Composer Xenakis still out there
At a time when many 20th-century composers have lost their aura of radicalism and begun to seem approachable, Iannis Xenakis resists the trend. Xenakis – who was born in Romania to Greek parents and died in 2001 at the age of 78 – was an engineer by training, and he created a compositional technique based on abstruse mathematical theories. Whether this gives his works their forbidding, almost angry sensibility is hard to know, but time seems not to have softened their sturm und drang.
His music also packs a visceral punch, as Thursday’s “Composer Portrait” at the Gardner Museum by the International Contemporary Ensemble amply demonstrated. “He’ll hit you right where it counts,” quipped guest percussionist and conductor Steven Schick before launching into the solo percussion piece “Psappha,” in which a complex rhythm devolves into single, thunderous beats separated by long stretches of silence, before gradually reassembling itself into a flurry of motion and sound.
In the aptly named “Akanthos” (”Thorns”), Xenakis pushes the idea of treating the voice as an instrument to its limit. A soprano sings, speaks, and vocalizes wordless syllables against a noisy instrumental backdrop that includes glissandi, quarter tones, and strings played on the bridge. Despite the constant shifts in color and texture, the music seemed to emanate from and return to a single note, giving it an oddly unified feel.
“Palimpsest” is a kind of mini-piano concerto. It was the most complex piece of the evening, presenting a tangle of intersecting lines and rhythms that came almost too fast for the ears and brain to process them. The work takes its title from a manuscript that has been erased and written over; true to the image, some of the music had to be experienced in memory, as new information arrived to cover it over.
The closing work, “Échange,” sounded like the accompaniment to some strange, ancient ritual. It began in long, drawn-out sonorities for a solo bass clarinet, echoed by the ensemble in low, thickly dissonant sonorities. A lengthy cadenza leads to a vigorous, brightly scored section, and the piece ends in mechanistic, hammered repetitions of a single, jarring chord.
Whereas other entries in the “Composer Portraits” have left a listener hungering for more, it was hard to escape the impression that one concert of Xenakis goes a long way. But that was certainly no fault of the performers. The ICE played with astonishing polish and intensity, and all the soloists – soprano Tony Arnold in “Akanthos,” pianist Cory Smythe in “Palimpsest” and clarinetist Joshua Rubin in “Échange” – were excellent. Schick guided those three works with a deep understanding of this composer’s demanding, esoteric voice.
