Music Review: New Music
Ensemble well-tuned for trip east
by Peter Jacobi H-T Music Reviewer
March 10, 2007
This evening in College Park, Md., Indiana University’s New Music Ensemble begins a three-concert tour, with additional appearances to follow Sunday and Monday in Philadelphia and New York City. Eighteen players, assistant conductor Christian Capocaccia, and director/conductor David Dzubay are making the trip, designed to show east coast audiences what this talented group from the Jacobs School of Music can do technically and aesthetically.
Thursday night’s concert in Auer Hall served as final fine tuning for the travelers. From what one heard, they were tuned.
The bill of fare focused on an established contemporary work by the late Japanese master, Toru Takemitsu, three recently written pieces by composers on the IU faculty, and, in premiere, a student’s creation that won the 2006 Dean’s Prize Commission. The material chosen gave the musicians a variety of styles to deal with and yet seemed to avoid the way far out repertoire that the ensemble sometimes includes on its local programs.
The new work, “Suspended in Perpetual Ascent” by Joseph Sheehan, is a weave of light and bright chords and scales, intricately, most effectively put together, which, indeed, reflects in modern form the concertos of Vivaldi and Bach, as Sheehan intended. At the center were the ensemble’s two violinists, Veronique Mathieu and Stanislav Pronin, playing off each other as a sort of instrumental Juliet and Romeo.
Takemitsu’s “Rain Coming” (1982) is all subtleties, emitting a feel of weather ahead, but of a more benign than stormy nature. Conductor Capocaccia and the ensemble fully captured its essences.
The most substantial of the three faculty pieces, in this writer’s view, was Claude Baker’s “Tableaux Funebres,” not because, at a declared 18 minutes, it happened to be the longest item on the program but because the music — built on haiku plus hints and quotations from works by Mahler, Strauss, Schubert, and Stravinsky — had been developed into a genuine quintet for piano and strings, with emotional sinew reflective of the poetry that inspired it.
Violinists Mathieu and Pronin, violist Sheldon Person, cellist Alvin Wong, and pianist Timothy Best honored the score.
P.Q. Phan’s “from Perseus Cluster” called on the ensemble to approximate the wonders of space: black holes and constellations and the seductive sounds of the beyond. The score offered a sense of floating and discovery. It’s a bit longer than need be but constructed with imagination.
David Dzubay’s “Double Black Diamond,” occasioned by a commission from the Utah Arts Festival and the composer’s skiing adventure, was the evening’s most aggressive, most athletic, and most lively piece. Its 15 players, led by the composer, engaged in a fancy exhibition of rhythmic and tonal activity that insinuated a foolhardy but exhilarating race downhill.
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.
