Chaya Czernowin ~ the divine thawing of the core

Above: composer Chaya Czernowin, photo by Astrid Ackerman

~ Author: Lili Tobias

Tuesday August 19th, 2025 – This evening, the Talea Ensemble, with Claire Chase on solo contrabass flute, performed the US premiere of Chaya Czernowin’s the divine thawing of the core at the DiMenna Center. The concert was part of the Time:Spans Festival, and the musicians delivered a stunning performance to a nearly full house!

Breathing played a prevalent role in the sound world of the divine thawing of the core. The unusual collection of instruments in the ensemble, which included six flutes, six oboes, and six trumpets, leaned heavily on the winds, which were truly “windy” to the greatest extent. It was as if the musicians made up a collective weather system, at times calm and at others, stormy. The music began with a plaintive, single-note call-and-response structure between Claire Chase on the contrabass flute and the other sections of instruments. Tranquil, but at the same time eerily apprehensive and ill at ease.

Above: Claire Chase (rehearsal photo)

Further on in the piece, the storm broke: the winds and brass howling and screaming, the notes swirling behind the frantic trills of the contrabass flute. Chase displayed incredible breath control when the music got chaotic. Although it seemed at first as though she was struggling for breath with sharp uptakes of air, I could ultimately tell that this effect was deliberate. The breath in was just as important as the breath out, as it added an extra layer of humanity to the music that can be difficult to achieve with a non-vocal ensemble.

From the first few delicate tones to the turmoil of a “demonic waltz,” Czernowin’s music continually circled around exact pitches, rarely landing solidly on a frequency. The winds bent the notes, wavering and unstable, while the cellos bowed deep into the strings, producing rumbly low sounds. Even the piano, when it first entered the soundscape, provided key strikes that oscillated up and down in their decay. 

And together as an ensemble too, the musicians often behaved as one entity emitting and ever-shifting collection of sound. The addition and subtraction of tones from the cumulative voice of the ensemble created a brand new form of pitch variance, and this perpetual suggestion—but never clarification—of pitch kept me attuned to every tiny transformation.

Suddenly though, all airflow was cut off, and just the breathing of the audience was left in the hall. After a moment of silence, applause erupted through the rows of seats and lasted for a good 5 minutes!

The musicians of the Talea Ensemble:

Laura Cocks, Flute

Yoshi Weinberg, Flute

Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, Flute

Catherine Boyack, Flute

Amir Farsi, Flute

Michael Matsuno, Flute

Michelle Farah, Oboe

Stuart Breczinksi, Oboe

Christa Robinson, Oboe

Jeffrey Reinhardt, Oboe

Karen Birch Blundell, Oboe

Mekhi Gladden, Oboe

Sam Jones, Trumpet

Jerome Burns, Trumpet

ChangHyun Cha, Trumpet

Alejandro López-Samamé, Trumpet

Atse Theodros, Trumpet

Robert Garrison, Trumpet

Mike Lormand, Trombone

Dan Peck, Tuba

Margaret Kampmeier, Piano

Sae Hashimoto, Percussion

Chris Gross, Cello

Brian Snow, Cello

Thapelo Masita, Cello

Conductor: James Baker

~ Lili Tobias