Oberlin

Led by conductor Tim Weiss and joined by three-time Grammy-award winning sextet eighth blackbird, Oberlin Conservatory's Contemporary Music Ensemble (CME) presented an ambitious and exciting performance on Friday evening, October 4th.

In the days leading up to the concert, a heightened energy spread throughout the conservatory as students, faculty, and community members awaited the concert, billed to fuse together elements of the conservatory's past and present. This contemporary music frenzy could barely be contained, as Warner Concert Hall neared maximum capacity as the concert began.

The evening's program was bookended by two world premieres, works by Oberlin Conservatory faculty Tom Lopez and Peter Swendsen. Lopez's Skipping Stones begins with a hazy soundscape, over which flourishes of pitch are articulated. Dynamics hardly rise above restrained fortes, and phrases never last longer than a few seconds.

This sporadic texture over a serene background was divided by a haunting collaboration between eighth blackbird's clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri and CME flutist Hannah Hammel, performing on various train and slide whistles. Aside from this duet, passages played by members of eighth blackbird did not overlap those by the CME sextet. Through these exchanges, Lopez illustrates the calm effect of a stone grazing successive areas of water before settling.

Ending the concert was Swenden's "Six Ways Through a Glass of Absinthe."  The piece is of intellectual interest, filled with rhetorical and musical cleverness, but as a whole quite stagnant and dull, an anticlimactic way to end an otherwise exciting evening.

Bringing attention to the virtuosity and creativity of eighth blackbird were pieces by Kaija Saariaho, Lisa Kaplan, and Derek Bermel. Saariaho's "Amers" featured eighth blackbird cellist Nicholas Photinos. The piece suffers from a lack of textural variety and direction, but wowed in regards to Photino's incredibly accurate playing and the ensemble's clear musical effects of intense and dangerous maritime associations.

Whirligig, for piano four hands, was composed and performed by eighth blackbird pianist Lisa Kaplan. Assistance at the piano was provided by eighth blackbird members Matthew Duvall and Yvonne Lam, as well as a surprise appearance by Oberlin Professor of Piano Sanford Margolis, Kaplan's former teacher.

Preceding a beautiful duet and boisterous boogie-woogie was an opening movement in which a driving rhythmical sequence ended with the four hands of Kaplan and Lam struggling to fit in a shrinking pitch range until only one note was left.

eighth blackbird then took the stage as a sextet in performance of Bermel's Tied Shifts." The piece was a musical argument, asking members of the ensemble to travel around the stage, physically confronting one another with heavily accented passages.

CME followed with a performance of composer in residence Benjamin Broening's What the Light was Like. This fascinating piece took the audience through different emotions and dynamic ranges, ending with an ominous trumpet tune played over a disturbed and rumbling texture.

As current Oberlin students were joined by alumni to play new works by faculty, the night served as both a celebration of excellence of Oberlin conservatory and as a major success in carving a way for the future and understanding of contemporary classical music.