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The Tank as cathedral: ICE’s David Bowlin recites Sciarrino, Berio, and Nono

Written by CJH
The Soundmind Review original link
April 30, 2009

My new friend Dave (different Dave than the performer) summarized it ideally I think: It's amazing to feel like you're hearing the best thing in the City.

This punctuation—uttered in the otherwise unearthly pause immediately after violinist David Bowlin's fingers had completed their ineffable glidings through the evening's two selections from Sciarrino's 6 Capricci per violino—seemed to sum up not only his performance of those pieces, but for me the entire evening. For those of us among the packed audience lucky enough to witness International Contemporary Ensemble's founding violinist, David Bowlin's command performance of solo works by Italian masters Salvatore Sciarrino, Luciano Berio, and Luigi Nono at The Tank last Thursday night, it was a rare and special experience indeed. What happened between the strings and Mr. Bowlin's fingers was, at least to my new friend and I, without equal in the musical life of the city that night.

Mr. Bowlin, on loan to NYC from his Oberlin professorship, spoke briefly and charmingly about the program, offering succinct bits of history and context before launching into the onslaught of an evening. Though Sciarrino gives appropriate homage to another, much older Italian composer who himself wrote a popular series of virtuoso works for the solo violin, Sciarrino's music is anything but sycophantic to tradition—with the occasional exception, almost the entirety of the two Sciarrino Capricci selections were made up of relatively fast harmonic-pressure pitches, with a few expressive held passages and the occasional fully-depressed note jumping out to us like little anchors perhaps to help keep us from floating away entirely. It's like Sciarrino had enlisted his mind's sponge to help wipe away the ghosts from the old strings, and then rearranged the fragments and ethers into a game where it appears to us that the fingers are chasing the ineffable through the impossible—like four horsemen attempting somehow to catch and hold down the satyric sound. But it's infinite and can't be restrained, and eventually the struggle ends as the music run off into the streets—the sound and the glittering violin mutually consenting to go their separate ways for the time being.

After the two selections by Sciarrino—to whom, incidentally, Luigi Nono's saga on the second half of the program was dedicated—came Luciano Berio's monolithic Sequenza VIII. Not for the faint of heart, Luciano's slippery and gorgeous obstacle course was however and again no match for Mr. Bowlin. And this time it was another front-row friend, Jessica, who summed it up perfectly—stunned at the close of the work she mumbled something to the effect that it was like hearing an entire history of Rome compressed into a piece of music, and it struck me again how it seems so often that hyperbole is in fact the most honest way to express certain experiences. And what is it about this piece? The truth is that I have maybe a handful of best guesses and quasi-worthy assumptions, but when I try to think about how one might sum it up, the best I can do would be to say that the idea of a work like this, from a series of works like this... that the idea of writing a series of pieces for many of the major orchestral instruments where each would be both each a fantastic work of music in and of itself and in addition each in some way a compendium of instrument-specific possibilities…that this idea seems on its face in a sense to me impossible. But I hear Bowlin and I hear what Berio left and I think that Berio decided to do the ridiculous, and that he was the kind of composer wherein by doing this, by simply making this decision, he would make it no longer ridiculous; that Berio was the kind of artist who could turn the ridiculous into the possible. And so to hear a player like Bowlin pirouette through Berio's answer to the violin in a context like this is, it would seem to me, to participate in a very special thing.

After a brief intermission, the last piece on the program existed—if you know Nono and in particular the questioning La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura you'll understand why finding the ideal adjective for this could be difficult, as an amazing performance of this work could seem to exclude the classic catalogue of descriptors (NB—if you don't know this piece please listen to the Kremer/Sciarrino recording on Kairos). La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura—for violin, eight eight-channel prerecorded tapes, and eight to ten music stands, subtitled Madrigale per più "caminantes" con Gidon Kremer, violino solo, 8 nastri magnetici, da 8 a 10 leggii—was written with and for violin virtuoso Gidon Kremer in 1988 and 1989. Nono tape recorded Mr. Kremer playing a variety of pre-arranged sounds on violin, their conversations during the rehearsals, etc., etc., and then proceeded to take these compendia of noise and music back into the studio for dissection and re-composition. The resultant work consisted of Kremer playing alone, responding to the taped sequences, which would be manipulated and orchestrated through the eight speakers around the room by a sound engineer cum co-performer as the concert took place. As the eight tapes are triggered, the violinist walks among eight to ten music stands (I believe it was eight on Thursday) and s/he performs from the various distributed scores at the various stands around the room in whatever order s/he chooses.

I could talk far too much about this piece, and in fact probably already have, so without going on much further for now we'll just say that Mr. Bowlin gave himself over to the work entirely and in doing so permitted the creation of something that for me at least only very occasionally happens at concerts, when the music and the space together become something like mystical. With ICE's own MacGyver and tech wizard Mr. Joshua Rubin riding shotgun with a very nuanced and sensitive orchestration of the live electronics and de facto invisible half of the counterpoint from back behind the proverbial curtain, David Bowlin simultaneously encapsulated Nono's wanderer, dramaturge, composer, and performer. But most of all, Mr. Bowlin was and is a musician whose relationship with the violin and with music is something that has the ability to still make my jaded jaw drop and hang embarrassingly.

Claire Chase—ICE's dynamic ED and resident Alexandra the Great—noted something after the show that struck me as well: that a black box theatre like The Tank really feels like the best and most appropriate place for a concert of these pieces. The Tank, now relocated in the 45th Street Theatre in Hell's Kitchen (354 W. 45th Street between 8th and 9th – http://www.thetanknyc.org/) is a gritty cool black box style theater seating forty, and indeed it felt perfect—fundamental and stripped down and true. And again I have to agree and believe her words were stolen from my little brain before I had a chance to think for myself, and I think again of Papa Emerson when he said that In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Yeah, so it goes.

And my buddy Dave was right as well—this was a rare and special experience and like so many jewels in the city only a handful of fortunate souls, he and I among them, were fortunate enough to hear Mr. Bowlin's performance last Thursday. And I have to admit here in closing that I am not an entirely unbiased party—I am fortunate to have many friends in ICE and a great respect for what they do, and I already love these works and these composers—admittedly so. So then here's my disclaimer so I can sleep tonight: I am not entirely objective, far from it, but in the end I feel compelled to try at least to capture a little bit of this little transient evening, this great performance in the city, maybe out of little more than my own sense of justice. But then maybe I try to delude myself again, and dream that in my bias stands my real review: since I'm writing this now simply because the concert was so good that indeed I believe that someone had to.