The versatile performing duo known as “The Kenners” played a terrific concert Saturday night at the Tenri Cultural Institute. The program featured works by Charles Wuorinen, Toru Takemitsu, and Jason Eckhardt, and premieres of one form or another by Kate Soper, David Brynjar Franzson, and Petr Bakla. The Kenners’ catch is that each musician plays more than one instrument. Saturday’s program required Eliot Gattegno to switch between alto, tenor, and soprano saxophones; Eric Wubbels alternated between piano and accordion. (Sometimes he performs live electronics as well.)

Soper and Franzson provided the world premieres. I liked Soper’s I Had a Slow Thought on a Hard Day for accordion and alto sax. A meditative piece interspersing lyrical gestures with pitch-less pulling and pushing of air through both instruments, the music successfully sustains a slow rate of development and builds elegantly into more continuous passages. Franzson’s aggressive and noisy piece for the same combination, Closeness of Materials, reminded me pleasantly of Salvatore Sciarrino. But the music ends before much of a shape has been established.

Receiving its New York premiere was Petr Bakla’s WAFT for piano and tenor sax. Reminiscent of Shih’s work, the piece blurrily taps up and down the chromatic scale without quite doing enough to compensate for the inevitable intervallic monotony. But timbrally the piece is attractive. Jason Eckardt’s Tangled Loops for piano and soprano sax is an extravagant, virtuoso work with some sumptuous dissonances and out-of-this-world passage-work; but the composition’s block-like construction seems at odds with the very pregnant material with which Eckhardt fills the sections.

Charles Wuorinen’s Divertimento is a great piece, and I don’t feel the need to comment about it here (again), other than to say I felt the Kenners’ performance brought out wonderfully the music’s emotional contrasts. But hands down the best work on the program was Toru Takemitsu’s stunning Distance for soprano sax and off-stage accordion. The saxophone’s wild outbursts of multiphonic music dance over an accordion drone which, somehow, manages to foreground and expand upon the on-stage solo. Imaginative, clear-eyed, and intensely emotional, the piece was also the most convincingly paced work on the program. Its progress felt both surprising and inevitable. Let us hope The Kenners themselves enjoy a similarly successful progress.

There was a terrific profile of Gil Rose, Music Director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and of BMOP itself in Sunday’s Boston Globe.  If you don’t know BMOP you’re missing out on one of the best forces for new orchestral music around.  There’s a lot of good stuff in the article, which is why you should read it for yourself, but it might be of particular interest to this crowd that they’re putting together their own record label “BMOP Sound” which will be launched in January “with five new releases adding to its existing catalog of 13 commercially released CDs, and 28 more albums in progress.”  Later in the piece we also learn the interesting statistic that Rose receives upward of 150 unsolicited scores every month–so if you’re wondering why James Levine and Essa-Pekka Salonen aren’t returning your calls this may give a sense of how overwhelmed with submissions a music director with a national profile and a known interest in new music must be.  (It also makes Bang On A Can’s claim that “we will listen to everything” all the more impressive.)

BMOP inaugurates its 10^th season at 8 PM tomorrow night (November 2^nd) in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall with a concert of piano concerti.  Nina Ferrigno, Anthony Davis, Joanne Kong, and Marilyn Nonken will be playing the pianos, and the program consists of pieces by Elliott Schwartz (the premiere of a new revision), Anthony Davis, Michael Colgrass (the U.S. premiere), and David Rakowski (world premiere).  I’ve heard parts of the Rakowski, and it rawks.

The biggest shock of the day was reading in the NYTimes Book Review a review by Pankaj Mishra of Coltrane:  The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff, the following sentence:  “Jazz’s turn to the avant-garde and exoticisms of the 1960s now seems as inevitable as the rise of atonal music after the breakup of the stable societies of 19th century Europe.”  These days you’re likely to get stoned if you so much as hint that there was any kind of inevitability in the rise of atonal music (whatever that might be).  Fancy not knowing that “we” all now regard “atonal music” (whatever that might be) not only as not being inevitable, but as being a downright aberration or perversion (if they’re different things).  How did Pankaj Mishra fail to find that out?

After his spectacular Spoleto Festival performance of the 16 piece Violin Futura set, Piotr Szewczyk continues to promote the series with a new video and an upcoming gig at the Santa Fe New Music Festival, February 2nd.

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Check out the entire series, which was designed around short, exciting pieces for solo violin composed just for Piotr. My favorites include our own Lawrence Dillon’s Mister Blister, Piotr’s Cadenza and Carson Cooman’s The Doors in the Sky. Other composers featured include Mason Bates, John Kennedy, Marc Mellits, and myself with Puce. Piotr’s use of YouTube videos and the web in general for promotion of the series is a model for any new music superstar wannabe.