OOPPERA SKAALA LEVYTTI GLASSIA

Philip Glassin kamariooppera A Madrigal Opera on levytetty ensimmäistä kertaa Helsinkiläisen Ooppera Skaalan esittämänä.

A Madrigal Opera on Glassin toinen ooppera Einstein on the Beachin (1975) jälkeen ja se on kantaesitetty Amsterdamissa vuonna 1980. Helsinkiläinen nykyoopperaan keskittynyt Ooppera Skaala esitti harvoin livenä kuultavan teoksen huhtikuussa 2009 Suomessa ja nyt oopperasta julkaistaan cd-levy. A Madrigal Opera on abstrakti musiikkiteos, kamariooppera kuudelle laulajalle, viululle ja alttoviululle.

Ooppera Skaalan ensemble: Tenori Petri Bäckström, mezzosopraano Satu Jaatinen, mezzosopraano Essi Luttinen, sopraano Laura Heinonen, baritoni Vikke Häkkinen, basso Riku Pelo. Viulua soittavat Max Savikangas ja Linda Hedlund.

Julkaistu: 10. marraskuuta 2009
Levyn julkaisu / jakelu: Orange Mountain Music worldwide distribution

Tilaa cd osoitteesta: toimisto@oopperaskaala.fi
Hinta 12,90 euroa + postikulut 1,60 euroa

Recent Customer Reviews:

YEAH! By Eric Mars
This truly IS an important Glass work. I'm elated!!! As the other reviewer says you can hear the seeds of Koyaanisqatsi (Pruit Igoe to be exact, but actually, more detailed, complex and emotional.) If you're a Glass devotee you're a bit jaded about new releases - so much repetition (ha ha). But this is truly glorious and different - it's not 'yet another soulless recording of Music in 14,257 parts' by any means. I would actually also have to put Naqoyqaatsi and EOTB Knee Play 5 in this family. It's PG without compromises and taking no prisoners. It's not decorative, it's not meant to prove you're smart. It's meant to move you. And it does. I give credit to the musicians - it's INCREDIBLY performed by musicians who truly understand the music. Very emotional. Not mechanical in the least. The non-initiated may hear squeaks on a chalkboard, those who understand. Will cry.

Seminal work by Occidental Guest
First off, kudos to Orange Mountain Music. Releases such as "Early Voice", "Juniper Tree", "Descent into the Maelstrom", and the re-issues of the two Alter Ego early-Glass CD's, are priceless. This recording brings us a step closer to having most of Glass's early and early-middle-period works on disc. (Would still love someone like Ensemble Alter Ego to perform and record some of the remaining--and presumably unrecorded--early works, such as "Music in Eight Parts", "Head On", "Two Down", "Another Look at Harmony Part 3", or any of the Mabou Mines theater music.) Compositionally, Madrigal recalls, in certain passages, "The Photographer" and "Koyaanisqatsi"-- though the vocal parts in Madrigal are more subdued than in either of those works, and the absence of winds and keyboards creates a leaner, more stark overall texture. This is the lyrical, melancholic, elegant Glass of "Mishima" and "Facades", as well. In other words, it sounds exactly like the period in which it was composed, and for that, I love every note of it.

Glass second opera after Einstein and before Satyagraha by Richard G.
A Madrigal Opera dates from 1980 and is Philip Glass' second "opera" although it lacks a narrative and text. What makes it different from Einstein on the Beach is that it even lacks a subject. Scored for a traditional madrigal ensemble of six singers with the accompaniment of a solo violin or solo viola, the piece exists as a musical creation meant to inspire future directors and writers to create a piece in and around it.
The music is like the music Glass was writing at that time: exciting because of his new post-minimalist thoughts on "putting back" expressive elements of music after having stripped music down to its very basic elements. The result is still very stripped down, but fantastically expressive and moving. The performance by the Finnish Ooppera Skaala is wonderful.

Finally Recorded! by OgreOgress productions
Having performed "The State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera" many times with Christina Fong in the late 1990s, it is wonderful to finally hear this little-known but very important Glass work on disc. I wish that we had been allowed to record our version back in the late 1990s when we performed it on a regular basis for a 2-year period throughout the midwest and Canada (Canadian premiere at Open Ears Festival). This is some of the finest solo string writing of Glass's early career. One can hear the seeds of Koyaanisqatsi (in the solo viola movement) along with a unique choral writing style soon to be heard in Satyagraha.

Earlier Glass work with an intimate and beautiful scoring by Douglas Burkett
Containing Glass' early, repetative style yet beautiful and intimate, this music was a surprise and 'A Madrigal Opera' will likely be one of my favorite Glass CDs over time. This is truly one of the most unique pieces I have heard from Glass and it is one of the most original, refreshing CD releases of his work in a while from the OMM label. Scored for a very intimate performance of violin, viola and six voices, this work contains all of the intense, repetative (and occasionally dissonent) tonalities heard in his early works but scores them for this small, almost gentle sounding orchestartion of stings and voices. It's nothing short of a Glass paradox by taking the kind of heavy, repetative structures you would expect from 'Koyaanisqatsi' and then having them performed through this almost ethereal sounding scoring. But even though the flavor of the piece is 'early Glass', I never felt as if 'I have heard this before' or felt as if Glass was borrowing from himself as I have complained about as of late with works like 'Toltec'. There is a little bit of paraphrasing from a 'Koyaanisqatsi' track but that is all; it felt like a completely original composition. This older work of Glass will definitely remind you of early Glass technically but the beauty of the simplicity of the scoring just lets the entire piece fantastically hypnotize you from start to finish.

For those who like comparisons, I would liken this composition to that of the string and vocal parts heard in the second piece/track of 'The Photographer' (Act II) as well as the 'Another Look at Harmony' track from the 'Early Voice' release. Much of this work has that 70's kind of Glass sound as heard during psychedelic-like animations during 'Sesame Street' and the like back then. Hints of the String Quartets are also evident here but the main style is that early Glass with this unique, chamber instrumentation.

Absolutely no reservation in recommending this amazingly beautiful, original and hypnotic work.

A Madrigal Opera
(2009)

By Philip Glass Release: November 10, 2009

TRACKS:

1. Opening 8:06
2. Part I 13:12
   
3. Part II 12:11
   
4. Part III 10:17
   
5. Part IV 12:07
   
6. Closing 4:38

NOTES:
Orange Mountain Music presents the world premiere recording of Philip Glass’ A Madrigal Opera performed by Finland’s Ooppera Skaala. Glass’ second opera after the hallmark Einstein on the Beach in 1975, A Madrigal Opera contains no narrative or subject matter. It is a work composed for future writers and directors to create in and around Glass score.

The work is composed as for a traditional madrigal, with six voices with violin and viola accompaniment. The clean and dynamic Glass score from 1979 represented a huge musical step for the composer as he moved toward a more expressive idiom which later produced works like Satyagraha and Koyaanisqatsi.
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The birth of the Madrigal came in Italy in the 16th Century as part of the evolution of secular music and the desire to set text to the poets of the day. Early madrigals were for a small collection of unaccompanied voices and became a new way of secular expression for musicians that were pioneering the marriage of verbal language and musical language in the early 1500s. So it is also with Philip Glass' A Madrigal Opera from 1980.

The early form of madrigal called for a small collection of mixed voices with later forms of the style incorporating the accompaniment of a solo instrument. The style spread beyond Italy to France, England and elsewhere, and was eventually taken over by the birth of opera itself in the 17th Century when Moneverdi's musical vision expanded beyond the madrigal form. Secular music had a new and exciting challenge to consider: to fuse into one unified dramatic form, music, text and singing as a dramatic work. Namely, opera.

The history of opera is that of Western culture's great musical minds expanding their creative forces by reacting to the needs of a particular drama. Philip Glass has consistently argued that the radical changes in music happened more often in the theater than the concert hall. Monteverdi, Mozart, Wagner and Stravinsky made huge leaps in the language of music, found new means of expression and broadened their creative voices by confronting dramatic situations which called for new and different ways of writing music. Today, this evolution of musical language continues owing much to extra-musical materials found mostly in the world of theater, dance, and opera.

In the late 1970s, the opera world was confronted with one of the 20th century's seminal works which redefined what an opera could be. The "opera" is "Einstein on the Beach" created by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass. Their piece contained all the traditional elements of most operas. It had actors, dancers, singers, text, and a subject. However, their work contained no narrative whatsoever. Most of the public who saw Einstein were aware of Einstein (the man) as a giant of the 20th century and knew various details about his life and the legacy of his work. However, in Einstein on the Beach, the audience is presented with a theatrical portrait of Einstein, called an opera, which possessed nothing akin to the traditional dramatic linear story that the Western World had come to expect in opera. The result was a top-to-bottom re-evaluation of the possibilities of construction of an opera.

For many, a gigantic creative and expressive license was forged by what Glass and Wilson had done. Furthermore, they had produced the piece in great institutions such as the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which stood as a beacon of conservatism and conventional opera. At that time, Glass' musical language of highly reductive and repetitive music had begun to change (during and before Einstein on the Beach.) Forever a composer with a strong relationship to the world of theater, Glass considered the period of so-called musical Minimalism having ended in 1975 and he soon embarked on a successful career as an opera composer.

After Einstein, Glass was asked by Hans de Roo, Director of the Netherlands Opera, to compose a "real" opera for the City of Rotterdam in 1980. This opera was to be Satyagraha (which also was presented at the Met Opera in 2008) and was the composer's first writing for orchestra in more than 15 years. Writing a "real" opera, for orchestra and acoustic operatic voices, meant in fact a departure from writing for Glass' own amplified ensemble of electric keyboards, woodwinds and soprano voice. Orchestration aside, for Glass, it was a period of the incredible possibilities of "putting back" into the system after having stripped musical language down to its essence and beginning anew. This "putting back," created music that at that time was incredibly expressive in contrast to the music composed only 5 or 10 years earlier and it led to new discoveries of how Glass' music could be used for dramatic purposes.

It was during this time of blossoming discovery that Glass composed A Madrigal Opera. Written for six voices (soprano, mezzo, alto, tenor, baritone, bass) with violin and viola, the piece originally composed for the Dutch theater artist Rob Malasch. The opera is conceived as and abstract music theater work, which is designed to be "completed" by various future directors. It is for this reason that though the work has a clear emotional shape, it has no specific theatrical content. This idea relates to the origins of renaissance and baroque madrigals that were in effect one of the first attempts to merge secular proto-dramatic text and music. In early madrigals, there is a seemingly naive relationship between the text and music; those madrigals possessed an inherent abstractness, as they were the first essays in connecting the two elements. Philip Glass' music plays greatly on that broad possibility for connection.

Glass' score, still bearing elements of his reductive style of that time, leaves tremendous room for directors to create a story in or around the music and the wordless singing. Part of the ingenuity of the piece is that the score leaves so much emotional room between what it is as it stands alone as a piece of music and what it could be as a piece of theater. As such, it can inspire an endless amount of versions. Including productions in Holland (Attaca - A Madrigal Opera, 1980), New York and Houston Grand Opera (The Panther), and Los Angeles (A Madrigal Opera, 1985) and the recent Finnish production after which this recording was made which used texts Oton Lauri Koski (A Madrigal Opera - Cameo. Sinfoninen runo Symphonic poem.)

Excerpted fom Music by Philip Glass(1987):

"A Madrigal Opera" is a vocal work for six voices, violin and viola, and it could be classified as a chamber opera with an unspecified story line. My idea was to write a musical//dramatic work tat could, with different direction, be realized with different narrative content. In this way, I was following common practice in the dance world, where choreographers routinely adapt music written for another purpose to their own dramatic needs. In this case, a new writer can be brought in to complete the work for each new production...

“...there are a few works (of mine) such as A Madrigal Opera that are completely written in terms of the music but await the contribution of other yet unknown authors in order to be completed for the theater. The results can, of course, be unpredictable. But for those wo have the nerves for it, having an open-ended piece of this kind can be very exciting."

The score was completed in March 1980 and premiered at the Carré Theater at the Holland Festival that year. This is the first recording of Philip Glass' "A Madrigal Opera"
CREDITS:

A Madrigal Opera is published by Dunvagen Music Publishers, Inc. (ASCAP). (p) and (c) 2009 by Orange Mountain Music.

Ooppera Skaala
Direction:Janne Lehmusvuo
Music direction: Jari Hiekkapelto
Recording Engineer and sound design: Timo Muurinen
Editing,mixing and mastering: Michael Riesman

Petri Bäckström,tenor
Essi Luttinen,mezzo-soprano
Vikke Häkkinen,baritone
Laura Heinonen,soprano
Satu Jaatinen,mezzo-soprano
Riku Pelo,bass
Max Savikangas,viola
Linda Hedlund,violin

Director's assistant:Benita Laakso
Lighting design:Harri Peltonen
Choreography:Thomas Freundlich
Costumes:Tyra Therman
Make-up:Kukka Silius
Voice of a child:Minna Luukka
Production:Ooppera Skaala
Photos:Timo Muurinen
Thomas Freundlich,dancer
Tanja Kuisma,dancer

Recorded at Sipoo Church,Kuninkaantie 19,Nikkilä Finland

Album produced by Don Christensen and Richard Guerin

Executive Producers for Orange Mountain Music: Philip Glass, Kurt Munkacsi, and Don Christensen

www.philipglass.com