Richmond Times-Dispatch

Birds take flight in UR residency

The sextet eighth blackbird launched its residency at the University of Richmond last night with a program that punched all the buttons this group uses to connect listeners with often elusive contemporary art-music.

The 'birds played five works in which the modern intersected with the ancient, tradition with innovation, intellect with emotions and senses, pure sound with physical or literary allusion.

The most substantial offering, note for note, was George Perle's "Critical Moments 2," nine delicately textured miniatures, in 12-tone style but perceptibly linear in flow and mainly cheerful in outlook.

The most forbidding work was Kaija Saariaho's "Cendres," a dense exercise in sound combinations and unusual techniques for piano, cello and flute.

Frederic Rzewski's "Les Moutons des Panurge," inspired by Rabelais' cautionary tale about following the leader, builds up, then tears down a vaguely Latin-sounding tune of 65 notes. Quirky rhythmic accents keep things interesting while you wait for the players to lose their places in an intricate, speedy musical pattern which they inevitably do.

More serious fun is sparked by Steve Mackey's "Indigenous Instruments," which seeks to evoke the folk music of an imaginary culture and implicitly invites listeners to flesh out the culture.

If music derives from language and reflects people's movements, Mackey's folks speak a language with a lot of high-pitched vowels but not much sibillance, and dance moves that tend toward the vertical.

The program's finale, David M. Gordon's "Dramamine," as its title suggests, means to suggest the disorientation and imbalance of motion sickness. Strings and winds are tuned slightly off one another's pitches, a piano is "prepared" to produce percussive and stringy tones and the percussionist plays some novel instruments.

The result echoes the Indonesian gamelan; at the same time it has the overmodulated quality of a monumental electronic device.

Gordon posed the ultimate challenge to the musicians' energy and concentration, which they sustained without flagging.

Copyright 2004 Richmond Times-Dispatch