PNME engages senses with music, visuals
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble was an early adopter — one might say a pioneer — of a multisensory, multimedia approach to performance that is becoming the norm among classical musicorganizations.
PNME, the city’s summertime contemporary music ensemble, prides itself on theatricality. Indeed, its guiding mantra is to offer audiences a “theatre of music,” and it enhances new and unfamiliar works with lighting effects, theatrical scripts and visual artwork.
In comparison with some of its shows from previous years, this summer’s PNME programming was tame. This season, no single concert brought together music with puppetry and an original text, like “The Gray Cat and the Flounder,” the flagship program from 2015, and none of them had an especially pronounced theme. Friday’s concert at City Theatre showed, however, that PNME can create drama without theatricality, and that was more than enough.
The season finale was centered on the intimate, textured music of PNME composer-of-the-year Christopher Cerrone and the striking paintings of Pittsburgh artist Michael Lotenero. Those elements, along with the impressive lighting design by Andrew David Ostrowski, engaged the senses without overwhelmingthem.
PNME increasingly has programmed Mr. Cerrone’s music over the past few seasons, and the pairing between this ensemble and artist is a natural one. The Brooklyn-based composer frequently collaborates with PNME percussionist Ian Rosenbaum. His music, which is full of literary and geographical references, lends itself well to PNME’s visual approach.
The six works on Friday’s program made references to Thomas Pynchon, a Brooklyn subway stop, the Italian countryside, an interactive sculpture, the lights of Los Angeles, Jorge Luis Borges’ views on nightmares and a poet named Bill Knott. (His opera “Invisible Cities,” based on Italo Calvino’s novel, was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. Maybe PNME will tackle that another time.) Brief descriptions of these pieces were projected onto the stage, while four large paintings by Mr. Lotenero were suspendedfrom the ceiling.
Even without a theatrical staging, the program felt like it was organized into three acts. Much of Mr. Cerrone’s works were built off short, nut-like motifs that were repeated with increasing intensityor otherwise modified.
The first two pieces, “Shall I Project a World?” for solo violin and “HoytSchermerhorn” for solo piano and electronics, derived their emotional impact from their intimacy. The searing violinsolo was like a modern movement from a Bach partita, requiring violinist Nathalie Shaw to saw throughthe upper register of her instrument with athletic endurance. She received relief only through Daniel Pesca’s glassy, fragile piano solo, “Hoyt-Schermerhorn,” whose unusual name refers to that Brooklyn subway station. The work, which opens with simple melodic sequences, darkens through interjections from the left hand and from the shattering tones of the electronics.
“Double Happiness,” for percussion, piano and electronics, was the highlight of the evening. This introspective piece, which includes field recordings from the Italian countryside, includes three main movements and two shorter interludes, and the live and recorded sounds neatlymelded together.
Mr. Rosenbaum, the percussionist, had to navigate between the bright crotales and vibraphone; his comfort with new music reminded me of the performance practice of a knowledgeable baroque violinist. While the version of this work that I heard online is scored for electric guitar and percussion, in this performance piano strings replaced guitar strings.
“South Catalina” was highlighted by the fragile yet full multiphonics of clarinetist Eric Jacobs, while “The Night Mare” featured clicky interjections from the ensembleover a droning bass drum. In most of these works, texture, rather than melody and harmonic shifts, was the centralgoverning feature.
That formula was swapped in the program’s conclusion, “Naomi Songs,” a setting of Knott’s poetry that had pleasant but facile melodies sung by artistic director Kevin Noe. While these love songs served as a sweet ending to the concert, the piece cast into relief just how effective — and dramatic — PNME musicians can be with only their instruments.