TILT Brass with Nate Wooley at University Settlement, September 21, 2012
The New York Times, Sept. 26, 2012
Scroll down past reviews of Kimiko Ishizaka and the Talea Ensemble for a succinct snapshot of a rich collaboration between New York agit-prop new-music ensemble TILT Brass and trumpeter Nate Wooley, who presented the fourth and latest installment of his substantial Seven Storey Mountain project on Friday night as part of the Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT).
If I'd had a bit more space, I'd have devoted it to the New York premiere of Louis Andriessen's de Volharding, a brilliant 45-minute magnum opus from 1972 that caused the founding of the long-running Dutch new-music group Orkest de Volharding—whose instrumentation, I was fascinated to learn, was similar to that of another brilliant Dutch institution, the Willem Breuker Kollektief, whose leader, the late saxophonist and composer Willem Breuker, had founded Orkest de Volharding with Andriessen.
The performance, trance-inducing and paint-peeling by turns, was superb. The piece is not one of flashy display, mostly, but it seemed slightly paradoxical that the showiest playing of a brass-oriented night came from pianist Stephen Gosling in the work's lengthy, cyclonic minimalist dance-frenzy opening.
Incidentally, speaking of the Willem Breuker Kollektief, that wonderful band is paying homage to its late founder and leader with a farewell tour currently underway. The Kollektief will perform at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn next Thursday, Oct. 4; sorry to say that I won't be able to attend, but you should consider it. And the Festival of New Trumpet Music runs through Oct. 6.
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