Soft, fluid and yielding — or ferocious, wild and brutal? The textures and sounds of water are myriad, and the audience will experience them all at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater in a performance by Third Coast Percussion with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra and Principal Symphonic Conductor and Music Director Rossen Milanov.
The program consists of John Luther Adams’ “Become River,” Christopher Cerrone’s “Meander Spiral, Explode” and Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. The program was designed with “Meander, Spiral, Explode” in mind, and the composer will be on hand this evening to introduce the piece.
“Meander, Spiral, Explode” is the third work Cerrone has written for Third Coast; the piece was inspired by Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, a book that focuses on unusual structural elements in novels. He had been working on the second movement first, which already had this sort of spiral shape, he said; “it was one of those things where it’s baked into the DNA of my practice as an artist, having this organizational thing behind it.”
Any time Third Coast Percussion performs Cerrone’s music, said ensemble member Sean Connors, is “thrilling” — especially with the “full force of the symphony orchestra.”
As a reader and consumer of art, Ceronne aims to create a feeling of being on a journey through his compositions. His composition style is contextual; Ceronne “always has some kind of narrative behind” the music, and “Meander, Spiral, Explode” is no different. Listening to the outer movements have him on the edge of his seat, but the central movement is more lyrical and melancholy, he said — “my whole idea was attack and sustain.”
“Where it could go feels more indeterminate; it heads in one direction, heads in another,” he said. “Finally, it sort of finds itself at the very end, and it’s as the movement finds itself narratively.”
Adams’ and Britten’s pieces are connected through the theme of water; Adams specifically, Milanov said, “delivers the message of how important it is” to protect the planet on which we live.
“The idea is the music takes us on a journey, from the way a river begins with a few small streams, which is illustrated in the orchestra by this beautiful, enigmatic high-pitched violin that starts in the stratosphere register, slowly unfolding into a big white flowing river that moves down to the base register — it’s a kind of exploration,” Milanov said.
Britten’s Four Sea Interludes is from his opera Peter Grimes, a grim story about communal fear and the persecution of an individual by a society — reminiscent of issues Britten and his partner faced. Grimes, an off-putting fisherman, is accused of murdering his apprentices and an angry mob sets out for retribution. Grimes sails out to see, never to return.
Milanov finds the work one of the best examples of 20th-century opera, partly because Britten’s masterpiece “charts its own way” into what Milanov calls mid-century realism.
“They show everything the way it is, without sugarcoating things or making it necessarily easy on the ear but, in this case, with a very strong sense of drama,” he said. “You could listen to the music without having to see the staging — that’s how powerful it is.”
A benefit of collaborating with a guest percussion ensemble, Milanov said, is the visual nature of the musicians’ work — the ability for the audience to witness exactly how the quartet synchronizes amongst themselves while complementing the orchestra adds texture to the performance.
“Music of the 21st century is all about rhythm and it’s all about orchestration and colors — the rhythm is the primary factor,” Milanov said. “Percussion instruments are more or less contributing to the rhythmical component of the music.”
Milanov enjoys conducting music with rhythmic challenges, like “Meander, Spiral, Explode,” as he uses a calculator to determine temporal relations. Looking at his notes, one would see passages of the scores littered with calculations based on how each one of the sections is correlated.
Tonight’s performance is the second in as many days for Third Coast Percussion on the grounds. The ensemble performed Monday in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall for the Chautauqua Chamber Music Guest Artist Series — just the four musicians, in a much more intimate space. For the performance in the Amp this evening, Connors said there’s something moving about experiencing music with 74 other musicians. To have all of those musicians on stage together will be “exhilarating” — “especially musicians of the caliber that make up the orchestra at Chautauqua; these are professional musicians from all over the country, and the sound of their individual instruments combined all together,” he said. “We just don’t experience that big, lush sound when we’re performing in different formats.”
