October 15, 2009

In the world of commercial music, the conventional wisdom is that the full-length album is dead, that listeners want individual tracks, downloaded rather than on discs. But on Monday, when the big news elsewhere was the release of a single by Michael Jackson, a handful of new-music performers gathered at Le Poisson Rouge and, in two unrelated shows, offered glimpses of an alternative universe in which expansive, unified projects are everything…..

The late show was a collaboration between the cellist Matt Haimovitz and the composer Du Yun. They played most of Mr. Haimovitz’s new recording, “Figment,” a challenging collection of harmonically and rhythmically complex works by Elliott Carter, Ana Sokolovic, Luna Pearl Woolf, Steven Stucky, Gilles Tremblay and Ms. Du, linked here by quirky improvisations in which Ms. Du provided electronic sound and spoken texts….

Mr. Haimovitz performed his set as a nearly continuous stream of music, amplified and bathed in electronic reverb. He was at his most vigorous in Mr. Carter’s assertive “Figment” and Mr. Stucky’s vividly drawn, harmonically vital “Dialoghi.” But his best performance was of Mr. Tremblay’s “Cèrdes en Voile: Thrène Pour le Liban,” a passionate, occasionally introspective solo score…

by Allan Kozinn

View article at The New York Times