A Modern Foray Into The Past

By Allan Kozinn

May 6, 2005 | The New York Times


Blair McMillen is best known as a new-music pianist, both as a member of the contemporary music ensemble Counter)induction and as a soloist. But musicians as imaginative as Mr. McMillen tend to dislike being typecast, and perhaps the satisfyingly idiosyncratic recital on Wednesday at Casa Italiana at Columbia University was his way of showing the breadth of his interests.

There was, not surprisingly, plenty of contemporary music. But the program's central nervous system was music from long ago, drawn from the Faenza Codex, a manuscript compiled before 1450. The collection, which Mr. McMillen has been studying for several years, includes some of the earliest known keyboard music, and he played several selections from it.

Those pieces put a handful of distinct compositional moves in the listener's ear - a convoluted melody soaring over a simple, repeating bass line, for example, or a bright dance tune set against spare, primitive harmonies. With these antique ideas as a backdrop, Mr. McMillen played works by later composers - "later" here running from Baroque to contemporary - that updated and expanded on them. He also performed new works that reconsidered elements of older scores.

It must be said, too, that even Mr. McMillen's performances of the Faenza works, including pieces by Machaut and Landini, were modern renovations. He was not shy about tapping the piano's dynamic and coloristic fluidity, or its comparatively dry articulation, and his arrangements included some modern-sounding accompaniments.

Still, he caught their spirit sufficiently to set up the modern pieces. Matthew Greenbaum's "Ballate" drew on antique rhythmic and melodic gestures, but wrapped them in prickly, dissonant harmonies. Fabrizio De Rossi Re, in "Hurucane (Demon-Spirit of the Wind)" was also attracted by the rhythms of the Faenza pieces, but he reinterpreted them as a jazz-classical hybrid for piano and tape. The tape's main contribution was a scat vocal, and as vivid as Mr. McMillen's response to it was, the two-way interaction he might have had with a real singer would have been far more exciting.

A Respighi "Prelude on Gregorian Melodies" had nothing to do with the Faenza manuscript as such, but in weaving a pleasant, updated fabric around a chant theme, it was akin to Mr. Greenbaum's and Mr. DeRossi Re's works, though from the perspective of 1919. Jon Magnussen's "Toccare!" ran with the freewheeling gestures of a Frescobaldi toccata. And John Adams's "China Gates," played delicately, and Giacinto Scelsi's "Five Incantations," played with a riveting assertiveness, brought further modernist variety to the program.

Blair McMillen will appear with Counter)induction on June 3 at the Tenri Cultural Institute, 43A West 13th Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 645 2800.