On Sunday afternoon, the Solar Winds Quintet performed in Slosberg Recital Hall as part of the music department's Marquee Series, featuring performances by faculty and touring professional musicians. This particular group was founded and is led by Brandeis flute instructor Jill Dreeben.

All players are music educators, and they are, according to their website, a "traditional wind quintet." Their repertoire includes "the most demanding compositions of the modern era as well as the classics, arrangements, and novelty pieces that make a woodwind quintet concert such an unusual and delightful musical experience." Members are flutist Jill Dreeben, oboist Charlyn Bethell, clarinetist Diane Heffner, French hornist Robin Milinazzo and bassoonist Neil Fairbairn.

The program started off with a piece by Anton Reicha-one of the fathers of the modern wind quintet. Born in 1770, he was a contemporary of Beethoven and neatly fits into the aesthetic of the Classical period. He wrote 25 quintets, most of which utilize a very large scale. This piece "Quintet in E major" was "edited down to be 'performable,'" said Fairbairn after the piece. The music was very pleasant and attentively delivered, but at times it lacked the je ne sais quoi to keep me engaged. As historically significant as the piece may be, it lacked the angst, complexity and beauty of Beethoven's work and other more engaging pieces from the period. Not to stigmatize the entire classical canon, but this piece stuck out as the only one on the program that predated the 20th century.

Immediately after that, the group played a piece by John Cage-or rather, spoke it. Cage's "Story" was written not for wind quintet but for four speaking voices. The piece is a text setting of Gertrude Stein's The World Is Round: Once upon a time/the world was round/ and you could go/around and around." The voices had varying rhythms and the words were mixed and remixed in novel ways. It was a pleasant adventure that starkly contrasted the Reicha quintet. It was as far away as you could get from the previous piece. This performance was a fitting introduction to the next piece, a lengthier work for wind quintet and speaking voices, by Luciano Berio-another avant-garde 20th century composer. Berio, well known for his electronic music, combined the sounds of a full wind quintet with that of a spoken voice, as heard in the Cage piece.

The piece, "Opus Number Zoo," comprised of four movements, is based on a text by Rhoda Levine. The texts, four poems, use anthropomorphized animals to explore some weighty aspects of our world-violence, death and our slavery to the effects of time. Yet the text is self-aware, full of dark humor-as one could perhaps guess by the title. The piece capitalized on the bizarre contrast between untrained speakers' unaffected voices and the tumultuous textures and tonalities of a modern wind quintet. During the piece, the text was shared by the players, each turning toward the audience and addressing them before going back to playing. The musical ideas supported the text in a strong way, underpinning the whimsical elements and providing an emotional backdrop for the text. The character of each wind instrument shone through the piece, adding additional lyricality and feeding the gaps in text with additional contemplation. The poetry itself is quite incisive; the additional element of musical performance and rehearsed rhythm lets the audience access the meaning in a more visceral way.

After a short intermission, the program resumed with a second half full of music composed by Brandesians-Prof. Peter Van Zandt Lane (MUS) and the late composer and Brandeis Professor Irving Fine. These pieces also filled in the gap between the Cage and Reicha pieces-modern but not overly inscrutable, experimental yet cohesive. Lane's piece was based on traditional music he heard from street musicians while studying in Buenos Aires. It draws from the forms and rhythms of this traditional South American dance music. But it is a pointed departure from the strict accordance of the styles. The harsh dissonances and rhythms, slightly more syncopated and abstract than tango, fit in nicely with the dark humor from the Berio piece-a serious musicality, with a bit of humor in spite of its tone.

Rounding out the concert was Fine's "Partita for Wind Quintet"-a classic in the canon of wind quintets according to Fairbairn. The harmonies suggested typical modernist tendencies of the early to mid 20th century. It felt like Lane's piece, both able to be followed and relatively concise. However, it may be more apt to say that Lane's piece was rather like Fine's-he cited this piece as a reference point for his work. As a bassoonist as well as a composer, he had performed and studied this piece many times before writing his.
The next concert in the Music department's Marquee Series is Nov. 1 at 8 p.m. Pianist Naoko Sugiyama will be playing a program entitled "Back to the Classics," featuring Mozart and Beethoven sonatas as well as one of Schubert's piano trios.