The International Contemporary Ensemble and the Talea Ensemble at Roulette
The New York Times, September 28, 2009

Most of the pieces by composer Mario Diaz de León detailed in this review — and one more piece I omitted due to space concerns, 2.20 for string trio and electronics — are included on his excellent new CD, Enter Houses Of, out this Tuesday (September 29) on John Zorn's Tzadik label. I'd been wanting to hear more from Diaz de León ever since I first encountered one of his pieces in an ICE concert at P.S. 122 last May. That piece was Mansion, and it sounded even better at Roulette. Well after the concert was over, I was still lingering in a trance state induced by the last work on the program, Gated Eclipse.

Your next chance to hear ICE is coming up on Wednesday (September 30) at 7:30pm at The Tank, where flutist Eric Lamb, violist Wendy Richman and percussionist Nathan Davis will be playing electroacoustic music by Kaija Saariaho. The Talea Ensemble, which went on to play Georges Aperghis's kinky Sept crimes de l'amour at a Lexington Avenue hotel on Sunday afternoon, is now headed to Paris and London; its next New York concert, at the Tenri Cultural Institute on November 13 at 8pm, includes Morton Feldman's Why Patterns?, Salvatore Sciarrino's Omaggio a Buri and the U.S. premiere of Fabien Levy's à propos.