“H” review
Ensemble's sound heads for stratosphere
MICKEY COALWELL
NewEar Contemporary Chamber Ensemble
Reviewed: Thursday, May 5
Where: St. Mary's Episcopal Church
Attendance: 60 (approx.)
Additional performances: 5 p.m. Sunday, May 8 at Unity Temple on the Plaza. For more go to newear.org (816-235-6222).
Kansas City's contemporary chamber ensemble, New Ear, presented new music, including three world premieres, in a typically eclectic and challenging program Thursday evening at St. Mary's Episcopal Church.
The musicians in NewEar showed off their usual stratospheric level of musicianship, coupled with a penetrating musical sensibility and impeccable taste.
Opening with the Sextet (2000) by the Polish-born dean of the European avant-garde, Krzysztof Penderecki, NewEar made wonderful music out of this difficult, two-movement work scored for clarinet, horn, string trio and piano. The first movement overflows with cheeky, Shostakovich-like musical gestures and requires bravura playing. It is frantic and ironically upbeat, contrasting strongly with the outrage and bleakness of the second movement. Penderecki's Sextet is no less than a faithful musical portrait of the 20th century.
New Zealand's arts laureate composer John Psathas contributed the first world premiere, a short, energetic work called "Mal Occhio" ("Evil Eye"), composed in 2003. The scoring for soprano sax, electric guitar, marimba/vibes and piano is clever, providing both humor and a touch of ominous mystery. Percussionist Mark Lowry was kept busy trading off bursts of sound on marimba and vibes.
Judith Shatin's premiere, "Clave," (2005), commissioned for NewEar by the Virginia Commission for the Arts, explores that basic rhythm of the salsa, the clave, with an ensemble of winds, strings and piano in addition to the heroically overworked Lowry. "Clave" sounds like a deconstructed "West Side Story," capturing the tropical heat and playfulness of the bomba beat. Pianist Robert Pherigo deserves special praise for his brilliant playing in both the Shatin and Penderecki pieces.
Finally, the world premiere of Michael Henry and Dwight Frizzell's "H for Thermonuclear Device and Remote Chamber Ensemble" was an ambitious attempt to musically map the short- and long-term effects of a B61 Mod-11 thermonuclear gravity bomb, such as those routinely deployed above Missouri in B-2 bombers. The ensemble performed from a location suggestive of a bomb shelter and was viewed via a remote camera. The image was projected onto a screen while the music was mixed live and heard through a multichannel sound system.
The detailed program reflected more than 500 pages of technical information including EMP, atmospheric effects and biological consequences. Turning this horrific data into music may strike one as repugnant, but Henry and Frizzell explain, "As longtime pacifists, we have attempted to curb our aversion to these threatening weapons in order to appreciate their broadband musicality."
The work was surprisingly effective but would have benefited from a richer sound palette, perhaps augmented by electronics, to achieve a multilayered listening experience.