21st Century Consort serves up a diverting array of works at the Hirshhorn
Mezzo-soprano Katherine Lerner Lee performed Schoenberg’s The Book of the Hanging Gardens with the 21st Century Consort Saturday night at the Hirshhorn Museum.
The 21st Century Consort regularly offers Washingtonians an introduction to the vital work of living composers. The group opened their new season in the Hirshhorn Museum’s Ring Auditorium Saturday evening. The program, drawing together music on themes of gardens and birds, heralded the imminent reopening of the institution’s sculpture garden, across Jefferson Drive on the National Mall.
The Hirshhorn’s outdoor extension, closed since 2023, has been revitalized by architect-artist Hiroshi Sugimoto to include more artworks and green space. It may still look like a construction zone, but is scheduled to reopen to the public October 31. A massive new sculpture by Elmgreen & Dragset titled Eight is visible, like an enormous aqua swimming pool standing on end.
A rare performance of most of Schoenberg’s The Book of the Hanging Gardens heralded the ground-breaking musical advances of the early 20th century. Mezzo-soprano Katherine Lerner Lee and pianist Lisa Emenheiser gave a rarefied, mysterious rendition of eleven of the fifteen songs in this cycle, among the first works by the composer to embrace an openly atonal style.
Poems by Stefan George describe a youthful love affair in a garden, set to music by Schoenberg in 1908, just as his wife left him and their children to have an affair with his friend, the painter Richard Gerstl. With clear diction and polished tone, Lerner chronicled the obsession of the lovers, whose separation ultimately renders their happy Eden a desolation. Emenheiser supported her partner with a carefully scaled accompaniment.
In homage to the idea of a garden’s entwined plants, the ensemble interspersed the Schoenberg songs among the five movements of Helen Grime’s string trio Aviary Sketches, from 2014. This unorthodox idea proved not only interesting but worthy of consideration for others programming this kind of thorny repertoire: the alternation of textures softened the asperity of both works by providing some variety for the ear.
The Scottish composer was inspired by the surreal boxed assemblages of American artist Joseph Cornell, like Untitled: Aviary with Yellow Birds, currently on view on the museum’s second floor. Violinist Xiaoxuan Shi, violist Daniel Foster, and cellist Rachel Young, all musicians of the National Symphony Orchestra, wove together the strands of trills, twitters, and whistled harmonics in a complex fabric.
Shi, appointed as the NSO’s second assistant concertmaster last year, dueled with Young on some wild outbursts in the central third movement. Foster remained steadfast against them in a dignified solo lament, with the other two eventually joining him in austere unison. The resulting sense of oddly chosen musical objects, as if on display in one of Cornell’s boxes, provided a stark contrast to the Schoenberg songs.
A similar interlayering planned for the second half had to be unwound, given the complexity of changing seating arrangements. Instead the series of four discrete pieces began with Landscape with Birds, composed by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks for solo flute in 1980. Flutist Sarah Frisof brought together a host of special effects, like flutter-tonguing and quietly singing along while playing, in a pleasing vista of nature.
Clarinetist Paul Cigan anchored Paul Novak’s Entwining, a 2021 quartet, joined by Emenheiser, Shi, and Young. The first movement (“Swirling”) featured frenetic lines overlapping one another and forming a pleasing if chaotic rhythmic groove. The middle movement (“Attuning”) felt more sedate, gentle night music punctuated by Emenheiser’s large-handed, Messiaen-like chords. The final movement (“Dancing”) returned to the pulsing style of the first, after opening softly.
Emenheiser treaded lightly through Wach Ya Haydn?, a 2020 miniature by Mikhail Johnson, the Jamaican-born pianist-composer who joins the 21st Century Consort this season as composer-in-residence. Antic curlicues and spastic leaps, inspired by a Haydn piano sonata, unfurled in charming fashion. More substantial works by Johnson, including a violin concerto and a symphony, await performance in future concerts.
Last came Caroline Shaw’s Plan and Elevation: The Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks, a piece heard a couple times from the Dover Quartet about a decade ago. Composed a decade ago for the 75th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, when Shaw was in residence there, this string quartet touches on gestures overly familiar from Shaw’s work. Open fifths, parallel harmonic movement, feathery arpeggiation, and some borrowings from Ravel and Mozart: all evoke places in that museum’s celebrated garden. An all-NSO string quartet, with the three string players heard earlier joined by violinist Marina Aikawa, left no stone unturned in a lovely rendition.
The program will be repeated 2 p.m. Sunday. 21consort.org
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