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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
September 9, 2007
"There aren't any modal composers, tonal composers, or serial composers. There is only music that is coloured and music that isn't."
Olivier Messiaen would presumably have been pleased with Sunday evening's Aventa Concert, the 2007-8 season opener, which featured six highly-coloured and colourful works by living composers, all participants in Aventa's Second Composers Workshop.
Each half of the evening opened with a work by an established composer, which was then followed by a pair of world premieres.
Linda Catlin Smith's Little Venice is now over two decades old and perhaps reveals more of her influences than her more recent music. The clearest influence was Morton Feldman and, in one sense, the piece felt something like one of those three-hour late Feldman works compressed into fifteen minutes.
But Feldman never, in my experience, wrote such gorgeously textured music for strings as that which opened Little Venice (and if the title is a reference to the eponymous area of North West London, I'm afraid the logic escaped me).
Hiroko Tsurumoto's deux monts proved a fascinating work and Tsurumoto obviously has a fondness for writing for the combinations of extremes, as witness the pairing of piccolo and bass clarinet, or the rapid figurations in one pair of instruments pitted against slow-moving ethereal chords in another.
Cassandra Miller is a composer with a genuine wit and rhythmic flair. Quite what connection Orfeo by Monteverdi has with the original, with which I am unfamiliar, I cannot say. For all I know Miller could have taken every note in the work from the Italian.
But it hardly matters. The eight short - some extremely short - movements flew by; not only did none of them outstay their welcome, they hardly lasted long enough to be welcomed. I know for a fact that the ensemble actually practised the page-turning in the penultimate movement, practise which paid off in a performance of verve and accuracy.
I see that I was fairly lukewarm about Michael Oesterle's Urban Canticle when Aventa played it last year. Obviously Bill Linwood has a high regard for the music to have programmed it a second time so soon. I believe that Sunday's performance was a more tightly-focussed one which - for this listener at any rate - made the music cohere rather better.
Although Urban Canticle may have been the toughest nut to crack in Sunday's programme, its counterpoint of eerie beauty and harsh dissonance is beginning to infiltrate my consciousness.
Simon Martin's Geyser is music of dense but not thick textures. One could place Martin in the broad spectrum of Quebec music, as influenced by (particularly) Messiaen, but he has his own voice, which I'd like to hear more from. The final gesture - a crescendo abruptly cut short by the closing of the piano lid, with the last sounds heard the resonance of the piano strings - was most impressive and effective.
The last work of the evening was Justin Christensen's Fundere, which opened with a quite extraordinary duet for roaring bass drum - the head being rubbed with some implement I could not clearly see - and (very) high horn. The music progressed in a series of seeming ever-expanding passages, which felt as if some theme was gradually being unfolded - it wasn't, it just felt that way.
There was, if not exactly something for everyone, then something for everyone prepared to keep an open mind (and ears). And if a piece really did not appeal, then none of them was too long and there would be another one along shortly.
It has become a truism and almost (but not quite) goes without saying that the music was given real Aventa performances: beautifully and accurately played, with verve and flair.
What young composer could reasonably ask for more?
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