Last time I wrote about the Argento Ensemble, they were taking their audience on a tour of contemporary French composers. On January 31st at Merkin, they extended their range a century and moved a bit northwest. This new program, entitled “Expressionism in Motion,” traced the legacy of Austro-Germanic Expressionism from Wagner and Schoenberg through Stockhausen to Wolfgang Rihm and Georg Friedrich Haas. Interestingly, Argento chose not to present the works in order of age. Rather, they arranged the pieces in order of increasing instrumental forces. The concert, then, began in the chronological middle with Stockhausen’s “Der Kleine Harlekin” from 1975.
Read moreOn the Friday before Thanksgiving, the Argento Chamber Ensemble took the audience at Symphony Space on a little transatlantic trip with an evening featuring four contemporary French composers: Fabien Levy, Gérard Pesson, Tristan Murail, and Philippe Hurel. Of course for many readers, the phrase ‘contemporary French composers’ will evoke one word (especially with Murail being one of the composers in question) – spectralism. For those of you how aren’t familiar with the term, spectralism is an approach to composition that arises from the analysis of the partials of a particular sound or sounds (its spectrum). How this information relates to
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