In the golden vastness of St. Mark’s Basilica after night had fallen, the voices seemed to hover in an endless haze. It was the closing concert of the Venice Music Biennale in October, and Lisa Streich’s “Stabat,” written for 32 singers divided into four choirs, blurred over half an hour into a soft yet never quite settled dream.
Streich, 39, was represented in Venice not just by “Stabat,” but also by the premiere of “Orchestra of Black Butterflies,” a rigorous yet playful, pleasurable work for four musicians that unfolds like an off-kilter machine. That piece is now coming to New York, where it will be performed at the Miller Theater on Thursday by the piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire in a Composer Portrait devoted to Streich, a rare American showcase for an important rising artist.
Born in Sweden and raised in a small town in northern Germany, Streich already has a formidable career in Europe. She was a composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival last summer. She has been commissioned by major institutions like the Berlin Philharmonic and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, which asked her to write a final scene to append to Hans Werner Henze’s one-act “Das Wundertheater.” Conductors as eminent as Alan Gilbert and Matthias Pintscher have led her scores. After hearing her work in Venice, I’m hooked.
Streich’s music is often quiet and deliberate. The program note at Miller says that when she was a young composer, her goal was “to find the slowest tempo where a performer could still keep a solid pulse.” Her favorite? Thirty-seven beats per minute. Her pieces tend to fade into oblivion as they end; “Ishjarta,” her Berlin Philharmonic commission, ends with almost the entire orchestra playing an extremely soft pianissississimo.
Even when her work skirts inaudibility, it’s complex. Streich has taken to using software to analyze recordings of choirs she finds on the internet. She focuses on gnarly harmonic moments and has compiled some of the results — divided into 14 categories, like “Gloria” and “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” — in “Book of Chords,” alongside her photographs and poetry.
These dense chords, of around 24 notes each, have formed the generative material for her own music. She’s been able to conjure some of their intricacy by using motorized interventions on instruments — particularly the piano, whose strings, in her pieces, are often made to subtly resonate by being brushed by paper rotated by motors that can be adjusted in speed and direction.
This motorized component can give a tough spine to her pieces, as in the repetitive creak that twists through “Safran,” for violin and motorized piano, which will be performed at Miller. There are passages of aggressive force in that work, reminders that Streich’s music isn’t docile. (Her orchestral music can summon controlled explosions of roiling energy, like gusts of wind passing through.)
But “Safran” is more fragile than harsh, with the motorized sound surrounded by wispy violin arpeggios and solemn, complicated, almost silent chords. A couple of minutes in, uncertain austerity suddenly gives way to a bronzed glow, as if a shaft of sunlight had briefly warmed an abandoned warehouse.
“Falter,” a violin solo also on the Miller program, is a study in precisely notated shifts in bow speed and pressure. Despite the amount of detail in Streich’s scores, her work is not preoccupied with moment-by-moment textures; it’s the sturdiness of her structures that makes her pieces engrossing even over long spans.
“Orchestra of Black Butterflies” lasts 30 minutes, and mesmerizes through all its turns. One of a pair of pianos is tuned a quarter-tone down, giving the music the candied melancholy of a music box — sometimes going at full carnival tilt, sometimes droopily winding down. There’s a party that turns pounding; darkly solemn evocations of Baroque dance; clangorous floods of arpeggios; soberly resonating chords.
The musicians faintly hum at certain points. At others, they whirl harmonic tubes, making whispery wails. Notions like these never feel like gimmicks. Instead, they add to the prevailing mood of ghostly sweetness. “Butterflies” is haunting and humorous, sprawling and focused.
And yes, the ending is pianississimo, and marked “very very slow.” It recedes into nothingness, yet has lingered in my mind for months.
