Ensemble Green: Saturday, March 5, 2011
The atmosphere of this concert was much different from previous new music concerts that I had been to: simplistic lighting instead of theatrical technology, a modest audience, and a stage that encouraged an intimate, human connection with the listeners. Even the style of the program and its notes were quite modest and personal, but highly effective. The notes aimed to connect the audience with the mindset of the composer during the writing of the piece instead of over-elaborating on the compositional process of the music and all of its relatively insignificant details.
The programming of the concert centered itself around relatively small chamber ensembles, with the largest being a string quartet. Many of the pieces were solos, some of them unaccompanied. Unfortunately, this left me with the feeling that everything was too thin texturally—I was looking for at least one or two relatively large, dense works maximizing the timbral color of the ensemble. Perhaps such programming would have been too overbearing for the atmosphere that Ensemble Green intended to create for the evening—they might have been aiming for a recital-like environment.
The opening piece, Nick Norton’s “Gare D’Arras” was a trio for violin, clarinet, and cello. Although I appreciated its experimentation with color (i.e. slap pizzicato, tapping/slapping the instruments), I feel that a lot of its coloring effects could have been more elaborately used and woven into the framework of the piece. Striking the body of the stringed instruments was a bit too unexpected at the point it arrived in the piece, and for me, it was hard to take the completely percussive section of the piece seriously in spite of it being a valid musical technique. (This is partly because of my unwanted association between clapping/stomping/etc. and entertaining young string orchestras with their repertoire.) In listening to the piece, I wanted the piece to “prove” that the percussion was necessary at that point.
One of the interior pieces of the program, “Impermanent Things,” for cello and piano, functioned well as a cinematic piece, although that was most likely not Elizabeth Alexander’s intention. In listening to the piece, I thought that its melodic content was a bit overemphasized while its harmonic content was relatively thin. However, Alexander succeeded in developing this piece into a meditation as she said it would: the nearly hypnotic repetition of the intervals in the motif as well as the chords in the harmony created a useful backdrop for the listener him or herself to meditate, not the just the music itself.
