Dave Liebman at Birdland Jazz Club

Last night, a colleague and I went to the Birdland Jazz Club on West 44th Street, not far from Broadway. This is a really nice space with a good bar, good if not great food, and an OK wine list. The band was Dave Liebman (saxophones), Randy Brecker (trumpet), Marc Copland (piano), Drew Gress (bass), and Billy Hart (drums). They opened with the howard Dietz song "You and the Night and the Music", then a Brecker original, "Moontide", then a Leibman original, "All About Bird". Dave Liebman is a very accomplished player, though I found his solos a bit "notey", as my old music teacher used to say. But he has enormous fluidity and a fiery attack that wins you over in the end. There were moments of magical interplay between him and Brecker, especially on "All About Bird", which seemed to quote every Charlie Parker tune you have ever heard.

But the greatest fascination for me was watching and listening to Marc Copland, a very accomplished pianist with a distinctive style that I found quite captivating. His solos seemed to combine knottiness with lyricism in a quite effortless way, playing lushly extended chords with a sparsity and precision that was more like Ravel or Messiaen than Evans or Jarrett. The contrapunctual playing on "All About Bird" sounded like a bebop Bach invention, and his altered chord voicings on the fabulous version of "Sidewinder" that closed the set gave the song a new lease of life for me. The rest of the rhythm section certainly carried their water, with Drew Gress on bass never flagging and providing some very nice chromatic work on "Moontide", while Billy Hart's percussion was always innovative, and he played some nicely judged solos.

SPCO at Carnegie Hall

Last night, I attended the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's sell-out concert in the Zankel Hall at Carnegie. The program began with Dvorak's Serenade in D Minor for Winds with cello and bass, which proved to be a robust and muscular opening to the evening. Then came Dawn Upshaw's performance of 5 short but exquisite vocal pieces, by Stravinsky (Two Poems of Konstantin Bal'mont) and Ravel (Three Japanese Lyrics). Then more Ravel songs, in the form of "Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé", with ensemble accompaniments that managed to be both lush and spare. This was my favorite moment of the concert, and I thought that Dawn Upshaw's voice really sounded much warmer and more live than a previous performance of this work I had heard at the Ordway. This may have had something to do with the extremely clear and focused sound of the Zankel Hall, which is a relatively recent space, opened in 2003. Then followed the ambitiously arranged (by Osvaldo Golijov) Schubert song cycle "She Was Here", which required very skillful handling on the part of the full orchestra and the conductor, Dougie Boyd, who did a masterly job. The concert ended with the orchestra playing Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, in which musical play combines with pastiche to create much animation and many amusing moments.

The First Emperor at the Met

Last night I went to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to see "The First Emperor", a two-act opera conducted by the composer, Tan Dun. Placido Domingo sang the role of the Emperor Qin, and Sarah Coburn the role of his daughter, the Princess Yueyang. This is the Emperor who set about unifying the country (by conquest) and building the Great Wall; he also left behind an army of terra-cotta soldiers to guard his tomb.

The opening of traditional chants by Wu-Hsing Kuo in the role of the Yin-Yang Master (the court geomancer) was perhaps the most striking musical moment, coupled as it was with dance, some of which involved wearing a mask on the back of his head while moving as if he were facing the audience. The sets were splendid, especially the third scene, where snow appears to fall as the Princess seduces her father's captive nemesis, the musician Gao Jianli.

The cast played to a full audience, and the building is magnificent, of course. However, the house was hot and stuffy and the seating was a bit cramped, so it was also pleasureable to leave the theater for the New York night and stroll past Central Park back to my hotel, the Parker Meridian. Here I was too cold, since they had turned off the heating for the summer, so the only place I was truly comfortable during this trip was out in the street.