The Justice

Media Credit: Max Matza CONTEMPORARY CONCERT: Jae Kyo Han '10, a member of the Irving Fine Society, performed works by Fine and student composers Saturday afternoon in Slosberg.

On Saturday afternoon, a group of undergraduate musicians called the Irving Fine Society, under the direction of Nicholas Alexander Brown '10, came together to present a concert of works written by their namesake, the composer and Brandeis Music Department founder Irving Fine, as well as to premier works by Brandeis undergraduates, in the spirit of musical creativity that Fine championed. Fine's music is sadly underperformed by professional music ensembles, but Saturday's concert proved that his strange and beautiful works deserve a much wider audience.

The concert's first half was dedicated mostly to pieces for solo piano, the first by honoree Fine and three others by undergraduate composers. Leonard Bernstein called Fine's Diversions charming, and I absolutely agree. There is an irresistible optimism in this suite, which was played gracefully and with great tenderness by Jae Kyo Han '10.

Daniel Neal's '10 Boosh was a brooding and repetitive piece played, again by Han, with strong dynamic sensitivity. It had the great virtue of ending at just the right time-that is, just as it was starting to annoy me.

Aufruhr, which was performed by its composer, Brown, was an interesting case-it was clearly designed to be a technically easy piece for an unpracticed player, consisting almost entirely of stepwise motion and repetition. I felt as if I had heard it before, which is not a compliment, but for a piece of largely atonal music, it was pleasantly inoffensive.

Derek Strykowski '10 says in the program that Nuages de Bespin, his piano piece, "draws the listener into the swirling clouds which envelope Bespin, a fictional planet" from the Star Wars universe. A piece based on a Star Wars planet sounds like a delightful idea to me, and the piece almost lived up to its concept. The dreamy right hand and the darker left hand operated semi-independently, evoking the contrast between skimming clouds on the planet's surface and its unbearably hot, poisonous core.

It is hard for me to evaluate Fine's Partita for Wind Quintet, which concluded the first half, because I do not believe I heard a credible performance of it. While all five instrumentalists seemed individually strong, together they seemed poorly rehearsed and had no ensemble feeling. Their entrances and cutoffs were not together, and when the melody was handed off from one part to the other, there was no sense of continuity or complete phrasing.

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