Last night in Herbst Theatre, Earplay presented the first of the three concerts it has planned for its 35th season. The title of the season is Light and Matter, which was probably taken from the title of the piano trio that Kaija Saariaho composed in 2014. Saariaho is the focus composer of the season, meaning that one of her compositions will be performed at each of the three Earplay concerts. (“Light and Matter” will be performed at next month’s concert.)
Last night’s Saariaho composition, “Terrestre,” concluded the program. It was preceded by the 2019 Earplay Donald Aird Composers Competition winner, “Late Shadow,” which Gilad Cohen completed in 2017. All three works on the first half of the program were commissioned by Earplay, and the first two of them were receiving world premiere performances. As might be imagined, this threatened to be an evening of cognitive overload. However, between the clarity of the performances and the informed remarks by the composers during the pre-concert discussion, the entire evening was more “digestible” than one might have anticipated.
As I have previously observed, Saariaho is an alumna of IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, or Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music in English) in Paris. Much of her activity involved investigating the synthesis of sounds with both analog and digital equipment. However, for much of the last quarter of the twentieth century, Saariaho applied what she had learned at IRCAM to the synthesis of new sonorities enabled by conventional orchestral instruments.
Having created many impressive compositions based on that technique, the new century saw Saariaho investigating new approaches. “Terrestre” was composed in 2002 and shows a shift of attention to the nature of performance itself and away from designing and implementing models of synthesis. The piece is scored for a solo flutist (Tod Brody), accompanied by harp (Meredith Clark), violin (Terrie Baune), cello (Thalia Moore), and a percussionist (Jim Kassis) working with a prodigious array of pitched and unpitched instruments. The solo part involves not only playing the flute but also uttering words between the instrumental phrases, presumably extracted from the long poem Oiseaux (birds) by Saint-John Perse.
This makes for an intriguing challenge in the control of breath. The “close-cutting” of notes and phonemes demands an intense focus on exhalation and strategic planning of when and how much to inhale. Brody seems to have found just the right groove to enable the rapid deployment of highly contrasting sonorities, and watching him at work was as fascinating as listening to the results. The risk, however, was that attention kept being lured away from the rest of the ensemble, even though it was clear that Kassis was pursuing a journey of his own through his collection of percussion instruments. Nevertheless, with a little bit of initial orientation, the attentive listener could easily “buy into” the overall journey of “Terrestre” and enjoy the satisfaction of making that journey.
All three of the commissioned works were for small ensembles, two trios and one duet. Perhaps by coincidence, all three of them involved the viola (Ellen Ruth Rose). The only wind instrument was the clarinet (played by Peter Josheff) performing with Baune and Rose. The selection was the world premiere of Addie Camsuzou’s “Twilit;” and the interplay of these three contrasting sonorities seemed to reflect (pun intended) the play of faint light that apparently inspired the composer. The world premiere of Bruce Christian Bennett’s “the art of disappearing,” on the other hand, paired Rose with Clark and was distinguished by the diversity of contrasts between bowed and plucked sonorities. Laurie San Martin’s “Fray,” in turn, involved revisiting (and, to some extent, reworking) a commissioned score first performed in 2016. Having missed that premiere performance, I am not sure how much the piece had changed; but it involved string trio work that was both imaginative and engaging.
Cohen’s “Late Shadow” was the “fun” piece of the evening, scored as a duet for violin and piano (Daniela Mineva). During the pre-performance discussion Cohen talked about the mirror-image structure of the composition. This structure can make for problematic listening, particularly if the listener cannot detect the “point of reflection.” Nevertheless, Cohen’s score involved a generous amount of boldly declaimed phrasing. The listener was thus assisted by recognizing familiar sonorities, even when the notes were playing out in the opposite direction. As a result, it was not difficult for the attentive listener to share in the fun that Cohen had concocted.
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