Contemporary Music Ensemble Dazzles Warner

CME Electrifies With Concert of Varied Works

The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, under the baton of Paul Polivnick, presented the work of four American composers in their opening concert in Warner Concert Hall Wednesday.

Russell Peck's Don't Tread On Me or On My String Quartet proved to be a palatable and promising beginning. The performers confidently and skillfully executed this energetic one-movement string quartet with admirable flair. The harmonies were relatively consonant and clean-sounding, sometimes resembling modern pop. Folk elements peppered the solos that were playfully tossed amongst the four performers.

Polivnick then mounted the podium to conduct David Sampson's Dectet, scored for string quartet, bass, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn and piano. The first movement opened "ominously with a sustained pedal in the bass and ostinato figures in the other strings while the winds create long lines," Sampson has said of the piece. Though this and the general outline of events (the addition of instruments, increased tension, eventual release) may seem traditional, Sampson's inventive writing proves to be energetic, firmly gripping the audience's attention.

The second movement, a lament for the death of a close friend, began with a four-bar plucked bass ostinato. Wind solos sang in turn from above, the repeated phrase gradually finding a gentle, rocking ostinato. Violins entered with lyric counterpoint. The sheer simplicity and balance of this movement was enhanced by the asymmetry and instability of the first movement. It concluded with a violin duet that rose softly into upper harmonics, accompanied by the winds' ostinato played in the piano's upper register.

The third movement was a macabre waltz replete with heavily accented downbeats and a disquieting, satirical playfulness. The piano acted as an aggressor, nearly always the first to break silences or consonance. The ending was vicious and abrupt.

The fourth movement was similar in character, and featured virtuosic violin and piano writing, clouds of spiraling chromaticism and clusters. The canonic horn and cello duet in the B section offered a glimpse of tranquility amidst the turmoil. The piano entered with empathetic chords that quickly became dissonant and troubled, as if it wanted to find peace but couldn't reconcile itself with the past. The horn and cello again offered peace, but this time the piano rudely and decisively hurled the ensemble into the frenzied opening material, crashing in a percussive and sforzando climax. The performance was professional, exciting and highly polished.

Peck's Lift-Off, though the oldest piece on the program, was perhaps the most successful. It was scored for nine drums, played by three percussionists. The composer emphasized two main ideas in the two sections of the piece: polyrhythms and unison-playing. Peck achieved an astonishing effect in the latter section by writing independent volume swells for each player which were strongly suggestive (perhaps due in part to the title) of passing helicopters. The spatial relationship of the players (one center stage, one on either side) created another dimension to the sound that became especially evident in the accents and the hairpin dynamics. The players were extraordinarily well rehearsed and involved in the piece.

Bill Stevens' '00 Live in the Sound We Breathe was the first piece to utilize the full ensemble. It was a brief, coloristic work focusing on brass and winds. The composer, who was present for the performance, is synaesthetic and said he tries to capture the impression that "sound, idea and physical phenomenon are all the same" in his work. This charming piece ended humorously with a musical quote from "Inspector Gadget" in the bassoon followed immediately by a vibraphone hit, like the wink that follows a pun. Stevens wrote the piece in April and May of 1998 and wished to thank fifth-year Corey Dargel for his aid in its notation.

After the performance, the conductor turned to the audience and precluded a second performance of Stevens' piece with an anecdotal reminder that the world premiere of Mahler's 4th was followed by Mahler's 4th. Throughout the course of the evening CME presented impressive and inspired performances of interesting and important repertoire.

And then there was Gerald Plain's Clawhammer. This piece amounted to a really disappointing hoedown. The violin part consisted of quirky, pseudo-folk fiddle played cautiously by absolute stoics. Every now and again a gong would sound for no good reason. The trumpeter at several points made some god-awful racket on his instrument that resembled a screaming elephant. And there was some slapping sound in the percussion section that didn't appear to be in time with anyone else. Maybe someone had wandered onstage and the percussionist was beating him repeatedly, perhaps out of sheer boredom.

Excluding this last number, the concert lived up to the admittedly high expectations of the audience, confirming the suspicion that CME will again offer us a semester of intelligent and adept performances of 20th and 21st century concert repertoire.