Review: Nature inspires art at chamber and Music in Time concerts

Mezzo-soprano Charlotte Hellekant has been performing in Spoleto Festival's Chamber Music Series this year. WILLIAM STRUHS

Adam Parker  Email  @adamlparker

Jun 1 2014 11:24 pm

The Spoleto Festival rightly gets noticed for its big productions: the operas, plays, dance shows and pop and jazz headliners. But some remarkable things happen during the daytime.

On Friday it snowed in the Simons Center Recital Hall. On Sunday, the Dock Street Theatre was submerged under ocean waters for 4 billion years, from the Archean to the Phanerozoic eon. And later that afternoon, a white-browed robin and polyglot mockingbird made a bit of a racket during the Music in Time recital.

If there was a common theme, it was trickster Nature herself, provoking (as she is often wont to do) composers and creators who ever seek to imitate her wondrous phantasmagoria.

Chamber music

Let's begin with Chamber Music Program VII, which featured George Crumb's "Vox Balaenae" ("The Voice of the Whale"), a mesmerizing piece from 1971, composed not long after Crumb heard scientific recordings of the songs of the humpbacks.

But he wasn't about to limit himself to imitating that; no, he was determined to evoke all of time, too, from the beginning of it (a solo flute vocalise) to the end of it (a note silently struck by flute, cello and piano).

Tara Helen O'Connor first played the piece in 1988, and she wanted to play it again now, according to series director and concert M.C. Geoff Nuttall. And who was he to stand in her way? O'Connor didn't just play her flute, she sang into it, doubling the melodic line, she trilled her lips and her tongue to create oceanic effects, she sounded enormous wavelike melismas, she mimicked sundry sea creatures and, evoking Ellen DeGeneres in "Finding Nemo," she spoke whale.

She was in very good company. On alternatively-tuned cello was Chris Costanza, expertly generating whale whistles, seagull screeches and atmospheric underwater noises through the use of harmonics and other effects that actually were musical.

Pedja Muzijevic, who apparently can play anything, clicked and splashed in his grand piano, generating low rumbles and harplike flourishes, occasionally adjusting the pitch of a particular note by running a finger up and down a string.

But wait, there's more. They players were amplified. They performed wearing masks. The stage was lit blue.

Arguably, Crumb's "Vox Balaenae" is a little dated now (who hasn't yet marveled at the humpback's song?), but the piece certainly works its magic. My guess is Nuttall was being glib when he told us that his answer to O'Connor's request to program the piece was: "Why not?" He must have wondered how it would go over, whether those chamber music regulars would like it or merely tolerate it.

Read more: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20140601/PC2106/140609898/1002/review-nature-inspires-art-at-chamber-and-music-in-time-concerts