Festival of Contemporary Music: 1
Thursday, July 17, 8 pm
JAMES MATHESON (b.1970) - The Anatomy of Melancholy (2008)
ANNA WEESNER (b.1965) - Mother Tongues (2006)
SEUNG-AH OH (b.1969) - Canonic Phase (2008)
JACOB DRUCKMAN (1928-1996) - Bō (1979)
FRED LERDAHL (b.1943) - Wake (1968)
JOHN HARBISON (b.1938) - Parody Fantasia (1968)
I was so excited to be in Ozawa with a relatively small audience dense with other composers and musicians; BUTI students, TMC fellows, faculty, all the composers whose pieces were performed aside from the passed-away Druckman, and other eminent people like Christopher Rouse. Yes! Finally a haven for like-minded people who want to hear something new, people who want to be challenged, to leave with an expanded mind.
The pieces all had their good moments, but none struck me as completely genius. I enjoyed Druckman's piece the most; it was simply beautiful, and gave me the same calming contemplativeness as much of Saariaho's music does. Lehrdahl's piece, with text from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, fit the text so well in its impenetrableness, that it actually made the art more easily digestible. I enjoyed the timbres of the soprano, her varied vibrato, the punctuation of the text and the strange words.
Harbison's piece was a strange, difficult epigram of an ending to the program.
Of the pieces by the younger composers, I liked Matheson's better, but found the ending not so compelling. Weesner's piece had some great harmonies in the first 20 seconds, but after that, it became sparer and uninteresting. Oh's percussion piece was unmemorably alright, the same way a lot of percussion music is just alright in that it physically feels good but doesn't seem to have much of a macroscopic direction or meaning.