(The New York Phil’s CONTACT! series generated quite a bit of buzz on the blogging community. Below are some bloggers’ review of Lei Liang’s Verge after its premiere by the Philharmonic in Dec, 2009.)
Lei Liang's Verge, for string ensemble, was definitely the highlight of the performance and the biggest hit with the audience. When he said he used his newborn son's name (Albert) to derive the pitches for the work, I was expecting some kind of twelve-tone pitch-class mumbo jumbo. But the work was intense and emotionally powerful, beginning with some cool Xenakis-esque (Xenakisy? Edit: I think the appropriate term is actually Xenakesque) effects and interesting spatial combinations. It was divided into two sections, each of which started slow and built into enormous, frantic, and beautiful climaxes before suddenly dying away into silence. Throughout the work, a Mongolian chant melody weaved in and out of the ensemble, adding a folksy aspect to the bracing atmosphere.
- Seated Ovation
Chinese-born,
California-based Lei Liang’s Verge proved to be
the highlight of the night, using four string quartets and
two double basses to create an incredibly tense atmosphere
that built to a fever pitch. Lei imbued his music with a
distinctive Chinese sound, full of bending notes and hand
slaps that ebbed and flowed like the Mongolian long chant
he grew up listening to. An absolutely fresh and vital
voice I hope we hear more of in these parts.
-
Feast of Music: A Journey thru the Music of
New York
Lei Liang
labeled the sources for his piece - his new son (literally,
picking notes from his name, Albert) and the sounds of his
Chinese roots - but those gave little warning for what came
next. The piece’s otherworldly, almost-electronic
introduction expanded into an awesome burst of melody and
abrasion.
-
Brooklyn Vegan
Lei
Liang began Verge
one month before
his son was born and finished it one month after the birth.
Converging to a point and then diverging, his work is both
homage to life and life changing.
“I came to love Mongolian long-chants—such a sense of
space,” said Liang, using the polyphonic structure of that
form for his own flowing lines. “We named our son Albert,
and took the motif from his name. A, B, E and Re.”
Shostakovich famously sketched his own name as motif.
18 musicians took the stage in a semi-circle—four string
quartets (two violins, a viola and cello each) bracketed by
a bass on each end. The bass were to play deep plucked
notes at 150 beats per minute, a neo-natal heart rate.
Expecting lullabies, squeaks and thumps greeted us. A
violin’s sharply bowed “skrich” led to high harmonics,
punctuated by occasional smack of plucked bass. Though not
easy listening, patterns soon appeared. Slow shimmers and
violent rising glissandos were unsettling, a nervous
waiting. Then a viola broke through the hisses with a
pentatonic motif, unexpected and tender, the notes from
Albert’s name.
As the
work evolved, cellos ran after each other and violins
churned out dense matter, gradually converging to a single
note before dying away. Slow sounds of tuning arose,
awareness conceived from intervals of open strings.
Albert’s melody resurfaced, and violins rose to harmonic
screams against urgent bass piz zicato. A newborn was
crying.
- Repeat Performances
“Lei Liang on
the verge of a glorious breakthrough”
- Time Out New York
Review of Lei Liang’s solo disc
Milou
“The new
generation of composers (Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Sheng, et
al.) have bridged the cultural gap with the West by
inserting new connecting elements, but there is one who
is trying to do much more: creating contemporary music
without barriers and taking into account the intrinsic
cultural elements of a country are only one part of the
formula. Lei Liang (b. 1972) represents this new
dimension of cultured music...[sic] With Liang you
certainly are not faced with a product of stylistic
mediation between East and West. Liang is contemporary,
and he takes the theories of Cage and of the New York
School as his first working level, passing freely
through the many elements that comprise that
school...[sic] He makes cultural references with such
discretion that in the end one appreciates it more for
the wide range of solutions employed. In the space of
freedom opened naturally by contemporary composition,
Liang manages to travel magnificently giving instruments
a language all their own that affirms not only its
prerogatives of highly intense technique but that also
affirms their engaging sense of the mysterious and
transcendental that does not pass forcibly for modern
western theory: it is a sort of new age spirituality,
but one that has a strength of definition and an
entirely serious modernism...[sic] His music is at the
same time both abstract and sensitive and is made up of
a thousand trajectories condensed into appealing and
ultra-modern sounds.”
- Percosi Musicali [translated
from Italian]