From the front page of the Arts section of the New York Times:

What a Curious Feeling! Making a Big Idea Small

By Steve Smith
Published September 3, 2007

WOODSTOCK, N.Y., Sept. 1 — Chamber music could be described as the art of expressing big ideas in small packages. Occasionally it also denotes the necessity of conveying big pieces with limited means. That definition came to mind on Saturday night at Maverick Concerts, a long-running summer series housed in a handsome, rough-hewn wooden shed here, set among stately trees.

Maverick, like many rural chamber-music festivals, presents a steady stream of soloists, string quartets and chamber ensembles; recurring themes and repeated composers provide a sense of unity to its offerings. But the season’s penultimate program brought an ambitious undertaking: David Del Tredici’s “Final Alice,” described by the composer as a “grand concerto for voice and orchestra” and an “opera written in concert form.” Saturday’s presentation was a new chamber version by Alexander Platt, a conductor and the Music Director of Maverick Concerts.

Mr. Platt is an experienced hand at this kind of reduction. In 1993 he reconstructed a version of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 scored for soprano and 12 players, created in 1920 by Erwin Stein for Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna. Mr. Platt’s arrangement has been widely performed and recorded.

“Mahlerian” is an apt description of the forces for which Mr. Del Tredici originally wrote “Final Alice,” commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; it had its premiere in 1976. The piece, a setting of passages from the last two chapters of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” lasting more than an hour, required a gargantuan orchestra, an amplified soprano and a “folk group” of two saxophones, accordion, mandolin and banjo.

For his orchestra Mr. Platt made do with a string quartet and double bass, one apiece on flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet and French horn, pairs of percussionists and pianists, and a harmonium part played on synthesizer. The saxophonist Rob Scheps did the work of two in the folk group, which also featured impressive contributions from the accordionist William Schimmel. Patrice Michaels provided a vivid account of the high-flying vocal part, secure in pitch and with careful delineation of multiple characters.

What emerged was a vision of “Final Alice” that underscored aspects overshadowed by the voluptuousness of the original work: in particular, its jarring juxtapositions of disparate melodies, harmonies and rhythms. Where Mr. Del Tredici’s work once heralded a bold return to tonality via melodies so luscious they verged on parody, Mr. Platt’s offered a muscular, sometimes discordant edginess, in tune with contemporary parsings of Carroll’s tales for the forbidden passions they contained!

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And More praise from our neighbor in Albany

A  landmark piece, well played

  By  JAMES HENNERTY, Special to the Times Union
First published: Monday,  September 3, 2007

Maverick Concerts in Woodstock scored quite a coup on Saturday with a special program of works by American  composer David del Tredici.

In the early 1970s, the National Endowment for the Arts commissioned del Tredici to write a work for the  American bicentennial. "Final Alice" was the result. It is best described as a dramatic cantata using texts from Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in  Wonderland." The composer had already used the same work as inspiration for earlier pieces, and this was intended as a grand finale.

Not exactly a salute to the red, white and blue—but “Final Alice” became important for purely musical reasons.

For one thing, it used a familiar story together with a huge orchestra of 120 or so players. It was a serious work which used traditional tonality, not the 12-tone system invented by Schoenberg and accepted at that time as the only musical language fit for important  statements in classical music. It had its premiere in Chicago in 1976 and was  performed all over the nation. A recording boosted its popularity even further.

Now, 12-tone music is on the outs, and traditional tonality is more or less the accepted norm. Del Tredici can take a lot of the credit for that change.

The problem is that the work is rarely performed. Only the largest orchestras can afford the players and provide the space to re-create  the original. Maverick's music director, Alexander Platt, has arranged "Final Alice" for chamber music proportions, with the composer's blessing. Would such a pared-down version put the important points of the piece across?

At least in this performance, the answer was a resounding yes. Maverick Concerts uses a small wooden hall built early in the 20th century. In that resonant setting, the five strings, several brass instruments and various percussion pieces easily recalled the sounds of the work when this reviewer heard it in Boston's Symphony Hall several months after its premiere.

Soprano soloist Patrice Michaels has a sizable voice, but even so she was occasionally drowned out by the chamber ensemble. That didn't detract much from her expert recitation of the text and singing. The writing calls for her to sing at ever higher pitch, which never fazed her. Best of all was her depiction of Alice herself.

The Maverick Chamber Players, a small folk group (playing  saxophones, accordion, mandolin and so on), and pianist Stephen Hargreaves were all led by Platt. Hargreaves opened the concert with a small piano piece by del Tredici on the same subject. The smaller "Final Alice" packed just as much punch as the original, as the reactions of the audience and the composer, who was on hand for the event, showed.

James Hennerty is a freelance writer from Albany and a regular contributor to the Times Union.

Music  review: Maverick Concerts, When: Saturday, Sept. 1, Where: Woodstock , New York, The crowd: About 250 enthusiastic listeners of various ages!

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From the May 30 issue of
Time Out New York
 issue 608

In the 2007 CONCERTS issue of Time Out, New York, music editor
and critic Steve Smith wrote: “Plan ahead of the season’s choicest
Classical-music outings.”

Steve went on to list only four venues outside of New York City
that were “Notable Outings.”

Foremost among these destinations was our own Maverick Concert series and he
generously devoted a quarter of a page to our wonderful season and made special note of Alexander Platt’s world-premiere re-orchestration of David Del Tredici’s evening length work for soprano and Chamber Orchestra, FINAL ALICE on September 1.

For your further information, Steve Smith only listed three
other festivals of note out of the City: Bard, Glimmerglass Opera, and the Caramoor International Music Festival. We know that those other venues are in very good company!

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Woodstock Times

July 26, 2007 
MUSIC / Leslie Gerber

"The program opened with Beethoven's String Quartet in G, Op. 18, No. 2, the most conservative and Haydnesque of Beethoven's quartets. But this was no routine performance; the Pacifica's playing was alert, well-balanced and very expressive, every passage played with real attention to detail and content. The Pacificas really let loose in Gyorgy Ligeti's String Quartet No. 1, "Metamorphoses Nocturnes." This very post-Bartokian music is full of amazing invention, and although it's still recognizable as folk-influenced music, Ligeti uses many sonic tricks and devices which point the way towards his unique music of the 1960s and later. The amazingly well-coordinated and detailed performance was full of drama and imagination, and it will stay in my memory for a long time. ... Theirs was as expressive and moving a performance of the music as I've heard from contemporary performers, and it was a real treat. I don't mind admitting the conclusion left me with a tear or two."

Russell Platt writes about FINAL ALICE:

My first encounter with the music of David Del Tredici was in 1984, when I heard the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s recording of “Final Alice,” masterfully crafted by Georg Solti and sung by Barbara Hendricks. I was so entranced by the piece that I insisted on playing the record as my contribution to a contemporary-music assignment in my music theory class at Oberlin Conservatory, even though this 1976 work was over the last-five-years deadline. David’s command of the late-Romantic harmonic and orchestrational apparatus was so complete that I was amazed that the work could seem so amazingly fresh and new.

David has gone on to become one of our classical masters, but even then he showed signs of being the cultural provocateur he is today. To celebrate the American bicentennial, in commemoration of a Revolution we like to think of as being simple and innocent and inevitable, he chose not an American subject but went back to the culture of the mother country: a fragment of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, a work whose “innocence” is at once childlike and dangerously complex. The florid solo part calls for a lyric soprano trained in the European coloratura tradition, but the orchestra is filled out by a very American “folk group” boasting a banjo and two saxophones.

Since Alexander [Platt], in his first season at the Maverick, conducted his acclaimed version of Erwin Stein’s chamber-orchestra arrangement of Mahler's Fourth Symphony, he and I, in one of our long talks on programming, wondered if there was a contemporary American work which might benefit from such treatment, and the subject of Final Alice always seemed to conclude our rambling conversations. As in Mahler's music, “Final Alice” creates a whole expressive world, beautiful, radiant, raucous and aggressive by turns; it makes a striking use of the female voice; and its deep stylistic immersion in the Mahler-Strauss-Tchaikovsky musical world of 100 years ago meant its sounds could be remolded to fit the capabilities of Stein’s Viennese chamber-band. Encountering David at a Bard Summerscape concert last summer, we proposed the idea, and he graciously agreed to let the project proceed.

 

Alexander Platt writes about FINAL ALICE:

Suffice it to say that this Final Alice project came about through sheer chance.

Last summer, my brother Russell and I crossed the river to see the opening night of the Bard Festival’s production of Schumann’s neglected opera Genoveva, and afterward we bumped into one of Russell’s old composing mentors, David Del Tredici, with whom we expressed our great admiration for another neglected masterpiece, David’s monodrama Final Alice from 1976.

On the way back, with our minds still very much on German music, Russell said to me, “You know, your arrangement of the Mahler Fourth Symphony was such a success, and Final Alice is so completely forgotten. You should make a similar chamber orchestra version of it!” We immediately realized that it was an amazing idea.

Then, a few weeks later, when I and our Maverick board of directors began searching for a grant proposal for the New York State Music Fund, Final Alice became the perfect project for a very simple reason: it was utterly unique. An hour-long monodrama that brings to life the “trial scene” from Alice in Wonderland, Final Alice is indeed a unique work in American music, one the neglect of which is completely unacceptable.

Written in 1976 for Sir George Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Decca recording that soon followed, with Barbara Hendricks beautifully negotiating the treacherous soprano part, became a cult classic, and then the piece basically disappeared, in part perhaps because of the enormous orchestral forces required. That’s sad, because with Final Alice, Del Tredici basically made lush, neo-romantic, tonal music acceptable in America again, after decades of slavery to academic atonalism that we were all supposed to “grow into” but never really did.

It's that important a piece, and hopefully this new chamber version, made in the spirit of the chamber ensemble arrangements that Schoenberg, Berg and Webern made for the “Society for Private Musical Performances” in Vienna in the 1920s, will help bring the work into the mainstream repertoire, where it surely belongs.