Versatile eighth blackbird makes music look easy

By Walt Amacker
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
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Wednesday's concert "The Only Moving Thing" by University of Richmond resident sextet eighth blackbird at Camp Concert Hall had a lot more than one thing moving.

Fresh off its first Grammy award, the group showed a versatility that must be seen and heard to be fully appreciated.

The first half comprised a piece entitled "Double Sextet" by Steve Reich, which was receiving its world premiere. Reich is no stranger to modern music enthusiasts and has been on the cutting edge for more than 40 years.

Having a sextet play a double sextet isn't easy, but 8bb made it seem so. And the folks that invented digital recording and playback made it possible.

The members of the group -- Lisa Kaplan (piano), Matt Albert (violin, viola), Matthew Duvall (percussion), Nicholas Photinos (cello), Michael J. Maccaferri (clarinets), and Tim Munro (flutes) -- already had recorded the slightly mirrored image against which they played live.

If it sounds hard, it probably was. The group said in an after-concert discussion that they found it to be more comfortable the more they did it, and that they eventually intend to play it with a live sextet.

The "Double Sextet" had Reich's fingerprints all over it. The pianos and percussion drove the fairly structured piece, with easily recognized movements and relatively normal key changes. But it was a definitive workout for the musicians.

The second half of the program brought another world premiere, "singing in the dead of night." The various sections include a prologue and epilogue by composer David Lang tucked at the beginning and end of three "episodes" by Michael Gordon, Lang, and Julia Wolfe, with stage direction by Susan Marshall. Suffice it to say that they rocked the boat with everything from sand on a table to six people playing or plucking the piano strings at the same time to a tray full of varied utensils, pipes and pans that were dropped on the floor, picked up, and dropped again.

That's modern music, although stage director Marshall did an unthorough job of explaining the symbolic representation of these events.

Of course, interspersed with the unexpected choreography were some interesting and difficult musical happenings. The amazing thing to see was the continuing sound coming from the talented six musicians who played much of all the pieces from memory.

And the UR Modlin Center for the Arts is to be commended as one of the commissioning agents for all of these pieces.

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