SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Hersant, Freund, Leroux, Shapiro, Campion: Ensemble Zellig, presented by Cal Performances, Hertz Hall, University of California at Berkeley. 7.11.2010 (HS)

Ensemble Zellig, a French quartet that specializes in new music, brought six captivating, compelling pieces to Cal Performances on its first U.S. tour Sunday. The concert before a half-filled Hertz Hall revealed four musicians who know each other well, play fearlessly and often beautifully. But most of all, they demonstrated that they have the taste to select music that is both listenable and intellectually stimulating.

That doesn’t happen with new music as often as it should.

The group took the name Zellig as a reference to the Woody Allen film “Zelig,” about a man who was able to fit seamlessly into any environment. They had to add an extra “l” to avoid copyright problems, but they proved themselves to be equally chameleon-like.

Cécile Cuniot (flute) and Jonas Vitaud (piano) joined founding members Etienne Lamaison (clarinet) and Silvia Lenzi (cello) in various solo offerings, duets, trios and ultimately a tempo bending quartet. Four of the pieces were West Coast premieres.

The standout, for me, was Change and End, a series of duos for clarinet and cello written earlier this year by the American composer Gerald Shapiro, a professor at Brown University. The pieces fascinated on several levels. The writing for the two instruments interwove and layered their sounds to create a timbre that blurred the individuality of the instruments, often sounding like a whole new instrument (the clarello?). Melodically and harmonically they ranged from simple folk-like tunes to complex dissonances, but the form of each miniature (usually no longer than two minutes) was clear. The title refers to a compositional device in which Shapiro introduces a new, tangential idea to conclude several of the movements. Most of all, this music had clear and compelling emotional content.

Cuniot opened the concert by meeting the formidable technical challenges of Philipped Hersant’s Five Miniatures for Alto Flute. Written in 1995, it treats the deep, warm sound of the extra large flute with vaguely Japanese, Burundi and Berber influences. Most of Hersant’s Six Bagatelles, transcribed for clarinet, cello and piano, seemed intent on exploring sonorities rather than developing a clear musical narrative, except for the fourth, a slow, steady threnody that found the piano reflecting the clarinet and cello’s music like glints off a jewel’s facets.

The most dissonant pieces came leavened with humor. Don Freund’s Crunch Time put the piano and bass clarinet through a series of raucous canons, some of them recalling jazz saxophone riffs. It ended without going anywhere, which was the point, I think. Philippe Leroux’s PPP, for piano and flute, started off almost sweetly, but got inexplicably violent and shrill by the end.

The final piece, Campion’s Auditory Fiction, was a study in weaving together tempos for each individual player that got slower and faster independently. It used a computer to feed a different click track to each musician so that the music could flow smoothly.

In theory this could add extra melodic and harmonic depth to the oft explored idea of many clocks ticking at different paces, occasionally together, often creating unusual fluctuating rhythms. And indeed, the first few minutes found the musicians pulsing on a single note, in unison, until they went off on different tempos as their music expanded into individual melodies. After a short while, the fluctuating tempos came together for a surprising and delightful unison riff before separating again.

Unfortunately, whatever developed after that sounded mostly like a group that couldn’t keep a tempo together. It came off as what musicians often refer to as a “train wreck.” There could be humor in that. Or it could have become something riveting. Campion’s technical proficiency in creating a way to let tempos fluctuate and come together was impressive. But the music never got to a payoff.

Give Zellig, and Campion, credit for exploring those boundaries. This was a concert worth paying attention to.

Harvey Steiman

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