TALEA ENSEMBLE
> BY ALEXANDER VARTY
Fausto Romitelli. Pierluigi Billone. Olga Neuwirth. If you recognize those names, chances are that you’re pursuing an advanced degree in musical composition. As far as household recognition goes, they’re lagging far behind even the likes of Evan Ziporyn, Helmut Lachenmann, or Caroline Shaw. But that’s exactly why their music is being performed, here and across North America, by New York City’s Talea Ensemble: they’re not known, but they should be.
“The mission of the ensemble is to present, basically, pieces and composers that deserve to be heard—in our opinion, of course,” explains Talea percussionist and executive director Alex Lipowski. “The aesthetic of the group stems from composers and music that we felt weren’t being presented in the United States. That certainly could be American music, but our initial artistic interest or taste was for the European avant- garde.”
Lipowski has a particular fondness for Billone’s work: Talea brought the Italian composer to New York for the 2014 edition of its American Immersion concert series. Vancouver New Music artistic director Giorgio Magnanensi shares that respect, which provided the spark for Talea’s local debut this weekend.
“Billone’s music is so important to us because he’s a composer who is looking to reinvent things,” the percussionist notes. “He experiments with the instruments firsthand. He owns flutes and a cello and a double bass, and if he wants to write special things for a gong, he gets a gong and figures it out. But it’s more than that with him. Actually, the real beauty of playing his music was working with him really closely. You don’t hear it explicitly in his music, but especially with Ebe und Anders, the piece you’re going to hear, he talks about Miles Davis, and these blue, jazzy kind of solos— but the soloist speaks through his flügelhorn. It’s wild stuff.”
The members of Talea will also have the chance to work closely with the fourth composer on their program, Stefan Maier. The young Canadian has written territories III especially for the ensemble’s Vancouver appearance, and will contribute live electronics to the mix.
“We worked with him at a composition seminar at Harvard,” Lipowski says. “So we already knew his music and had played one of his pieces when Giorgio suggested him as someone who would fit well, coming from the starting point of Billone’s music and this idea of timbral, colourful sound worlds. We agreed, and he was able to write a new piece, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
“He’s interested in noise music, and his score is rather loose,” Lipowski continues. “It’s composed, but he wants people to explore and dig deep into the sounds. In that sense, he is asking us, more or less, to improvise. There’s these long periods of what would seem like, on the page, a thundersheet being scratched by a fork, but he really wants us to find the insides of these textures that he has in mind.”
Vancouver cellist Marina Hasselberg admits she was scared when she saw at least one of the 11 new works she’ll tackle at Sonic Boom. Morgan Burke photo.