On Saturday at 2:30, Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music continued with its second concert. The FCM performances contain generous helpings of music. While established composers such as George Benjamin, David Rakowski, and John Corigliano were included Saturday, curator Augusta Read Thomas programmed a great deal of music by the “emerging” generation and by composers underrepresented on US concerts. Some highlights:

Jacob Bancks’ Rapid Transit, for mixed chamber ensemble, received its premiere. A TMC commission, the piece started out slowly, alternating nervous percussion flurries with chorale-like pan-modal verticals. Eventually, the winds picked up the percussion’s rhythmic ideas, and the ensemble was off to the races. Bancks created a clever amalgam of ‘transit sounds,’ using brass for car and train horns and percussion for the various noises that routinely besiege commuters. The faster sections also employed a more chromatic pitch field to further ratchet up the tension. While some details of pacing between the ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ sections might be rethought, Bancks’ compositional language is attractive and the overall impression was quite promising.

Judd Greenstein inverted the famous Boulez essay title, “Schoenberg is Dead,” to create his own work title: Boulez is Alive. In this piece for solo piano, Greenstein detached and deconstructed the modernist elements of his postmodern aesthetic. As the composer acknowledges in his program note, he wrestled with modernism during his training, ultimately rebelling against it. The surface of Boulez is Alive contains evidence of this struggle, with Notations-like angularity pitted against an insistent, gradually emerging tonal center and ostinato figuration. If the piece served to exorcise some demons for Greenstein, it also proved to be a fine performance vehicle for the excellent pianist Makiko Hirata.

Another performance highlight: Pianist Gregory DeTurk played the hell out of three piano etudes by David Rakowski. He reveled in the quick arpeggiations and repeated notes of E-Machines, gave a jaunty rendering of Taking the Fifths, and created a wonderful, lyrical ambience on Les Arbres embué. For anyone who thinks that Rakowski’s etudes are all about mixing jocularity with virtuosity, they need only listen to the latter piece to hear an example of considerable depth and poignancy.

This is the second time I’ve heard Akrostichen-Wortspiel by Unsuk Chin, and it is a piece well worth revisiting often. Korean-born and based in Berlin since the late 1980s, Chin draws upon a host of reference points, ranging from her own background to studies with Ligeti, work in electronic music, and an interest in the writings of author Lewis Carroll. (more…)

The opening concert on Tanglewood’s 2009 Festival of Contemporary Music on Friday featured several works by established composers and a TMC commission. This year’s festival is curated by Augusta Read Thomas. Rather than creating a unified theme for the five days of performances, Thomas has put together a varied group of offerings. In her opening remarks in the TFCM program booklet, she emphasizes,”This is not a festival with a house style.” Instead, what has thus far unified the proceedings are well-prepared, dedicated performances by youthful yet artistically focused musicians.

Christopher Rouse‘s percussion ensemble piece Ku-Ka-Illimoku is a great curtain-raiser: splashy, noisy, and abundantly virtuosic. Based on Hawaiian ceremonial drumming, it provides metric twists, turns, and overlays aplenty. Rouse hasn’t composed a piece for percussion ensemble since Bonham back in the late 1980s; one wishes he’d return to the genre.

Matthias Pintscher‘s Lieder und Schneebilder proved a tougher nut to crack. These settings of e.e. cummings poems for soprano and piano (sometimes prepared) are almost willful in their angular deployment. While cummings’ idiosyncratic typography seems to invite close attention to phrasing and line breaks, Pintscher’s use of ellisions and sprechstimme often seemed problematically placed. Still, Pintscher excels at creating evocative timbres and complexly hued harmonies.

Flutist Brook Ferguson, who was one of the leading lights at last year’s TFCM (devoted to Elliott Carter), was the soloist in Pierre Boulez‘s mémoriale (…explosante-fixe..Originel). Once again, Ferguson wowed with impressive control, beautiful tone throughout the flute’s compass, and attention to the score’s myriad details. The ensemble made the piece sound effortless (which it certainly is not) under the fine direction of Gergely Madaras.

While David Lang has certainly subsequently eclipsed Illumination Rounds, one of the earliest pieces in his catalog, one can see why it often gets played. Violinist Katherine Bormann and pianist Brett Hodgdon reveled in its con fuoco opening, which juxtaposes repeated unison notes and secundal dissonances. The piece’s inspiration tends to lag a bit in the middle; but the performers here made a great case for its sudden return to the opening material, rallying to end with a flourish. (more…)