Friday’s 6 p.m. concert at Philharmonic
Hall highlighted the electric guitar – an instrument not often heard in concert
music setting – with a wide range of compositions performed by the
Belgian-Dutch electric guitar quartet, Zwerm. As a starter, Alessandro
Massobrio’s Pale Blue Meadows created a rich and moody sonic landscape, once
evoking the noise of a far away battlefield or some underground urban activity.
The use of reverb for the whole ensemble produced a delayed stream of floating
sounds, alluding to shifting light and perspective.
An accomplished electric guitar player, Larry Polansky’s music was prominently
featured in the concert. At the beginning of for jim, ben and lou – an homage
to three mentors (James Tenney, Ben Johnston and Lou Harrison), performed by
Péter Balog on electrical guitar, Jutta Troch on harp and Jeroen Stevens on
percussion – the guitar was retuned while the performer was playing, creating
unexpected and compelling harmonic modulations. For the concert’s finale,
Polansky joined Zwerm for Ensembles of Note – a fun piece in which the
performers/improvisers filled an ostinato with various musical gestures until
they all join the contagious, driving force of the ostinato.
Also programmed on this concert was Lejaren Hiller’s String Quartet No, 6 – a
dramatic, sometime cartoon-like, commentary on various sonic environments (from
a congested urban area to what drifts through an open window). Vigorously
performed by O.B.SQ – a string quartet comprised of members from Ostravaská
banda – the work was striking for the wealth and the evocative power of the
sounds one would expect more from electronic instruments than from the acoustic
ones with which they were produced.
The concert also included Guy de Bièvre’s probing Pokertest, resident student
Beau Silvers’ Memory Networks, exploring how and what we remember, and Charles
Ames’ Excursion, with its circular and repetitive motives generated from the
application of artificial intelligence.
The New York-based Jack Quartet – one of America’s most praised young ensemble
– was the featured guest of the 9 p.m. concert, also held at Philharmonic Hall.
Renowned for their exceptional recording of Iannis Xenakis’ string
quartets, the ensemble kicked off the concert with Ergma, one of the composer’s
late works, featuring massive monorhythmical sound clusters pulled at slow
tempi. Compositions by two resident students followed. The sparse and
angular structures of Péter Tornayi’s doubleleaf, were inspired by the
architecture of a water tower. The composer required the two movements to be
performed on the same program but separated by another piece, and Maté Gergely
Balogh’s C-o-n-s-u-m-m-a-t-u-m e-s-t proved to be the perfect segue – a
3-minute performance of the G tone played in different manners (bowing,
plucking, harmonics, etc) with drastically different dynamics.
Elliott Sharp, a central figure in New York City’s improvisational and
experimental scene, was also included in the program with the groovy rhythms
and edgy, urban sound of The Boreal. However nothing quite prepared the
audience for the large vision and radical sound of Horatiu Radulescu, the
French-Romanian composer who died prematurely in 2008. Using the
“spectral technique of composition” the composer developed over the years, “before
the universe was born” taps into some kind of sonic matrix, capturing the upper
part of the harmonic spectrum through new compositional and playing devices,
and the extraterrestrial sonorities it produces – sometimes eerie, sometimes
radiating – never cease to astonish. The Jack Quartet gave a stunning
performance of the work, which was received with great admiration by the
audience.
