LENOX, Mass. — The Boston Symphony Orchestra is defined by traditions, and the recognition the annual Festival of Contemporary Music brings to active composers and musicians is one of them.
During the contemporary festival’s long weekend July 23–27, the Tanglewood Music Center Fellows executed a weekend’s worth of marvels. Conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen curated this year’s festival, programming much of his own music, adding inviting glimpses into other composers.
But Tanglewood is also serving a big bowl of awkward this summer. BSO music director Andris Nelsons has been fired, the BSO musicians and audiences are in revolt, and “Reinstate Nelsons” yard signs dot the Berkshires. President and CEO Chad Smith continues to look like the bad guy, and Salonen’s presence adds yet another scoop of awkward. Smith and Salonen thrived together on the Los Angeles Philharmonic team decades ago. Speculation? Yeah, it’s here.
Salonen let his musical choices talk during the festival and quieted any discussion with his focus. He put together five superbly accessible programs, including a dozen rigorous new works — every single one engaging and provocative.
Maya Miro Johnson’s bruises (disambiguation), for piano and piano interior, mixed innovative musical concepts with an arrow-straight device: exploring the question of what happens when you age. Treating the melody and the instrument like the human body, a duet offered a tune and slowly battered it. bruises had August Baik and Ariel Mo play the tune and then damage it; Baik stood alongside the piano, peppering the piano with ping-pong balls, mallets, his hands, and dampening it with a scarf. Some theatrics pursued the theme as well: Bruises heal, but things change. As they played, the melody suffered more and more. The concept and performance were touchingly effective.
Gabriella Smith’s Anthozoa had Kronos Quartet energy: world-music influences, alternate techniques, utilizing instruments in all the ways they can make sound. This foursome — piano trio with percussion — was heavily percussive, with a moving deep groove, all inspired by underwater field recordings. Smith, an active naturalist, made recordings of coral reefs with a mike dangling from a surfboard.
Alisson Kruusmaa’s Mesmerism was a tasty miniature for marimba and piano, two instruments that blend together sweetly. That made the instruments morph into one sound, with the blurring enhancing the hypnotic intent. Kruusmaa’s wasn’t the only quiet, inward-looking piece. Hannah Ishizaki’s piano trio Float/Shake, reveling in dance rhythms, worked splendidly, featuring lots of pizzicato and piano plucking.
Anna Berg’s string quintet remnants of confetti unexploded used Webern-like miniatures and mosquito textures to dabble in various forms, leaving them mostly incomplete; it ends in a five-voice fugue figure that only gets to three. Nico Muhly’s pristine arrangements of two William Byrd motets will be played by generations, as they were beautifully by this generation.
Music from Salonen and his Nordic counterparts peppered the programs. Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you, with Lauren Smith conducting and featuring luminous soprano Alexandra Henderson, is an atmospheric soundscape for voice and orchestra. A voice-as-instrument setting quietly forms the story of Ophelia into existence. Henderson sang each of the three demanding movements in deep poetic character.
Mature works by Hillborg, Saariaho, Lindberg, Ligeti (a fascinating ’70s piece, Melodien), and Lutoslawski (a late character piece, Chantefleur et Chantefables) were performed. Salonen included four settings of poet A.R. Ammons by Steven Stucky, a frequent collaborator in Los Angeles. Two sturdy and characterful baritones, Fellows Holden Turner and Raphaël Laden-Guindon, realized the poems.
Arabesques for Olly (a remembrance of longtime Tanglewood mentor, composer Oliver Knussen) also worked splendidly with violin drone Isabel Tannenbaum alone in the balcony and cellist Han Lee center stage, playing with surprising engagement to the drone.
Salonen conducted his cello concerto, a virtuosic turn for Finnish cellist Senja Rummukainen and electronics. Other works by Salonen had far-flung roots: Saltat sobrius, a theme treatment taken from medieval polyphonist Pérotin; Fog, a fantasia on the Prelude from Bach’s Partita in E, which violinist Matthew Cone performed dramatically from the upper mezzanine in Ozawa Hall.
The Festival of Contemporary Music began in the 1950s, rooted in adventurous music-making from the beginning. Salonen’s version avoided an abundance of “ink-still-wet” compositions, replacing many of those choices with living but established composers, including himself. But the flavor of the festival makes noise in any possible way, and its value as a snapshot of music here-and-now remains.
