Thirteen Ways

Thirteen Ways

The exciting young contemporary-music sextet eighth blackbird has been snatching up glowing reviews, prestigious engagements and residencies, and competition victories, including the 2000 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. This innovative ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion takes its name from the Wallace Stevens poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." <P>Thirteen Ways is also the title of the group's commercial recording debut album on Cedille Records, featuring music by four of America's most gifted composers:David Schober (b. 1974), Thomas Albert (b. 1948), Joan Tower (b. 1938), and George Perle (b. 1915). Tower's sparkling Petroushskates is a vibrant homage to Stravinsky; Schober's elegantly crafted Variations, by turns ethereal and insistent, garnered the 1999 Wayne Peterson Prize from San Francisco State University; Perle's Critical Moments II, one of the ensemble's recent commissions, is "remarkably fresh in its spiky crystalline fragments, rapid atonal flurries and muted wisps of sound" (Los Angeles Times); and Albert's kaleidoscopic Thirteen Ways is as evocative and stimulating as the poem that inspired it. <P>With its "hip, engaging energy and a sterling musicianship" (Chicago Tribune), eighth blackbird "proves that new music can be both fun and serious" (Detroit Free Press). Even if your tastes tend toward the traditional, you'll find yourself beguiled by the new CD from "this wise and vivacious ensemble" (San Francisco Chronicle).