http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/arts/music/chaya-czernowins-wintersongs-at-miller-theater.html 2014-10-25 01:14:09 Chaya Czernowin’s ‘Wintersongs’ at Miller Theater “Wintersongs V: Forgotten Light” was part of the “Composer Portrait” of Chaya Czernowin at the Miller Theater at Columbia University. === “Pick up a plastic comb.” So instructs the penultimate page of A quirky read on paper, it proves an eerily disturbing but moving end to Ms. Czernowin’s brutal series of songs without words. The International Contemporary Ensemble’s ideal performances of the second (“Stones,” 2003), fourth (“Wounds/Mistletoe,” 2013), and fifth “Wintersongs” — interspersed with another work, the fragmentary “Five action sketches” (2014) — under the conductor Steven Schick, and with the brilliantly agile singers Kai Wessel and Jeffrey Gavett, left me eager to grapple with the complete set. Ms. Czernowin’s songs are not instantly lovable. That The five “Wintersongs” were conceived as a single journey. A septet of low instruments would provide instrumental material held constant, as electronics, percussion, a high septet and then voices and more were added. That’s how the first three played out; the tension was supposed to collapse in the fifth, revealing an unlikely love song. But after a near-decade gap before the fourth, the journey changed. The septet is a dangerous, present memory in the latest songs, as they struggle with intentions that once, as the last song’s title implies, provided light. Ms. Czernowin’s unnerving music occupies the shadows, rattling and whispering, wailing and panting, until unwelcome recesses of a mind dissonantly flare. Ordinary language collapses. To end “Wounds/Mistletoe,” six players whisper randomly into plastic bottles. A piano and harpsichord play mute in “Forgotten Light,” their mechanisms hoping to create notes now improbable. In the “Five action sketches,” the singers spew rushes of toneless consonants, then long swoops of melismatic vowels. They do the same in the concluding “Wintersong,” stuttering until a single word finally negates its own achievement: “Don’t.” Yet Ms. Czernowin’s great success is to maintain a strong urge of “do.” Fracture aside, the music keeps a sense of togetherness, albeit at dynamic and harmonic extremities. Fleeting moments of community seem always to be the aim. And so, something as everyday as stroking a comb becomes profoundly important.