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
Oberon's Glade 