Our favorite downtown dwelling, (Le) Poisson Rouge, has heard a lot this month. With Jonny Greenwood leading the indie classical scene, March 7 saw Ensemble (L)PR's U.S. debut of Bryce Dessner's Lacrhimae and Greenwood's There Will Be Blood suite.
Now, March 20 will offer the Australian Chamber Orchestra Underground (ACOU) in a fantastic display of new sounds and swift arrangements ranging from Nirvana to Stravinsky, Nine Inch Nails to Paganini.
Classicalite was able to get up with ACOU's frontwoman, violinist and singer Satu Vänskä, for a few words on the upcoming concert.
Classicalite: A lot of new wave classical artists are passing through the chic underground at (Le) Poisson Rouge. With homage to the chamber notion here, how do you feel ACOU's performance will sound in a more intimate setting?
Satu Vänskä: It's a different venue because it's more intimate. People can have their drink and listen to music. It's immediately a different atmosphere to the listener. And the performer. And the performance. Also, I like the way that it has a lot of different genres happening there in one night, at once.
C: The music you've chosen--Stravinsky juxtaposed with Paganini, Jonny Greenwood with J.S. Bach--then you have Nirvana buried at the end of the mix. How do you hear all come together?
SV: It's very much contextualizing the program--what sort of flows from one piece to another. We don't really want to make it a highly intellectual concert. Instead, it's more emotional, it's what you would like to hear and what you'd like to be surprised with. We begin with the great Australian composer Anthony Pateras--you can say he's quite punk in his own writing--and then we go straight into Richard Tognetti's little piece. The whole idea of the program is that it's not necessarily about finding a connection between the popular music and the classical pieces. But having said that, there's definitely a bit of an emotional connection with the nine-piece grunge of Nirvana and, say, Shostakovich.
C: OK, what would you say brings Nirvana and Shostakovich together--in a modern sense?
SV: There's a similar kind of modern psychic terror that I'm sure both Kurt Cobain and Shostakovich were experiencing in their lives in one way or another. And it's interesting that when we started arranging [the performance], it is, in fact, the melodic chords and form, which actually have a similar kind of tragic terror. That is an interesting thing at their core, without a doubt. And we put Bach in the middle as a centerpiece. If you put Bach next to Nirvana, you're not sure which one sounds more shocking. And yet, it isn't about shocking people, it's about putting pieces of music into context, to hear it with different ears.
C: Having Bach as a centerpiece is interesting. Programming is an art form, in and of itself. Can you learn this, the science of putting music together for performance? Or is it more of a innate thing?
Here in Australia, the audiences in general are quite vibrant in seeing music. People are expecting that, pretty much. For ACO, it's very unusual for us to give a straight, conventional concert. We always like to meet different genres--genres being somewhat classical--that we do a program with Bach juxtaposed with some contemporary music. It brings a fresh take to it. It brings the music alive in the 21st century. We think it's very important to bring it to people. We're in this amazing position where we've got so much music from the 1600s, we have music that spans over 400 years. And we can draw from that and find a repertoire and make it our own little treasure.
C: Jonny Greenwood has been popping up everywhere. I mean, it seems everyone is doing Greenwood these days. He's even performing at the Big Ears Festival this year alongside Steve Reich, a cited influence. ACO Underground has worked with him before, yes?
SV: It's very nice people are doing him because, and here's the thing, he wrote a piece for Australian Chamber Orchestra in 2012, doing workshops with us and even having a piece premiering this year in London. And as one of those classical people--one of the very brave people whose come from a rock world and can write so-called classical music--he has a knack for writing music that belongs to a classical genre. And that's a very important thing to be celebrated. It's what fascinates us in these programs, which is to not just give boundaries within the program for the music we play, but to give boundaries within the musicians. We have, quote, rock musicians, and we also have us classical musicians turning into a slightly new endeavor, which is exploring classical in a new way. It's good to keep it healthy. We're all skipping boundaries. It gives the music a personality, taking us away from our comfort zones.
C: Finally, for the scant, but inevitable older crowd that shows up, any words regarding Nirvana down at (L)PR?
SV: Recently, I had an 80-year-old woman come up to me and say, "I love grunge!" It's not just the younger people; the older people are getting into it, too. And I think that's very nice, that regardless of your age you can discover new music at a new time.
