The second half of Friday’s program was given over to the world premiere of Sarah Davachi’s “The Lower Melodies,” a languid sound bath opulently scored for two bass flutes, two bass clarinets and strings. The work begins softly, on a low note in unison that eventually splits, creating layered sustained harmonies. As pitches changed, the sound seemed to form delicate ripples. Davachi’s transfixing work seemed to encourage a physical identification with the music; with more space and a yoga mat, an audience member could have a transformative experience with it.
Saturday’s concert was anchored by Leilehua Lanzilotti’s “with eyes the color of time,” the festival’s highlight. Inspired by the exhibition galleries she grew up playing in when her mother worked at Honolulu’s contemporary art museum, the work moves dreamily through states of spacious stillness interrupted by skittish pops, scrapes and crunches created by string players pressing their bows hard on the string. With subtle tweaks of tuning, the sound seemed to alternately evoke the unpredictable natural world and the realm of human memory.
Scott Walker’s powerful “Rubato (It: ‘Stolen Time’)” started with the wail of a siren and tore onward at high-decibel throttle until it melted, unexpectedly and disarmingly, into a simple chorus sung by the instrumentalists. The title of the work refers to the musical practice of taking liberties with tempo, but its performance instructions ask the musicians to play in strict time. Sampled recordings of military machines are blended with acrid brass into growling chords. In other works at the festival, nonconformist tunings evoked the intelligence of the nonhuman natural world. Here, it stood for the inhuman logic of war.
Claude Vivier’s “Zipangu” (1980) is a lustrous and slippery work that offers an almost sculptural play on contrasting surfaces and blocks of sound. The Wild Up players brought out its stark, Expressionist colors in a performance that hummed with intensity. The energy was more diffuse and exploratory in James Tenney’s “Saxony,” which begins with a double bass sounding the harmonic series of a single string and builds up a throbbing monument of sound that feels monolithic even as it is animated with rhythmic accents and keening slides.
The festival concluded on Sunday with a marathon performance of the Biber sonatas by McIntosh, who as a violinist specializes in the Baroque. He was joined by a stellar continuo ensemble with Ian Pritchard on harpsichord and organ, Maxine Eilander on Baroque harp and Malachai Bandy on viola da gamba. Biber wrote the sonatas as musical meditations on the stations of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, with each work specifying different string tunings for the violin. In the crucifixion sonata, the two middle strings even cross each other.
McIntosh had to constantly retune in between works. His playing had exceptional clarity and rhetorical verve, and the sound colors resulting from the different levels of tension placed on the strings lent variety to a recital almost three hours long. But for all the deep musicality on show, the stop-and-go nature of the event made it feel — as too much of the festival had — more like a demonstration than a mystery.
