16 November 2009
eighth blackbird cause to celebrate
Sunday's return of the contemporary music ensemble eighth blackbird to the University of Louisville School of Music was cause for considerable celebration. Anyone who heard this group almost five years ago to the day will recall its undeniable, happily infectious passion for a wide swath of modern repertory.
eighth blackbird cause to celebrate
By Andrew Adler
Sunday's return of the contemporary music ensemble eighth blackbird to the University of Louisville School of Music was cause for considerable celebration. Anyone who heard this group almost five years ago to the day will recall its undeniable, happily infectious passion for a wide swath of modern repertory.
Indeed, one of the works heard Sunday — George Perle's deftly wrought, nine-movement piece “Critical Moments 2” (2001) — echoed an earlier account by eighth blackbird. Hearing the group's remarkable facility with this succinct, lightly pointed score testified anew to the composer's pristine ear and the ensemble's skill at making the densest instrumental textures clear and revealing.
Comprising six technically brilliant musicians — flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri, violinist/violist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos, percussionist Matthew Duvall and pianist Lisa Kaplan — eighth blackbird boasts the flexibility to perform an unusual range of chamber literature. And within the broad genre we call “contemporary music,” the group proves intuitively adroit at parsing various stylistic subdivisions.
Whether in Missy Mazzoli's slashingly attacked “Still Life with Avalanche” from 2008, or Pierre Boulez's restless, tension-defined “Derive I” written almost a quarter-century earlier, eighth blackbird understood the expressive, idiomatic particulars. And when a particular work called for nontraditional performance elements, the group wasn't fazed for a moment.
No wonder, then, that Sunday's Chamber Music Society accounts of Thomas Ades' “Catch” (1991) and Stephen Hartke's “Meanwhile” (2007) both proved so pleasurable. Each piece involved telling bits of choreography — a roaming, impish clarinetist in the Ades; a snaking parade of participants in Hartke's six-movement timbral indulgence — and each confirmed that eighth blackbird is the best possible ambassador for the aesthetic of Right Now.
