Pianist Emanuele Torquati found the vibrant dramatic thread in the fragmented rhetoric of Olivier Messiaen's "Le courlis cendré," the finale of his 1958 "Catalogue d'oiseaux." Mauricio Kagel's 1964 "Match" leavened modernist sounds with theatrical humor, as two cellists (Shirley Hunt and Rachel Arnold) engaged in virtuosic competition, with a percussionist (Davy Anderson) acting as a deadpan, eccentric referee; a snapped string on Hunt's cello (which didn't slow her up a bit) actually enhanced the overall effect.
Morton Feldman's "The King of Denmark" dates from 1965, a barely audible, exquisitely calibrated exhalation for unspecified percussion, dispatched with choreographic grace by Anderson on a closet's worth of instruments. And Karlheinz Stockhausen's 1960 "Kontakte" for tape, piano, and percussion, with its stiff jabs of violent dissonance and the rough-hewn eeriness of its primitive electronic sounds, still packs a formidable aesthetic wallop: Percussionist John Andress and pianist Minji Noh (tasked with an extra percussive array of her own) were equal to the work's unrelenting, uncompromising grandeur.
A handful of pieces from attendees of SICPP's Composition Workshop didn't approach Stockhausen's scope and ambition but showed impressively deft skill; a couple were particularly compelling. Dave Hollinden's "Flux" (a world premiere), for three winds and marimba, opened with hazy phrases that clashed diatonically but soon juxtaposed obsessive, piercing, irregular chords, punctuated by a honking saxophone. Marco Visconti-Prasca's violin-cello-piano trio "Ulrich" energetically discoursed in a vocabulary that, while hinting at both café jazz and Messiaen-like refraction, was idiosyncratically original.
