New music moves across new landscapes

Music Review

SICPP’s night of favorites, combinations

June 27, 2011|By Matthew Guerrieri, Globe Correspondent

Stephen Drury conducts six players in French new music composer Tristan… (MATTHEW J. LEE/GLOBE STAFF)

SUMMER INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE

Stephen Drury, director

SICPP 2011 Iditarod

At: Brown Hall, New England Conservatory, Saturday-Sunday

As more new music wilderness gets charted, the Sick Puppy Iditarod gets longer. The annual student-performance (plus guests) finale to the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) has always been casually epic, the sort of concert that can program a musical monument almost in passing. (This year it was Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,’’ 60 minutes of aggressive percolation that commenced around 9:15.) But this Iditarod pushed past midnight into Sunday, a 10-hour course.

The expanded landscape, perhaps, reflected the presence of French composer Tristan Murail, in residence at SICPP this summer, with five works on Saturday’s bill. Murail likes to get inside musical sound, dismantling it and unhurriedly regarding the components. But he does so with sensual precision, amply evident from 1974’s “Transsahara Express,’’ dark, soft daubs given smooth varnish by bassoonist Christopher Watford and pianist Ingrid Lee, to “Lachrymae,’’ a six-player, slow-motion ululation premiered earlier in the week, and reprised under the direction of SICPP director Stephen Drury.

That sort of mobile-like aesthetic, more atmosphere than arc, was prominent, especially in 10 works by fellows in SICPP’s New Works Program. The best went beyond influence with either energy — cellist Elizabeth Lee and saxophonist Zach Herchen’s vehement bow-pressure-and-multiphonic distortions in Ryo Nakayama’s “Xxxx xxx’’ — or efficiency with Davide Ianni’s “Trasparenze d’Accenti,’’ a nicely paced key-clicks-and-air musical X-ray for flute (Sarah Brady), trombone (McMillan Gaither), and percussion (Sayun Chang), or Eliza Brown’s aptly-titled “Barely,’’ a just-audible aria of hesitance for solo flute (Jennifer Ingertila).

Lee Weisert’s “New England Drift,’’ a premiere, combined seven players’ worth of whispers, clicks, and fleeting triads into a charmingly eerie forest of parlor-song ghosts. Memorials were memorable: Christian Wolff’s “For Morty’’ (a tribute to Morton Feldman), realized with off-kilter gentleness by pianist Sid Samberg and percussionists Gary Donald and Jeffrey Kolega; the furious bells of Philippe Hurel’s “Tombeau in memoriam Gérard Grisey,’’ pianist Jack Dettling and percussionist Cory Bracken rhythmic and ringing; and György Kurtag’s explosive, gnomic “Hommage à R. Sch.,’’ finely etched by violist Ethan Wood, clarinetist Benjamin Irwin, and pianist Christopher Owen.