16 October 2008
By Gary Anderson
Arts Hub original link
MUSIC REVIEW: MIAF Eighth Blackbird
At any Arts Festival there is always the hope of experiencing the outstanding and exceptional. In recent years there was the profoundly moving work of Cambodian dancers reclaiming the art form after Pol Pot (a regime which had murdered almost every artist in the country). A nascent and triumphantly renascent assertion of the human spirit.
This year it is Eighth Blackbird, widely acclaimed as the finest virtuoso ensemble interpreters and drivers of contemporary music.
The start was substantially delayed leaving the audience standing, (some like me) for well over an hour at the door waiting. A fuzzy grey-haired organizer, bejeweled with five or six security badges and festival passes around his neck ambled out, stood some distance from the crowd, smiling in a smug way, as if we should be impressed to see such an important person, and mumbled something as he walked down the line before re-entering the hall leaving us still
standing
outside
waiting. What was he wearing? I heard someone ask. His dickhead tags responded a gentile-looking lady behind me.
When questioned later on the delay he said, after taking a long sip on his coffee near the electronic controls desk, and offering a smug smile These things happen.
Not very well prepared professionals, I thought to myself. Both public and performers could reasonable be very disappointed with the organization behind the event and also its promotion it was a sparse audience for a group that can pack out Carnegie Hall.
The musicians came on stage and dissolved the audience into an enveloping sonic cloud.
The performance opened with a new work commissioned by Eighth Blackbird (the name references the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Steve Reich. Reich, who is credited with developing minimalism, is widely regarded as the greatest living American composer and its only serious composer to alter the course of western music.
Much of Reichs music is about texture and rhythms. The Double sextet sets the musicians playing against a recording of themselves, reinforcing through doubling, the intense, volumatic and densely sustained passages that transition, abruptly between key and section. The musicians play with relaxed focus. Cello passages in high positions were deftly executed with adroit attack against pulsing rhythms and expanding volumes. It is interesting to contrast Reich and Glass (near exact contemporaries, and Glass a darling of MIAF).
Reichs method avoids the technical limitations of Glass arpeggios by developing texture, tempo and rhythm, arguably, allowing a much greater expressive and tonal range. The device of playing against recording, which is long established in Reichs oeuvre (he cites Triple Quartet (1999) and his Pulitzer prize winning Different Trains (1988) inspired by reflection on the train trips he took as a boy in California in the 1940s as the same time different trains delivered he Jews of Europe to the Holocaust) creates intense, enveloping and exciting music that leaves the heart pounding.
After a break, the program continued with the composite work Singing in the dead of the night by David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe. In the current period its hard to think of any artist as a maverick its a standard form in itself but Lang won the Pulitzer prize for music this year and this was an impressive, ambitious and deliberately performance-staged work in five sections.
One aspect of the music was the placement of the artists on the stage in carefully choreographed positions and episodes, extending the concept of performance. It is a device that could fall over into performance art parody or theatrics. Instead, it worked to engage the audience deeply by humanizing what might otherwise be a technically arduous performance marred by intellectual gravitas. The musicians of Eighth Blackbird have vibrant personalities that we can see and experience through their music in live performance, and it seduces you.
The work commenced with evanescent textures with four players clustered centrally flanked by flute and piano. Then the cello at left provide a base of slow, long glissando passages punctuated by assertive, very loud chords delivered in cluster at right around the percussion stand. Over the course of this section the chordsters moved from the group one by one slowing inverting the balance.
Next, the musicians clustered around the piano, which the flutist plucked (like Gage), dissolving into quite flute percussion passages while a musician put down his instrument and took centre stage, folding his arms. A colleague loaded him with metal buckets rivets and pipes, which, randomly fell, crashing loadly in fractal counterpoint to the soft base tonalities- order and chaos- onto the microphone-equipped floorplates. An electronically amplified table and two chairs were erected in place and, against the softest background pedal, rice was poured over the surface. Two players slumped into the rice heap slowly pushing the grains over the table edge creating an exquisite, microscopically audible cascade, re-amplified, echoed and remixed electronically. And the work concluded with a length passage of staggered crescendos with pounding drumbeats and rolls to end suddenly in the dark, leaving me tingling.
It is always possible to hear contemporary music on radio or in recording but the scale, dynamics and timbres never carry. Eighth Blackbird delivered a transcendent experience- the very finest performance of the leading edge of musical high culture. Im already begging that the next director, or our music societies, will invite them back soon.
There is one performance only left- tonight. Contemporary music often puts people off as too cerebral or too opaque. Put those concerns aside and immerse yourself in the experience.
Life is short and festivals more so.
Eighth Blackbird
The only moving thing
BMW Edge
Federation square
double sextet by Steve Reich
singing in the dead of the night by David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe
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