Xenakis Leaves a Mystery About His Music's Source

Iannis Xenakis died in February, but his music goes on loud with life. On Friday night at the Miller Theater the Ensemble Sospeso presented five works that were different in time and different in sound, but all had the same raw energy. Some excellent performances, conducted by Rand Steiger, fully communicated it.

Xenakis never learned to do things nicely. Even in his 60's — in the ensemble piece Thallein ("Burgeoning") that gave this concert its robust finale — he was out there, with stomping reiterations and fierce mismatches of instrumental tone. He kept his immediacy and lack of self-consciousness, to the extent that one cannot be quite sure in this piece whether the strong suggestions of The Rite of Spring are deliberate or accidental…

Xenakis's achievement was to find a primitivism that was all his own, and that led to works of vigor and diversity without peril to his freshness. Zyia sounds like a dead end. You would think this was a composer who had to learn something. Instead he had to forget better.

The victory of his forgetting was proved right after in N'shima, even if the performance was over- amplified. Again vocal and instrumental sounds are combined in irregular verses, but now the music sounds ancient and undiscovered. Two mezzo-sopranos chant, yell and growl with the hot accompaniment of horns and trombones in pairs and a stray cello, a combination completely unexpected and completely right.

Dmaathen, for oboe and percussion, had Jacqueline Leclair precise in blowing chords and astonishing in creating a high whistle, to powerful accompaniment from Thomas Kolor. Palimpsest featured superfast, sparkling and rightly objective piano solos from Stephen Gosling and some glorious Xenakis grunge.

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