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    Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes: A Diary of an Influential Life

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    Begun to improve his own technique, piano exercises that Glass wrote over decades are the subject this month of a new book, a concert and dances.Philip Glass wanted to become a better pianist.He didn’t study the instrument in earnest until he was 15. And by the time he was 30 and founding an ensemble — to perform his pathbreaking music of repetitive structures — he needed to be good enough to keep up with his colleagues.So Glass turned to Charles-Louis Hanon’s classic “The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises.” Eventually, he took a crack at writing some études himself. “They were totally about my own limitations, in pursuit of technique,” he told the public radio personality Ira Glass, his cousin, in an interview for a new collection, “Studies in Time: Essays on the Music of Philip Glass.”“I was not trying to compose like Scriabin or Rachmaninoff, who were demonstrating the techniques they already had,” Glass added, characteristically underselling himself. Those études, from the early 1990s, may be aspirational in technique, but they are assured in craft: portals into Glass’s world of whirling arpeggios, shocking rhythmic and harmonic turns, and meditative discipline.Once the conductor and pianist Dennis Russell Davies, the reigning interpreter of Glass’s symphonic music, heard about the études, he commissioned a set of six for his 50th birthday in 1994. Those turned into 10, each focused on a specific technical challenge. And then 10 turned into 20, completed in 2012 for another birthday: Glass’s 75th.Now a generation of artists has come of age with Glass’s études. Choreographers have used them for brief, charged dances. And pianists have interpreted them with a wide range of approaches, like the straightforward, crisp treatment by Maki Namekawa, Davies’s wife, who gave the first performance of the whole set a decade ago; or the soft-spoken, sensitive account that Vikingur Olafsson released in 2017.This month, audiences and artists alike have new ways to take in Glass’s études. At David Geffen Hall on Nov. 19, a group of 10 pianists will gather to perform the entire études for a densely kaleidoscopic program that will run about two and a half hours. Then, starting Nov. 28, the Joyce Theater will present “Dancing With Glass: The Piano Etudes,” a program of works from five choreographers, including Lucinda Childs and Justin Peck. And a handsome, informative new folio collection of the études — edited by the composer-performer Timo Andres and Cory Davis from Glass’s publisher, Dunvagen Music — has just been packaged with “Studies in Time” and published by Pomegranate Arts, producers long associated with Glass.A new folio edition of Glass’s études, based on his manuscripts, has been released by Pomegranate Arts.Stephen DoyleStephen DoyleIt’s an unexpected landing for a project that started as personal exercises. But today, the études are spoken of in the same breath as those by Chopin and Debussy. And their influence extends beyond the world of keyboard playing. “Studies in Time,” edited by Linda Brumbach and Alisa E. Regas of Pomegranate Arts, includes surprising contributions from, among others, the filmmaker Martin Scorsese, the artist Maira Kalman and the chef Alice Waters.“What strikes me — aside from their extraordinary range of mood and feeling — is how they represent a life of practice,” Waters wrote. And practice not just for Glass. The first 10 études, more focused and less difficult than the comparatively rhapsodic and occasionally cosmic later set, can be played by the average amateur. And unlike the technical pieces in Hanon’s exercise book, they are rewarding from a purely musical perspective.The artist and musician Laurie Anderson wrote in “Studies in Time” that the études can sound to her like voices: “There’s the stumbling and the trembling of voices. There’s chatting, joking, brisk analysis, rambling, explaining, crooning, grumbling, shouting; there’s the confident attorney rolling out the arguments; there are rules and regulations being spelled out, prayers, announcements, shouts of joy.”That quality of Glass’s music — patterns and repetitive phrases infused with so much character — is in part what has made it a perennial draw for choreographers. (Movement of all kinds, really: Last year, Anderson D.J.’ed a party for his 85th birthday at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink, and wrote that she can now “say with confidence that Philip Glass didn’t write anything you can’t skate to.”) It has become so common for dances to be set to his music, Peck said in an interview, that he had long found himself resisting it.“But,” he added, “I’ve always loved the music.” As a teenager, he saw Jerome Robbins’s “Glass Pieces” at New York City Ballet. It felt “like I’d experienced vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice creams,” he said, “and then someone discovered you can make ice cream with pistachios.” He ended up choreographing to Glass for “In Creases” at City Ballet in 2012, and created a new solo, set to the Sixth Etude, for the program coming to the Joyce.Lucinda Childs, the postmodern dance-maker who has had a relationship with Glass and movement going back to “Einstein on the Beach” in the mid-1970s, said his music has always felt like a “sounding board.” They later collaborated on “Dance” (1979), which she described as controversial at its premiere, with its repetitions prompting exasperated audience members to walk out. (That work was recently revived by Lyon Opera Ballet at New York City Center; when she and Glass saw how it was received there, she said, it was “kind of a joke for us because it’s become a classic.”)Then and now, Childs said, she has felt “a tremendous freedom” within his carefully structured scores. For example, the Joyce’s program features a duet of hers set to the 18th Etude. “My first reaction is just to listen,” she said — to the Rachmaninoff-esque shading, the mellowness and alluring romanticism. “There’s passion in this music. I like the idea of that.” From there, she took her work into the studio, eventually bringing in dancers, for a process that she described as fundamentally intuitive.Peck similarly described his étude, the Sixth, in poetic rather than structural terms. “There’s this layer of anxiousness in it,” he said. “It made me feel something emotional, almost like being in a waiting room and not knowing what test results you’re going to get. And the amount of time the étude takes, it feels like an eternity.”Not everyone has such strong emotional reactions to the études. Some have found them downright unmusical. “There’s always been a cadre of people, specifically in the more entrenched classical music world, for whom Philip’s music does nothing,” said Andres, the composer and editor of the new folio set, who is performing in the Geffen Hall concert. “What Philip would say is, there’s plenty of other music in the world.”If there is any agreement on the études, it may be about their specific difficulties. Like works by Mozart, they sound easier than they are, and punish anything short of precision in players. They demand metronome-specific steadiness and crystalline articulation, without sacrificing expression or shape, sculpted over several bars or several slow lines of score.They teach pianists, Davies said, to “be relaxed when dealing with a technical problem, while also building up endurance.” Otherwise, playing the music becomes physically painful. He recalled the story of a musician running out of the orchestra pit during the premiere of Glass’s opera “Satyagraha” because his arm was hurting so much; the études, he added, also “expose weaknesses in anyone’s technique” that can lead to discomfort.Maki Namekawa was the first pianist to perform Glass’s études on a single program. She will play in performances of the pieces this month.Richard Termine for The New York TimesNamekawa, who is performing at both Geffen Hall and the Joyce, warms up for them by playing Bach. Before she brings the Fifth Etude onstage, she will try out a Bach invention in her dressing room, with an ear focused on “the really tiny changes” because in both cases, “the beauty is in tiny changes.”Glass has performed from only the first set of 10 études; he didn’t care as much about whether he could play the second half, which, Davies said, goes beyond “thinking about what’s possible.” By the 20th, Glass achieves a tone poem more like “a benediction,” Davies added. (But these are still exercises. Andres called the 20th “a really good technical étude for legato playing.”)Through all of them, Glass repeats not only short phrases but entire sections, like Schubert, with whom he shares a Jan. 31 birthday. Both composers, Namekawa said, are “always right, very correct” in their use of repetition. And unlike Baroque composers, they don’t use recursive gestures to welcome ornamentation: When something repeats, it returns in identical form.Yet it feels different, Andres said. “When I get to the end of No. 6, for example, when that melody comes back, it has a completely different meaning than it did at the beginning of the piece,” he added. “There’s a settling, a resignation.”In Andres and Davis’s new folio edition of the études, assembled from Glass’s manuscripts, it’s easier to track changes in the music, particularly in the rhythm. Glass wrote with a shorthand that flags shifts more clearly than the comparatively spelled-out version published in 2014. “It’s like reading a sentence,” Andres said. “You’re not reading one word at a time, or one letter at a time. When you’re reading music, the more you can break it down into chunks and the more it makes sense grammatically, the smoother and more pleasurable the reading experience.”With more than one edition now available to players, Glass’s études are starting to look more like classics. They also double as a kind of musical autobiography. “He composed the whole thing in 20 years,” Namekawa said. “It’s a diary. You can see his thoughts and his compositional technique.”In that sense, the études are also something of a guide to Glass. “The thing all the great étude sets have in common is that they’re not just technical études,” Andres said. “They’re études, in a way, for understanding the composer’s language. If you were to learn Philip’s études, you would have a very good overview of his music over his career. You could say the same of Chopin and Debussy and Ligeti études. They’re compendiums: The whole is greater than the parts.” More

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      ‘Heart of Brick’ Review: Finding Love in Black Gay Clubs

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      The production, about the slow rewards of romance, starring the musician serpentwithfeet, premiered at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan on Friday.“My vibe is cozy, comfortable,” the R&B musician Josiah Wise, professionally known as serpentwithfeet, says near the start of “Heart of Brick.” Covered in a fuzzy blanket, sipping a glass of wine, he tells us that he prefers to stay at home.It’s an unusual introduction for a show in a theater. But “Heart of Brick,” which had its premiere at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan on Friday, is an unusual production. It’s somewhat like a staged concert of songs from Wise’s latest album, “GRIP,” which he performs live to recorded tracks. But it’s also like an 80-minute jukebox musical in which he stars as a version of himself, the songs threaded with scenes of dialogue heard in voice-over while he and the other performers silently act and dance.The story is sweet and slight. Having made a confidante of the crowd, Wise gets up the courage to visit a nightclub where he has heard his ex-boyfriend might be showing up. The ex-boyfriend might as well be named MacGuffin, since he isn’t mentioned again. Instead, Wise meets Brick (Dylan M. Contreras), one of the owners of the club, and the two fall for each other immediately. Will the affair last? Is Brick a heartbreaker?These are the dramatic questions.While the format takes some getting used to, it focuses the point of view. Wise — the only one talking and singing to us directly, the only one holding a microphone — is telling us his story. The songs, which he delivers in a sensitive, tremulous tenor, express his feelings of romantic hope and vulnerability. The dialogue, by Wise and Donte Collins in collaboration with the other performers, is naturalistic and conversational, not too subtle or shaded. A slightly catty clique of five clubgoers offers a little comic relief, but between jokes and what Wise calls “heart stuff,” heart stuff predominates.Directed by Wu Tsang, the production is mostly clear and economical. Carlos Soto’s set design suggests location changes between the club and Wise’s apartment with little more than curtains and rails. Costumes (by Julio Delgado) and lighting (by Luke Rolls) are also mostly understated.So, too, is the choreography by Raja Feather Kelly. The clubgoers slink and ripple in fluid patterns and florid armwork, occasionally stretching a leg impressively toward the ceiling, hinging backward to the floor or unspooling multiple spins. But however sinuous, they are stuck in the role of backup dancers to serpentwithfeet.Wise’s songs don’t advance the narrative or deepen insight into the characters, and several of the dialogue-to-song transitions are clunky. But mostly, the show is a cozy, comfortable experience, about the slow rewards of romance rather than sex; the lovers spoon but don’t even kiss.Cozy and comfortable, that is, until Darius — the drunk shaman played by Justin Daniels — arrives, posing riddles and warning about poisoned plants. The clubgoers, now dressed in floral ruffles to embody the plants, entangle Brick, who collapses in a coma. To save him, Wise must go on a quest for a mystical flower.The company members, in a costume change that is meant to depict them as poisonous plants.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesThis might be a swerve into allegory, the poisoned plants symbolizing gossip (which the show also represents, amusingly, in the form of news reports). It might be a dream ballet. It is certainly an attempt to heighten the drama of intimacy issues. Not strange enough to break into the realm of the surreal, it lifts off awkwardly, as at the end of his quest Wise makes an underpowered leap into the light.That swerve is a risky move that fails, but the true value of “Heart of Brick” lies in its simple portrayal of love between two men and in Wise’s affectionate celebration of Black gay clubs. It’s a fuzzy blanket of a show.“Heart of Brick”Through Friday at the Joyce Theater; joyce.org. More

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      Alan Cumming Uses Dance to Get at the Truth of Robert Burns

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      GLASGOW — Rain pours down, thunder growls, lightning flickers. Fragments of melancholy melody emerge from the tumult, and a lone, silhouetted figure appears onstage, moving his upper body in sinuous circles, entwining his arms and gesturing with slow deliberation. Then he walks forward, opens his arms and smiles impishly. “Here am I,” he announces.Here he is: The Scottish poet Robert Burns, embodied by the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in the one-man dance-theater show “Burn,” coming to the Joyce Theater on Sept. 20.Conceived by Cumming and the choreographer Steven Hoggett, “Burn,” which had its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in August, is an unlikely hybrid: A movement-focused show performed by a famous actor with no dance training, about a man whose medium was words.Why dance? Why Burns?Cumming answered those questions at some length a few days after that Glasgow performance, in a video interview from Aberdeen, where — between performances of “Burn” — he was filming the second season of a Scottish travel series with the actress Miriam Margolyes. To boil it down: He loves a challenge, he loves dance even more, and he had been thinking about taking on another physically demanding role since reprising the role of the M.C. in “Cabaret” eight years ago. (He won a Tony Award for the performance in 1998.)Vicki Manderson, left, did the choreography with Hoggett (back to camera). Here, they are rehearsing with Cumming iin Glasgow.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“When that ended in 2015, I was 50,” he said. “I felt sad to think I’m never going to be as fit as this again, this is it. Then I slowly began to think, No, I have one more thing left in me.” He added, “I put it into the universe.”The universe responded. In 2018, he went backstage at the Joyce Theater after watching “The Tenant,” choreographed by Arthur Pita, the partner of his old friend and flatmate Matthew Bourne. While chatting with Pita, Cumming was introduced to Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce. “She asked me if I had any dancey ideas,” Cumming said. “I do!,” he answered.He had been thinking about Burns at that time, he said, prompted in part by writing an autobiography and revealing dark aspects of his own past. “It made me think how we don’t have a holistic picture of our icons,” he said. “Burns is everywhere in Scotland — on statues, milk bottles, chocolate boxes — he is a sort of Scottish DNA wallpaper. But we don’t really know who he is. Somehow, at that moment, the two things, Burns and dance, merged in my mind.”He told the Joyce team that he wanted to do a dance-theater piece about the poet with the choreographer Steven Hoggett. But he neglected to mention he hadn’t yet asked Hoggett.“It’s true,” Hoggett said in a video interview from New York, where he is working on a coming production of “Sweeney Todd.” The two men — friends since 2007, when they collaborated on the National Theater of Scotland’s “The Bacchae” — were having dinner one night when Cumming asked him what he thought about the idea. “I said it sounded fantastic and he should do it,” Hoggett recounted. “He said, ‘Good, because you are doing it, too.’”Cumming wanted to work with Hoggett, he said, because the choreographer comes from an experimental background (he founded the physical theater group Frantic Assembly) and has extensive experience working with actors. “He brings that energy and aesthetic to the more commercial work,” Cumming said, “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Cumming, right, said that Hoggett, left, brings “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanCumming and Hoggett began a residency at the National Theater of Scotland, which produced the show with the Edinburgh International Festival and the Joyce. Although their first idea, Hoggett said, was to look at Scottish male identity, they changed focus entirely after Kirsteen McCue, a professor of Scottish literature and a director of the Center for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, talked to them about the poet. McCue suggested they read his letters and the research of her colleague, Moira Hansen, who posits that Burns might have suffered from bipolar disorder.“They guided us to his mental health, to his relationship with his patron Frances Dunlop, to things that aren’t so sexy, but fascinating,” Cumming said. “When you read the letters — and there are two thick volumes — you realize he is much more fragile, more florid, sometimes obsequious to rich people, a bit stalker-y to women, often depressed.”The men began to work on movement that could evoke Burns’s states of mind, and in the process started to “find out what Alan’s body did and didn’t do,” Hoggett said. “He wasn’t going to learn a rond de jambe,” he added, referring to a step in the basic ballet vocabulary.Instead they did exercises around some of the content of the letters: farming, writing, joy, love, lust, depression. “What happens to the body when you’re using farming implements? What does his joy feel like, where does it spring from?” Hoggett said. “What does it feel like, in the body, to be inspired?”Every day, they would do an hourlong warm-up, then try out various exercises. Together with Vicki Manderson, who choreographed the piece with Hoggett, they would create material and construct movement phrases.“He would try anything,” Hoggett said of Cumming. “I encouraged him to really feel whether something felt right and fit on his body.”Hoggett said of Cumming: “He would try anything.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanIt was hard both physically and mentally. “The sheer pain of it,” Cumming said, grimacing. “It was intense.” It was also scary, he added, to go into rehearsal and not have a structure. “Steven is used to just making things up in the room,” he said. “But actors like to have a script!”Asked whether it had been difficult to memorize movement sequences, and eventually an hour of choreography, Cumming clutched his head in his hands. “I kept thinking, I memorized the whole of ‘Macbeth,’ I can do this!” he said. “But of course, getting the muscle memory of movement into your body is entirely different.”He learned that to tell a story with your body, “you have to think in a different way, let the story touch you in a more nonlinear, visceral way,” he said. “It was an incredibly emotional thing to do. I felt very vulnerable, which is what I want to be.”And, gradually, he became more sure of himself. “The exercises, zoning into the themes we were focusing on in the show,” he said, “gave me more confidence about my body and storytelling. It was a shock to me that some of the movement started coming from me.”He also realized, he said, that he was playing both Burns and the Alan Cumming that people know. “I am asking people to look at me in a different way, and also to look at the character I play in a different way,” he said. “The form really helped tell the story.”Cumming and Hoggett knew early on, Cumming said, that they wanted to use the genre-defying music of the Scottish composer Anna Meredith, whom they both admired. “We press-ganged her a bit,” Hoggett said. “Then she came to a few workshops, saw how forensic we were being with her music, and sent us a lot of stuff that hadn’t been released before.”Meredith, whose memory of those workshops involves “mainly doing a lot of Scottish country dancing with an expert who had come to work with the men,” said that she “loved the ambition of the show,” and the way it revealed unusual aspects of Burns. The score, she said, is made up of both existing tracks and older, sometimes experimental, work that “I hadn’t found a home for.”Cumming working with Manderson.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“It’s a mix of acoustic and electronic,” she said, “some tracks untouched, others needed edits or extensions to fit the exact length of Alan’s words and rhythms.”Working with Meredith to shape the score also helped in creating a structure for the show, when the men reconvened at Cumming’s home in Scotland last summer. “By then, we had pared down the topics we felt were important to telling the story of who Burns was,” Cumming said. He ticked off key points: Burns’s upbringing on a farm; starting to write; his relationship with Jean Armour (who would be the mother of nine of his 12 children); his affairs with Mary Campbell and others; his poverty, depression, and his love for Scotland and its stories and themes.“To label ‘Burn’ as dance might be stretching a point,” Mark Fisher wrote in The Guardian, adding that Cumming has nonetheless “dared to put himself in an unfamiliar place.”As several reviewers pointed out, there is not a great deal of Burns’s famous poetry in the show. Instead Cumming and Hoggett focus on the autobiographical content of Burns’s letters, evoking the highs and lows of his emotional life through their words, digital projections (Andrzej Goulding), dramatic lighting (Tim Lutkin) and occasional stage magic, as quills scroll independently across a manuscript and a dress rises from the floor to incarnate a character.“When Alan is 90 years old, he can recite Burns poetry in a rocking chair, under a spotlight,” Hoggett said. “And he can do that beautifully. But we wanted to go further and do a show about the man and the way movement can reveal a reality that words often hide.” More

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      5 Things to Do This New Year’s Weekend

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyweekend roundup5 Things to Do This New Year’s WeekendOur critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually.Dec. 31, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETDanceMaking the Old NewKenneth Shirley of Indigenous Enterprise in a scene from a short film that is streaming on the Joyce Theater’s website until Sunday.Credit…Danny UpshawSince September, the Joyce Theater has been offering a free virtual fall season that is as good as some of its best in-person ones. The secret has been surprise and an avoidance of the usual suspects. If that is a little less true of the latest batch of videos — available through Sunday at joyce.org/joycestream — the variety still provides plenty of spice.The connecting theme might be “tradition reimagined.” Indigenous Enterprise captures the beauty of Native American dances in urban settings. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo revives parts of the 19th-century ballet “Paquita” with an all-male cast. Streb Extreme Action does daredevil stunts with huge machines; it’s like a carnival side show performed by cool astronauts.Vanessa Sanchez and the group La Mezcla, from San Francisco, mix modern tap and zapateado to celebrate the women of the Zoot Suit Riots of the 1940s. And Rennie Harris Puremovement shows once again how hip-hop can convey both can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it flash and hard-to-watch grief.BRIAN SEIBERTKidsBon Voyage to BoredomA scene from “Journey Around My Bedroom,” an interactive production that will livestream on Zoom through Jan. 10.Credit…New Ohio TheaterA room can be a refuge, but without an easy exit, it can also feel like a jail. For the Frenchman Xavier de Maistre, it was both: While under house arrest in 1790, he wrote “Voyage Around My Room,” a tribute to the creativity his imprisonment unleashed.Now de Maistre’s work has inspired New Ohio Theater for Young Minds’ first virtual presentation, “Journey Around My Bedroom.” Written by Dianne Nora and directed by Jaclyn Biskup, with songs by Hyeyoung Kim, this whimsical 35-minute play emulates Victorian toy theater, in which puppeteers manipulated cutouts on a tiny stage. (Myra G Reavis did the inventive design, assisted by Ana Maria Aburto.) Traveling in a failing dirigible, de Maistre visits Xavi, a contemporary girl who discovers that her own room offers hidden adventure.The production, which livestreams on Zoom Fridays to Sundays through Jan. 10, includes audience participation and a post-show discussion. Children can also follow the journey, though less interactively, in an on-demand video Jan. 11-Feb. 11. Tickets to gain access to these performances are pay-what-you-wish and available at newohiotheatre.org.LAUREL GRAEBERArtTime to Ponder Time ItselfClodion’s “The Dance of Time: Three Nymphs Supporting a Clock” will be the topic of discussion on Friday during the Frick Collection’s “Cocktails With a Curator.”Credit…Claude Michel and JeanBaptiste Lepaute; via Frick Collection; Michael BodycombWhen the Frick Collection introduced its virtual series, “Cocktails With a Curator,” its deputy director and Peter Jay Sharp chief curator, Xavier F. Salomon, described the program as a way to show how the museum’s pieces are “relevant to issues we’re facing today.” That’s especially true for the artwork featured in the next episode: “The Dance of Time: Three Nymphs Supporting a Clock,” by the 18th-century sculptor Clodion with the clockmaker Jean-Baptiste Lepaute. Looking back on 2020, the passage of time has never felt so complicated.There’s also nothing simple about “The Dance of Time.” The three terra-cotta nymphs holding up a globe-encased clock are either witnessing the passage of time or represent it themselves. To find out more, make a metropolitan (or the mocktail alternative, a ginger ale hot toddy; both recipes are on the Frick’s website), and tune in to the museum’s YouTube channel on Friday at 5 p.m. Eastern time to hear Salomon discuss the timelessness of this unique timepiece.MELISSA SMITHPop & RockSummerStage Is Just a Screen AwaySoccer Mommy and her band performed for SummerStage Anywhere in November. The show is available to watch on YouTube.Credit…via City Parks FoundationWhile its recently renovated stage in Central Park sat idle this past season, SummerStage — the nonprofit organization that typically floods the five boroughs with live outdoor music — sprouted roots in virtual space. Its season of free online programming, SummerStage Anywhere, is now complete, but is archived on their YouTube channel for latecomers to enjoy.Offerings are wide-ranging, crossing disciplines, genres and generations. Soccer Mommy, an indie-rock darling, performed her first and, so far, only full-band show in support of her latest album, “Color Theory.” ASAP Ferg joined Fab 5 Freddy, one of hip-hop’s elder statesmen, for a conversation about creativity in the face of racial injustice. Gloria Gaynor and her band revisited hits from her disco heyday (including, of course, “I Will Survive,” a song that has special resonance these days). For those of us yearning for a time when we can once again spread our blankets and take in the sounds at Rumsey Playfield, this series provides a nice stopgap.OLIVIA HORNClassical MusicCatch Up With ‘Density 2036’Claire Chase recently released four full-length CDs for her ongoing “Density 2036” project.Credit…Karen ChesterPreviously, listeners curious about “Density 2036” — the ambitious, 23-year commissioning project that the flutist Claire Chase started in 2013 — have needed to stake out her concerts. (While Chase recorded her interpretations of a couple of the earliest works at the beginning of the project, studio renditions seemed to have taken a back seat to live dates in recent years.)Now four new full-length CDs, released by Corbett vs. Dempsey Records, allow a global audience to catch up with the first half-decade of Chase’s initiative. (They’re also available digitally on Bandcamp.) Highlights abound in each set, thanks to a range of composers that includes Marcos Balter, George Lewis and Pauline Oliveros. And one particularly striking stretch on “Part IV” features a version of Tyshawn Sorey’s “Bertha’s Lair” (with the composer heard on percussion alongside Chase). That fancifully vigorous piece is directly followed by a distinct yet similarly percussive work: “Five Empty Chambers” by Vijay Iyer.SETH COLTER WALLSAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More