Composer Institute: Trevor Gureckis, [Very Large Array] / live broadcast information

Tonight's "Future Classics" concert will stream LIVE online on Minnesota Public Radio; just click "Listen" in the green Classical box.  The two-hour concert broadcast will start at 8:00 Central time.  I urge you to listen to the whole program, as all the pieces are amazingly well-constructed and undoubtedly will be well-played by one of this country's most fiery, committed, and admirable orchestras.

I had the opportunity to sit in on yesterday's rehearsal of this year's seven Composer Institute selections.  The Minnesota Orchestra sounded absolutely engaged from the first downbeat of Trevor Gureckis's terse, twinkling [Very Large Array].  With a high-power telescope in New Mexico as its namesake, this piece immediately constructs a relentless and unique space around the listener: hot, clanging percussion and crunchy brass accents punctuate glassy, sustained string chords.  The rhythmic drive comes from quick, flip woodwind staccato attacks unpredictably dotting the landscape. 

The rhythms sound complicated, although this entire introductory section is conducted in 4/4 time.  This quality probably arises from the highly independent nature of the part writing, which gives the score itself the visual appearance of a flickering grid.  Gureckis often embeds the most propulsive and jittery rhythms in the lower voices of the ensemble: violas, cellos, bassoons.  The sparkling woodwinds take on a sheen of clarity and forwardness floating above this solid, emphatic foundation.

Flashing dots transform into elongated rays in the slow section. Here, woodwinds are joined by plucked harp as they sustain octaves that pass freely among instrumental pairs.  The disjunct patterns spread through the orchestra until the oboes get stuck in a loop of minor thirds and octaves.  The clarinets bubble underneath, and eventually all the instruments repeat their melodic material in a remarkable passage of echoing -- like a riff on Mahler's "unsharp unisons" -- and diminishing phrase lengths.  This section comes across as thoroughly original and possibly inspired by club or electronic music, its insistent repetitions remixed into morphologically fresh sounds.

Gureckis explained to me that the whole piece focuses on diminished chords that gradually move through key areas from c minor chromatically down to g minor and back up again.  Osmo's conducting focuses on the piece's horizontal, rather than vertical, qualities.  He asked the violins and violas to play out a halting unison octave passage.  His attempt to isolate thematic material was well considered and brave.  In intense new music, it's easy to play everything loudly with no subtlety, no shading.  The music in [Very Large Array] is often tiny and twitchy enough on its own without Osmo's overt demonstrations of both.  Where his physical vocabulary finds the perfect word, however, is in the piece's conclusion.  An abrupt brass outburst closes the piece, with a typically larger-than-life Osmo making the final, fatal slice.