Satisfying Kotik, Interesting Ligeti, SubversiveCage and a Sprinkling from Young Composers
May 12, 2011
Kotik, Mincek, Ligeti, Francesconi, Chen, Cage: Daan Vandewalle (piano), Hana Kotkova (violin),
Joseph Kubera (piano), The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, Ostravská Banda, Peter Kotik(conductor), Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, New York City, 13.04.2011 (GG)
Petr Kotik: In Four Parts 3, 6, & 11
(For John Cage)
Alex Mincek: Pendulum #7
György Ligeti: Concerto for Piano and
Orchestra
Luca Francesconi: Riti Neurali
Carolyn Chen: Wilder Shores of Love
John Cage: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
While the intertwining threads of this concert were the piano and John Cage, the central focus wastruly on Petr Kotik. As a flutist, conductor and composer, he consistently creates and performs some ofthe strongest, most fascinating and satisfying concerts in the modernist/experimental tradition ofWestern Classical music. His hallmarks are the combination of substantial ideas, taste and a rigorous, intelligent musicality that combines precision with involving expression. This particular concertbrought together two ensembles he founded with music for which he is a long-standing, passionate andimportant advocate, sprinkled with attractive pieces from young composers.
Ligeti’s Concerto had been heard the previous month in this same city, under the baton of Esa-PekkaSalonen and in the hands of the formidable Marino Formenti, as part of the New York Philharmonic’s“Hungarian Echoes” festival. It was natural to compare the two performances, and only mildlysurprising that, under Kotik and Vandewalle, the music is clearer, makes more sense, breathes withmore musicality and humor, and is simply even more interesting and enjoyable. (The Philharmonic’sreputation makes it more of a known, expected quantity, while the S.E.M./Ostravská simply don’t havethe same number of performing and recording opportunities to impress their own exceptional qualityinto a permanent place in the listener’s mind.) Conductor and pianist share a light touch and a sharpfocus, and throughout the piece, from the densest passages to the strange, haunting, microtonal ocarinachords, they revealed the continuous line in Ligeti’s thinking, his intention to stretch the concerto ideato its breaking point.
Cage’s Concerto, with Kubera at the piano, was played with even greater musical skill. In fact, theperformance was almost subversive. The piece is built around two of his main concerns; measuring theflow of music through timed intervals, rather than beats and bars, and structuring the work to goagainst the intentional, expressive grain of classical music. So, as Kotik stood in front of the ensemblelike a human clock, the musicians made their own choices as to what part and amount of notated musicthey played. We are not supposed to hear a personal viewpoint, a dramatic narrative, an antagonistic orhomophonic, “heroic” relationship between the musicians and “soloist,” but the combined forcesplayed their parts with such extraordinary skill, such fluid phrasing, that the notes and gestures, andtheir combinations, came out as deeply expressive – mysteriously so, and also quite beautiful. It’s anodd but important moment in history we’ve reached when musicians are both so skilled andunderstanding that Cage’s music might become impossible to play “correctly.”
The remaining works showed a creative turning away from these two deconstructions of form; theyconsciously built specific things. Francesconi’s piece, with Kotkova at the front, is a concerto in theold-fashioned sense and one in the style of Neo-Neo-Romanticism that conveys a powerful, abradingsense of emotion with rich doses of dissonance, and a sense of gestural freedom that comes out of bothjazz and Cage. The music is intensely active and, with these musicians, always coherent, with broad,dramatic highpoints. It’s a gripping piece. Mincek and Chen showed a similar sensibility via different,personal idioms. Pendulum #7 is a representation of that object, the music swinging back and forthbetween two points, but doing so with a variety of colors and, most interestingly and effectively, with acomplex rhythmic sense. Mincek’s pendulum is frequently interrupted between its dual zeniths, heldstill and in suspense for periods that range from tiny to breathlessly long. The sharp colors that thecomposer added on the alto sax were especially appealing. Chen’s piece, although it has the flow ofcontaining a natural ending that the composer misses, extending the work past a culminating point ofinterest, is a gorgeous exercise in how Debussy’s colors and textures can be translated through a morecomplex set of timbres, harmonies and rhythms. Its strong parts were perhaps the most impressivemoments of the concert.
That honor, though, should go to Kotik’s composition, which opened the evening. The paucity ofrecordings of his music in no way reflects his achievement as a composer, which is considerable. InFour Parts exemplified his qualities of a rigorously focused concept, and the sense that the results were achieved both through experimentation and intuition. The music sounds as if he laid out athorough plan and then found that, when his ideas exploded past it, he went where they took him. Thethree percussionists begin by trading off rolls, combining accelerando and crescendo, then diminuendoand decelerando, the music breathing in and out like a giant. The piece moves into stretches of soloswith accompaniment, the music coming out of both Cage and Ionisation, but wholly personal, thenconcludes in a long section that is quiet, haunting and lovely at first, then builds into loudness and evenchaos. It has a sense of voices both crying for liberty and raging against the dying of the light. It is amysterious, marvelous, thought-provoking work.
George Grella
