A Composer Turns Down the Tempo, and Turns Up the Complexity

In the golden vastness of St. Mark’s Basilica after night had fallen, the voices seemed to hover in an endless haze. It was the closing concert of the Venice Music Biennale in October, and Lisa Streich’s “Stabat,” written for 32 singers divided into four choirs, blurred over half an hour into a soft yet never quite settled dream.

Streich, 39, was represented in Venice not just by “Stabat,” but also by the premiere of “Orchestra of Black Butterflies,” a rigorous yet playful, pleasurable work for four musicians that unfolds like an off-kilter machine. That piece is now coming to New York, where it will be performed at the Miller Theater on Thursday by the piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire in a Composer Portrait devoted to Streich, a rare American showcase for an important rising artist.

Born in Sweden and raised in a small town in northern Germany, Streich already has a formidable career in Europe. She was a composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival last summer. She has been commissioned by major institutions like the Berlin Philharmonic and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, which asked her to write a final scene to append to Hans Werner Henze’s one-act “Das Wundertheater.” Conductors as eminent as Alan Gilbert and Matthias Pintscher have led her scores. After hearing her work in Venice, I’m hooked.

Streich’s music is often quiet and deliberate. The program note at Miller says that when she was a young composer, her goal was “to find the slowest tempo where a performer could still keep a solid pulse.” Her favorite? Thirty-seven beats per minute. Her pieces tend to fade into oblivion as they end; “Ishjarta,” her Berlin Philharmonic commission, ends with almost the entire orchestra playing an extremely soft pianissississimo.

Even when her work skirts inaudibility, it’s complex. Streich has taken to using software to analyze recordings of choirs she finds on the internet. She focuses on gnarly harmonic moments and has compiled some of the results — divided into 14 categories, like “Gloria” and “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” — in “Book of Chords,” alongside her photographs and poetry.