Thursday night's Southern Exposure concert at USC was a ton of fun. I think the Bartok went pretty well, Lynn and I had a great time and we are grateful to our colleagues Scott Herring and Greg Apple for their percussionistic contribution to the whole. Marina Lomazov and Joe Rackers gave a hair-raising version of Rite of Spring for two pianos...all of us now are plotting a performance of "Les Noces" sometime down the road.

Lots on the music blogosphere these days about the problems facing classical music and proposed solutions for same...but anybody reading this from New York should know that "mini-music-scenes" are alive and kicking in many places overlooked by the "MSMM"...the "Mainstream Music Media."

John Fitz Rogers has done an extraordinary job with the SE series here in Columbia...it is now routine for the hall to be packed to its very capacity, with quite a number of people having to be turned away at the door. If Columbia had an acceptable 400-500-seat hall, I'm sure that the series could come close to filling such a space. And that's for new music, too. (Granted, this last concert focused more on 20th-century classics, but performances of those are quite rare around here too. Moreover, John Adams and Mary Ellen Childs had works on the program, and I heard from person after person backstage that the Childs work--"Kilter" for two pianos, from 1992--was their favorite work on the program.)

Now I'm off tomorrow morning for Milwaukee, where Kevin Stalheim and his group Present Music have been drawing audiences of 300-700, almost every time out, for years now. Next season is their 25th. And I do hear "good news" stories coming from many unlikely places. It's all about grass-roots, people. Building from the ground floor up. On his blog this weekend, Alex Ross quotes Esa-Pekka Salonen as saying, "The most important function of a conductor is that of developing local musical life." I couldn't agree more...how few really do that, though? Moreover, I'd also add university music faculty member to that list. Too often musicians, having attained a secure position in academia, allow their world (and their students') to be circumscribed by the walls of their particular School of Music building, not seeking to be a musical citizen of their community, not seeking to connect their art to the community, not seeking to do the badly needed work to build audiences in the community at large. There are exceptions, and Rogers in our city is a shining example. Well, this is a topic I could "pontificate" (my wife's word for what I'm prone to do) on ad nauseum, but we'll leave it here for now. Happy Easter and more from Milwaukee later this week.

This Thursday night April 13, at 7:30 PM, the final concert of the Southern Exposure series will take place at the USC School of Music's Recital Hall. It's a concert centered around duo-piano works with two of the most significant works of the last century on the program: Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the latter in the version for piano duo. My wife Lynn Kompass and yours truly will be playing the Bartok, in collaboration with USC percussion prof Scott Herring and Greg Apple; the Stravinsky will be performed by USC piano faculty members Marina Lomazov and Joseph Rackers.

Jeffrey Day wrote a nice piece about the upcoming concert in last Sunday's State newspaper if you'd like to know more; he also added a sidebar with good info about the music itself here.

There are also two other short and intriguing works on the concert by composers who are very much alive: Mary Ellen Childs, a composer who has been based for some time now in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, wrote a lovely post-minimalist work for two pianos entitled "Kilter," which Lynn and I are playing; and I'm opening the program with "American Berserk," a piece that John Adams wrote in 2001 for Garrick Ohlsson. The title is apt; it's six minutes of Nancarrow-esque "bonkers"-ness, and fun as hell to play.

The concert is free admission; composer John Fitz Rogers has curated another remarkable season of the series, and one of the hallmarks of the series is that the recital hall fills up early and to capacity...so if you want to go, my suggestion is to get there at least 30-40 minutes early for a good seat. Hope to see you there, should be a fun evening.

Opera at USC turns to the musical theater format this weekend for their spring production, with three performances of Stephen Sondheim’s 1973 musical, “A Little Night Music.” A number of Sondheim’s works push the envelope of the music theater tradition, being more ambitious musically and conceptually than other such works of the same period.  So it’s natural for Sondheim to be the choice for the opera department’s first foray into musical comedy territory in some time.

It’s not unusual for opera companies to do Sondheim: “A Little Night Music" itself was produced at New York City Opera in 1990 and that production was revived in 2003. Based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1956 film, “Smiles of a Summer Night,” the original production of “A Little Night Music” won 5 Tony awards in 1973. (Plot synopsis can be found here.) Sondheim strove for a musico/structural unity in this work by use of a bold gambit: all the music in the show is in some variation of triple meter, that is to say, music with three beats to each bar. As he put it in a 1982 interview, his intent was "to put everything in some form of triple time so that the whole score would feel vaguely like a long waltz with scherzi in between so that no song would seem to have come from another texture.” (This tidbit and other illuminating observations on the show come from a thorough musical/dramatic analysis by Larry A. Brown.) The most well-known song from “ALNM” is, of course, “Send in the Clowns.”

USC’s production draws not only on the gifts and hard work of the students involved, but two leading ladies and shining stars of our musical scene in Columbia...Helene Tintes-Schuermann of the USC vocal faculty, and Ann Benson from the Columbia College voice faculty. At a time when the Metropolitan Opera’s new boss, Peter Gelb, is trying to bridge the gap between opera and what he terms serious musical theater by commissioning the likes of Adam Guettel, Jake Heggie, and Michael John LaChiusa, it seems an appropriate moment to reflect on the body of work Sondheim has created; if, where, and how his work fits into the picture of late 20th-century American opera, broadly defined.

“A Little Night Music” will be presented Friday April 7 and Saturday April 8 at 7:30 PM, and Sunday the 9th at 3 PM. Shows are at Keenan Theatre at Keenan High School on Pinebelt Road. You can find directions to the theatre and more ticket information on the website of the USC Opera Department.

The epidemic seems to have taken a new turn, adapted new methods, and has reached the heart of our fair city.