The NY Phil­har­monic hosted another “blogger night” for its new contem­po­rary music series, CONTACT!, on Friday. I was espe­cially eager to go for a few reasons. I knew two of the composers person­ally (Sean and Nico) and was eager to see what they‘d come up with for the Phil­har­monic; I‘m also just inter­ested to watch the evolu­tion of the series, the exis­tence of which would have been unthink­able even a couple of years ago. (You can read some of my thoughts on the first CONTACT! show here.) I‘d never seen Alan Gilbert conduct before, embar­rass­ingly enough. And lastly, who am I to turn down free tickets from the NY Phil­har­monic? Just a composer who dearly hopes he might be commis­sioned someday, too! (I think was subtle. Was that subtle?)

So I met my dear friend Ted up at Symphony Space. That place still needs to get more legroom. And less carpet­ing. But other than that, it‘s a nice venue for a new music concert, and it was pretty packed on Friday, which was great to see (I wonder if the second show, at the Met museum, where they didn‘t hand out massive numbers of free tickets, was as full). I was looking forward to hearing some music, but CONTACT! wants to be all up in your face about it before­hand, which is probably why they named it that. I‘m all for putting composers in the spot­light and making them talk. But there was So Much Pontif­i­cat­ing. Alan Gilbert, John Schæfer, Magnus Lindberg PLUS Sean, Nico, and Matthias Pintscher; all smart, charis­matic, and artic­u­late people, but just too many voices. They could have cut down the talking and added a fourth piece to the program.

The music on this show felt completely in place at a New York Phil­har­monic Concert; polished and inven­tive, but not too risky. Sean’s piece, These Partic­u­lar Circum­stances, sounded ravish­ing— quite a feat in the bone-dry acoustic of Symphony Space. It struck me as cele­brat­ing a partic­u­lar kind of virtu­os­ity or craft, both compo­si­tional and instru­men­tal. The level of work­man­ship of the piece was so obvi­ously of the highest quality that the musi­cians responded by genuinely playing their best. Sean‘s musical language is very much an “embar­rass­ment of riches” kind of sound— beau­ti­ful details fly by at an alarming rate. I had the feeling of being at some sort of over­whelm­ing buffet and wanting to eat every­thing, but not being able to take it all in. The piece was struc­tured in seven or eight very short, contin­u­ous episodes, and I missed a logical thread connect­ing them, but mostly I was so amused by what was taking place at that very moment that it didn‘t bother me.

Nico joked before­hand that he wrote a piece without any detail, knowing it would be paired with Sean’s obses­sively detailed one. (Their titles, however, share a certain simi­lar­ity of tone; Nico’s is called Detailed Instruc­tions.) It actually was quite a stark change from Sean’s gesture-driven music to Nico’s, which is pulse-driven (even when he distorts the pulse with cæsuras and jump-cuts) and rigor­ously struc­tural. Here, I felt, a more flat­ter­ing acoustic would have done the music many favors; the orches­tra­tion was down­right arid, with the excep­tion of the middle section, which worked up a lovely, Brian Eno-esque soupi­ness. Overall, though, the piece felt a bit pale after Sean’s riot of color; maybe this had to do with Nico’s decision to cast out the violins in favor of more violas, which didn’t seem to adequately fill out the sound. It was as though an impor­tant frequency of the orches­tra had been EQ‘d into oblivion. Of course, this may have just been a factor of program order, and could have easily been fixed by swapping the first two pieces.

Matthias Pintscher’s songs from Solomon’s garden was clearly meant to be the “big piece” on the program, and it had a big star in it: Thomas Hampson. He looked earnest and a bit out of place in his New Music Concert­blax and avun­cu­lar reading specs. I think Hampson is a good singer, and his album of Mahler lieder saw me through high school, but I think he was a terrible choice for the Pintscher. I always have a hard time telling what pitch bari­tones are singing, much less in music that lacks any sort of tonal center, and here the vocal writing was very “generic New Music”: tritone here, minor second there, major seventh leap for a partic­u­larly expres­sive moment. I commented to Ted that I would have liked to hear a more pure-voiced singer like Theo Bleck­mann sing it; the more abstract the harmonic language, the more dead-on precise the singer’s pitch has to be.

Pintscher’s orches­tral writing was exquis­ite to a fault, but I didn’t under­stand how it related to the vocal line or the text (which was set in the original Hebrew). Every compo­si­tional decision seemed geared toward achiev­ing a partic­u­lar kind of æsthetic beauty, in a control-freak watch­maker sort of way, but as in These Partic­u­lar Circum­stances, I failed to grasp a narra­tive thread; the struc­ture of the piece seemed to be completely a function of the text. I guess I’m more of the David Lang school of text setting, where I like my words to wedge them­selves into a musical form, not vice versa. Music and text are struc­tured differ­ently for a reason; reading poetry takes place in the reader’s mind, at his own pace, while music exists in real time, meaning it can control the audience’s percep­tion of time passing. Why even bother setting text if you don’t have any of your own inter­pre­ta­tion to add? Other­wise you’re more of a glori­fied medieval trou­ba­dour, strum­ming your lute quietly along to a dramatic recita­tion. If that‘s the affect Pintscher was trying to achieve, that‘s fine, but in that case, he should have set the text in English, and made absolutely sure we could under­stand every word without follow­ing along in the program (which it was too dark to read, anyway); it would seem a safe assump­tion that Hebrew is not the primary language of New York Phil­har­monic concertgoers.

But the really impor­tant thing about this CONTACT! show: free beer instead of free flavoured vodka. Know your audience!