UCSB’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music is going all out to be accessible in its first concert of the 2012-13 school year at 8 p.m. Tuesday in Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall (Music Building).
The avant garde ensemble, under the superb direction of Jeremy Haladyna, will punch our “Ticket to Heaven” — for that is what the concert is called. It promises to be a truly celestial evening, harp and all.
The program, assembled in some sublime region of the cosmos, will include Alan Hovhaness’ Upon Enchanted Ground (with Anahita Navab on harp, Azeem Ward on flute, Zach McGee on cello and Anthony Garcia and percussion), Per Norgard’s etherial Spell (Amanda Kritzberg on clarinet, Larissa Fedoryka on cello and Mark Gutierrez on piano), Lou Harrison’s The Perilous Chapel, a 1948 ballet that takes its title from a poem by William Blake (also featuring Anahita Navab on harp, Azeem Ward on flute, Zach McGee on cello and Anthony Garcia on percussion), Haladyna’s Lost: White Dog [Sak Tz’i], a new installment of The Mayan Cycle (Abby Sten on flute, Haladyna on organ and Andrew Manos on ritual drums), Alan Smith’s Vignettes: Letters from George to Evelyn, based on the World War II letters of First Lt. George Honts to his wife, Evelyn (soprano Sloane Artis-Thomas with Bridget Hough on piano), and two of Tom Johnson’s Infinite Melodies (Ori Barel on guitar).
If the first two selections are any indication, there will be no need to fasten our seat belts at any point. We are in for the smoothest ride imaginable.
Whether you consider them as men or as composers, Hovhaness and Norgard are very different creatures, yet they share the characteristic that each is trying to capture eternity in a web of chords. Hovhaness is the one more perfectly resigned, and his music always soothes. Norgard is rather chillier, a sad but unyielding puritan, imagining heaven without the human stain.
And they both make me think of the lines by W.B. Yeats that Wilfred Owen misquotes in the epigraph to his poem, “The Show”:
We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living
Breathe upon the tarnished mirror of the world,
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.
Tickets to Tuesday’s concert are $15 for general admission and $7 for students, with tickets available at the door or in advance by clicking here.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk or @NoozhawkNews.