Word: rhythmically
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...unexpected. The opening act sets the tone for the rest of the show: A young man, wearing a scruffy work shirt and jeans splattered with paint, enters from the wings, pushing a large broom before him across the dusty floor. Evidently intrigued by the noises made by the rhythmic swish of the broom's bristles against the floor, he begins to experiment with its tempo and pressure, resulting in swishes and taps of varying pitch and loudness...
...curious innovation, placing an entire choir of instruments against the orchestra. This form poses some practical problems: the challenge is making the soloists truly stand apart from the orchestral strings. The concerto traditionally accomplishes this in three ways: alternation of solo and orchestral passages; dynamic, registral, and rhythmic isolation; and use of the instrument's individual tone color. This last method, in the case of the string quartet, is the hardest: the quartet's tone color is easily blanketed by the larger orchestral strings. The genre of concerto depends upon contrast between soloist and orchestra. Yannatos' Concerto for String Quartet...
...Dumbarton Oaks made an appropriate and thought-provoking follow-up to the Bach. The influence of the earlier work appears quite strikingly in some melodic and rhythmic allusions, though the Stravinsky definitely keeps its integrity as an entirely independent piece. (However, the connection between the two was complicated, not clarified, by the somewhat enigmatic program notes.) A reduced version of the orchestra managed Stravinsky's characteristically tricky harmonies, rhythms and meter changes, although somewhat shakily: this, and the thin orchestration of some parts, left the audience wondering at times if the group was on the verge of falling apart. Howeverall...
...lyricism is a challenge, rhythm is entirely idiomatic to this instrument. The program was dominated by groove; that is, in almost every piece the music was underpinned by rhythmic regularity, be it the ocean-like undulations of the opening chords of Keiko Abe's Memories of the Seashore, the fantastic polyrhythms of Rhythm Song by paul Zadbeck or the intricate arpeggios, executed at amazing speeds, of Keiko Abe's Michi...
...complaint is necessary, this rhythmic consistency, along with the primarily diatonic harmonies of most of the works, made the program a bit too homogenous. The one admittedly "atonal" work, Two Movements for Marimba by Toshimitsu Tanaka, provided a welcome contrast to the harmonic vocabulary of the other works. With a change of mallets, Kissel brought out the greatest diversity of color and texture from the instrument. Perhaps one of the most dramatic works on the program, the piece's opening gestural fragments are later contrasted with homophonic and polyphonic textures. Arriving at a moving climax, Kissel superimposed complex passage work...