Above, the almost impossibly adorable and fabulously talented young Belgian guitarist Adrien Brogna (who is in the USA for the very first time) hangs on Dawn Upshaw’s every musical twitch. She has this mesmerizing effect on all of the band’s musicians.
Our first pre-tour rehearsal of Ayre last Wednesday night in Richmond VA was hijacked by delayed-flight-induced absences and technical difficulties. (Monitors, used on previous tours, had been replaced by a problematic, if very nifty, headphone setup).
We did have the chance to run much of the work, enabling me to experience four minutes of musical bliss exactly twice. The work’s fifth movement is a duet for voice and alto flute, with strumming accompaniment in other instruments. (Read the text here.) Voice and flute twist and turn through, over, in between, across one another; Golijov chose to express this using quite complex rhythms, but in rehearsal he encouraged me to ignore the detailed instructions and to overlap freely and naturally - to listen and play off Dawn’s richly ornamented line.
Osvaldo gently approached me after the first run-through of the movement: “Teeeeem, Teeeeem. You must really sob with these notes: Dyaaaaa-da-Dyaaaaaa-da-Dyaaaaaaa-da. Also, don’t wait for Dawn to finish, but you must be restless, always moving on, even if it isn’t in the music. You can’t sound like you are waiting for her.”
Below, Osvaldo laughs at the unspeakably obscene humor emanating from the Mac and the Ruske (Eric Ruske, the only horn player in the world never to have cracked a note):
Working with Dawn I felt uninhibited in a way that was cathartic. Technical issues and insecurities fell away as I strove to match Dawn’s full throated freedom and natural intuition.
During a soft section in another movement, Osvaldo approached me again. An aside: I have been very lucky to work with Ollie Knussen, and Ollie achieves spectacular musical outcomes by communicating with performers on a purely technical level. Osvaldo and Ollie are like chalk and cheese. Instead of “Play softer!”, Osvaldo used an evocative image to inspire my playing: “You must be like a feather in this moment; the air must be heavier than your sound is.”
Dawn and Osvaldo’s deeply passionate attitude to music comes through everything they do and say. When Osvaldo talks, and when his music sings, there is passion that always appears to be fighting away tears, but this raw intensity is balanced by a technical command that brings performers and audiences to the same emotional location. I feel very at home in this zone.
We finished the rehearsal early; Osvaldo is wary of preparing too much in advance: “We must keep it fresh, open, new.” He is a composer who wants music to sound wet on the page.
Below, the spectacular Michael Ward-Bergeman solos on “hyper-accordian”. Listen to a recording of his composition, Three Roads, written for the Carnegie Hall Training Workshop last year. Raw. Direct. Intense.
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