Music from Canada

The other night I went to hear the Aventa Ensemble at Roulette in Brooklyn.   The Aventa Ensemble is an excellent new music group based in Victoria BC that frequently tours across Canada and Europe.  (Though for some reason, they never play in Vancouver.  Musical politics?)   And here they were in New York.   The best part of the program was a piece entitled something like Black Box by a young Danish composer.  This featured a live video on stage  of a camera that was inside a black box, with various objects being manipulated by a pair of hands, and a large ensemble spread around three sides of the room.  The music was percussive, lively, and inventive.  But the effect was eventually spoiled by mickey-mousing music that responded to the hand gestures in the video.   The two Canadian pieces on the program were both overly long, self-indulgent, and uninteresting.