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| new commission |
| Sunday 23 June, 2013 |
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JH has been commissioned by dizi (bamboo flute) virtuoso Zhang Weiliang to compose a compact concerto for solo dizi, 20-member dizi ensemble and two cellos. The cellists will be Julian Lloyd-Webber and Jiaxin Cheng. The new work will be premiered at Royal Festival Hall in London in 2014.
dizi virtuoso Zhang Weiliang
| | The Rumpus interview with Missy Mazzoli |
| Thursday 6 June, 2013 |
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JH's interview with composer Missy Mazzoli has just been published in the online arts journal The Rumpus:
http://therumpus.net/2013/06/the-rumpus-interview-with-missy-mazzoli/
| | Milken Archive radio show with Leonard Nimoy |
| Thursday 6 June, 2013 |
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JH's "Self-Portrait with Gebirtig" for cello and orchestra is featured on the Milken Archive of Jewish music this month. The host of the show is Leonard Nimoy. The piece was recorded by cellist Gary Hoffman with the Berlin Radio Symphony, Christopher Wilkens, conductor:
http://milkenarchive.org/#/voices/index/3/Radio+Program
| | new youtube videos |
| Wednesday 10 April, 2013 |
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There are three new videos of JH's music posted on youtube.com:
"Piano Trio 3 on C#", first movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGL5rvN36Vs
"Piano Trio 3 on C#", second movement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGL5rvN36Vs
"Stone Soup", for narrator and violin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjkuwG78qaw
| | review of latest CD |
| Tuesday 9 April, 2013 |
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HOFFMAN Three Paths
1: Three Paths
2: 9 Pieces for Piano
3: ...the first time and the last
Parry Karp (vc); Christopher Karp (pn); Joel Hoffman (pn); DecaCelli
ALBANY 1372 (58:55)
Joel Hoffman (b. 1953) is a composer who has always cultivated a voice rich in expression and a more traditional romantic impulse. This doesn’t mean that his music is a knockoff of the 19th century, however. It’s always readily identifiable as from this time. In his notes, the composer says that earlier on he was creating works that were more “postmodern” in their historical references and juxtapositions. As the works here show, like many of his generation, his music has become more stylistically consistent and focused in its utterance.
The pieces come from 2009-2010, and so are quite “hot off the press.” They have three very different characters. Three Paths, for cello and piano, has the most formal continuity and traditional rhetoric of the program. It begins with an extremely plain and plaintive cello line, archaic like a folk song. Over time the work explores a wide range of expressive states, and grows in complexity and emotional variety. But there’s a strong sense of the opening material always being present in some form. The Nine Pieces is a suite of bagatelles that’s held together by a formal strategy of the odd-numbered pieces being about two minutes apiece, the evens about one. In addition, the former are more spacious and lyric, while the latter are more energetic. Though the effect is of two alternating tempos, in fact all the pieces have the same metronome marking, which is reinforced by the actual ticking of a metronome between each movement. This all sounds somewhat cerebral (and it is!), but I think it’s an ingenious way for Hoffman to derive a certain unity from very diverse materials, and also useful for pushing his imagination to creatively meet the demands of these constraints. As the piece progresses I also find its ideas ever more interesting, in particular starting from the Debussian “V. Moderato.” The composer shows himself to be a very accomplished pianist, and his mastery of very fast repeated notes and chords is particularly exciting.
The final work for me is the most engaging....the first time and the last is for cello decet (though in fact it’s an arrangement of a cello quartet written only a few months earlier). It comes from a transcription that Hoffman was making of a Lassus motet, which morphed into a piece in its own right. The piece consists mostly of lovely fragments, most of them cadential, separated by meaningful pauses. In a sense it is constantly ending, and yet it always revives, and harvests the seeds of its own renewal. Towards the end the source work is stated in its entirety.
The cello ensemble has a fabulous sound, and its richness of timbre, registral range, and contrapuntal capacity would seem to make it a natural for composers to embrace. I’m frankly surprised we don’t have more literature for it. Boulez’s Messagesquisse is a masterpiece (indeed I think—and it may unnerve some others—that it may be his best piece). Martin Bresnick’s B.’s Garlands is another grand essay in the medium. Hoffman’s takes a radically different approach from either of these, and as such it claims its own territory.
All three works receive what seem to be authoritative performances. The cello ensemble piece in some ways, with its overt “historicism” seems the most “postmodern,” and so could be dated, but its intense and sustained focus on a single source has at least as great a consistency as that of the other pieces. Overall this is strong music of an artist who has a profound, non-dogmatic musical engagement. If I can think of an older composer within whose lineage Hoffman might fit, John Harbison comes to mind (though of course, I may have just offended both composers by so saying!) Recommended as evidence of a composer who continues to pursue a personal vision without relying on tricks, superficial novelties, or shifting stylistic tastes.
Robert Carl
This article originally appeared in Issue 36:5 (May/June 2013) of Fanfare Magazine.
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