By NILS VAN OTTERLOO
Staff Writer
 

From the first piece to the last, this ensemble made no pretences of what it was here to do: entertain. Which, for someone who was taught that all contemporary music was dull and utterly drained of musical life, is a really refreshing concept. There was hardly time for the audience to gain its composure before the music would set off on some wildly fantastic and engaging new mood.

This ensemble impressed not just because of its immense musicality and exellently chosen program, but also because of the immense range of sound such a small group of performers were able to generate. Formed in 1987 to create the "Bang On A Can Festival", the ensemble was created as a touring vestige of said festival, and its members were culled from numerous excellent performers who have been a part of the festival which runs yearly in New York City.

The leader of the ensemble, Evan Ziporyn, played soprano saxophone and contrabass clarinet, and is a major leader in Gamelan Orchestra music in America. Maya Beiser, an Israeli-American trained in the auspices of a touring concert musician, played cello sensuously, with many stunning solo passages which knocked the audience out of their seats. David Cossin, a native of Queens, played some impressive percussion, though his role within the ensemble was more support oriented. Robert Black played brake drums and acoustic bass to uproarious acclaim during the solo piece "Failing". Lisa Moore astonished many with her amazing technical control of the piano, and particularly impressed during Rzewski's "Piano Piece #4". The ensemble was rounded out by Mark Stewart on electric guitar, who must be given credit for appearing in such a guitar-hostile environment as a contemporary classical music ensemble.

The style indication of the first piece on the program called on the performers to play "Ominous Funk". Written by David Lang and entitled, "Cheating, Lying, Stealing", this piece was ominous indeed, employing angular, syncopated juxtopositions which drew a very fine line between melody, harmony and pure rhythm. The most interesting part of this piece was the percussive acompaniment played on brake drums (like from cars), kick drum, tom-toms, and marimba which created a very somber tone for the piece. The melody was taken care of by Ms. Beiser and Mr. Ziporyn on cello and contrabass clarinet, respectively, and chilled the audience to the core.

The second piece, "Lick", by Julia Wolfe was equally captivating. It began sparse and phrenetic, with harsh and disonant textures. This degenerated into a static one-note harmony which really began to rock in an out there contemporary classical-type way. The bottom fell out when the cello and bass abandoned their traditional roles and played upper harmonics with very sparse accompaniment. This was followed by shear craziness marked by biting pizzicato passages and wild percussion.

The last piece before the group took a break was "Electric Counterpoint", a work for solo guitar and prerecorded accompaniment by Steve Reich. Although it was performed ably by Mr. Stewart, this piece suffered from a monotony and running on of the mouth which certain of Steve Reich's least compelling works share. It seemed to lack the directionality and sureness of statement which made the first two pieces of the show so compelling.

After the break, Ms. Moore played a rapturous solo piece for piano by Frederic Rzewski. In the program notes Ms. Moore described the piece as the closest you can get to an exploding piano, and the audience was noticeably affected by the experience. The piece begins with just the top note of the piano's register to which another note is added, then another, and another until there is one huge cascading wall of sound reverberating throughout the concert hall. This was truly a concert hall piano piece to end all concert hall piano pieces in terms of audacity/originality of expression.

This was followed by "The Low Quartet" written by Michael Gordon for the the low instruments of the world, and arranged for guitar, cello, bass, and contrabass clarinet. It is hard to say what about this quartet makes it "low" other than the instruments it was written for, because it strayed quite severely from these instruments traditional registers. Parts of it seemed to be heavily influenced by Yiddish music, with amazingly pronounced digressions of playing dynamics ranging from the incredibly soft and plangent to the spectacularly wild and disonant.

The best piece of the evening in terms of raw entertainment value came when Mr. Black stepped forward to play the piece "Failing" for solo acoustic bass by Tom Johnson. Subtitled "an extremely difficult piece for solo acoustic bass" this piece involved Mr. Black reciting a speech relating to the performance of the piece while playing an increasingly tongue-twisting solo line on top of the speech, though without drawing any specific attention to either. Mr. Black added a comic's panache to this piece and only occasionaly let slip that he was failing...which is to say that he succeeded in failing to fail to fail, which is in the true nature of the piece. At the end of the piece, which required him to ad lib his speech while the solo went on, Mr. Black cleverly cited the Bates Bobcat Football Team for "failing to fail" to great applause.

The best composition of the evening was saved for last. "Arupua", by Hermeto Pascal, the father of modern contemporary music coming from Brazil, was an impressive piece by any standard, with grooving Afro-Cuban rhythms transplanted through the arrangement by Mr. Ziporyn into this chamber ensemble setting. "Arupua" translated means "bumblebees", and this piece affected the many moods and behaviors of these fierce creatures, ranging from alien crescendoes, to John Zorn-like fits of wild screeching abandon, to absolute rampaging storms of fury with every instrumentalist completely giving his or her all towards some unrealizable climax.

For those in attendance this concert was an entertaining mishmash of different styles and instrumental colors, blending together to create a whole which was greater than the sum of the individual parts, though it could be found unsettling to some more tender ears. During the encore Mr. Ziporyn once again plugged the Bates Football team before launching into a fairly tongue in cheek rendition of Kurt Cobain's anthem, "Lithium", which suffered slightly from a certain tightness in the performers' style, though some of the more loud, distorted passages were rendered interesting through their transposition to the all-acoustic chamber ensemble setting.