Greenwich Music Festival

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from the Counter Critic, June 2007

Greenwich Music Festival, Not your scotch-drinking, yacht-buying, Cheever-reading Grandpa's music festival

So I made it up to Greenwich, CT (gasp!) last night for one of the Greenwich Music Festival’s installments, “Body Of Sound: Music for the human form”.

The festival is organized by two young guys, Robert Ainsley (principle Conductor) and Ted Huffman (Artistic Director). Now in its fourth year, the festival looks to be a serious voice in the summer festival scene. What I like about this festival is that the programming seems to be of a surprisingly adventurous variety, including engaging up-and-coming artists to stage full-scale opera works (this year, Moving Theater Company’s “It’s My Party,” based on Handel’s “Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne”) and concerts featuring avant-garde music from the 20th century and today.

“Body Of Sound: Music for the human form” was of the latter variety, a chamber concert featuring works by Reich, Cage, Xenakis, Globokar and Huang Ruo. The idea behind the program is that all of the music recognized–in one way or anther–the body as instrument.

The evening got off to an approriate start with Steve Reich’s seminal “Clapping Music” performed by six “festival musicians,” which included Mr. Huffman. It was strange to see this music performed live, especially by such a young ensemble (the oldest of whom couldn’t have been much above thirty). There’s not much technique needed to play this kind of music. One is instead drawn to the ritualistic moment playing this music creates; six people clapping in syncopated variations of the same rhythm. One feels a greater sense of the interdependence of “parts” with this piece compared to most other kinds of music. The stakes are higher, and the necessity for trust and compliance is heightened.

Then percussionist Ayano Kataoka performed Huang Ruo’s 1993 solo “Sound of Hand,” the only new piece on the program. I have to say that as much as I enjoyed Kataoka’s focused and sensual performance, the piece, which was essentially Ms. Kataoka standing barefoot in one place, exploring the relationship between her two hands and the sounds they can make by touching each other (clapping, slapping, patting; palm-to-palm, fist in palm, or back-to-back) or not, wasn’t as effective musically as its theoretical conceits were interesting. I liked that the work challenges our expectations of music–there were long pauses and hand and body gestures that made no detectable sound but were no less essential to the experience of the piece–but it went on a little too long and there weren’t enough formal signifiers to keep it from sometimes slipping into an area where one couldn’t tell if Ms. Kataoka was performing from score or improvising.

Alex Lipowski (performer and percussionist) delivered the first of Xenakis’ well known percussion solos, Rebonds A. His skill was precise and the asymmetrical rhythms came out with clarity, but seemed to lack a particular vitality that is so essential to these wonderful examples of musical high modernism. This was made even more evident when Ayano Kataoka came out (after a modest interlude of John Cage’s “Five”, which featured some exceptional singing from soprano Mary Thorne) and rendered a full-bodied interpretation of Rebond B. The less driven of the two pieces, “B”, under Ms. Kataoka’s hand, actually came across as the more tactile; it was humanistic and engaging. Some might fault Ms. Kataoka for her show(wo)manship, but her willingness to “get into” the music (for lack of a more descriptive phrase) is an achievement that so much 20th century music suffers from not having. Ms. Kataoka humanizes a music that is so often derided as impersonal, thorny, even ugly. Hers was certainly the standout performance of the evening and apropos of the concert’s title.

Mr. Liposwki came back out with Vinko Globokar’s physical performance work, Corporel, stage directed by Andrea Dorf. Probably a landmark piece when it was written, it incorporates the entire body mechanism of the performer to produce sound, and it relies heavily-if not entirely–on the performer to realize the piece through improvisation. This is very much in line with a lot of performance art that came out of the 1960’s. Mr. Lipowski (lit only by four flashlights held by the other musicians) performed shirtless and barfoot, slapping his torso, scratching his head, fervently discovering a variety of pre-linguistic methods of vocal utterance. His performance was earnest, and certainly a shock to the audience at hand, but there were moments that were less convincing, stereotypically primate-ive, and more obviously theatrical in a work that at its best will surprise the viewer with its bizarre atheatrical authenticity.

A couple other performances featured a Cage piano work where the pianist used credit cards to strike the instrument, and a Cage song sung by Ted Huffman. Considering the audience pool they’re drawing from, the work Mr. Huffman and Mr. Ainsley are doing could easily be called a public service.

The final evening of the festival is this Saturday (June 16) at 8pm in Greenwich. The concert will feature songs by Luciano Berio and Huang Ruo sung by mezzo-soprano Brenda Patterson. For more info call (203) 637-0536.

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