Roberta on the arts

posted 4/29/2006

Transient Glory V: The Young People's Chorus at
The Society for Ethical Culture

This was a lovely program, hosted by the eloquent and knowledgeable John Shaefer, WNYC Radio Host. Mr. Shaefer was warm and humorous, respectful and well-timed, as this event was being recorded for presentation on WNYC at a future date. Pauses were brief, and there was no intermission (amazingly, the students were on their feet for hours), and the interesting program kept momentum flowing, as composers spoke, children sang, and dancers joined the production for a full use of space at The Society for Ethical Culture. This auditorium is warm and wood-lined, a meditative, spiritual space. Francisco Nuñez, the chorus' Artistic Director, has achieved a professional sound from this chorus, and I saw many smiling and proud youngsters singing their hearts out.

The six composers, who were commissioned by Young People's Chorus to compose music for this event, to accompany prose or poetry, each spoke briefly with Jon Shaefer, prior to the premiere performances. The seventh composer, Rufus Wainwright, whose recorded music from Bloom was used for song and dance, could not attend, but, in his place, Stephen Petronio introduced his dance company. Previte chose E.B. White's Freedom Essay for My First and Greatest Love Affair , and the chorus sang a cappella, with the word "freedom" repeated often. There was a political undercurrent to this work, well conceived for the times: "My first and greatest love affair was with this thing we call freedom."

Adamo's work, Garland , sung with the instrumental ensemble, was based on poems by Emily Dickinson. For Adamo, this was a personal work, written in dedication to a deceased friend. The poetry reflects loss and memories, "We follow thee until thou notice us no more." Musgrave chose poems by John Keats for music set to two clarinets. This atonal work was sung to Going North: A Song About Myself , about ".a naughty boy, a naughty boy was he.", who ran away to Scotland. Corigliano, renowned and Pulitzer Prize-Grammy Award-winning composer, wrote One Sweet Morning for this event, based on text by Yip Harburg (who wrote lyrics to Brigadoon and The Wizard of Oz ). This ant-war poem predicts that "Out of the embers of blossoms and ashes of clover, Spring will bloom-one sweet morning."

Sawer used Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, Mutability . This sensitive, dramatic work was noteworthy for its lack of frills or ornaments. "The flower that smiles today, Tomorrow dies: All that we wish to stay, Tempts and then flies." Bermel used text by his father, Albert Bermel, based on childhood memories of London Bombings in World War II. A Child's War was actually the first melodic work in the program, and its overlapping phraseology was mesmerizing. The chorus sang with accented body language and emotional intensity. There was clapping for rhythmic percussion, and wooden sticks enhanced the dynamics.

For Rufus Wainwright's Bloom , composed to poetry by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, a full dance-choral production was staged, replicated from a recent evening at The Joyce Theater . The Stephen Petronio Company was onstage in wispy grey, silky costumes, gathered and short, with the male dancers in even briefer shorts and tank tops. The chorus first appeared in the aisles in tie-dyed colorful florals on white shirts and dark pants, all matching except for the original floral designs. The chorus soon found its way to the stage, behind the dancers, and the recorded Wainwright, pop-rock score was mixed with live vocals, charismatic choreography, and energized acrobatics, in solos and duets.

As a former school administrator, I found this entire event a wonderful vehicle for student self-expression and channeling of energy and emotion. Kudos to Francisco Nuñez and The Young People's Chorus of New York City. Kudos to the six composers with commissioned works and the seventh composer, who collaborated with the dance motif. Kudos to Stephen Petronio Company and the lighting and costume designers, all of whom created a most eclectic and energized Transient Glory V.

 

The Voice of Chorus America, Spring 2006

RISING UP: Urban Youth Choruses
Inner-city choruses are fostering greater diversity in recruitment and repertoire

by John Sparks

The scene in the rehearsal space at the 92nd Street Y in New York City is repeated daily in rehearsal rooms across the country: singers, milling around, talking loudly, going through bags, checking their cell phones, swigging from water bottles, laughing, and catching up with friends. Then everyone gets very quiet and there is intense focus on their purpose for being there: To sing together.

This ritual is the same, whether it’s an adult or youth chorus. In the case of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, busy rehearsing at 92 nd Street Y for an upcoming Martin Luther King Day event, founder and artistic director Francisco Núñez thinks the young people in his chorus are different from those nearly 20 years ago, when he first began working with youth choruses.

“Today they take it all more seriously,” says Núñez. “They know that investing the time produces important results,” he contends, adding that in earlier years, there was less inclination to learn difficult music or to explore different styles of singing. According to Núñez, the change may have something to do with their immersion in all kinds of music and its availability anywhere at anytime.

“I call it the iPod shuffle,” he says. “Before, people owned records, and that tended to restrict their listening” to certain kinds of music. The advent of the compact disc helped to broaden the possibilities, but with iPods, MP3s, and downloadable music from a seemingly endless variety of sources, it has become easier for people to store and carry around vast libraries of sound. In that process, Núñez believes exposure to variety, even accidentally, happens. Young people are omnivores of technology, and even if an individual is inclined to listen only to rap most of the time, the expansion and blurring of genres, the instant access, and the ease of sampling may combine to create a different kind of musical literacy.

Still, we have a society, at least in the United States, where a generation was basically lost in terms of music education. “Out of the decline of quality music education in the schools in the 1970s came the growth of independent children’s choruses,” says Barbara Tagg, founder and artistic director of the Syracuse Children’s Chorus and one of the leaders in the children and youth chorus movement for more than 25 years now.

Tagg thinks that the wave of budget cuts in public education – starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s and early 1990s – created a climate where alternatives began to bubble up. While nothing really replaces formal, direct classroom instruction in music, she notes, freestanding children and youth choruses started to develop partly in response to the decline in classroom teaching.

There had been, of course, some well-known children and youth choruses before that, among them the Boys Choir of Harlem, the Chicago Children’s Choir, the San Francisco Girls Choir, and the Glen Ellyn Children’s Chorus. For the most part, however, children’s choruses were limited to churches and schools. That is no longer the case, as evidenced by the fact that children and youth choruses make up the fastest growing segment of Chorus America’s membership.

A New Model Emerges

As with adult choruses, there is no one model for children and youth choruses – be it in repertoire, recruitment, audience development, or collaborations. But as the independent children’s chorus movement has matured, one recent phenomenon is the emergence of urban youth choruses – ensembles formed to serve diverse populations in large urban areas where kids often do not have access or the means to participate in quality musicmaking.

A common purpose of today’s urban youth choruses is to promote personal growth and multi-cultural awareness and cooperation among participants. Núñez founded the YPC in 1988 “to foster personal and artistic growth and cross-cultural understanding, as well as to provide a safe haven where young people from many different backgrounds could come together with the common goal of learning and creating beautiful music.” The program now serves 250 young singers from age 8 to 18 from all ethnic, economic, and religious backgrounds. In addition, the YPC choral program is available to 400 more students as part of YPC’s Satellite Schools program in five New York City schools.

read the full article at Chorus America

 

Village Voice Review, 4/24

posted 04/26/06 1:27pm

Hope Springs
Force that through the green fuse drives the flower

by Deborah Jowitt

You turn 50 and move from Manhattan to a town north of the city. What happens? If you're choreographer Stephen Petronio, you do not go all bucolic, forsaking your gift for depicting what the Times of London saw as "the mania of the downtown New York scene." Even though Petronio called his two gleaming new works Bud Suite and Bloom, his is no easy vision of spring. Those buds have to crack the earth to emerge, and the blooms are wind-whipped and bee-stabbed. His eight stunning company members still perform as if they have titanium joints that they take apart and grease every night. Seldom can dancers fling and lash their legs high into the air with such speed and precision and still look fluid.

But both new pieces are a little softer than Petronio's usual driving, careering, hang-on-to-your-seat works, and he's set them to warm-toned songs by Rufus Wainwright and a new Wainwright score that employs a choir of teenagers. Bud Suite emphasizes connections between people, especially in the opening. Gino Grenek and Thang Dao are in costumes (by Tara Subkoff/Imitiation of Christ) that suggest they're a unit: Each wears red trunks and half a black jacket held on with black bands. Even though—bursting into the air, legs flashing, feet beating together, bodies and arms whipping—they might be riding the fast train Wainwright sings regretfully of, they're also joined much of the time. Grenek sags into a split and Dao hauls him up. Often they hold hands while dancing furiously, and it's hard to tell who's tethered to whom. The lifts and supports don't seem manipulative; one man balances by leaning against the other, or clings to him like a vine.

Four women (Elena Demianenko, Davalois Fearon, Jimena Paz, and Shila Tirabassi) also function as a unit. They wear red trunks, white men's shirts, and short, frontless shocking-pink tutus by H. Petal with Deanna Berg (Petronio has always favored outré high-fashion deconstruction). Clustering, splitting into pairs, and joining again, they bring vaguely to mind the four cygnets of Swan Lake, but they're more discordant within unison, apt to look as if they're waiting to attack, and liable to melt. Wainwright may sing (on tape) "I guess I'm getting on in years," but these women are fresh and tender. Amanda Wells, alone onstage, looks as if she were twisting herself with a kind of voluptuous strain through suddenly thicker air.

The distinctive, fevered wail of Wainwright's "Agnus Dei" sets the dancers staggering, leaning, rolling, collapsing, reprising motifs, and picking up a litany of gestures Wells has introduced (while she sits, her back to us, in a pose suggesting meditation). Finally they fuse into a cluster.

Bloom, as befits its title, grows and expands into a kind of ecstasy. The sweet voices of the Young People's Chorus of New York City, under Francisco J. Núñez, intermittently float from a side balcony to join Wainwright's already layered vocals. The lyrics move from the "Lux Eterna" of the Latin Mass to two Walt Whitman poems to Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the Thing With Feathers," and the whole dance lifts and seethes as it goes. Here the performers' frequent one-arm-up gestures seem to hail the horizon, and Ken Tabachnick's imaginative lighting keeps changing the environment: Now it's orange-gold; now two figures dance into silhouette; now the air is bright and clear. Women in short, pale green pleated tunics by Rachel Roy stir the space around them, and the men (Grenek, Dao, and Jonathan Jaffe in green trunks and ruffled white vests) kite through like birds with a busy agenda. And that's just the first image.

This is a rich, constantly changing work, with the voices spurring it on, pooling it into quiet, lifting it higher. The choir chants Whitman's words about "billions of billions, and trillions of trillions" of buds waiting to burst from the earth, and the choreography has that churning force. It's formally very beautiful, with various pairs bookending successive central duets and the virtuosic dancing becoming more and more ardent. By the end two of the women have blossomed out in fluffy white dresses, and the piece all but boils over as the young people chant Dickinson's first word, "hope," over and over as if to hammer it up to the sky.

Perhaps appropriately, the evening ends with an excerpt from Petronio's 1992 Full Half Wrong, set to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." It's almost too much dazzling, high-energy dancing for one evening (with Demianenko and Tirabassi electrifying in wrenching solos). Spring comes with a vengeance of leapings and pantings and flying sweat.

Vilaine Fille, April 25

Young People’s Chorus of NYC

Newsday Feature, April 24

Seen in all their 'Glory,' kids rise to the challenge

BY MARION LIGNANA ROSENBERG

"You're going to eat? You're going to go outside."

A streetwise edge cuts through Francisco Núñez's words. The artistic director of the Young People's Chorus of New York City is about to start rehearsal for "Transient Glory V," Saturday's concert by the acclaimed ensemble of New York-area schoolchildren. The offending food vanishes, and the maestro's youthful charges snap to attention, awaiting his downbeat.

That furtive nibble was the sole breach of professional etiquette in the chorus' two-hour run-through of "Bloom," a new piece by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. "Bloom" is one of seven premieres making up "Transient Glory V," which also includes music by Thea Musgrave, Mark Adamo and John Corigliano commissioned by and for the chorus that Núñez founded in 1988.

"One of the things I tell composers is that I do not want them to write down to the children," Núñez said by car phone. "When it comes to children today, we need to challenge them. They want to be challenged. If you don't give them goals to reach for, they're bored."

A man with a mission, Núñez speaks with wholehearted belief. His rehearsal demeanor, like his words, conveys uncompromising respect for his musicians. Amid a sea of T-shirts and baggy jeans, he is dressed formally, in a charcoal suit and silver tie.

He asks much. "This needs to be memorized by the end of the day," he says, handing out the latest version of "Bloom." He gives much, too. Mouthing the words along with his choristers, Núñez laughs with them when their voices fade away as they reach for the score's extravagant heights. After a few words of encouragement, the chorus dives back in, their tones shimmering and splaying in a luminous cloud of sound, as Wainwright nods approvingly.

"The Young People's Chorus can muster that chiming, clear-blue sound - now silk, now ice - but there's a warmth, too, in their sustained sounds and an expressiveness in their dynamics," wrote composer Adamo by e-mail. He chose death-drenched verse by Emily Dickinson for "Garland," his contribution to "Transient Glory V."

Adamo echoes Núñez's faith in the choristers' intelligence and ambition. "I do think that it's naive, not to say patronizing, to think that children or adolescents don't feel grief as keenly as adults do. I think they feel it more so, actually, because they haven't lived through enough of these experiences to know that 'This, too, shall pass.'"

Notions of time and change inform the concert's title. "'Transient Glory' means a thing sung by children before adulthood, right before they mature, vocally as well as mentally," Núñez noted.

Cool and impassive while Wainwright critiqued their efforts, the choristers - including youngsters from Elmont and Valley Stream - swarmed around the pop star, squealing and brandishing camera phones, when rehearsal broke. Fusing inspired musicianship with the vulnerability and enthusiasm of youth, their art shines fleetingly but unforgettably.

"Transient Glory V" by the Young People's Chorus of New York City. Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Society for Ethical Culture, 2 W. 64th St., Manhattan. Visit www.ypc.org or call 212-415-5500.

 

The New York Sun

A Downtown Firebrand Gets Happy
April 20, 2006

by Valerie Gladstone

The Stephen Petronio Company usually hits town like a gale-force wind. Mr. Petronio's dances are so fierce and wild they sweep you up in their oddity and dark, ungulfing emotions. But the famously provocative choreographer arrived at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday night with a program surprisingly touched by Spring.

The program included two dazzling new works: "Bloom," set to a commissioned score by singer Rufus Wainwright, and "Bud Suite," to three Wainwright songs. The company also revived 1992's "The Rite Part," an excerpt from Mr. Petronio's "Full Half Wrong."

Mr. Wainwright's music perfectly mirrors the wistful mood of the dances. For the lyrics to "Bloom," Mr. Petronio and Mr. Wainwright selected poems by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and part of a Latin Mass. The Young People's Chorus of New York City, under the lively direction of Francisco Nunez, sang them with sweetness and lucidity.

The members of the chorus - wearing bright white shirts handpainted with multicolored flowers -filed into the theater before the dance began, standing in front of the stage singing the Latin prayer, "Lux aeterna." When they left the stage, the curtain rose on five commanding women in the company: Elena Demianenko, Davalois Fearon, Fimena Paz, Shila Tirabassi, and Amanda Wells. Posed in dim light, they appeared like goddesses in a Greek frieze wearing short, billowy dresses of pale green, created by the ingenious Rachel Roy.

They remained motionless in their poses, their backs to the audience or curled up on the floor, like flowers ready to bud. The members of the chorus sang the words of Whitman's "One's Self I Sing" as they spiraled in turn across the stage. Mr. Petronio created layers of movement that continuously dissolved into one another.

To the phrase "Of life immense in passion, pulse, and power," the dramatic Ms. Paz spread her arms wide like wings and thrust out her chest. She curved her leg behind her in an almost impossible feat of balance, creating one of the evening's many lasting images. Gino Grenek, Thang Dao, and Jonathan Jaffe bounded in with springy jumps. Dressed in white vests and shorts, they stretched their arms straight out and scissored them in the air, then paired up briefly with the women.

By far the most moving section came during Emily Dickinson's poem, "Hope Is the Thing With Feathers," which begins, "Hope is the things with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops at all." The lighting, masterfully designed by Ken Tabachnick, bathed the stage in shades of pale green and orange. Ms. Wells stood alone, slowly lifting her leg to the side into a slow turn, before the dynamic Ms. Fearon flew in from a diagonal, changing the mood instantaneously. The young people's voices soared.

Through exhilarating movement, Mr. Petronio made optimism palpable, choreographing this sequence as if he were orchestrating the entire season of spring, urging new growth to burst forth after a long winter. Still, the joyous scene was not without a tinge of sadness and yearning.

"Bud Suite" began with dancers Messrs. Grenek and Dao, sexy and muscular in tight red shorts and halved white shirt jackets, facing one another on the barely lit stage. To Mr. Wainwright's song "Oh What a World We Live In," they leaned into each another, only their shoulders touching, and then lurched away, with one falling to his knees and the other lifting him to a standing position. Moments passed with them unable to stay together but still reaching for each other's hands. Mr. Grenek did a series of flutter kicks that turned into jerky movements, until haplessly falling into Mr. Dao's arms. Before long, the other dancers in the eight-member company swirled around them, creating a community of disjointed but caring people.

All this is enough to make you ask: What's this? Intimacy and tenderness from Stephen Petronio?

Mr. Petronio founded his company in 1984 and came on the scene as a punk artist who titillated audiences with highly sexual dances. He performed with the Trisha Brown troupe for seven years in the early 1990s, during which he loudly asserted his homosexuality and support of AIDS activism. But as his life has changed, so has his work. He now lives with his longtime partner in a farmhouse in upstate New York and has won enthusiastic audiences in Australia, Sweden, Britain, and France. Clearly his vew of life has undergone a change.

Mr. Petronio started letting light into his dense and complex works with "City of Twist," a wrenching work created in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The same light floods "Bloom" and "Bud Suite." Indeed, he has moved into new territory, broadening the emotional atmosphere of his dances. But he has not sacrificed the physically bold and idiomatic style that made him the quintessential downtown choreographer.

"The Rite Part," danced to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," belongs to Mr. Petronio's earlier, more violent period. He created original, aggressive movements to Stravinsky's unpredictable and surging score - not an easy feat given its popularity with choreographers from Nijinsky to Balanchine to Shen Wei.

While the dancers often appeared airborne in the other works, here they spent a good deal of time close to the floor. They grappled with gravity and inner conflict. Dressed dramatically in black unitards decorated with ragged pieces of cloth, they reflected the harshness of primitive fertility rites. But while the work pulled one into its vortex, the final, riveting solo by Ms. Tirabassi went on too long. Or maybe Mr. Petronio simply offered too much to absorb in one program, a surfeit of riches.

 

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