PERFORMING ARTS

Monday, March 1, 2004; Page C05

counter)induction

A New York-based new-music group called counter)induction made its Washington debut Saturday night at George Washington University with a graceful tribute to two musicians on the GW faculty. Douglas Boyce's "The Druid's War: Go Back to Being a Eucalyptus" for tenor, violin, viola and cello, uses a surreal text by Mexican poet Octavio Paz, with music that is emotion-laden, vividly descriptive, very demanding of the singer and perhaps a shade more audience-friendly than the text.

In a program note, Boyce said, "This work was written for tenor Robert Baker as a means of revenge for the hours of torture resulting from having adjacent offices." But in the world premiere performance, a process lasting nearly half an hour, Baker showed no sign of discomfort. He rose easily to the composition's quite reasonable vocal demands and conveyed its intense, chaotic images and emotions logically and powerfully. Paz's text involves a series of images and episodes that morph into one another with no logic but that of dreams.

There are, among other things, a visit to the river Styx, an epic cat-and-dog fight involving the mythical three-headed Cerberus, a storm and a metamorphosis (human to tree). The flavor is captured well in one climactic passage:

I was a statue in an empty square,

I was a word enclosed in parentheses,

I was a hand on a stopped clock,

I was left with a fistful of echoes,

a dance of phantom syllables

in the cave of my skull.

The program, titled "Day for Night," featured pieces that embody their own contradiction. Kyle Bartlett's "The Weight of a Reflection" opened with a set of melodic wisps, hints and fragments for piano and strings that gave way to a strong, positive statement eloquently played by cellist Sumire Kudo. Jukka Tiensuu's "Beat" played games with different tones generated by microtonal dissonance, and Gyorgy Kurtag's enigmatic "Hommage à R. Sch." was full of cryptic allusions to the music of Robert Schumann and other classical composers.

The performances were all first-rate, and the ambiance of GW's high-tech Jack Morton Auditorium suited the music both visually and acoustically.

-- Joseph McLellan

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