu (who studied at the Paris Conservatoire National de Musique under Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen). By his late teens, Matti was already a successful composer and had an opera already staged, Ami and
 Tammy, inspired by the story of Hansel and Gretel. Following his army service in Israel, he received his
 bachelor’s degree from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (working with Menachem Wiesenberg and Michael Wolpe). He earned his master’s degree from the New England Conservatory (NEC), and is currently working towards his Ph.D., also at NEC.  His teachers and mentors in this country include John Heiss, Anthony Coleman, and Michael Gandolfi, to name a few. He was a 
Tanglewood Fellow in the composition program in Summer 2008.

Many high-tech entrepreneurs bootstrap their companies. Artists bootstrap their entire existence and live from their ability to express themselves – and can do this quite successfully. This is the case with Matti, who makes a living as the current director of the
 NEC Children’s Choirs, teaches privately piano and composition, receives scholarships and gets commissions for his compositions, the latest one being the commission of a large scale vocal orchestral work from Carnegie Hall for the Osvaldo Golijov and Dawn Upshaw Workshop (to be performed on May 9 &10). His goals? To work even more and be able to create a touring company one day.

Sophie Delphis & Marylene Delbourg-Delphis 

More about Matti Kovler:

http://www.myspace.com/mattikovler: This site offers an earlier version of A Jew Among the Indians as well as Shoresh Nishmat, performed at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall during a concert celebrating Israel’s
 60th anniversary, as well as his Clarinet Quintet. Upcoming performances include his
 string orchestra piece Nineveh, scheduled to premiere in Boston on
 January 31, 2009. 

http://www.mattikovler.com: More compositions are offered on this personal site, especially  Enosh, a rock opera, and the The Escape of Jonah, an oratorio that was performed at the
 Jerusalem Music Center in June 2008.

www.newenglandconservatory.edu/prep/ensembles/children_chorus.html

More about Jerome Rothenberg: Born in New York in 1931 from Polish-Jewish immigrants, Rothenberg is certainly one of the most prominent American poets, and an amazing translator and anthologist. He is the author over seventy books. For details see:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/rothenberg/bio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Rothenberg

Incidentally, for high-tech readers, he is the father of Matthew Rothenberg, who worked for Ziff Davis for a number of years and is now the Director for editorial and content at The Ladders (http://www.theladders.com).

More about Zoomorama: http://wla.zoomorama.com (Special thanks to Franklin Servan-Schreiber)