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Review of festival Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice 2006Monday-Saturday, June 19-24, 2006 The music encountered at this year's Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) at the New England Conservatory was less consistently good than usual. But that's the risk one takes in programming off-the-beaten-track fare. Fortunately, the best music was well worth encountering, and most of the performances were first-rate. Monday's festival opener consisted of two presentations that epitomized the proverbial sublime and ridiculous. Morton Feldman's final piano opus Palais de Mari , despite its twenty minute duration and unrelentingly soft dynamics and slow tempo, is wonderfully right in its pacing of motif and use of pitch. Ideas are clear and develop with care, encased within an intuitive but satisfying process of unfolding. It received a beautifully sensitive rendition from SICPP director Stephen Drury, one that found remarkable shadings and nuances within its quiet, unhurried confines. However, Charlemagne Palestine's performance of his two-piano, single- executant work The Golden Mean was the most self-indulgent conceit this critic has yet encountered. To a stage crowded with stuffed animals, an eccentrically dressed Palestine eventually emerged to prattle to the audience at length while quaffing lavish quantities of pricey cognac before intoning a prayer and beginning to play. The piece, a sloppy and poorly-paced minimalist entry with clear debts to the oeuvre of LaMonte Young and Steve Reich, was so long and vapid that it made Feldman's offering seem as densely succinct as Webern by comparison. If not the worst experience your reviewer has ever had in a concert hall, it definitely ranks among the top two. SICPP's composer-in-residence Michael Finnissy took to the keyboard Tuesday night. His playing was excellent, too: clean, measured, thoughtful, even aristocratic, though not lacking in color and verve. Tone quality was luscious, pedaling was tasteful, and voicings were lucid. The program primarily consisted of miniatures by himself as well as various of his teachers, colleagues, and students. The best were La Natura dell'Acqua , Op. 154 by Elisabeth Lutyens , a serial work of much depth and contrast that smartly juxtaposes pointillist writing with more linear textures, and Elegiac Fugue on the Name "Geraldine" by Bernard Stevens, an unapologetically functional harmony based selection consisting mostly of warm music with more forceful spikes that makes no secret of its old-fashioned values while still coming up an absolute winner. Also notable was Judith Weir's Strathspey and Reel , which packs truckloads of Mussorgsky-like intensity into its bantamweight but riveting frame, as well as Andrew Toovey's To Sappho , which proves a brief but bracing romp through the land of pounded tone clusters. And Mickey Finn by Howard Skempton was tiny, triadic, folksy, and fun. Less successful were All Change by Chris Newman, short and generally tonal sounding but underdeveloped, and Wird's denn bald dumper? by Claudia Molitor , an unconvincing mishmash of atonal craggy bits and more traditional horn-fifth derived ideas. Regrettably, Finnissy's pieces did not please, either. His Two Mazurkas (from Polskie Melodje Ludowe ) and Romance ( with Intermezzo ), the former triadic, the latter more polytonal, are well-meaning but slight juvenilia. His ERIK SATIE, Like Anyone Else , by far the largest item encountered, is dry and lacking in contour, finding precious little contrast in its clangorous harmonies woven from tonally tinged lines. And an encore, Finnissy's arrangement of George Gershwin's tune Swanee, merely repeats ERIK SATIE'S shortcomings in miniature. While none of the works heard on Wednesday's presentation proved wholly pleasing to hear, most had their merits. For piano solo, the primarily atonal opus Interludium A by Isang Yun contains several isolated passages that compel and makes an intriguingly idiosyncratic stab at utilization of binary architecture. But its sections do not balance satisfactorily, and one encounters altogether too much sloppy handling of material. The three movements of Henryk Gorecki's Piano Sonata No. 1 are by turns full-on ferocious, austerely chorale-like, and humorously forceful, with reasonably compelling ideas and formats. But like so many other young composers of the 1950s, Gorecki was at the time smitten with Bartok's output, and in this piece it shows to the point of toadying -- raw polytonal harmonic language, repeated-note accompaniment figures, folk-like melodies, you name it. Interspersing texts by AIDS sufferers with poetry by gay Russian authors, Finnissy's Unknown Ground makes static desolation a virtue from the musical end of things; the meat of the work is found in its baritone voice part, surrounded by sparse accompaniment from a trio of piano, violin, and cello that at times suggests kinship to Medieval organum . And its scalar, often triadic language is handled ably. Imparting a bit more energy and trimming a bit more duration would have made it truly wonderful. But Finnissy's solo piano arrangement of another Gershwin standard, Nashville Nightingale , reiterated Tuesday's problematic issues of Swanee . Pianist Jeffrey Gilliam is a young player with clean technique, excellent interpretive instincts, and a strikingly full sound in loud spots; his soft playing lacks true warmth as of yet but appears well on the way to achieving this desirable quality. Brian Church's baritone voice regrettably shows signs of wear and strain, but he is clearly talented, the possessor of excellent musicality and polished enunciation. Members of Drury's always changeable ensemble The Callithumpian Consort backed Church with personality and respect. Nearly everything clicked Thursday, both from a compositional and performance standpoint -- it was the most satisfying of these evenings. Finnissy offered two items, one excellent, the other less so. His clarinet/piano duo Marilyn, Brian, Mike, and the Cats proved notably less compelling than its unusual title. Like ERIK SATIE , it snitches a fair bit of tonal material (here from Charles Gounod's opera The Queen of Sheba ) and sinks it into a dense, dissonant contrapuntal carpet that offers little in the way of local or overall interest; frequent punctuations of instrument textures with prerecorded cat meowing bestow mild dashes of sweet spice here and there. But the solo soprano selection Moon's Goin ' Down was hugely engrossing, in essence highly chromatic scat-singing punctuated with microtonal inflections and glissandi. Modest nods to Peter Maxwell Davies's more outre vocal fare are manifest to an extent, but this fine listen transcends any influences. And both its length and unfolding are highly commendable. Harrison Birtwistle makes a stab at being the English Webern in his Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker for soprano and cello pairing. These are intense, mostly tiny slices of non-tonal writing boiling over with compelling speech. Two classic items from the mid-twentieth century also made appearances. The early Sonatine for Flute and Piano of Pierre Boulez catches this venerable tonemeister at the start of his career putting forth one of his most effective utterances. Gripping and showy, it avoids the often dogmatic sameness of his later oeuvre to remain fresh and bracing over half a century later. Terry Riley's In C is of course one of process music's seminal examples and, because of its liberal use of indeterminacy, one of its most atypical. It never ceases to please in performance and tonight was no exception; a ten-strong incarnation of the Callithumpians did well by it despite some rhythmic insecurities. Jessi Rosinski (flute) and Yukiko Takagi (piano) shone brilliantly in Boulez's challenging score, while pianist Finnissy and clarinetist Michael Norsworthy played Marilyn, Brian with security and sensitivity. Soprano Jennifer Ashe sang with remarkable agility, power, and control in Moon's Goin ' Down and the Birtwistle , though her diction was mushy; David Russell added yeoman cello buttressing in the latter opus. Only one can't-miss item appeared Friday -- and it was truly great, Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion , which is enough of a classic now that it transcends critical notice to achieve masterwork status. A second hearing of Bongo-O by Roberto Sierra confirmed its impression from several months back as being a frothy Latin-tinged bauble, a charming romp that pulls a wealth of color possibilities from two wee drums. It was much more enjoyable than Adam Greene's solo piano selection for nothing , a disjunct East Coast item that mixes the occasional tonal-leaning fragment into a predominantly dissonant sound palette. Unfortunately, it has precious little surface appeal and no perceivable structural assets. Nor do a pair of Finnissy entities, Hinomi for solo percussionist and Strauss Waltzes for piano alone, demonstrate these wished-for qualities. They show their composer still penning amorphous, unengaging fare, though truth be told, the former exhibits a welcome amount of vim. Presentations were generally top-notch. Pianist Shannon Wettstein possessed marvelous digital control and tone, giving for nothing and Strauss Waltzes every chance to convince. Both battery bashers, Scott Deal (in the Finnissy ) and Robert Schulz (in the Sierra) impressed greatly, the former coming across he-man and gung-ho, the latter cheeky and stylish. And the two joined forces with pianists Drury and Takagi to present the Bartok in a gripping, clean, exciting manner that pleased in all but one aspect; for some reason, the decision was made to have the pianos in back of the percussionists, which resulted in sections where the keyboards lacked edge and clarity. Saturday's marathon concert, commencing at 5:30 PM instead of the usual 8:00 PM weekday start and featuring students and fellows enrolled in the Institute, was not reviewed. --David Cleary |