This coming week is a busy one for music lovers. Winnipeg’s New Music Festival, the internationally renowned feast of leading contemporary music, is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary this year.

The WNMF kicked off with a night full of dramatic premieres, featuring Pulitzer-prize winning American composer David Lang, internationally renowned legend Joan Tower, and the WSO’s own former frontman Glenn Buhr.

 

The WSO, led by Alexander Mickelthwate, set the audience buzzing with the world premiere of WNMF Co-Curator Glenn Buhr's work Solstice ii. The piece was highly cinematic, structured around a lively flute solo and set against a foreboding orchestral layer of plucking and sustained pitches. WSO principal flutist Jan Kocman’s smooth and virtuosic solo performance was enough to convert anyone who has ever given the flute a bad name. 


Post-minimalist composer, David Lang, occupied the middle section of the program with two Canadian premieres: mountain and man made. Lang’s tribute to Aaron Copland, mountain, is an initially startling work. In his program notes, Lang claims that he was inspired to write the piece after observing the mountains from his summer cottage in Vermont. He found himself thinking about the way that mountains are “rugged and beautiful and far away and imposing and timeless” and then subsequently thought about the briefness of our own lives, hung against the backdrop of the eternal. This concept is exactly what is captured in mountain, structured around a punchy repeated chord, and interspersed with dramatic silences and gradually changing orchestral drones. The first five minutes of listening to this idiom was compelling, and then, as it continued on, unchanging, the music got a little old (like a mountain, I guess).


Lang's second feature, man made, showcased the WSO in collaboration with the New York ensemble SO Percussion. This percussion concerto explores, as Lang describes in his program notes, “the process of finding something intricate and unique, decoding it, regularizing it, and mass producing it - it reminded me of how a lot of ideas in our world get invented, built, and overwhelmed.” The music enacts the process of finding what makes something genuine and attractive, and then exploiting it for large-scale consumption.

 

The synchronized percussion playing of the four cool-looking guys who make up SO Percussion - Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting - might have been the highlight of the evening. The fantastic racket of sounds made up of snapping sticks, wine bottles, glockenspiels and garbage cans was unlike anything you've ever seen or heard, and totally mesmerizing. The performance had the entire audience hypnotized through to the end.

 

The WSO finished the night with a fiery, virtuosic performance of Joan Tower’s Concerto for Orchestra, featuring three concertos for clarinet, flute and violin. Among the League of American Orchestras’ 20 most popular living composers, Tower’s work is performance art at its best. Her Grammy-nominated Concerto for Orchestra is a rhythmic, fast-paced tsunami of sound, exciting enough even for the most conservative listener. Despite the mess of interesting phrases and textural contrasts, Tower says that she gave herself minimal parameters when composing the work (if there is some greater underlying concept to her work she definitely did not let on): “I wanted it to be a larger composition for orchestra, and feature as many soloists and instruments as I could find!” Including a standout tuba solo. For such a musically dense piece of music, it might have been more accessible for listeners if there had been some kind of coherent idea. The work felt like an eclectic orchestral version of Flight of the Bumblebee. Extremely frenetic, but also exciting and entertaining.

 

The wonderful thing about attending the New Music Festival is that the music is not meant to fit into a closed box of ideas, but explore the (sometimes freakish) potential of sound. Listeners are free to love it or hate it. And, hopefully, discuss or argue or rave about at home.

 

The New Music Festival runs every night until Friday, and is crammed with all kinds of events, from pre-concert panels to Q + A’s and post-concert receptions with all kinds of eats and opportunities to chat with the composers themselves!

Sara Krahn will be back with another review on Tuesday night's "Back to the Future" concert at the Centennial Concert Hall (7:30PM). So stay tuned for that!