Englishman
Gary Carpenter is a real rarity -- a composer who can express humor in his music without relying on broad comedy or trite silliness. An example is Ein musikalisches Snookerspiel, for wind octet, which he wrote for the bicentennial of
Mozart's' death. It takes as its source material
Mozart's Ein musikalisches Würfelspiel (A musical dice game), which predates
Cage's use of chance operations as a compositional tool by several centuries.
Carpenter uses the results of a game of snooker to organize his material (although he admits to altering some of his self-imposed rules "to stop the piece from sounding like
Philip Glass") and the results are deliriously odd. Its five brief movements ("Frames," actually) use obviously recognizable elements of Mozartian Classicism, but skewed into bizarre and unpredictable harmonic and gestural configurations.
Carpenter's Die Flimmerkiste is named after a bar he frequented while working at an opera house in Krefield, Germany. It's in 67 very brief movements, and they tumble past in such quick succession that each barely has as chance to establish itself before it's overtaken by another, to a delightfully whimsical effect. The performances, by
Ensemble 10/10, conducted by the composer and
Clark Rundell, are models of the excellent timing and precision that good comedy requires. NMC's sound is clean, with good spatial separation.