Contemporary Music Forum
By Stephen Brookes • The Washington Post • May 23, 2006
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The Contemporary Music Forum abandoned their usual lair at the Corcoran Gallery to perform at the Phillips Collection on Sunday, where they blew away the Music Room’s old-world gloom with some of the most provocative and colorful new music heard yet this year.
Douglas BoyceFour of the Forum’s member composers were on the program, including Jeffrey Mumford, whose earnestly pedantic titles often belie the radiant beauty of his music. His intricate “a focused expanse of evolving experience” was a perfect example – a sort of heroic mini-concerto for flute, whose complex structure was put completely to the service of its emotional logic. (Eloquent playing by David Whiteside didn’t hurt, either.)
Tenor Robert Baker delivered two songs from Douglas Boyce’s “A Book of Songs” that can only be described as drop-dead beautiful. Easily the most captivating works on the program, these songs of love and death are extraordinarily well-written, with moments of toe-curling beauty and genuine insight. And Boyce could hardly ask for a finer interpreter than Baker, accompanied by the brilliant Lura Johnson-Lee on piano.
Percussionist Barry Dove brought wit and impressive voltage to Toshimitsu Tanaka’s 1965 classic “Two Movements for Marimba”, which still sounds so fresh it could have been written tomorrow. But Frederick Weck’s new “Video VI” for violin and marimba, with its stale vocabulary and light-show of geometric shapes, felt mired in some bygone avant-garde decade. Steve Antosca’s “for two” for flute and viola got a lively and unpredictable performance, though, and Eric Moe’s “riprap” was a feast of musical imagination – a fine work from one of America’s most gifted young composers.
Stephen Brookes
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