‘Sawdust’ flies in premiere

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Pittsburgh Festival of New Music is one of the most ambitious recent arrivals on the city’s classical music scene, so it’s fitting that Alia Musica Pittsburgh plays a central role in it.

Alia Musica, a scrappy yet important member of Pittsburgh’s contemporary-music scene, produced this biennial festival and gave an ambitious concert in the midst of it, performing Thursday night at the Henry Heymann Theatre inside the Stephen Foster Memorial in Oakland.

Conducted by artistic director Federico Garcia-De Castro, the concert marked the culmination of composer Ken Ueno’s season-long residency with the ensemble. Mr. Ueno, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., has an unusual, distinctive compositional voice, so it’s no small feat that Alia was able to commission and premiere his “Sawdust on Ararat.”

The piece is a quasi-oboe concerto written for flute, oboe, clarinet, two cellos and two percussionists. It explores two of the composer’s interests — the themes of creation and destruction and the notion of “hacked” instruments, which both retain and extend the histories of an instrument in Mr. Ueno’s view. In “Sawdust,” Lenny Young enhanced his oboe with a snare drum-cumresonator, which amplified his woodwind instrument and added buzzy textures. He gave a committed performance throughout.

While the oboe was technically the only hacked instrument, there were plenty of extended techniques to go around — lateral bowing for the cellos, pitch-less air blown through the woodwinds, multiphonics. The piece began with whispers from the percussion and cellos, which filled out into fuller tones from the ensemble, as if the music was patiently pacing itself. Throughout, the work transitioned in and out of its own bizarro world. A lyrical cello line gave way to distorted bowing techniques; an oboe melody became tangy with microtones.

As is often the case with Mr. Ueno’s music, the work had theatrical elements, including squeaky bird toys and the literal sawing of wood, courtesy of the percussionists. (Both planks of wood were supposed to fall to the ground at the end, although only one succumbed to gravity in this performance.)

Overall, the piece had the disturbing quality of white noise, and although it could be grating, it was also aurally challenging and intriguing.

The concert also featured soprano Tony Arnold, whose appearance in three works was a highlight. Mr. GarciaDe Castro’s “Memoria,” which concluded the concert, was a ripe opportunity for the singer to exhibit her abilities.

Composed for soprano, guitar, percussion, violin and cello, the piece set quotations by a former Colombian presidential candidate who was assassinated in 1990. Ms. Arnold delivered the text like a lament, drawing connections among the Spanish words with similar sonic qualities (”memoria,” “me muero,” “mi amor”). This searing piece also benefited from Mr. Garcia-De Castro’s most assured conducting of the evening, along with strong ensemble playing from guitarist Dieter Hennings and others. Ms. Arnold gave a lively account of August Read Thomas’ “Of Being Is a Bird,” which sets Emily Dickinson poems.

The ensemble featured strong individual musicians, although there were problems of cohesion and execution that, in general, improved over the course of the concert. Along the way, Alia also performed the works of two other local composers: Brian Riordan’s “K.” was a noisy sound-picture for bass clarinet, prepared piano, violin and cello that lacked a certain skeletal anchor. Curtis Rumrill’s episodic “Rover,” for two sopranos and ensemble, described a whimsical tale of a dog destroying a village. It offered some intriguing melodies and fanciful vignettes within the elegant (yes, elegant — bass drum solos come to mind), even if it could be repetitive or harmonically assorted.

While this concert was a one-off, there are several other festival programs in the coming days; see www.pghnewmusic.com for details.