Review of concert

Collage New Music

Monday, March 27, 2006, 8:00 PM
Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall, Longy School of Music, Cambridge, MA

For its season finale, Collage New Music decided to premiere three works newly minted for the occasion (two of which made for excellent listening) and reprise an older commission.

Scored for Pierrot ensemble plus percussion, danger garden (2006) by this year's composer in residence Curtis K. Hughes gleefully intertwines two seemingly incompatible kinds of music during the course of its pair of movements. Here, one encounters ideas that are by turns athletically driven and statically stubborn, stated in opposition and combined in a dizzying number of ways. Hughes handles these disparate threads with seasoned sureness, further casting them in intuitive formats rife with unusual twists and turns that nevertheless seem perfectly logical. This is energetic, compelling stuff that expresses its clangorous sound world expertly.

Tod Machover's music often exhibits an inimitably flinty take on scale-derived neo-process approaches, but in Another Life (2006) he looks nostalgically back to the even more rawboned ethos espoused by Paris IRCAM in the 1980s -- a time when Machover was in residence there. Cast in three interlocking movements that are respectively busy, more laid-back, and busier yet, this engrossing selection dares the listener to love its forceful, often unruly manner of speech and succeeds in all possible ways. Its mixed nonet scoring is combined with live computer electronics that simultaneously provide intriguing colors and sonic glue to bind together the wide ranging acoustic timbres.

Sad to say, the usually reliable Andrew Imbrie produced the concert's least engaging listen in The Tyger (2006), a setting of poetry by William Blake, Thomas Moore, and William Wordsworth for soprano, baritone, and ten players. Its Atlantic Seaboard writing, containing more simplified textures than usual, comes across as stiff and dry. Vocal writing, while idiomatic, is rhythmically awkward while instrumental doublings of the singers' lines seem obvious, uncrafty, and altogether too frequent and prominent.

The one item getting a repeat presentation this evening, Martin Brody's Beasts (2002), pleased much more. There's a clever overarching plan afoot here; the cycle's odd-numbered movements utilize the same Richard Wilbur poem, which freezes up partway through each time until its final appearance, all serving to frame complete verses by James Merrill and Walt Whitman. It manages the neat trick of combining a heavily clouded tonality with dark Expressionism while avoiding any toadying to Second Viennese School icons. In brief, an entity that eminently deserves a revival.

Members of Collage New Music, expertly led by David Hoose, played each work with equal parts accuracy and enthusiasm. Baritone Mark McSweeney sang quite well, though both his highest and lowest notes sometimes lacked grounded projection. Elizabeth Keusch's full throated soprano voice was a perfect combination of power, focus, and musicality. Crisp word enunciation was a hallmark of both singers.

--David Cleary