The cellist Seth Parker Woods offered an evening-long, multimedia program titled “Troublesome Grace” Saturday night on the 92nd Avenue Y’s Kaufmann Live performance Corridor. It was the complete staging’s world premiere, however, as Woods remarked, he had premiered a “nucleus model” in February 2020 in Seattle; the coronavirus lockdown gave him the chance to remodel his idea into its present kind.
Woods was already a cellist of prodigious technical presents and sharp mind. This program has stretched him even additional into performing as a spoken phrase artist and singer in addition to instrumentalist.
Aided by the choreographer and dancer Roderick George — a childhood good friend from Houston — “Troublesome Grace” was a feast for the ears, eyes and thoughts.
In a single portion of Freida Abtan’s “My Coronary heart Is a River,” the viewers sees a prerecorded video projection of two dancers as Woods performs dwell in entrance of the display. The dancing figures straddle a cello that they’re reimagining as a ship. The performer in entrance — truly Woods himself, with dancer Tamzin O’Garro behind — is wielding the cello bow as an oar. It’s a marvelously apt metaphor: Woods is an artist rooted in classical music, however whose cello is a car that takes him, and his concertgoers, on wide-ranging journeys.
This system included works by a big roster of composers, lots of whom used digital sound design in addition to dwell acoustic cello: Fredrick Gifford, Monty Adkins, Nathalie Joachim, Abtan, Ted Hearne, Devonté Hynes and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay. (Along with Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, who died in 2004.)
Gifford’s piece “Troublesome Grace,” which lent its title to all the program, included projected art work by Barbara Earl Thomas and was impressed by Dudley Randall’s poetry. Regrettably, it was tough to discern from the auditorium seats a lot of what Woods was saying throughout lengthy spoken-word stretches. (Projected supertitles can be a welcome addition.) The identical was true throughout Hearne’s work with an unprintable title, with texts by the poet Kemi Alabi. Inside probably the most riveting part of Hearne’s piece, Woods sang and performed R&B-flavored harmonies atop hip hop-inspired digital beats.
Every composer who used prerecorded cello and digital sound design, generally with on-the-spot manipulations, did so to very completely different aesthetic ends. Woods carried out two actions from Abtan’s piece (“Opening Out” and “Seeping In”), wherein the electronics and the dwell cello swirled round one another in haunting, echoing duets. Adkins’s light, cinematographic “Winter Tendrils,’‘ accompanied by an equally warmhearted movie by Zoë McLean, used electronics nearly like an invisible string orchestra, framing Woods’s cello in lush, glowing harmonies.
Essentially the most overtly narrative work was Nathalie Joachim’s “The Race: 1915,” which used projected photographs from the artist Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series” and texts taken from The Chicago Defender, the Black newspaper that was based in 1905 and urged Black People to maneuver northward in what grew to become the Nice Migration. Joachim’s music alternated between busy, cyclical movement and durations of meditative, gradual arcs.
Essentially the most historically “classical” piece through the night was a technically demanding cello sonata written by Devonté Hynes, whom sure music-loving New Yorkers could recall from his latest stint opening for Harry Styles at Madison Sq. Backyard.
The opposite totally acoustic work was the third motion from Perkinson’s “Lamentations: Black/People Music Suite for Solo Cello,” entitled “Calvary Ostinato.” Perkinson’s music evoked centuries of Black American music, between lavish pizzicato sections which referred to as to thoughts the connections between the American banjo and West African plucked string devices and bluesy slides from word to notice.
The night ended with a strong duet between Woods and George dancing dwell onstage in Tremblay’s “asinglewordisnotenough 3 [invariant].” It’s a bit that crackles with nervous, coiled power. Woods usually attacked his strings with livid depth, whereas George’s dancing mixed stable muscularity and sinuous actions. One way or the other, all of those emotional currents discovered a house inside Tremblay’s rating.
Troublesome Grace
Carried out on Saturday at Kaufmann Live performance Corridor, Manhattan.
