Metropolis Ensemble launched its new season on September 15 with Renderings, showcasing music from Ray Lustig, Vivian Fung, and Timo Andres at the fantastically whimsical, Tim Burton-esque Angel Orensanz Center. As with last year’s concert at the center, audience members were given a chair at the door and invited to choose any place to sit on the premises. Metropolis opened the evening with Ray’s piece, Compose Thyself, which took an unfinished Bach cantata (composed only of a soprano melody line) and refurbished the work with Ray’s distinctly robust, western voice (lush strings, clean harmonies, intricate woodwinds, cinematic grandness, prominent piano part) filled the space and echoed Aaron Copland’s music. The work threads around the solo soprano voice sung by Jolle Greenleaf; guest ensemble TENET wove intricate vocal counterpoint throughout the piece. Vivian Fung’s Violin Concert enchanted the audience with its ethereal color palette, dizzyingly intricate hyper-rhythms, and explosive percussion. The fiery, virtuosic solo part was written for and performed by Metropolis’s Kristin Lee, who personally asked Vivian to compose the piece. The bewilderingly complex piece was performed in completion for the first time at the concert, as it was only rehearsed and recorded in sections. Kristin describes the piece: “This piece is really complex; from beginning to end, it’s like a puzzle. It’s different from just ‘solo and orchestra,’ it’s more like chamber music.” The piece is inspired by the textures, colors, and rhythms of Balinese gamelan playing: Highly physical and percussion, the music features a lot of cross-rhythms and compound meter changes, wildly fluctuating tempos, off-beat pulses, and atmospheric colors and sounds. Kristin talks about her interpretation of the piece:
At the performance, I let loose and had a good time. I didn’t necessarily care if I missed a note, I really went over the top and was much more flexible with my interpretation. When you really like a piece, you get into it and comprehend it more deeply, and find more creative energy to play around with interpretation. I feel like even if this piece weren’t written for me, I would love it anyway.
The evening ended with an encore performance of Timo Andres’ re-imagined Mozart’s “Coronation” Concerto. Metropolis commissioned Timo to complete the concerto, which is missing the majority of the left-hand part., as well as a new cadenza. Timo came up with a feisty, ambitious left-hand part that strongly established its own independent voice from the right-hand melody: sometimes rudely interjecting, sometimes grotesque, other times enhancing the beauty of the music, the left hand packed a lot of sass and was highly unpredictable in nature. “I thought of it as using the rest of the piece as a playground for the left hand,” Timo explains his compositional approach. “I was experimenting with different ways to subvert it and play along with it in ways you wouldn’t hear in Mozart.” His composition has unmissable references to piano’s composer giants: Prokofiev, Ives, Rachmaninoff, Debussy. He even quoted his own music throughout the piece in the left hand, and also referenced material from other movements in order to tie the piece together. Pulling from all sorts of varied sources, the compositions on the evening’s program celebrated the echoes and ties between music of the past and present, while giving us something to look forward to for the rest of the season!