The Colibri Duo at the Center for New Music

Monika Gruber, Michele Walther, and Kyle Hovatter in the “banner” for today’s Center for New Music concert (from that concert’s event page)

Today at noon marked the beginning of the first of two concerts to be presented this month live-streamed from the Center for New Music. The performance was given by the Colibri Duo, consisting of violinists Monika Gruber and Michele Walther. The repertoire for a pair of violins is relatively sparse; and, as a result, the first two of the three works on the program were written for Colibri by local composer Kyle Hovatter. The program then concluded with Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 56 sonata for two violins in C major. Following the live-streaming, the video was been uploaded to a YouTube Web page for subsequent viewing opportunities.

Hovatter provided an introduction for the first work on the program, entitled “Graphite.” He explained that the score involved combining his own original music with that of Johann Sebastian Bach while also providing opportunities for improvisation. The improvisation, in turn, amounted to a response to an animation by Josh Dorman in which a pencil sketch (which appeared to be of a caged animal in a park) gradually begins to take shape. As many might guess, Bach appears in the guise of the Ciaccona movement he composed to conclude his BWV 1004 partita for solo violin in D minor.

In this context it was interesting to observe how Hovatter’s own contributions interleaved elegantly with both the Bach quotations and the improvised passages. (Mind you, since those passages were improvised, at least some of that interleaving may have come from the two improvisers!) More interesting was how Hovatter’s architecture seemed to accommodate the listener’s awareness of familiarity. Thus, as Dorman’s animation gradually disclosed the images he was depicting, one became more aware of the motifs Hovatter had invoked for his own contributions to the overall score. Even more important was that any cerebration about structure could still give way to the more straightforward enjoyment of how the thematic material developed as the performance progressed.

The second Hovatter offering, “sand stack,” was more a matter of a study in sonorities due entirely to the efforts of the composer. One of the advantages of having a duo is that the composer could introduce thematic material for one instrument and then leave it to the other to “reflect” that material. Thus the attentive listener is easily drawn into an overall give-and-take strategy, through which one could appreciate the extent to which any performance owed more to the performer than to the marks on paper.

Prokofiev’s sonata does not receive much attention, given how few recitals there are by violin duos. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating study of the interplay of old and new. The overall structure is guided by the sonata da chiesa (church sonata) of the seventeenth century. The tempo structure of the four movements is slow-fast-slow-fast. If this is retrospective, then it is also the case that listeners familiar with Prokofiev’s music are likely to find no end of familiar gestures, even if none of those gestures explicitly quote themes from other sources. As a result, even though the music is seldom performed, there is a comforting feeling of familiarity in the listening experience, leaving the sympathetic listener regretting that this music is not played more often.