BMOP season finale is a study in contrasts

By Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe |  May 26, 2004

The final concert of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's eighth season featured a generation of American composers coming into full bloom in a selection of works written since 1989 that you wouldn't be able to hear anyplace else in town. Of the five composers represented, only one, Augusta Read Thomas, has been programmed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, although a couple of the others have had their chamber works played at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.

BMOP founder and artistic director Gil Rose has a genius for programming, so each of the pieces was written in a different and contrasting contemporary style -- for that matter, stylistic diversity within each of the pieces was a defining element of its character. Thomas is the most hard-core modernist of the group, but even her "Aurora," composed for Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic (not, as we had assumed, for the Chicago Symphony, where Thomas was composer-in-residence), is polystylistic. The music mediates between sustained, or singing sounds, and sounds that decay, like those of bells (or of a piano). The piece also mediates between the mysticism of Messiaen and that of Jonathan Harvey.

Thomas's bells and Messiaen's birds don't sound all that different from each other, and the magical close of the piece, with a soprano (Kendra Colton in an unbilled cameo) and temple gongs, invokes Harvey's sound and spiritual world. But the voice is Thomas's own, and it reminds us that mysticism is not something out of this world but instead offers familiar things realigned by the imagination to restore the aura of wonder around them. Ursula Oppens played the piano part with rhythmic precision and an amazing palette of contrasting timbres.

Elena Ruehr's "Sky Above Clouds" is a minimalist piece, but it is about the surprise of shapes that evolve and outlines that are limned with kaleidoscopically changing colors. David Rakowski's "Persisent Memory" is basically an elegy, both collective and individual; the music transforms into many emotions but always cradles its origins within it. This is an eloquent and beautiful piece.

Stephen Hartke's Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, "Landscapes With Blues," is a crowd-pleaser. The three movements trace the evolution of the blues from its African origins to the American South and finally into the nightclubs of the urban North. The piece represents a rethinking of what Gershwin sought to do by combining classical and popular elements 70 years ago; the slow night music is both a precise evocation of the Mississippi Delta and a tribute to Bartok. Richard Stoltzman, in a pied-piper jacket with appliques of African fabric, was a virtuosic and intense soloist, both nostalgic and in-your-face. Evan Ziporyn was in the unenviable position of having a premiere begin after 10 p.m., but his 15-minute "War Chant" triumphantly survived the ordeal.

The piece is literally about an airplane ride, but it is also about the way euphemisms and corporate coddling mask but do not conceal wild and ferocious forces at work on the fringes of consciousness. The piece is both funny and terrifying, like the world it mirrors. All the performances were first-rate, and Rose leads every piece as if it were his favorite; the audience was hip, curious, responsive. In a curiously clueless gesture, there were floral deliveries to the soloists but not to the composers who made their success possible, although the composers have every other reason to be gratefulto one of their best friends, BMOP.