The Boston Globe
CAMBRIDGE — You’ll occasionally hear from musicians that certain seemingly complex works aren’t as hard as they sound to a listener. The opposite is true of Elena Ruehr’s music. As flutist Sarah Brady put it on Saturday at a Radius Ensemble concert, Ruehr’s new piece “isn’t as easy as it sounds.”
Brady was introducing “Quetzal Garden” for flute and string quintet, the first of four new works Radius is premiering this season (one on each concert). Its muse is a rare and exotic bird, whose songs are simulated in Brady’s playing. Ruehr is well known for hiding complex structures beneath simple structures, as she once put it, and though “Quetzal Garden” has an inviting exterior, there are a wealth of rhythmic displacements and subtly intricate counterpoints. It must take a lot of skill to create such airy textures, as well as a seamless construction that sounds perfectly proportioned, not to mention the profusion of effortless melodies. Ruehr’s art is to never let craft get in the way of an unabashedly beautiful piece.--By David Weininger
