Eclipse, the chamber ensemble Antares' 2004 release on Innova, is an exciting collection of works for this adventurous group's instrumentation of violin, clarinet, cello, and piano. While the pieces cover a wide array of moods and expressions, from the hectic energy of John Mackey's Breakdown Tango (2000), to the opposite extreme of George Tsontakis' sparse and somber Eclipse (1995), there is also a unifying quality in the program that savvy listeners and followers of contemporary trends may detect. Perhaps the brash patterns of James Matheson's Buzz (2001) seem at odds with the quiet tremolandos of Kevin Puts' eerie SIMAKU (1996), or the wild antics of Stefan Freund's dodecaphunphrolic (1997) seem contrary to the meticulous details of Carter Pann's Antares (2004), but these are superficial differences. These six compositions work well together because they share something close to a common language, notable in their flexible tonality, freely dissonant counterpoint, rhythmic regularity, and self-aware rhetoric; and their composers seem utterly free of ideology and comfortable with borrowing from a variety of resources. Perhaps this CD is a fluke, but its surprising consistency is a hopeful sign of the development of a common practice, which would have been impossible decades ago, at the height of the avant-garde, but seemed quite possible at the start of the twenty first century. Innova's sound quality is exceptional.
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