Rick Baitz: Into Light
Innova
A flattering portrait of Rick Baitz emerges from Into Light, whose three works present distinct yet nevertheless complementary sides of the NYC-based composer. Like Philip Glass, he once drove a cab in the city, but there the similarities end, Baitz having forged a personal style that shows scant trace of a minimalism influence. That the material ranges as widely as it does might be in part attributable to his beginnings—he was raised in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, and Durban, South Africa—though perhaps more the education he acquired at Columbia and Manhattan School of Music and from his ongoing faculty position at Vermont College of Fine Arts. The music's strong evocative character also might stem from the work Baitz's done for dance, theater, and film productions, including HBO's The Vagina Monologues. Regardless, though the titular work largely situates itself within the Western classical tradition, the other two extend into other zones, making for a rich, polystylistic listen.
Into Light, a 1984 composition that predates the other two by three decades, shares with them a strong rhythm emphasis, even if its instrumentation—clarinet, viola, and piano—doesn't necessarily scream dance music. Still, if any players are capable of drawing forth said dimension from Baitz's writing, it's Ken Thomson, Jessica Meyer, and Stephen Gosling. Of the three pieces, it's the most meditative: during the opening part, Meyer's viola gracefully soars across Gosling's delicate underpinning and Thomson's near-subliminal tones, the interlacing of their voices exuding a character reminiscent of Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Six minutes into the twenty-two-minute performance, the music springs to life with lively dance patterns, after which the three sustain momentum with impassioned playing. Their finely attuned interactions impress, regardless of whether the section's slow or fast, as does the superior level of musicianship.
As credible a piece as Into Light is, it's a tad less interesting than the other two, both of which add fascinating wrinkles to the album presentation. In keeping with its title (cthonic referring to the underworld), Chthonic Dances is devilish but not in the way one might expect. Written in 2011 at the request of violinist Mary Rowell and revised five years later, the twenty-two-minute performance hews to a fairly conventional (though still compelling) string quartet path during its largely aggressive opening half before an unexpected shift occurs, albeit one effected seamlessly. Though the work's rhythms, patterns, and harmonies are said to reflect the composer's early years living in Brazil and South Africa, its rustic swing feels as much indebted to country music, and when that first raw, fiddle-like flourish arises eleven minutes into the performance, one's ears can't help but immediately perk up. Associations aside, the material captivates, especially when the quartet imbues its singing melodies with high energy and joy.
Baitz himself participates in the realization of the fourteen-minute middle piece, 2015's Hall of Mirrors, though you could be forgiven for being unaware of it, simply because his laptop is used to process the sounds produced by the four percussionists into multiplied and transformed versions of themselves. With tablas, talking drums, thumb pianos, windwands, nipple gongs, dumbek, triangle, temple blocks, caxixi, and tamtams generating such rhythmic heat, it hardly surprises that Baitz's piece evokes Africa and India more than other countries, even if the electronic treatments he applies do in certain passages grow conspicuous. Not to take anything away from the third setting, but Chthonic Dances and Hall of Mirrors provide such pleasurable listening, one's curiosity is naturally aroused as to what else Baitz might have up his sleeve and the desire to investigate his discography beyond this recording intensified.October 2018