A pair of violinists will be featured in the Symphony's Concert à la Carte series at the Art Museum. Artist-in-residence Christina Fong will perform on March 14 and acting concertmaster Marina Brubaker will be featured on March 28.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Christina Fong joined the Grand Rapids Symphony in the 1988-89 season as a member of the first violin section and was a featured soloist earlier this season on the Casual Classics series. Fong will be accompanied by Chicago pianist Paul Hersey in a performance of Charles Ives's Sonata No. 2 and Barber's Canzona, which the composer transcribed from the second movement of his piano concerto. Fong will be joined by her husband percussionist Glenn Freeman, to perform Michael Twomey's Memos for Timpani and Violin.

A graduate of Wichita State University and Yale School of Music, Marina Brubaker came to Grand Rapids last September and will serve as acting concertmaster of the Symphony through May, when she returns to her position with the Houston Symphony. Brubaker, who also was featured earlier this season on the Casual Classics series, has held positions with the Fort Worth Symphony and the orchestras of New Haven, Austin and Wichita. She will be joined for the recital by local pianist Richard Ridenour and her sister, Chicago Symphony violist Catherine Brubaker. The concert will include Stravinsky's Suite Italienne, an arrangement the composer made for violin and piano of part of his Pulcinella Suite, and Mozart's Duo in Bb for violin and viola. Both concerts begin at noon and are free.

On-the-Town
March 1991 (page 12)
by Melissa Madura

Women's History Month

The second Concert à la Carte will be held on March 27 and will feature violinist Christina Fong in a salute to the American students of Nadia Boulanger. Fong will be joined for this varied concert of all 20th-century music by a host of colleagues, including pianist Deborah Gross, who will double on the organ and as a speaker, violinist David Wheeler, violist Mary Jane Slawinski, cellist Karen Krummel, pianist Paul Hersey and violinist Diane McElfish, who also will serve as a speaker. Featured on the concert are Aaron Copland's Nocturne and his Ukelele Serenade (both written in 1926), Philip Glass's Solo Violin Music (Knee Play No. 2) from Einstein on the Beach (1976) and his Company (1984) and Donald Erb's Three Poems for Violin and Piano (1987).

Grand Rapids Magazine
February 1993 (page 46)

The Wrecking Ball
UICA/Race Street Gallery

The Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts has called the one-story brick structure on Race Street "home" for 10 years. This month, however, the institute vacates the premises in favor of temporary quarters on its way to a new facility in the Heartside district of Grand Rapids.

The last events UICA has scheduled at Race Street include its annual fund-raiser Jump Start, on Feb. 6, during which the works of more than 100 local artists will be auctioned.

On Feb. 12 and 13, Deanna Morse will present a benefit screening of her recent film and video work at UICA, to help underwrite moving costs. Morse, an associate professor in the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University, has exhibited her work internationally. Her animations are represented in various metropolitan collections and have been seen on Sesame Street and Romper Room.

The grand finale will be The Eviction Concert -- A Moving Experience, featuring Christina Fong's Music for Loud Violin. Accompanied by Nancy Benedetti's slide projections, the music includes the world premiere performance of Water from the Moon, a work commissioned by UICA from local composer Bob Shechtman.

It's sure to bring the house down.

On-the-Town
February 1993 (page 7)
by Melissa Madura

A Moving Musical Experience

Violinist Christina Fong and photographer Nancy Benedetti will join forces for a performance on February 15 titled Music for Loud Violin, or The Eviction Concert -- A Moving Experience, at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts' long-time home at 1064 Race Street NE. The event will be the last concert at UICA's Race St. facility, as the organization has been forced from its home by the expansion of Consumer's Power facilities. They will be moving into an interim facility in February, where they will launch a capital campaign to raise funds to renovate and occupy the former Harris Furniture building on Division St. More information about the interim facility and programming there will be included in the March issue of On-the-Town.

Fong has developed a program for the farewell event that she hopes will help weaken the walls before the wrecking ball has to do its job. An artist-in-residence with the Grand Rapids Symphony, Fong's concert will include works by two of this century's most influential composers, Philip Glass and John Cage. Performing on amplified violin in front of slides by Nancy Benedetti, Fong will play Glass's 1967 composition Strung Out and the late John Cage's 1985 work Eight Whiskus.

The concert also will include two premieres, a world premiere of Grand Rapids composer Bob Shechtman's Water from the Moon, and a U.S. premiere of Michael Nyman's Z00 Caprices. Shechtman's work was commissioned by UICA, the first time the local multi-disciplinary arts organization has commissioned a piece of music. The commission demonstrates UICA's commitment to providing support for innovative local artists in all genres. Michael Nyman is best known as the composer for the films of Peter Greenaway, including The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, The Draughtsman's Contract, Drowning by Numbers and Prospero's Books. The work that will be performed at the UICA concert, Z00 Caprices, is based on the score of Greenaway's film A Zed and Two Noughts.

The eclectic multi-media concert, which will begin at 8pm on February 15, should provide an appropriately contemporary atmosphere for a farewell to what has become Grand Rapids' most beloved alternative venue.

The Grand Rapids Press
February 14, 1993 (page F1)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Fong to send UICA's Race Street era out with a 'Loud Violin'

Joshua and his hosts needed trumpets and seven days to blow down the walls of Jericho, but Christina Fong may manage just as well in two hours with a violin, an amplifier and four works by contemporary composers.

Fong's performance Monday evening at the Race Street Gallery is expected to bring the house down in more ways than one.

Unofficially dubbed The Eviction Concert -- A Moving Experience, Monday's program is the final event at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts' headquarters on Race Street.

"This performance should serve to weaken the structure in preparation for the wrecking ball," said UICA Director Marjorie Kuipers. Consumers Power Co., owner of the Race Street property, plans to expand its substation facilities at the site.

Titled Music for Loud Violin, the program of music for unaccompanied violin includes the premiere of Water from the Moon by Grand Rapids composer Bob Shechtman.

Earplugs, however, will not be necessary.

"It isn't going to deafen a person. It's certainly not as loud as a full band playing," Fong said. "But it is loud."

The concert also includes works by contemporary American composer Philip Glass, avant-garde composer John Cage, and film composer Michael Nyman.

Inspired by the remembrance of the past, Shechtman's latest composition is titled Water from the Moon.

"It's a Javanese expression designed to express something you can never have," Shechtman said. "I just thought it was a very poetic turn of language, so I thought I'd write a piece with that title."

Influenced by the mythical legend from Ulysses of the siren's song -- a sound of such beauty it lured sailors to their deaths upon rocky shores -- the five-movement work's first, third and fifth movements are lyrically expressive and make use of the amplifier's echo effect to create the illusion of hearing several notes played at once.

"I wanted Chris to be able to set some things in motion and then play against them." Shechtman explained.

The second and fourth movements were influenced by popular dances, the soft shoe and the jitterbug.

"The past is something one can never have," Shechtman said.

"Certainly in my life there were lots of siren's songs. And jitterbug songs I associate with big band music and my high school days."

A professor of music at Grand Valley State University, Shechtman was commissioned by UICA last fall to compose the work.

"I poke fun at the minimalists in this piece," he said. "I've minimalized jitterbug melodies. I don't know if it comes across, but hopefully I'll get some smiles."

Glass's Strung Out is one of his early compositions in the cyclical minimalist style he uses today. The title makes fun of the 1960s drug cliché and describes certain aspects of the composition.

"The music is laid out in a long, long line," Fong said. "It lasts about 20 minutes, and the violinist pretends to collapse at the end."

Cage's Eight Whiskus, written in 1980, is one of the composer's later works. Influenced by minimalism and "prepared piano" -- the avant-garde technique of placing objects on a piano's strings to alter the sound -- Cage elicits new and unusual sounds from the violin.

"It's prepared violin," Fong said. "You can't really prepare a violin like a piano, but there are strange attacks, and it's serialized."

Nyman, best known as the composer of such film scores as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, The Draughtsman's Contract and Drowning by Numbers, uses a variety of musical elements in his works.

"He takes a lot of pop elements and things that are out there and treats them in a classical way," Fong said.

Three of the four works call specifically for amplified violin, and Fong uses a small microphone to amplify the natural sound of her Becker violin.

"You can amplify yourself so you sound like the room you want to be in," she said. The entire performance will be accompanied by simultaneous slide projections created by photographer Nancy Benedetti.

None of the works was composed with slide projections in mind, but Fong said the multimedia show adds to the music.

"I always try to use all forms of art when I perform," Fong said. "I don't think of the slides as interfering. I think of it as enhancing the qualities of the music."

In her fifth season with the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra, Fong teaches music at Grand Valley State University and plays with several local groups, including Ethnoeccentric, a new music trio.

Last year, Shechtman wrote a new piece for Ethnoeccentric and enjoyed it so much, he was pleased when Fong asked him to write Water from the Moon for this concert.

"I had been hoping to write a piece just for her," he said. "She's an amazing player. Imaginative, very open to new ideas."

Fong said she's excited to premier Shechtman's latest work.

"It's all amplified and slightly manipulated with reverb and echo," Fong said. "It's rhythmically free, and it's really a piece."

UICA is remodeling its new facility in the former Mutual Federal Savings and Loan Association building on Monroe Mall and plans to reopen in May. The current office telephone number will be transferred to the new location, Kuipers said.

Grand Rapids Press
February 16, 1993 (page B4)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Fong engages audience in entertaining UICA farewell

Who says modern music is boring?

Not Christina Fong, nor Bob Shechtman, nor any members of the audience that filled the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts on Monday night.

An unaccompanied violin, an amplifier and music so new the ink's still wet on the page, made for an entertaining and enlightening farewell to an old home as the UICA prepares to move to a new site downtown.

Though there were several interesting pieces on the multimedia program, the premiere of Shechtman's Water From the Moon was the highlight.

An introspective work, the piece alternates three expressive, almost wistful movements called "Siren's Songs" with two movements that quote liberally from such big band jazz classics as In the Mood and I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.

Accompanied by photographer Nancy Benedetti's projected slides of the moon, the songs alternated from nostalgic and wistful to angry and demanding to resigned and accepting.

Fong deftly handled the demanding score that explored the full range of the instrument. Her conclusion on the third movement, titled Siren's Song II was particularly effective for its blend of powerful bowing leading to a gentle ending.

The second and fourth movements featured snippets of big band classics twisted in an unearthly fashion -- something like a space-age Glenn Miller with an attitude. One flaw in the performance was what probably was supposed to be a relaxed swing feel came across rather straight in Fong's playing. Violinists don't get much chance to swing. When they try, it generally shows.

The charm of the Grand Rapids composer's work was its use of the amplifier's echo chamber to setup chords and multiple-note effects not normally possible for one violinist to play. To his credit, Shechtman uses the echo, not merely as an attention-getting special effect, but as a serious compositional device. To her credit, Fong took great care to bring out the chords, giving the notes plenty of space to breathe and expand.

Philip Glass's Strung Out, a 1967 composition, opened the concert. The title is most appropriate, both for the droning repetition in its 20-minute length and for its reference to the 1960s drug subculture.

Former flower children who turned onto drugs and tuned into serious music in the '60s say marijuana seemed to make classical music go by slower. Glass apparently was after that pharmacological/musicological effect without actually having to pass out wacky weed and print the concert program on rolling papers. Still, the challenge for the listener -- who isn't on drugs -- is to stay interested. The task for the performer is to hold the audience's interest, and it's a challenge Fong met.

Benedetti's accompanying slides of various views of a strand of rope, were particularly effective here. The subtly changing shapes and patterns and differing angles and lighting gave an added insight to the performance.

Z00 Caprices, a 1986 work by English composer Michael Nyman, received its American premiere Monday, Fong said.

The demanding nine movement work is quite a stretch, calling for aggressive attacks, moments of of melodic lyricism and a great deal of stamina. The work also calls for the performer to make some sense out of movement subtitles such as Swan Rot, Bisocosis Populi and Vermeer's Wife Watches Prawns.

John Cage's Eight Whiskus, which opened the second half, is something of a study on how the violinist attacks the strings. The eight short movements focus almost entirely on color and timbre.

While Benedetti displayed slides of cats in various states of repose, Fong played a score that suddenly took on the aural characteristics of a cat snarling and scratching, creeping and stalking, batting a bit of yarn or unsheathing its claws. No doubt without the slides, many of the hearers would have misunderstood Cage's intent.

On-the-Town
April 1993 (page 5)
by Melissa Madura

Contemporary Concert

Violinist Christina Fong will be the featured soloist in the Grand Rapids Symphony's Concert à la Carte series on April 28. The Grand Rapids Symphony violinist, who is fast gaining a reputation locally as a champion of contemporary music, was featured recently in the final concert at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts' Race St. location. One of the most popular pieces on her Music for Loud Violin concert that served as UICA's farewell was Z00 Caprices by British composer Michael Nyman. A writer as well as composer, Nyman got his start composing contemporary music for an eccentric street band made up of medieval instruments. Although he is a prolific composer of opera, chamber music, vocal music and dance scores, Nyman is best known for his collaborations with filmmaker Peter Greenaway.

For her Concert à la Carte, Fong will team with Symphony colleagues pianist Deborah Gross and violinist Ion Corneanu to present three of Nyman's works. She will open with a U.S. premiere performance of his Miserere Paraphrase, which was written for Greenaway's film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. She will continue with Z00 Caprices, a virtuoso work for solo violin based on the film score Nyman wrote for Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts. The concert will conclude with the Michigan premiere of Childs Play, from the Lucinda Childs ballet Portraits in Reflection.

The concert will be held at Fountain Street Church at noon on April 28 and is free.

On-the-Town
April 1994 (page 48)
by Christopher Scapelliti

The Artist, the Composer, His Musicians, and Their Collaboration

UICA premieres works by Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman

Surrealist painter and fantastical filmmaker Peter Greenaway once said, "research kills the imaginative excitement … too much concern with facts bogs you down with a desire to get things right and correct" -- a perfect explanation for the meandering thoughts and drippingly sensual imagery that mark the English director's impressive films. He has collaborated with composer Michael Nyman (who scored Jane Campion's Academy Award winner, The Piano ) on the films The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero's Books, Drowning by Numbers, and A Zed and Two Noughts.

The work of this duo will make its Grand Rapids premiere in The Peter Greenaway/Michael Nyman Event, presented by UICA (Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts) on April 10 at 2pm. The show is a marathon live concert and film event with the short films of Greenaway and the live music of Nyman, performed for the first time in the United States by some of Grand Rapids' most progressive contemporary musicians: Gwen Faasen, voice; Christina Fong, violin; Mark Thomas, keyboards; and the musicians of UICA. The screening includes A Walk Through H, about the journey a soul lakes at the moment of death, "H" being heaven or hell; Vertical Features Remake, a mockumentary about the Institute of Reclamation and Restoration, which sets out to reconstruct a film by a recently deceased filmmaker; and Act of God, a chronicle of humans who have been struck by lightning. 

Grand Rapids Press
April 3, 1994 (page F4)
by John Douglas

Event features three film shorts never shown here

A very unusual event is taking place next Sunday at 2pm at the Ladies Literary Club, 61 Sheldon Blvd. SE. The Peter Greenaway/Michael Nyman event, a mixture of live music and motion pictures, will be sponsored by the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts.

On the screen will be three short films, by director Peter Greenaway, entitled A Walk Through H, Vertical Features Remake and Act of God. Greenaway makes very eccentric films, of which there can be no doubt if you've seen any of his feature films, such as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, or The Draughtman's Contract. The three short films to be presented as part the program have never played before in Grand Rapids.

Composer Michael Nyman has often provided the music for Greenaway's films and, in fact, it's difficult to imagine Greenaway without Nyman. And Nyman was complimented several times this year on the Academy Award show for his score for The Piano.

Nyman's music, which is considered to be minimalist in structure, will be presented at this event before and in between the films, with Gwen Faasen providing vocals; Christina Fong on violin; and Mark Thomas on piano, along with a small group of musicians.

Grand Rapids Press
April 8, 1994 (page B8)
by John Douglas

Three movies showcase composing, direction

It's going to be an afternoon of music and movies Sunday in this program sponsored by the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts at the Ladies Literary Club, 61 Sheldon Blvd. SE.

Three short films by director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and The Draughtman's Contract) will be presented at 2pm along with compositions by composer Michael Nyman performed live by a group that includes Gwen Faasen doing vocals, Christina Fong on violin and Mark Thomas on keyboard.

Nyman has long been the composer of choice for Greenaway and most recently composed the music for Jane Campion's The Piano.

Nyman also provides music for the three films included in this program:Act of God, A Walk Through H and Vertical Features Remake.

Act of God is something of a documentary (or is it?) on people who've been hit by lightning. If there is any truth in this film, it's downplayed by Greenaway in favor of wonderful visuals and subtle and not-so-subtle digs at the complacent British attitudes toward even a major event such as being struck by lightning.

A Walk Through H is very weird. It has something to do with ornithology but I can't say what. The film is made up almost entirely of shots of watercolors done by Greenaway which are supposed to represent maps collected over the years. Much of the content is supposed to be taken from a bird book written by Tulse Luper (more on him later).

The watercolors are really quite nice to look at, which is helpful since that's about all we see in the film. A Walk Through H does have some brilliant narration that seems to signify nothing. But it sounds like many narrations we've heard over the years in other educational films.

Tulse Luper pops up again in Vertical Features Remake but this time he's some kind of theorist who supposedly once made a film about his theory -- but it was lost. The film is remade by academics by using Luper's recently-discovered notes.

As soon as the film is remade, more information is discovered and the film has to be remade again. The problem is all the versions are rather boring. Vertical Features Remake is a satire on academic research and it will test the endurance of Greenaway fans -- of which I am one. I couldn't help hoping this one would be over soon.

On a purely intellectual basis, one can see from looking at these early films that Greenaway has always been fascinated by numbers. Plus the kinds of watercolors that appear in both A Walk Through H and Vertical Features Remake were evident in Prospero's Books, a recent Greenaway feature.

So -- Greenaway and Nyman. If you are well disposed toward them, you really should consider going to this showing to see if there's a point of satiation provided in an afternoon of minimalist presentations.

One thing is for sure. Greenaway and Nyman march to their own drummers.

Grand Rapids Press
May 12, 1994 (page D9)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Musicians display their expertise in new works

There's no question that hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or seeing Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady for the umpteenth time is fun -- so long as the performance is good.

What's exciting about hearing or seeing new works is the thrill of discovering something entirely new -- as well as hearing or seeing a good performance.

Violinist Christina Fong, one of the area's biggest champions of new music, and pianist Deborah Gross premiered two works by Grand Rapids composers Robert Shechtman and Roelof Alexander Bijkerk in the season finale of the Grand Rapids Symphony's Concert à la Carte series in Fountain Street Church.

In a sense, Shechtman's Sonata for Violin and Piano isn't all that new because he wrote it in 1964 at age 25. But Wednesday's program was the first time it was performed.

The two compositions couldn't be more different, which made for an interesting performance by the musicians, both members of the Grand Rapids Symphony.

Shechtman's 25-minute sonata, in two movements, is a largely atonal work that explores variations on melodic, harmonic and rhythmic fragments throughout. Somewhat spacious and atmospheric, it nevertheless had several sections that were quite intimate.

To the extent that the sonata wasn't full of fast tempos and blazing passages, it might appear fairly simple to play. Just the opposite is true. Shechtman called upon Fong to push at the outer limits of the violinist's bag of technical tricks with trills, harmonics and huge leaps from note to note.

Because there is little recognizable melody or harmony to carry the listener along, atonal works also demand the performers make up the difference with extraordinary musical interpretation to maintain interest. Both Fong and Gross met that challenge.

The opening movement, Refraction, featured several fine moments of melodic lyricism from Fong. The pair integrated the tricky rhythms in the spirited final section to bring the movement to a fine conclusion.

In sharp contrast, Bijkerk's Lullaby from Memories of Polynesia was a tonal work full of flowing chord progressions and a melodic line inspired by Native American music. Evocative and dreamy with little contrast or harmonic development, the composition painted a picture of the eternally constant forces of nature and spirituality.

Less of a technical challenge to play than Shechtman's sonata, Bijkerk's 1993 composition called for a deeper sense of interpretation more akin to enlightenment.

Fong and Gross offered a fine performance in their respective roles, Gross's accompaniment murmured gently while Fong's solo captured the essence of a dreamy lullaby.

No doubt some of the audience, depending on their tastes, preferred one of the works to the other. Since opportunities to hear new music are few and far between, Wednesday's performance was a real treat.

Grand Rapids Press
December 14, 1994 (page C9)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Program pushed the envelope of holiday music

A darkened, candle-like cavern of a cathedral is in the contemporary mind, a long, long way from modern notions of Christmas.

Yet the program New Music with Mystical Choir, which transported the audience far from strobing blue-light specials and beeping cash registers, certainly captured the essence of Advent better than store speakers blaring Frosty the Snowman ever will.

Co-sponsored by the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Tuesday evening's concert in the Cathedral of St. Andrew capped an exceptional year of new music for both UICA and the cathedral.

The program conducted by Mark Thomas, featured music by better known composers including Philip Glass and Henryk Górecki. But the two works composed by organist and director of music at the cathedral received the most favorable response from the audience. For my money as well, they were best of the evening.

Penetrating Laughter is a perfect title for Thomas's solo organ piece that opened the program. Inspired, according to the program notes, by the work of Japanese Zen painter and calligrapher Kazuaki Tanahashi, the movement from Thomas's larger work, Six Pieces for Organ, combines rolling arpeggios with percussive, rhythmic chords in a texture that suggests bells ringing and hands clapping.

A hypnotically uplifting work, Thomas's performance transfigured the listener with waves of sound that penetrated deep into the subconscious while, on the surface, the aggressive chords thundered with self-awareness. Together, they made for a satisfying listening experience.

Thomas's somber song In the Land of the Living featured the captivating voice of bass John Scheid together with the Cathedral Choir. Over a humming accompaniment by Thomas at the keyboard, the words from Psalm 116 floated beautifully from Scheid's resonant voice. Aside from a couple of forced high notes that really shouldn't be expected from a bass voice, Scheid sang poetically on the mystical text and the big cathedral was a wonderful setting for his equally big instrument.

In a clever bit of staging, the Cathedral Choir rose unexpectedly from the shadows of the choir loft to conclude the work with a choral setting of the text that was simple, almost child-like and really lovely.

The concert featured the Cathedral Choir alone on two a cappella pieces. John Tavener's The Lamb, and Henryk Górecki's Totus Tuus.

Taking its text from William Blake's Songs of Innocence, Tavener's brief setting is full of notes that clash as they pass by each other only to resolve into unisons.

Such a setting is quite difficult to sing in tune, and the choir sounded uneasy at first in its effort.

The 36- voice choir sang better in Górecki's Totus Tuus, a hymn of praise to the Blessed Mother that the composer wrote in 1987 for Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland. Again the choir was confronted with simple musical lines that are easy to sing by themselves but that clash when put together. On this hymn the singers gave a more secure and heartfelt performance.

Narrator Bob Shechtman and violist Christina Fong joined the choir for an enlightened performance of the closing section of Philip Glass's A Madrigal Opera. The chamber opera has no particular text, so Shechtman recited guidelines for achieving spiritual serenity set down by the 16th century mystic St. John of the Cross.

The repetitive text calling for a denial of all worldliness as the price for spiritual union with the divine was an excellent counterpoint to the brittle choral accompaniment and steady drone of the viola.

The longest work on the program was four movements of Olivier Messiaen's La Nativite du Seigneur (The Nativity of our Lord) for solo organ. Messiaen's arhythmical music is a challenge both for performers to play and audiences to listen to, and Thomas gave a fine reading of what is a rather cerebral work.

The long, slow movement titled Eternal Purposes simmered with tension bubbling below the surface of imagination while the lowest pedal notes weighed in with chest-rattling rumbles. The even longer movement, The Word, is almost achingly slow, yet Thomas's rabidly shifting palette of tonalities and voicings made for an interesting performance.

The next movement, Jesus Accepts Sorrow, came as a harsh wake-up call. Full of piercing pain and penetrating anguish, it concluded with a satisfying, triumphant resolution.

It's rare these days to hear live performances of serious music from composers who aren't dead Europeans, and it's a pleasure to hear it performed so well.

On-the-Town
January 1995 (page 6)
by Christopher Scapelliti

New Music

The Sum of Its Parts

New music in West Michigan takes on new proportions this month with the U.S. premiere of Michael Nyman's Yamamoto Perpetuo.

It may have taken his memorably haunting score for The Piano to put avant-garde composer Michael Nyman on the pop-culture map. But here in Grand Rapids, violinist Christina Fong has been tending to his music well before Jane Campion's Academy Award winning film hit theaters in late 1993. Since 1992, Fong has performed all of the U.S. premieres of the British minimalist's works for solo violin and violin with piano -- each one taking place under our very noses.

A violinist with the Grand Rapids Symphony, Fong will continue her streak on January 11, when she performs the U.S. premiere of Yamamoto Perpetuo,Nyman's 1993 work for solo violin, at Fountain Street Church. Fong's concert takes place as part of the GRSO's Concert à la Carte series, a forum that puts the spotlight on the symphony's individual performers. Her concert is especially noteworthy for emphasizing new, classically oriented music -- a genre responsible for palpitations among a throng of soft-hearted classicists.

"Maybe I'm just an experimentalist at heart," Fong says, explaining her musical selection. "In college [at Northwestern University] I volunteered to play new music that no other violinists would. I figured that in the Concert à la Carte series, I can do new music and it will be associated with the symphony; so maybe people won't be so terrified of going to it."

Fong is among a small group of area musicians and composers helping to push classical music's envelope by performing the works of modern, "experimental" composers, like Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, and Nyman. Though registering as mere blips of creative seismic activity, these efforts have had the combined effect of awakening a growing number of open-minded enthusiasts to music's evolution.

Like much of the new music being presented these days, Fong's selection of Nyman is not without controversy. A former music critic (he coined the term minimal music to describe the late 1960s musical movement), Nyman has become a visibly handy target for the musically effete. His work, critics complain, is derivative and formulaic. In fact, Nyman's music is rife with references to other works, including neo-Renaissance pieces to 1950s rock. But then that's nothing new. Everyone from Mozart to Vaughan Williams drank eagerly from the folk and popular culture of their day.

Then why such animosity toward Nyman? "I think whenever anything is revolutionary or new, the establishment is going to rebel against it, because it's against the status quo," says Fong. "With Nyman especially, people think, 'Oh, it sounds like pop music.' If the music has any remote connection to what's popular, a lot of the classical establishment push it away. It's a superiority thing."

Nyman's foray into composition began in 1976, when, for a production of Italian librettist Carlo Goldoni's Il Campiello, he arranged eighteenth century Venetian popular music for an eccentric street band of medieval instruments. In short order, Nyman's idiosyncratic style was in demand by the equally eccentric film director Peter Greenaway, resulting in a relationship that has lasted over ten films.

It was in Greenaway's 1989 film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, that Fong first heard Nyman. "The music really stuck out in my mind," she recalls. A friend at Yale helped her track down the composer through a "who's who" book. It was 1992, and Nyman told her he had just finished recording the score to Prospero's Books.

"This was before The Piano, which of course pushed him over the edge in popularity," says Fong. "I was able to get a lot of this music sent to me, probably because I had contacted him before he became so popular. Needless to say he is no longer listed in the 'who's who.'"

Nyman's distinctive style -- simple tunes and chord progressions, an insistent beat, and loud dynamics -- is evident in Yamamoto Perpetuo. "It's so long and so involved, it sort of encompasses all of his styles," says Fong. "It has the neo-Renaissance style of the music he wrote for Greenaway's films and more of his 'minimalist' style from The Piano."

While sour-faced critics stew over Nyman's popularity, only time can sort out the composer's historical significance. For now, Fong isn't going to wait. "I think two elements must exist for music to live on," she says. "They are incredible craftsmanship and original style. I've found them in Nyman's music and I'm willing to play pretty much anything he's written."

Grand Rapids Press
January 12, 1995 (page E7)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Christina Fong shows you're wrong to think classical means centuries-old

It doesn't have to be old to sound good.

Sometimes it's hard to explain that to people who think classical music ended with the demise of gas lamps, hooped skirts and buggy whips.

Yet violinist and new-music enthusiast Christina Fong reminded listeners that contemporary composers have interesting things to say as well in a Grand Rapids Symphony Concert à la Carte recital Wednesday afternoon in Fountain Street Church's Chapel.

Premieres are uncommon, yet Fong went three-for-three in the new-music department with first performances by Nathan Barber and Arved Ashby and a North American premiere by Michael Nyman.

The highlight of the program was Nyman's Yamamoto Perpetuo, a lengthy work for unaccompanied violin.

Best known for his score for the Academy Award winning film The Piano, Nyman is a scholar, critic, conductor and composer whose minimalist-influenced music ruffles the feathers of the blue bloods in the classical music establishment. But his short phrases and bouncy rhythms, which bear a resemblance to pop music, have found favor among the great unwashed.

In Yamamoto Perpetuo, Nyman uses a traditional Japanese folk melody as a point of departure for a set of variations, thus combining a static Oriental melody with the Occidental compositional device of development. The multifaceted work occasionally is quite subtle. At other times, the rip-roaring sections resemble a Japanese hoe-down.

Generally harmonized throughout, Nyman calls upon the performer to be a mini-orchestra unto himself, and as the work progresses, Nyman raises the difficulty level to a high degree.

Fong gave an impressive performance, playing the pizzicato passages with kyoto-like delicacy, and attacking boisterous variations with vim and vigor. Her phrasing was excellent, and her command of the violin's upper harmonics, outstanding.

Whether it's through training or inclination, many string players are sectional musicians who are better suited to fitting into an ensemble than performing as a soloist. Though Fong is a member of the Grand Rapids Symphony, she has the aggressive, gutsy technique of a genuine solo artist.

Though many of the variations in Yamamoto Perpetuo are quite interesting, the work lasted over 30 minutes, which is too long for my taste. If Nyman intended the length and repetition to convey a sense of endlessness, he went on about 10 minutes longer than he needed to make the point.

Ashby's For Morton Feldman featured the unusual combination of violin, piano and a single handbell. Inspired by the music of Feldman, Ashby's provocative seven-minute work proved a unique blend of progression and stasis. On a small scale, the motives and phrases appeared to move forward in a linear fashion, but as a whole, the piece was rather cyclical and endless.

Fong, accompanied by pianist Deborah Gross and percussionist Glenn Freeman, gave a mesmerizing performance that achieved a fine balance between the two extremes of harmonic motion and melodic rest.

The program opened with Nathan Barber's more cerebral 5 minutes … precisely, an interesting work for violin, piano and clock. Actually, the sound of a small grandfather clock on stage was dubbed by a metronome, but the point was made that the piece would last exactly five minutes. Regular pulse of the clock contrasted with periodic outbursts in the violin and piano, which also generally were opposed to each other. In short, there was a whole lot going on.

Grand Rapids Press
January 13, 1995 (page B5)

Art series explores healing (at UICA)

7:30pm Friday: The Words and Sounds of Healing, a program of music and literature presented by nine writers who will read their works and music by area composers dealing with the healing and grieving process.

Writers whose works are to be heard are Miriam Pederson, Annamarie White, Anne Reynolds, S. Butler Robinson, Carolyn White, Jackie Bartley, Linda Albert, Harry Dietermann and Cullen Bailey Burns.

The composers are Will Gay Bottje, Roelof Bijkerk and Debby Topliff.

On-the-Town
December 1995 (page 17)
by Christopher Scapelliti

New Music!

Michael Nyman, Arvo Pärt and Henryk Mikolaj Górecki Starring in Attack of the Killer Post-Minimalists!

Their talent was too huge! Europe was too small! Now they're climbing to the top of America's classical music charts and heading straight for Grand Rapids! This month local musicians give them their due, courtesy of the Grand Rapids Symphony.

Long before there were records to sell and record sales to keep track of, composers earned their fame the hard way: one concert at a time. Unfortunately, the hard way has remained the only way for all but a few modern classical composers. Up until five years ago, a warm, breathing classicist didn't stand a chance of earning widespread attention. Those who did -- the John Cages, the Philip Glasses -- found their fame liberally doused with the vitriol of outraged purists determined to claim the classical form as their own life-supported vegetable.

But change is in the air. Over the past few years, composers of new, classically based music have begun to shine, first as dim flickers on the periphery of popular conscience, and, lately, as a few roaring flames. The evidence is in the record charts. Recent recordings of music by Polish composer Henryk Górecki have orbited the top spots in Billboard's classical music charts for months at a time. Even casual listeners have become familiar with the work of British composer Michael Nyman, courtesy of his score for the 1993 Academy Award winning film The Piano.

This popularity comes as no surprise to Christina Fong, principal violinist with the Grand Rapids Symphony. A dedicated follower of new composers (she routinely scours New York newspapers for evidence of neoclassical life), Fong, along with her local contemporaries has been staging concerts of new music in Grand Rapids for years, each enjoying greater attention than the last.

This month, Fong takes the torch in hand again, with pianist Deborah Gross, to perform Living European Chart-Busting Post-Minimalist Composers, featuring the complete music for violin and piano of Górecki, Nyman, and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

If the ambitions of such a title seem to border on pretentious, think again. "These are the top selling composers in classical genre," Fong points out. "All three of them do very well on the Billboard charts."

So many Europeans. So little time.

What the charts fail to explain is why America is experiencing an explosion of European talent unseen since rock and roll's British Invasion of the 1960s. "They're really the only people writing in this post-minimal style," Fong explains, "even though minimalism is an American innovation that ironically the majority of American composers have rejected."

While mass popularity is far from the goal of the post-minimalists, they have doubtlessly struck a nerve in the culture. The earliest evidence of this was in the late 1980s, when the Hilliard Ensemble's recordings of Pärt's Passio and Arbos hit the top 25 on the classical music charts. In 1993, the London Sinfonietta's recording of Górecki's 3rd Symphony spent eight months at number 1 to become the tenth-best-selling classical recording since Billboard began the chart, in 1964. The biggest of all was Nyman's score for The Piano, which has stayed in the top 10 of Billboard's crossover chart since July of 1994.

All of which begs the obvious question: If Nyman and his contemporaries are so popular, why does it take individual performers, like Fong and Gross, to bring this music to concert going audiences? It's a question Fong has asked herself many times. "One thing I find ironic in new music today is that it's the record companies who are the ambitious and creative, risk taking organizations. It's really the most expensive thing to put on, but they're willing to take the risk. Unfortunately performing organizations are not quite as ambitious."

Nor are they necessarily any more successful than Fong when it comes programming. In recent years, Fong has often seen better attendance at her concerts of new music than she has seen at concerts of traditional works. "I think the market is out there but somehow we're taught that this [music] offends people. It's only been in the last forty or fifty years that the musical establishment has started thinking this way -- 'we don't want to offend this musical benefactor, who don't want to offend the people who give us this grant.' But it's clear in the a record sales that there's a market."

A Post-Minimal Christmas.

Given the month's holiday nature, Fong has arranged the program around Górecki, whose music is built upon Poland's religious and folk culture. For Fong, the inclusion of Nyman and Pärt was natural, not only for their chart success but for their compositional style as well. "Like Górecki, Nyman and Pärt have sort of combined minimalism and elements from medieval and renaissance into their music.

Fong and Gross's concert opens with Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) and closes with his Fratres (1980) both of which represent his "tintinnabuli" style, in which the composer builds upon one tonality. At the program's center is Nyman's On the Fiddle (1993), three works based on his scores for films by British director Peter Greenaway. Of the three composers featured, Nyman has garnered the most controversy for freely cross-referencing everything from neo-renaissance to 1950s rock in his compositions.

The two oldest works on the program are Górecki's Variations, Op. 4 and Sonatina in One Movement, Op. 8, both written in 1956. "The two Górecki pieces are in a folk style, which is his early style," Fong explains. "He based a lot of his music on Polish folk music."

While the post-minimalists continue to pound the charts, they still have one thing in common with the composers of old: the live concert is still as vital as ever to building an audience. Says Fong, "About forty years ago Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Copland were recorded all the time, and the classical music establishment performed and endorsed their works. I feel that I'm carrying on that tradition."

Columbus Alive
April 3, 1996 (page 12)

Arved Ashby and Christina Fong: A Program of European Post-Minimalists brings an evening of contemporary music to OSU's Weigel Auditorium this Friday. Showcasing the spare, harmonic works of such composers as Henryk Górecki, Michael Nyman and Arvo Pärt, OSU professor Ashby and guest artist Fong will coax the stirring music from the violin and piano.

Columbus Guardian
April 4, 1996 (page 25)
by Tracy Zollinger Turner

Giving it up for Good Friday

Lent and "post-minimalist" music -- peanut butter and jelly? Ohio State University professor of piano Arved Ashby thinks so. That's why he and guest violinist Christina Fong will celebrate Good Friday by performing a program of works composed by European post-minimalists Henryk Górecki, Michael Nyman, and Arvo Pärt. It will be the first time many of the works have ever been played in Ohio.

The duo will play Górecki's early Variations and Sonatina in One Movement. The Polish composer is widely known for his Third Symphony (The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) -- one recording of the piece has recently become one of the best-selling classical discs in history. They will also play Nyman's On the Fiddle (Nyman wrote the soundtrack to the film The Piano) as well as Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel and Fratres.

Other Paper
April 4, 1996 (page 29)

It's modernist mania Friday night at 8 in OSU's Weigel Hall, 1866 College Road North, when Christina Fong, who's a violinist with the Grand Rapids Symphony, and pianist Arved Ashby -- a professor of music history at OSU -- team up to play the music of Michael (The Piano) Nyman, Henryk Górecki and Arvo Pärt. All of these guys are popular modern classical music composers. Go on -- be adventurous. Besides, it's free.

On-the-Town
May 1996 (page 6)
by Paul Samra

New Music

Henryk the Great

Grand Rapids Rolls Out Its Best For Polish Composer Henryk Górecki

It's not surprising that the music of a man who grew up just miles away from the Nazi death camp called Auschwitz should have a distinctly melancholy air.

But Polish composer Henryk Górecki has moved beyond mere lamentation, rousing the modern listener with liturgical orchestrations rooted in spirituality. From his bold exploration of atonal and avant garde music in the 1960s to his more recent purveyance of mystical, hypnotic works -- like the 1992 release Symphony No. 3 (Elektra Nonesuch Records), one of the best-selling classical CDs of all time -- Górecki has woven a connecting thread of hope and endurance.

"The man fulfills everything emotional and endearing about music," says Mark Thomas, a composer and the former music director of the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Grand Rapids. "He hits it right it on the head." Now music director for the Cathedral Church of the Immaculate Conception in Portland, Maine, Thomas returns to Grand Rapids this month to perform Górecki's Cantata for Organ as part of the St. Cecilia Music Society's An Evening With Henryk Górecki. The concert -- featuring performances by Thomas, the St. Cecilia Youth Chorale, the Grand Rapids Youth Symphony, among many others -- will be attended by Górecki himself, who will speak about the pieces performed.

Thomas, who's been studying Górecki for twelve years, last performed the composer's work in June 1994 as part of the Music For Sacred Space concert at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Thomas's reverence for the Polish artist -- as well as his own efforts to popularize new classical music in the Grand Rapids area helped sow the seeds for this month's visit, which was made possible through the cooperation of St. Cecilia, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the Lira Ensemble, Chicago's Polish/American musical organization of which Górecki is a frequent guest.

Given the fact that the elusive composer is averse to traveling, the Grand Rapids visit is quite a coup. Add to this the sheer weight of Górecki's reputation, and you have the makings of a spectacle.

"So much of what we call 'new music' has had bad connotations over the years," says Thomas. "It's generally known as that disparate, way-out 1960s stuff that turned people off. But it's perhaps Górecki more than anyone else who's brought it to its full fruition, made it accessible in a very moving, exciting way."

Recent history tells us differently. Up through the mid 1970s, Górecki's strong emotional appeal was eclipsed by fellow Polish composers Pendereski and Witold Lutowslowski, whose ornate notational works remained in vogue and were studied largely throughout Europe. While the two basked in their celebrated academic circles, touring the continent with an entourage of musical aesthetes, Górecki remained in his native village of Katowice, working the land and attending mass with his countrymen.

"The result, I think, is an acute sense of spiritual strength and caring that comes through his music," says Thomas, "of cultural perseverance in the face of Nazi and communist aggression, [as well as] of care, responsibility, and healing. Górecki is a man for his people, and his artistic vision of hope has touched the world, catapulting him to a greatness guys like Pendereski never knew.

While Thomas cites the past decade as Górecki's most accessible, melody-oriented period (recordings of his work have stayed at the top of the Billboard charts for a year and a half), his own contribution to this month's concert will be an older, darker, and more convoluted selection from 1968 titled Cantata for Organ.

"What strikes me most about Górecki's more recent music is the building of these huge, anticipatory gestures," says Thomas. "The music hangs and floats in simple tonal fields that grow as he staggers them. He creates a culminating anxiety that's sonorously beautiful."

By contrast, Cantata for Organ is "a big, wonderful mess," says Thomas, "full of dissonant chords and misleading melodies. It's violent, loud, and full of terror, yet still has that great element of spirituality found in all his work."

Thomas, who's studied the sheet music but never actually heard a recording of the rare piece, can't hide his apprehension about playing it in front of its creator. "My worst fear is that he'll stop me halfway through and say, My God, what are you doing? But heck, at least then I can say I've been tutored by Górecki."

In addition to the Cantata, the concert will feature two unpublished, unrecorded Górecki compositions performed by the St. Cecilia Youth Chorale called Two Songs of Tuwim. The songs -- one concerning seasonal change, the other playful birds -- are a capella works for treble choir that take their inspiration from the works of Polish poet Jullian Tuwim. "The first is so sad and deep at times I can barely lift my hands," says Paul Caldwell, director of the chorale and artistic director for St. Cecilia. "But the other is funny and very animated. This is music that washes you in contemplative sound. Both are trance-inducing. And you'll find yourself humming the stuff as stress relief."

Also on the program is the Calvin College Campus Choir and Capella performing Górecki's Amen, an a capella number influenced by the polyphonic choral works of sixteenth century composers Palestrina and Thomas Luis de Victoria; the Grand Rapids Youth Symphony Orchestra performing Górecki's Three Pieces in Old Style; Christina Fong, principal violinist with the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra, performing Górecki's Sonata in One Movement, Opus 1 and, with pianist Arved Ashby, Variations for Violin and Piano; and flutist Ed Clifford and mezzo soprano Linn Maxwell Keller performing various works by the composer.

St. Cecilia's concert may prove an unprecedented musical event in Grand Rapids as it brings together such a variety of elements from the community to honor a world-renowned composer in the flesh. "The sound," promises Caldwell, "will roll around in St. Adalbert for days after."

Grand Rapids Press
May 2, 1996 (page B8)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Tribute is well received by master himself

There's a rumor out regarding last year's unexplained disappearance of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the celebrated American atheist: She heard a recording of Henryk Górecki's music and discovered God.

All right, I made that up. But many who have heard the Polish composer's music have noticed the deep spirituality within it, which raises the question of where that spirituality comes from.

Those who have heard and been moved by Górecki's music, such as the million-selling 1992 recording of his Symphony No. 3, filled the Basilica Church of St. Adalbert Wednesday for An Evening With Górecki.

With the 62-year-old composer in attendance, nearly 400 area musicians participated in the program that drew upwards of 800 people for 90 minutes of contemporary music that was written within most of their lives.

"For a composer, it is the greatest joy that someone wants to play his music, and someone wants to listen to his music," Górecki said, through his translator, Lucyna Migala, at the end of the program.

Górecki's most captivating voice seems to be in his choral music, and the two choral works on the program captured the essence of the evening.

The St. Cecilia Youth Chorale, directed by Paul CaIdwell, was given quite a challenge with Dwie Piosenki (Two Songs). The first song,The Year and Misery, is bleak and as repetitive as the inevitable change of the seasons.

With the bouncy Bird Gossip, a humorous depiction of a squabble between barnyard birds, the chorus met the challenge of declaiming the nonstop patter in the difficult Polish language while producing a sound such that you almost could hear bells ringing and a harp strumming behind the voices.

Górecki himself, seated in the middle of the audience, smiled broadly and applauded vigorously the performance of the 24-year-old songs.

Singing in English a text from Shakespeare's Hamlet, mezzo-soprano Linn Maxwell Keller's voice was angelic and ethereal in the deeply spiritual Good Night, In Memoriam Michael Vyner, written in 1990 in memory of one of Górecki's leading advocates in England.

Alto flutist Ed Clifford offered a haunting obbligato, and pianist Mary Scanlan and percussionist Glenn Freeman contributed atmospheric accompaniment.

Clifford and Scanlan also offered a satisfying performance of Górecki's For You, Anne-Lill a duo for flute and piano. The somberness was weighty at the beginning and end while Clifford deftly handled the lightening fast passages in the middle.

Violinist Christina Fong and pianist Arved Ashby were featured in two other early works. With the extended Variations Górecki shows himself to be a vigorous young man as well the offspring of an old culture, and Fong and Ashby brought out and balanced both qualities, giving a heroic performance of the final variation.

Organist Mark Thomas, former music director of the Cathedral of St. Andrew until last July, returned to Grand Rapids to open the concert with Górecki's Cantata for Organ.

Nothing resembling the slow, graceful arches of the Third Symphony, this work is a jarring, jolting array of clashing intervals and colors that is at once dramatic and tragic.

The strings of the Grand Rapids Youth Symphony, under John Varineau, performed Górecki's Three Pieces in Old Style, an older work that nevertheless hinted at Górecki's more recent compositions.

The reverberation in the church is a bit strong for strings and tends to shortchange the inner voices, but Varineau and the orchestra captured the mesmerizing nature of the outer movements while giving a friskiness to the dance like middle piece.

The Calvin College Campus Choir and Capella, under the baton of Sean Ivory, joined together to close the evening with Górecki's popular Amen, a popular work. "We all know our world is a much more beautiful place because you are in it," Caldwell told Górecki and the audience during the concert. Amen.

On-the-Town
November 1996 (page 7)
by Christopher Scapelliti

New Music

The New Noise

From Bach To Nine Inch Nails: Welcome To Totalism

The problem started with Eating Living Monkeys. The modern musical work by New York composer David Lang was slated for a Grand Rapids Symphony concert during the orchestra's 1989-'90 season. Like most new compositions undertaken by regional orchestras the piece was safely tucked away among the concert's more conventional fare, where, presumably, it wouldn't draw too much attention to itself.

No such luck. Well before the concert date, the symphony-going public was getting unruly. Christina Fong, the GRSO's principal violinist and newly appointed associate concert master, recalls: "There were [ticket holders] who called up and complained before they even heard the piece, just because they couldn't get past the title. People were saying they wanted their money back."

The reaction was especially ironic, considering that Lang's title was meant to show how absurd stereotypes result in cultural biases. "He thought this title was the epitome of such an exaggeration," explains Fong, "the notion of a culture eating living monkeys. It was a tribute to how things can get so blown out of proportion due to people's ignorance."

"I did find it ironic that people were condemning this thing, when the whole idea of it was to bring that kind of ignorance to light."

To add to matters, the orchestra made short shrift of the piece, focusing its rehearsal efforts instead on the program's showcase works. "It was a prime example of not taking a new piece of music seriously." notes Fong. "It was blown off during rehearsals and not performed terribly well at all."

Now, some six years later, Fong has a chance to, among other things, right the wrongs of the past. Having established a reputation for local performances and premieres of works by contemporary composers -- including Arvo Pärt, Michael Nyman, and Philip Glass -- Fong will join local musicians this month to present New York Noise: The Totalists, a noon hour concert featuring works by Lang and contemporary composers Michael Gordon and Lois V Vierk. The concert will be the first music event in West Michigan devoted to the music of totalism, a movement that embraces a kitchen sink of influences, ranging from classical works to contemporary music forms.

Where minimalists like Nyman or Pärt have informed their work with references to past cultural movements, the totalists are noteworthy for drawing inspiration equally from academia and last week's grunge-rock release. Like the post modernists, they love the range of styles available and harbor no clique mentality with regard to musical institutions. In that way, the totalists are truly an American phenomenon, appropriate to our melting pot culture.

Mark Swed, a journalist who has followed and written extensively about modern composers, explained the rise of totalism in a recent online article: "This is the music of a new generation of composers … who grew up in a musical world unlike anything previous generations had known. By the time they came on the scene, the big battles of 20th-century music had already been fought. … Music from all eras and all cultures had become handily available on recordings. But pop, as every kid growing up in America well knew, was the world's real and inescapable music; the backbeat, the universal language of the global village."

The first evidence of the movement came in 1987, when Lang and Gordon co-founded Bang On A Can, a festival for new music in New York City. The festival is unique in that it has always made room for a variety of genres, whether it be the established music of the "uptown" academics or the avant-garde experiments of the "downtown" crowd.

"That's exactly the opposite of orchestras," says Fong, "which I honestly think try to trick people into hearing a new piece by hiding it on the program. It's almost like they have the mentality of, If you're good and eat your peas, you can have your dessert. It's not really conducive to creative and honest programming."

Fong pulls no such punches with this month's concert. Opening with Lang's 1981 composition Illumination Rounds (performed with pianist Deborah Gross), she'll work her way through Gordon's 1992 composition Industry (written for solo cello and electronics and re-scored for for solo violin for this performance). For the finale, Fong and Gross will join with Robert Byrens, viola, and Stacey Bosman, cello for Vierk's River Beneath the River. The most established of the concert's composers, Vierk has based many of her works oh her own principles of "exponential structure," in which elements of time and pitch movement change exponentially with the emotional thrust of the music.

In many ways, Vierk's principles underscore the totalists' bottom line: it's about being open to all possible options. Says Fong, "That notion really isn't anything terribly new. I think most composers throughout history have been in touch with what's going on in society, and I think they develop an intuitiveness that can result in a great deal of activity; unlike universities and orchestras, where people get stuck in a system."

"And I think that once you get yourself in touch with society, not only are you going to appeal to and get an idea of what the organic part of society is about; you can also figure out what the organizations are about. Whereas sometimes, when you're in the machine, you can no longer figure out what's going on because you miss the big picture."

Lanthorn
February 13, 1997 (page 11)
by Melissa Vandenbroek

Fong to play Philip Glass

The Artist-Faculty Series continues this month with violinist, Christina Fong on Feb. 20 at 4 p.m. in the Louis Armstrong Theatre in the Calder Fine Arts Center.

Fong will present a multi-media concert featuring the complete works for solo violin by Philip Glass. This is a first-ever performance of this caliber for Grand Valley State University.

Fong, a violin instructor at Grand Valley, is also a member of the Faculty Quartet, the Grand Rapids Symphony, and Next Generation, an ensemble that represents civic and educational concerts throughout West Michigan.

Philip Glass, Musical America's 1985 Musician of the Year, has written for opera, orchestra, film, theater, dance, chorus, as well as his own group; the Philip Glass Ensemble.

A graduate of the Juilliard School, Glass has written music for diverse artistic projects, such as the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

This is the first complete performance of Philip Glass's works for unaccompanied strings.

Grand Rapids Press
February 16, 1997 (page F6)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

GVSU's Christina Fong presents string works by Glass

Composer Philip Glass has created more than seven full-length operas, four chamber operas and a half dozen film scores.

The Metropolitan Opera commissioned him to write The Voyage, which the company presented in 1992 on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World.

CBS Masterworks, now a division of Sony Records, offered Glass its first composer recording contract since Aaron Copland, and his records have sold by the tens of thousands.

Yet despite those successes and more, the pioneer minimalist composer remains something of an outsider in most classical concert halls.

Christina Fong would like to change that.

"I think he's the most important composer of the late 20th century, in that he came up with a completely original method of composition," she said. "Very few of the great composers didn't do something groundbreaking that changed the direction of music."

Fong, a violin instructor at Grand Valley State University, will perform an entire program of Glass's solo music for violin and viola on Thursday at the university in Allendale.

"Everything he's ever written for solo strings," Fong said. "Two of them will be highly amplified -- like to rock concert levels."

Glass, a native of Baltimore who studied at the University of Chicago, The Juilliard School and with French composer Darius Milhaud at Aspen, Colo., showed early promise as a modernist composer during his student days in the 1950s and 1960s.

But in the 1960s, while studying in Paris with legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, Glass had the opportunity to work with renowned Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar.

The influence of Indian music, particularly the fluid, non-linear expression of rhythm, inspired Glass to repudiate his earlier music and develop a new technique of composition using tonal melodic material in a droning, hypnotically repetitive process.

Glass's landmark works include his 1976 Opera Einstein on the Beach and film scores such as Koyaanisqatsi. With his Philip Glass Ensemble, using amplified keyboards, voices and wind instruments all fed through a mixer, the composer has performed for nearly three decades, giving some 100 concerts a year and appearing in such unlikely venues as NBC-TV's Saturday Night Live.

Although the Cleveland Orchestra commissioned him to write The Light, Glass's music rarely is performed by American orchestras.

"The Grand Rapids Symphony, like most other orchestras, has yet to perform anything by Glass," said Fong, who is associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony.

But Glass, who turns 60 this year, has produced a body of work that deserves equal treatment to other major American composers, such as Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein, according to Fong.

"When Copland was alive, we played a lot of his music. When he was in his 50s and 60s, we played a lot of his compositions," she said.

"Glass's orchestral composition is a lot more extensive than either of those composers, and he's already written much more orchestral music than either of those composers," she said. "At the rate he's going, he'll probably write 10 or more symphonies."

As a composer who has revolutionized contemporary music, Glass still is considered rather avant-garde in many circles. But with some 30 years' worth of work and development behind him, Glass's music should no longer be considered something new.

"This isn't new music. It's only new because it isn't heard," Fong said. "I look at this as old music. Three of the pieces I'm going to perform were written before I was 4, so for me that approaches classical music."

A member of the Grand Rapids Symphony since 1988 and an instructor at GVSU since 1990, Fong was named associate concertmaster of the symphony last year. She also performs with the GVSU Faculty String Quartet, the Grand Rapids Symphony's Calder String Quartet, and the Next Generation Sextet.

A graduate of Northwestern University with bachelor's and master's degrees in music, Fong has given North American or Michigan premieres of new works by composers such as Arvo Pärt, Donald Erb, John Cage, Michael Nyman and Henryk Górecki, among others.

She met Glass for the first time last summer at a Buddhist retreat.

"He gave a talk, and I did get to talk to him several times, and I got to play for him," she said. "He's a fascinating person. He has a very intellectual mind, and he's very complicated, but he's also really down to earth."

Grand Rapids Press
February 21, 1997 (page B7)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Fong on Glass makes for violin show like no other

Never have I been to a violin recital where they passed out earplugs at the door.

Nor have I been to a concert where nearly half the audience had walked out by the end of the program.

Such is the kind of afternoon you'll get when you put Christina Fong to work playing the music of Philip Glass.

Fong, a violinist and violist, presented an extremely rare performance of the complete works for unaccompanied strings by the revolutionary minimalist composer on Thursday afternoon as part of the Grand Valley State University Artist-Faculty Series in the Louis Armstrong Theater. The amplified sound of violin and viola, bits of pre-recorded dialogue and lighting effects made for an unusual multimedia performance for an audience that began with about 200.

But at the center of it all was a talented musician playing solo works by a brilliantly unorthodox composer.

Glass, who turns 60 years old this year, remains a controversial figure in music. Time magazine once dubbed him the world's greatest living composer, and he is widely admired for such works as his massive 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, which has been heard all over the world, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

While Glass has won many crossover fans from pop/rock music, his non-linear, hypnotic, repetitious style of composition, heavily influenced by non-Western rhythms and values, still is discounted by many classical musicians.

Enjoyable, if overlong

Personally, I enjoy his music, though an hour and 45 minutes worth for a solo string instrument did become tedious.

Fong, unquestionably, is an accomplished musician. Associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony, she has the smooth, flowing technique necessary to evoke the tranquil lull in a piece such as the Opening from A Madrigal Opera.

While it might seem easy to play the steady drone of arpeggios that Glass so often uses, it actually takes more concentration and stamina than performing more familiar fare.

On the other hand, performing Glass's music still requires an organic sense of musicality that, say, a computer just couldn't reproduce. With a work such as Gradus, originally composed for soprano saxophone in 1968, Fong capably communicated the repetitious rhythmic quality while bringing out the pentatonic melodic character of the piece.

Just as Glass's music poses challenges for the performer, it also takes some practice for the listener to get the hang of. One can't hear his music in a linear fashion, listening for a progression from beginning to end with assorted climaxes and denouements along the way. Rather, the listener must suspend his sense of forward motion and the steady progression of time and attempt to experience the music in the moment.

Role of the audience

The challenge for the audience is to be mentally prepared at the beginning for that kind of sonic experience because you can't suddenly switch it on several minutes into a piece. I suspect that mental fatigue is what led people to start sneaking out of the darkened theater after a couple of selections. Either that or they felt dinner calling.

The performance of Knee Play 2 from Einstein on the Beach proved to be a highlight of the program in more ways than one. While dressed in a long white robe, hidden upstage behind a scrim with offset lighting, Fong dug in with the very loud and energetic amplified violin solo, accompanied by a spoken audio track of pre-recorded, non sequitur phrases and the bright glare of strobe lights that jarred the audience out of its complacency.

The program opened with a work titled 1+1, a mesmerizing drone for solo percussion, accompanied by equally repetitions surreal images projected on an overhead screen that set the stage for the performance.

It's difficult to say how Glass's music will be regarded in the future. But Fong deserves credit for a well played, thoughtful presentation of music by a composer who has changed the course of classical music within our lifetimes.

Lanthorn
February 26, 1998 (page 10)
by Laura Miller

Faculty violinist performs multi-media concert

Thursday, Feb. 26, Christina Fong performs a free concert of solo violin compositions by renowned composer John Cage. The concert begins at 4 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center Recital Hall.

"Don't expect Beethoven, Brahms or Bach ... but something very electronic sounding," said Fong, adjunct instructor of violin at Grand Valley.

The program includes Cage's One⁶ [A,B,C], One¹⁰, and Glenn Freeman's Violin and Vacuum. The pieces will be performed simultaneously with One¹¹, an accompanying film.

Fong is hesitant to disclose information about the "multimedia event."

"Part of an artist's tool is to leave things hanging," she said. "Music is not about words alone."

As well as working for Grand Valley, Fong is currently the associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony and plays in the Next Generation Sextet, a string quartet with electronic percussion.

Fong has held several orchestral positions across the country and has performed premiers of compositions by composers such as Philip Glass and Igor Stravinsky.

Fong has performed numerous other pieces by Cage and is recording this selection of "number music" for her "first commercially available recording."

"As far as I know, it's the first time these pieces have been performed together (as a pair) in a single concert," Fong said.

Cage wrote 45 "number pieces" as a culmination of his career. They represent his rethinking about music's essential nature and its relation to the performer and listener.

the Paper.
May 7, 1998 (page 7)

Mother's Day Benefit Concert

The Grand Rapids Federation of Musicians and the Professional Orchestral Musicians Association will present a scholarship benefit concert on May 10. The concert, which will include works by Prokofiev, Mendelssohn, Philip Glass and others, will be held at 3pm at Trinity United Methodist Church, 1100 Lake Drive in Grand Rapids.

The concert will help fund two music scholarships offered by the federation. It also will help a new scholarship.

The federation has given more than $32,000 in scholarships to 144 music students since 1961, says the GRFM's Jason Economides.

The GRFM is a non-profit organization of more than 350 professional musicians who are involved in a wide range of music, including jazz, rock, theater, country, folk, ethnic, chamber and classical.

The objectives of the organization are to protect the general interest and welfare of its members, to promote good faith and fair dealings between its members and employees and to promote the use of live music.

The program will include chamber works by familiar composers: Sergei Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes for clarinet string quartet and piano; Felix Mendelssohn's Sinfonia No. 9 for strings and Philip Glass's A Madrigal Opera for viola and electronics. Also on the program are pieces by lesser known composers Herman Goetz, Peter Warlock and Nigel Westlake.

Grand Rapids Press
May 9, 1998 (page A8)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Mother's Day concert is benefit for music scholarships of note

In more than 30 years, the Grand Rapids Federation of Musicians has given away more than $30,000.

But the organization would like to give away more.

Members of the musicians' union and Professional Orchestra Musicians Association, the players' association of Grand Rapids Symphony musicians, will hold a benefit concert Sunday afternoon to raise money to fund music scholarships offered annually to area high school and college students.

"The union has given out over $32,000 since 1961 to 144 music students," said Jason Economides, violinist with the Grand Rapids symphony.

The GRFM annually awards the Robert Madura Scholarship, a $600 prize, to an outstanding orchestral string player chosen by audition for study at a summer music program. Madura, who died of leukemia in 1989, was principal cellist of the Grand Rapids Symphony.

The union Local 56 also awards a number of Donald D. Armstrong Scholarships to high school juniors, based on recommendations of their music teachers. The $100 prize, which also is for summer music study, honors the former director of music for the Grand Rapids Public Schools.

But the money doesn't go as far as it used to.

"Six hundred dollars seven years ago was a good amount, but it's not the same today," Economides said.

The 90-minute program on Sunday will include such works as Prokofiev'sOverture on Hebrew Themes for clarinet, string quartet and piano; and Mendelssohn's Sinfonia No. 9 for strings.

More eclectic works will include Nigel Westlake's Omphallo Centric Lecture for four marimbas, and Philip Glass's A Madrigal Opera for viola and electronics, the latter performed by violist Christina Fong.

Union officials also hope to raise money to begin a new scholarship fund in memory of John Kik, a former president of the Grand Rapids Federation of Musicians, who died in 1994.

the Paper.
October 29, 1998 (page 15)

books/calendar

Sun. the 1st

Embellish Handbell Choir: at Trinity Lutheran Church, 2700 E. Fulton St. The local handbell choir and guest artist, GR Symphony violinist Christina Fong, will perform Music Of The World, which features music from Tibet, Indonesia, Germany, Africa, Japan, the United States and Native America. The concert also will feature the premiere performance of an arrangement of Suite for Violin and Gamelan, arranged by Embellish founder Carl Wiltse. 4pm. Free.

An open-ended touch of Glass

This weekend, fans of the music of Philip Glass have a rare opportunity to hear his unrecorded work A Madrigal Opera of Mind, thanks to the Tibetan Cultural Center.

Christina Fong (violin|viola) and Glenn Freeman (electro-percussion) will perform the 1980 composition at the center on Sunday at 3 p.m., with all proceeds going to the center in aid of the Kalachakra for World Peace 1999.

Glass describes this intriguing piece as "a chamber opera with an unspecified story line," and elaborates, "My idea was to write a musical/dramatic work that could, with different direction, be realized with different narrative context." Each incarnation of the piece therefore has a different title, causing a certain degree of confusion among concert-goers. This time around, it's being given a concert performance, with a slide show of current conditions in Tibet.

The choice of venue is far from coincidental; Philip Glass was director of Tibet House in New York for may years, and still helps produce their annual benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. This benefit performance was arranged after an invitation from Takster Rinpoche, elder brother of the Dalai Lama. Glass's continuing work on behalf of Tibet, says Glenn Freeman, "is bearing fruit in many ways, and it's great to be playing a small but active role in all this."

Christina Fong is a violin instructor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, and associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra. Her acquaintance with contemporary music is thorough. Besides having presented North American or Michigan premieres of work by (among many others) Stravinsky, Pärt, Glass, Cage, Górecki and Morton Feldman, she is to perform the world premiere of Michael Nyman's On The Fiddle for violin and strings with the Grand Rapids Symphony in January 1999. She and Freeman are agreed on Glass's stature in the music world.

"Philip Glass is the most important living composer of recent history," says Fong. "He's like Mozart or Bach because he came up with an original composition structure."

Some of the musical elements, according to Freeman, are similar to those heard in Koyaanisqatsi, Glass's acclaimed collaboration with film-maker Geoffrey Reggio, which comes from the same period. There is some "eastern influence," but, Freeman remarks, "with Glass I always felt this was not always an auditory influence but a philosophical one." These less tangible elements, he feels, can nevertheless be heard in the final result.

A Madrigal Opera is an unconventional and risky piece, even for such an innovative composer. But, says Glass, "for those who have the nerves for it, having an open-ended piece of this kind can be very exciting.

Bloomington Independent
November 12, 1998 (page 19)
by Peter Schimpf

Tibet seen through rare Glass

Considering the popularity of composer Philip Glass, it seems odd that there aren't that many opportunities to hear his work performed, particularly the operas. There are a few reasons why. First of all, Glass's music requires a tremendous amount of concentration and stamina, as the performers are required to play extremely repetitious patterns for long periods of time. Another reason is that Glass's music often requires a somewhat unorthodox instrumentation, including synthesizers, and electric string and wind instruments.

Glass's 1980 opera A Madrigal Opera is even further removed from the repertory because of its lack of libretto or story-line. Glass states that it is "a chamber opera with an unspecified story line ... my idea was to write a musical/dramatic work that could, with different direction, be realized with a different narrative content." A new and original realization is precisely what musicians Glenn Freeman and Christina Fong, in collaboration with photographers Kathryn Culley, Sonan Zoksang, Nancy Jo Johnson and Katie Murphy, presented Sunday afternoon at the Tibetan Cultural Center.

The original score for A Madrigal Opera was written for six voices (singing only solfeggio syllables), violin and viola. Freeman transcribed Glass's score for violin|viola, performed by Fong, and for his own instrument, electro-percussion (essentially an electric marimba). Freeman explained that this is keeping with the composer's own practice, as Glass transcribed his 1984 opera Akhnaten from full orchestra to chamber ensemble.

Freeman and Fong planned to perform the work in concert format; that is, without any story. They instead incorporated the photography in the form of a slide show depicting people and places in Tibet, along with narration.

To a certain degree they succeeded. The title of this production (which also varies, depending on the performance) thus changed from the originally advertised A Madrigal Opera of Mind to The State of the Tibetan Nation -- A Madrigal Opera . The performance took place inside a large, comfortable room, furnished with chairs and couches. The projector screen was placed in a corner, and at either side sat Freeman and Fong. All the lights were turned out, aside from a few candles and the musicians' stand lights.

Only 20 to 30 people were present, which was a shame considering the rare nature of this performance. Many in attendance sunk back in their seats, closed their eyes, and slipped off into a meditative state. Freeman noted that they had to keep their volume lower than they would have liked, because the narration had to be heard, and he observed that a higher volume would produce a completely different effect. This would have been more desirable, as the somewhat unpoetic narration seemed to intrude on the aesthetic created by the music and some fine photographs.

Glass's music is always recognizable: various textures made up of repetitive scale and arpeggio passages flavored with rhythmic and harmonic shifts. This effect is only successful when the musicians are attentive and accurate, as both Fong and Freeman were. Fong in particular was most impressive, playing virtually without rest for the duration.

The sound of Freeman's electro-percussion bore little resemblance to a percussion instrument. By electronically manipulating the sound, Freeman's instrument sounded much more like a keyboard synthesizer, often an essential timbre in Glass.

The timing of the slide presentation with narrative coincided with shifts in the music's texture. The photos mainly depicted places in Tibet, with an emphasis on the people, and the suffering that they endure under Chinese occupation.

The overall mood in Glass's music for A Madrigal Opera is forlorn seriousness. The subject of Tibet was appropriate, considering Glass's own interest in Tibet, which manifested itself most recently in his soundtrack for the film Kundun.

If not for anything else, the musicians should be commended for the effort of producing a work which is of quality and rarely performed. I believe the omission of singing voices, which I'm sure adds a tremendous dimension to the score, was unfortunate. But considering what they worked with, they produced an effective, worthwhile production.

the Paper.
December 31, 1998 (page 16)
by Serena Donadoni

movies/music

Grand Rapids Symphony

If you've seen the movie The Piano, you've already been introduced to the music of Michael Nyman.

Now you can hear the first live performance of his On The Fiddle for violin and orchestra when the Grand Rapids Symphony presents the world premiere during its Casual Classics Series on Jan. 7, 8. & 9.

While On The Fiddle is available on CD and portions of the piece can be heard in feature films, the Grand Rapids concert is the live debut of the work in its entirety.

With Associate concertmaster and championed violinist Christina Fong as soloist the orchestra is gearing up for a fresh performance after usually being sustained by music of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Nyman is known for blending the sounds of 17th-century composers with the harmonies and rhythms of 1950s pop music.

Associate Conductor John Varineau will lead the concert series, titled A Classical View of Pop. Varineau and the orchestra will use anecdotes about the composers to show how popular music and culture impacted the classical pieces.

Varineau says people who view orchestral music as stuff that was written 200 years ago will be in for a surprise when turning out to hear Nyman's work.

"This is a great example of minimalist music as influenced by pop music," says Varineau. "The distinguishing feature here is lots of repetition and very gradual change."

Varineau says he's only half joking when he says Nyman's work is "based on the same three chords as rock and roll."

The program also will include Grieg's Holberg Suite, Shostakovich's Ballet Suite No. 1, and Milhaud's Le Bouf sur le toit. Audience members will have a chance to rub elbows with Fong, Varineau, guest artists, and members of the orchestra at a complimentary reception following the show.

The concert will be performed at 7:30pm Thursday, Jan. 7, at St. Cecilia's Music Society, at 8 pm Friday Jan. 8 in the same location, and 8pm Saturday Jan. 9 at West Ottawa High School in Holland.

Grand Rapids Press
January 3, 1999 (page B3)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Symphony spotlights works by Nyman, Glass

When associate conductor John Varineau invited the Grand Rapids Symphony's associate concertmaster to be a soloist on this year's Casual Classics Series, he knew he wouldn't end up conducting some violin concerto that had been gathering dust.

More likely, the ink on the page would still be drying.

Christina Fong this week will give the world premiere performance of Michael Nyman's On The Fiddle for violin and orchestra.

"John said I was free to pick any piece I wanted to do," Fong laughed.

But Varineau had a pretty good idea what he was gelling himself into.

"Chris is a real champion of this style of music which she calls post-minimalism," Varineau said.

Besides Nyman's 16-minute work for violin and orchestra, Fong will perform composer Philip Glass's Echorus for two violins and orchestra featuring Grand Rapids Symphony concertmaster James Crawford.

Nyman, known for his film scores to movies such as The Piano, and Glass, composer of the operas Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, are two of the best known composers in contemporary music.

Nyman's long list of works includes the scores to film director Peter Greenaway's films The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed and Two Noughts, while Glass is composer of the chamber opera The Fall of the House of Usher which Opera Grand Rapids performed in September.

Yet the two remain unfamiliar to many fans of more traditional classical music.

"They're two of the composers who are most significant in the world right now who have been completely neglected in the orchestral world," Fong said. "This is the first time the Grand Rapids Symphony has done either of these two composers."

Nyman and Glass, whose "steady-state" compositions involve simple harmonies, repetitive melodies or rhythms and static structures, are a long way from Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

Yet they're equally far from their contemporaries such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who favored 20th-century atonal and serial techniques.

This weekend's Casual Classics, A Classical View Of Pop, will explore how popular music has influenced serious music through the centuries.

"Composers often times echo or are influenced by popular music," Varineau said.

"I'm trying to break down the barrier between pop and classical music. I'm also trying to show that's an artificial barrier."

Nyman's On The Fiddle, a 16-minute work for violin soloist and orchestra, is drawn from the scores of three of his films, A Zed and Two Noughts, Prospero's Books and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

"He took music from all three films for On The Fiddle," Varineau said. "It's portions of those three film scores and reworking the music."

The Grand Rapids Symphony program also includes Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite, Darius Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le toit and Dmitry Shostakovich's Ballet Suite No. 1.

Shostakovich's suite is a set of melodies the Russian composer culled from his earlier scores.

Fong, who joined the Grand Rapids Symphony in 1988, was appointed associate concertmaster in 1996.

As a soloist, Fong has premiered new works by composers Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki and Mark Thomas. But she also played new works by non minimalist composers Donald Erb, Lou Harrison, John Cage and Robert Shechtman.

"There are many minimalist composers I don't like," Fong said. "There are a lot of good craftsman who aren't good composers. They lack soul or originality or personality. The kind of things you can't describe in person."

Though minimalism strikes some ears as bordering on mindless repetition composers such as Nyman and Glass distinguish themselves in the way they use material in different ways.

"They sound radically different from each other in the same sense that Shostakovich and Copland sound different," Fong said. "Not only are they two of the most significant composers today, people actually like their music."

the Paper.
January 7, 1999 (page 19)
by Scott VanderWerf

Modern Sounds
Symphony to premiere piece by noted film score composer

The Grand Rapids Symphony with violinist Christina Fong and associate conductor John Varineau will highlight works by renowned post-minimalists Michael Nyman and Philip Glass this weekend in both Grand Rapids and Holland.

Two of the most significant composers alive, Nyman and Glass rarely are featured in the orchestral world, an environment that perpetuates the works of the great long dead composers.

"Something happened back in the '70s," says Fong, who has premiered works by Nyman and performed the works of some of the great composers of our time: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, Lou Harrison and Glass. "It became that only some people were supposed to understand some music. People lost perspective about what is new … what people like to listen to … and became more concerned with the technical, more about the way the machine works instead of the being aware of what is organically happening in society."

The symphony and Fong will perform the world premiere of Nyman's On The Fiddle for violin and orchestra and a new Glass piece titled Echorus.

The Nyman piece brings together themes from three separate film scores that he composed for director Peter Greenaway (A Zed and Two Noughts,The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and Prospero's Books ). The recent Glass composition Echorus is dedicated to Edna Mitchell and Sir Yehudi Menuhin.

"(Echorus) was to evoke feelings of peace and compassion, and I think when he refers to compassion, he is referring to the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, which he has been a practitioner of 20 years or so," Fong says. "I think it is interesting that the piece is dedicated to Yehudi Menuhin, who is often known as the humanitarian gentleman of classical music … for him (it) isn't just about self glorification or glorification of the arts."

Glass, like Nyman, has also had an extraordinary relationship with distinguished filmmakers, most recently Martin Scorsese with the film Kundun.

"They are like co-authors or co-creators, like Stravinsky and Diaghilev or Prokofiev and Eisenstein … they co-author or co-create a work," says Fong. Greenaway's films in particular flow in ways predicated on Nyman's scores.

Both artists are structuralists that complement the other in ways that go past many Hollywood director/composer relationships.

"At some point, real artists -- for whatever that means -- instead of just being craftsmen, they become an artist," Fong says. "Where their craft is a means to the art … for Greenaway it is the film making, for Nyman it is the music, but in many ways, it goes beyond the craft."

Grand Rapids Press
January 8, 1999 (page C5)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Symphony shows that pop can be a fine art

The program was billed as A Classical View Of Pop.

That takes some explaining.

I'd describe Thursday's Grand Rapids Symphony concert as unfamiliar music that's fun to hear.

No more explanation necessary.

Back after a two month break from the Casual Classics Series in St. Cecilia Music Society's Royce Auditorium; associate conductor John Varineau treated the audience to five mostly unfamiliar and eclectic works all influenced by popular music of the day.

Popular is good.

Associate concertmaster Christina Fong, a committed champion of new music, was guest soloist for the world premiere performance of Michael Nyman's On The Fiddle, a three movement work culled from three of the English composer's film scores.

Technically, or technologically, speaking, the piece has been played in a studio and recorded. But strangely, it's never been performed in front of a live audience.

Best known for his scores to a such movies as The Piano, the classically trained ex-rock musician turned eclectic composer weaves post-minimalist flavored music that's a bit like "One Hundred and One Strings" meets Bruce Springsteen, as quiet, mesmerizing passages suddenly erupt into driving rock riffs.

Over the steady accompaniment of the Grand Rapids Symphony, Fong grew forth some lovely, song like melodies. Especially in the third movement, drawn from the Peter Greenaway film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Fong commanded the stage with a performance alternately passive and passionate that inspired bonhomie in the orchestra.

For an encore, concertmaster James Crawford joined Fong to give the North American premiere of American composer Philip Glass's Echorus for two violins and string orchestra.

With Glass's more repetitively structured music, the soloists complemented each other like twins, introducing the beautiful, meditative harmonies before handing off to the orchestra to elaborate with subtly changing, peaceful variations.

In the second half, Varineau led the Grand Rapids Symphony in Dmitry Shostakovich'sBallet Suite No. 1 and Darius Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur la toit Ballet for Orchestra.

The former work is based upon such familiar dance forms as the waltz and polka, while the latter often sounds like the silent movie score for a Keystone Kops film set in Latin America.

With the Shostakovich ballet, Varineau led the lyrical waltz with a distinctively Russian duality -- light and merry in melody in the upper winds and strings, heavy and foreboding in the double basses and timpani.

The movement marked playful waltz had an enchanting, wide-eyed, child-like simplicity, and the gallop was full of gusto.

Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur la toit or The Ox on the Roof, a pantomime set in a tavern, features decidedly rollicking Brazilian rhythms and wonderful melodies that frequently wander into the uncharted musical water of polytonality.

Through the fantastically colorful performance, Varineau and the orchestra wove images of such characters as a boxer, a bookie, a dwarf, a fashionably dressed woman and a police officer in the noisy and nefarious setting of an American speakeasy during Prohibition.

The program opened with Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite Op. 40, a warm diversion for a cold evening.

Based on such baroque dance forms as the sarabande and gavotte, the work for string orchestra nonetheless is full of romantic expressiveness. Consequently, the stately sarabande was more interesting than the typically staid 17th century version.

Varineau gave the movement dubbed Air a pleasant shape while decorating the entire piece with bright, shimmery tonal timbres from the spirited prelude to the effervescent rigaudon.

Toronto Globe and Mail
May 22, 1999 (page C9)
by Colin Eatock

Open Ears festival opens minds to adventurous new music

Sounds Unfamiliar

A park, a hotel and a derelict department store are among the venues for Kitchener's ambitious new-music event.

Abandoned buildings often have a ghostly quality, and the old Goudies department store in Kitchener is no exception. For a decade this former hive of activity contained nothing but darkness and an eerie silence. It was that very silence that led composer Peter Hatch, the 42-year-old artistic director of Kitchener's Open Ears Festival of New Music and Sounds, to select it as a performance space.

"You can't hear any noise from the street in here, and yet it's right downtown," he said in a recent interview, standing inside the cavernous building. "And it has a great acoustic -- a three-or-four-second reverb time." He clapped his hands to illustrate his point, making the dingy walls ring with the noise.

Now in its second season, Open Ears makes a point of bringing people to unusual places to hear adventurous new sounds. On Wednesday -- the opening night of the six-day festival -- Goodies served as a concert hail for a contemporary music program by the locally based Penderecki String Quartet. Tomorrow night, the building will turn into an opera house for the Canadian premiere of Philip Glass's Madrigal Opera, The State of the Tibetan Nation -- a most unusual opera, as it requires no singers, just a violinist/violist, a percussionist and a narrator.

Throughout the festival, the erstwhile department store is also home to the Sonic Playroom, created by sound artist Gayle Young with sculptors Reinhard Reitzenstein and Mary Catherine Newcombe, open free of charge during the day. "It's an interactive installation -- a sound sculpture that is performable by the public," Hatch explained.

As if in answer to the all-too-common problem of the public failing to notice, much less attend, most new music concerts, Hatch put together a series that Kitchenerites could scarcely avoid. The festival opened with bells ringing in six downtown churches and a performance by alphornist Michael Cumberland from atop the Farmers' Market. Other in-your-face performance venues include Kitchener's modern City Hall Square, the spacious green of Victoria Park, and the Walper Terrace Hotel, an old downtown landmark. As well, West Coast sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp is taking audiences on "soundwalks" -- guided and interpreted aural tours of the city.

It's a wide-ranging festival, even by the eclectic standards of contemporary music, and the diversity is deliberate: "The three themes of the festival are concert music, electroacoustics and sound ecology," Hatch said.

By combining these three elements he's created a hybrid, full of ideas and approaches he acknowledges are drawn from other music festivals around the country. Open Ears audiences can take in a formal new music concert by the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony tonight, just as they might at the Winnipeg Symphony's annual festival.

Then, tomorrow morning, they can experience a Deep Listening Workshop with meditative music guru Pauline Oliveros -- the sort of thing often experienced at the biennial Sound Symposium in St. John's, Nfld. And in a format common to many jazz festivals, there's a late night Twilight Sounds Series, featuring various forms of improvised music, acoustic and electronic, in Victoria Park's pavilion.

Open Ears' eclecticism is also the result of several local organizations coming together to create the festival. The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (for which Hatch serves as composer-in-residence) is a leading force behind the event, with additional contributions from local contemporary music groups Numus and Viva Voci. Opera Ontario is new to the series this year, with a double-bill of chamber operas from Quebec performed tomorrow afternoon in the studio theater of Kitchener's Center in the Square concert hall.

The result is a festival that, according to Hatch, makes sense for Kitchener -- a city of 185,000, lacking what he called "a hard-core new music audience." Not content with presenting to a few elites he hopes to attract 6000 people to Victoria Park tomorrow night to hear Montreal electric guitarist Tim Brady accompanied by fireworks. "When you get out of the concert hall you get rid of preconceptions. People are more open to new ideas in a new environment."

Hatch believes so strongly in his unorthodox venues that he was almost apologetic for putting tonight's Kitchener Waterloo Symphony program -- featuring works by Hatch, R, Murray Schafer, Christos Hatzis and Boyd Macdonald -- in a well appointed concert hall. "We're using the Center in the Square for that one," he sighed. "I still haven't found a good alternative space in town for an orchestra."

Detroit Free Press
May 30, 1999 (page 3E)
by Mark Stryker

The State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera

Philip Glass calls his stage works operas, and if some are conventionally structured, others bear little resemblance to your mother's Puccini. His 1980 "Madrigal Opera," which lacks a libretto, is an empty dramatic vessel. changing narratives with each new production.

Christina Fong and Glenn Freeman have reinvented the opera as a political statement about the Chinese occupation of Tibet and called it "The State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera."

Freeman has reconfigured the original score (six voices, violin, viola) for just two instrumentalists -- himself on electronic percussion and Fong on violin and viola. The music accompanies slides and narration. As popular and influential as Glass's pulsating minimalism has become, we rarely hear it live in metro Detroit. 8 p.m. Thursday thru Sunday, 1515 Broadway in Detroit. $15. 1-313-965-1515 or 1-248-548-9888.

Metro Times
June 2, 1999 (page 45)
by Norene Cashen

Ruminations on Glass

It is said that Philip Glass gained an interest in the people of Tibet as he composed the score for the film Kundun.  The Tibetan story now finds itself in the latest manifestation of the composer's adaptable "Madrigal Opera," which holds an open place for a narrative. Violin virtuoso (and adjunct violin instructor at Grand Valley State University) Christina Fong, will team up with Glenn Freeman June 3-6 at Detroit's 1515 Broadway for a benefit performance of State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera by Philip Glass. Fong will play violin and viola, and Freeman will play electro-percussion against a backdrop of projected slides and text. Pairing the "forlorn seriousness" of Glass's opera with images and meditations on Tibet is sure to provide an electrifying and enlightening experience. Fong has performed music of John Cage, Igor Stravinsky Arvo Pärt and other composers and is considered one of the state's leading performers of New Music. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Gaden Tehor Tibetan Buddhist Monastery of India and is sponsored by Detroit's New Music Society. The State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera by Philip Glass will be performed Thursday through Sunday at 8 p.m. tickets are $15. For more information call 313-965-1515 or 248-548-9888.

the Paper.
September 30, 1999 (page 17)
by Scott VanderWerf

Music Options

Christina Fong: John Cage One⁶ and One¹⁰ (OgreOgress)

This music opened me right up! As if my sternum could be cut with sound, as if a note could pierce membrane, or a harmonic create a third ear! Cold, precise, electric, this disc by Grand Rapids violinist Christina Fong left me -- at times -- trembling, anxious, intoxicated, overall in a trance.

Fong is the associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony, a Grand Valley State University instructor and a bold explorer of 20th-century compositions. These are some of American composer John Cage's "number pieces" that he composed during the the last five years of his life. Representing his final project, this is a worthy epilogue to a body of work that has redefined the concept of sound, silence and listening that has made Cage the most important American composer of this century.

On this disc, silences are filled with the ambiance around me changed to notes, tones ringing, then back to silence. Liberated modularity results in a dynamic of liberated sound. Some phrases are quiet, almost muffled; some cut like the razor. This is difficult music, and yet if one surrenders to the experience, actively listens with a receptive mind open the rewards may be many. Throughout, I was as ever changing in my reactions as the changing timbre and attack. By the end, my physical being was filled with an energy, leaving my mind buzzing with possibilities.

You may find this disc at Schuler Books & Music and Harmony House.

In Unison
October 1999 (page 4)
by David Prudon

As is evident by the picture above, Associate Concertmaster, Christina Fong is a unique individual. Answering most of my questions with brevity, sometimes with a hint of sarcasm, the 35 yr. old violinist opened her world to me to share with all of you. I started by asking Chris about her well publicized passion for new music.

DP: You've made quite a reputation for yourself as a champion of new music. Why the special interest in this particular style of music?

Chris: I wouldn't call new music a "style" of music. There is plenty of so-called newer music that many and most would rather never hear, much less perform.

DP: What do you tell someone when they ask how you got hooked on playing the violin and being a performer?

Chris: Chance-Karma.

DP: What port of the Orient are your ancestors from?

Chris: Mostly the land, except for my maternal grandfather and great grandfather who spent a great deal of time at sea. Seriously, I am not terribly interested in my ancestral origins because most of my ancestors (like everyone else's) are currently dead. I do keep in touch with most of my family and that means my very extended family, including cousins, aunts, uncles and even second cousins, second uncles. This in-touchness with so many is really thanks to email.

DP: Do you think that this period of economic prosperity for Grand Rapids Symphony will continue?

Chris: I guess I'm not all that interested in money or economics. Don't get me wrong, I want my "fair share" and my colleagues to have their "fair share" as well, but I'm more interested in the artistic "prosperity" of the organization as whole. Sometimes musicians are not getting their "fair share" when compared with management and conductors. This "fair share" also applies to programming. If we and orchestras at large continue to program all dinosaurs or new stuff meant to sound like dinosaurs, we are on a treadmill to nowhere. On the other hand, like I said before "I'm not all that interested in money … " In the "grand" scheme of our world at large, like the atrocities happening to Tibetans due to Chinese occupation, the genocide in Rwanda and unfortunately countless more tragedies, we in Grand Rapids, and we as musicians are in the big picture VERY lucky.

DP: How long have you played with the GRSO? Do you plan to live here until retirement or would you like to move elsewhere someday?

Chris: Bazillion years. I don't make plans.

DP: How long have you and Glenn been married? Will you ever have children or is that not part of the master plan?

Chris: Bazillion years plus one. I don't make plans.

DP: If you could listen to only 3 orchestral pieces for the rest of your existence, what would they be?

Chris: TOO many, and I don't think I can even narrow things down to three composers, so I will narrow it to three living ones: Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and Michael Gordon.

DP: Are there things about you that you would change if it was possible?

Chris: Sure. I'm constantly changing; it's the non changing that is an impossibility.

DP: Are there CDs available of your performances of new music?

Chris: Yes, my first commercially available CD is two of John Cage's "number pieces." That is, the world premiere recordings of One⁶ (one for the 6th time) and One¹⁰ (one for the 10th time), now available everywhere online (CDworld, CDnow, CDuniverse, etc.) and locally at Aris, Schuler's and Barnes & Noble. Two recording projects now in progress are a CD of unrecorded early Michael Nyman works (also premiere recordings) and a CD of Grand Rapids-based composer Bob Shechtman's works, which I recorded this past summer.

Grand Rapids Press
October 14, 1999 (page B9)

best bets for going out tonight & tomorrow

Madrigal Opera

Local musicians and artists will present a multimedia performance of The State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera, by contemporary American composer Philip Glass, at 8 tonight and 9pm Friday in the recently opened Total Sphung coffee house at 428 Bridge St. NW.

Local musicians include Christina Fong playing five string electric violin/viola and Glenn Freeman performing on electro-percussion. Narration will be provided by Angie Forton, The Sloth and other surprise guests. The performance will include visual images of Tibet by photographers Kathryn Culley, Sonam Zoksang, Nancy Jo Johnson and Katie Murphy.

An offering will be collected at the free event to benefit Tibetans in exile.

Grand Rapids Press
December 9, 1999 (page E6)
by Rich Berry

Versatile musician

As part of its Local Composers Series, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts features the music of Matthew Plichta at 7:30pm Friday in the UICA Theater, 41 Sheldon Blvd. SE.

Plichta plays rock with Milkhouse, a Grand Rapids rock group that recently released the CD Culture Spread.

He has also collaborated on classical works with noted area musicians including violinist Christina Fong, percussionist Glenn Freeman and classical guitarist Paul Vondiziano.

the Paper.
December 9, 1999 (page 15)
by Jay Bennett

Chamber Made

Local composer stretches boundaries of classical music

Matthew Plichta is caught in a culture that celebrates dead artists and often ignores the living ones. Composing classical music in the United States usually assures the composer anonymity and an under appreciation by the masses.

That's why artists like Plichta need programs like UICA's Local Composers Series for rare opportunity to put their music in front of the public.

"In Europe, there's a feeling of cultural immediacy," says the 34-year-old Grand Rapids composer and musician. "They really want to know what's going on currently. Here we don't have the attention span."

That's exactly why the Grand Rapids native knows his presentation Friday, Dec. 10, at the UICA Theater is, in several ways, a make-or-break proposition.

"This show will be evidence if it's going to fly," says Plichta, who's been composing chamber music since his days at the acclaimed music school at the University of North Texas in the late 80s and early 90s. "It's a personal stepping stone."

It helps that Plichta recruited such established professionals as Grand Rapids Symphony associate concertmaster Christina Fong and local classical guitarist Paul Vondiziano to perform his compositions.

"It's a huge thrill to have someone like Christina to embrace what I've written," says Plichta, who wrote the piece music|electronic|repetitive for Fong and electro-percussionist Glenn Freeman. "She's always helped me out. We both share a love for the music of John Cage and now I feel a kinship to those people."

Fong, who's known in the area for her adventurous forays into new music, says: "It's current and it's well crafted. I'm into performing the work of a living composer who has something current." She says music|electronic|repetitive sounds as if "Shostakovich wrote techno house music."

Besides the great 20th-century composer Cage, Plichta lists Shostakovich, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, William Schuman, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Pablo Picasso as men who have inspired him to compose music. All were artists who challenged convention and, in doing so, practically created new genres.

Plichta has written pieces for solo flute (his first ever and most performed piece, he says), a woodwind trio of clarinet, oboe and flute, a string quartet and, of course, the duet for electric violin and electro-percussion.

"The violin is distorted and the performance is very loud. Some of my classical music rocks," says Plichta, who also plays guitar and sings in longtime local rock band Milkhouse.

It's an odd position to be in, says Plichta. Credibility and respect from the symphony crowd doesn't come easy. And rock fans -- and even some of his peers in the local rock scene -- might see a rocker who dabbles in classical music as pretentious.

"It's been one of my biggest problems," he says. "Some of the biggest local bands have a problem with what I'm doing. I think it's an insecurity factor."

Classical music fans are different from classical musicians, Plichta says. While fans often look down upon rock music, classical performers sometimes are more likely to recognize rock as a legitimate art form.

"There's a range between intelligent and fun that both kinds of music cover," he says. "I try to cover both. When I'm playing with Milkhouse, I love hitting that solo and singing and screaming. I love it."

He also loves composing and stretching classical music into new shapes. "I wouldn't be true to the art form to go backward in style."

Others appear interested in what he's doing, too. Plichta says, on the MP3 website, there have been more than 7,500 downloads of his classical compositions Wake for woodwind trio and Chamber Music #4 for string quartet, which also appeared on the Milkhouse CD Culture Spread. Milkhouse, which fits somewhere between hard rock and art rock, recently released the CD Secondairy and continues to perform occasionally in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. Plichta, one of the band's main songwriters, says he is inspired by Midnight Oil, Golden Earring and the Samples.

Plichta says being a classical composer and a rock musician is like being in two different universes, but two universes that can share each other's experiences.

"There is nothing bad that can come out of being led to new music," he says.

American Record Guide
January/February 2000 (page 77)
by Rob Haskins

Cage: One⁶, One¹⁰

Cage's Number Pieces are generally all long works where the pitches are completely notated but their performance is relatively free in flexible "measures" that Cage called "time brackets". They often evoke a meditative response from their listeners, especially when the works are for a solo instrument, as on this disc. I have special, personal memories of these two pieces. They were both performed by Janos Negyesy in April of 1992 (just four months before Cage's death) in Baltimore, Maryland; the performance of 0ne¹⁰ was a world premiere. At that concert, both pieces were intended to be performed with a beautiful sculpture by Mineko Grimmer that consisted of pebbles frozen into an inverted ice pyramid suspended overhead. As the ice melted, the pebbles fell into a pool. I remember that, as I listened to the pieces, I slowly drifted into a state of mind that was neither boredom nor sleep, but also decidedly not the kind of consciousness that I usually have when I hear music. No other music has ever had that effect on me, and I've been obsessed with the Number Pieces ever since.

Christina Fong's is the first recording of these works. In each work, she plays long-held single tones; those in 0ne¹⁰ are entirely harmonics. Perhaps in none of Cage's other works does he come closer to his idea that each tone is its own center, unrelated to any other tones in the composition. And yet, paradoxically, the number of tones Cage uses in each piece is so restricted that listeners can always make their own, constantly changing connections. Fong's performance respects Cage's oft repeated remark in the notes for these pieces that the tones should be ragged and imperfect, "brushed into existence" in a manner similar to Chinese calligraphy. If I remember correctly, Negyesy's performance emphasized beauty of tone. It's gratifying to know that the pieces can sustain both approaches.

American Record Guide
January/February 2001 (page 106)
by David Moore

One must presume from the dates given (1988, 1991) that this collection of long and longer tones is John Cage's last works, or perhaps only his last numbers, since the music may have been primarily improvised by the performers. No information is given. What you hears is what you gets. Three² and Six are continuous sounds for percussion, Twenty-Three and Twenty-Six are for violins and cellos electronically manipulated at great length and all in endlessly long tones. There are no notes, but one may eventually discover a paragraph quoted from Cage printed on the disc itself. 3, 23, 6, 26, Hike!

The Wire
September 2001 (page 55)
by Philip Clark

Soundcheck

There's a famous photograph of John Cage pictured outside the Harmonie Cafe in Paris with a look of amused irony on his face. Schoenberg had told him that he had no feeling for harmony and Cage took this on the chin, pushing against what he considered to be the manipulative game of European composition. At first hearing, Cage's 'number pieces', which he started in 1987 and worked on until his death in 1992, might seem to be extreme oxymorons as beautifully voiced chords imperceptibly drift in and out of focus. Cage's writing certainly feels as though it is conceived harmonically. But is it, in fact, the case?

Well, it's certain Cage wouldn't have passed any academic music theory exam, but his 'number pieces' represent the most radical rethink of the very stuff of harmony. Cage was an anarchist interested in the spiritualism of Zen Buddhism, and the hierarchies and conflicts of Western harmony had nothing to offer him. Cage's methods of chance and coincidence kicked away the certainties around which traditional composition works. For him, each note can be both fundamental and accidental. Among the purest music he wrote, the 'number pieces' are notated with indications of material to be performed within a given duration. The first numbers in the titles refer to the number of performers or layers, while the second effectively indicates which version it is. It's up to the performer to control and shape the work.

On the three CDs released on their own OgreOgress label, percussionist Glenn Freeman and violinist/violist Christina Fong rise to Cage's challenge magnificently. Freeman's 72 minute performance of the percussion piece Four⁴ is mesmerizing, producing the sort of meditative concentration that Cage the Zen Buddhist would have greatly appreciated. With traditional ideas of harmony gone, our perception of scale also changes and the 72 minute span becomes all consuming.

Freeman's performances of Three² and Six are equally insightful, but this CD really belongs to Christina Fong. If Four ⁴ is monumental, Twenty-Six is oddball and eerie. The harmonies are slightly sour and given extra spice by tiny, expertly placed glissandi. The effect of layering 26 separate vibrato-less violin parts suggests something almost superhuman, but the music also has an attractive vulnerability. Twenty-Three adds Karen Krummel on cello to make a virtual string quartet, and the richness and scope of this highly sensual performance is a joy.

The third OgreOgress CD and volume six of MDG's exemplary cycle of Cage piano music played by Steffen Schleiermacher both focus on the One cycle. One represents some of the composer's greatest music even if it now seems strangely innocent.

the Paper.
December 20, 2001 (page 15)
by Les Jared

Hovhaness: Violin|Viola and Keyboard Works

Music from Central Eurasia is rife with strings. It's strange really, since the mountains and endless plains are pretty bereft of tress, which provide the wood to which the strings of stringed instruments are usually attached. Apparently gypsies who came out of the South, brought with them the instruments of India -- sitars and veenas -- which were then adapted by Armenian artisans. Or so the story goes.

Nevertheless, Armenian music composer Alan Hovhaness's influence and idiom, still has the overtones of the gypsy, especially in this recording of the Hovhaness canon for the violin and viola. While you can smell the horses and campfires and hear the women, the music is far more subtle than the raucous gatherings among the encircled wagons. It's delicate and expressive, and at times Fong's strings woven together with Arved Ashby's keyboard work give the music the substance of a sail: Flexible, yet strong enough to pull you along to your next port of call. The pieces, all with Armenian titles, are deliciously vibrant, and emotionally refreshing. Even though there seems to be agenda behind the titles and the sound, the works are best served on their own, as music about music.

Cage: The First Recordings

I have a friend, great taste, musically inclined, who simply doesn't like Ornette Coleman, the seminal free jazz saxophone player. "That's not music," he says, "it's noise. You can't enjoy it, and the people who say they do, they're posers."

I've always felt that way about John Cage. There seems to be something that smacks of showmanship in his pieces, that they've been written with an eye towards arousing an audience, and not in the good way. On the other hand, like Coleman and other composers and performers in the avant-garde vein, Cage's music has the capability to expand minds and redefine the nature of music, as much as the nature of our expectations about music.

By allowing us to explore the sounds and the spaces between the sounds we engage much more than we ever would by singing along with a ditty on the radio, or even by tapping our feet behind a swing band. This is music that is less experiential and more cerebral, like algebra rather than geometry. If that means it's less accessible, well, at the very least it makes you appreciate the stuff you do like.

American Record Guide
January/February 2002 (page 86)
by Rob Haskins

Cage: Four⁴

In his final works, Cage sought for a way of composing that would leave no traces, that would resemble writing on water. I'd argue he came closest to realizing this elusive goal in Four⁴. The piece is for four percussionists. Most of Cage's Number Pieces are sparse, and this one is more so than most. When it was premiered by a group of four students from the Julliard School, Cage commented how difficult it was for the performers, so used to virtuosic display, to do so little.

Allen Gimbel reviewed another recording by the Amadinda Percussion Ensemble, in July/August 2001. (By the way, that recording was touted as the premiere recording of the work; Freeman's came out first but Cage's publisher had already promised the use of the phrase "premiere recording" to the Hungarian group, for whom the work was originally written.) In that review, he commented on the long stretches of silence in the piece and the way those silences help listeners attend to the aural properties of the room that they're listening to the recording in -- those properties, he maintains, are as much a part of the piece as the recorded sounds. Allen has a point: the silence in Four⁴ is so pervasive that it almost engulfs the sounds completely. Still, I find paying attention to the sounds brings me to something that Allen doesn't mention, something that strikes me as most important aspect of all the Number Pieces: the emphasis on an almost timeless serenity that makes the tranquility of an Arvo Pärt seem like heavy metal by comparison. Now I suppose I can get a similar feeling from listening to a refrigerator for 70 minutes, but somehow I think I'd rather listen to the CD.

Freeman overdubs all four parts on the release; in so doing, I think he doesn't experience the wonderful surprises that can happen when you're playing the piece with other people. He also violates Cage's wishes by making the individual iterations of tremolos too audible. But I can't question his spirit and devotion to the music -- all the more important in the Number Pieces involving percussion because the players choose which instruments to play. Freeman's choices are inspired: cymbals and gongs make an incredible effect when their tones are sustained for a s long as he sustains them; the reverberation (either added in the studio or a property of the recording venue itself) makes the remaining instruments just as rich. Even so, I have to say I like the sounds that Amadinda chose just a bit more. Freeman's performance, though, seems to have more silence overall than Amadinda and it makes a stunning effect.

Cage's music always tends to disorient the listener, but I have to say that the Number Pieces -- and this one in particular -- accomplish this feat in a manner extraordinary even for Cage. About the only thing to complain about are the liner notes (written by me, by the way), which are so badly laid out that they're almost impossible to read.

Cadence
February 13, 2002 (page 15)
by Joe Snapper

Local artists bring Feldman masterpiece to Planetarium

What do you get when you cross composers John Cage and Philip Glass, and then zoo it with a laser light show?

"For lack of a better term, it's a CD-release party," said Glenn Freeman, co-producer of "Morton Feldman Under the Stars," which debuts for artists and the public alike Feldman's 1985 piece Violin and String Quartet .

At 7:30 p.m. this Monday under the starry Chaffee Planetarium in the Van Andel Museum Center, 272 Pearl St. NW, designer Matt Fox twines his laser-light motifs with the legendary music of Feldman, performed by five members of the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra.

Violin soloist Christina Fong and a foursome of violinists Chris Martin and Sieu Mahn Phong, cellist Karen Krummel, and Heather Storeng on viola, perform on the eighth and latest release from Grand Rapids record label OgreOgress productions.

Fong said this premiere recording of Feldman's pieces offers a kind of music that's difficult to describe in words.

"It's very atmospheric, a good match for the planetarium," said Fong.

The two-hour two-CD show sponsored by the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA) gives spectators access to cutting edge classical music, said Freeman.

He said the composer's work niches Feldman, born in New York City in 1926, between the edgy staffs of Cage and the more mainstream Glass.

"Feldman is identified with John Cage," said Freeman. "He is considered to be the second or third most important composer in that style, and many believe him to be the premiere composer in the crossover from the avant-garde style of Cage to the accessible, minimalist style of Philip Glass."

Fong in 1999 and 2000 released two Cage recordings showcasing premiere work, as well as a recording of largely premiere work from the composer Hovhaness last year.

Feldman, who died in 1987, composed over 30 works, running between one and four hours long, naming them after the instruments for which the pieces were written, said Freeman. Such startling monikers as Violin and Clarinet and Piano and String Quartet.

Fox, a light designer at Chaffee Planetarium for the past four and a half years, said he always wanted to design a show that stepped away from the rock-and-roll riffs normally waving through his laser beams and stars.

"I figured this would be a chance to explore, creatively, how classical music can be represented visually," said Fox, who has designed two Pink Floyd shows and the recently opened Radiohead show. He said the planetarium's array of visual effects, including laser, 3D, and incandescent, along with its 1700-watt sound system make it one of the most technologically advanced presentation venues in the state.

"Classical music seems very conducive to planetaria, which, like classical music, is very fluid in nature," Fox said.

The release is Fong's fourth with OgreOgress, a label she has worked on frequently with Freeman, her husband, who started it in 1997.

Fong recorded her solo part about four months ago in Chicago, while the quartet filed into a Calvin College studio to do its part about a year ago, said Freeman.

The quartet last performed together with Opera Grand Rapids for Philip Glass's The Fall of the House of Usher at Spectrum Theater in September of 1998.

All five artists will hear the final recording, which leapt from the post-production womb about 10 days ago, for the first time Monday at the planetarium, Freeman said.

"The planetarium has a great sound system." he said. "And it's one of the best places in Grand Rapids to listen to a recording, even if there are no stars. We just said to ourselves, 'Let's do something a little unusual.'"

Avant
Spring 2002 (page 60)
by Brian Marley

Glenn Freeman and Christina Fong's label, the splendidly named OgreOgress, has issued three CDs of Cage's music to date, all dedicated to the Number Pieces. Two versions of One -- One⁶ (1990) and One¹⁰ (1992), both played by Fong -- focus mainly on single pitches, wavery, long-breathed, keening, with myriad fluctuations in tone colour. It's an austere soundworld, but a compelling one. Subtle changes in dynamics occur throughout, and tension is generated through fragility of tone and pitch instability. This binary music juxtaposes sound and silence in an extremely effective manner, and after it has been playing for a while you come to appreciate that the silences have presence, they're not just periodic absences of music.

The CD containing Three², Twenty-Three, Six and Twenty-Six has greater variety. On Twenty-Six, Fong overdubs 26 violin parts, each part of which remains independent of the others. Appropriately, the composition runs for 26 minutes. Twenty-Three proceeds in a similar manner, only this time Fong plays violin and viola, and the expanded soundworld that she and cellist Karen Krummel create is like breath filtering through the respiratory system of a vast organism. The strings, played without vibrato, have a buttonholing directness, though nothing is being conveyed; if you have an emotional response to the music, it's your response, and your responsibility. Of course, Cage's music is not without an agenda (music always has some kind of an agenda), but it manipulates the listener less than any other music I can think of. When Morton Feldman said of Messaien's music, "I don’t know what it is ... it's Disney," manipulation was probably what he had in mind. The remaining compositions on the CD -- Three² and Six --  are played by percussionist Glenn Freeman.

There are certain performers who don't just play music, they breathe life into it. Freeman performs that vital role for Cage. Whereas too many recordings of Cage's music are prissy and formulaic, Freeman is bold and imaginative. This is particularly evident on the final CD under consideration, Four⁴, a monumental (72 minutes) percussion quartet. All four parts are played by Freeman. Cage's flexible mode of composition leaves many choices to the discretion of the performer, and to my mind Freeman makes all the right ones. The instruments he has chosen sound terrific, as does the acoustic in which the piece has been recorded. Some of the loud, sustained sounds attain a massive presence due to the resonance characteristics of the recording venue; sound piles upon sound in towering waves. This is, quite simply, one of the best Cage recordings I've heard -- but all of the OgreOgress CDs are recommended unreservedly.

Gramophone
March 2002 (page A9)
by Jed Distler

Hovhaness: Violin|Viola and Keyboard Works

This release compiles Alan Hovhaness's complete published output for accompanied violin plus all his works for unaccompanied violin and viola. The influence of Eastern folk and religious idioms inform the vast majority of this prolific composer's works. Even the Lullaby he penned as a teenager, which opens the disc, foreshadows the spacious modal style he forged in the 1940s.

Most of the pieces here are short and evocative, making their points with succinct simplicity. Varak for instance, begins with gently spinning melodies in the violin's lower register, supported by the piano's progression of fifths. The sombre atmosphere is quickly dispelled by whirling sixteenth notes from both instruments, colliding in and out of unison accord. Certain pieces such as Shatakh and Yaraz for violin solo strike me as rather two-dimensional in mood and harmonically static, although the slowly unfolding patterns throughout Saris (also for violin and piano) cast an agreeable spell during the course of its 15 minutes. By contrast, Khirgiz Suite's three brief movements are garnished with more rhythmic variety and discreet dabs of dissonance, while more elaborate harmonic motion colours the piano part in the Three Visions of Saint Mesrob.

The 1954 Duet for Violin and Harpsichord stands out for its spiky Webern-like registral leaps and utter unpredictability as to where each aphoristic gesture is headed. The concluding 'Aria' features a seemingly innocent, lyrical violin tune, accompanied by steadily hammered harpsichord chords that transform from Jekyll to Hyde within a mere minute-and-a-half. Christina Fong admirably adapts her violin and viola timbre to the music's flavour, obtaining a reed-like tone for sustained pitches, and 'bending' notes when appropriate. I'm particularly impressed with her beefy sonority and huge dynamic range in the unaccompanied Chahagir, and Arved Ashby's lucid, precise keyboard support and well-researched programme notes are everything they should be.

The packaging pushes space-saving to its extreme limits on all levels, but at least there's no skimping when it comes to Glenn Freeman's excellent engineering.

Grand Rapids Press
April 14, 2002 (page F11)

Trailblazing works for violin set for Monday, Tuesday presentations.

New music for violin will be heard twice this week by one of Michigan's leading performers of new, avant-garde or experimental music. Violinist Christina Fong will give the North American premieres of Michael Nyman's 2 Violins and Maria de Alvear's Energia redonda at 8 p.m. Monday at Grand Valley State University's Loosemoore Auditorium in downtown Grand Rapids.

The performance will repeat at 8 p.m. Tuesday in GVSU's Cook-DeWitt Center at the university campus in Allendale.

Fong, associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony and an adjunct instructor of violin at GVSU, also will play other contemporary solo works for violin by composers Michael Gordon and Marc Mellits.

Both programs are open free to the public.

American Record Guide
May/June 2002 (page 124)
by Charles Parsons

Hovhaness: Violin|Viola and Keyboard Works

The Wire
June 2002 (page 72)
by Philip Clark

Feldman: Violin and String Quartet

This premiere recording of the companion to Feldman's widely known Piano and String Quartet follows on from violinist Christina Fong's scintillating recordings of Cage's valedictory number pieces. Fong has a penchant for dealing with the demands of pacing extended structures, and with The Rangzen Quartet she brilliantly captures Feldman's icy introspection and weeping lyricism. The first hour finds the solo violin pushing against the tart, asphyxiating harmonies of the string quartet, filling the listener with expectant intrigue. In its final hour, Feldman's harmonies and textures gradually pare down until shellshocked pizzicato figures push against blurred tunings. It's quite a trip -- disturbing and fulfilling in equal measure -- making a revealing contrast to the erotic soundworld of Piano and String Quartet.

American Record Guide
July/August 2002 (page 98)
by Jack Sullivan

Feldman: Violin and String Quartet

Two hours of sighs, whispers, murmurs, and tremolos from a string quartet etherealized further by a solo violin floating above. That's what you get with this epic anti-epic from 1985 by Morton Feldman. Feldman's admirers regard him as the most significant composer of our time. It's a hard case to make for something so minimal; this piece in particular seems less like music than music's ghost -- a pure essence that denies anything remotely substantial or corporeal. "Let's get out of here before it starts to develop," Debussy once said to a friend following the exposition in the opening of a Beethoven symphony; Feldman's music is the ultimate manifestation of that stance. Unlike Webern, who sometimes did develop his tiny cells, if only for a moment, Feldman creates the smallest musical materials imaginable, only to have them slowly vanish. Still, Feldman is a distinct, instantly recognizable voice (or anti-voice) -- something that cannot be said for many recent composers.

This is the first recording of the Violin and String Quartet, making it an important release. One thing that is not minimal about this work is the length, but the Rangzen Quartet, enhanced by the spectral violin of Christina Fong, seems undaunted by two hours of musical self-denial. With elegant professionalism, they work hard to say as little as possible. This exotic double CD, the fourth in a series devoted to unrecorded string music by prominent composers, may be hard to find; if you have trouble, log on to http://ogreogress.home-page.org.

Feldman may not be the greatest composer of our time, as his cultish advocates assert, but he may well be the greatest for insomniacs. This mysterious, wispy stuff is very close to a pure dream state, perhaps the best 3 AM music ever.

Fanfare
July/August 2002 (page 97)
by John Story

Cage: Three², Twenty-Three, Six, Twenty-Six

OgreOgress productions is a recording venture out of Grand Rapids, Michigan that is producing first recordings of music for strings and/or percussion by well known composers that has heretofore gone unrecorded. In addition to the present disc, they have listings of several other recordings of Cage as well as the first recording of Feldman's Violin and String Quartet . Music by Hovhaness and a series of discs devoted to monastic music of Tibetan Buddhist monks make up the rest of their catalog. The Cage recordings are centering around the Number Pieces, so called because their titles are the number of performers. The superscript in the case of Three² means it is the second trio in the series. As will be noted in the headnote, there are only three performers on the recording, the ensembles being created via overdubbing. This is a practice that had Cage's explicit endorsement from at least the time of the first release on Mode of the three versions of the Etudes Borealis for piano, cello or both when Michael Pugelise's ill health prevented a joint recording session for the duo version. At Cage's suggestion the two solo versions were mixed together to create a duet that never happened in the flesh. Personally, I cannot imagine what it must have been like for Christina Fong to work her way through twenty-six takes of the twenty-six minutes of Twenty-Six or eighteen of the twenty-three minute Twenty-Three but such things are not at all unusual in the pop world and the resulting sound is convincingly that of an ensemble rather than a recording process.

Cage's Number works are some of his most rarefied. Many of them, such as One⁵ for piano, for example, contain as much or more silence than they do sound. The pieces here are much more about sustained sounds although how much is inherent in the score and how much is due to the particular performing decisions made by the performers I could not say. The recording comes with no notes on the music beyond a coy statement printed in a spiral on the CD itself so exactly what the choices are within each of the four works to be made by the performers is unclear as are the identities of the original commissioning organizations. This is in fact my only complaint about what is in many respects a remarkably beautiful and even moving release.

Both percussion works are short. Three² is played here on metallic instruments and runs about nine minutes. The instruments seem to be a cymbal, a flexitone and a set of metal wind chimes (I am assuming that Cage, as he did in most of his late percussion works, left the actual choice of instruments up to the performer). The result is a sustained exploration of metallic percussion. Six is even shorter at three minutes and uses a wider variety of instruments including what sound to be tympani. Effectively it forms an interlude between the two big string works which occupy most of the disc. Twenty-Three is for roughly the same ensemble as Strauss's late Metamorphosen (Cage does not use double basses in his work). Although the actual music could not be more removed from the Strauss masterpiece, it does convey a sense of loss of surprising poignance. Twenty-Six is for twenty-six violins and is rather similar. The result in both cases is a slowly shifting cluster that expands and contracts in both pitch and density over the twenty plus minutes of each piece. Somewhat surprisingly all the sounds in both works are produced by bowing which may be either an option or a requirement. The emotional content is, I am quite sure, entirely unintentional. Still there is an elegiac quality to both of the string pieces, in particular Twenty-Three, that is surprisingly moving and beautiful.

Recording quality is fine and the performances are by definition sui generis. One could have literally an infinite number of performances of these four works and no two would ever be exactly alike. All four works will eventually turn up in the ongoing Mode series, of course, but these performances are certainly an important addition to the canon of Cage performances. Recommended.

The Strad
July 2002 (page 767)
by Philip Clark

Feldman: Violin and String Quartet

Fanfare
September/October 2002 (page 128)
by John Story

Feldman: Violin and String Quartet

With the release of this recording and the first appearance of String Quartet II on HatArt, all of the huge chamber works that were Morton Feldman's primary focus the last ten years of his life are now available on disc. Feldman developed what are now known as the pattern compositions around the time of Why Patterns? which is usually considered the gateway to the late works. Structurally based on the imperfectly repeating patterns of oriental rugs, Feldman's crippled symmetry as he called it investigated a variety of patterns that shift and return over the often extremely extended duration of his pieces. They explore the effects of memory and what he called memory forms. Although there was not a more sensitive ear for orchestration than Feldman's, the bulk of the late works, the four spectacular works for flute aside, are all for more or less standard ensembles -- piano solo, string quartet alone and with a soloist, piano trio, piano quartet, piano and string duo. In a vast lecture given at Middleburg in 1985, Feldman proclaimed his solidarity with the Western tradition in music arousing the ire of many as he proclaimed his complete lack of sympathy for any non western music. This can seem odd since the long (and very long) late works demand the sort of concentration that has been likened to Eastern meditation. Still however removed from the western greats he so admired they may be in terms of sound, Feldman's late works all use comparatively standard western devices in their construction, specifically things like the non literal repetition of material or, in other terms, the continuous development advocated by the second Viennese School for example. That Feldman was able to personalize this so completely so as to sound completely sui generis is one of the many wonders of his music. It is as far removed from the straightforward repetition of the minimalists that is sometimes invoked as can be imagined.

Beginning with the three works published in 1985 and continuing through the end of his life, Feldman began to severely restrict the basic materials of his music. The first of these, For Bunita Marcus for solo piano, makes the previous work for piano, 1981's Triadic Memories seem as lush as Liszt. In Violin and String Quartet, his next work, which runs nearly two hours, the basic material is a shifting cluster chord that assembles and disassembles in a variety of ways while the soloist either plays phrases constructed from one to three pitches -- the actual melody can be considerably longer than three notes but the pitch material of any given phrase never includes more than three pitches -- or joins invisibly in the ensemble. Indeed for the opening fifteen minutes or so the soloist plays exactly two notes over and over while the cluster shifts behind her. In point of fact much of the solo part consists entirely of these two notes which recur again and again in different contexts. Until Violin and String Quartet, Feldman's music for strings had reveled in the variety of bowings and attacks possible with string music. No more. In the first ninety minutes or so every note is played arco. Special effects are reduced to the use of mutes, playing sul tasto, and harmonics, natural and artificial. The essential string playing is as basic as Vivaldi.

This makes the music sound as if it must be frighteningly dull whereas a better description would be intense. Events which would ordinarily go for nothing take on enormous expressive significance. The first bass note that occurs at around six minutes is tremendously unsettling as is the harmonic crisis that occurs at around the eighteen minute mark. Indeed, even something as simple as when the violin repeats one of its two notes before moving to the other, in the long opening paragraph, takes on an expressive intensity entirely out of scale with the means used to achieve it. To take another moment from late in the piece, at around the hour forty mark, the quartet is playing chords which are attacked and released in unison and the soloist plays pizzicato for the first time. It is impossible to describe how unexpected and unsettling this is to the listener. The return to arco just before the end is like a safe return home.

The present performance and recording are quite beautiful. The performance is perhaps not quite the last word in refinement but it is very good. On the plus side, the performers manage the tempo nearly perfectly and count Feldman's infinitely finicky rhythms extremely well. Feldman's super quiet dynamic scheme (ppp throughout) is a strain on any instrumentalist's control. As the music progresses, one gets the sense that the performers audibly tire and they seem to lose some of their control over the hushed dynamic indicated. By the end they are firmly playing piano not triple pianissimo and there is a certain inconsistency to how notes are attacked. Related to this is an inconsistent use of vibrato. In the opening the soloist plays with vibrato and the quartet without which effectively sets the violin in the foreground. Later, matters are not so consistent and the viola player in particular has a peculiarly throbbing vibrato to the point that it can sound as if a tremolo is being played rather than a single note. These are really extremely small complaints about a performance that is very beautiful. There is a second recording of the work due to be released this summer on HatArt by the Pellegrini Quartet. It will truly have to achieve the unearthly beauty of something like the Kronos/Aki Takahasi performance of Piano and String Quartet to seriously better the present performance. Firmly recommended to all of Morton Feldman's fanatic admirers.

Fanfare
November/December 2002 (page ?) & January/February 2003 (page ?)
by John Story

Cage: One⁶, One¹⁰
Cage: Four⁴

More very late Cage from the good people at OgreOgress Productions. Given the methodology and the motivation of the number pieces, that they are so expressive and, well, just musically interesting I guess is somewhat amazing to me. Essentially, they were created by using a specially created computer program developed for Cage by his assistant Andrew Culver that allowed Cage to fill the many commissions of his last years quite quickly. In the last five years of his life, Cage completed no less than 48 pieces for ensembles that range from various solos to the enormous 103 for the Boston Symphony. Despite, as always, Cage's determined avoidance of compositional choice as regards the results, the music for the various instrumentations seems to form patterns depending on the scoring. The piano works, for example, are frighteningly austere, running at times to an average of about one sound event per minute so that most of the work is actually composed silence. The string works tend to be much more sustained and the works for large ensemble -- Fifty-Eight for winds, Twenty-Three and Twenty-Six for string ensemble, 101 and 103 for full orchestra -- are positively dense.

Four⁴ (or as Cage would have read it, Four for the Fourth Time) for four percussionists is one of the sparser works. As is the usual practice for OgreOgress, Glenn Freeman overdubs the four percussion parts using a large variety of percussion sounds and methodologies for playing (there are, for example, in addition to the more expected sounds of wood, skin, and metal percussion, what appears to be a lot of bowed percussion). Among the parameters Cage did not specify, in common with most of the other works for percussion of his last 40 years or so, is the specific choice of instruments to be used. Freeman's choices are quite beautiful and the work is quite affecting over its extremely long playing span. As always, collectors should be aware that the work will eventually appear in the Mode series of the complete Cage, but because no two performances are ever entirely alike (or in the case of the percussion pieces even on the same selection of instruments) each performance is a unique event.

That aspect of the number pieces is made explicit in this recording of violin works where Christina Fong offers the three (movements) of One⁶ for solo violin. I would have preferred, as on their disc of Twenty-Three and Twenty-Six that they had interspersed works for another instrumental combination between the separate (movements), which ... run together to form a single work of about 45 minutes. One¹⁰ ... is written using very much the same style, mostly involving sustained pitches (there is a consistent absence of most of the special effects available to string players in the number pieces, perhaps reflecting the greater austerity of Cage's thinking in his last years as he contemplated the position of the artist in society or it may just be an option he allowed his players that was not taken in the performances I have heard—one never knows). Again, both works either have or will appear in the Mode series as played by Irvine Arditti, along with all the other Cage works involving solo violin.

The packaging for the percussion disc is decidedly cheesy, and one needs to take measures to keep the disc from sliding out of the sleeve. The violin disc is more conventionally packaged, although the graphics are less attractive. In both cases, there is little in the way of notes, not that it really matters in the long run. OgreOgress is doing fine work (I recently reviewed another Cage disc of theirs as well as the first recording of Feldman's massive Violin and String Quartet). Their web site at http://cdbaby.com/all/ogreogress includes purchasing information as well as their future recording plans. This is an enterprise decidedly worth supporting and the discs are extremely reasonably priced. Recommended.

The Strad
March 2003 (page 295)
by Philip Clark

Alvear: Fuerzas

'Maria de Alvear is the most original young composer in Europe,' screams the cover of this premiere CD recording of her 66-minute piece for solo viola,Fuerzas. Second guessing originality is a high-risk business but Fuerzas is unquestionably a brave and immensely striking work.

De Alvear was born in Madrid in 1960 and now lives in Berlin, but she rejects developments from the recent European mainstream. To my ears the lineage of her piece combines the drones and slowly evolving melodic lines of Gregorian Chant with a nod to the extended-duration pieces composed by Morton Feldman and John Cage late in his career. Like Feldman, de Alvear seems obsessed with the transformation and expansion of tiny triadic figures into material that is fertile enough to sustain itself over a vast span. However, unlike Feldman, de Alvear's piece has a decidedly churchy feel that's oddly reminiscent of the cathedrals of sound that Bruckner erected by exposing church chorales to larger scale architecture.

Viola player Christina Fong relishes the challenges of long duration playing and here she gives a performance that avoids obvious sentiment and delivers a more pure and unaffected beauty. From the start, her imposing presence gives notice that we're in for quite a journey, and her sustained concentration amply fits the ambition of de Alvear's concept. OgreOgress records with a rich boomy sound that allows for an unheralded range of overtones. A compelling release.

Alvear: Fuerzas

The notes to Maria de Alvear's Fuerzas are a long review of her music by Kyle Gann. He writes that she is "the most original young composer in Europe." That may be true, but it doesn't convince me that this is a great disc. This is one long work for solo viola, performed by Christina Fong. The writing reminds me a bit of Gregorian Chant (without organum) in the sense that this is absolute monophony -- a series of notes, each one isolated and yet part of a larger stream. But where the analogy breaks down is in the sense of tension and release. In the best performances of the best Gregorian Chant, there is a clear sense of melodic line and cadence. The austerity of the single melodic voice is offset by the loveliness of the melodies. But here there is no sense of arrival or even of departure. It just kind of goes on and on. I realize I'm exposing a bias here, but even after several attempts at this music I couldn't get away from the feeling that this was easy composing. Gann also speaks in the program notes about the ritual aspect of her performances. I find that very attractive. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it translates to records. There are parallels here with Morton Feldman's work. I have always found the experience of performing Feldman's music and hearing it in concert far richer than listening to it on records.

The Wire
May 2003 (page 80)
by Andy Hamilton

Alvear: Fuerzas

Kyle Gann goes a little over the top in his sleevenote, praising the Madrid born but Berlin based De Alvear as "the most original young composer in Europe." Christina Fong is the solo viola player on the first recording of Fuerzas. At 66 minutes it might be considered grueling, but in fact the slowly unfolding lines are compelling in a performance of tremulous but rapt intensity. Rhythmically unnotated, the piece, as Gann comments, is suffused with pulsation, while the reverberant recording emphasizes its hieractic qualities -- closer to Feldman than to the mainstream of European modernism. Hypnotic and very beautiful.

Feldman: Violin and String Quartet

MUSICIAN SPOTLIGHT

As associate concertmaster, violinist Christina Fong sits in a prominent place on stage in the orchestra. Should the concertmaster not be there, she would step in. The responsibilities of the concertmaster include leading the violin section and signaling the orchestra to begin tuning at the start of each concert. She shrugs at the mention of her leading role and says she views the orchestra as a "collective," adding, "we're all in this together and each musician is important."

Her strong sense of equality and justice also flows into her pursuits outside of music, and she is active in the movement to free Tibet from Chinese occupation. She is especially drawn to the movement because she says Tibet is one of a few countries seeking to remove its oppressors through nonviolent means. Fong has written many letters to her congressmen about the importance of freeing Tibet and she was active in a postcard campaign to liberate Ngawang Choephel, an ethnomusicologist who was captured by the Chinese government while documenting folk music in Tibet.

"I think people were moved to do something because it was so apparent that this Fulbright scholar from India, who was in Tibet for a folk music project, was unjustly imprisoned."

Just as the involvement of many Caucasian Americans was necessary for the black civil rights movement in the 60s, as an American of Chinese ancestry, Fong believes her voice is necessary in the chorus to free Tibet from China. She is a second generation Chinese-American, the daughter of two mathematicians who went into the restaurant business, starting the first Filipino-Chinese eatery in Chicago. She started playing the piano at age three and the violin at nine. She says there wasn't a defining moment when she decided to become a professional musician, rather "it was a gradual process." She received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Northwestern University, where she graduated Pi Kappa Lambda and was awarded the honorary title Eckstein Scholar.

"My parents both thought it was important to get a good education," she says. "It wasn't a matter of if I would go to college, but where."

Before joining the Grand Rapids Symphony in 1988, Fong was a member of the Florida Philharmonic and Civic Orchestra of Chicago. She is passionate about the performance of new music on violin and viola.

"It's interesting because orchestras until very recently were actually very adventuresome," she says. "Even conductors like Stokowski and Toscanini performed music by Shostakovich, Copland, Prokofiev and Stravinsky; all composing music in radically new styles for that time. But then within the last 50 years or so, orchestras became more conservative. So, I guess I'm kind of retro." Christina's interest in contemporary classical music carries into her recording career. She is doing post-production work on her sixth CD recording of new music written for violin and viola and has started working on a seventh. Her CDs, which include first recordings of music by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Alan Hovhaness and Maria de Alvear, have been recorded in a variety of soundscapes including the Basilica of Saint Adalbert in Grand Rapids and a Tibetan Buddhist Temple in Toronto. She maintains a website listing her CDs at http://christinafong.com. Her husband Glenn Freeman who is a percussionist and sound engineer, produces her recording projects which have been favorably reviewed in publications like Gramophone, The Strad, The Wire and American Record Guide. The couple lives in downtown Grand Rapids in an apartment with their cat named Mao Mao, which means kitty in Cantonese, on an upper floor of the historic Peck Building on Monroe Center. Interestingly, their apartment is former home of A.R. Killiger Violin Shop, in business during the late 1920s. Christina likes living within a ten minute walk of DeVos Performance Hall and a five minute walk of St. Cecilia Music Society. She enjoys the repertoire the Symphony performs each season, but would like to see the orchestra perform more contemporary works. "I think the performance of more new music would raise the orchestra to an even higher artistic level," Christina says. "Some people are hesitant about being exposed to new music. However, if they are not able to hear it, how can they decide whether they like it or not? My feeling is, that by hearing the music of today, we may learn to appreciate the voice of our contemporaries. As artists and musicians, we owe it to the audience."

Grand Rapids Press
February 15, 2004 (page ?)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Violinist seeks sound adventure

"Go nuts."

That's what violinist Christina Fong told Robert Shechtman before the West Michigan composer wrote his first piece for her to play.

"I told him I was interested but only if he would go nuts and be as original and creative as he possibly could be," Fong said. "And not to worry what others might think about it."

"Including me," she added.

That was in 1991, when Shechtman began writing Variations on the Huang Chung of the Eleventh Moon for Fong to play. More than a year following Shechtman's sudden death from a heart attack in December 2002, Fong will give the premiere performance of another work, one of Shechtman's last pieces, Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary, featuring members of the Aquinas College Percussion Group, directed by Rupert Kettle, will be performed Monday evening at Aquinas College. The 15-movement work was inspired by the cycle of meditations contemplated by Roman Catholics while praying the rosary.

"Bob was always interested in the spiritual aspect of music, what made certain works seem religious," Fong said. "What is the nature of meditation and music itself? Can music really be religious? These are questions Bob was interested in."

During the performance, Sister Catherine Williams of Aquinas College will speak about the rosary meditations, known as "mysteries," that Catholics ponder while reciting the series of prayers in the rosary.

Shechtman came to West Michigan in 1971 to teach at the former Thomas Jefferson College, which later was dissolved and absorbed into the present Grand Valley State University.

An award-winning composer as well as a jazz trombonist and bass player, Shechtman was known as an iconoclast with wide-ranging interests and a dry wit.

Fong, associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony, and Shechtman met years ago when both taught at GVSU.

"I was actually more interested in Bob's conversation and ideas, more so than his music," Fong recalled. A member of the Grand Rapids Symphony since 1988, Fong has garnered a national reputation for playing new music, premiering and performing music by composers such as Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and others. "In recent years, the new music scene in Grand Rapids has been very conservative and unadventuresome," Fong said. "You have the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts presenting decades-old music the Grand Rapids Symphony should now be performing."

The native of Chicago has recorded several compact discs, by such composers as John Cage, Morton Feldman and Alan Hovhaness, all of never-before-recorded works.

Shechtman originally wrote Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary for Fong, playing a five-string electric violin, and for her husband, Glenn Freeman, playing electronic percussion.

Shortly before his death, Shechtman revised the piece, at Freeman's suggestion, for natural percussion instruments.

Four players, under conductor Kelli Tilley, will perform with Fong playing five-string electric violin.

"I think of it as a violin and a viola in one," she said.

Fanfare
March/April 2004 (page ?)
by Walter Simmons

Hovhaness: Violin|Viola and Keyboard Works

This CD caught my attention chiefly because it concentrates on rarely heard pieces by Hovhaness composed during the 1940s and 50s -- the period when he was writing his most inspired work. I was not previously familiar with either of the performers, or with OgreOgress productions, which seems to be a tiny operation based in Grand Rapids, Michigan (see http://cdbaby.com/all/ogreogress). Violinist Christina Fong is no Itzhak Perlman, displaying a rather thin tone, with little vibrato, and a reticent approach overall, although her intonation is generally on target, and there is a clean purity to her sound. Furthermore, this music does not require a rich, throbbing violin sound or lots of "personality." Most of the music on the disc has either not been recorded before, or was available on obscure and/or long-unavailable LPs.

Oror has the distinction of being identified as the prolific composer's first composition, ostensibly dating from his early teens. (I say "ostensibly" because Hovhaness was one of those composers inclined to revise early works without indicating having done so.) It is a brief lullaby based on a simple, pentatonic-flavored melody presented and reiterated with little adornment or complication.

Almost all the remaining music on the disc originated during the 1940s and 50s, when Hovhaness returned to his spiritual/cultural roots, attempting to use aspects of Armenian (and other similar) folk and religious music as media for expressing his own personal concerns. Much of the music from this period displays a dynamic fervor and creative urgency largely absent from his later work. Most notable of these pieces is the brief (four-minute) Varak, named for a holy Armenian burial ground. An opening section presents a passionate incantation with strong major-minor conflicts. This section calls to mind portions of the work that many Hovhaness experts consider the composer's masterpiece: the Concerto for Viola and Strings, subtitled Talin. (A brief digression is warranted here: A brilliant and deeply moving performance of Talin, featuring violist Emanuel Vardi, was available briefly during the mid-1950s on an MGM LP. Some 20 years later, clarinetist Lawrence Sobol persuaded the composer to make an alternate version of the work for him to perform and, later, record. That recording has been reissued on a Citadel CD (CTD88107), still available. However, the clarinet, lacking the viola's capacity for incisive articulation and passionate intensity, is a poor substitute and changes the character of the work entirely. Unfortunately, Vardi's performance has never been reissued, nor has any other violist chosen to champion the work. (One would think that Kim Kashkashian would be a natural and likely candidate, wouldn't one?) In a sense, Varak is almost a preparatory study for Talin. The lively second section displays one of Hovhaness's more effective devices: the violin and piano each representing the characteristic style of a different Middle-Eastern instrument, playing together but independently in seemingly ad hoc, improvisatory counterpoint. Similar in style but not quite as inspired is the somewhat more extended Shatakh. Hovhaness enthusiasts will want to know both these pieces.

On the other hand, quite disappointing is Saris, actually (at 15 minutes) the longest piece on the disc. The violin plays long, melismatic melodies, while the piano accompanies, first "strumming" in obvious imitation of a stringed instrument, then later in a slow "jhala" style, rather like raindrops. Initially intriguing, the piece remains flat in affect throughout, becoming an excellent soporific.

Chahagir features unaccompanied viola, while Yeraz [The Dream] is for unaccompanied violin. Both are improvisatory modal incantations. By now, readers will know whether these pieces are their cup of tea.

Familiar from another MGM LP of the 1950s, the six-minute Kirghiz Suite comprises three concise movements. This is the only piece that calls for anything approaching virtuosity, and here Ms. Fong really shines. Her rendition is more polished, precise, and dynamic than that of Anahid and Maro Ajemian, who originally championed and recorded the work, and she and Ashby make of it a far more substantive and satisfying piece of music.

Even more concentrated is the Duet for Violin and Harpsichord, composed in one day, its three movements lasting a total of three minutes. Floating around for nearly 50 years on CRI issues performed by Robert Brink, with composer Daniel Pinkham at the harpsichord, this rather odd piece comprises two movements in which angular phrases in the violin are accompanied by cluster harmonies, then later, by a strange ostinato in the harpsichord. More than one listener has described these movements as "Webernian" and not without reason. The third movement is a fervent hymn, accompanied by full triads in repeated quarter-note rhythm. Here, I think I prefer Pinkham's more sustained rendition of the accompaniment to Ashby's detached plunk-plunk-plunk.
The melodic angularity and cluster harmony of the duet anticipate the direction Hovhaness was to take in the 1960s, exemplified by Three Visions of Saint Mesrob. Attempting to evoke a sense of mystery, these short movements comprise improvisatory melismas without a clear sense of meter, accompanied by tone clusters or single notes in the piano, often tonally unrelated, played with pedal remaining down throughout, creating a semblance of some exotic stringed instrument.

OgreOgress productions's packaging is spare, to say the least, with no information about the performers, although this is mitigated somewhat by a midrange price. Pianist Ashby provides brief but informative program notes on the music.

The Wire
May 2004 (page 56)
by Philip Clark

Feldman: Early and Unknown Piano Works

Digging around among the sins of their youth doesn't alway do composers favours. This survey of Feldman's juvenilia starts in 1943 and it shows a composer who's already pitting himself against the niceties of academic composition. His First Piano Sonata [To Bela Bartók] was written when he was 17 and still a pupil of the traditionally minded Wallingford Riegger. A spaciously hammered chord provides the opening dramatic gesture and, remarkably, it doesn't sound too far removed in spirit from the chord that introduces Two Pieces For Three Pianos (1966), the most recent work to be heard here. The sonata then progresses into a ragged structure that zigzags with the flow of material characterised by a tactile yet sympathetic approach to piano writing.

Structure as scale and a highly refined ear for instrumental timbre were to become Feldman's calling card, and even the sonata's subtitle demonstrates that long before For John Cage and For Christian Wolff, Feldman was already referencing the most avant garde classical sounds to be heard in New York. The basic language of the piece owes much to Bartók (obviously) Scriabin and perhaps a hint of Berg. When he discovered abstract expressionism and Cage, Feldman would ditch such obvious borrowings, but this early sonata is full of tantalising clues to the direction his music ultimately followed. Two other early pieces, Preludio (1944) and Self Portrait (1945), find him getting to grips with the basics of counterpoint and he manages even this chore with a light touch and imaginative resources.

Belonging to Feldman's mature period, the remaining three items -- Three Dances (1950), the undated 50s piece For Cynthia and Two Pieces for Three Pianos (1966) -- for various reasons have been forgotten. Three Dances chimes with spiky little modules of notes, while the 40 second dedication to his first wife, For Cynthia, is a jokey Satie-like miniature. Both are interesting footnotes, but the Two Pieces For Three Pianos is a seriously neglected masterpiece. Previously unrecorded and not even mentioned in the catalogue of Feldman's published works, it is one of those transitional pieces that transforms the sounds of early Feldman onto the larger canvases typical of his late music. Here pianist Debora Petrina overdubs the three parts to produce a soundscape with an oddly twisted and squashed perspective that seems an appropriate response to Feldman's asphyxiated textures.

Fanfare
September/October 2004 (page ?)
by John Story

Feldman: Early and Unknown Piano Works

An artist's juvenilia can be a treasure trove of discovery in the sense of figuring out just where someone came from but, especially in music, where there truly is no such thing as the amateur composer, it is usually only interesting for the glimpses of what was to come. People like Erich Wolfgang Korngold are rare. Korngold apparently had no childhood, at least as an artist, whereas the more usual situation is that of another famous Wolfgang. The works of Mozart's youth are remarkably accomplished for a boy of his age, but the masterpieces did not start truly flowing until he was an adult. Feldman follows the more usual path I think, judging from the very early work composed in his teens and early twenties that has appeared in the nearly 20 years since the composer's death.

The works on this disc are arranged chronologically. The First Piano Sonata [To Bela Bartók], dates from 1943, when Feldman (1926–1987) was seventeen. The composer has written that he composed a bunch of Scriabinesque pieces while a student of Madame Press, none of which have thus far appeared and may not have survived. The First Sonata (there would, of course, be no second) is a five-minute essay written during the composer's studies with Wallingford Riegger. Blocks of Bartók-influenced material are laid end to end. This is virtually the only hint of the music to come. The piece is full of large-scale expressive rhetoric that has no place in Feldman's mature language. The Preludio and Self Portrait, from 1944 and 1945, continue this line, although here the pieces are pretty much about a single expressive stance. The Three Dances are part of the body of work that Feldman wrote in his early twenties for a variety of dance performances. They move from a language most reflective of the Variations for piano by Anton Webern (one should remember that Cage and Feldman met at the New York premiere of Webern's Symphony, and Webern's music would be a lifelong influence on Feldman's work) to the final piece, which is possibly the most Cagean thing Feldman ever wrote -- a single chord is repeated, played by the left hand, while the right alternately strikes a drum and a water glass. The tiny For Cynthia is undated and was presumably written sometime in the early 50s for Feldman's first wife. Again the language is much more rhetorical and conventional than that for which Feldman would become noted.

Far and away the bulk of the disc is taken up by the first recording of Two Pieces for Three Pianos written in 1966. The work is quite different from any of Feldman's other music for multiple keyboards and the notes suggest that more players than three are necessary to realize the work in live performance. Often, if not always, Feldman provided the same music for each pianist to play at his or her own rate, producing what is, in effect, an irregular canon of pitch material. The last of these, Five Pianos from 1972, is a veritable orgy of luminous clouds of soft piano sound and various vocalizations from the five players. Here, in the first piece, Pianos I and II play Feldman's characteristically beautiful tone cluster chords softly, their tempo indication being that the sounds are allowed to die out before progressing to the next, whereas Piano III is fully notated -- complete with rapidly changing metronome markings. Fermatas provide points for the players to become re-coordinated before proceeding. In the second piece, each pianist enters as the sound produced by the previous player begins to fade. In this performance, all three parts are played, via overdubbing, by Deborah Petrina. It is remarkably lovely as sound, although, especially in the second piece, I wonder if the results of a performance with the interaction of three pianists (or more as necessary to reach the extended chords) and the individual resonances of three separate instruments might not produce a rather different result (I have the same complaint about the Barton Workshop performances of Two Pianos and Piece for Four Pianos where all the parts are overdubbed by a single player -- the performances by Le Bureau de Pianistes on Sub Rosa is just that much more effective in both works). Still, that is looking a gift horse in the mouth. At well over 30 minutes, this is a major addition to the recorded canon of Feldman's work in characteristically beautiful sound from the tiny OgreOgress operation. This is a must-have for all Feldman fanciers, and I am sure it will stand up well to whatever is subsequently produced in either the Hat(now)Art or Mode series of Feldman recordings.

American Record Guide
November/December 2004 (page 93)
by Mark Lehman

Feldman: Early and Unknown Piano Works

Whether Morton Feldman (1926-87) will go down in music history as the profound and original master his admirers claim him to be is an open question. He wrote a huge number of pieces and many are so grotesquely long that few people will ever have the willingness or even the stamina to listen to more than a few of them. I suspect that the concepts behind the music may be more attractive than the music itself. Feldman defied the limits of human perception, attention, and memory -- and made that defiance the point: time is the fire where we burn, and Feldman seeks to chill musical fire from its restless, ever-changing stream of desires (for movement, for resolution, for formal completion) into a static, marmoreal sonic architecture that we are meant to simply accept and contemplate without asking for anything more.

Or so it seems to me. At any rate Feldman's personal brand of what might be call mystical abstract expressionism is revered by his devoted admirers, and though it isn't going to be filling concert halls anytime soon it's generally greeted with esteem, if not awe, by critics and reviewers. Various releases devoted to Feldman have gotten responses in ARG ranging from respectful to rave, from Tim Taylor (Nov/Dec 1991), Arved Ashby (Jan/Feb 1995), Allen Gimbel (May/June 2000), and Jack Sullivan (July/Aug 2002).

This new collection of piano pieces in first recordings caught my interest because it offers five of Feldman's earliest compositions. Sometimes discovering a difficult composer's musical point of departure can be a way "into" his aesthetic world, and I thought maybe listening to this disc might help me to better understand and appreciate Feldman's music.

It begins with Feldman's First Piano Sonata (there are no later sonatas). The piece is subtitled To Bela Bartók and lasts only six minutes; it was written in 1943 when Feldman was a teenager studying with Wallingford Riegger, but doesn't sound like Riegger in the slightest. It begins with, and mostly consists of, a sequence of lush, sonorous, and rather grand chordal gestures set off by jagged rhythmic punctuation. A comparison might be the way the fluent opening of Schubert's great Piano Sonata in B-flat rounds off its richly harmonized first melody with low, rumbling trills. Despite the sonata's dedication the music isn't at all what's commonly thought of as Bartokian, though there is, I think, a kinship to Bartok's early, Debussy-influenced piano music -- for example, the Seven Sketches and Four Dirges. Still, as remote as this sonata is from Feldman's mature style it does prefigure his later music in several ways. For one thing (like so many of the works to follow) it's explicitly written as a tribute to another artist. For another, it distorts the conventional time scale -- it is much shorter than one would expect of a sonata. And for a third and most important thing, it subverts conventional formal patterns; it is static, repetitive, and truncated instead of developing its material in a typical 'sonata-like' fashion. Indeed the work ends on an upbeat that in a normal sonata would have led to the main body of a big allegro first movement, leaving the impression of a frustrated premonition, an announcement of an imposing full-length opus that never materializes -- like the Messiah of the Jews, always just about to arrive but never actually showing up.

If I've spent a lot of time on this six-minute item -- well, that's part of Feldman's appeal: his music provokes response and thought. It's fascinating to ponder and to write about, and it isn't really necessary to actually listen to much of the stuff to have (what seem to be) print-worthy ideas about it. But in truth I enjoyed this in its own way remarkable piece; it very nicely marries sensuous pianism and rapturous-but-genteel mysticism in a mode that one sometimes notices in certain English and Scandinavian early-moderns, as for instance John Ireland's Legend, John Fould's Essays in the Modes and Gösta Nystroem's Regrets.

Preludio is from 1944 and lasts only 2-1/2 minutes; Self-Portrait, from 1945, is a little under 4 minutes. Both are similar in language to the sonata, the former (as its title implies) more contrapuntal and neo-Bachian, the latter more dissonant and expressionist, growing from a quiet, moody opening to a noisy, climactic outburst of of anguish and outrage.

By 1950, when Feldman wrote his short set of Three Dances, he'd undergone a radical stylistic change. The music uses spare, reiterated rhythmic ostinatos, gnomic interludes, and gaping silences in a manner obviously indebted to John Cage (though -- and how odd is this? -- at times faintly resembling some of Wallingford Riegger's dry, peppery chromatic neoclassicism). For Cynthia is a 41-second, tonal, aborted two-part invention tossed off as a joke and included in this recital as a curiosity only.

Finally, Two Pieces for Three Pianos, from 1966,  in two long movements (19 and 15 minutes), billed as a neglected masterpiece in the liner notes, brings us to Feldman's characteristic later manner. Overtone-haloed, cluster heavy chords manifest themselves so slowly and deliberately they seem to hang in the air as sonic objects, and the flow of information is so glacial that every nuance acquires exaggerated intensity and significance. In short, we approach the negation of time, "the magical sense of uneventfulness" (as Roberto Gerhard put it). Despite what might be thought of as a knotty, rugged idiom, these piano pieces are calming, restful, and moreover have an unyielding purity that compels admiration. Traditional ideas of form are of course by now beside the point: this music could go on for ten minutes, ten hours, ten years, ten centuries. Its pathos is that we, mortal listeners, cannot.

Performances by Debora Petrina (she plays all three parts in the three-piano pieces) are devoted and sensitive; sonics are not sharply focussed and too reverberant -- not enough to hurt much, though the music would certainly have benefitted from a clearer recording.

The Wire
March 2005 (page 74)
by Philip Clark

Cage: One⁴, Four [all versions], Twenty-Nine

The OgreOgress label continues its survey of Cage's Number Pieces with a quietly monumental version of Twenty-Nine, all versions of Four and One⁴. The scores are realized by Christina Fong (violin/viola), Karen Krummel (cello), Michael Crawford (bass) and Glenn Freeman (percussion), and the musicians aim for a noticeably objective and 'once removed' quality to the performance. Twenty-Nine moves as though by stealth through its long duration. The strings fuse into a seamless meta-instrument and Freeman's brusque percussion rolls add a tangy second dimension. The six versions of Four can be edited by listeners at will into ten, 20 or 30 minute version(s); One⁴ is heard through the painterly medium of Freeman's resonant cymbals and gongs.

American Record Guide
September/October 2005 (page 87)
by Rob Haskins

Cage: One⁴, Four [all versions], Twenty-Nine
Cage: One⁷ [from One¹³], One⁸

Here are more inventive and imaginative Cage recordings from percussionist Glenn Freeman and friends. (I contributed the liner notes.)

The first release includes One⁴ (1990), for a single percussionist; Four (1989), for string quartet; and Twenty-nine (1991), for violas, cellos, double basses, percussion, timpani and piano; only Four has appeared before, in a crystalline, no-nonsense reading by the Arditti Quartet on Mode 27 (not reviewed in ARG).

As usual, Freeman has recorded the pieces through multi-tracking. In Four, the artists play with more vibrancy than the Ardittis and a tad more roughness. I like the tone, but I wish the recorded sound itself was more spacious. One⁴ and Twenty-nine are revelations to me; Freeman selects an interesting variety of percussion sounds for One⁴ and takes care that sufficient silent periods account for a substantial part of the performance; as always in Cage, the silence has a destabilizing and yet magical effect. In Twenty-nine, the performers sustain their separate notes for very long durations, so that the music moves through a variety of fascinating and varied harmonies -- in the late 1980s, Cage claimed he finally wrote harmonic music that pleased him, and he defined harmony as any sounds noticed together. And yet there are many other ways of apprehending the harmonies in this beautiful music; listeners are lucky to have this work and the others. As Glenn knows, I'm somewhat skeptical about the use of multi-tracking technology in the performances; the technique also flaws Steffan Schleiermacher's brilliant performances of various ensemble pieces in his recording of all Cage's piano works for MDG (see Mar/Apr 2003). But I can also imagine a recording of Twenty-nine with, say, 12 non-committed musicians, which might be worse; in Freeman's release, I know at least that all the musicians are committed to the works and their aesthetic.

One⁷ (1990) is a piece where the performer chooses 12 sounds he or she is willing to play. Cage's score shows which of the 12 sounds is played at any given time, but the player has freedom about the exact duration of the sounds and some control over their start times. The unidentified cellist on the recording selected sounds from the worksheets for One¹³, an unfinished cello piece for Michael Bach. In this piece, Cage wanted the cellist to play the same F-sharp in many different ways (on different strings, with different harmonics, and so on), and he also wanted pre-recorded cello F-sharps to come from speakers arranged around the audience. I doubt any other performer would ever perform One⁷ this way, but I must say it's fascinating to hear a piece that consists of many iterations of a single pitch. I'm sure many listeners would find it a colossal waste of their time -- too bad for them. One⁸ (1991), a cello piece also composed for Bach, often requires the cellist to play chords of three and four tones; Bach designed a special bow for this purpose. I don't think the cellist on this release uses the special bow, so I am not sure how he or she sustains the chords. (more multi-tracking, perhaps?) Although this composition has greater variety than the performance of the earlier work, it lasts 13 minutes longer. I think it's a good performance, but I prefer Michael Bach's cleaner and more unpredictable recording on Mode 141 (not reviewed in ARG).

Muskegon Chronicle
September 29, 2005 (page 2D)
by Marla Miller

"New Music" violist to perform

A leading performer of new music on the violin and viola will play the American premiere of Morton Feldman's recently discovered [Composition] for violin at 3pm Saturday at Muskegon Community College's Overbrook Theatre.

Christina Fong, who has seven CDs featuring world premiere recordings, will give a free concert in conjunction with the Muskegon Area Arts and Humanities Festival that includes concerts, films, exhibits, receptions, speakers and discussions.

"This important 11-minute work was first made public by the Paul Sacher Foundation (where Feldman's original works are housed in Switzerland) in 2003. It is Feldman's only work for solo violin," said Fong "Not only do I believe it to be one of the finest works of its type for solo violin, it was composed by one of America's most important and original composers."

Besides Feldman's 1984 composition, Fong also will perform Philip Glass' Opening (from A Madrigal Opera), Maria de Alvear's Fuerzas, and John Cage's One⁶. His black and white silent film (One¹¹) will be shown simultaneously.

Fong, a Chicago native, has played violin since elementary school and learned to play the viola in college. She has both a bachelors and masters degree from Northwestern University, where she graduated Pi Kappa Lamda and was awarded the honorary title, "Eckstein Scholar." She served as an adjunct violin instructor from 1990 to 2002 at Grand Valley State University.

A member of the Grand Rapids Symphony since 1988, Fong is currently associate concertmaster and plays in the symphony's Calder Quintet, which tours western Michigan giving civic and educational concerts. This will be her first performance in Muskegon.

"The reason I have had the opportunity to play all of these premieres, in short, is that I specialize in new music," she said. "I have chosen to perform and record new music exclusively (i.e. no traditional or standard literature). There are very few violinists or musicians for this matter that do this."

The Wire
May 2006 (page 55)
by Brian Marley

Feldman: Complete Violin|Viola and Piano Works

Glenn Freeman and Christina Fong's OgreOgress label has made recordings of John Cage and Morton Feldman its speciality. The latest addition to their Feldman catalogue is a career-spanning collection of pieces for violin and viola, with or without piano. It begins with the first ever recording of a three movement sonata Feldman composed in 1945 aged 19. It's a well made piece that's firmly in the Western classical tradition and probably of little interest to anyone but Feldman completists. Violinist Fong and pianist Paul Hersey play it sensitively and without a hint of irony, though one can't help feeling that Feldman couldn't have intended it to be taken entirely in earnest. The brief, somewhat Webernesque Piece (1950) marks the emergence of Feldman's personalised compositional language. By the following year he'd began to investigate graphic scores and his ideas had firmed up considerably, as indicated here by Projections 4 and Extensions 1. The survey then jumps to Vertical Thoughts 2 (1963), followed by the elegant Viola in My Life 3 (1970). Spring of Chosroes (1977) bears witness to Feldman's transition from a composer of disparate elements in obscure gravitational orbit to one whose use of repetitions represents a continuum, albeit one that's not wholly predictable. The indiosyncracies of his mature style are most evident on For Aaron Copland (1981), the monumental For John Cage (1982), and a previously unrecorded solo violin piece, [Composition] (1984). [Composition] may actually be a fragment of a piece for Paul Zukofsky that Feldman abandoned, 100 Precious Things. Fong and Hersey play well throughout, producing a richly resonant acoustic that draws the listener into Feldman's music.

Grand Rapids Press
May 7, 2006 (page ?)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Symphony 'stars' come out for concert

Conductors usually spend long hours preparing their programs -- pondering soloists, poring over scores, putting pieces together bit by bit.

Associate conductor John Varineau had an easier time preparing for the Grand Rapids Symphony's "Stars of the Symphony" concerts this week.

Once he had picked his "stars" for the Pops Series concert, Varineau left much of the rest to the four soloists.

"I just went to them and said, 'What would you like to play?' " Varineau said.

That opened the door wide for a colorful ending to the Grand Rapids Symphony's Pops Series this weekend in DeVos Performance Hall.

Violinist Christina Fong, flutist Christopher Kantner, trumpeter Charley Lea and percussionist William Vits will be the stars for the concerts that end the orchestra's Pops season.

Some of the music is near and dear to their hearts.

"This is the personality of these people and what they wanted to give to our Pops audience," Varineau said.

Kantner will play from Astor Piazzolla's The History of the Tango.

"Everybody loves a tango, and these are brilliant showpieces for Chris," Varineau said.

Kantner, who is in his 29th season with the orchestra, has played the Argentinean composer's pieces for years, accompanied by guitar or harp. For this program, West Michigan arranger David Culross has orchestrated the accompaniment.

"It's always been a real pleasure to play," Kantner said. "This is an experiment, and we're very excited about it."

Lea, associate principal trumpet, will perform Armenian composer Arthur Arutiunian's flashy Concerto for Trumpet, a piece he played 20 years ago after winning the concerto competition at The University of Michigan.

But Lea said he picked it back up again easily.

"I was thinking it wouldn't be, but surprisingly it was," he said. "I really pounded it into my memory."

Fong, associate concertmaster of the orchestra, will be featured in music from John Williams' Schindler's List.

A passionate supporter of new music, Fong also will be soloist in a portion of a Concerto for Violin and Orchestra by Philip Glass, a contemporary American composer who has written orchestral works, operas, film scores and other media.

"This concert marks the first time any work by Philip Glass has been officially programmed by the Grand Rapids Symphony," Fong said.

Vits, principal percussionist, will break a few rules, playing a violin piece on xylophone, a cello piece on theremin and a tap-dance piece on rhythm bones.

"Bill's a consummate entertainer," Varineau explained.

The xylophone piece is Tambourin Chinois, which violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler wrote for himself to play. The cello solo is The Swan from Camille Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals, which Vits will play on the theremin, an electronic instrument from the 1920s frequently heard in old science fiction films.

Morton Gould's Tap Dance Concerto is just what the title suggests -- a piece for tap dancer and orchestra, though Vits will play it on the wooden sticks called the bones.

"It's humorous and light and kind of fun, and I don't think anyone's ever attempted to do it on the bones," Vits said.

For that matter, he doesn't think anyone's ever played theremin in DeVos Hall, though Vits has played it for the Picnic Pops at Cannonsburg.

"I take it out on my school shows, or I take it out for the odd Halloween gig," said Vits, who joined the orchestra during the 1979-1980 season.

Crowd-pleasing tunes -- including a march, movie music, well-known classical melodies, novelty tunes and a few surprises -- will round out the third "Stars of the Symphony" program.

"The rest of the program, I filled out with lots of fun stuff for orchestra," Varineau said. "This is going to be a concert for fun."

Grand Rapids Press
May 13, 2006 (page ?)
by Jennifer Lund

Symphony 'stars' inspire toe-tapping, laughs

Dancing might have seemed more natural than sitting for the Grand Rapids Symphony's final Pops Series concert of the season.

Featuring four "Stars of the Symphony," the concert Friday night in DeVos Performance Hall highlighted music from a variety of genres led by associate conductor John Varineau.

Associate concertmaster Christina Fong had the audience transfixed more than once during the evening, not only with composer John Williams rendition of Jewish Town and the main theme from the film Schindler's List but also with Philip Glass' mesmerizing third movement from the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.

Both appearances displayed Fong's ability to fully immerse herself in a work and make it her own. A strong advocate of new music on the violin and viola, Fong proved herself a champion of the minimalist realm with an amplified violin and a gutsy performance, not to mention a gutsy outfit with long, striped stockings and retro black shoes.

Principal percussionist William Vits pulled out several unlikely solo instruments to the delight of the audience.

Most unusual was the theremin, an electronic instrument that was invented, according to Vits, in "an attempt to make a burglar alarm."

In addition to what sounded like signals from outer space, the theremin produced a unique rendition of The Swan from Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals.

Vits also showed off his stuff on the marimba with Fritz Kreisler's Tambourin Chinois and played his bones, but not literally of course.

The bones were actually rhythm bones, and since "bone players don't read music," Vits had the audience chuckling as he turned his back on the spectators and seemed to improvise a minuet with the orchestra playing Morton Gould's Tap Dance Concerto.

Also featured on the program was principal flutist Christopher Kantner in Astor Piazzolla's The History of the Tango.

A member of the orchestra for nearly 30 years, Kantner performed all four movements of a work originally written for flute and guitar but arranged by Grand Rapids composer David Culross for flute and orchestra.

Throughout the program, I noticed an outstanding collaboration between soloists and orchestra, and Kantner's performance was no exception.

He soothed the audience into submission with lovely embellishments and spicy accents, highlighting the work of a composer who is somewhat like the George Gershwin or Aaron Copland of Argentina.

Interspersed in between the "stars" was a nice selection of catchy tunes ranging from Holiday for Strings, Red Skelton's TV show theme, to the fiddle tune Orange Blossom Special.

Unfortunately, assistant principal trumpeter Charley Lea's performance seemed slightly anticlimactic placed at the end of a program filled with shorter works and tongue in cheek humor.

He performed Armenian composer Alexander Arutiunian's Trumpet Concerto, a staple of the trumpet repertoire, with dignified finesse that earned a warm round of applause.

Overall, the concert was extremely enjoyable, inspiring and downright funny at times.

Listeners had reason to smile, tap their feet, and yell words like "yahoo," "cool" and "bravo."

In the end, that's what it's all about.

American Record Guide
September/October 2006 (page 122)
by Rob Haskins

Feldman: Complete Violin|Viola and Piano Works

Looking for a reference to Feldman's [Composition] for violin (1984) -- which doesn't appear in the work list for The New Grove entry on the composer -- I found by accident a review of this release. I don't normally make a habit of reading other people's reviews of recordings that I am reviewing, but one phrase caught my eye before I could turn away: "Although not exactly ambient sounds, much of his music is so eminently listenable you can play it and work at the same time without (a) having it distract you, and (b) missing much through random attention lapeses."

I feel just the opposite. I can't do anything while I'm listening to Feldman's music. It commands my attention through its persistence and its opacity. In spite of its great beauty and the relative simplicity of its musical gestures, I rarely find the experience an easy one. This has to do, I think, with his abnegation of recognizable musical time spans, which he manages to do even as he uses recognizable and eerily familiar musical ideas and gestures. The music defies explanation just as surely as it commands attention, so the thought of evaluating a recording of it against others of the same repertoire seems almost hopeless.

Before attempting that, let me say that this new release includes an early sonata for violin and piano from 1945 not present on its chief competitor, the complete violin and piano music collection on Mode 82 with Marc Sabat and Stephen Clarke as well as the poignant (and uncharacteristically brief) For Aaron Copland (1981) for solo violin. The other compositions are the Piece (1950), Projection 4 and Extensions 1 (both 1951), Vertical Thoughts 2 (1963), The Viola in My Life 3 (1970), Spring of Chosroes (1977), and For John Cage (1982).

Christina Fong plays with an understated authority and a surprising variety of articulations and timbres. I especially like her straight-forward and yet elegiac performance of the Copland piece; she responds very well to the open, simple sonorities in the work that so unexpectedly and uncannily evoke Copland's own music. Paul Hersey matches her artistry in every detail; in fact, he gives me the rare experience of a pianist who sounds more like another soloist rather than an inspired but secondary accompanist.

The recording quality is spacious and richly textured - this is by far the best OgreOgress recording I have ever heard. In fact, it makes more compelling case for the music than the Mode release. Sabat and Clarke perform very well, too. Their more expansive For John Cage (80 minutes versus Fong's and Hersey's modest 66) contains a lot of unexpected rhythmic hesitation that makes a great case for the music. (The effect is hard to describe; it's not anything even remotely like rubato, but something more coy and elusive.) Unfortunately Mode offers the works in a dry, close-up-and-personal acoustic that stresses Feldman's asceticism but neglects his sensual, even erotic qualities. Here, perhaps, is an element that might make it possible to distinguish between different but just as expert Feldman performance: sheer sonic allure. With the benefit of the added repertoire, OgreOgress's release is superior on every count. Press materials mention that this is the first in a series of complete violin and viola works by well-known composers. I can't wait to hear the ones to come.

Fanfare
September/October 2006 (page ?)
by Robert Carl

Feldman: Complete Violin|Viola and Piano Works

OgreOgress is an enterprising little label that currently seems devoted to the music of Morton Feldman (I purchased another disc a little while back, of early pieces, that fills in some fascinating gaps of the composer's juvenilia). This collection is billed as the "complete solo violin and viola with piano works." It's a satisfying survey, with some surprises along the way. The 1945 Sonata would never be taken for a work of this composer, but rather one of a member or a follower of Les Six. It also suggests that Feldman had solid traditional technique, a capacity to write music as fast and notey as he would want, and a lively wit to boot. But once we turn into the 1950s, the recognizable voice of the composer we know as Feldman emerges clearly. Piece, Projection 4, Extensions 1, and Vertical Thoughts 2 date from 1950, 1951 (2), and 1963 respectively, and enter an exquisite post-Webernian world of tiny, spare events. Projection 4 is one of the graphic works that allows for performer choice of pitch within specified ranges, Extensions 1 reasserts control over all parameters, and Vertical Thoughts 2 writes everything down, but loosens coordination between the individual parts. There's a subtle progression between the works, but they still sound as though cut from very similar cloth. By The Viola in My Life of 1970, we begin to move into Feldman's "high" mature voice, one of mysterious coincidences and repetitions, gorgeous non-tonal harmonies, and a far more languid, gradual pacing. The scale of the music starts to open up, and by the 1970 Spring of Chosroes, it is asserting a sense of patterning that will be a defining characteristic of the composer's work until his death. For Aaron Copland (1981) for solo violin is an unusually short (for Feldman) work at four minutes, perhaps the closest he gets to an "occasional" piece. Similar to it is the 1984 Composition, also for solo violin, which has an almost Stravinskian sound in its restraint and double-stop harmonies (which are about the only challenge that I feel Christina Fong doesn't quite meet, though I suspect they are also terribly difficult in such an exposed context).

Then there is For John Cage (1982), which seems to me one of Feldman's true late masterpieces. It's for violin and piano, and I happened to be in a position to view the score just when this landed on my plate. I was fascinated to see that the piano is notated entirely throughout on a single stave, something that may make the sense of equal partnership between the two instruments particularly strong. The piece itself is slightly over an hour, and is a restless, continuous stream of invention. No single idea, while repeated, lasts very long. It is always replaced by another in the creative flow. It may seem strange to reference such an image for such an intimate chamber medium, but I had the feeling of being carried away on an imaginative torrent.

As befits a label with such a whimsical name, there are some idiosyncratic elements of production and presentation. Through the works from the 1950s and 1960s, the sound is very clear and close; starting with The Viola in My Life, it suddenly becomes heavily reverbed. This may be meant to suggest the blossoming of Feldman's vision (and if so, wouldn't be too far off the mark), but it also is jarring and tends to mar some of the continuity in the program. The notes are divided into two sets, dealing with the works on the two respective CDs, and are respectively very "straight" and factual, then suddenly mystical and a little loopy. And the program and timings are printed only on the CDs themselves, so the listener needs to memorize them in advance, if one wants to be sure of what one is hearing -- okay for CD No. 2, which has only For Aaron Copland and For John Cage, but a greater trial for No. 1, which has a lot of pieces. Incidentally, there's no record number, no address or Web site listed. Fortunately if you Google them, you'll get to a page which will give you necessary order information.

So these are minor irritants. They don't keep me from recommending this disc, though. Every bit of Feldman we get we need, because his is one of the great œuvres of the second half of the 20th century. And For John Cage is worth the price of the entire collection.

Fanfare
September/October 2006 (page ?)
by Peter Stokely

Feldman: Complete Violin|Viola and Piano Works

American Record Guide
January/February 2007 (page 197)
by Rob Haskins

For Feldman (with Beardsley Kotlowy Prokop Toub)

Two early quartet works by Feldman and four newer compositions by composers who all seem to honor or engage in dialog with his work. David Toub's mf is an essay in repetitive figurations and slowly shifting harmonies. The figurations and minor dissonance give the music a restless quality that's very effective. The fairly unchanging rate of change in the music reminds me of Gavin Bryar's first string quartet (Black 1079, M/A 2003) or Graham Fitkin's masterly Slow, recorded on Argo (deleted; Nov/Dec 1992).

Schoenberg: Early and Unknown String Works

Believe it or not, I have spared you the details in the headnote to "Schoenberg: Early and Unknown String Works"; there are 45 tracks here, each sporting an archival number from the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna. At least two of these musicians traveled to Austria in 2005 and brought back copies of the scores; the recordings were made in 2006 "at Saint Isidore in Grand Rapids, Michigan."

There are two types of music on this disc: very early compositions, written from age eight to 23 years, and fragments from that point on, including his Fifth String Quartet, which may include his final written notes. Blessed with a musical idea, Schoenberg would often begin to work it out in his head before putting pen to paper. As with most composers, not every idea came to fruition, but rather than toss the page and begin again, he seems to have saved every scrap; the fragments played here range from eight seconds to 3:33 in duration, most running about a minute and a half. The longest piece, at 8:32, is the Romance in D Minor.

There are no undiscovered masterpieces here; the interest is in hearing what the child could accomplish -- the Birthday March is delightful, and the Romance competent and pleasing -- and what the mature composer rejected as not worth pursuing; I think he made the right call most of the time. In 1949, the young Juilliard String Quartet came to California, played his First Quartet in public, and asked him for a new (Fifth) quartet. We get to hear brief fragments, from 0:21 to 0:57 in length, of each of four movements. It's not enough to inspire any comment, let alone judgment, but I'm glad to have heard it. The playing throughout is expert and committed, but this disc is more for examination and study than for pure listening pleasure.

This is a 96 kHz, 24 bit audio DVD, which plays on an SACD or DVD player. The sound is superb, be it one instrument or 10 -- the full complement of Rangzen Strings. Apparently one must watch a video screen to read track numbers and maneuver through the disc. The annotations on the screen do not quite agree with those in the printed program notes; for instance, the booklet says the Birthday March is for two violins and a viola, whereas the video credits only Christina Fong, and it does turn out to be a solo violin piece. The single-page program listing is not only written in very small type but covers a sheet of Schoenberg's equally tiny handwriting, making it even more difficult to read. This disc can be found at cdbaby.com, which claims to provide "the best independent music from the cutest little record store on the web." It certainly isn't little, as it features thousands of discs of all kind of music, but I'm afraid cutest is a euphemism for least user-friendly. Schoenberg lovers will persevere.

American Record Guide
January/February 2008 (page 81)
by Rob Haskins

Cage: Two³, Inlets, Two⁴

First, a disclaimer: I wrote the liner notes for the release but was not allowed to hear the recording before it was published. I won't comment on the notes' quality, of course, but as we all know from previous OgreOgress releases, they are set in an infuriatingly small type and the layout of each line spans the entire length of the double fold CD packaging with minimal margins, so I doubt anyone will want to read them anyway. And frankly, that doesn't bother me too much, because what's most important is the music and its medium of delivery. DVD Audio allows for longer playing times and higher audio quality. That's especially important for Cage's Number Pieces. Some of them last a long time, and most of them depend on the listener's ability to hear subtle variations in pitch and timbre.

Two³ is, I believe, the longest of the series -- some 121 minutes! It's scored for a shō (a Japanese mouth organ) and conch shells. Cage made a careful inventory of all the possible chords that could be played on the shō -- not just the ones for traditional Japanese music -- and in effect reinvented the instrument. Much of the work consists, then, of a series of vastly different chords (some dissonant, some quite consonant, all in the treble range) that are punctuated by silence. The performer of the conch shells tilts the shells (filled with water) this way and that; sometimes a sound results, sometimes not.

There is no sense of development, no sense of drama or rhetoric, and certainly no melody. With repeated listening, I feel that it would be easy enough to detect patterns and recurrences owing to the sho's restricted range, the total number of simultaneous pitches that can be produced, and the close voicing of the chords - even though the work's extraordinary length would make it difficult to carry out many repeated hearings. But this lack of easy sense doesn't bother me. The succession of chords is very surprising, and many of the chords are quite beautiful and resonant. And the sound quality is excellent; I love the way that the conch shells pop out of the texture when they are played. And the commitment of the performers to sustain their energy over such a long time span earns my highest admiration. By the way, the notes include no information on Ms Tono, but I found a biography at http://www.shoroom.com.

The rest of the DVD is filled by Two⁴ (in its alternate scoring for shō and violin) and a too-short performance of Inlets (1977), for three conch shell players, conch trumpet, and the sound of fire. The one by the Helios Quartet on Wergo (May/June 2002) lasts two minutes more, but the whole piece should unfold much more slowly. It's marvelous to hear Two⁴ in the alternate scoring, and Christina Fong handles the stoic violin part with finesse. Of all the releases in OgreOgress's survey of the Number Pieces, this is probably the most important.

Feldman: Complete Violin|Viola and Piano Works

While sparsely documented on record during his lifetime, there have been a prodigious amount of CDs since Feldman's passing in 1987. In a way, Feldman's music needed this. Besides the delicate quality of many pieces, a large number were also too long to fit on record. A few still require multiple disc sets, or as in the case of Mode's recording of "String Quartet No. 2", an audio DVD. In both this way and people's expanding interest, the times are finally catching up to Morty. Most labels that deal with contemporary classical music have one or more of his works in their catalog now. In recent years it has even reached a point where new CDs often come out which are just new recordings of pieces which have been recorded multiple times already. Everyone wants to do the classics, yet there are several of Feldman's pieces that have not been recorded at all yet, or are rarely represented. For that reason it is great that this CD starts with a recording of Feldman's sonata for violin and piano which was composed in 1945 when he was only a teenager. I'd never heard this piece before, and upon first hearing it was quite surprising. Unlike so much of his oeuvre where his style is so distinctive, this early sonata sounds very much of its era and seems to come from a time before he found his voice. It's a rather uplifting piece of music, it could almost be described as jaunty. On its own it is a pleasant piece and skillfully performed. It is great to hear the roots of Morton Feldman. It sets the stage for the rest of the set which is an exhaustive collection of works for violin or viola (outside the context of large ensembles) performed by Christina Fong and Paul Hersey. In addition to the sonata, the set includes "Piece" (1950), "Projection 4" (1951), "Extensions 1" (1951), "Vertical Thoughts 2" (1963), "The Viola in My Life 3" (1970), "Spring of Chosroes" (1977), "For Aaron Copland" (1981), "For John Cage" (1982), and "[Composition] for Violin" (1984). Through these pieces we have a chronological progression of Feldman's various stages of composition from early indeterminate pieces to a later large scale work like "For John Cage" which works with asymmetrical repetitions of a small gamut of material. The three early 1950's pieces have a feel of the "New York School" where the sounds seem to hang like individual elements much as contemporaneous compositions by John Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff did. There is a zen aspect to these pieces in that the notes avoid being strung into recognizable melodies or forms. Often using staccato notes, the silence becomes just as much a part of the composition in "Extensions 1", the dynamics also become more obviously disparate, jumping from quiet to loud in what can sometimes sound uneven. Obviously a lot of thought was put into these as it took a great deal of discipline to compose works so removed from the aesthetic considerations that created the earlier sonata. Likewise, it takes great skill to perform this music since the player must be constantly attentive to the great changes from note to note. The next step in Feldman's development was to orchestrate these sounds so that they would contrast and play against each other. We hear this in "Vertical Thoughts 2", "The Viola in My Life 3" and "Spring of Chosroes" where notes still can come in punctuated outbursts yet the sounds are overall less free and work together to set a mood. By the time o f "For John Cage", there is a constant interplay between the instruments, in this case violin and piano. The basic material is short phrases which are varied and repeated. Feldman is often quoted as being inspired by Middle Eastern rugs at this period of his life. He used the analogy that the patterns were symmetrical if seen as a whole, but the details were constantly varied as if the weavers were adding small flourishes to keep the entirety from being too rigid. "For John Cage" continues with these subtle repetitions of pattern for over an hour -- exactly 66 minutes on this recording (Paul Zukofsky's recording was 77 minutes). To the uninitiated the work might be a test of patience, but to those calm enough to listen to it deeply, the piece is a fascinating composition, at the same time seeming static yet ever changing. Perhaps this characteristic was the result of his friendship with the abstract expressionist painters, much in the same way that they created massive canvas which appeared to have the same gestures across them, the gestures never really repeated themselves or overlapped in the same way. In contrast to this, "For Aaron Copland", from a year earlier, is a plaintive sounding violin solo. Here there is a thread to follow. Unlike the sonata, this captures the spirit of Feldman's sound, which is not surprising considering that he throughout it the artist's duty to continue in the same vein through their career. The same mood is also heard in the latest work on this disc, which is another I have not come across on any other releases. The "[Composition]" of 1984, which appears not to have been given an actual title, again returns to a small set of utilized materials which are used throughout the piece. Here there is also a tension rising, however the overall mood remains peaceful. Overall it is a very enjoyable listen, a great addition to your Feldman collection, or a good introduction to his various phases of composition if you are new to his work.

American Record Guide
July/August 2008 (page 118)
by Don Vroon

Hovhaness: Janabar, Talin, Shambala

Janabar takes 36 minutes, Talin 16, Shambala 45. Then there's half an hour of talk -- mostly the composer. The CD layer (side, actually) only has Shambala complete. The gorgeous first movement of Janabar is added (12 minutes), along with the two-minute fast middle movement of Talin. Unless you can play DVD Audio, you will miss lots of music. If you can play DVD video, I assume you can play DVD audio. I can also play this on my Marantz SACD player, though I haven't figured out how to select tracks, even though I've listened to it three times (of necessity, straight thru).

Alan Hovhaness was an American from Boston whose father was Armenian. His music shows that he moved in Boston's ethnic communities and soaked up influences from the Armenians, the Indians, and Middle Easterners. He rejected the clever and dissonant vogues of Western music of his time (he died in 2000), and his music is based on melody, serenity, and beauty. It is also often strangely pure and otherworldly. He wrote more than 500 works, but it is now generally agreed that his peak period was the 1940s thru the 1960s (his 30s, 40s and 50s).

Janabar (1950) means Journey. It is classic Hovhaness and very appealing. It starts out a piano solo. After five minutes we begin to hear bass rumblings, and the orchestra makes its presence known. Then we hear the wonderful trumpet soloist -- very mellow, very tender. There are five movements and four moods; in the last movement we return to the mood and some of the music of I. It's very satisfying to come back to that beautiful music. Janabar was the big discovery for me; it has become a favorite piece.

I have known Talin (1951) since 1959, when I discovered the MGM recording with Emanuel Vardi. I was immediately attached to it and taped it so I wouldn't wear out the LP. The only other recording I know of in all these years used the clarinet in place of the viola. I like the music enough not to mind too much, but I am really glad to have an excellent new recording on viola. I have always thought of it as a viola concerto, but Hovhaness doesn't really write concertos or symphonies. What he writes, it seems to me, are symphonic pieces with prominent soloists.

The soloist in the third work (1969) plays the sitar, so it sounds very Indian. If you like Indian classical music and the sound of the sitar, you are bound to like this long, rather diffuse work. There is a lot of what sounds like improvising and repetition in Indian music, and you will hear that here. You will hear the almost jazz-like way a theme or idea gets passed between instruments (in one case the violin becomes a charming conversation partner to the sitar). I have to admit that my patience with the sitar is not deep, and my attention is inclined to wander. In other words, this big 45-minute work often becomes mostly background music while I sit at the computer. But what classy background music -- how exotic, how multicultural!

American Record Guide
November/December 2008 (page 88)
by Kraig Lamper

Cage: Three, Twenty-Eight, Twenty-Six with Twenty-Eight, Twenty-Eight with Twenty-Nine

American Record Guide
November/December 2009 (page 88)
by Rob Haskins

Cage: Sculptures Musicales, Fifty-Five, Eighty-Three, Eighty

American Record Guide
November/December 2009 (page 168)
by David Moore

Schoenberg: Early and Unknown String Works

Shechtman: Moons and Ancestors

Hovhaness: Solos, Duos, Trios