Premiere of New Work for Guitar and Clarinet

Guitarist Silviu Ciulei and clarinetist Jeffrey Brooks premiered Lee’s newest chamber work, Evasive Maneuvers, at a recital at the University of Florida on Wednesday. The piece features slinking clarinet tunes and syncopated guitar grooves that weave around each other in different streams of rhythmic activity, sometimes seemingly at odds, and sometimes coming together. Knowing Ciulei’s extensive background in flamenco, Lee incorporated a number of noisy and virtuosic flamenco guitar techniques into the piece, such as the rasgueado, which involves the rapid strumming of a note or chord with each finger in quick succession. The clarinet complements the guitar with trilling and rapid flourishes, also serving to introduce much of the melodic material throughout the piece.