Audience for Ransom

The best flutist of the post-Rampal generation is exposing concert-goers not just to the wonders of the lesser solo instrument. He's expanding their classical imagination.

A Friday night in New York can mean different things to different people. But if you really want to unwind after a long work week, you might pass up the dance clubs for a sumptuous sit-down in the Alice Tully Hall at a concert presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Yeah, classical concerts can still be stuffy, stupid or stulifying. But changes in the music, and the open minds of some classy musicians, can sometimes get you the same rush you get from a scruffy club band.

I went to the Lincoln Center Feb. 20 to bask in the brilliance of Ransom Wilson, the greatest flute player of his generation. Even though he lives in Woodridge and teaches at Yale, he hardly ever plays in the New Haven area.

I first encountered Wilson on a disarming cassette of repetitive, rhythm, unflutish compositions by Steve Reich, Phillip Glass and Frank Becker, released over 20 years ago. The tape became not just a favorite album for me but a token, a souvenir of when 'classical' music began to really appear for me, demystified, deep, dangerous, delightful.

Even when they star such amiable talents as Ransom Wilson, shows at places like Alice Tully Hall have the decorum and classiness you associate with classical concertizing. Performers like Wilson subtly break down the stuffiness by challenging their audiences with not just virtuosity but versatility.

Before this concert, the audience was already being asked to be quiet and attentive. No chance to fluff your coat properly on the back of your seat - one of those pretentious talking heads with a local radio station was conducting an onstage interview with one of the night's featured composers, Randall Woolf, who'd be world-premiering his 'Everything is Green' (written expressly for Wilson) on this night. While the pompous interviewer namedropped and quoted famous writers, the down-to-earth Woolf squirmed, trying to keep the conversation on a less erudite plain. It was a bad start for an evening of far-flung and transcendent sounds that don't deserve to be deadened with dull dialogue.

From the opening "Bach Suite No.2 in B Minor", you could see what an excellent team player Ransom Wilson is. His solos rose naturally out of the piece as a whole; his playing wove intricately in and out of the notes which flowed from the six other performers.

Things got punchier for Prokofiev's "Sonata in D Major for Flute and Piano", when everyone but Wilson and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott left the stage. As the piece grew louder and more dramatic, Wilson would flash intense looks at the audience. There were some coughs between the movements (often a sign of squeamishness in a classical crowd), but also genuine gasps at the spirited endings to some of the sections of the jumpy piece.

After an intermission the smooth classical strains disappeared. A storm of the new sounds were ushered in with the Randall Woolf premiere.

Woolf had personally set up some electronic equipment on stage before taking his seat in the front row of the auditorium. "Everything is Green" unfolded with a recorded recitation of a short story by the modern writer David Foster Wallace, loops of distorted country-music samples, wind sounds and breathy repeated vocals. Wilson and McDernott were the live variables that cut through this soundtrack. While the piano added to the clamour, Wilson's flute flitted through the emotional breeze like a bird in flight, ending the piece with a final shrill note both alarming and awe-inspiring.

Wilson and McDermott swiftly changed gears for another world premiere, a flute/piano arrangement of Aaron Jay Kerns' 'Air'. The concert concluded with an unexpected burst of fun when the gang from that first Bach number reassembled and Wilson pulled out a piccolo for some vivacious Vivaldi. His bright, simple playing seemed almost silly, like a classical guitarist goofing on a ukulele, or a saxophonist blowing a harmonica.

An encore which repeated an earlier piccolo melody on the flute gave the concert a dramatic finish, reminding us that this night was about not just breath but breadth, not just flute but fluidity, not just classical but her and now and whatever's on hand.

When I catch up with Wilson by phone, he's sitting on a dock overlooking San Francisco Bay.

"Twenty years ago, the music we were forced to listen to in the concert hall was academic. It was excruciating," he recalls. " The way I see it, the minimalists wiped the slate clean. It was a cleaning of the harmonic blackboard. It also opened the door for ethnic music, brought world music into the classical vocabulary."

I tell Wilson how important his minimalist recordings from the '80s have been for me; he recalls when he too was first turned around by those sounds: "I saw Phillip Glass' opera Einstein on the Beach, and I didn't know such music existed. I loved how intellectually driven it was. I called this famous music critic I knew, Jamake Highwater, and asked him what he knew about it. He said he'd gotten this huge press package from the producers. So I went over and got it from him, and stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning just trying to make sense of it."

Does Wilson think modern classical audiences are more daring? "I hope they are," he says. "It's kind of boring for us to keep doing Schubert and Schumann."

Before I ring off, I apologize for keeping the conversational on such a general, music-is-good-for-you level.

"It's the most important thing to be talking about," Wilson says. "What we do for a living is such a luxury."

by Christopher Arnott - March 25, 2004