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SUN. APR. 18/2010 |
| “I am honoured to be asked to compose for Array again; it was wonderful to look through the Library and see all the many works the ensemble has performed over the years. This program will feature works by Canadian composer Rudolf Komorous (the brief but haunting Sweet Queen), Japan’s Jo Kondo (his seminal work Standing), and Italian composer Aldo Clementi (one of my favourite pieces, Madrigale); all three of these are works that have made deep impressions on me. I also re-discovered Canadian composer Scott Godin’s work Soccer, a work I remembered hearing several years ago that I have always wanted to hear again. I am in the midst of composing my new work, and look forward to hearing it in the context of these marvelous pieces.” | |
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Music Gallery, 197 John St. |
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Linda C. Smith’s title for her new work, “Stare at the River" suggests a watchword for the music she assembled from the Arraymusic score library - ‘Focus’ or ‘Concentration.’
Gerald Barry’s extended “Sur les points” for piano starts with a very quiet, unrushed rain of solid chords (about 330) almost nothing else, all staccato at first. But they talk: Little patterns catch us, sequences return, tiny variations grow into gripping polarities. When, finally, something else happens, equally uniform, it’s the perfectly prepared contrast, that you wouldn’t predict. The focus is tight and full of life.
Godin’s “Soccer” is not music’s first football game. Gilberto Mendez (Santos, Brazil) composed a orchestral soccer match with folks on stage holding cue cards to tell the audience when to cheer or boo. A terrific show, but it does not achieve the tension or suspense of Godin’s match, where there are no gags, no distractions and far more focus. With Godin’s tight vocabulary, you can feel cleats and muscle. Every pause rebounds to the same unflinching pulse (it would be so easy to lose that pulse in a recording, so you come hear this live!). The ball is hardly ever out of play, never out of sight. Our eye (ear) stays on that ball. Going by yards gained, the piano, overcoming brilliant interference from drum kit and percussion and with deft assists from the couples of strings and winds, is MVP.
In Clementi’s "Madrigale" for piano four-hand with vibes and glockenspiel, the just one single phrase each player repeats, different in length and speed from the others, like gears of different sizes, makes a spring unwinding – a musical clock - one idea, one image.
If they were paintings. the shortest pieces would be “white-on-white’s”. Sabat’s miniature subverts our expectations for two loud instruments by counterpointing the merest rumble of a bass drum and a very high, tiny whisper from a trump yet is so sustained in its adroit focus that his longest silence becomes a climax.
But Linda Catlin Smith’s own wonderfully lyrical new work ups the ante. With all the other composers in her program, it’s not so hard to identify a technique or device or rules-of-the-game that help to mark out the centre and set up a dénouement. You can get a notion 'how they do it'. Not so easy in her case! Smith’s intensity of focus, so far as I can tell, emerges from two bare ears, and it is a privilege to share what she hears. We ‘stare at the river’, and the more we listen, the more it deepens, the more it unfolds. There is no break in the flow. At first it’s just a few notes; gradually, she sings us into an expansive, vivid dream.
Do join us. The program is rich, but not so long that we can’t chat before or after. I would love to hear your thoughts.
David Lidov
