Reviews

Sunday, 20 July 2003, The Berkshire Eagle
Review of Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music

Parallel Universes at Tanglewood
By Andrew L. Pincus
Special to The Eagle

LENOX
On Friday afternoon, the contemporary festival presented works by four composers who had three things in common: All are Americans within hailing distance of age 40, all were present for the occasion, and all had thoughts worth hearing. Tanglewood Music Center students (discreetly reinforced by a few ringers) supplied the strongly expressive performances.

It would be hard to plug any of the selections into the slots of "The Sacred and the Profane," the festival's theme. Perhaps closest was Jakov Jakoulov's Viola Concerto No. 2 (2000), which invokes ancient Greek poetry and ritual in music that seems at once ancient and new.

The incantatory solo part was played by BSO violist Michael Zaretsky, for whom the work was written. Conducting fellow Laura Jackson led a chamber orchestra of piano, harpsichord and strings with a sure hand.

Jakoulov is a composer with something urgent to say and an original language to say it in.

If Jakoulov spoke from the gut, Aaron Jay Kernis came from the heart in "Brilliant Sky, Infinite Sky," a 1990 work for baritone, violin, piano and percussion.

An improbable conflation of texts by four writers, the four movements nevertheless coalesce into an affirmation of life amid harbingers of doom. Gleaming sonorities underpin a declaimed and sung baritone solo, delivered handsomely by Daniel Cilli with strong support by violinist Zhongling Li and staff conductor Michael Morgan.

Works by Jennifer Higdon and Augusta Read Thomas came more from the imagination than urgency of message. Higdon's "Voices" (1993), in movements aptly titled "Blitz," "Soft Enlacing" and "Grace," pours new wine into the old bottles of the string quartet.

Thomas is one of the music center's most noted composition graduates, having held many important positions and received important commissions.

Her "Spirit Musings" (1996), for violin and chamber orchestra, is one of her evocatively titled and conceived instrumental pieces. The three movements are all slow, with the violin weaving a continuous rhapsodic line over bursts and clusters of orchestral color. Marc Rovetti, a TMC alumnus, played the solo part with conviction. Jackson conducted with equal effect.