DUBLIN, N.H. — Summer music camps, combining focused isolation and self-contained richness, channel something of Henry David Thoreau’s joy in realizing that his Walden retreat “was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers . . . a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.” The Walden School, founded in 1972, lets interlopers sample that spirit with an excellent — and free — concert series on its campus here. On Sunday, the day after some 50 students arrived for the school’s Young Musicians Program, New York-based pianist Blair McMillen welcomed them with a program that was mostly new and appropriately cosmic.
It was both showcase and homecoming for McMillen, a one-time member of the school’s resident ensemble. The repertoire played to his robust technique: coruscating, muscular, forging notes and flourishes on the keyboard’s anvil — qualities already on full display in the opener, a pair of preludes by Claude Debussy (“Le cathédrale engloutie” and “Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest”), rendered with an impasto of accents and athleticism.
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Three miniatures by David Rakowski (“Toyed Together” — a left hand-right-hand duet for piano and toy piano — “Extended Puppy” and “Absofunkinlutely”) exemplified that composer’s rampant imagination, ideas and riffs aggressively growing, mutating, overrunning a stretch of time like invasive species. “Medieval Induction” and “Defensive Chili,” a pair of etudes by Marc Mellits, were musically leaner, but of a similar cast, tag-teaming bright, driving, and boisterous versions of relentlessness. Nico Muhly’s “A Hudson Cycle” was, on the surface, an outlier, gently pealing fogged-glass harmonies, but there was a disquiet here, too, the loping 3-against-2 rhythms constantly jump-cutting out of regularity.
It was all extended prelude to the compendium/divination/be-in that is volume two of George Crumb’s “Makrokosmos.” The 12-piece suite, written in 1973 and unabashedly redolent of its era, encompasses just about everything one can do with or to a piano: faux-medieval austerity, fierce modernist firepower, the performer attacking the keys, vocalizing, stopping and strumming the strings. Titles refer to gods and gurus, destruction and transcendence.
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In less committed hands, it might be a recipe for retro-preciousness. But McMillen’s playing vouchsafed the score’s quality and drama. His conviction gave the work’s far-out details urgent immediacy, while bringing out each movement’s rhythmic and structural spine, such that Crumb’s bag of extended-technique tricks felt like an orchestral resource.
“Makrokosmos” is a heavy statement, but the combination of performance and setting brought to mind nothing so much as the distant flute that, in one of Thoreau’s fables, calls a farmer to grander conceptions. “Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you?” Thoreau writes. “Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.” The Walden School aims — and gazes — high.
Blair McMillen, piano
Presented by the Walden School
At: Louis Shonk Kelly Recital Hall, Dublin School, Dublin, N.H., Sunday
Matthew Guerrieri can be reached at matthewguerrieri@gmail.com.