Saturday, September 5, 2020

Natalie Raney’s Helia Recital at C4NM

Last night, unless I am mistaken, the Center for New Music (C4NM) offered its first ticketed live-streamed event. The mechanics were straightforward: Tickets could be purchased online until 45 minutes before showtime. Then, about half an hour before showtime, all ticket holders received electronic mail with a hyperlink to a private YouTube Web page. The process could not have run more smoothly, the only weakness being a minor speed bump in streaming the very beginning of the performance.

The program, entitled Catalyst: A Musical Collaboration, was a solo recital by cellist Natalie Raney. Raney prepared her selections working with the Helia Music Collective, co-founded by composers Emma Logan and Julie Barwick. Each of them had one of her own recent works presented. Barwick’s was “Counterbalance;” and it was followed by Logan’s “Desert Aesthetic.” The other newly commissioned Helia offerings were “stringDefinition” by Elizabeth A. Baker and “Moments” by Belinda Reynolds. By way of an “overture,” Raney began her program with Kaija Saariaho’s “Près.”

Natalie Raney with her gear for performing Kaija Saariaho’s “Près” (screen shot from a YouTube video of a performance given on March 17, 2019)

Those that have been following Raney’s work know that Saariaho’s music is a “strong suit” in her repertoire. This includes not only solo compositions but also “Light and Matter,” the piano trio that Raney performed during her tenure with Curium. “Près” was apparently conceived as a reflection on the sea, illustrating both calm and storm (a trope likely to be familiar to those that know their music history). Drawing upon her experiences at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, which translates as “institute for research and coordination in acoustics and music”), Saariaho scored “Près” for solo cello and live electronics, synthesized by a laptop situated next to Raney.

Beyond any efforts of denotation or connotation, what was most impressive was the relationship between the cello and the synthesized sounds. Bearing in mind that audio quality streamed in real-time over the Internet tends to have its shortcomings, what was most evident was how the electronics tended to enhance the qualities of the cello’s reverberation. In other words the composition was not so much a “dialog” between two sound sources as it was the exploitation of synthetic techniques to supplement and broaden the “physical” qualities of the cello itself. Raney clearly has internalized this composition to accommodate that subtle relationship; and, even under Internet constraints, her performance was compellingly convincing.

Mind you, most regular readers should know by now that I have a long-standing interest in Saariaho’s music and have become familiar with many aspects of it. That gave “Près” an unfair advantage over the much newer works on the remainder of the program, all of which were “first contact” experiences. The C4NM Web page for this program said nothing about any of these compositions, providing only biographical background for the four Helia composers. Fortunately, each piece was conceived as a set of relatively short movements, numbering between two and five. Indeed, the four movements of Barwick’s “Counterbalance” could almost be taken as a latter-day reflection on sonata structure, complete with a scherzo in the third movement.

Nevertheless, there was more for mind to process than could be mastered by a single listening experience. In many respects the attentive listener would probably have done best to dwell on the rich diversity of sonorities that cut across these four recent compositions. Also Raney announced that Reynolds’ “Moments” consisted of three movements, each with its own title, “Looking,” “Wishing,” and “Gone.” That provided listeners with an overall framework for approaching both the whole and its parts.

The only weakness arose in Baker’s “stringDefinition,” which was scored for “speaking cellist.” Unfortunately, microphone placement only established that Raney was speaking but provided a weak account of what she was saying. As the result, the significance of having the cellist speak at all was lost in the rich sonorities of the instrument. To be fair, however, C4NM is just beginning to get the hang of working with live-streamed technology; and I am hoping that, by the time the Friction String Quartet makes its next C4NM visit next month, C4NM will have a firmer command of that technology.

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