Gentleness with Just a Touch of Spikiness

A fascination with varied, shifting textures.

The Ensemble Sospeso, which formed in Seattle four years ago and is now based in New York, is playing several of these concerts, and on Saturday evening, Jeffrey Milarsky conducted the group in the series opener, a program devoted to works by Sir Harrison Birtwistle.

As Sir Harrison's music goes, this was something of an oldies evening: the most recent work, Silbury Air, was composed in 1977. Still, La Plage: Eight Arias of Remembrance, a vocal work from 1972, was given a belated American premiere, and although Tragoedia (1965) is a pivotal work in Sir Harrison's career, it is rarely heard in New York.

The earliest work on the program was Précis (1960), a short solo piano work that was given an incisive reading by Steve Gosling. To the limited degree one can generalize about Sir Harrison's work, this one is uncharacteristic: it presents distinct groups of spiky lines and quick bursts, separated by silences. One can hear the roots of Sir Harrison's compositional approach here, if only because Précis is decidedly nonnarrative.

Sir Harrison's music is about sound itself, but abstraction comes in many flavors. In this composer's case, a fascination with varied, shifting textures and interlocking rhythms keeps the ear engaged. In Silbury Air especially, the interplay of the strings, winds, harps and percussion, each unfolding at a different speed, created the sense of a complex mechanism. Where there are harsh elements—the stabbing flute figures in Tragoedia, for example, or some of the harmonic fabric of Silbury Air—an underlying lyricism provides a sense of compensating balance.

Harshness, in fact, was a less salient feature of the program than an alluring gentleness. In Tragoedia and Silbury Air this is an intermittent quality, offered episodically between more aggressive, complicated sections and usually coming when a release of the accumulating tensions is most needed. La Plage, which is a setting of a text by Alain Robbe-Grillet, is a gentle work from start to finish. Three clarinets, piano and vibraphone create an atmospheric haze, over which the soprano line sometimes floats hauntingly, and sometimes hangs in short melismatic bursts... 

Ensemble Sospeso's… expertise served Sir Harrison's music well on Saturday and left one looking forward to their surveys of music by Tristan Murail, Magnus Lindberg, Wolfgang Rihm and Gyorgy Ligeti later in the season.

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