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Nico's Choice

Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony

At Koerner Hall

in Toronto on Thursday

Nico Muhly has written music for films and dancers, and for pop stars such as Bjork, Grizzly Bear and Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons). His audience isn't the usual public for notated contemporary music, which is how a mostly young, hip-looking crowd came face to face with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony at a Toronto concert for which Muhly, who is 28, chose all the pieces.

He wrote only one of them, but all the others were indirectly about his tastes and way of composing. Muhly is a third-generation minimalist, and has no anxiety of influence when it comes to acknowledging forerunners such as Michael Nyman (heard via three pieces for the Peter Greenaway film Drowning by Numbers) and Philip Glass (represented by the third movement of his Symphony No. 3).

Like them, Muhly is keen on different rates of happening within the same music, and on creating a simultaneous impression of stillness and activity. This isn't a completely recent effect: Nyman's chattering strings and woodwinds (in his third excerpt) flew above a lumbering brass melody that a baroque or renaissance composer would have recognized as a chorale or cantus firmus.

Muhly followed that line of thought into a couple of 17th-century motets by William Byrd, in Muhly's own limpid arrangements. This music touched on another virtue in Muhly's world: clarity of sound and procedure, even when things aren't organized in a precise way.

Richard Reed Parry's For Heart and Breath and Orchestra featured a very gentle kind of indeterminacy, achieved by having individual musicians play in time with their own breathing or heartbeat. By writing mostly in octaves and unisons, however, Parry minimized the chances of real discord, and converted the strings' uncoupled pluckings into a mainly textural effect. The piece seemed to aim for a kind of delicate enchantment, enhanced in one movement by a melody played by Muhly on celeste.

The finale was Muhly's ballet score From Here on Out, which reiterated the kinds of opposition heard earlier from Nyman and Glass; for example, when a growling brass and wind theme, in the first movement, crawled underneath a bright clamour of strings. I liked the way his melodic lines grew out of their own extensions, ascending like mountain climbers who reuse the same bit of rope all the way from base to summit. In the second movement, the high parts soared slowly while more rugged things roiled below, and those floating melodic traces often had a tinge of the American pastoral about them.

The main problem with the piece was that it faded into the context that Muhly had taken pains to provide. Next time Muhly gets carte blanche with an orchestra, he should try for more contrast, and less similarity. No complaints at all about conductor Edwin Outwater and the orchestra, who played all this music with attentiveness and heart.

This concert will be heard on CBC Radio 2's The Signal on Nov. 25, and In Concert on March 7.