MUSIC REVIEW
ICE keeps its cool as its marathon of concerts heats up
Chicago Tribune
Published: September 25, 2007
By Michael Cameron Special to the Tribune
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For a fifth consecutive year, the International Contemporary Ensemble has invaded Chicago with its trademark saturation performances dubbed ICEFest, directing its insurgency not in hallowed concert halls but in spaces more accustomed to Monk than Messiaen.
After an overflow crowd Saturday jammed the legendary jazz haunt Velvet Lounge, ICE set up shop Sunday in the soupy acoustics of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, the second in an exhausting string of 11 concerts at 11 venues in eight days.
Philippe Manoury's primary local advocate has been Pierre Boulez, conductor of two of the French composer's orchestral premiers with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The Chicago and New York-based ICE hopes to widen his stateside exposure with the commission of the 35-minute "Cruel Spirals," premiered a couple of weeks ago at its Eastern base.
The work is framed by two movements based on Jerome Rothenberg's "A Poem For the Cruel Majority"—a title aptly describing its angry polemic, but with a core sorely lacking nuance. Led by conductor Matt Ward, Manoury's score surpassed its source material, with dizzying technique and dazzling colors that barely mask a populist 1950s beat sensibility. A shudder could be felt in the rapt audience with the line "The god of the cruel majority is hanging from a tree," an unanticipated nod to the headlines from Jena, La.
The core of the nine-movement work, and its most powerful music, came in five internal "Laments." These sober musings were inspired by aerial photographs of concentration camps. The stanzas were spare and ambiguous, inspiring the composer to create starkly vivid utterances. Each lament was marked by the slow, labored thud of a bass drum, perhaps evoking an expiring heartbeat or the death march of emaciated bodies.
As usual, soprano Tony Arnold was a marvel, unintimidated by the thorny score's brutal leaps and stratospheric range. More to the point, she imbued an uneven text with varied color and rhetorical depth.
In most hands the use of marimba and bass clarinet would scarcely rise above gimmickry, but Manoury's "Last" hit the spot, finding unlikely synergy between the reedy clarinet and the woody low register of the marimba. Indeed, clarinetist Joshua Rubin and percussionist David Schotzko were the virtuosic duo.
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