Italian, With a Messiaen Accent

By Allan Kozinn

November 7, 2003 | The New York Times

The influence of Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time" on contemporary chamber music has been such that even when it isn't played, one can often see its shadow. The young musicians in Antares play the instruments that the Messiaen requires: violin, clarinet, piano and cello. By deploying themselves in different combinations, they are able to play a fairly broad repertory, and they proved as much on Wednesday evening in an installment of the Contemporary Classic Italian series at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, at Columbia University.

Italian music of the last 50 years dominates these programs, but composers of other nations, including the United States, are included as well. Antares opened its program with Elliott Carter's "Con Leggereza Pensosa – Omaggio a Italo Calvino," a short burst of spiky pointillism for clarinet, piano and cello. The Carter set the tone for a program devoted mostly to music that was either Serial or that steadfastly avoided the conventions of tonality. But the works were arranged slyly: the Carter was probably the most abstract, and each of the five works that followed edged progressively (or, from a certain modernist point of view, regressively) closer both to tonality and narrative. Luigi Nono's "...sofferte onde serene..." set a live piano line against the distant thunder of taped, electronically modified piano sounds, and if the work was as gritty as the Carter, its sound palette made it more picturesque. The first of Luigi Dallapiccola's "Due Studi," for violin and piano, was ruminative and fairly arid, but the second was a burst of vital energy.

Where things really started picking up, though, was in Giacinto Scelsi's "Preghiera Per un' Ombra," a solo clarinet work that began vividly and grew increasingly wild – with zippy figuration that leaped through the clarinet's range – yet ended as a touchingly elegiac melody. Luciano Berio's "Due Pezzi," for violin and piano, at first sounded like a test of technique but quickly yielded a rich, tightly packed array of musical ideas. And Gyorgy Ligeti's Sonata for Solo Violoncello very nearly abandoned atonality entirely. Its first movement offers long, singing lines punctuated by pizzicato and sliding effects, as if leaping between the 18th and 20th centuries. Its rippling finale dispensed with the modernist touches more decisively.

The four musicians play with superb technical polish and, equally important, a sense that they not only are comfortable with this music but also understand its vocabulary and syntax. They are Vesselin Gellev, violinist; Garrick Zoeter, clarinetist; Eric Huebner, pianist; and Rebecca Patterson, cellist.