http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/ar...gewanted=print
Music Review | 'Bang on a Can All-Stars'
Melodic Inventions, Frenzied to Calm
By
ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Bang on a Can, the collective of composers, performers and activists who champion hip contemporary music, began almost 20 years ago with an all-inclusive festival. Marathons and festivals are still the main attractions of this enterprising outfit.
But the festivals are sometimes inclusive to a fault. Concerts by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a roster of six elite performers, tend to be more discriminating, the classy events. The All-Stars program on Tuesday night at Zankel Hall was no exception. Four of the six new and recent works performed were inventive and captivating, a high satisfaction quotient in any field of art.
Fred Frith’s beautifully conceived “Snakes and Ladders” is set in motion with a repetitive series of pensive, bluesy piano chords, nudged now and then by the bass and electric guitar, and woven through with melodic bits in the clarinets and cello. What keeps the music from becoming excessively soothing are staggered rhythms in the percussion and abrupt melodic flights that keep spiraling upward — the “Snakes and Ladders” of the title. Eventually the flights turn fitful and skittish, almost pointillistic, until the piece winds down, thins out and ends in wistful calm.
The versatile and highly skilled All-Stars — Robert Black (bass), David Cossin (percussion), Lisa Moore (piano), Mark Stewart (electric guitar), Wendy Sutter (cello), Evan Ziporyn (clarinets) — seemed particularly engaged by the next work, two pieces from the “Opere della Musica Povera” series by Martin Bresnick, a mentor to several founding members of Bang on a Can, including Mr. Ziporyn. In these scores, inspired by grimly poignant tales from Kafka, Mr. Bresnick strives to create astutely structured and organic works using only minimal materials.
“The Bucket Rider,” with its delicate pedal tones, murky sonorities and a chorale-like pattern of pungent chords, was a mesmerizing prelude to “Be Just!,” a breathless work, like some wild toccata that began and ended with the terrifying thump of rattling chains dropped upon a bass drum.
Four studies originally created for player piano by the iconoclastic American composer Conlon Nancarrow, who died in 1997, were heard in recent arrangements by Mr. Ziporyn. Nancarrow’s evocations of boogie-woogie, swing, wailing jazz, African rhythms and his trademark frenetic pummeling are made more explicit in these colorful and effective arrangements, though you lose some of the honky-tonk plainness of the originals.
The composer and clarinetist Don Byron describes his jazzy, punchy and pulsating “Show Him Some Lub” as a confessional piece. Mixed into the instrumental textures are the amplified voices of the performers giving answers to personal questions about their ancestors, ethnic backgrounds and aspirations. The audience heard only the answers, not the questions, so the flow of disconnected words, though affecting, became just another musical element.
For me Julia Wolfe’s “Big, Beautiful, Dark and Scary” was a tiresome din of perpetual motion and swelling cluster chords. Thurston Moore’s “Stroking Piece # 1” was also blunt, blaring and orgasmic. Both works shook the place, though, and earned some lusty cheers. I wouldn’t be surprised if the aural onslaught loosened up the granite walls surrounding this underground hall, just in case
Carnegie Hall is thinking of excavating some more to expand the place.