double entendre

BMOP concert
Double Entendre
Saturday March 29th, 8pm
Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory

all world premieres!
verdict: FUN. (mostly)

Alejandro Rutty
The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops (2007)
I love the way Gil Rose (BMOP's conductor) started the piece before the audience had a chance to settle after the opening applause. BAm right into the sleepwalker's world. A slightly schizophrenic, yet coalescing ride ensued, alternating and mixing frenetic walls of orchestral sound with delicate piano/glockenspiel flirting. Some hints of flamenco and Argentine tango come through, too, showing Mr. Rutty's background. Although sometimes a bit "cartoonish", the piece was thoroughly entertaining and captivating.

Derek Hurst
Clades, Concerto for Amplified Quintet (2007)
Sorry to say so, but this was the lowpoint of the concert for me. The structure did not hold together. Although there were a few brief moments of an interesting timbre emerging amidst the chaos, motivic development seemed to me superficial and fleeting. There was not enough to hold the audience. The Firebird Ensemble's playing was terrific, but I'm not sure that the amplification added much to the piece. If there were some other electro-acoustic element that made the Ensemble stand out, or blend in, or something, the "amplified" version would have made sense to me. But as it was used, the amplification didn't serve a musical purpose, other than to compensate for some bad orchestration technique on Mr. Hurt's part that somehow managed to muddle with the fabulous quintet's ability to shine through the orchestra. Maybe analyzing the score would convince me of the composer's inspiration from biological "clades" as the structure of the piece, (Hurst says, "Much of the musical argument centers on ways of behaving: i.e. characteritic gestures, rhythmic motives, intervallic relations etc.: soloists alone "behave" differently from duos, trios, or as the full quintet.") but these ideas did not come through to the audience upon listening. Very cerebral, not so much expressive.

Kenu Ueno
On A Sufficient Condition for the Existence
of Most Specific Hypothesis (2008)
Ken Ueno is quite a compelling overtone singer or "throat singing" as it sometimes refered to in Tuvan music. (You can hear Professor Ted Levin and Tuvan group Huun Huur Tu on NPR here - it is SOOO worth a listen the whole way through, esp. the song about 14 minutes in). There were some amazing moments of clarity amidst the engulfing fuzz/grizzle in the sound of Ueno's voice. But I was not always convinced that the orchestral score enhanced/added to his singing. Too much scoring at times clouded his voice, when subtlety is so key in overtone singing. His voice stole the show so much that I may have enjoyed a solo performance by Ueno more so than the ensemble with orchestra. I also found myself wanting to hear more of the recording (Ueno at age 6 making vocal sounds evocative of those heard in On a Suffient Condition 30 years later) that was used in the opening of the piece. A few bits of cliche'd sliding in the strings also made me cringe once in a while, but that was momentary. The very long title apparently is from a computer science article by a different Ken Ueno that the composer discovered on a "vanity search" on google. Composer Ueno says this, along with use of the childhood voice recording, was an attempt at engaging in his Japanese-American "personal history" (not sure if I got a clear picture of this history). Overall, Mr. Ueno has a lot of stage presence that can keep an audience interested for sure.

Lisa Bielawa
Double Violin Concerto (2008)
Lisa Biewala is kind of my hero right now. And the violinists, Colin Jacobsen (performs with Yo-yo Ma's Silk Road Project) and Carla Kihlstedt (does a lot of free improvisation) are both amazing performers. They are both improvisers as well as written music performers, so as Bielawa says, "these soloists come with a lot of experience in, and capacity for, thinking creatively at their instruments." Bielawa describes the first movement (Portico) as an exploration of two lyrical melodies, one of which appears in five-part canon, and the middle movement (Song) as containing a "special surprise" (Carla sings an excerpt from Goethe's Faust while playing). It actually looked like the performers were ENJOYING themselves immensely while playing. Sad to say so, but that is kind of rare and really precious these days in the "classical" music world.

here's a review by sequenza 21 of the same BMOP program performed at the MATA festival in Brooklyn