Jason Eckardt is a young American composer who has been making quite a stir on both sides of the Atlantic. He’s won numerous awards and commissions; his music has been performed frequently and several of his works have been recorded.
The 42-year-old composer is the current Abravanel Distinguished Visiting Composer. He will be in town this weekend, and Sunday’s NOVA Chamber Music Series concert will feature three of his works. Among them is the world premiere of pulse-echo, a NOVA commission.
NOVA artistic director and pianist Jason Hardink, who has known Eckardt for almost a decade, speaks highly of him. “I feel comfortable to say he is the most important composer of my generation,” he said in an interview with Reichel Recommends.
Eckardt is a proponent of New Complexity, a term coined in the 1980s to describe music that verges on the extreme edge of playability. While acknowledging the music’s difficulty, Hardink also sees more than just a jumble of notes on a page. “Jason’s music is intense, complex and dissonant,” he said, “but there is an underlying energy and joy of life in it. It’s a positive energy, and I’ve actually come to think of this concert as one of the most optimistic of the whole season.”
Hardink will be a busy performer Sunday, because he’ll be playing all three of Eckardt’s works. Two of them, Cuts and Echoes’ White Veil, are for solo piano. pulse-echo is scored for piano and string quartet.
“The two solo pieces are actually related,” Hardink said. “Cuts is a short, kind of compositional flash piece that reminds me of Debussy’s Études. It’s all about color.” The piece is also very nonlinear in that there are “passages of abrupt dynamic shifts that are unpredictable.”
Echoes’ White Veil, on the other hand, is a piece that Hardink describes as “composed improvisation.” The virtuosity is daunting. “It’s really out there,” he said, comparing it to avant-garde, atonal jazz.
The last of Eckardt’s three works on Sunday’s concert also has the piano as the focal point, but, as Hardink pointed out, “it’s not a piano-centric work. The strings play around the resonances from the piano. They play off of what the piano plays.” In that regard it’s a true chamber work in concept. “It’s real chamber music.”
The rest of the program includes two late works by Beethoven, the lyrical Piano Sonata in E major, op. 109, and the impossibly demanding Grosse Fuge, op. 133, for string quartet, which was originally intended to be the final movement of the String Quartet in B flat major, op. 130. But it proved to be too complex for contemporary audiences to grasp, so Beethoven wrote a new finale for the quartet and published the fugue separately. “Some aspects of the Grosse Fuge are far more challenging than a lot of current music,” Hardink said. “And when you hear it [the B flat Quartet] played with the original ending, it changes the whole discourse of the work.”
Hardink is thrilled with how the program has turned out. “I believe in it,” he said. “There is a nice symmetry in the program. You get to see [different] sides of the two composers.”
Joining Hardink for the concert are violinists Hasse Borup and Alexander Woods; violist Brant Bayless; and cellist Noriko Kishi.
- CONCERT DETAILS
- What: NOVA Chamber Music Series
- Venue: Libby Gardner Concert Hall, University of Utah
- Time and Date: 3 p.m. Feb. 9
- Tickets: $20 general, $5 students, free for U. students, at the door
- Web: www.novaslc.org