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part three
part three
Seated Ovation
April 2, 2011
by Will Robin
Ken Ueno’s portrait event, presented by the American Academy in Berlin, exemplified the typical new music concert: a glacial piano piece (Disabitato, given an exacting performance by Heather O’Donnell); a world music piece (the tranquil, slowly unfurling Kizu for Japanese koto and Kyoto Kawamura’s dipping, intimate voice); a crazed, extended technique-laden woodwind piece (the tactile I screamed at the sea until nodes swelled up, then my voice became the resonant noise of the sea for clarinet, played grippingly by Greg Oakes); a radical improvisation (a duet of sustained, expanding growls sung by Ueno himself with Robin Hayword, a specialist in microtonal tuba); a timbral large ensemble work (the eerie, spectral Talus, a concerto for violist Wendy Richman and string ensemble).
The typical new music concert, though, acquires its variety from featuring works by a number of composers. Ueno, as he explained in an on-stage interview, sees his compositional process as a kind of channel surfing between styles, in which each piece embodies its own set of distinct rules. Rather than building towards perfecting a certain style, with individual pieces acting as stepping stones, Ueno captures a certain artistic spirit in each work and moves on. The result is eclectic but also unified, a multiplicity of rhetorics which somehow always feel like Ueno’s own. The best piece of the bunch was Two Hands, a placid work for violist Kim Kashkashian and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, a success as much for its compositional rigor as for its luminous performance—Kashkashian, the dean of American viola, gave each individual gesture a sense of inevitability, the kind of radiant deliberateness one hears in a great reading of Mozart or Bach.
The typical new music concert, though, acquires its variety from featuring works by a number of composers. Ueno, as he explained in an on-stage interview, sees his compositional process as a kind of channel surfing between styles, in which each piece embodies its own set of distinct rules. Rather than building towards perfecting a certain style, with individual pieces acting as stepping stones, Ueno captures a certain artistic spirit in each work and moves on. The result is eclectic but also unified, a multiplicity of rhetorics which somehow always feel like Ueno’s own. The best piece of the bunch was Two Hands, a placid work for violist Kim Kashkashian and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, a success as much for its compositional rigor as for its luminous performance—Kashkashian, the dean of American viola, gave each individual gesture a sense of inevitability, the kind of radiant deliberateness one hears in a great reading of Mozart or Bach.