Results tagged “ditsonfestivalofcontemporarymusic”

            

On Sunday, the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music's last pair of concerts at the ICA began with two people and finished with over sixty, in a glass box on the harbor. The former were Matt Haimovitz, on cello, and Geoff Burleson, on (and in) piano. Children standing on the postmodern boardwalk outside pressed their faces against the window as Burleson hit keys with one hand and reached in with the other to pluck at the piano's viscera, as Augusta Read Thomas's "Cantos for Slava" (2008) required. When Haimovitz wasn't wringing long, doleful cries from his instrument, he too plucked, as if the cello were a tall, fat lute.

       

Friday night's installment of the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music was all about text. Whole, grammatical sentences; comprehensible, English, (mostly) well-enunciated; no Italian arias, no liturgical Latin, no repurposed Sanskrit, neither Einstein nor beach—this is not what Bostonist has come to expect from classical music, contemporary or otherwise.

      

Firebird Ensemble, based in Somerville and outfitted like an accomplished H&M ad in black and red and sparkling knitwear, opened the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music on Thursday night. They began with a darkly animated piece that sounded like a fit night of half-sleep in a bed of swaying strings, heckled by lonely trills of from a flute and the footsteps of a piano that approached like a serial killer. Never has sudden bongoing sounded more ominous to Bostonist's ears. (Leafing through the program after the fact, we saw that the composer, Curtis Hughes, has titled it, in lowercase, "danger garden".)