The Australian

Egalitarian ensemble struggles to keep up

by Chris Boyd
original link

AND like the voice in the Wallace Stevens poem from which this Chicago-based sextet takes its name, Eighth Blackbird knows a thing or two about "noble accents" and "lucid, inescapable rhythms". Those words are a near-perfect fit for a piece Steve Reich wrote for Eighth Blackbird in 2007: the brilliantly agile and deliciously melodious Double Sextet, which won the 2009 Pulitzer prize for music and remains the ensemble's greatest coup.

In the studio, and more often than not in performance, the six musicians play against a recording of themselves to make up Double Sextet's 12 parts.

But here, after a week spent mentoring musicians from the Australian National Academy of Music, Eighth Blackbird performs it with six ANAM musicians. (Not an us-and-them split, incidentally; there are three Eighth Blackbird musicians on each side.)

Unwisely, the egalitarian ensemble was not using a conductor on Tuesday night, and the 22-minute piece chugged along for most of the first movement without the sextets meshing.
Free trial

Perhaps, in the louder outer movements, the musicians couldn't hear one another. They certainly weren't watching each other. And, well, telepathy didn't quite cut it.

A different combination of ANAM musicians opened the program with a fine performance of Still Life with Avalanche by New York pianist and composer Missy Mazzoli. Through a buoyant and shifting swell of droning harmonicas, a passionate violin (Isabel Hede) broke the surface like a distressed swimmer gasping for air. This surprising piece resolved with a heavy melancholy and a thudding kick drum. It's a nine-minute wonder.

Also taking advantage of the double-sextet configuration afforded by Eighth Blackbird's presence at ANAM is resident composer James Ledger, whose work In Orbit premiered on Tuesday. Like that Alice in Wonderland cinematic effect where pan and a zoom are executed simultaneously, leaving the figure unchanged and the background telescoping away, Ledger seems to digitally manipulate the music before our very ears. It's the aural equivalent of Luna Park crazy mirrors. Despite Ledger's aversion to melody, In Orbit is eerily reminiscent of Prokofiev's music for Romeo and Juliet.

Adding to my belief that Stephen Hartke's 2007 composition Meanwhile is just 21st-century Eurasion Holst, Eighth Blackbird members wander around like planets while performing it. It has all the choreographic sophistication of an early ABBA video. It adds nothing.