Laura Jackson News

Reviews

21 July 2003, Boston Globe, page B7
Review of Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music
by Richard Dyer

MUSIC REVIEW

LENOX -- The offical theme of this year's Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, chosen by coordinator Robert Spano, is ''Sacred and Profane.'' But you could also dub the festival ''Ingratiating and Irritating,'' and the categories don't always divide the way you'd think -- music that tries too hard to please becomes uningratiating.

This was certainly true of Aaron Jay Kernis's ''Brilliant Sky, Infinite Sky,'' which suffers from the composer's youthful sweet tooth (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Kernis was 30 when he wrote it back in 1990). Questions of life and death are addressed in music fashioned from Marshmallow Fluff, and not even the talented lyric baritone Daniel Cilli, exceptionally able conductor Michael Morgan, and the fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center could bring any nutritional value to all those calories.

Boston's Russian-born Jakov Jakoulov is an unclassifiable musician (and demon pianist). His Viola Concerto draws on a varied background as gypsy musician, concert artist, academic, church organist, and nightclub pianist. The first two movements wander discursively between present and past; the last movement, ''Hymn,'' displays a fascinating darkly dancing peasant energy. The expert and committed soloist was the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Michael Zaretsky and Laura Jackson proved a conductor to watch.

Automotive troubles deprived me of the chance to hear the first movement of Jennifer Higdon's string quartet ''Voices.'' The second movement, ''Soft Enlacing,'' had a mysterious, subtly shifting musing quality before she helped herself to the sticky Fluff jar for the final movement, ''Grace.''

Augusta Read Thomas's ''Spirit Musings'' is exploratory and rewarding. All music moves sequentially through time, but each movement of this piece seems entirely and simultaneously present while the composer leads the listener's ear around and over it. The second movement investigates an interval, the third a kind of whorl of sound; the whole piece is like a silver globe struck by the sun. Jackson again excelled, as did the solo violinist Marc Rovetti, who played with pinpoint accuracy of intonation.

Late Saturday afternoon the amazing chamber choir the New York Virtuoso Singers, under the direction of Harold Rosenbaum, sang choral music by Gyorgy Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki, and four Americans, Charles Wuorinen, William Kingswood, Sean H. Carson, and John Harbison. Ligeti's ''Lux aeterna'' (1966) is a 20th-century classic, and it was sung with luminous rapture. Most of the other pieces borrowed from its sound world without adding much to it, beyond a certain modishness (deconstruction in Kingswood, irony and political commentary in Carson's ''Kyrie, L. A. Is on Fire.'') Wuorinen's piece did bridge the Renaissance and today, and Harbison's ''Concerning Them That Are Asleep'' sounded the most original of all because the composer had assimilated so many lessons of the past into his own questioning and answering.