AMOC brings blast of silence to music of Sciarrino, Hersch at TIME:SPANS
The ensemble performing works by Salvatore Sciarrino and Michael Hersch as part of the TIME:SPANS festival was called the American Modern Opera Company. But the result was more bracingly modern than conventionally operatic Wednesday night at the DiMenna Center.
This “company of creators” has been defying convention in music, dance, writing and staging for almost a decade now. So it made sense that baritone Ty Bouque could be the compelling central figure in Sciarrino’s Stupori (Amazements) without delivering a single aria or barcarolle. The drama of this work, and also of Hersch’s Carrion-Miles to Purgatory, was entirely—sometimes fiercely—inner-directed.
Composer Sciarrino described his setting of highly eclectic, enigmatic texts for baritone, flute, violin and percussion not as a song cycle but “six readable silences.” And in fact, Bouque performed almost the entire half hour of Stupori in various shades of pianissimo, allowing his gleaming baritone to ring forth only once or twice–a remarkable (one might say stupefying) feat of vocal discipline and breath support.
The words he was singing, derived from such wildly divergent sources as an ancient gnostic Christian vision, a Japanese haiku and a graffito scratched on a wall in Urbino, seemed to have dramatic potential, but in this piece they felt instead like echoes in a great silence.
The performance was not without theatrical touches, such as lights fading to black between sections, the singer changing his location on the stage, and the eye-catching array of gong, bass drum, marimba and other percussion, which the composer described as “exaggeratedly large instruments, relics of a symphony orchestra, left on the chamber-music stage.”
With discreet but constant gestures as he sang, Bouque seemed at first to be conducting his colleagues, then to be conducting himself, and finally to be doing a subtle dance, shaping the words in the air as he sang them.
In keeping with the singer’s delivery, Jonny Allen wielded his array of percussion instruments with the utmost discretion—a glow of marimba here, a hiss of bowed cymbal there—until the score called for a brief moment of Chinese-opera-style clanging cymbals and squealing flute before returning to its usual hush.
Aside from those rare outbursts, flutist Emi Ferguson supported the singer with soft colorations to match his voice, from liquid to hazy, from buzzing to breathy. At one point she detached the head joint of her instrument and made wind sounds with it.
Violinist Miranda Cuckson played sparingly, smooth-toned and expressive even in pianissimo, senza vibrato. Her passage of two-note sighing phrases at the piece’s midpoint was especially touching.
Having closed Sciarrino’s piece with a whole section in unrelenting pianissimo, Cuckson returned with cellist Coleman Itzkoff to begin Carrion-Miles to Purgatory with very long notes, soft almost beyond audibility. Each of the work’s 13 pieces was inspired by an excerpt from Robert Lowell’s long poem Lord Weary’s Castle—passages that composer Hersch allowed, with some ambivalence, to be printed in this concert’s program. (The composer needn’t have worried—the audience sat in near-total darkness throughout the performance, making “following along” all but impossible.)
A peek at those Lowell lines when the lights were on revealed imagery every bit as dark and pungent as the title Hersch lifted from them. Given this composer’s reputation for sudden mood swings in his music from tender sensuality to extreme violence, one might expect the poet’s texts to touch off a Herschian storm of grand—even operatic—proportions.
If so, one would be wrong. This music dealt in predominantly adagio tempos, soft dynamics and hesitant dialogue between the two instruments. But as the short pieces unfolded, the players’ long bow strokes dug deeper into the strings and impassioned dissonances swelled, only to drop to super-pianissimo in one of this composer’s characteristic sudden shifts.
As usual for him, Hersch achieved his emotional effects without resorting to “enhanced” playing techniques. An occasional drip-drip of left-hand violin pizzicato, or a sul ponticello whisper in the cello, sufficed. Otherwise, he did it the old-fashioned way: exploring extreme high and low registers, setting string tones in vibrant (but non vibrato) interaction, letting the dissonant intervals roar.
Cuckson and Itzkoff had the discipline and sure intonation to create Hersch’s unique sonic landscape and sustain it through many pages of soft music to the vanishing pianissimo conclusion. Even if one had Lowell’s tough, vivid images in mind, one would look in vain for anything pictorial about this music. Rather, the artists’ triumph was in realizing the composer’s spiritual response to words on the page.
Note: Wednesday’s performance of the Hersch piece was billed as its New York premiere. Not the case since New York Classical Review reviewed the same work a decade ago—also played by Cuckson with cellist Mariel Roberts.
TIME:SPANS continues with The Alarm Will Sound performing in vain by Georg Friedrich Haas, 7:30 p.m. Friday at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, 450 W. 37th Street. timespans.org
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