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A Trio of Vocal Curiosities New York
Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall
02/11/2025 -
Michael Gordon: A Western
Julia Wolfe: Italian Lessons
John Luther Adams: A Brief Descent into Deep Time
Vicky Chow (Keyboard), David Cossin (Percussion)
Theater of Voices, Paul Hillier (Artistic Director) 
P. Hillier with Theater of Voices (© Birgit Ternberg)
“My hope is that the music creates a strange, beautiful, overwhelming–sometimes even frightening–landscape, and invites you to get lost in it.”
John Luther Adams
“Vishnu Schist/two billion years/gray, gray, dark gray, black”
Last words from Mr. Adams’ A Brief Descent into Deep Time
No metaphors can capture the complexity and clarity of Paul Hillier’s Theater of Voices. Perhaps the weaving of a Bukhara carpet or Pythagorean music of the stars. But hearing them last night with three New York premieres from three outstanding American composers, one could come close to their mastery of Ars Nova, Ars Antiqua and the most complicated 21st Century compositions.
Not that all the works had equal value. The first, in fact, was rather puzzling.
One could adore the endless musical transformations in Michael Gordon’s I Wanna Be A Cowboy. The words twirled about commercials for pistols, cowboy melodies–and most of all, that classic High Noon.
The program notes gave scant notice of the revolutionary meaning of High Noon, with its allegorical story of one hero (Gary Cooper) against the cowardice of the population and his own wife, when a gang comes to shoot up the town.
The story was a fable about the Purge of Communists (mainly Hollywood’s Jewish community) where “naming names” was the only way to keep one’s jobs. Most–including Elia Kazan and Stanley Kramer–gave in. The High Noon writer, Carl Foreman, refused, and his other films were written under a nom de plume in London.
That, though, though, was never hinted at. In Michael Gordon’s work, the six singers went through a thesaurus of sound, occasionally miming a “Bang! Bang!” for the gunplay.
It was a jaunty effort by a superb composer, but difficult to reap the point.
The voices were maximized from six to four in John Luther Adams’ A Brief Descent Into Deep Time. The title sounds mystical, but the peripatetic Mr. Adams is firmly, literally a man of the planet. And saving what is left of our planet.
Not with didactic orations, but, here, where the four singers traced the spiraling descent, the ages, the colors of the Grand Canyon. At times, he inserted history itself, the extinctions of earth. Starting with the four singers breathing out like a rushing wind, each geologic era or color was based on a different descending scale. Yet each scale was different, the words some times in near harmony, at times tumbling over themselves like an antediluvian cataract.
D. Cossin/V. Chow
(© Manhattan School of Music/Kaitlin Jane Photography)
Yet the composer added more, Like a time-clock ticking away the seconds, percussionist David Cossin tapped his vibraphone with a series of strokes, some gentle, some with more force. At the same time, Vicky Chow (like Cossin, a member of Bang on a Can) left her usual Steinway for an electronic organ, creating the undertones of history.
Added to this, the Zankel lights changed, ever so subtly from green to orange to blue.
Methinks Stanley Kubrick would have discarded Zarathustra at the start of 2001 for John Luther Adams’ work creating billion‑year history into the near silences of music.
The final work was created for Theater of Voices by Julia Wolfe, a world premiere with words by the noted poet Cynthia Zinn. Actually the words were created by Ms. Zinn’s poetic conception of an English-Italian phrasebook. She had written it for Ms. Wolfe and the Theater of Voices itself. As always, they performed with words and word‑pictures.
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When the phrase was “The fog is a cloud on the ground”, we had hushed silence. With “The children play in the snow”, the six singers launched in a perfect consonant loveliness. For the final “There are many stars in the universe” they came together in a quiet anthem and a quiet solo.
Alas, the words of poetry were distracted by physical mimes, by branches of dead leaves hoisted, by a huge cardboard sun raised aloft.
Those were hardly needed. Ms. Zinn’s fictional phrases, Ms. Wolfe’s uncanny inspiration, and of course the Theater of Voices itself gave Italian Lessons a verse‑imilitude of curious wonder.
Harry Rolnick
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