In his review of "Shimmers and Thrills," Joshua Kosman (San Francisco Chronicle) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/21/DDNSTFUT3.DTL&hw=maresz+entrelacs&sn=001&sc=1000 chose Yan Maresz's Entrelacs as the concert's highlight.
Executive Director Adam Frey writes: I love the piece too! I first got interested in Maresz's music about six years ago when I heard the trumpet player David Bithell play Maresz's Metallics at a concert of the Berkeley Contemporary Music Players conducted by David Milnes. In 2005, I met Maresz at the Musica Festival in Strasbourg, and it was soon after that that he sent us Ensemble Intercontemporain's CD of his music. For David Milnes and me, the piece Entrelacs jumped off the CD as being perfect for our ensemble, and our musicians seemed to agree, although they pointed out that the technical challenges would be daunting. They were right! The piece demanded an unusual amount of practice and rehearsal, but in the end we all thought it was worth it. It's one that the group would love to play again, perhaps in a touring situation.
As for the rest of Joshua Kosman's review, I would take exception to his implication that we intended for the audience to focus mainly on the Swedish music. Long experience, including data from annual audience surveys, has taught us that every piece speaks to some audience members and not to others. On a varied concert program, there has never been anything approaching consensus among audience members about which piece was most striking, affecting, interesting, or exciting. But perhaps this was just a way for Kosman to give his review a dramatic structure.
I did feel that he missed the value of the piece that Liza Lim wrote for us. To me, it is a really beautiful piece and one that, like the Philippe Leroux premiere we presented in October, breaks new ground in the way that it effectively integrates sounds that we might once have thought of as "noise." But then I have the advantage of having heard the piece in rehearsals and at the Contemporary Insights performance on November 18, and also of having heard Lim speak several times about the music.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
SF Chronicle Review of Shimmers and Thrills
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3 comments:
The Maresz was one of my favorites,too. I also loved "Shimmer Songs."
Maresz's music has almost no rhythmic interest. It is just a barrage of notes in quick succession, like being attacked by a hypomanic chainsaw.
Devlin Thompson
I agree Adam -- I really loved the Shimmer Songs piece by Lim. I was struck by the complexity, layers and textures within the piece. I was also fascinated by the cross-cultural process by which she developed the piece (described during the pre-concert talk).
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