aizai016 Review: Colr and Contrasts From the New Julliard Ensemble - Tha New York Tima TheNew YorkFimes —hep:/inytimsimTPvue MUSIC Review: Color and Contrasts From the New Juilliard Ensemble By JAMES R. OESTREICH —APRIL.25, 2016 The New Juilliard Ensemble, led by its founding director, Joel Sachs, offered five 21st-century compositions — four premieres and one work new to the Western Hemisphere — in its program at Alice Tully Hall on Thursday evening. All were colorfully orchestrated but they shared few other obvious commonalities. The most salient connection was one of contrast rather than comparison, in two works infused with exotic elements. The brief “Trace: Komachi Shosho Michiyuki” (2008, the Western premiere), by Rica Narimoto, came with heavy theoretical baggage, which made for more compelling reading than listening. In a program note, the Japanese-born. Ms. Narimoto writes of her “analysis of traditional Japanese ‘Itchu-bushi’ music,” and especially “Komachi-Shosho- Michiyuki,” a song “performed by a certain type of narrative chanting.” Ms. Narimoto’s analysis engendered a new twist on Western notation involving “three curvy lines,” and “Trace” ip two nytimescom2016/0426/rtsimusicioview-color-and-contrast-trom-the-new.ullard- ensemble hil rrf=collcton*é2F spol ghtcollection?2Fclassical-music-roviawsaizai016 Review: Colr and Contrasts From the New Julliard Ensemble - Tha New York Tima offers intriguingly sinuous sonorities, but the work’s larger progressions too often seem merely arbitrary to an ear unschooled in the niceties of the style. Saad Haddad, a young American of Lebanese and Jordanian parentage, on the other hand, achieved a remarkable fusion of idioms in “Takht” (2016), named for the Arabic word for “ensemble.” He uses Western relatives of Arabic instruments to create a convincing equivalent of a Middle Eastern ensemble. The most striking effect, intended to evoke the voice of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum (1898-1975) and heard at the outset, is the harpist’s haunting vocalization of a drooping semitone through cupped hands into the instrument’s soundboard. Emily Levin sang it well and played beautifully throughout. The Bolivian-born Augustin Fernandez, resident in Britain, contributed “Rio Bravo” (“Fierce River,” 2016), a reaction to calamitous flooding of the Rede River in northern England last December, in which “a melodious companion of many years,” as Mr. Fernandez put it, “turned into a roaring monster many times its usual size.” The work does not purport to be descriptive, he writes, but it begins with an alarm in the percussion, followed by fulminating surges, a tentative calm and, finally, another alarm. (The flood recurred, with lesser intensity, four times.) “Spoliarium” (2016), by the Philippine-born Joshua Cerdenia, is named, he says, for a chamber of the Roman Colosseum where dead and dying fallen gladiators were “stripped of their armor and dispatched.” It, too, avoids overt description, here in favor of what Mr. Cerdenia calls “a large, quasi-symmetrical narrative arc.” Most touching for a hymnlike string passage midway through, the work pretty much explodes at the end. Mr. Sachs filled out the program with “Evening Music” (2002) by Valentin Bibik, a Ukrainian composer who died in 2003 and whose work Mr. Sachs often champions in these concerts. Pleasant enough, it was notable for its solo ip two nytimescom2016/0426/rtsimusicioview-color-and-contrast-trom-the-new.ullard- ensemble hil rrf=collcton*é2F spol ghtcollection?2Fclassical-music-roviawsaizai016 Review: Coler and Contrasts From the New Juiliard Ensemble - The New York Times writing for violin (beautifully played by Tes Lark) and, to a lesser extent, guitar (Bokyung Byun). ‘A version of this review appears in print on April 26, 2016, on page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: A Global Whirl of Color and Contrasts. © 2016 The New York Times Company ip two nytimescom2016/0426/rtsimusicioview-color-and-contrast-trom-the-new.ullard- ensemble hil rrf=collcton*é2F spol ghtcollection?2Fclassical-music-roviaws