Review

March 5, 2006

Michael Huebner Birmingham News music critic
Duo premieres five works

Birmingham Art Music Alliance has proved time and again that the experimental and avant garde are still healthy and
relevant. These steadfast modernists are surviving the onslaught of what many classical music marketers perceive as
audience-pleasing (therefore tonally conservative) new music. Instead, they stage a refreshing mix of world premieres,
off-the-beaten-track oddities and multimedia works.

Monday's concert at Birmingham-Southern College offered five premieres and two works with live computer processing. The performers were two of Birmingham's most prominent new music devotees, one the violinist Karen Bentley-Pollick.

BSC's Dorothy Hindman contributed "Monumenti," a duo inspired by Cindy Sheehan's anti-war protests in which images of confrontations, arguments, periods of repose, humor and ridicule were easy to conjure from the two opposing instruments.

Charles Norman Mason, completed "Entanglements" in Rome recently, where he is fulfilling his Rome Prize obligations. An intricately scored duo, its acoustic string timbres are imitated and expanded by computer-generated sounds in snappy rhythms, balanced by eerie sustained tones.

Bentley-Pollick commissioned Czech composer Jan Vicar to write "Homage to Fiddlers," a bold, dramatic work with lively rhythms and a hint of Bartok. Tracy Mendel combines lyricism with tension-producing repetition in "Lines After Neruda and Gismonti," but the work's connection with its title is vague.

Projected images of melting timepieces, family photos and outer space propelled UAB composer Michael Angell's Sonata for Cello and Tape, a work that oozes nostalgia and surrealism.

An amplified Bentley-Pollick accompanied herself in "Fiddle Faddle," as Troy, N.Y., composer Neil Rolnick manipulated a feed of her live performance with a computer. Easily the most technologically advanced piece on the program, it was also the least adventurous, its Gershwin-esque language and suggestions of fiddle tunes softening the experimental bite. Michael Huebner is fine arts writer and classical music critic for The Birmingham News.