Deerhoof and Ensemble Dal Niente performing Marcos Balter's Meltdown Upshot
Last Wednesday night Deerhoof and new-music group Ensemble Dal Niente came together for a concert at Merkin Hall as part of the third annual Ecstatic Music Festival, providing an example of the festival’s curatorial skill in fostering unique collaboration among forward-thinking artists from both classical and non-classical traditions.
With a program featuring the Brazilian-born composer Marcos Balter as prominently as the critical-darling rock quartet, the concert opened on an intimate note with Balter’s Wicker Park, a work for solo sax that, through extended technique, writhes and respires to great effect.
Following Ear, Skin, and Bone Riddles, for soprano, violin, and cello, all of Ensemble Dal Niente’s members took the stage for Deerhoof Chamber Variations, a piece by Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier, which uses Deerhoof songs as base material. Lithe and mercurial, the piece bounced between vignettes that included the jagged-edged figures of math rock, Dadaist vocal passages, supple instrumental melodies, and, overall, a particularly keen use of texture and color.
The work was met with an enthusiastic reception by the audience, a few of whom, in earshot, pointed out Saunier’s classical training as the backbone of the piece’s success. (Saunier studied at Oberlin in the early '90s.) However, while Saunier’s classical background certainly bubbled to the surface, the work owes just as much to his DIY ethic and unabashed spirit of experimentation.
Ensemble Dal Niente harpist Ben Melsky
Following a short intermission, Deerhoof took the stage to perform a set of their own work. While the quartet’s strength as a creative force is the members' collective musical intuition, they are equally deft showmen (and woman)—able to bring audiences to a frenzied froth and back down to attentive listeners in a single set. However, their Merkin set felt, in some sense, defanged; Saunier’s drum hits landed with diminished intensity, and Matsuzaki’s stage gambol at times felt restrained. Regardless, one can understand changing performance practice to meet the concert-hall audience halfway as a necessity.
Deerhoof's Satomi Matsuzaki and Ed Rodriquez
The night’s culminating work, the world premiere of Balter’s Meltdown Upshot, brought Ensemble Dal Niente and Deerhoof onstage together. Balter’s composition interwove the best of both groups’ attributes into a shimmering amalgam. Matsuzaki’s wistful vocal style, pure in tone and piquant in articulation, was adopted by the versatile Amanda DeBoer Bartlett and Carrie Henneman Shaw, who, together with Matsuzaki, sprinkled the piece with nonsense syllables. Underneath this, Dal Niente’s string section provided a broad base for harmonic movement.
Compared to many of Balter’s works, the piece’s sound palette is rather conventional. However, Balter keeps things interesting through gorgeous passages for horn and saxophone, blended expertly by players Matthew Oliphant and Ryan Muncy, as well as through delicate touches from harpist Ben Melsky. Deerhoof guitarists John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez provided a stewing backdrop of reverberation, with occasional smatterings echoing the duo’s work in Gorge Trio. Trading in his sticks for brushes, and later on his bare hands, Saunier played with the characteristic freewheeling intensity exhibited on albums such as Offend Maggie, but tempered for the concert hall.
Satomi Matsuzaki, Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, and Carrie Henneman Shaw
Dal Niente, Balter, and Deerhoof all show an interest in musical ideas, regardless of genre classifications, and ultimately this was the unifying (if, in fact, tacit) theme of the evening. In a program that vacillated between pieces fit for a salon setting, rock venue, and concert hall, it would be all-too-easy to fall into an air of pastiche. Yet that night’s selections displayed a commendable level of continuity—and consequently—earnest gravity.