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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

newEar opened their 18^th season on Saturday night—not with a bang—but with a subtle program of shadows, dreams, and natural elements.

Bonnie Miksch’s man dreaming butterfly dreaming man for violin and piano was stuffed with lovely moments from the gossamer exchanges of tremolos and trills (all played sul ponticello) to the enraptured climax.  Miksch used Chuang Tzu’s famous dream of self-realization/self-confusion as a basis for this piece.  Pianist Robert Pherigo, usually relegated to playing insanely virtuosic pieces was equally at home in this contemplative work, playing his austere and unencumbered lines with perfect simplicity and delicateness.  As the piece progressed it was evident that Pherigo was “man/earth” and violinist Tomoko Iguchi was “butterfly/air,” and what a resplendent butterfly Iguchi’s sound embodied.  The piece called for constantly shifting between quick bow and finger techniques to dark and lyrical lines.  These culminated and boiled into a whirling dervish of climatic double stops all executed deftly by Iguchi, making the one intonation issue devastatingly noticeable.

Pherigo performed Edward Jacobs’s echoes, shadows for piano and fixed media with his expected adroitness.  It was a shame that the piece was awful.  Written in 2008 as homage to Jacobs’ teacher and electroacoustic pioneer Mario Davidovsky, the piece was a jumbled sectional mess of acid-tripping-three-legged-cat-on-piano instead of showcasing Davidovsky’s tightly controlled form.  The electronic portion was extremely dated in its sounds and included unforgiveable clipping and hisses that were not the fault of the playback equipment but rather Jacobs’ original samples and sources.  Whether or not the clipping and hisses were intentional, so as to recall the now degraded original tape of Davidovsky’s Synchronism No. 6, is hazy but if they were intentional I would expect them to occur with more regularity.

Winner of newEar’s Student Composition Competition, Peiying Yuan’s modular piece Five Elements for mixed quintet was a catalogue of well crafted and performed extended techniques.  Though Yuan creates some ingenius sonic moments and textures (e.g., highly embellish folk tunes, muted piano strings, behind the bridge string playing, key clicks), all the elements were the same tempo and there was not enough variety to fully differentiate between them.  Yuan used a plethora of such wonderful sounds early on that I waited for them to appear again, but was too frequently left unfulfilled.

Roderik de Man’s Rush won the prize for biggest wasted title and worst program note I have seen in a long time.  Note to composers: if you find yourself referring to Webster’s Dictionary, then using that definition as the entire basis of your note, you should probably reconsider, especially if the word is as commonplace as “rush.” If you choose to define the word, your music had better exemplify that to a T.  In this, de Man failed.  Rush is a fine piece, but when the listener is expecting a dizzying array of quickening notes and instead is presented with an overall slow piece with no sense of urgency or acceleration, de Man sorely disappoints!  Despite the weak title and note, the performance was solid with some slight misfires.  All the players were presented with exposed solos (except for the poor forgotten violist, Jessica Nance).  The solos for bassoon, set stratospherically high (above those in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, for those keeping score) were nailed by a resolute Keel Williams.

Having never been the biggest fan of Takemitsu’s compositions, I admittedly was dreading the 18-minutes of his piano trio Between Tides.  However, I was surprised that I found myself enjoying it.  I owe that to the performers—Iguchi, Pherigo, and Larry Figg on cello.  They were not shy about playing softly for the duration.  With only a few flows up to a mezzoforte and plenty of ebbs around piano and below enabled me to concentrate on recurrence of the simple melodic motives that served as the germs for Takemitsu’s piece.

Between Tides was arguably one the best performed newEar concerts I have attended.  There was a sense of full commitment and musical understanding that is so often lost on just figuring out how to play new music.  The program, though I did not care for all the pieces, also worked effectively as a whole, opening and closing with a whisper­; a purposeful one at that. 

REVIEW
newEar
Between Tides
Saturday, September 11, 2010
All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church
4501 Walnut, Kansas City, MO      
For more information visit http://www.newear.org

By Lee Hartman

Editor-in-Chief; Traditional and New Classical Contributor

Lee Hartman holds degrees from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (D.M.A., M.M.) and the University of Delaware (B.M.). At the University of Delaware, he received a Dean's Scholar position enabling him to pursue an individually designed academic program combining music education and composition. At the University of Missouri-Kansas City he served for three years as the Assistant Director to Musica Nova, the conservatory's new music ensemble, while teaching a variety of composition classes.

In 2007 he was invited to both the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík, Iceland and the Sichuan Conservatory in Chengdu, China to give lectures and master classes in composition. In the summer of 2009, Hartman served as an orchestra manager for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and Aspen Opera Theater Center for various performances. He serves on the National Executive Committee of the Society of Composers, Inc. as Submissions Coordinator. His primary composition instructors include James Mobberley, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Paul Rudy, John Beall, and Jennifer Margaret Barker. He currently teaches music theory at the University of Central Missouri and general music classes at Park University having previously taught at UD (2007–08) and UMKC (2006–07).

His compositions can be found at http://www.leehartmanmusic.com