Gloria Justen: Press

"...in Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat...concertmaster Gloria Justen projected a singular authority that can perhaps come only from a performer who is also a composer.
Momentarily, I'd forgotten that Justen, who has composed works for Relâche and others, has this other life - until realizing how much unanticipated musical information was coming out of her instrument. Even when L'histoire isn't presented as a theater piece...the violin is a musical protagonist requiring more than just intelligence and style. But like many composers who perform the works of others, Justen met the piece at eye level, acknowledging its passing influences from jazz and folk culture, but mostly giving the violin the kind of aura that comes with their being only the most tangible elements of a larger world. Rhythms don't just snap, but speak. A sustained note suggests a character having a contemplative dilemma. Ideas and melodies are reprised with an ever-new slant."

"But what especially struck me about the performance were some of its most subtle and vulnerable moments: the opening...and the violin solo that accompanies Joan’s “relapse” about two-thirds of the way through...the first violin [Gloria Justen] was playing it with an intensity that had her practically flying out of her chair." (Joan of Arc score by Richard Einhorn)

The next piece was totally unique. Violinist Gloria Justen, like Mozart in “The Magic Flute,” took childhood stories and wove them into a tale of her own about a lady fox’s adventures with a magic alchemical box that could transform the four elements- earth, air, fire, and water- into gold. Justen pre-recorded all the music- violin and electronic- and pantomimed the violin playing while telling the story. The music itself was quite interesting, but overshadowed by Ms. Justen’s dramatic and humorous buffo movements and feinting of violin playing. Overall, this was a delightful rendering of the archetypal theme of the “wild woman” with a Jungian twist.

A bonus in the Perelman Theater is that you can see the players and instruments at close range...the concertmaster literally bounced as her fingers tore through the final movement of the Schubert.

Create an entirely new opera, why don't you, and that's just what Gloria Justen does. She wrote, narrates and plays three tracks of electric violin, and acts the lead in Foxy Lady and the Magic Box, about a fox who finds a plan to build a magic box. The accompanying music is intricate, interesting and involving, as are the soprano and bass vocal parts. It's not quite The Magic Flute, but more akin to Peter and the Wolf, and would make a charming animated feature.

Experimental, eclectic... excellent
By David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Music Critic
If there's one gift that 20th-century modernists gave to 21st-century experimentalists, it's vanquishing that silly old question as to what constitutes music. Any sound or even an idea of sound (as with the conceptual artists) is indeed music - at least, theoretically.

Luckily, the actual form such concepts mostly take these days is more sensible than in the heyday of experimental music composer John Cage and video artist Nam June Paik. An almost photo-realistic approach to sound was intermittently a part of what violinist/composer Gloria Justen (who is also Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia's concertmaster) called a "sonic immersion performance" titled The Movie is in Your Mind.

Premiered Friday at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the 45-minute work presented through 24 huge and tiny speakers consisted of clear-cut "scenes," each roughly five minutes long. Justen sought to make these scenes as personal and vivid as possible by blindfolding her audience. The blindfolds also addressed the ages-old problem of electronic music - the performance has almost no physical aspect - this time Justen coolly mixed the piece at her laptop.

It's her biggest work of this kind yet, and though she plays a bit safely here, she does so with the clarity of someone who wants, above all, to be understood.

Given the wide-open possibilities of electronic music, you have to be grateful for a piece that knows what it doesn't want to do, each section taking on a well-defined compositional problem and placed in a sequence that has each section reacting to the last, as some sort of polar-opposite or reverse-negative of what came before. One consisted of geologic layers of rhythm, followed by a homogenous sound mass whose forward progression came from throbbing highlights on the edges of the timbre. A collage of "found" sound (often in the form of everyday nature and city sounds) was heard next to a block of synthetic sound.

Like French composer Claude Debussy, Justen knows to give her listeners something resembling a traditional tune close to the end. But because this is Justen and not Debussy, the tune came in the form of a jazz riff. Any number of instances suggested that the rhythm of the natural world was just a small step away from the hypnotic repetition of Philip Glass-style minimalism. So many different impressions could be taken from the piece that, whatever is suggested by the movie allusions in the title, the music's descriptiveness is anything but prosaic. The Movie is in Your Mind is such a complete and powerful musical entity - a quality not often found in fringe festivals - that you look forward to the even more rich creative zones that Justen is likely to explore next year at this time.

Chamber Orchestra at the Perelman "Harp soloist Elizabeth Hainen projected all sorts of subtle coloring...she projected a sense of ensemble particularly amid interplay with concertmaster Gloria Justen."

Chamber Orchestra plays the Moderns
"The program’s second half was devoted to much more familiar works by two of the 20th Century’s three great Bs, Bela Bartok and Alban Berg... Again, the performers were excellent, and the way concertmaster Gloria Justen’s brief but exquisite solo in the third movement faded into the body of the other strings was breathtaking. The ensemble was particularly effective in the second movement, whose sharp accents and pizzicati remind us that Bartok’s Fourth Quartet was being composed at the same time."

The entire piece was a continuous workout that kept the soloist operating close to the limits of her craft. The sight of a first-class woman violinist playing a first-class premiere by a woman composer was, of course, the best memorial James Freeman could have arranged for his mother.

Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia concert: "Conductor Brossé drew an unusually solid performance [of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, arr. by Schoenberg], with minor miracles of phrasing and beautifully judged vibrato, from cellist James J. Cooper and, especially, concertmaster Gloria Justen."

Performance of Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" by the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia: "...concertmaster Gloria Justen’s violin, alternately ethereal and impassioned, encapsulated an entire Mahler string section in a single singing tone..."