More stories

  • in

    Review: Braxton’s ‘Trillium’ Gets the Attention It Needs

    Anthony Braxton’s “Trillium X,” part of a sweeping cycle of operas that began in the 1980s, finally premiered in Prague.Anyone bold enough to take command of a pirate ship should also be prepared for strife. Cannon battles? Frustrated crew members? All part of the job.Yet Helena, the captain of the Dragon Lily BX4, must face more than that in the first act of Anthony Braxton’s opera “Trillium X,” which was completed in 2014 but premiered on Tuesday at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague.After scheming like a titan of industry, and after sending scores of enemies to their watery graves — even after genocidally pledging to foster “the kind of mess that historians will love forever” — Helena still has to deal with those who doubt her ruthlessness. When the pirate discovers some young stowaways aboard her vessel, she learns that they have studied her violent exploits at college. They’re not impressed, calling her “overrated” to her face.It’s one of the best jokes in this opera. And it was hardly the only punchline in the four-act, over-five-hour evening, which had young audience members laughing out loud in the aisles of the museum’s joyously oversold hall.In the role of Helena, the soprano Eva Esterkova deployed a secure vibrato — including in piercing, high-tessitura phrases — that channeled the character’s unflappability. On the whole, the performance came off as a significant milestone in Braxton’s opera career, thanks to some revelatory work by a cast of 12, the Prague Music Performance Orchestra and the conductor Roland Dahinden, a longtime Braxton collaborator. Officially a concert performance, the show had enough video projections and lighting design choices to foment some stage magic, too.Roland Dahinden led the Prague Music Performance Orchestra in the performance.Marek BoudaThis “Trillium X” also served as a reminder of the broader “Trillium” series, an ambitious cycle that Braxton has said will eventually include 36 discrete acts — all of which can then be freely recombined from one production to the next. They have been produced by his own Tri-Centric Foundation on shoestring budgets in the United States. But this performance in Prague demonstrated just how much American opera companies, and audiences, are missing in neglecting this project.You may catch a scrappy outfit like Experiments in Opera delving into the “Trillium” operas at a black box theater, like that company did earlier this year. Braxton’s foundation produced a semi-staged version of “Trillium J” in 2014: a vivacious performance that was released as a Blu-ray, alongside a studio-recorded version. But, sadly, major classical music presenters have shown little interest in this work.That might have something to do with a broadly held perception that Braxton is too abstruse for the mainstream. Since the 1960s, he has long been reputed for the complex, overlapping nature of his many creative guises: as an experimental composer, as a student of jazz and an improviser, and, starting in the 1980s, a creator of music dramas.In the “Trillium” operas, the music seems to always be in flux, moving from pleasingly sour drone states to singsong marches and riotous blasts of orchestral pandemonium. Nor do the plots stay put. As in other “Trillium” works, each act of “Trillium X” featured the same singers, and the same character names, but placed them in entirely different situations. Braxton has expressed affection for the operatic cycles of Wagner and Stockhausen, but with no linear narrative, this is far from the “Ring.”Alongside all the complexity — and here is the too-often undersold part — this stuff is a lot of fun, too. In the semi-staging of “Trillium J,” which is also available on Vimeo, you can see how much the soprano Kamala Sankaram enjoys playing (in her character’s own words) a “helpless maiden who happens to own 400 nuclear weapons stockpile containers — not to mention the chemical gas warfare options.”Featuring the soprano Kamala Sankaram.After the first act on the high seas in “Trillium X,” the second act begins with singers hiding out from robots that have taken away humans’ voting rights, and their ability to get credit. Act III, titled “The Three Sisters,” depicts the joint wedding of a trio of celebrity bank robbers. (Esterkova was once again a key presence during that section’s gun-toting delirium.) The fourth act begins in the White House’s war room, before moving to the site of a Roman orgy.Dahinden’s orchestra responded to the score’s tumultuous moments with precise intonation and enviable balance. But the violins also sound sympathetic and sweet in the second act, as human characters lamented the way they’d allowed robots to slowly take over the world.Video projections (Barbora Jagrova and Tobuke are credited for the lighting and visual designs) that show robots patrolling a doomed, lamp-lit cityscape were both comic and chilling. When one live human singer proposed a détente with the robots, he was greeted with pretaped sounds from the robots, which declared on repeat: “YOU. ARE. WRONG.”Those robot chants, as well as cannon blasts and nuclear explosions in other acts, were delivered by speakers. Singers, too, were amplified. But the sound mix didn’t feel artificial; each portion of the orchestra was audible at all times. In the second act, brass exclamations contributed to an interpolated Braxton piano composition performed by pianist Hildegard Kleeb. (Since Braxton has written that “all compositions in my music system can be executed at the same time/moment,” the insertion of this material — like Composition No. 30 for piano solo, or Composition No. 257, which included the brasses — was fair play.)Braxton’s own Tri-Centric Orchestra deserves more opportunities to play this music in American halls. But the Prague Music Performance Orchestra proved that it can also pull off a credible “Trillium” show; thankfully, the program for Tuesday’s concert advertised the ensemble’s plans to record “Trillium X” and present the live premiere of “Trillium L” in 2025.So this language is not too complex to be learned. This orchestra’s founder and director, Jan Bartos, said in an email that the concert had come together with a week of rehearsal and a budget of about $100,000.More performances of this music, and at a similarly high level, should be possible. A question, then, now hangs over the United States: Who will take on “Trillium” next?Trillium XPerformed on Tuesday at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague. More

  • in

    Anthony Braxton, Experimental Music Master, Gets His Due

    Anthony Braxton’s music is difficult to program even among forward-thinking institutions. Leave it to the scrappy companies to get the work done.Anthony Braxton’s music is inherently theatrical. It’s also serious, and hilariously entertaining.It is not, however, performed with a frequency that befits Braxton’s stature, in a glaring, countrywide omission. More on that in a bit, but first: When seasoned practitioners of his work gather to explore some of his most overlooked pieces, which is happening this weekend at the Brick Theater in Brooklyn, that should qualify as a major event.On Thursday night at the Brick, the scrappy Experiments in Opera company pulled off a delirious debut performance of what it’s calling “Anthony Braxton Theater Improvisations.” The one-hour show proved delightful; and the small, cozy venue was rightfully sold out. The run continues through Saturday, so grab one of the remaining seats while you can.Those who can’t make it can still dig into this side of Braxton’s music, thanks to how doggedly he documents his projects. The Experiments show deserves attention, and perhaps documentation, given the way it provides a new lens on a corner of Braxton’s more conceptual side.The trumpeter Nate Wooley.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesRob Reese served as both narrator and director.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe evening is based on Opuses 279-283 in Braxton’s catalog: comedic efforts written for a narrator and an improvising instrumentalist. Back in 2000, Braxton — playing a range of saxophones and clarinets — recorded several of these works with a young stand-up comedian, Alex Horwitz.In Composition No. 282, that narrator is called upon to read the day’s newspaper (with an option to crumple it for timbral effect), while the instrumentalist improvises. In No. 281, bebop-like phrases run underneath one-liners and observational humor.But with just two people, the recording’s charm sometimes peters out. The Experiments show maintains higher energy, and brings three artists to each performance: a narrator-actor (Rob Reese, who also directed); another scene partner and soprano (Kamala Sankaram, a veteran of Braxton opera recordings); and an instrumentalist (on Thursday, the trumpeter Nate Wooley, who participated memorably in some larger Braxton ensembles during the 2010s).Before the show, the saxophonist James Fei, who performs on Friday’s set, told me that Composition No. 279 is essentially a compendium of jokes. That piece didn’t make the cut in Braxton’s recording with Horwitz from 2000, but it was featured in the Experiments show.Holding a top hat, Reese paced among the audience members and asked some of them to pick a card from inside it. A card might carry one of Braxton’s “language music” organizational prompts (like “intervallic formings”), paired with a genre of joke from Composition No. 279 (like “Republican/Democrat jokes.”)While Wooley and Sankaram worked with strident, leaping intervals, Reese delivered a joke that tended toward the school of the one-liner king Henny Youngman (to whom Braxton dedicated Composition 282). I roughly transcribed one of the jokes this way: “Why are Democrats always in favor of gun control? Because they keep shooting themselves in the foot.”On the page, this may not seem like much. But set against a duet of wildly leaping figures, it all produced a dazzling novelty that also reinvigorated a vintage form; the borscht belt never sounded so endearingly strange.Reese, who collaborated with Sankaram on her imaginative opera “Miranda,” also improvised some scenic work at the front of the stage with her. Some of their material was less obviously connected to the Braxton compositions as previously recorded but felt in the right spirit — as did Wooley’s improvisations away from his horn. In the background of one scene between Reese and Sankaram, the trumpeter sat against the brick wall at the stage’s rear. While lit with the penumbra of a spotlight aimed elsewhere, he coolly mimed the smoking of a cigarette with a kazoo.And since Braxton has written that “all compositions in my music system can be executed at the same time/moment,” the troupe reveled in that possibility. At one point, Wooley relished the languid, bop-tinged opening theme of Composition No. 23D, originally recorded on the album “New York, Fall 1974.”Then Sankaram swung into one of the meatier passages written for her in Braxton’s Composition No. 380 — the opera “Trillium J,” which was recorded and performed in 2014 at Roulette in Brooklyn. In one scene, Sankaram plays the role of “Miss Scarlet,” a “helpless maiden who happens to own 400 nuclear weapons stockpile containers — not to mention the chemical gas warfare options.”Coloratura singing, written for those lines? That’s funny. In the full opera — which is available on Blu-ray and as a paid download on Vimeo — the moment of humor that Sankaram really sells can whiz by amid all the orchestral complexity. But it had new verve when she brought it back around in the improvisational maelstrom of Thursday’s more intimate set.Some of the assorted instruments used during “Anthony Braxton Theater Improvisations.” Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesAll of this spoke to the unexplored potential of Braxton’s oeuvre. His catalog of over a half-century’s compositions and his playing on reed instruments are both rightfully talked about with awe, as is his record as a mentor. Wave after wave of celebrated player-composers, including George E. Lewis and Mary Halvorson, have cut their professional teeth in his ensembles. Aaron Siegel, the executive director of Experiments in Opera, has also served as a percussionist in those groups. In opening remarks on Thursday, he credited Braxton as one of his company’s original mentors.Braxton has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation grant, and an NEA Jazz Masters award. If you talk to leaders of forward-thinking orchestras and opera companies, you’ll often hear (off the record) about their desire to program Braxton’s ambitious pieces — the ones that carry traces of bebop and Karlheinz Stockhausen, of Hildegard von Bingen and American folk dances.But it’s evidently difficult to make happen. When the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang was young and working with the New York Philharmonic, he tried pushing Braxton’s orchestral music on his superiors. No dice. Perhaps that’s because Braxton asks players to improvise as well as pay attention to complex notated material.So, for now, we have to rely on smaller organizations like Experiments in Opera to find the right balance and bring Braxtonia to life properly. And this week, they’re nailing it. More