New works for the flute performed with verve
No kid on Christmas morning ever unwrapped her presents with more infectious glee than flutist Claire Chase displayed during her mostly solo performance marathon in Berkeley on Saturday, Dec. 2. The difference is that Chase loves to share her goodies with others.
You could feel the delight and excitement that inform Chase’s long-range commissioning project “Density 2036,” as she spent nearly six hours (with breaks, naturally) unveiling one new or newish flute piece after another. You could marvel at the musical and theatrical virtuosity that Chase brings to the most arcane and far-flung strains of the contemporary repertoire.
And although it’s perfectly predictable that some of these pieces would have proved to be more successful than others — and that we could disagree on which — there was no way to resist the pull of Chase’s enthusiastic advocacy for all of it. Everything she plays can feel, at least in the moment, like a
musical utterance of the keenest urgency.
“Density 2036” is conceived as a multiyear undertaking designed, ultimately, to celebrate the centennial of Edgard Varèse’s 1936 modernist masterpiece “Density 21.5.” Each year since 2013, Chase has commissioned a passel of new pieces — most of them, like the Varèse, for unaccompanied flute, or else for flute and electronics — and she plans to continue until she has enough material for a 24-hour marathon in 2036.
Saturday’s event, presented at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive by Cal Performances (which also provided an online live stream), presented the first fruits of this project in a single sweep. The results — in which Chase’s virtuosity was abetted by the aural magic of sound designer and electronics whiz Levy Lorenzo — were brilliantly varied, often surprising and altogether marvelous.
Each annual installment was presented in a single connected sweep, running just about an hour apiece. And because each year’s works are loosely thematically linked, there was an overall shape to the proceedings that kept it from feeling like just one thing after another.
The first year’s offerings, when the whole undertaking was only just taking shape, comprised a mix of new pieces and flute classics. Steve Reich’s dappled, undulating “Vermont Counterpoint” and Philip Glass’s too-little-known “Piece in the Shape of a Square” from 1967 rubbed shoulders with Marcos Balter’s beautiful “Pessoa,” in which six bass flutes (live and prerecorded) traded mournful, whale-like calls.
The arithmetic of that first installment was an ingenious progression from the multiple flutes of the Reich through decreasing numbers of instruments, arriving finally at the starkly unadorned splendor of Varèse. Hearing Chase’s eloquent account of that piece at the end of the set felt like a culminating distillation of everything we’d heard so far.
But at the same time, it was a germinating seed — as everything that followed made clear. The music of “Density 2036” covers plenty of stylistic ground, but for at least the first three years’ worth, it all bears an expressive family relationship to the Varèse.
That meant a profusion of strong-limbed melodies, often punctuated by unvoiced rhythmic tapping of the flute keys or vocal explosions through and around the instrument’s mouthpiece. It meant a continual emphasis on rhetorical forcefulness, on dramatic vigor and on angular, often insistent sonic palettes.
Yet composers, as is their wont, interpreted their assignment with distinctive individuality. Felipe Lara’s “Meditation and Calligraphy” for bass flute waxed somber and reflective. “The Famous Box Trick” by Francesca Verunelli inspired a bouquet of momentary effects both electronic and live, all combined by an undercurrent of emotional grandeur.
Matthias Pintscher’s “Beyond (A System of Passing)” invoked the influential solo works of Luciano Berio titled “Sequenza,” in a flurry of extended techniques shaped by rigor and wit. And Nathan Davis’ “Limn” moved in a subtle progression from an almost inaudible beginning to a joyous final climax.
The range of the music was underscored by the panoply of instruments that Chase brought to her task — piccolo, flute, alto flute, bass flute, and the outsize monster known affectionately as “Big Bertha,” a contrabass flute that stands taller than Chase herself. And in the final completed chapter of the program, Chase welcomed percussionist-composer Tyshawn Sorey and violinist composer Pauchi Sasaki onstage with her for a pair of engaging highconcept duets.
But wait — there was even more before the crowd finally dispersed. As a concluding teaser for next year, Chase presented a 20-minute sampler from Balter’s “Pan,” which will ultimately be a 90-minute participatory drama about the Greek god of the title, known — like Chase — for his unparalleled piping.
It’s designed to include a crowd of lay participants, who provide harmonic and textural accompaniment by rubbing the rims of pitched water glasses and blowing on glass bottles. The sample that concluded Saturday’s event was serene, crystalline and absolutely breathtaking — as irresistible a pitch as anyone could want for the next chapter in this wondrous ongoing story.