Last Friday night’s Contemporary Music Ensemble concert was remarkably well-attended, and the audience wasn’t disappointed. Exceptional musicianship, a diverse program of great pieces and a talented student conductor contributed to a wonderful evening.

Charles Wuorinen’s Arabia Felix pitted sustaining instruments — flute, violin and bassoon —against ringing instruments — guitar, vibraphone and piano. The ringing instruments created moments of what the program notes described as “bustle,” and the sustaining instruments created moments of calm. Sometimes these two conflicting moods overlapped, sometimes they were heard as separate and distinct. Where this piece became particularly interesting, and where the performers really shone, was when Wuorinen turned these ideas on their heads and combined these two conflicting moods.

The composer asked performers to play their instruments like they were not meant to be played (at least not traditionally)—ringing instruments must sustain and sustaining instruments must ring. Not only that, but there was a calmness in the ringing and an agitation in the sustain, antithetical to what Wuorinen had laid out for us in the exposition of the piece. The performers, under conductor Tim Weiss, communicated these ideas marvelously.

Jonathan Harvey’s Death of Light/Light of Death was a tour de force for oboe player Emily Brebach. She was asked to play many difficult multiphonics (a technique in which a wind player overblows his or her instrument, producing two or more notes at the same time) as well as quarter-tones (the notes in-between what we think of as “normal” notes). The other players didn’t have an easy job either. The strings were asked to match the pitches in Brebach’s multiphonics, which vary greatly from normal tuning and the harp was played with drum sticks and mallets. Despite a little scrambling now and then, obviously due to the great difficulty of the music, this piece came off exceptionally. It should also be noted that this was the first time that this piece had been performed in the United States.

James Feddeck conducted a thoughtful, energetic, and precise version of Witold Lutoslawski’s Chain 1. Lutoslawski describes a chain composition as one in which “particular sections do not begin [or] end together. In other words, in the middle of a section in one strand a new section begins in the other.” It was Feddeck’s job to activate certain chains, to set them on their course, and then stop them when the score told him they should stop. Certain chains overlapped, producing complex simultaneities in the ensemble. After receiving a cue to start a chain, a player then proceeded on his own, with various elements left up to him. For instance, notes might be given, but tempo and dynamics not. This type of music is known as Aleatoric music — music where certain elements are left up to chance. Other parts of the piece were entirely determinate — nothing was left up to chance — and Feddeck conducted these with skill and vigor, as well.

Following the intermission, the Oberlin Percussion Group made a forceful appearance with Russell Peck’s Lift Off. This was primarily an adrenaline piece. The audience felt part of something big. There were moments of quiet, but they were only there to build tension and suspense so that the sound could build back up. Matthew Cook, Konstantin Dobroykov and Jonathan Hepfer performed this piece with plenty of gusto. There were certainly some tricky things as well, such as tempo modulation, cross-rhythms and a circular crescendo, passed off between all the players, which were all done admirably.

The final piece in the concert, Eight Lines, by Steve Reich, a minimalist work, was challenging for the players in that it asked them to repeat things many, many times without a break. Alice Teyssier, in particular, must be commended for playing an intensely challenging cell without hyperventilating. After all of the microphone levels were set for each of the “eight lines” (the eight instrument groups), the piece went off with hardly any mishaps, which was remarkable, given that the ensemble had had very little practice playing this piece without a conductor.

CME will be playing the Wuorinen and the Harvey, along with Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, heard at the last CME concert – and a piece by composition professor Lewis Nielson in Merkin Hall in New York City in January.