In Friday’s (8/5) Boston Globe, Jeremy Eichler writes, “Every summer at Tanglewood, for a few enticing days, the fringes become the center and an adventurous audience convenes in Ozawa Hall for the Festival of Contemporary Music. This year’s festival is being directed by the composer Charles Wuorinen, often grouped with high-modernism’s old guard. But the programs are at least somewhat generationally and stylistically diverse. Fred Ho’s newly commissioned ‘Fanfare to Stop the Creeping Meatball!’ is a short, swinging, and extroverted curtain-raiser for two trumpets and two trombones, and Wuorinen has placed it as a kind of call to order before most of the concerts.… The evening’s main event was the premiere of Wuorinen’s ‘It Happens Like This,’ a new cantata built from settings of seven Tate poems, and scored for four singers with chamber ensemble.… [Brian] Ferneyhough’s imposing ‘Terrain’—essentially a hypercomplex violin concerto—proved at once pulse-quickening and inscrutable.” The program also included works by Milton Babbitt, John Chowning, Jason Eckardt, Tobias Picker, and John Zorn. Performing groups included Ensemble Signal, the Tanglewood Music Center fellows, and the New Fromm Players, who “did the heavy lifting in these exemplary performances.”
Posted August 5, 2011
