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New Music Connoisseur
http://www.newmusicon.org
The Idea of Two: New Gallery Concert Series
by David Cleary
Thursday, January 27, 2005, 7:00 PM
Allen Hall, Community Music Center of Boston, Boston, MA
This event by the New Gallery Concert Series focused
solely on duos for various instruments. It's a tribute
to this spunky, vital presenter that the program offered
music of remarkable contrast and, in several instances,
profound depth and strength.
Enchanted Preludes (1988) shows Elliott Carter penning
an entry of crystalline beauty for flute and cello,
string harmonics and tremolo gestures in both
instruments predominating. Only later do more forceful
variants of this earlier material emerge. While brief,
the piece is packed with aural pleasure on many levels.
Alicia DiDonato (flautist) and David Russell (cellist)
performed with secure control of technique and texture.
Thomas Ades's Life Story (1994) expertly captures the
wry discomfort of the one-night stand depicted in
Tennessee Williams's poem of the same name. Busy
neo-Expressionist piano textures provide support, not
cover, for a challenging yet idiomatic soprano line-well
written and most effective. Caprice Corona 's singing
was exemplary, sporting a large yet smooth sound,
scintillating enunciation, and evocative stage presence.
Despite a tendency to force the tone at times, pianist
Tali Morgulis was an able partner.
As transcribed by Lewis Porter and edited by Eric
Hewitt, John Coltrane's Venus (1967) proves to be one
sassy, intense gal-stunning, remarkable stuff, and a
powerful inspiration for the raw
Uptown/Downtown-straddling utterances of Lee Hyla ,
Jason Eckardt , Ken Ueno, Curtis K. Hughes, et al. The
Yesaroun ' Duo, with Hewitt on tenor sax and Samuel
Solomon on traps, took no prisoners in a funky, full-on
presentation. The Duo for Oboe and Viola (1981) of
Hilary Tann is a curious listen, one that nicely melds
the colors of its two participants and possesses a tight
motivic fabric, yet unfolds in rather scattered fashion.
The unsteady, sometimes out-of-tune playing of oboist
Jennifer Montbach and violist Bradley Ottesen
regrettably did not please.
The remaining three works gave the group Primary Duo
(Aaron Trant , percussion, and Sarah Bob, piano and New
Gallery series artistic director) a chance to show how
expertly well they can handle music of highly varied
kinds. Remnants and Remembrance (2003) by Richard
Grimes is charming if not exactly substantial in its
faux-naive Third World way; straightforward verse-chorus
constructs and standard textures rule here. Justine
Chen's Inside-Out (2004) alternates fast and slow
sections and employs a mildly jazzy sound world, but
seems capricious in its harmonic control and gawky in
its manner of speech and structural delineation. By
far the most successful of this triumvirate, Unsafe (At
Any Speed) (2001) by Roshanne Etezady , bursts with
kinetic post-process drive in its outer sections while
magically transforming this jittery basis material into
warm, pulsating, atmospheric music at its center. Here
is a fine composition that merits several hearings.
At its best, the New Gallery folks demonstrated that
three's a crowd and two's just right. Gratefully
received from this corner.
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