October 20, 1999

Marilyn Nonken: A Recital Given More To Nuance Than Fury

By Allan Kozinn

The urge to give concerts catchy titles should be reconsidered before it becomes too much of a nuisance. Marilyn Nonken, a pianist who is heard regularly in new music concerts with Ensemble 21 and other groups, called her Thursday evening recital at the Miller Theatre "Fists of Fury," evoking images of Muhammed Ali playing the clustery music of Henry Cowell. But Ms. Nonken's program did not require her to use her fists much. Just the opposite: she played music that demanded the agile, speedy fingerwork that has become her calling card.

Nor was there a lot of fury. This was intricate (if by no means delicate) music, works visceral and cerebral in equal measure. Mainly, Ms. Nonken's concert was a celebration of Milton Babbitt. Two of Mr. Babbitt's works were the centers of gravity, and the three other composers whose music was played -- David Rakowski, Martin Butler and Jeff Nichols -- were all students of Mr. Babbitt. As one might have guessed, the shared language of the evening was post-tonal and full of both rhythmic and contrapuntal complexity. That said, Mr. Babbitt's students have developed styles of their own.

Mr. Rakowski, whose relentlessly virtuosic "E-machines" (1988) and "Bam!" (1991) opened the program, is an unusually accomplished eclectic. Even as a listener notes a parade of influences, from Minimalism to jazz, the music somehow maintains a sense of consistency. Mr. Butler's "On the Rocks" (1992) combines angularity and a glittering Impressionism: it is as if Debussy had lived to expand his own experiments outside tonality. And if Mr. Nichols's "Chelsea Square" flirts with tonality but keeps its distance, it nevertheless allowed Ms. Nonken to paint in more gentle, rounded hues.

Mr. Babbitt was represented by an old work, the Three Compositions (1948), and the premiere of a work that Ms. Nonken commissioned for the concert, Allegro Penseroso (1999). Both are witty, nuanced works that make extreme technical demands. Ms. Nonken was not only equal to them, but more crucially, she clarified the conversational flow within these abstract works. In Mr. Babbitt's music, that single element makes the difference between an involving performance and a distantly abstract one.