It’s not everywhere you can go hear the Pierre Boulez masterpiece Le Marteau sans Maître for free, so I seized the chance and headed to the Swarthmore campus last night for an on-the-edge performance by Orchestra 2001 under the direction of James Freeman. The reading was poised and elegant, but there were moments in the faster passages when the ensemble was way out on a limb, tackling music on the furthest limit of playability. You practically broke a sweat just listening. Props to classical guitarist Jason Vieaux, who not only played Le Marteau but also stayed on for Allen Krantz’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” a guitar/chamber orchestra suite inspired by William Blake. (Krantz was in the audience and took a bow afterwards.) Kenji Bunch opened the evening playing his own Suite for Viola and Piano, a richly varied modern work featuring pianist Marcantonio Barone.
Yesterday afternoon I was also happy to catch “Sonic Cinema,” a project of the Philly chamber ensemble Rêlache, which set to live music three works by the visionary filmmaker Maya Deren. Her 1958 piece “The Very Eye of Night,” with negative images of ballet dancers superimposed on a night-sky background, was shown twice: first with the original Teiji Ito score, then a beautiful, far less abstract setting by Kyle Gann.
Philadelphia! It’s not New York, but all the same, what a town.
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