It’s a rainy night and a little girl’s recorded voice sings out “it’s ice cream time”, triggering an outburst from sax quartet and electric guitar, a sort of warped chorale loosely based on her melody.
Thus began sax quartet PRISM’s Roulette debut, and the New York première of Nick Didkovsky’s Ice Cream Time on Sunday night. Originally commissioned by ARTE Quartett in Basel in 2003, the piece is based on an exuberant answering machine message from the composer’s six-year-old niece (now an adult and in attendance at the concert). The message was her response to her uncle’s request to make up a song based on a few lines of lyrics he had emailed her and her brother. It was, he said, the “weirdest phone message of my life”.
The piece is divided into twelve sections and played continuously. Its character is much like that of an abstract tone poem, as it traverses many moods and conjures up various images in the mind’s eye. Thomas Dimuzio’s live processing is to be praised for its nuance and taste, creating a subtle sheen throughout the whole, and augmenting the intensity of what the instruments were playing. His and Didkovsky’s electronic contributions felt organically integrated into piece. To echo the composer during his opening remarks, the group comprised “a killer band”, PRISM giving an impassioned and skillful performance.
Angular, jazz-like melodies followed the opening sections described above, followed in turn by a quasi-fugal texture, the soprano and alto saxes and guitar playing in something like imitative counterpoint, and the tenor and baritone saxes providing a countermelody. Suddenly the guitar burst out in a discordant howl, died away, and began churning out an ostinato with the baritone sax, the other three saxes playing a disjointed melody, continuing the polyphonic texture.