March 2, 2004
MUSIC REVIEW | BLAIR MCMILLEN Skillfully Exposing the Heart of the Avant-Garde
By ALLAN KOZINN
lair McMillen set himself a challenge when he decided to devote his entire recital at Miller Theater on Feb. 19 to music by Giacinto Scelsi and Luciano Berio. Those composers, towering figures in the mid-20th century Italian avant-garde, favored spiky textures, irregular rhythms and unresolved dissonances, and they demand concentration on either side of the footlights. It is music to grapple with, not to bathe in.
But Mr. McMillen showed both the technique to negotiate this music and the imagination to find its heart. He also presented a few surprises, including an early neo-Classical suite by Berio, and the American premiere of Scelsi's uncharacteristic final work. That piece, ``Un Adieu'' (1987), is short and funereal, with gentle dissonances, uncomplicated textures and couched as an almost Gorecki-like repetitive meditation.
On the surface, ``Un Adieu'' was just about everything Scelsi distanced himself from during his long career. Yet its undisguised emotionality and lyricism could be heard at the core of the two other Scelsi works Mr. McMillen played. In the Sonata No. 2 (1939), those qualities were often hidden by aggressive, high-energy bursts of timbre — rapidly repeated notes and fast rumbling figuration, for example — but when Scelsi softened his textures and slipped into a more ruminative style Mr. McMillen lingered over the music as if it were Chopin.
If Mr. McMillen showed this to be inherently soulful music, he did not underplay its vitality. There are sizzling sections in this sonata and in the Five Incantations (1953) that are based on riffs a rock band would envy, and that Mr. McMillen played with an irresistible energy.
Berio, who died last year, seems to have turned up on more programs this season than in the last five. His ``Sequenza IV'' (1966) is the most familiar of the works Mr. McMillen played, and in some ways the most characteristic of Berio's way of juxtaposing the sober and the playful. The ``Petite Suite'' (1947) is playful as well, but comes from a time just before Berio was drawn toward Serialism. Some of it is just plain pretty, but there are some wicked parodies of Baroque dances here as well, including a Gavotte packed with exaggerated leaps.
The other Berio works played were the ``Six Encores,'' a set of short examinations of different aspects of pianism, composed between 1965 and 1990, and ranging in spirit from piquant to trenchant. Mr. McMillen split the set over the two halves of the program, and repeated the most attractive one
— the graceful ``Wasserklavier'' (1965) — as an encore.
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