By Daniel Webster
For The Philadephia Inquirer original link

A sextet of instrumentalists, eighth blackbird, entered a musical world so free Friday night that listeners expected the players to levitate - at least.

In its classical program "Strange Imaginary Animals" performed at the Perelman Theater of the Kimmel Center, eighth blackbird flew beyond standard repertoire.

With such startling technical command available, a God-fearing composer like Joseph Schwantner could leap to new levels of exploration, while the introspective Canadian Gordon Fitzell could lay bare a complex of feathery shimmers he titled "Violence."

The program rang with implications, reference and exuberance.

Blackbird may be the enduring synonym of freedom.

Because they perform almost entirely from memory, the players lull listeners into thinking they are the composers, too, but the steely structures and intricate joining are pure architecture in sound.

Proof came in the opening piece - played with music on the stands - of Franco Donatoni's "Arpege." Donatoni could not have known eighth blackbird, but he envisioned music with improvisation to vary its length and breadth, and a percussionist as magical as Matthew Duvall.

Almost everything blackbird has come to be - explosive, delicate, agile, witty - lay on the page. What couldn't have been on the page was the flaring performance, virtuosity taken for granted, which lifted the music high in the air.

The ensemble is theatrical.

The six musicians move toward one another for tight ensemble, and in Derek Bermel's "Coming Together," cellist Nicholas Photinos, facing left, and clarinetist Michael Maccafferri, approaching the stage from the back of the hall, locked in a battle of glissandi for dominance. It was settled as Photinos stood to play, and Maccafferri lay on the floor.

No such struggles were part of Steven Mackey's "Indigenous Instruments" or Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez's "Luciernagas."

Mackey, using no percussion, merged pop styles within deft forms to create high-tension music able to support his marking, "mesmerizing."

Schwantner's big piece, "Rhiannon's Blackbirds," summarized the ensemble's virtuosity: ingenious pairings, lavish sound, pure wizardry.

Copyright 2007 Philadephia Inquirer