Review of Festival

SICPP 2005: Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance

Monday-Saturday, June 20-25, 2005

Jordan Hall and Williams Recital Hall, New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, MA

Composers don't come more mould-shattering than Frederick Rzewski. And while iconoclasts sometimes pay a heavy price for their independence, they can also produce remarkable cutting-edge art. Rzewski was the featured guest at this year's Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance (SICPP) festival, an event demonstrating the highs and lows of being a big risk-taker.

The first two evenings were devoted entirely to Rzewski's compositions, and two items on Monday's concert pleased especially. Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues successfully melds what might seem to be two mutually exclusive idioms, the blues and process music. Gradually moving from the bottom to the top of the keyboard, its feral introduction and coda melt convincingly into an appealingly funky center, thereby imparting a convincing structural framework overall. Pianist Jung Hee Shin's forceful yet wonderfully musical playing perfectly suited the piece. Rzewski's gargantuan variation set, The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, is a noble opus of great sincerity. And thanks to its carefully executed architectural scheme, one that clumps the variations into cogent larger divisions (later examples of which provide recapitulatory grounding of older material), it's also an essential addition to the solo piano repertoire. A truly special presentation is required to bring out the work's attributes; it's a pleasure to report that Stephen Drury's performance was a revelation, utterly masterful in delineating formal balance and unflagging in energy and technical execution. This critic has never heard it done better. Less successful was another solo piano item, The Road, Part 1, a collection of invention-like modules intertwined with chorale-oriented passages that comes across as scattered and crabbed. John Mark Harris gave it excellently, lucidly delineating contrapuntal lines and imparting a felicitous tone quality to this rather arcane music. For mixed trio, Whangdoodles can be seen as Rzewski's personal wrinkle on John Zorn's jump cut ethos. It's a collection of tiny snippets that are more or less variants of each other, their source later revealed to be folk songs of American and Yiddish origin. While there's much contrast in texture and approach, overall organization is lacking and the work stops rather than ending convincingly. Members of the Callithumpian Consort (Gabriela Diaz—violin, Yukiko Takagi—piano, Timothy Feeney—dulcimer and vibraphone) exhibited the sort of clairvoyant awareness seen in the best chamber playing and showed individual prowess in personality and technique.

Rzewski took the stage Tuesday night to perform recent selections from his sizable solo piano portfolio--and regrettably, here's where the downside of being a maverick became evident. The four works encountered, Andante Con Moto, The Babble (The Road, Mile 62), Ballad #5, and Spells, can all be described in the same manner: overlong variation procedures (often inspired by vernacular idioms) that consist of densely clangorous thickets of notes lacking direction, profile, and structure. Nor did the composer's presentation help his cause. Despite possessing both a formidable digital capacity and a peculiarly intense manner of expression, Rzewski's somewhat unorthodox playing suffered from undifferentiated phrasing and a raw, monochromatic sound prone to banging.

Surprisingly, there wasn't a keyboard instrument in sight on Wednesday's program, as both selections heard utilized mixed chamber ensemble. Two large chunks of Cornelius Cardew's Treatise led things off. As given by The BSC, a variable member collective consisting of everything from theremin to trombone, these were respectively reserved and outgoing, loaded with extended techniques and mindful of texture and color. A large-scale incarnation of the Callithumpian Consort assembled to present Rzewski's Les Moutons de Panurge, a splendidly effective process composition that, if the metaphor be pardoned, is the most enjoyable barnyard brawl music has to offer. Its systematically additive-then-subtractive melodic line is bright and perky, slowly morphing from minor to major tonalities. Perhaps even more so than Tom Johnson's Failing, mistakes drive this work's engine, allowing each performance to move from unison textures to canons of increasing complexity. The ensemble tore into it with irresistible enthusiasm, though why several members of The BSC decided to come back onstage, adding in a reflective improvised coda that had little to do with what went before, is anyone's guess.

As if to compensate, the next night saw nothing but solo piano fare. Proving much more dissonant than his usual output, Jeffrey Mumford's Barbaglio dal Manca is an intensely showy piece that imaginatively reinvents its opening reiterated pitch motif, couching the material in a subtly etched variation overlay. It's an excellent listen, as is Triad by David Evan Thomas. This latter composition makes no secret of its old-fashioned manner of handling material, casting its three sections into clear versions of toccata, passacaglia, and fugue. The most tonally focused work heard tonight--though not always triadic in nature--it manages to avoid mustiness by exhibiting a punchy, tight, memorable manner of speech and emotional sincerity one encounters all too rarely. Shannon Wettstein gave both terrifically well, sporting clean linear differentiation, evident care in finger work, and a big, multi-hued, cultured tone. Of the four solo piano items by composers enrolled in SICPP's New Works Program, one stood out prominently. Like the Mumford, the first two movements of David Laganella's The Schuylkill at Night are built from a repeated note idea. Formal considerations stay firmly in focus here, and the clangorous sound world is expertly handled in this enjoyable opus. The three Etudes by Seth Rozanoff prove a bit nebulous structurally but outline clear, attractive atonal writing. Warren Weberg's Thirty-three Proposals, apparently based on a snippet from the Diabelli waltz tune Beethoven made famous, never gets out of neutral gear with its non-directional pitch sense and syllogistic unfolding. The Variations of Douglas Ovens show a mature voice, clear rhythmic profile, and able handling of gritty pitch languages, but its variation procedure runs a roller coaster ride of fast to slow alternations and the work ends unexpectedly. Rozanoff's piece benefited mightily from Brendan Nguyen's full sound, smart voicing, and fluid fingers. Keith Kirchoff performed the rest; he's a talented pianist with clean technique and good interpretive instincts who will fully realize his potential when he fleshes out his dry sound and learns to play loud without forcing.

Friday saw the return of three prominent artists from the festival's opening concert. John Mark Harris came forth with demonstrative, multifaceted playing that made marvelous music of Karlheinz Stockhausen's famously fractured Klavierstuck XI, as well as a lush sound and sensitive phrasing that ideally complemented your reviewer's SICPP Fantasies, a festival commission. And Yukiko Takagi and Stephen Drury showed remarkable range in a pair of two-piano entries. Piano Phase by Steve Reich, while less ornate than this tonemeister's more recent output, is fascinating in its bare-bones process simplicity—bracing and clean as Alpine air. Drury and Takagi went at the work like two perfectly oiled machines, allowing this sparkling toccata to speak for itself. And their intensely driven rendition of Rzewski's Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues as cast for two players brought the festival full circle in riotously wonderful fashion.

Saturday's concert, featuring students attending the week-long seminar, was not reviewed.

--David Cleary