Contemporary, But Familiar, Too

Music of Kaija Saariaho, Leon Kirchner,  Joan Tower and others made up the excellent inaugural program of Now! Concerts at the Millerton Library Annex last Saturday afternoon. As I listened, it struck me that we now have a century of music behind us that explored radically different sonorities from the hundreds of years preceding. From Stravinsky and Schönberg to the thorny works of Pierre Boulez, the intricacies of Elliot Carter, the explosions of Ralph Shapey, the soundscapes of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, our ears have been cultivated to the point where the sounds themselves are becoming as familiar as the music of the preceding centuries. And today’s young performers seem perfectly at home with repertoire that in earlier days would have been thought unplayable, as well as unlistenable.

   So although the music was contem-

porary, much of it had a very familiar ring to it. Five excellent musicians carried off the program with great style and seeming ease. The Kalmia String Quartet’s members are still students at Bard College, where they have worked with the renowned composer Joan Tower, and gave a keenly sensitive and dynamic performance of her Quartet No. 4 “Angels,†and the energetic first movement of the Samuel Barber Quartet No. 1, which contains the lyrical and ubiquitous Adagio.

   The Kalmia four, three of whom are brothers, alternated with the superb cellist Sophie Shao, who offered solo works by Saariaho and Benjamin Britten, the former replete with tricky harmonics, and the latter more conventionally lyrical and characteristic of the composer’s keen sense of rhythm, all exquisitely played. And the short Kirchner work, “For Cello Solo,†the most rigorously academic of the afternoon’s music, seemed as comfortable as Brahms in her hands. If the word spreads, Now! Concerts, which hopes to expand to four concerts next season, will need to find a bigger hall for the audience, some of whom drove over an hour for the event.

   For information about future events, go to www.nowconcerts.org.

  

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