Ashlee Mack (left), John McMurtery

The program featured two works each by Romig and Taylor, as well as five that were the product of the SCA's first Call for Scores. Romig commented to me before the event, "SCA tried to approach this in the way that we would like to be treated when applying to other organizations' Calls for Scores. Instead of doing just one of the submitted pieces, we're programming as many as possible." The result was an eighty minute program packed with challenging music, impeccably prepared.

McMurtery and Mack specialize in the Modernist and New Complexity styles of contemporary music; their selection of repertoire reflected this enthusiasm for pieces that demand much, from both a technical and interpretive standpoint. Romig's Double Four, a brief duo, called upon them to build intricate, well-coordinated arpeggiated harmonies. The flute and piano occasionally dovetailed toward a unison pitch, creating several colorful moments of confluence. Taylor's "The Shores of Elsinore" was a piano solo that also revelled in complex verticals, inhabiting a gradually unfolding, mysterious and decidedly Schoenbergian realm. Ming-Hsiu Yen's piano piece Movements (of which there were two) seemed less fully fleshed out. A brief and thorny "Prelude" gave way to a moto perpetuo movement, "Web", which didn't conclude so much as stop. That said, Mack gave the piece a strong and confident performance.

Many composers on the program employed an impressive array of extended techniques for flute. Sun Mi Ro's Summer's Dream used glissandi as an idee fixe throughout, which served as a punctuating device amid long, arching and extremely wide-ranging melodic lines. Derek Charke, a composer as well as a flutist himself, presented a well-composed flute part in his duo Distant Voices. While the language of the piece was attractive, Distant Voices suffered from a lack of editorial restraint -- it could have easily been more effective at half the length. Andrian Pertout's Echoes from the Past, on the other hand, played with a large array of extended flute tricks -- glissandi, multiphonics, percussive attacks, vocalisms -- while maintaining an integrated and compelling formal design.

Even for new music aficionados, so much dense and formidable music presented in close succession is a challenging sit. While SCA might consider a brief intermission on their next concert program, Christopher Brakel's "Meta-Tango" supplied the next best thing -- dance music! I would have preferred a bit more tango and a bit less "meta", but Brakel's music is forceful, lively and engaging. Mack excelled in this hybrid work -- a rapprochement between post-tonality and more direct gestural rhythms. It would be wonderful to hear her assay more repertoire in this vein.

McMurtery has every reason to play Romig's Sonnet 2 like he owns it; the piece is the topic of his doctoral dissertation. Still, it's impressive to hear his fluent command of this challenging solo. The Sonnet is filled with rhythmic flourishes and flurried arpeggiations. At the same time, a strongly articulated harmonic trajectory unfolds out of the work's compound melodies. The concert concluded with Taylor's Voices in the Night, a duo comprised of several movements. While most of these were brief, Webernian vignettes, the sum total was filled with striking gestures, ear-catching harmonies, and a number of memorable moments -- a microcosm of the SCA concert experience.

Article by Christian Carey