Potpourri

Program

Emil Petrovics: Cassazione

Performed by the Hungarian Brass Ensemble

Michael Tilson Thomas: Street Song

Performed by the Center City Brass Quintet

Dmitri Tymoczko: Rube Goldberg Variations

Unknown Recording

A lively Hungarian brass quintet by Emil Petrovics, Cassazione opens the program. Petrovics blends classic Hungarian harmonies with modern contemporary aesthetics, such as playing with a sense of atonality, and at times polyrhythm. This piece follows a slow-fast-slow-fast movement structure and ends with a brilliant chordal moment in the finale.

We segue from here to a piece by Michael Tilson Thomas called Street Song. This work opens with long, dense, and lush brass harmonies, before diving into a more rhythmically intense section that still keeps the same sense of density in the harmonies. The piece then backs off again for a beautiful and tuneful slow middle section, before picking up the pace again after a long upward chord bend across the ensemble. Tilson Thomas also brings in an innate sense of American musical culture when he uses jazz influences particularly toward the latter half of the work, when it bounces from tuneful melodies to bright bouncy almost improvisatory elements that seem to swing.

Rube Goldberg variations brings elements of chaos in the first movement. Much of the movement keeps a motor in some fashion of running sixteenth notes, while different instruments pass around long arching ‘melodies.’ With the prepared piano there is also a tin like percussive element that brings in an industrial feel. The second movement Stravinsky Fountain definitely screams Stravinsky influence (obviously), with a sort of disjunct, snappy melody being passed around the ensemble in quarter notes, again with the prepared piano, that to the listener also sounds almost like a harpsichord at times. One can imagine that to perform this movement requires excellent subdivision skills to avoid the dreaded ‘stepping into a hole.’ Homage brings back the chaotic feelings from the first movement. This section is largely the piano playing very technical, broken rhythms while the rest of the instruments play longer, or at least more stable rhythms underneath. The final movement Father Makes the World opens with a slow dreamy feel, that progresses into what I would consider “Quiet controlled chaos™,” in that though the melodies and harmonies can seem disjunct and random, it maintains the soft dreamlike elements, without getting too wild.