In Monday’s (12/13) Boston Globe, Matthew Guerrieri writes, “A chamber-size contingent of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and director Gil Rose visited Wellesley College on Saturday (part of a weekend tour that also stopped at Bowdoin College and Tufts University) with an all-female-composer program called ‘Luminous Noise.’ Such a deliberate spotlight is, hopefully, not quite the necessary corrective to a predominantly male compositional culture that it would have been all too recently, but it still invited consideration of what it does—and does not—mean to be a female composer in the world of classical music. Stylistically, the composers were a divergent trio.” Jenny Olivia Johnson’s Dollar Beers (Redondo Beach, ’96) “acoustically and electronically layering the sound into a gorgeous and ominous haze. … Chen Yi’s 1992 octet ‘Sparkle’ was in a skilled, standard new-music vein, with handfuls of shimmering dissonance.” Also on the program were Chen’s Suite for Cello and Chamber Winds, and Judith Weir’s Tiger Under the Table, which featured “jagged bass lines, slushy strings, jazzy trumpet, a heavy nudge of old-time swing.”
Posted December 14, 2010
