MUSIC

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Caetano Veloso

Most aging musicians are content being revered by younger generations. Caetano Veloso prefers to play alongside them. That felt obvious during a lively two-hour set at Lisner Auditorium Sunday as the Brazilian pop laureate raced through cuts from his new album, "C¿" -- an uncharacteristically twitchy batch of songs that resemble both the sobriety of contemporary American indie rock and the restlessness of no-wave.

To rapturous applause, the 65-year-old trotted onto a stage decked out with flashing lights, a fog machine and four colored poles that hung above his backing band like a Calder mobile with the petals plucked off. He launched into "Outro," a song prickling with spiky guitar runs, tick-tocking drums and bass lines that prefer to fidget rather than groove. The quirkiness felt perfectly in tune with Veloso's roots in tropicalia -- the movement he founded in the face of Brazil's military dictatorship in the late '60s. (For the full story, check out Veloso's autobiography, "Tropical Truth" -- quite possibly the best memoir ever penned by a musician.) And even when Veloso's arrangements got nervy, they never got on your nerves, thanks to a sweet, generous voice residing at the heart of every song.

It was on full display during the devastatingly beautiful "Cucurrucucu Paloma," an older tune where his breathy syllables evoked a tea kettle the moment before it begins to whistle. That enchanting, pregnant energy permeated the entire performance, including the spindly new tune "Odeio." The singer was so enamored of this one that he reprised it for the encore, encouraging elated fans to sing along with a refrain that translates as "I hate you." Veloso said earlier in the set that he loved hearing a room sing it back to him.

-- Chris Richards

NSO Family Concert

The children listened in delight as the flowing melodies formed a colorful weave. Iv¿n Fischer, the National Symphony Orchestra's principal guest conductor, moved among them, peppering the Kennedy Center Family Theater audience with questions about the music: "Do you like one instrument or two better?" And later: "What is the deepest instrument in the woodwind section?"

With this well-conceived program of musicmaking and conversation on Sunday afternoon, the NSO did its part for musical education before two sold-out audiences. Fischer charmingly got the crowd going with a lesson in concert fundamentals, listening and applause.

Then came a flowing account of Kreisler's Recitative and Scherzo, played by violinist Natasha Bogachek. Her husband, Zino Bogachek, joined in Leclair's Sonata for 2 violins, while violist Mahoko Eguchi made it a trio for Dvorak's zesty Terzetto. A high-low combination highlighted the woodwinds. In between, Fischer talked about the music's emotions, asking his young listeners simple, but not simplistic, questions.

Flutist Alice Weinreb gave an enrapturing, off-stage reading of Debussy's "Syrinx." Lewis Lipnick, sitting in front, showed the low-lying rumble of the contrabassoon in Schulhoff's "Bass Nightingale." Fischer sent the little ones atwitter when he said that the instrument sounded like it had a bad cold.

But he wanted them to think more seriously too, asking them moments later, "Do you prefer to listen to the music with players on or off stage?" A trio of golden trombones sounded in Bach's "My Spirit Be Joyful," BWV 146. And Fisher gave profuse thanks for the superb listening of his young audience.

-- Daniel Ginsberg

Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra

Play the encores first. That was the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra's clever approach at George Mason University's Center for the Arts on Sunday. The Norwegian orchestra, which is on its first U.S. tour in 41 years, opened with two works that resembled reflections of each other in a funhouse mirror.

Shostakovich's "Festive Overture" was bold, brassy and raucous. Music Director Andrew Litton wielded his baton with such enthusiasm that the front-row cellos had to duck at one point. Knut Vaage's "Chatter," written for the orchestra in 2005, also featured jaunty rhythms and lots of percussion, with a mildly contemplative middle section.

In a more substantive vein, the Bergen Philharmonic's excellent cellos and basses provided strong grounding for clean and precise sound in Grieg's Piano Concerto. This orchestra surely knows the concerto inside out -- Grieg himself was once its artistic director -- but played it as if it were freshly minted. Soloist Andr¿ Watts started prosaically, with lots of pedal, but warmed up by the first movement's cadenza, which he turned into a rhythmically free miniature fantasia. The second movement melded gorgeous orchestral textures with pianistic tenderness. Watts opened the finale with strong rhythmic intensity, stamping both feet for emphasis, and then joined the orchestra in a striking mixture of power and lyricism.

There was lyrical potency in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 as well, with strongly accentuated rhythms and impressive solos by violin, flute and harp. Some other conductors find anguish in the finale, but Litton made it speedy and dramatic, providing an emotionally supercharged performance.

-- Mark J. Estren

Alan Mandel

Pianist Alan Mandel has spent many years championing American keyboard music, onstage and on recordings. (His discography includes the complete piano works of Charles Ives and extensive surveys of music by Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Edward MacDowell.) He is also a skilled composer whose new solo keyboard piece, "Phillips Phantasia," received its world premiere in a recital he gave on Sunday at the Phillips Collection.

The second work the Phillips has commissioned from Mandel in the last two years, this 20-minute piece is a set of 13 miniatures, each based on a painting in the collection. Mandel's writing here is neither a literal attempt to describe canvases by, say, Calder, Kandinsky or Rothko in music, nor a pastiche based on the artists' periods or countries of origin. Instead, an objective, all-purpose modernism -- clusters of dissonance, angular melodies, virtuosic polyrhythms, clouds of Messiaen-like color, percussive bursts of energy -- serves to categorize most of the paintings. It's all expertly composed, but (at least upon a single hearing) there seems to be too little contrast in content or mood in these depictions of wildly disparate paintings.

A sensitively shaped yet vividly emotive performance of Schumann's rhapsodic Fantasie in C, Op. 17, and a warm reading of 20th-century American composer Elie Siegmeister's bluesy and genial (if ultimately unmemorable) "Sunday in Brooklyn" completed the program.

-- Joe Banno

Andrew Manze and Richard Egarr

Violinist Andrew Manze and keyboardist Richard Egarr spoke entertainingly from the stage of the Gildenhorn Recital Hall about the instruments they played Sunday night during their concert at the University of Maryland's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. Both instruments perfectly suited the program of Mozart and Schubert sonatas; Manze's "unmodernized original" violin dated from 1782 and had a thinner, scratchier tone than today's violins, while Egarr played a copy of an 1800 fortepiano that had a tangy cimbalomesque tone.

Happily, Manze and Egarr also performed the music in period style: like two guys having fun, entertaining themselves and a bunch of (paying) friends. They knew the music cold but still took risks, choosing quick tempos that never sounded rushed, playing with phrasing to emphasize surprises and climaxes, and exploring the extremes of the tone colors their instruments could produce.

The duo didn't short the graceful charm of the two smaller-scale sonatas on the program -- Mozart's Sonata in F, K. 376, and Schubert's Sonata in D, D. 384 -- but also gave them a delicious spontaneity. And Mozart's Sonata in A, K. 526, became a dynamo, with broad strokes in the opening movement and a scintillating perpetual-motion finale.

Mozart's Sonata in E-flat, K. 481, received a performance that supported Manze's description of it as an unknown masterpiece. In the glorious Adagio, which repeatedly turns toward tragedy before recovering its equipoise, they took a relatively fast tempo but found new worlds of expression in exquisitely shaded tone colors and lyrical feeling. They also sharply characterized each of the variations in the wonderfully wide-ranging finale, including a false ending so convincing that a few audience members started clapping during an extended pause.

-- Andrew Lindemann Malone