Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Firebird

The Firebird Ensemble, which has become an ever more important fact of new music life in Boston, presented their most visible concert yet in Jordan Hall last night. The concert was part of New England Conservatory's Composers' Series, and contained six first performances of works by NEC faculty, students, and alums. John Malia's Peripheral Gain for string trio and electronics would have been a perfectly satisfying piece if one had heard only the instrumental parts, which were in a very handsome sounding more or less classic east cost academic language. The electronics enhanced those notes, providing a sort of halo around it all from time to time. The piece came to an end, however before it stopped, which was a little disappointing Malia's program note spoke of opening up the form; to this listener it came off more as the form falling apart, although none of the music, in and of itself, had any problems and the very ending was very striking. Marcin Bela's Szela was concerned with Jacub Szela, "a shady character in the troubled history of Polish-Ukrainian relations." The three parts, which were continuous, were comprised of a section concerned with the marriage of Szela to a much younger woman, a slow section setting texts by inmates of the Butyrka Prison, and a final song about Szela catching his wife with another man, one Wicus, and the mayhem that followed. Szela, which was in Polish, featured Bela playing the piano and singing along with Lisa Harkness and Suzanne Klock, in a musical language that lived at some intersection of Weil, the Carpenters, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I liked it, although I could have stood something considerably more violent in the last section. Montserrat Torras's Impromtus for Chamber Ensemble, which opened the concert, was lively and less memorable than the other pieces on the program. It featured at the beginning a lot of hand clapping and stomping; it was not clear whether it was intended that for large stretches the singer, Jennifer Ashe, was supposed to be less clearly heard than the players.

Ashe was the focus of Curtis Hughes's The Beck Journals, Vol. 2, a sort of interior monologue grand opera which sets selections from the journals of Rosemarie Beck, a painter who was the grandmother of his wife. The voice part is the generating element of the work; for much of the piece the singer, doubled consistently by the instruments, is the center of a brisk swirl of activitiy, usually associated with Beck's thoughts about art. A different, slower, kind of seasick, music is alligned with Beck's assessment of her works. Yet another, more varied, strand has to do with the publication and reception of a novel by her husband, Robert Phelps; it includes a furiously bitter excoriation of Dorothy Parker, set to equally furious and bitter music, which is maybe the most memorable part of the strangely dramatic and compelling piece. Since Ashe was amplified, there was not problem hearing her vivid and impassioned singing.

The concert ended with Field Guide by Lee Hyla. Hyla has a certain kind of fascination for birds of all kinds. They often end up figuring in the titles and substance of a number of his pieces in various ways. This one, which is a concise, jaunty, and tender pastorale, wrought in a masterly manner, is based on five specific bird calls, each associated with particularly instruments, which are presented and combined in various ways along with a fragment of a song by Donovan.

Even though there were copious program notes for all the pieces, each of the composers spoke before the performance of his or her piece. Since there wasn't much else to say about the music, each one ended up being an on the spot endorsement of the Ensemble and the performance we were about to hear. It might have been annoying, but since all the performances were brilliant and beautiful and compelling and about a good as one could imagine,it seemed justified.

posted by Rodney Lister 5/10/2006