New schools of art or music tend to violently break with the past, plunge headlong into the unknown future to leave behind the blinking and bewildered. But there is a strong sense of continuity in Present Music’s latest concert offering, “Connecting in the Chamber.”
As in last year’s PM chamber music concert, Kevin Stalheim and company move the action into smaller, more intimate venues. This weekend, six members of the ensemble perform in a private home, the new Fifth Ward Anodyne Coffee, and Villa Terrace, where I caught the performance on Friday morning.
The idea of the concert was laid out early, with a pioneering avant-gardist (Harry Partch) experimenting with the musical vocabulary of Ancient Greece, which is built on different scales than the Western music familiar to our ears. Written for string quartet, and prominently featuring violinist Eric Segnitz, the two pieces featured exotic ascending arpeggios. You could hear the way the notes fell between familiar Western notes, and when one or more instrument lingered on them, it created a palpable disquiet.
Kamran Ince’s trio, Fortuna Sepio Nos (Fortune Protect Us), is a musical prayer for a sea voyage, and it unfolds like the calendar of a trip—one day calm, the next stormy, etc. Clarinetist William Helmers evoked the expanse of the sea with unusual, “bubbly” sonorities from his instrument, and rollicking arpeggios created the sense of a rough voyage, until the final section sounded a starlit calm. Or perhaps, evoking the Greek’s again, the end of Odysseus’ long voyage home.
Sofia Gubaidulina’s Reflections on the Theme B-A-C-H starts from the unfinished section at the end of J.S. Bach’s Art of the Fugue, and builds rich music on the material of that landmark piece in Western music. Motifs start in canons and gradually build to dense climaxes in the stratosphere of the instruments (string quartet).
The first half closed with a trio transcription (violin, clarinet and piano–Stravinsky’s own) of a few passages from the composer’s L’Histoire du Soldat, which offered a showcase for Segnitz’s powerful and devilishly pungent violin. But I also missed the sparkling orchestration of the original version.
The second half opened with the transcription of a 16th-century madrigal by Carlo Gesualdo, an exercise in old-school avant-garde, and then immediately followed it with Bruce Adolphe’s 2004 tribute to it, More or Less (A Reaction to Moro Lasso), which takes off from Gesualdo’s unusual harmonic progressions, and adds a driving rhythmic sense—propelled by Adrien Zeitoun’s cello.
Pianist Cory Smythe got a chance to celebrate his recent Grammy award (for his work with violinist Hilary Hahn in the contemporary music collection In 27 Pieces) with a bravura showcase of technique and improvisation. First, he played continuous piece that started with Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 3 and ended with Maurice Ravel’s virtuosic Scarbo, a movement from Gaspard de la Nuit that is consider to be one of the most difficult piano pieces every written. In between, Smythe improvised on some of Mozart’s motifs, turning elegant melodic runs from the principal theme into fractured and modern variations. He worked his way into Scarbo, navigating its orchestral sonorities with great power. And he didn’t stop there, following that mash-up with a reading of John Zorn’s knuckle-busting solo Novalis, which—keeping with the concerts theme—builds on the style of the late Romantics and Impressionists (like Ravel), and adds a hefty dose of atonal mischief, building even more complex cascades of notes. Or piling harmonies up on each other, letting stringent block chords resonate as he adds deep bass murmers in the mix.
Everyone was back for the finale, Nico Muhly’s gorgeously transparent Motion, which again takes a germ of material from the pre-Baroque—Orlando Gibbons’ early 17th-century choral work, “See See the World Is Incarnate.” A play on the nervous counting of musical beats (Muhly sang in choirs as a child), it suggests the passage of time with pizzicato tick-tocks, adding beautiful choral writing and driving syncopations. It was a fitting finale for a program that demonstrated that everything old could be new again.
Connecting in the Chamber repeats at two other locations Friday and Saturday nights. See the Present Music website for details.
