There aren’t many summer carnivals more diverting than NEC’s Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP, “Sick Puppy’’ to its friends). After a week of concerts and immersion training in the avant-garde, Saturday brought this year’s Iditarod (as director Stephen Drury has drolly dubbed it), the annual all-night marathon recital.
How to generalize a 36-piece, eight-hour sweep? Much of the program seemed compositionally less concerned with advocating particular vocabularies (tonal/atonal) or concepts (minimalism/serialism) than with exploring the means of production, the various orthodox and unorthodox ways instruments can make noise. Results were often mobile-like, artfully arranged rather than intensely plotted. Flutist Ashley Addington and guitarist Mark Wilson deftly placed the stop-and-go Impressionism of Toru Takemitsu’s “Toward the Sea.’’ Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Refrain’’ uses the decay of vibraphone, celesta, and piano (John Andress, Christopher Lim, and Stephen Olsen) to chart loose, ringing constellations. Lukas Foss’s “Ni bruit ni vitesse’’ explores the far reaches of two pianos - Lim and Leah Kosch at the keyboards, percussionists Victoria Aschheim and Masako Kunimoto working inside the instruments’ cases - and the combination of clanging, buzzing, and slow-rolling scales was mysterious and magical.
