Review: Coleccion Nocturna

Felder was conductor in his Coleccion Nocturna after a poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in which the composer felt 'powerfully evocative images of a surreal nocturnal landscape...' He scored the work for clarinet/bass clarinet and piano soloists, tape and orchestra. Neruda's poem contains a phrase, 'I am rent by the shock of my dreaming', which reflects the quality of this music. The clarinet is alternately lyrical, then used as the shrill leading edge of massed sonorities. Orchestral textures are generally quite dense but the strings were often given surprisingly consonant supporting chordal passages. Four loud speakers bracketed the hall, the tape tracks used not as a major element but to shadow the solo instruments or for heightening effect. It seemed a series of advancing and receding waves which reached for and achieved the same kind of ecstatic ambiance, at its peaks, that Ruggles' "Men and Mountains" is capable.