“For me, the concert does have this feel of culminating,” said clarinetist David Perry of the Second Movement Series. “I’ve had this experience with a number of different pieces, of ‘how on earth did this person know that everybody was going to connect to that moment in this piece of music?’ and I think that’s what we’re going for on this one. Having had that experience of seeing the things that you can’t see, and also the things that you know exist that you can’t see. It’s like a pain up close … but you pull back and see all this beauty. It sounds cheesy, but I think music has this amazing potential to bring people together, and that’s what we were aiming for with this series.”
Lucy Gellman Photo
New Haveners will have the chance to be pulled apart — and brought back together — on Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Manjares Fine Pastries in Westville and Saturday at 3 p.m. at Artspace in Ninth Square. There and then, folks from the Second Movement Series will perform Golijov’s Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind and Tenebrae in their final concert of the season. After an inaugural year of taking on groups like New Morse Code, Cantata Profana, Les Pierrots Lunaires, and others, series co-founders David Perry and Isabella “Isa” Mensz are ready to go out with a bang. Or at least, a celebratory explosion of strings and voice.
Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae was written in 2002 as a response to the composer’s “witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time.” The piece tiptoes on the precipice of something equally wicked and exquisite, falling and catching itself and falling again in a sea of billowing silks. Musical directions such as “like a cargo train,” “haunting like a Russian male chorus,” and “infinitely slow but with melodic direction and energy, as if in orbit,” come to life as a soprano voice sings the Hebrew alphabet from yod to nun, a mess of strings unwilling to agree beneath it. True to Golijov’s own statement — that “if one chooses to listen to it ‘from afar’, the music would probably offer a ‘beautiful’ surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain” — listeners are undone and sewn back together during the piece, witness to aural universes colliding in beautiful, violent ways.
To perform a piece like Tenebrae, Perry and Mensz have a system for musical success with two fundamental tenets. One: Only pick artists who can really, really listen to each other and grow from it. As I joined Friday’s ensemble — Matheus D’Souza and Jessica Oddie on violin, Mensz on viola, Kalmansson on cello, Perry on clarinet, and soprano Molly Netter for voice — for a Monday rehearsal, it was clear that collaborative listening (and a good amount of laughter) has long been the name of the game for musicians who rotate through the series. In Tenebrae, that’s particularly important. There are so many things simultaneously happening in it that Perry jokes there is one tempo allotted per musician.
Not often does one get to see musicians play as nicely in the aural sandbox as these guys do. Netter’s request for a baroque swing was met by quick, certain nods. Mensz wanted to know what it would sound like if the final high C became a classy bottom C. Quinn apologized for counting in four instead of three, and then reread the measure where it all seemed to go wrong. Perry, his face still beet red from holding a long, sweet note, smiled at the commotion around him.
“Amazing,” he said.
Rule two: Find artists who can listen to the city, too. Throughout its first season, the Second Movement Series has retained a strong New Haven aspect at all of its shows, celebrating some of the city’s youngest and most promising musicians alongside some of its most professional. Saturday, they will cap the year off with a woodwind duo from the Neighborhood Music School featuring New Haven public school seniors. That, for Perry and Mensz, is what makes the dissemination of music worth it.
“They’re really great teens, and outstanding citizens,” Mensz said.
“I think that when those opportunities come along … the greater goal is to portray this as an art form that’s living and breathing. There’s that extra special flavor to that when you can do a concert that is locally based, that is New Haven centric.” said Perry.