SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT REVIEW
 

CONTACT! Sierra, Liang, Dalbavie and Kampela: Musicians from the New York Philharmonic, conductor Magnus Lindberg, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 19.12.2009 (GG)

Arlene Sierra: Game of Attrition
Lei Liang: Verge
Marc-André Dalbavie: Melodia
Arthur Kampela: MACUNAÍMA


It’s hard to gauge what’s more astonishing, that New York City’s orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, now has a new music series, or that the orchestra has not had a new music series for a generation. That pivot points tells the fundamental story of the doldrums of the past twenty years and the entirely and refreshingly new set of ideas and expectations that music director Alan Gilbert has brought along, in just his first half-season of work. Under Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel, the Philharmonic may have produced excellent performances, but the content of those performances was almost invariably deeply familiar and completely expected. Now, under the hands of composer in residence Magnus Lindberg (also a new feature), the orchestra is performing music that is essentially entirely unknown to the audience. This is a good thing in general and also a necessary thing for a relevant institution representing a living art form.

While an impressive late fall blizzard fell outside, the Philharmonic mounted the second performance of the first, of two, ‘CONTACT!’ concerts this season, this one in the Metropolitan Museum’s excellent concert hall. Prior to each piece Lindberg and the composer of the work joined in brief discussions on stage, perched on the edge of stools, offering insight into how the makers felt their pieces worked and what their underlying ideas and structures were. These were variably illuminating; Lindberg is not a natural in this type of thing and the question were just a bit off the mark from being insightful, still it’s an effective and appropriate way for audiences presented with brand new works to get a handle on what to listen for, and also to put them on the side of the composer, rooting for the success of the work. And the works were all consistently successful, with some spectacular moments and features.

Sierra’s piece is described by its title; an exercise in conflict and entropy that she described as using “organic, small musical cells, transitions,” written for chamber orchestra. It has a bright opening, followed quickly by a slow, repeated note. From that point, it becomes a work where instruments chatter with and against each other, one group developing a coherent phrase before falling back against the pressures of another. There are burst of chords, sharp rhythmic attacks and ostinati layed over a subtle, consistent medium tempo pulse. A lyrical cello melody rises from the ensemble and leads to a contrasting contemplative section, before it too falls apart against the interjections of other instruments. As the texture slowly thins out, there are bursts of individual voices fighting against the tide – harp, piano, flutter-tongued flute, long tones in the brass – before the piece comes to a brief, final sense of coherence and then ends with a single attack. It’s a contemporary answer to Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, and consistently interesting. The ear is involved and the organic developments and transitions move the music along to points that are both unexpected and natural., and as music propagates itself through time, the concept of attrition is a natural. If anything, a work like this could be pushed to an extreme edge – in its own context, the fairly tight control on tonality and rhythm seemed almost staid.

There was a constructive contrast to this in Dalbavie’s piece. The composer and Lindberg discussed his background in spectral music, as well as the French national emphasis on the study of harmony, but Melodia only starts from those points, becoming something unexpected. If Sierra is taking her material apart, Dalbavie is using fragments of timbre and harmony to put his together; where her piece is organized horizontally, his stacks things vertically and places them along the time line. At the foundation is the Plainchant Offertory from the Requiem Mass, and from it the composer alternates spectral explorations of timbre with delicate, lovely chords and short phrases that have a touch of both Shaker Loops and cartoon music; they have sonic resonance and a quirky charm. The structure is well judged and seems based in intuitive good taste; the music reaches the penultimate point of highest interest in it’s explorations, then responds with Plainchant until, again, the point where it is just at the verge of complete satisfaction, then back again. There is a gorgeous, expressive, sighing coda before this fine balance of old and new ends on the ancient melody’s perfect cadence.

The most impressive and memorable works on the program were those from Kampela and Liang. Kampela gave a rambling, effervescent explanation for the meaning of MACUNAÍMA, a figure out of Brazilian Modernism who is some sort of combination of empty-shell and chameleon, able to incorporate contexts and experiences and becoming a person who fits into every situation without actually being a fully independent, autonomous being. The concept doesn’t seem to translate fully, and the music itself is hard to hear as expressing this idea, but it is fine nonetheless. It began mysteriously, with an unnatural rumbling from the back of the hall. What at first sounded like musique concrete turned out to be a group of percussionists, slowly advancing toward the stage and playing spring drums of various sizes, their combination of metal resonators, skin membranes and long, rubber tails creating an acoustic sound with fascinating touches of plate reverb and ring modulation. They were joined by the musicians on stage in choppy, atmospheric music that seemed to feature some degree of improvisation. As form and shape slowly cohered, a smaller ensemble rose from their chairs and went behind a curtain, and then all of a sudden rickety town band broke out, with off-center rhythms and misaligned ensemble, full of vibrant, utterly wonderful music for violin, tuba, trumpet, piccolo and clarinet, with plenty of talking, shouting and laughing thrown in. The band played, the ensemble responded without the band taking notice, and it kept going in a genial, one-sided confrontation, the sound and idea very much like both the multiple musics of Charles Ives and his conceptual argument in The Unanswered Question. Eventually these musicians returned to their seats and the piece reversed its arc, with the percussionists picking up their drums again and slowly making their way to the back of the hall, and silence. While the character at the center of this idea was perhaps invisible, and the piece a little slow to develop, the theater of it was simple, effective and impressive, and the music was a real pleasure. Kampela has produced a balance between concept, experimentation and the human joys of musical expression.

Liang’s Verge was simply stunning. The work is for eighteen strings, and he has them assembled in small groups made up of roughly a string quartet with added bass. In this configuration, the music is physically passed right and left and back across the stage, as well as forward and backward in the rows of players, producing exciting spatial effects, including the sensation that the music is a physical thing, rushing around. The music itself is written with real craft; Liang knows how stringed instruments are played and the variety of sounds they produce, and the sound of his piece is gorgeous, with beautiful dissonances, harmonic glissandi and an exquisite, highly vocal cello line. He begins quietly and dramatically with pizzicati and sul ponticello tremolos, and as the work goes on he spins out lovely melodic lines, short and long, and builds a rich mass of sound. No matter the tempo, the music is always moving towards a particular point and conveys real force along with its considerable sonic pleasures. It’s a piece one wishes to hear immediately again after the last note has sounded. And in an evening of excellent playing, this work brought out the very best in the Philharmonic musicians.

This first concert of this series was a success and suggests a lot of possibilities for the future. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the Philharmonic having a new music series, and although there was no one organizing aesthetic on the program, all of the music was made with both craft and a sense of personal exploration. This set of composers would not be mistaken for avant-gardists nor experimentalists, but they are creative musicians exploring the worlds of music and sound, they are discovering and conveying what is new to them, and that is the eternal newness of living, classical music.

George Grella