Either/Or Festival Concert #1 : Tenri Cultural Institute New York City, 6.04.2007 (BH)

 

Andrew Byrne: Cradle Song (2006, world premiere)
Richard Carrick: ∞+1 (2007, New York premiere)
Iannis Xenakis: Kottos (1977)
Nick Didkovsky: If Reptile’s Organs Thrive (2007, world premiere)
Beat Furrer: Lied (1993)
Christopher Fox: Generic Composition #3 (2001, New York premiere)
Michael Gordon: XY (1998)
Mauricio Rodriguez: Tenso (2006, world premiere)

 

Richard Carrick, piano
Jennifer Choi, violin
Andrea Schultz, violin
David Shively, percussion
Alex Waterman, cello

Shortly after I took my seat for this year’s Either/Or Festival, a chuckling friend next to me quipped, “I always try to make the latest crotales premiere.”  For those unfamiliar with these small, high-pitched cymbals struck with mallets, they are often used as piercing accents, balancing out lower-pitched percussion instruments.  But I doubt most composers would consider writing a piece for crotales alone, as Andrew Byrne has done in “Cradle Song,” a section of Radiation Studies.  David Shively’s flying hands produced a shrieking mass of metallic, reverberant overtones, able to cause one’s inner ear to vibrate unmercifully.  (I doubt any babies being rocked to sleep were actually getting any.)  Perhaps I was taking the title too literally, but the relentless pinging does create the feeling of being irradiated, and even odder, it’s a sensation I wouldn’t mind experiencing again.

Richard Carrick, the festival’s founder, continued with the tersely titled ∞+1 (i.e., Infinity Plus One) for solo piano.  Beginning with a sequence of savage chords, the work makes its way though a repeated note and ends with a section of descending chromatic passages.  Some of Carrick’s concerns seem to be the construction of chords and their overtones, reverberation – and silence.  I heard it almost as a contemporary piano etude, and the sensitive performance by the composer would surely be seen as definitive.

Carrick’s relative gentleness was all but blown out of the room by Alex Waterman’s ferocious reading of Kottos, in which Iannis Xenakis asks the cellist to pressure the instrument into a sputtering explosion of harmonics and noise.  The unearthly beauty produced seems borne of a planet in constant, seething turmoil, where snarling, lunging glissandi are the sounds of the day.  I can’t imagine a cellist applying more dedication than what Waterman unleashed, like Bartók on steroids.

The Title of the Day award went to Nick Didkovsky for If Reptile’s Organs Thrive, which also seems to resemble some of the subject lines in recent Internet spam.  The multitalented Didkovsky is a software developer at The Rockefeller University, and the principal author of Java Music Specification Language.  What emerges from his parameters are hundreds, perhaps thousands of compositional choices, from which he selects the most interesting ones to organize and notate.  Most of these appear to be short, including one just four or five seconds long; the six sections last scarcely five minutes.  With her superb focus, violinist Andrea Schultz often seems to be able to play anything, and she and Carrick made these agitated fragments teem with inner life.

In high contrast after the break, Beat Furrer’s Lied is an outright homage to Morton Feldman, albeit considerably shorter than the average Feldman journey.  With Carrick in deliberate, squarely planted chords on piano, Schultz offered quiet tremolos, and occasional pizzicato while Carrick plucked the strings from the inside.  The result had the hushed simplicity of listening to a lover, whose sleeping breaths fall on a pillow nearby.

Energy increased again with London-based Christopher Fox and Generic Composition #3, part of his installation Everything You Need to Know, premiered by the Ives Ensemble.  This portion is written “for a plucked instrument,” with Mr. Waterman first executing waves of tightly ordered pizzicato patterns, followed by strummed open strings and loud tapping sounds.  By this time, I suspect that the territory covered by Either/Or had snapped into focus.

But perhaps most astonishing was Mr. Shively in Michael Gordon’s relentlessly effective XY, a study in varying rhythms for each hand for five snare drums.  Playing it must be nonstop rhythmic torture.  (Afterward I asked Shively about carpal tunnel syndrome, and he confessed that he had to curtail practicing it for awhile.)  Each hand pelts out rhythms, one phrase swelling over the other, back and forth, Shively’s balletic foot motions only added to the joy of watching a great musician play an incredibly demanding piece.  At one point Shively sent a drumstick flying, causing a small gasp in the audience, but he miraculously produced a replacement and continued without a hitch.  Afterward, some of those in the audience were pondering what New York City percussionists might have the chops perform it, and only a handful of names came to mind.

The evening ended with Tenso, a study in fury by Mauricio Rodriguez for percussion, violin (here, the agile and alert Jennifer Choi) and cello, with all three players offering short bursts of violent noise, separated by silences.  Not coincidentally, Rodriguez studied with Xenakis.  Percussion seems to explode, with violin and cello in intense fortissimo scratches, creating not so much chords as clouds of harnessed electricity.

 

Bruce Hodges

 

For more information: http://www.eitherormusic.org/