Four new works and one almost a century old but as new in spirit as the others: That was the fascinating program at Town Hall Tuesday night in Town Music’s season finale. The series, under artistic director Joshua Roman, is building a reputation for new music of high caliber and often engaging content, demonstrating that new music does not have to be difficult to comprehend or uncomfortable to hear.
The four composers commissioned for the program’s first half were all present and one, Roman himself, also performing in three of them. Roman commented at the start that the composers had been asked to take as a jumping off point Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, and create something using an aspect of that work for theirs, and using only the instrumentation Schoenberg used: voice, piano, cello, violin or viola, flute or piccolo, and clarinet or bass clarinet.
They did so in unexpected ways. Wang Jie’s A Silence Older Than Love: A Song Cycle of Intimate Desire, took the erotic implications, setting poems by Emily Dickinson and June Sylvester Saraceno in music which was by turns tender, full of longing, climactic, languorous, fierce or fluttery. Soft slides up and down the strings sometimes using only harmonics tied the different aspects together while the voice soared over. At fleeting moments one could perhaps hear hints of Puccini or Ravel. A strong piece which grabbed the attention, it was nevertheless a little too long.
In his Beauty Spread Unearthly White, Raymond Lustig’s notes say that he intended to mirror the hypnotic clarity and simplicity of Walter de la Mare’s poem Winter. He succeeded admirably. There was a crystalline feel to the work, one could feel the icy chill and even trickles, maybe of dripping icicles or snowfall, with long sweeping snowy lines in in several of the instruments behind. Occasionally a little minimalist feel crept in.
Roman himself contributed Two Songs from Life on Mars: Strung Up and Passacaglia, from the poems of Tracy K. Smith. A tad of klezmer, a feel of Brecht and a bluesy voice combined to make the first frankly fun; the second caught the strangeness, the desolation of Mars, reaching urgency then calm.
Lastly in the concert’s first half, came Amir Shpilman’s Situation Object, in which he used only the voice. Throughout this program, every piece of which used voice, the singer was Mary Elizabeth Mackenzie. All the works were challenging, but none more so than Shpilman’s piece, which had her solo on stage, laughing. Yes, laughing. And only laughing, from smothered giggles at the start to high-ranging full shrieks of laughter.
Interesting at first, it was amazing to watch Mackenzie’s use of her superbly trained body to achieve a physically challenging tour de force in what for most people would be an exhausting display. However, this work became increasingly uncomfortable to hear as it continued considerably longer than it needed to be. We think of laughter usually as something warm, human, an answer to something funny. This was a clever composition, an intellectual working out, but it came across as cold, soulless and eventually psychotic and unnerving. At times there were what sounded like the whines and wuffs of a small dog in need of going out.
Pierrot Lunaire followed a short intermission. As an example of excellent programming this could not have been bettered. The six performers, Mackenzie, cellist Roman, pianist David Kaplan, flutist Daria Binkowski, clarinetist Bill Kalinkos and violinist Karen Kim, did splendidly by Schoenberg’s setting of the 21 songs of Albert Giraud’s poems of the same name. It’s a miniature melodrama, and we heard the different emotions which come through in Pierrot’s wanderings, from tenderness or sighs, to an unsettled feeling or ones that were sinister, moody, hysterical, disruptive, or jaunty and cacophonous: all of this through the music of the instruments and the half-spoken, half-sung words of Mackenzie.
Ensemble work all evening was excellent, but the evening really belonged to Mackenzie, whose extraordinary capabilities were manifest. She has a lovely voice, which she could ornament with vibrato or not as she chose, her range was very wide with strong low notes and ringing high ones, she was pitch perfect and at all times expressive of the music she sang as was her demeanor. With luck all these musicians will return to Seattle and give us more.
Next year’s Town Music season line-up is out and can be found at townhallseattle.org.
