Mature Eighth Blackbird flies high
Ensemble performs beyond the fringe

BY MARK STRYKER
FREE PRESS MUSIC CRITIC
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It's been a thrill for metro Detroiters to watch Eighth Blackbird grow into a leading new music ensemble, because we've known about the group's charisma and skill longer than most. The sextet made its local debut at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in 1997, a year after its founding at the Oberlin Conservatory.

Earlier this year the group won a Grammy award for its CD "Strange Imaginary Animals" and on Thursday reached another milestone, a University Musical Society debut.

The ambitious program featured music premiered last month. Steve Reich's "Double Sextet" found the ensemble performing live with a prerecorded tape of itself. "Singing in the Dead of Night" is a collaboration by the three founding composers of New York's Bang on a Can, David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, with restrained but effective choreography by Susan Marshall.

The chain of influences was alluring. Reich, 71, is a founding hero of minimalism, whose pulsating rhythmic grids, spare harmonies, vernacular leanings and self-reliant spirit left a huge imprint on the post-classical aesthetic of Bang on a Can, whose do-it-yourself model has inspired young ensembles like Eighth Blackbird.

"Double Sextet" features Reich's trademark gleaming surfaces and phase-shifting rhythms, but there is also the sneaky melodic lushness that has crept into his music in recent decades. Piano and vibes (and their taped counterparts) acted a rhythm section, creating a web of head-bobbing, asymmetric rhythms. Violin, flute, clarinet and cello laid slowly revolving melodies on top, creating a glint so bright you almost needed sunglasses.

In the slow movement, piano and vibes merged into a pool of open harmony and the melody took on a beautiful yearning quality that reminded me of a meditative John Coltrane ballad.

The performance had energy but felt a bit stiff, as if the players were still settling into the work, and the impact would have been greater if the tape had been louder. The piece sounded less like a dialogue between equals than a live sextet with taped accompaniment.

In "Singing in the Dead of Night," three sections by Lang surround movements by Gordon and Wolfe. The best music came from Lang (who won a Pulitzer for another piece this week). The bright and prickly mix of piccolo and glockenspiel and the complex rhythms in his prologue suggested Oliver Messiaen's birds with a groove, while the bell-like tolls in his central movement had the quiet intensity of poetry.

Gordon's agitated movement pitted jaunty fiddling and woodwind jamming against a sliding cello, humorously sudden percussive clangs and even a touch of harmonica and accordion. Wolfe's night music started promisingly but seemed overly long.

The music had a tactile quality that merged comfortably with Marshall's staging. There were two especially memorable moments of theater. In the first, one player so loaded another's arms with metal cans and percussion that he couldn't keep them all afloat. They sprang a leak, falling one-by-one until they all went in a final tragicomedic crash. Played against the gentle music, the scene was charged with existential angst that wouldn't have been out of place in a production of "Waiting for Godot."

The other great moment came as the players pushed sand around on an amplified table during Wolfe's movement to create an eerie whoosh; at one point pianist Lisa Kaplan's whole body rolled on the table.

Still, less is more in this idiom and the falling instruments and magic-sand tricks grew wearisome after several repetitions. On the other hand, the players -- Kaplan, flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael Maccaferri, violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos and percussionist Matthew Duvall -- attacked the music and theater with such vibrant virtuosity that it was easy to overlook the imperfections.

Copyright ©  2008 Detroit Free Press