Reviews and Testimonials

The last time Max Lifchitz performed in the Lincoln Center neighborhood, he was at the piano, delivering a characteristically diverse and eye-opening program of 20th century Mexican composers including works by Carlos Chavez, Manuel Enriquez, Manuel M. Ponce, Maria Teresa Prieto, Silvestre Revueltas, and an eclectically lively partita by Brian Banks along with a pastorale partita of his own. Much of the bill could be characterized as the Second Viennese School gone south of the border. Tuesday night, Lifchitz conducted his North/South Chamber Orchestra in a matter-of-factly transcendent program of contemporary compositions.

Katherine Hoover's South Zephyr was an evocatively buoyant, gently kinetic evocation of an enveloping, warmly comforting wind from the tropics, Lisa Hansen's flute afloat on a lush bed of strings. Victor Kioulaphides' Summer Concerto, a string piece, was the big hit with the audience with its misterioso pulse, dynamic shifts, subtly flamenco-tinged interlude and allusions to Andalucia and the Middle East.

Alla Pavlova's Concertino came across as the great lost Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #5, or something from late Tschaikovsky. It didn't have the virtuoso piano passages of Rachmaninoff, but it was packed with the kind of direct, emphatic, angst-ridden, stunningly memorable riffage that defines that composer's work. And it featured plenty of original tropes as well, most notably the shivery string passages in the opening segment as a backdrop to Helen Lin's icepick piano and Mioi Takeda's steely but cantabile violin.

Soloist Edmundo Ramirez brought a graceful but plaintive, sometimes vividly aching edge and an acerbic tone to the night's most stunning work, Anna Veismane's Concerto for Viola d'Amore. A tone poem, more or less, its tectonic sheets shifted slowly and methodically and grew more haunting as it went on, building a surreal, dangerously otherworldly mood with close harmonies from the strings. Lifchitz concluded with his own song suite, Forget Me Not, sung with deadpan wit by soprano Carol Wilson. Over the lilting sway of the strings, Wilson managed to keep a straight face through a long interlude about a potato, something some of the audience could do but others could not. It made for comic relief in the wake of a lot of searing emotion.

Lifchitz's agenda with his long-running North/South Consonance concerts is to cross-pollinate on a global level and promote the work of composers from across the Americas alongside their counterparts from literally everywhere else. It's an ambitious project, and something to keep an eye on if first-rate new works (and plenty of older rarities) by under-the-radar composers are your thing.

http://lucidculture.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/northsouth/

As 2014 is slowly getting underway and winter is dragging on, I was in fact pretty happy not to have to go out in the evening this week as the city was grappling with the merciless "polar vortex". Today the temporary sub-zero temperatures, which were quickly followed by unusual warm weather and torrential rains, are already forgotten, and life is more or less back to normal, which essentially means some live music was scheduled to brighten up an otherwise still rather gloomy winter Sunday.

This afternoon's contemporary chamber music concert actually constituted an exciting leap of faith as I was not familiar with The North/South Chamber Orchestra, the Christ & St Stephen's Church, the various composers or the program's works. But the venue is in my neighborhood and the concert was free, so why not go check-out what was going on there in the company of my intrepid friend Ruth?

Every time I go to a contemporary music performance and do not know the œuvre of the composers on the program, I always brace myself, just in case. Today, however, this precaution turned out to be completely unnecessary as the music was filling up the understated, lovely little Episcopal church.

The North/South Chamber Orchestra may be refreshingly casual in its look, but there was nothing even remotely nonchalant in their playing, and nothing off-putting in what they were playing either. The first piece, Ho scritto una canzone by Italian composer Ada Gentile, could not have been more welcoming, all pretty melodies and soothing mood, with a heart-on-your-sleeve lyricism that would have made Tchaikovsky proud.

Then we moved on to the first-ever performance of Sinfonietta, inspired by two Greek Orthodox prayers for children, was written especially for the orchestra by Tudor Dominik Maican, a former child prodigy from the Washington, DC area, who was born in Germany to Romanian parents. Besides being bombarded with prizes and commissions for the past few years, the 24-year-old is currently busy overseeing the rehearsals of his first opera in Romania, so he was not able to be with us to introduce this new work of his. We easily got into it nonetheless. The first movement's glowing strings beautifully described the unadulterated bliss found in heaven, and the second movement conjured up a highly rhythmical, care-free dance that ended on a triumphant chord. Nothing ground-breaking, but an engaging, solid crowd-pleaser.

Russian composer Margarita Zelenaia, on the other hand, had made it to the concert and graciously introduced her Lamentation, which was having its US premiere this afternoon, as being inspired by the aria "Dido's Lament" from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and which she had dedicated to the memory of Russian writer Chingiz Aiitmatov. That's when we switched from the generally uplifting mood of the first part of the concert to an on-going storm of urgency, turbulences, anguish, calm and instability. The solo violin was vibrantly played by Claudia Schaer while the cellos and bass added some unsettling dark shadows to the whole piece.

The last number on the program, Expressions, was by no other that The North/South Chamber Orchestra's founder and conductor, Mexican composer, conductor and pianist Max Lifchitz. The four movements succeeded one another fast and lean, four drastically distinct parts of a harmonious whole. It all started with the Expressivo's melodic power, continued with the Scherzo's jagged aggressiveness, went on with the Dramatico con calore's convoluted passion, and ended with the Dolce's newly found serenity.

This concluded our short but delightful concert with a wide array of colorful sounds and heart-felt emotions, and helped us revive our spirits to finish off the weekend.

http://www.classicalmusicrocks.net/2014/01/the-northsouth-chamber-orchestra.html

First, a disclosure, I was a student of Max Lifchitz back when he was teaching at the free-form School of Contemporary Music in the Boston area, while he was getting his doctorate at Harvard, in 1972-3. I doubt he'd remember me but he was an impressive teacher with a lively musical mind. Since then he of course has gone on to have a distinguished career as composer, teacher, pianist and director of the North/South Consonance and their musical endeavors.

Today we have a recording of his music for percussion, Rhythmic Soundscape (North/South 1059). On it we are treated to six works for percussion in various configurations, written over the period 1977-2005. The McCormick Percussion Group under director Robert McCormick do a fine job with the music.

Maestro Lifchitz's 1977 Music for Percussion has some of the more abstract rhythmic structures of all the works. It is advanced in a manner that fits in with the percussion ensemble music of that era, yet bears the stamp and the logical flow of Max Lifchitz the composer.

At the other extreme is the recent Dos Danzas (2005), which as the title suggests takes on dance forms in a lively manner.

Between those two poles we have a variety of pieces that stay in the mind in memorable ways. One of the highlights is the concerto-like Rhythmic Soundscape No. 5, with Max at the piano in fluent dialogue with a percussion quintet. The demanding and rewarding work for solo percussionist, Inner Pulse (1983), is a piece of challenge, virtuosity and cohesiveness, performed impressively by Beran Harp.

In the end we get a personally idiomatic program of works that give us a side of Lifchitz that is rhythmically involved, complex or more direct as the composer sees fit, and extraordinarily well-wrought. The earlier works sometimes show the elated, pioneering elegance of some of the works of early-mid last century. The music goes beyond that in later works to establish a melodic percussion language more Lifchitzian. It's not just percussion music, it's Max Lifchitz percussion music and as such is an impressive addition to his recorded output. The performances are stirringly right. Bravo!

Recommended.

http://classicalmodernmusic.blogspot.com/2014/01/max-lifchitz-rhythmic-soundscape.html

What Film Forum is to cinema, North/South Consonance is to modern classical music—an independent nonprofit bringing New York City deserving works overlooked by big-ticket distributors and mainstream media. North/South continued its 32 season of free concerts Feb. 19 with “Midwinter Sounds,” music for chamber orchestra by composers from Cuba, Italy, and the U.S., at Christ & St. Stephen’s Church.

Mexican-born Max Lifchitz founded North/South in 1980 to guide the works of Latin American composers to worldwide attention. Today North/South has its own record label and a long list of international premiers. Still, Lifchitz feels he’s fighting two concurrent trends: mainstream producers playing it safe by promoting only well-proven (i.e., commercially successful) composers coupled with lassitude on the part of the listening public. “Radio is afraid to play this music, and you can’t get a listing in The New York Times unless you have a big publicity budget,” he says. “With so much prerecording, people take music for granted. They want to have it on in the background, but they don’t want it to get in the way. This music isn’t easy listening.”

Maybe not, but “Midwinter Sounds” sure wasn’t hard to listen to. Modern classical music is often stereotyped as disjointed and overly intellectual, but the largely programmatic music featured in this concert conjured up a wellspring of good old-fashioned images.

Ada Gentile’s opening mournful phrases in Torre del Guado resolved into a pastoral ode, recalling the tenuously happy end of Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow,” while the four movements of Victor Kioulaphides’ New York Moments are so evocative that one can’t help but listen to the city’s sounds in a different way. Even without knowing the title of the second movement—“Central Park (Reflections on the Lily Pond)”—you’re crossing the Bow Bridge with your lover on a spring day; the eerie melodies of “Tugboat on the Hudson (Evanescent in the Morning Fog)” have you rubbing your shoulders against the strange beauty of the river at dawn.

Harold Schiffman studied composition with both Roger Sessions and Ernst von Dohnanyi. In Serenata Concertante, he offers a largo based on Appalachian fiddle tunes, as relaxed and charming as a sly romance. Ironically, the most “modern” instrumentation came from the oldest composer on the program—87-year-old Cuban-born Aurelio de la Vega. Sounds of fragmentation summoned another poem to mind: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Images of a modern age.

cityarts.info/2012/02/22/musical-images-northsouth-consonance-finds-modernity/

NEW YORK The concert presented by Max Lifchitz and his North/South Chamber Orchestra at Merkin Concert Hall on Monday night was billed as a 30th-anniversary gala. Since founding North/South Consonance in 1980, Mr. Lifchitz, a Mexican-born composer, conductor and pianist, has devoted copious effort to promoting the work of composers underserved elsewhere, through a regular series of concerts in New York and on CDs released by North/South Recordings.

But if you were looking for regal finery, flowery speeches and Champagne, you were in the wrong place. This particular gala was celebrated with business as usual. Works by Hilary Tann, Stephen Yip, Edward Green and Mr. Lifchitz received their first performances. A solitary nod to the past, Elizabeth Bell's "Andromeda," was featured in a 2002 North/South Consonance event, the first presented at Merkin.

In all of his endeavors, Mr. Lifchitz has adhered to no particular stylistic dogma, and this concert was accordingly notable for its range. Ms. Tann, Welsh-born and now based in upstate New York, reworked a 1998 trio for oboe, viola and cello, "The Walls of Morlais Castle," into a handsome piece for string orchestra, with dusky melodies and bracing, rustic rhythms.

Mr. Yip's "Spirit Labyrinth II" also dealt in folk-inspired notions, calling on a solo harpist, Megan Levin, and the string players to slap, thump and slide through a ritualistic sequence of gestures, conjuring calm meditation, frenetic enlightenment and eventual repose.

Mr. Green's Concerto for Clarinet and Strings, revised from an earlier work for saxophone and string orchestra, opened with a relaxed lyricism reminiscent of Hollywood's take on Copland's music. Wistful motifs never overstayed their welcome; indeed, you often wished one or another idea would linger to bloom fully. A suave, peppy second part eventually bustled its way back to the first movement's relaxation. Arthur Campbell was the eloquent soloist, sounding especially strong in his rich lower register.

Ms. Bell, a student of Vittorio Giannini and Peter Mennin, showed the most refined grasp of structure and pacing in "Andromeda," less a piano concerto than a well-wrought celestial fantasy in which piano figured prominently. Helen Lin, the soloist, dexterously grappled with contrasting meters and hand-over-hand legerdemain, chorused by strings and two percussionists.

In Mr. Lifchitz's "Night Voices No. 16," for clarinet, strings and percussion, Mr. Campbell was more clearly the focus. Unaccompanied for long stretches, his clarinet sang, purred and growled ornate soliloquies during the fitful work, as strings murmured and a percussionist punctuated the flow.

Throughout the evening you could wish for greater clarity and bite from the ensemble. But the sound the North/South players made was seldom less than respectable; their cause is still more so.

www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/arts/music/10north.html