The Idea of Two: New Gallery Concert Series

by David Cleary

This event by the New Gallery Concert Series focused solely on duos for various instruments.   It's a tribute to this spunky, vital presenter that the program offered music of remarkable contrast and, in several instances, profound depth and strength.

Enchanted Preludes (1988) shows Elliott Carter penning an entry of crystalline beauty for flute and cello, string harmonics and tremolo gestures in both instruments predominating.   Only later do more forceful variants of this earlier material emerge.   While brief, the piece is packed with aural pleasure on many levels.   Alicia DiDonato (flautist) and David Russell (cellist) performed with secure control of technique and texture.   Thomas Ades's Life Story (1994) expertly captures the wry discomfort of the one-night stand depicted in Tennessee Williams's poem of the same name.   Busy neo-Expressionist piano textures provide support, not cover, for a challenging yet idiomatic soprano line-well written and most effective.   Caprice Corona 's singing was exemplary, sporting a large yet smooth sound, scintillating enunciation, and evocative stage presence.   Despite a tendency to force the tone at times, pianist Tali Morgulis was an able partner.

As transcribed by Lewis Porter and edited by Eric Hewitt, John Coltrane's Venus (1967) proves to be one sassy, intense gal-stunning, remarkable stuff, and a powerful inspiration for the raw Uptown/Downtown-straddling utterances of Lee Hyla , Jason Eckardt , Ken Ueno, Curtis K. Hughes, et al. The Yesaroun ' Duo, with Hewitt on tenor sax and Samuel Solomon on traps, took no prisoners in a funky, full-on presentation.   The Duo for Oboe and Viola (1981) of Hilary Tann is a curious listen, one that nicely melds the colors of its two participants and possesses a tight motivic fabric, yet unfolds in rather scattered fashion.   The unsteady, sometimes out-of-tune playing of oboist Jennifer Montbach and violist Bradley Ottesen regrettably did not please.

The remaining three works gave the group Primary Duo (Aaron Trant , percussion, and Sarah Bob, piano and New Gallery series artistic director) a chance to show how expertly well they can handle music of highly varied kinds.   Remnants and Remembrance (2003) by Richard Grimes is charming if not exactly substantial in its faux-naive Third World way; straightforward verse-chorus constructs and standard textures rule here.   Justine Chen's Inside-Out (2004) alternates fast and slow sections and employs a mildly jazzy sound world, but seems capricious in its harmonic control and gawky in its manner of speech and structural delineation.   By far the most successful of this triumvirate, Unsafe (At Any Speed) (2001) by Roshanne Etezady , bursts with kinetic post-process drive in its outer sections while magically transforming this jittery basis material into warm, pulsating, atmospheric music at its center.   Here is a fine composition that merits several hearings.

At its best, the New Gallery folks demonstrated that three's a crowd and two's just right.   Gratefully received from this corner.