If music were candy, the SICPP Iditarod would be like a tour of the Wonka factory. The far-out and unexpected are the stock-in-trade of the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (“Sick Puppy’’ for short), a weeklong student immersion directed by Stephen Drury that annually culminates with a marathon concert. This year’s Iditarod — 29 pieces over seven hours — made for an impressive trick-or-treat haul.
Things kicked off with an electro-acoustic group improvisation led by Scott Deal, instruments refracted through electronic sound, an apt do-not-adjust-your-set introduction to the evening’s survey of the outer limits. Many works privileged artful arrangements of envelope-pushing sounds over melodic or harmonic narrative. In Kaija Saariaho’s “Cendres,’’ flute, cello, and piano (Ashley Addington, Jennifer Bewerse, and Kyle Adam Blair) churned up an undulating sea of keening and growling swells. John Luther Adams’s self-described “Dark Waves,’’ for two pianists (Emily Lau and Jonathan Cook) and electronics, blurred the line between music and sound art. Even the voice was reconnoitered: Soprano Ceceilia Allwein made dulcet work of the delicate, precipitous leaps of Morton Feldman’s “4 Songs to e.e. cummings’’; soprano Emily Quane gave an aristocratic account of Tan Dun’s all-over-the-map “Silk Road.’’
