International Contemporary Ensemble at Rose Theater, August 5, 2012
The New York Times, August 7, 2012
An amazing performance by the International Contemporary Ensemble, whose performances at the Mostly Mozart Festival this year mark the start of a tenth-anniversary season chock-full of musical marvels and extensive travel.
So giddy was I made by the concert, and in particular by Jukka Tiensuu's ingeniously fun nemo, that apparently I didn't notice the word ecstatic repeated twice within the same phrase in one paragraph. That repetition doesn't indicate a lack of imagination or a missing thesaurus, by the way; it's a cut-and-paste error in the draft I submitted. Mea culpa.
An aside: flush with excitement after the concert, I swear that I fully intended to compare certain passages in nemo to the work of DJ Screw (whose mixtapes, incidentally, are available to download here). Seriously. But somewhere between the thought and its execution, common sense prevailed. It's probably for the best – but if you've heard nemo, you know the parts I mean.
You can read a brief but interesting interview with Tiensuu, originally published in 2007 in Finnish Music Quarterly, right here, and an excellent DJ Screw feature by my friend and colleague Jesse Serwer, published by the Guardian in 2010, right here.
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