Review of "Rites of Summer" in the LA Times, May 16, 2008
"Bursts of ensemble activity are almost neurotically tight rhythmically, though tense and ragged in terms of clustered harmonies. Such fervent energy is juxtaposed with passages of airier lyricism, all with a distant kinship to 'The Rite of Spring.' "
Anthony Tommasini's Review of "The Rat Land" in the New York Times, May 15, 2007
"Complex and daringly modern...Mr. Beeferman’s music, with its skittish melodic lines and pungent atonal harmony, is gritty, fidgety and intriguing."
Review of "Rogue States" on ejazznews, March 2007
"...A multitude of curiously interesting motifs - all enamored with great depth and an irrefutable touch of class."
Review of "Rogue States" in All About Jazz, March 2007
"...Beeferman’s compositional instincts are readily in evidence: tracks like “Pirouette on a Pin” and “Terra Infirma” follow an informal “arch” form, bridging out in the middle sections to points—elsewhere, only to revisit the opening gambit; the insistently iterated monotones of 'Auuk' unravel organically in tight clusters; and 'Split Screen' and 'In a White Haze' illustrate the pianist’s ability to flesh out the implied architecture of his initial impulse, building ephemeral edifices from protean melodic cells."
Sounds of stirring music and shaking up the status quo -- The Boston Globe, December 31, 2006
...When BMOP composer-in-residence Lisa Bielawa sang Gordon Beeferman's haunting "West of Winter" in a vocal quartet with three prerecorded versions of herself, the effect was so entrancing...
Premiere of "West of Winter" by Anita Cheng Dance
Village Voice, January 2005
"A fascinating dialogue...conjures up storms."
Rara Avis in The Wire, August 2004
"First-rate improv from a couple of youngsters charting their own course with a depth of dynamic and feeling..."
Rara Avis in Jazz Review
"A cohesive unit... meshing superior technical ability with extreme imaginative powers."
Alessandra Tesi: "Film di Vetro" with Gordon Beeferman, piano
America Oggi, May 2, 2004
"Il bravissimi Gordon Beeferman..."
Archived Reviews
Albany Symphony Orchestra
Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, March 2003
Anita Cheng Dance, Merce Cunninghan Studio, January 2003
Anita Cheng Dance, Village Voice
Bodies of Water review in Cadence - June 2002
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Albany Symphony Orchestra
Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, March 2003
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=116014
All-American music not all red, white, blue
By JOSEPH DALTON, Special to the Times Union
First published: Sunday, March 16, 2003
TROY -- Forget about Europe. That seems to be the current message from
our President and for one night a year, that's just what the Albany Symphony
Orchestra does. As part of its monthlong Key American Music Festival,
the ASO's Friday concert featured all-American music for orchestra. The
evening commenced with the U.S. premiere of a work by the ASO's composer
in residence Michael Torke titled "An American Abroad" (so much
for ignoring Europe). It was a 20-minute romp through orchestral color
and winsome melodies. The structure seemed intuitive, as if the composer's
mind and imagination were wandering. Though syncopated brass wore out
their welcome after several entrances, the more pensive sections, like
the oboe solo and the long melodies for strings, were attractive and engaging.
Gordon Beeferman, only 27 [sic], was represented with a new work commissioned
by the ASO and BMI titled "Morbidity and Mortality Report."
Cast in four short movements, it wasn't nearly as gruesome as the title
or even the composer's description would lead one to expect. Beeferman
showed knowledge and skill of the orchestra, creating vivid scenes in
miniature. The doomed Russian submarine Kursk was evoked through breathy
wind playing, clicking and tapping, and a chilling single use of the cymbal.
A fight scene was unpredictable but ultimately brutal. Beeferman lent
some welcome grit to a program overly dominated by the sunny and accessible
side of American music.
The opening measures of Paul Creston's Violin Concerto No. 2 bore considerable
likeness to the Torke score with sputtering brass and fleet strings. Gregory
Fulkerson played with a clear, never cloying tone. Unfortunately, he was
regularly out of tune on the upper strings.
The masterpiece was Samuel Barber's Symphony No. 1. Written when the master
was only 26, the piece achieves what much of the evening's music seemed
to be reaching for. The ASO gave it their best playing of the night. Amid
a whirlwind of rehearsals and events, conductor David Allan Miller clearly
gave attention to where it would pay off most. The melancholy section
near the end was beautiful and deeply affecting.
MUSIC REVIEW
ALBANY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Where: Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Troy
Length: 2 hours 15 minutes
The crowd: About 900
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Anita Cheng Dance, Merce Cunninghan Studio,
January 2003
http://www.danceinsider.com/f2003/f0114_1.html
Mind Games
Quick (Anita) Cheng Artist
By Gus Solomons jr
Copyright 2003 Gus Solomons jr
NEW YORK -- The Cunningham Studio was an appropriate venue (January 9-11)
for Anita Cheng to present her evening of miniatures: nine dances ranging
from 2'30" to 11'00" long, with the timings listed alongside
titles in the program. Besides structuring her dances around duration,
Cheng's work shows Cunningham's influence in movement style and abstract
content as well.
Louise Burns, a Merce Cunningham Dance Company alumna, opened the concert with the first of four solos for women that led it off. She danced "Improvisation off Shore" to Gordon Beeferman's firm-handed but sensitive atonal piano improvisation played live. In typical Cunningham style, Burns's movement comprised long lunges, arched back attitudes, and sweeping leg extensions, spiked with jagged arm gestures. The simplicity, maturity, and joyfulness of her dancing set a promising tone for the evening. And when the time (2'30") had elapsed, the lights faded with unsettling abruptness, leaving us wanting more.
Janet Charleston, another long-time Cunningham-trained dancer, followed with the technically tough "Six of One" to original music by Carl Landa. Wearing an iridescent unitard by Yukie Moen, Charleston moved deftly through wide, deep plies, parallel jumps and balances. Next Erika Bloom in "Unravel" showed a softer, almost dramatic facet of Cheng's creative thinking. In a brown dress, Bloom stirred her limbs; her back rippled sensuously; her focus implied an unspecific but definite intention.
Charleston returned for "Prelude," a work-in-progress, set to original music by John J.A. Janonne, which Meg Harper, another Cunningham alum -- sidelined by an injury -- was meant to perform. The dancer skirted the perimeter of a circle of rippling, overlapping words (video by Ronaldo Keil) projected on the floor like a reflecting pool and on the wall behind, so we could see it. When she stepped into the circle, her footsteps made the words ripple and eddy as if she were treading on water, thanks to the live technology of Mark Boutros.
Several of the dances featured interactive video by Kiel and Boutros, which enhanced the dancing but did not distract from it -- no simple feat. Notably, in "Home of the Gesture" Victoria Lundell danced beside a real-time, life-size projection of herself. At times the live video would freeze briefly while the real Lundell kept moving. The adjacent matching images illustrated subtle differences between the live and electronic versions of the dancer. Video muted her dynamics and seemed to change slightly the expression on her face.
Cheng parcels out her choreographic devices sparingly, turning her short pieces into etudes rather than essays. In "Close-Up," a 1992 duet danced by Lundell and Cary McWilliam -- whose physiques match nearly identically -- lifting prevails. The women hoist each other into the air with agility and surprising upper-body strength.
Cheng's group dances show her playful intellect at work. In "Daybreak," against Kiel's video backdrop of animated vertical and horizontal lines, Bloom, Katie Sue Brack, Renee Smith, and Stacy Sumpman shift into puzzle-like tableaus, interweaving bodies and limbs. They do canonic merry-go-rounds, with all but one taking the same pose, then copying the fourth's deviation. They rotate three moving in unison, while the odd one out solos. The action stays lively for its eleven-minute duration -- not so long as to grow tiresome or predictable.
The premiere "City Shore" employed a similar formula and began
with the only jumping passage of the concert. Natsuki Arai, Bloom, Elyssa
Byrnes, and Marcie Munnerlyn danced ably, but the delight of "Daybreak"
eclipsed it. Christopher Mahlmann provided nicely varied illumination
of dancers and space without obscuring the video effects. Cheng's dances
-- more visually graphical than kinetic, technically precise, and relentlessly
abstract -- won't give you an emotional charge, but they're fun for the
mind: inventive little puzzles.
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http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0305/jowitt.php
By Deborah Jowitt
The Village Voice, Jan. 9 – Feb. 4, 2003
The notion of an alphabet of bodily gestures has fascinated dancemakers
in different ways. The lexicon of classical ballet is one such vocabulary.
In the 1920s Michio Ito used his "Ten Gestures" for arms alone
as the basis of his choreography. The "air mail dances" that
Remy Charlip began sending to dancers in the '70s consisted of lively
sketches of human figures offering ingredients for the recipient to structure
into a dance. In Merce Cunningham's experiments in the '50s, he sometimes
created a lexicon of possible movements and determined the order by chance
procedures. Setting limits can be comforting and liberating. No need to
consider every movement in the world before you start to make a dance.
I assume that all the nine succinct little works Anita Cheng showed at the Cunningham Studio in January were based on her 26-poses "alphabet." Most of the poses are Cunningham-esque—turned-out legs, straight spine—and the phrases she builds from them are spare, cool in tone, and, as you might expect, extremely legible in space. Instead of tumults of movement, you see metamorphosing body designs linked by steps. Her dances engage the mind, please the eye, but don't rock the emotions.
They vary interestingly, though, depending on what "letters"
Cheng focuses on. The movement for Louise Burns, former Cunningham dancer,
in Improvisation off Shore (accompanied by a piano improvisation by Gordon
Beeferman) looks muscular and curving, studded with pauses. Janet Charleston
in two other solos is more deliberate, delicately taut. Cheng's choreography
for Unravel, to original music by Arlene Sierra, emphasizes Erika Bloom's
lusher presence.
Cheng makes astute use of video. In the work-in-progress Prelude, videographer
Ronaldo Kiel creates circles and pools of words on the floor for Charleston
to run through. In Home of the Gesture, via Mark Boutros’s live
technology, Victoria Lundell dances beside a screen that imprisons her
simultaneously videotaped self—a self that freezes, then catches
up.
A duet, a trio, and a quartet show that Cheng is skilled at combining
and juxtaposing moves, at linking the dancers together. It's interesting
to watch, in her new City Shore, how Natsuki Arai, Bloom, Elyssa Byrnes,
and Marcie Munnerlyn escape from the closely bound group into solos and
are spooled back in, while behind them, projected on the wall, lines dance
to Beeferman's music.
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Bodies of Water review in Cadence - June 2002
Beginning with a morose and dense low-register exercise and maintaining a weighty ambiance throughout, the duo of percussionist Arnal and pianist Beeferman presents an energized ritual of free expression on Bodies of Water. Beeferman is fully liberated pianist who sprinkles in fragments of high-end improvisations but continually reverts to the lower keys to make his emphatic, jagged-edges statements. His left hand is a dominant force in portraying an overcast atmosphere laden with dark clouds. Arnal exerts his percussion influence in a comparable manner with emphasis on deeper tones and heavily punctuated responses often interjected at a slower tempo. The program appears to be a spontaneous creation by the artists who probe into unlit corners and explore an underworld of sound filled with foreboding warnings of doom.
Lightness of heart does not seem to exist in this music, yet its compelling
draw forces one deeper into their world. Their Mephistophelean command
over the performance is hypnotic. Arnal's ritualistic beating of the toms
and the mesmerizing effect of Beeferman's intensity have a gravitational
pull on the senses. The pace frequently approaches full-throttle speed,
only to be corralled by the prodding and methodical piano pronouncements
and the sobering drum beat. Arnal and Beeferman may view the world through
heavily tinted glasses, but they do produce music with muscle and appeal.
It won't improve an already depressed mood but it will enhance one's appreciation
for improvised creativity.
--Frank Rubolino
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http://www.geocities.com/soho/square/6100/drumduet.htm
Jeff Arnal and Gordon Beeferman's duet couldn't be much more different. Both are influenced by modernist composition as well as free improvisation, and their music is swirling where Singe and Studer's is irregular yet beat-driven. Although Arnal has worked in free jazz contexts before, there's very little of that music here, and comparisons with, say, Cecil Taylor/Han Bennink will yield more differences than similarities.
Beeferman is an interpreter of, among others, Messiean, and there's a clear influence in the ways in which he voices chords, with ambiguous, symmetrical-sounding intervals and, at times, multi-octave transpositions. He favours leaping, deep bass lines and clattering right-hand chords, at times making him technically rather like a ragtime player although nothing in his harmonic or rhythmic approach suggests such a source. While not a very structured player, he does have the knack working motivically which can be critical in making this kind of music hang together.
Arnal, meanwhile, works the kit like a free jazz player but never really swings; instead, his playing has the poise of a concerto soloist, an entirely suitable approach given the context. He drives the music with the cymbals, using the drums only for emphasis. With this simple (and well-tested) strategy, he seems able, when accompanying the pianist, to conjure a whole territory of sound behind him.
Indeed, it's the gimmick-free way in which this music is made which makes
it work. There's no piano interior, bowed cymbals or preparation to get
superficially excited about, just concentrated music-making which seems
to flow naturally from the enjoyment of playing together. The music has
a lightness which may very well be born of the simple pleasure of making
music, in contrast to the stodginess of some self-consciously avant piano
projects.
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