Seattle Chamber Players Go Wild for "Icebreaker"

Seattle Chamber Players (l-r) Laura DeLuca, David Sabee, Mikhail Shmidt, Paul Taub

Last weekend was Love and War, this weekend it's Songs of Wars I Have Seen (tickets: $18), and in both cases, Seattle Chamber Players have not been afraid of challenging either themselves or their audience. Maybe it has something to do with their On the Boards venue--I can easily imagine Lane & Co. encouraging SCP to get wild--but it would be hard to overstate the extent to which you are "in the shit," chamber musically, once you walk in.

Michael Upchurch previews the Songs of Wars program, which is a co-production of SCP and Pacific Operaworks:

On the one hand, you have German composer Heiner Goebbels' "Songs of Wars I Have Seen," an eclectic setting of excerpts from Gertrude Stein's 1945 book "Wars I Have Seen." On the other hand, you have Claudio Monteverdi's "Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda," a 1624 piece said to mark the first time a composer employed musical sound effects that directly mimic the action onstage.

I know, right? Who hasn't heard of Heiner Goebbels? Just about everyone in the U.S. It's freakishly out there for a small organization to pick a composer whose not yet known here and a composer who was super popular, you know, about four hundred years ago. Then why not stir in crowd-pleaser Gertrude Stein? (The UW's Jessica Burstein has a helpful podcast titled "Gertrude Stein for No One.") I have the feeling that no one ran this past marketing.

It's exciting. It's like we live in a real city, where our artistic William Tells don't aim their arrows squarely at the middlebrow, but at the not-quite-attainable apple.

I don't want to say that I loved Love and War. In fact, I developed a headache of some substance and gravity. I stopped in for a two-block performance on Sunday night, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., and then from 8 to 10 p.m. and near the end I was barely hanging on. It was too much to take in, and I am far from a new-music aficionado. (Zach Carstensen of Gathering Note, who ought to know, calls Icebreaker a "formidable survey of contemporary music.") But that's largely because I'm sheltered by programmers that do, in fact, worry about what's too hard and whether they might "lose" me.

The first program, with compositions from Russia and the Ukraine, brought pieces by Alexander Wustin (b. 1943) and Virko Baley ('38). Wustin's "post-Webernian" 12-tone technique was evident in "Musical Offering," bringing back memories of my college music appreciation class. I always end up thinking about the composer, with 12-tone serialists. It's like someone sat down to paint "Starry Night" using sudoku grids. How do you not love--fiercely love--such a person?

Baley's Shadows - Homage to Borys was probably the genesis of my headache--Baley was aiming for a dream soundworld, and succeeded admirably. Besides flute, violin, clarinet, and cello, two musicians played, with bows, what looked like birdcages sawn in half, generating high-pitched metallic tones. It was like a haunting via the ear, and it won my respect for completely defeating my attempt to keep a safe distance.

After the intermission were Yevgeniy Sharlat's Divertissement and Igor Kefalidis's alpastro--these were "friendlier" works, although the time signatures frightened and confused me. I recall Laura DeLuca's clarinet work leaving me with my mouth open in Sharlat's piece. For Kefalidis's work, the musicians donned headphones, and electronic sounds were piped in. I read in the program notes about it being "a chain of consecutive and continuous transformations by means of microvariational conversions of instrumental sound objects," and knew I was in for a treat. All I can say is, it was thrilling and at the end my brain felt like primordial ooze.

FIGURA

Next up was Danish and Icelandic contemporary music, courtesy of Denmark's FIGURA performance group and SCP. Mezzo Helene Gjerris sang, beautifully, for three of the pieces (Anders Brodsgaard's Galgenlieder, Steingrimur Rohloff's Stadig ikke/endu ikke, and Peter Bruun's Preludes to Disaster). Rohloff's Hit Upon is a virtual double bass solo, in which Jesper Egelund (again with the headphones) comes out and accompanies a recorded double bass in a duet so intimate and ballistic you lose track of which is live. I kept watching Egelund's fingers to reorient my ears.

Of the sung pieces, Rohloff's Stadig ikke/endu ikke, to Peter Laugesen's poetry, was probably my favorite--the music and words inform each other so deftly, and surprisingly, that it becomes a true wordmusic hybrid. That said, Bruun's Preludes is, indeed, a "very emotional, musical image of Don Quixote." Bruun says, "In a way, he is the saddest of all sad men in the world," and "his efforts only make us laugh!" These are some of the most touching composer's notes I've ever read, and of all the pieces I heard, Preludes is the one I would like to hear until I know it by heart.