Review

No Exit plays alongside art exhibit at the Maltz Museum (June 1)

by Daniel Hathaway

When the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage put up its current exhibit of pieces from the Progressive Insurance collection entitled “About the Right of Being Different: The Art of Diversity and Inclusion at Progressive” and invited the new music ensemble No Exit to concoct a program around that show, music director Timothy Beyer set out to choose selections that demonstrated a similarly wide range of expression. “I think the program we came up with features a lot of people who have a unique, singular and personal sensibility and aesthetic to their music”, he told us in a pre-concert interview.

Indeed, No Exit’s 75-minute program on Wednesday evening, June 1 included six works by five composers with very different things to say, and three of them, all members of No Exit, were present to tell us a bit about their creations in lieu of a printed program. The intimate, 50-seat Maltz theater was nearly full for the event.

Pianist Nicholas Underhill began the concert with the first movement (Slow. Soft) from Morton Feldman’s Last Pieces of 1959. Static and nearly rhythmless, the movement was something like a pianistic still life. Mr. Underhill segued directly into his own, aptly-titled Caprice from 1999. Varied and seemingly unrelated ideas shared the score with a bluesy section.

Timothy Beyer’s Malekhamoves from 2009 for solo viola was prefaced by the composer’s short dissertation on the tradition of wordless cantorial singing that led to the secular tradition of Klezmer. Violist Tom Bowling’s strong and assured performance was richly evocative of the style of impassioned vocalization Mr. Beyer sought to represent, replete with sighs and keening, bracketed by a striking pizzicato motive which began and ended the piece. Mr. Bowling drew a laugh from the audience when he laid out the pages of his extremely tattered score.

Kaija Saariaho’s Je sens un deuxieme Coeur (2003), a reflexion on pregnancy, brought cellist Nicholas Diadore together with Mr. Bowling and Mr. Underhill on the Maltz’s tiny stage. Its five moments — programmatic but according to the composer, ultimately abstract — were replete with Ms. Saariaho’s signature string techniques: squeaky, hesitant slides, miasmas, violent scamperings and ostinatos, amid cascades of notes, rumblings and bass chord clusters in the piano. The final movement, representing the two hearts beating in one body, was tortured but beautiful, reflecting its marking, Doloroso ma sempre con amore. The trio played the work with mastery and commitment.

Violinist Cara Tweed made her first appearance of the evening with Nicholas Underhill’s Habanera for solo violin. She prefaced her masterful performance by expressing her delight in having the opportunity to play the work on multiple occasions. An attractive set of variations with some very lyrical moments that returned to its original material at the end, the Habanera obviously is in Ms. Tweed’s soul as well as in her fingers.

The final work was Jenna Lyle’s Bat Anatomy, an entertaining musico-theatrical work involving the whole piano quartet, in which Ms. Lyle noted she was trying to achieve transparent textures while creating vivid drama. “Histrionics is my natural mode of expression”, she allowed, before plunging into the first movement, a strange, Dadaesque spoken-sung monologue by a husband to his mistress punctuated with riveting effects from the instrumentalists. The second, Punctus Contra Punctum, found Ms. Lyle circling the audience as she recited the text, ending up with her hands in the piano strings to alter some of its final notes.

This was a captivating evening of music presented by skilled and friendly performers in an intimate setting. No Exit performs with complete commitment to its repertory but doesn’t take itself too seriously either — something that really draws an audience into what they’re doing. And a quick turn round the art exhibit afterwards revealed that the ensemble had done a fine job of selecting music that paralleled its spirit and theme. Next time we hope also to hear from composer and pianist James Praznik, who modestly spent this evening serving as the group’s efficient stagehand and page turner.

Published on clevelandclassical.com June 7, 2011

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