Le Train Bleu

Time Out says

Tue Apr 17 2012

In 1982, flutist Ransom Wilson—a likely heir to his teacher and friend, Jean-Pierre Rampal—stunned his elite music peers by commissioning a work by Steve Reich called Vermont Counterpoint. The multitrack tape piece was too difficult, especially for a musical genre—minimalism—that was going nowhere, claimed naysayers. But Wilson liked Reich’s music, and soon became a certified champion of the downtown aesthetic.

For the most recent crop of American music-school grads, Reich is as much a part of the basic vocabulary as Beethoven or Jimi Hendrix. Wilson, also a versatile conductor and Yale professor, found this inspiring, and his latest venture, the new-music ensemble Le Train Bleu, is comprised primarily of musicians in their twenties.

The group roared onto the New York scene a year ago in a high-octane performance of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company at Galapagos Art Space. Almost immediately named resident ensemble of the Brooklyn venue, Le Train Bleu has since undertaken memorable performances of Reich’s iconic Different Trains and John Luther Adams’s songbirdsongs.

Up next is perhaps its most ambitious outing to date, Prison Life, featuring Frederic Rzewski’s rapid-fire diatribe Coming Together, based on a letter penned by Attica prison riot leader Sam Melville; its companion piece, Attica; and the world premiere of More Last Words from Texas, settings of final statements from executed prisoners by Corey Dargel, one of the postclassical generation’s most poignant voices who will also be a guest performer at the show. Pieces by JacobTV and Michael Gordon complete a program that by its end should have us asking why the U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate.

–Amanda MacBlane