A Hip Audience Packs the Hall to Hear Hip Works

The Dutch composer Louis Andriessen is hard to categorize, and that's the way he wants it.  Though he is a leader of the musical avant-garde in Europe, he has a background in jazz and has worked in theater and film.  His rhythmic style has been influenced equally by the metrical vigor of Stravinsky and the lulling repetitions of Minimalism.  And he boldly mixes electronic and traditional instruments in his works.  

The hip eclecticism of Mr Andriessen's music, which was center stage this summer in New York when the Lincoln Center Festival presented the American premiere of his experimental opera Writing to Vermeer, has won him ardent young listeners in Europe.  And on Thursday night a concert of his works performed by the impressive Ensemble Sospeso, a new-music ensemble in New York, attracted an enthusiastic and strikingly young audience to the Miller Theater at Columbia University…

The bracing way Mr Andriessen mixes genres was evident in the opening work, Hout (Wood), for saxophone, marimba, guitar, and piano, composed in 1991.  The instruments, all amplified, play short outbursts of canonic lines in driving 16th-note lines.  But the lines are rhythmically staggered by just one 16th note.  It sounded like four players trying to stay in unison but just slightly off.  The effect was giddy and brilliant.

Tao (The Way) from Trilogy of the Last Day, which received its American premiere, conducted by Rand Steiger, was a spacey, quietly restless work for four softly amplified women's voices, chamber orchestra and solo piano, here Tomoko Mukaiyama, who also played koto and sang softly in the work's blissful final moments…

Disco (1982), for violin (Mark Menzies) and piano (Stephen Gosling), was not what its title would suggest.  It began with the performers' trading incisive, jagged phrases, but segued into a  curiously long middle section in which the pianist struck loud, metallic single notes, one at a time as the violinist played soft floating nothings high above.

The program ended with the world premiere of The New Math(s), in which an ensemble of live musicians and electronics provided music for a grimly funny video by the director, Hal Hartley.  The story, as such, is everyone's nightmare of a high school math class.  Set in a bleak warehouse, a teacher, confounded by the new math, must deal with bored and surly students.  The characters eventually go at each other in fight scenes filmed like hyper-fast, comically violent cartoons.  The music, strangely calm twitches of sound and a soft intoning of a Blake poem (sung by the soprano Susan Narucki), disappeared into the background.  But that was the point.  Mr Andriessen is a composer who knows when to keep his place.

The audience packed the hall.  

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