The musical performance I most wish I'd seen this year
With musicians positioned around the rotunda at the Guggenheim, Orbits for 80 trombones, soprano and organ by Henry Brant. NYT:
Brant came to believe that music written in a single style could not evoke the “stresses, layered insanities and multidirectional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit,” as he once wrote. “Orbits” is defiantly polystylistic and multilayered. It begins with quiet trombone grumblings, like dinosaurs of our imagination stirring awake. The organ enters with a splattering of pitches in its high register, to contrast with the deep, indistinct sounds of the trombones.
As the music gains in intensity, there are captivating antiphonal effects, with ferocious outbursts passed back and forth among groupings of trombones and the organ erupting in a fit of cascading chords, holding its own against the din of brass. But there were also strangely spiritual episodes in this fitful and overpowering piece, as when the trombones played gently rising harmonies built from scores of individual lines while the ethereal soprano sang a wondrous mix of slinky slides and wordless melodic fragments.
