December 18th, 2008: Instant Donné – Stéphane Borrel / Noriko Baba

@instants chavirés

I’m still catching up on post about long past events, so this is probably going to be superficial. Yet another gig after so many seemed overkill at first, but it promised to be very different from what I’ve seen recently, and I had not seen Instant Donné for over six months despite my best intentions, so I had some catching up to do on that front too.

After the show, they explained they wanted to give more time than usual to performing works by composers that don’t get much play. I like the idea, so I hope they do stick to their plans to do this again. It’s much better than throwing in a single short one among a bunch of others, and having two means I have more of a chance to like part of it. I’m just too ignorant about contemporary music to get it every time, so I can use that extra shot. This one pretty much proved the point.

They started by playing Heurs, then Selon and finally Entrefaites by Stéphane Borrel. I expected to like the first one best, because it was for viola and percussions, but I didn’t. Too much of the expected tricks, so I got bored by its predictability. The second was for solo piano, and I liked it better but that’s because of Caroline Cren, as the music itself still sounded pretty tame. I liked the final one — for flute, percussion, violin, viola and cello — better, because even though it was still quite conventional, it did defeat my expectations a few times. Still, not much to keep me interested.

It was a much different experience with Noriko Baba’s music. En haut et en bas — for harp, violin, viola and cello — was probably my favorite, with its unconventional sounds, high notes and playful gimmick whose interventions and variants were really neat. The harp was really great, totally going against the prettiness that sometimes looms with this instrument. Harmonieux Forgeron was just as good — no surprise here with my being such a sucker for prepared piano — and again the title made complete sense, as the sounds did evoke hammering in a pleasant sounding way. Sol-itude — for prepared cello — again transformed the expected sound of the instrument, but less so than the previous ones. Finally Pseudoscope II featured the most instruments — flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion — and was the one with the most different things going on, but maybe the one I liked less, though I still liked it quite a bit.

I’d sure like to hear more from Noriko Baba. Her way of using unusual sounds from the instruments is something I like all the more because she’s not using electronics to do it. And I liked the way she sometimes used a sound or phrase that could be gimmicky but instead turned into a thread to follow through changes and variations, making the music both imaginative and solid.