CME delivers dynamic show

Programming served well by nuanced performance

The Contemporary Music Ensemble, under the direction of Tim Weiss, hosted guest conductor Mitchell Arnold and Associate Professor of voice Marlene Ralis Rosen last Friday in Finney Chapel. Weiss's taste and tact for programming prevailed again in an evening of music by Witold Lutoslawski, Peter Lieberson, Thomas Ades and Lukas Foss.

The first five minutes encompassed some of the most exciting sounds of the concert, as the night began with Lutoslawski's Jeux Venetiens. This piece showcased the composer's ingenuity as well as the impressive capabilities of the performers, another salient aspect of most CME concerts.

According to program notes, Venetiens was Lutoslawski's first work to engage "his own personal aleatoric technique, whereby the performers have freedom within certain controlled parameters." This format alone can pose many problems, for which Arnold appeared ready with solutions.

On the whole, Arnold's stance at the podium remained passive and stolid, as he doled out entrances to the instrumentalists. He acted as the initiator of events, while still communicating the musical gesture of each section.

These "events" reached their most frequent and dramatic in Venetien IV, and members of the Ensemble played with refreshingly unrestrained fury - where and when it was called for, of course. Manipulating sparse material in Venetien I, Lutoslawski, understood well by Arnold, created an energetic mechanical impulse that drove to the end.

Any discussion of sparsematerial, however, should be left for Lieberson's Ziji, based on a motive of, count 'em: two notes.The listening experience, not to anyone's surprise, was very contained and immediate. Pianist Mark Polesky, horn player Amber Chisholm, violinist JiSun Yang, violist Duke Lee, all juniors, as well as senior Josh Rubin on clarinet and fifth-year cellist Arturo Araya made up this small ensemble. Each had incredibly involved parts that at times went in disparate directions. Lieberson produced a thick polyphony that was almost too much to absorb at once, and this may have been his intention.

If the Ensemble's interpretive skills fell short of their own standards in any place on the program, it was in The Origin of the Harp, by young British phenom, Thomas Ades. Origin appeared to have all the makings of a romantic formal statement, with the four movements to be played attaca, and a climax near the end. In the performance, the linear material could have been treated with much more care, and an element of subtlety was definately lacking.

Ades based this work on a Celtic legend - the old Splash! scenario - of a water nymph who falls in love with a mortal and struggles hopelessly to join him on land. Maurice Ravel's Ondine, a piano piece from his Gaspard de la nuit, is set to the same tale, and has an explosion of sound near the end before it falls back into a shimmering water ostinato.

Ades provided something almost identical but, as he describes, "at the start of the fourth and final section, a flash of divine intervention." A CME percussionist turned his back to strike the inside of the piano for this presumed "flash," but with little climactic build or conviction that he was doing anything even remotely "divine."

The spectacle of the evening was Foss's Time Cycle, featuring the powerful soprano, Ralis Rosen. For a department that seems to favor bel canto over spreechstime, or even Rorem over Berg, it was encouraging to see a voice faculty member display a mastery of this music, bringing the program to an end.