A glance to last week's calendar in an effort to get caught up to speed, and to catch you up to speed.
Last Tuesday, Matthias Kaul stopped by the Renaissance Society for some spirited stickwork. The percussionist has recorded much of Alvin Lucier's, John Cage's and Mauricio Kagel's music, among much else, but this was a showcase for his own improvisation-based works. His Walk don't Run consisted of just a snare drum and turntable with a worn-out record spinning silently. As the grainy sounds emerged from the speaker, so too did various patterns. A fleeting glimpse of a swing trap set? Yeah. A straightforward pattern of eighths? Kind of. Around this sonic near-static, Kaul played various rolls and stretched the drum-head to new frequencies. A little shy of ten minutes, its quizzical nature never got dull or remotely close to politely spelling out its intentions.
Kaul's Doubleroom featured Gene Coleman's witty bass clarinet and an integrated loudspeaker magnifying everything he did out into this (almost comically) resonant space. Coleman's humming, reed- and key-tapping created a sonic web that wrapped around everyone's head. Coleman was joined by flutist Claire Chase, Kaul and bassist Jesse Ronneau for Arabesken, whose little volleys and solo shards added up to...volleys and shards.
Then there was Chicago Opera Theater's Abduction from the Seraglio, the review of which will be out in this week's Time Out Chicago. Suffice it to say that Sarah Coburn sang vibrantly and her soprano cut through the occasionally dry acoustic of the Harris Theater. The production featured a sliding wall that doubled as the city gates as well as a leafy enclosure to the harem that struck the right balance between evocative and cheap. It might not've been pretty to look at, but your mind could fill in the details...and if you're fine with that, the production was fine, too. If not...
Thursday was the Chicago Symphony playing Mahler 4 without a conductor. But before they got to that, there was H.K. Gruber's Aerial featuring trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger. At 25 minutes, Hardenberger has the horn on his face the entire time for the wicked leaps and furtive jumps Gruber puts him through. Beginning with an otherworldly setting of soft string chords, Hardenberger began with multiphonics, by playing and singing simultaneously. It sounded like a painful groan, but it also sounded like nothing else I can think of coming from a trumpet. A little bit of playing with various slides removed, a little bit of blowing on a horn carved from a cow's horn, some piccolo trumpet thrown in just to keep things interesting, and you've got the Gruber.
Then came the curiously static Mahler 4. David Zinman conducted, but the orchestra sounded like they were on autopilot and just went through the motions. No one seemed very pleased with having Zinman there to lead them, and he didn't give them anything worth responding to, apparently. No big climaxes, no drama enlivening that long third movement, not very much at all. Isabel Bayrakdarian sang the last movement with nice attention to the different moods of the child and altered her tone ever-so-slightly, and childishly. But Zinman did nothing to shape the piece.
Sunday afternoon, ICE was playing at the Green Mill as part of the occasional new-music matinees held there, hosted by DePaul's George Flynn. ICE, or portions of it, played three works by Dai Fujikura. Clarinetist Joshua Rubin went through the glib, short phrases of Rubi(co)n, which was written for him; cellist Katinka Kleijn slammed and banged her way through Eternal Escape and violinist David Bowlin and pianist/composer Sebastian Huydts had a good time with Breathless, for pizzicato violin and toy piano. (Prior to starting, Huydts gave Bowlin an A to tune to.) All three of these works, brief as they are, are the work of a composer who's taken the time to figure out how to put a nice shape into a little bit of time. "Toughly argued," as Alex Ross might say.
Monday night had me hearing Kleijn again in Eternal Escape, but this time in Orchestra Hall for MusicNOW. To my ears, and I was in the distinct minority with this opinion, mind you, but I am the one with the blog, she seemed to tear into it more in the jazz club. All the fingerboard-slapping Fujikura wrote sounded more violent and surprising to me Sunday afternoon than it did in the concert hall. Maybe it was where I was sitting.
Shulamit Ran's 15-minute Fault Line was the main event and premiere. Near the beginning, there's a skein of music that echoes the Shrovetide Fair bit of Petroushka and sounds like Petroushka is cutting capers in the Casbah as the woodwinds flit through the percussive string and piano chords. She relaxes eventually into a series of solos that pass from piano to cello to violin. Mostly major, the melody's few chromatic inflections lend it that Middle Eastern flavor that runs through so many her works.
Ran has prepared two versions of the work, one that includes a soprano at the end and one that trades her part between other instruments in the ensemble. I found the effect fairly haunting when Tony Arnold sang it, as the stringency of the wordless text was matched by her voice. John von Rhein had a slightly less positive reaction to the use of the soprano. He has a point. But if Ran wanted to end on an unsettling note instead of the fairly positive tone she'd established from the beginning, she succeeded.
The piece was played twice, separated by a conversation/demonstration with Augusta Read Thomas, conductor Cliff Colnot and Ran herself. They didn't shy away from getting nice and detailed about the work's motivic relations, which is admirable, but perhaps a little less didacticism would've been welcome. Instead of trying to remove all the mystery of a piece, maybe just say, "We think these are the big moments," and leave it at that. But then, I'd probably be upset that they weren't discussing the work in enough detail. Ran got a good line in (off?) when Colnot asked her about a passage filled with major triads. She said that composers had wanted to "emancipate the dissonance" in the early 20th century, and now, wearily "The dissonance has really been emancipated!" So she tries to find new ways to use consonance.
Joan Tower's string quartet In Memory came first. The firmly tonal, rhythmically straightforward work honored a deceased friend and was finished around 9/11. But the effect is the traditional Questioning-Anger-Resolution scheme, and left me cold. Maybe it was where I was sitting.