Music of Pierluigi Billone at Boston University, March 19-20, 2015
Boston Globe
March 23, 2015
Two concerts featuring compositions by the Italian-born, Vienna-based composer Pierluigi Billone, whose name and music I first encountered because of the Talea Ensemble. How often have I spoken or written that particular phrase now, I wonder? In this case, I saw Talea's Alex Lipowski perform Billone's Mani.Matta in a concert at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York City, which I reviewed for The New York Times a little more than a year ago.
Talea was originally supposed to perform at Boston University as part of a Billone residency that started on March 16 and runs through April 1. Plans changed, alas, but the BU programming is still quite rich. Plus, Talea will now play its own Billone program (including Mani.Matta, plus a world premiere and a U.S. premiere) at Columbia University's Italian Academy on April 8, and Boston will still see Talea on May 8 at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, where it will perform Happy End by Georges Aperghis. And Lipowski still served as an expert witness in David G. Weininger's excellent Boston Globe preview of the BU residency.
Almost invariably when I read my reviews in print, I come upon something that I regret, and that's true in this case. No, it's not the invocation of Shakespeare, Wagner, Beckett, and Herriman, all of which suited how those concerts left me feeling.
Rather, I regret that I forgot to mention something I discussed briefly on Friday night with Joshua Fineberg, the founding director of the Boston University Center for New Music and the organizer of the Billone residency: namely, that no matter how many times you might listen to a recording of a Billone composition like ITI. KE. MI. beforehand, nothing can prepare you adequately for the overwhelming barrage of sensation that a live encounter brings on. There's just something so tactile, so present, so vulnerable, so very human about the sensation of witnessing a performance like the one that Marco Fusi gave on Thursday...humbling is among the words that comes to mind.
As I state at the end of the review, there are two more concerts remaining in Billone's residency: one by bassoonist Christopher Watford on Tuesday night, and one by the ensemble [sound icon] on April 1, both at BU's College of Fine Arts Concert Hall (855 Commonwealth Ave.) Here's a bit of Watford playing Billone to provide incentive.
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