THE TANK CENTER FOR SONIC ARTS FIND A NEW WAY TO INTERPRET BEETHOVEN

In 2017, the Kronos Quartet recorded an album of music by composer Henryk Górecki. Jeffrey Zeigler played the cello as part of the quartet, lending a deep somber tone to the mournful compositions. I mention Górecki because the work on Zeigler’s new project, Slow Beethoven, has striking similarities to the common aural themes found in the late Polish composer’s pieces. Slow Beethoven focuses on the first movement from Beethoven’s Opus 131, Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo. The piece, usually running at around eight minutes, has been pulled into an epic 45-minute piece so that each moment of Beethoven’s original work can be savored and wrung out for its emotional capacity.

Zeigler works with a quartet that includes Lara St. John and Miranda Cuckson on violin and Milan Milisavljevic on viola. Zeigler, the Music Director for the National Sawdust Ensemble, leads the quartet at National Sawdust’s Brooklyn location. What is so innovative about the project is that while Zeigler and company were playing the piece, the audio was piped into the TANK Center for Sonic Arts in Colorado. The musicians’ playing took on resonance and depth due to TANK’s venue – an empty, cavernous water tank in the deserts of Colorado. When the musicians move slowly and solemnly through the music, the ambience of the tank adds a sorrowful accent (as well as a lushness) to the sound as it reverberates.

Though it may feel daunting to approach a project like Slow Beethoven because it’s one long track that runs about 45 minutes long, the experience does not feel slow or lagging, despite the premise of the work: instead of feeling sluggish, the changing of the tempo makes the work feel more poignant, far more melancholy. The measured way in which the track progresses – there are few peaks and valleys, and we don’t hear a crescendo or a rousing until we’re almost at the end of the piece – means the emotion is sustained and regulated, always in control. It’s at once hypnotic and expressive, keeping the audience in a state of perpetual pathos. The deliberate pace also allows Beethoven’s original composition to take on new shades of blue as the quartet finds space at a slower speed to let the chords in the piece travel through space.

If there is a criticism to be had for this record is that the quartet only tackles one part of the whole piece – given how startlingly good Slow Beethoven is, one hopes that this could be an ongoing series. Given the reputation, ubiquity, and popularity of the music, trying to do something new or novel is a formidable challenge. This recording is unique because it finds a new timber to the sadness by allowing the music to stand independently. By stretching the piece, the recording exposes the music’s ‘bones’ and structure, highlighting Beethoven’s composition’s genius. Often when a classical work is slowed down, it collapses, but the arrangement on Slow Beethoven recasts the piece as something wholly new, recasting it as a contemporary classical dirge.

RATING 8

Reanimating Cavafy, a Poet of ‘Future Generations’ Whose Time Is Now

In the festival “Archive of Desire,” artists and musicians thoughtfully engage with the writing of Constantine P. Cavafy, a self-assessed “ultramodern poet.”

By Anastasia Tsioulcas May 4, 2023

When I was about 10, the teacher at the Catholic school I attended in Massachusetts asked students to bring in a poem from home to share with the class. Looking at our bookshelves, I plucked out a slim volume by Constantine P. Cavafy. Many of its poems were short, manageable to read out loud and gorgeously plain-spoken. I chose “I’ve Looked So Much ...”:

I’ve looked on beauty so much
that my vision overflows with it.
The body’s lines. Red lips. Sensual limbs Hair as though stolen from Greek statues ...

I knew who Cavafy was. Like our family, he was from the once large and thriving Greek community in Alexandria, Egypt, that is now nearly extinct. Cavafy was a hero to us — and continues to be a hero across the Greek-speaking world. Many of his recurring motifs — of alienation, of queerness, of distrusting certitudes, of a life shaped in the margins — still feel startlingly modern, 90 years after his death, in 1933.

The Athens-based Onassis Foundation is making the case that Cavafy is a man for our moment with “Archive of Desire,” a nine-day New York City-wide celebration of the poet, ending Saturday. The festival, timed to coincide with the 160th anniversary of Cavafy’s birth on April 29, aims to bring new audiences to his work, filtered through the prisms of contemporary artists working in many mediums, including music, poetry, film and visual art, with 25 newly commissioned works.

Back when I was in school my father talked me into reading a much less explosive Cavafy poem, “Ithaka,” one of his most famous. At that young age, I had completely missed most of Cavafy’s themes and their context.

I would come to savor them: His life as a queer man in Egypt in the early 20th century, his writings about desire. His world-weary views on the passings of empires and power. His profound meditations on time. The stunning gap between his rich interior life and his decades-long bureaucratic day job, in the purgatorial-sounding Third Circle of Irrigation office. His careful layering of three different forms of Greek in his work: the modern language; an artificially constructed, “purified” 19th-century one; and occasionally the ancient form.

Cavafy often thought about being of a place and also not of that place, a feeling that reverberated throughout my childhood. And I latched onto the sheer music of Cavafy’s words.

Many composers have heard that music too, and have written settings for his work — Greek artists like Mikis Theodorakis, but also foreign musicians including Ned Rorem and John Tavener.

Paola Prestini, the curator of “Archive of Desire,” has brought together a new set of creators for the festival. They have thoughtfully engaged with his writing, resulting in works — sometimes illuminative and striking, sometimes more perfunctory — that take as their collective point of departure Cavafy’s self-assessment as “an ultramodern poet, a poet of the future generations.”

The festival’s opener, on April 28 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, was an intimate project from the visual artist Sister Sylvester and the Egyptian electronic musician and vocalist Nadah El Shazly. They named their collaboration “Constantinopoliad,” after the journal that Cavafy began when he was 18, when his family moved briefly to his parents’ native city, Constantinople, to escape the British bombardment of Alexandria.

Sister Sylvester led the audience through a communal reading of her intricately designed, handmade books while El Shazly performed her score live, interspersing moody electronics and vintage Egyptian recordings with her own, smoky-hued singing. The narrative deftly explored brief episodes from Cavafy’s life as well as musings on queerness, ethnic identity, migration and the tangled history of the Mediterranean region.

At Miller Theater at Columbia on Monday, a meandering program called “Days of 2023” awkwardly stitched together poetry recitations with recent works by U.S. composers as well as older musical settings of Cavafy, featuring musicians from the National Sawdust Ensemble, led by the cellist Jeffrey Zeigler. A highlight was a complete performance of the groundbreaking Greek electronic musician Lena Platonos’s 2010 album “Kavafis 13 Tragoudia,” in which she set 13 of Cavafy’s poems to music, working with the Greek singer Giannis Palamidas.

For this version of Platonos’s work, the composer Hannah Ishizaki created an imaginative arrangement for the live instruments, with Palamidas singing impassionedly. It was effective and moving, especially in a raucously percussive setting of one of Cavafy’s most famous poems, “Waiting for the Barbarians.” In this arrangement, the impending hordes were not threatening some long- deceased kingdom; their horses’ hooves were here and now, thrumming in a drum kit as the stage vibrated.

Lamentably, the organizers presented no texts or translations at any of the musical performances. For the Platonos, the 13 poems’ titles weren’t even listed in the program. If the festival’s mission was to expand awareness of Cavafy’s work, why leave out that information, essential for most in the New York audience? (The festival’s creative director and the director of culture for the Onassis Foundation, Afroditi Panagiotakou, said the decision was a creative choice meant to spark audiences’ curiosity about Cavafy.)

“Waiting for the Barbarians” was also the starting point for an even more spectacular musical interpretation by the multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson, in a program Tuesday night at St. Thomas Church, copresented with Death of Classical. The performances featured the sensitive Knights orchestra, conducted by Eric Jacobsen; and the exemplary Brooklyn Youth Chorus, led by Dianne Berkun Menaker.

Before she began, Anderson — whose sharp, sardonic delivery matched Cavafy’s tone perfectly — pointed out political parallels between our own lock-horned Congress and Cavafy’s imagined empire in decline with a do-nothing senate (“This sounds familiar!”). She declaimed “Barbarians” and “Ithaka” in English while layering her electric violin, two keyboards, synths and other electronics over the orchestra and chorus.

The program also included works by Helga Davis and Petros Klampanis, as well as Prestini, whose setting of Cavafy’s poem “Voices” for the chorus offered dazzling textures and beautiful counterpoint. Davis and Klampanis’s composition, “Cavafy Ghost,” featured Davis’s virtuosic vocals across several octaves and collaged several Cavafy poems. In one striking section, Davis and Klampanis, who also played double bass, read “Barbarians” (again!) in tandem, Davis in English and Klampanis in Greek, to mesmerizing effect.

For the Greek-born Klampanis, Cavafy’s work is part of a common cultural lexicon; but it was clear from their writing and live performances how deeply Anderson, Prestini and Davis had each grappled with Cavafy’s themes of isolation and memory. “Voices,” the choristers chanted solemnly in Prestini’s piece: “loved and idealized, of those who have died, or of those lost for us like the dead.”

That side-by-side recitation was also a reminder of Cavafy the polyglot: He was partly raised in Britain as a child, and he reportedly spoke Greek with an English accent. (Cavafy’s ease in multiple languages was common in Alexandria; my father spoke English as his fourth language, after Greek, Arabic and French.)

On Wednesday evening, I returned to National Sawdust for “Archive of Desire,” a meditative collaboration between the poet Robin Coste Lewis, the composer and pianist Vijay Iyer, Zeigler (here as composer as well as cellist) and the visual artist Julie Mehretu. As Lewis wove together her own words with frequent quotations from and allusions to Cavafy, Iyer and Zeigler played arcing melodies sometimes in dialogue, and sometimes contained in individual sonic universes that matched Cavafy’s sense of solitude. Mehretu’s work, full of her signature darting lines that imply movement and displacement, was projected on a screen behind the other performers.

At the end of the “Archive of Desire” performance, Lewis returned to the microphone and proclaimed, “Cavafy forever!” This festival was not about rediscovering a long-dead voice. Instead, it provided an opportunity for today’s artists to meet Cavafy’s ever-present future.

REVIEW: At Mass MoCA, Paola Prestini's work-in-progress 'Old Man and the Sea' is deep and layered

by Evam Berkowitz, The Berkshire Eagle March 27, 2023

NORTH ADAMS — Paola Prestini’s “The Old Man and the Sea” is an opera of layers.

Voices evolve into otherworldly soundscapes as cello and percussion deliver a call-and-response that tugs on our ears like receding waves underfoot. Characters meld into one another as their roles collide and coalesce. Themes cascade together even as they bridge disparate musical motifs.

Sometimes in the in-progress production — which was given an excerpted recital performance at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday, March 25 — the opera’s potential remained to be seen. Other times, these layers flowed into a swirling gyre of fate, dreams and emotion worthy of the dark blue depths they plumb.

Of particular note, Helga Davis, Prestini’s muse and frequent collaborator, is as advertised: a sublime, singular vocalist whose superhuman vocal range is matched by her ability to distill characterization into a single stare or smirk or sound.

Prestini’s adaptation, with librettist Royce Vavrek, aims to interpolate Ernest Hemingway’s novella with elements of his own life. The 42 minutes shared Saturday sketched well where the opera is going, and Prestini said about 35 minutes remains to be added.

Much of the plot is familiar: Santiago, an elderly fisherman, is on a monthslong streak of bad luck. Even Manolin, the boy devoted to him, is beholden to a luckier boat. Far out, alone on his skiff, he catches the fish of his life, but by the time he makes port, sharks have destroyed it. By morning, the enormous skeleton is a spiny string of harbor refuse.

As Santiago, baritone Nathan Gunn is tentative, reserved and resigned to the character’s fate. He shows vocal depth in slow, sawing solos that become sea dirges. When he doubles as Hemingway, he comes alive, swaggering and dancing over his words like ice in a tumbler.

Rodolfo Girón floors us as Manolin, his ethereal countertenor a rare gift well used as the boy who, far from being Santiago’s charge, is the old man’s guardian angel.

The opera uses microphones and speakers to lightly manipulate singers’ voices and pipe in “found sound” of ocean waves and the like. (Sound design is by Garth MacAleavey.)

It all seems excessive here. The voices are so staggering that they don’t need modification. The use of amplification, an opera rarity, undermined the singers by muffling their diction, though the acoustics of the room may account for this need.

The accompaniment, Romantic and colorful, evokes the sea far better than a sound effect.

The low register of percussionist Shayna Dunkelman’s marimba becomes the creaking wood of skiffs crowded in the harbor. At other times, the instrument can sound cliched, but Dunkelman’s work on a drum kit and what sounded like a musical saw is precise and arresting. It works in distinct harmony with virtuosic cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, who is also Prestini’s husband.

The buzzing chorus becomes dry rope, hot and blistering as it rushes through Santiago’s hands when the fish bites. The high string on Zeigler’s cello becomes a slicing cut in his hand when the fish bucks.

The opera, seven years in the making, will undoubtedly change significantly before its November premiere at Arizona State University. This weeklong residency at Mass MoCA was, as participants described it, a time of play and experimentation.

In its current form, the opera nails the progression from familiar to fever-pitched, not only in the characters but in the voices behind them as well.

The quotidian Spanish lyrics of the “Hail Mary” dissolve into the bustle of Havana before soloist Yvette Keong rises from the eight-member chorus and becomes La Virgen del Cobre, an amalgam of Santiago’s late wife and a Virgin Mary figure of Cuban religious iconography.

Keong’s clear soprano first navigates a rather traditional aria. Gunn tests the limits further before the unique Girón explodes them. By the time we meet Davis, whose voice defies classification along the usual lines, we might be ready for her.

She brings full force to La Mar (the sea) in a climactic, storming scene of predators destroying Santiago’s quarry. She becomes hissing sharks with gnashing teeth and the gong of a listing buoy. Davis knows just when to hold a smoldering cry and when to bite down hard on a consonant.

It becomes a maelstrom as characters converge into Santiago.

Their journey was interrupted regularly by what Prestini calls “pop songs” — separated group numbers that take us out of the story to the world of Hemingway himself.

They can fit perfectly — like the daiquiri recipe that introduces us to Gunn’s suave Hemingway and Davis’ sultry cosmic bartender, low and deep and as warming as good rum.

And they can distract — like the jazzy, artificial “Joltin’ Joe,” which revels in the career statistics of the great Yankee of New York.

Both numbers love numbers (ounces of liquor; home runs hit). It’s an intriguing conceit in the libretto, which throughout is clean and deliberate, taking its cues from Hemingway’s “rich, terse” language, Vavrek said.

They point to a certain obsession.

Taken in sum with the devolving, converging plots and the manic, interrupting “pop songs,” they show us a mind in crisis. In the final number of Saturday’s excerpt, a waltzing Istrian folk song, heavy crashes of drums take us to the fatal conclusion of Hemingway’s struggles, his suicide in 1961. (Chorus baritone Dominik Belavy deserves special note for his performance in the folk song.)

It’s a staggering and immediate return to land, to Earth, bookending with the “Hail Mary” as the melodies again become familiar and somehow ancient.

The sea has calmed, the sun will set and rise again, and the great fish’s skeleton is flotsam in Havana harbor.

Cellist Jeffrey Zeigler’s ‘Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello’ Expands the Concept of a Solo Album

By David Templeton | From the November-December 2021 issue of Strings magazine

In the early days of the pandemic, with vast expanses of unexpected time suddenly on many people’s hands, some decided to use that time to do something they’d never previously felt the freedom to do. While certain folks caught up on binge-watching TV shows and reading all the latest mystery novels, others devoted themselves to long-planned creative projects, from writing one of those novels themselves to memorizing swaths of classic poetry, from learning to play Beatles tunes on the ukulele to learning to speak another language. One magazine journalist taught himself to tie balloon animals.

New York–based cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, already widely known for pushing boundaries and breaking conventions, decided to spend his quarantine time collaborating with his wife, composer Paola Prestini, on a project they’d often discussed but never quite gotten around to. They set out to make one of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time. “This,” says Zeigler, simply, “is the biggest solo cello album I could ever imagine.”

Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello—released in digital format in September 2021, with a planned vinyl release set for January of 2022—features five pieces written by Prestini, all for solo cello: Océano, Eight Takes, Ophelia, Houses of Zodiac, and We Breathe Again. On the album, Prestini’s gorgeous and mysterious, hypnotically complex compositions, performed by Zeigler with daredevil intensity and a kind of surgical “mad doctor” precision, are presented alongside thematically crucial “interludes”—brief passages of recited poetry, spoken aloud, inventively underscored by new arrangements of music from the soundtrack of the 2017 documentary We Breathe Again, which Prestini also scored, with vocals by the sensational Inuk folksinger Tanya Tagaq. 

The album is a stunner. 

Its melodically experimental soundscapes, paired with the words of poets Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, Natasha Trethewey, and Anaïs Nin, make a clear and extremely successful attempt at blowing the minds of adventurous music lovers. It’s as if Prestini and Zeigler intentionally attempted to do for the cello what Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon did for rock ’n’ roll. Seriously, this is the kind of album you’ll want to listen to on vinyl, lying on the carpet with an excellent pair of headphones, merging into the music like pearl divers plunging into the ocean. 

Zeigler, formerly of the Kronos Quartet, resists such appraisals—“That’s a very tall comparison,” he says with a laugh—but does allow that he and Prestini knew they were doing more than just cutting some tracks of cello music. The inclusion of an accompanying video, directed by award-winning filmmaker Murat Eyuboglu, is evidence enough of the couple’s ambitions for the project, but when you add an immersive museum/studio installation combining spoken word, movement, music, and image to explore the human subconscious through mind, body, and nature, it’s pretty clear this was never going to be a recording you simply listen to in the background while folding the clothes.

Simply put, Houses of Zodiac is a trip, both in the colloquial sense and as a metaphor for travel and journeys, pretty much demanding one’s attention, and providing countless rewards to any listeners willing to give it a chance. And for those whose engagement goes beyond the album itself, for those able to view the film or catch one of the upcoming video installations or live performances, those rewards only multiply.

“At first, I just thought this would be a really great solo cello project, but what I should have known at the time was that nothing Paola ever envisions is small-scale,” says Zeigler. “I never originally envisioned dance and ballet, video and everything. We definitely allowed things to grow and expand.”

Zeigler notes that he and Prestini have been married for 15 years. “We’ve been working together in various ways for many, many years, but believe it or not, this is actually our first album together where we’re both equally lead artists on a project,” Zeigler says. “And yes, we’re still married.”

 Over those years, of course, Prestini has written numerous pieces with Zeigler in mind while writing several works for other cellists and other situations. Ophelia was originally written as one of the commissioned pieces for the Irving M. Cline competition in California.

“Océano was a piece she wrote while doing an exploration of stringed instruments while still in college at Juilliard,” Zeigler says. “Houses of Zodiac has existed in a couple of different forms. A lot of these pieces I’ve played over the years, but at the beginning of lockdown, I turned to Paola and I said, ‘You know, we should explore these again. Why don’t we make this a project? Why don’t I dive in really deeply?’”

The timing, as they say, was right.

“Her music is extremely instrumentally challenging,” Zeigler notes, appreciatively, “and thanks to COVID, I had a lot of time for practicing.”

As an album concept, Zeigler and Prestini started talking about it early on in the pandemic, either late March or early April. But Zeigler says he’d been thinking about “delving deeply” into these particular pieces for quite a while. “Houses of Zodiac, in an earlier form—the album features a whole new arrangement—I’ve performed a number of times,” he says. “Ophelia I hadn’t worked on yet, but Océano I had. That is a very instrumentally challenging piece. When you listen to it, it seems very naturally written. But a lot of the double-stops and shifts are very . . . you really have to pay attention. I had a few rough performances of it early on, many years ago. I think I’ve always had a mental hurdle that I had to overcome, so it was wonderful to get a chance and to have the time to really dig in deep on it, on all these pieces, because it finally allowed me to own them.”

Asked if his work on the pieces contributed to any compositional adjustments over the months he and Prestini were preparing to record, Zeigler says no, though he admits there was once a time, on a different piece, when he informed her that a certain note was literally impossible to play. “Basically, I really don’t like it when a performer tells a composer, ‘I can’t play that, that’s too hard, I think you should rewrite it.’ I think a player needs to have a dialogue with a piece, really getting a deep understanding of it, working to learn what the composer is attempting to capture in the music.”

Key to the album’s striking appeal are the spoken-word elements of the interludes, the short, brilliantly delivered vocal performances matched with music that neither overwhelms the spoken text nor disappears behind the poetry. The interludes also serve as commentary, in a way, on the compositions they precede. Océano, for example, is preceded by a snippet from Pablo Neruda, recited by Prestini herself. A piece by Anaïs Nin, which leads into Houses of Zodiac, is read by Maria Popova, best known for her popular blog on the search for meaning in life, Brain Pickings. Shaughnessy and Trethewey read evocative fragments from their own works for Eight Takes and Ophelia.

“Those interludes, and the little pieces of poetry, that’s all part of the project’s natural genesis, because in exploring these new works we realized that all of them were inspired by various writers,” says Zeigler. “So that became a major seed that grew the album.”

The underscore for the interludes includes a number of musicians, and, of course, those soul-altering vocals by Tagaq, which become especially prominent in the final piece of the album, an arrangement based on the full We Breathe Again film, the soundtrack of which was never released. “It’s a lot of individuals for a solo cello album,” jokes Zeigler. “It helps when you have such fantastic artists and such fantastic improvisers.”

For such an experimental and definition-blurring project, the recording of the primary pieces was fairly straightforward.

“We wanted it to feel like a traditional classical recording,” Zeigler says. “I played long takes, with very few edits, because we wanted to have as natural a feel as possible.” Prestini’s writing being what it is, he says he did have to be fairly experimental himself. “I had to figure out new bowings and fingerings to play this music sometimes. The thing about having such a long relationship with a particular composer, I got to know her language better—and she of course has been studying my playing for years.”

That language—the language of music—is vividly alive in such projects as Houses of Zodiac, and working on the album, with all of its ancillary pieces, has only deepened the couple’s resolve to continue working together, as well as with others whose voices deserve to be part of the conversation. “It’s personally important and rewarding because the more I collaborate with composers, the more I realize that string players have an odd way of looking at things,” Zeigler says. “We don’t think very linearly. So players and composers have to do this little dance to bring out the best in each other. Over the years, Paola and I have had a lot of conversations about that. Houses of Zodiac is part of what’s come out of that conversation.”