Time Spans, a wide-ranging immersion in contemporary work. balances good taste and risk-taking.
The Time Spans festival has carved out a unique place for itself in New York’s musical life over the past decade — and not just because it occupies an otherwise barren stretch of the calendar in late August. This contemporary-music event, now a multiweek affair, is that perfect paradox: reliably varied. On successive evenings you might find electroacoustic experiments, meditative string quartets and barreling pieces for chamber orchestra. There is no stylistic tribalism on offer, just a sagacious balance of good taste and calculated risk-taking. That’s thanks in part to the curatorial hand of the festival’s executive and artistic director, Thomas Fichter, a veteran bassist. And it’s also because of the quality of the performers. Ensembles like the JACK Quartet and Alarm Will Sound may well be familiar to music lovers. But they’re rarely presented in such concentrated helpings. Each Time Spans show generally lasts about an hour, while managing to feel like a full meal. After the pandemic led to the cancellation of last year’s festival, Time Spans restarts live performances on Tuesday, and runs through Aug.29. Presented by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust, and held once again at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan, it’s an early sign of concert life springing back to action in the city this fall. Here is a closer look at four of this edition’s presentations. (Details about the festival’s Covid-19 safety protocols are available at timespans.org.) The cellist Mariel Roberts’s debut album, “Nonextraneous Sounds,” announced her as a talent to watch back in 2012. Since then, she has commissioned music by George Lewis and joined the Wet Ink Ensemble, a respected collection of composers and instrumentalists. Her first composition for the full group will be heard at the ensemble’s Time Spans slot on Friday, and draws its inspiration from a narrative embedded within “Seiobo There Below,” a novel by the Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
