Fantasies on the Familiar

By Jules Langert

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For its opening concert of the season last Tuesday, Composers Inc. presented an often intriguing mix of pieces, including two piano solos, a couple of unusual duos, a trio, and a quartet finale. Pianist Eliane Lust began the program with a crisp, dynamic rendition of Three Pieces for Piano, by Jeffrey Miller (2007). The outer pieces, “Invention” and “Dance,” were contrapuntal, with motives combining and dissolving in animated interplay. The middle piece, “Elegy,” a reflective study in chordal textures, provided an apt contrast.

After intermission, Lust returned to play Remembering Opus 109 (1994), by the late John Thow, composer and music professor at UC Berkeley for over 25 years, who died unexpectedly a few months ago. This piece is an introspective meditation, based on the oscillating intervals that open Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Number 30 in E Major, Op. 109. Thow slows them down, so that the oscillation itself becomes the central musical gesture.

Up and down, back and forth, the gently rocking motion uses various intervals, taking on a pensively unresolved character, which Thow extends through a series of moody episodes, toward a final point of stasis. In a climactic passage, trills are introduced, “which are perhaps imported from the andante variations” toward the end of the model sonata. Eliane Lust played this brief reverie with just the right feeling for its melancholy beauty.

Walimpai, for piano and alto saxophone, by Philadelphia-based Michael Djupstrom (2004), is a winner of the 2007 Ettelson Prize, one of two such awards given annually by Composers Inc. as a result of a nationwide competition, which drew nearly 300 submissions last year. The work’s title comes from author Isabel Allende’s eponymous story, a quasi-mythological tale of death and spiritual possession within an indigenous tribe who live “just beyond the reach of the outside world.”

The Shaman’s Sax

The piano spins an expressively lyrical, highly ornamental texture that seems almost improvised, as if evoking a myth told by a shaman. Against this background, the saxophone keens a soulfully vocal melodic line, hypnotic in its comparative simplicity and emotive intensity. The music unfolds at a slow, steady pace with an admirable richness of detail, which is a tribute to the composer’s skill and his ability to sustain such a mood over a protracted length of time.

For me, though, the consistency of texture and lack of a major contrast began to lessen the music’s hold at a certain point, after which I felt that the piece lost its feeling of immediacy. The performers, however, were deeply attuned to the composer’s intentions throughout. Pianist Irene Gregorio brought out the wayward, lyrical complexity of her part as if she were making it up on the spot, and saxophonist Dale Wolford played with considerable tonal beauty and expressive intensity.

Martin Rokeach’s Fast Lane, for violin and trumpet (2006), is partly an attempt at yoking together two rather incompatible instruments. Muting the trumpet for much of the piece was definitely helpful, and the composer also attempted to neutralize the sonic and timbral imbalance through the frequent use of shared and echoing tremolos.

Often Rokeach had the duo bouncing off each other in brightly competitive runs. But the inequities of these two instruments were so much at the forefront of this piece that, by the end, it sounded more like a collection of brief episodes trying to bridge this gap than a satisfyingly achieved composition. Jan Dobrzelewski, violin, and Jean-Christophe Dobrzelewski, trumpet, were the stalwart protagonists.

Burlesca, by Dante de Silva (2003), is a lively and sparkling trio for clarinet, violin, and piano, successfully emphasizing fluid interaction, instead of the textural separation we heard in both of the duos on the program. It was played with great verve and an astute sense of instrumental balance by the three performers, whetting the appetite for other works by De Silva and performances by this ensemble.

A Genre Dissected and Reassembled

Ensemble cohesion was even more evident in the final work, Fred Lerdahl’s Marches, for piano, clarinet, violin, and cello (1992). In this piece, Lerdahl dissects the march, borrowing suggestive fragments and accompanimental patterns in order to build a freely evolving fantasy, like a patchwork quilt of many colors. There are a few moments reminiscent of Mahler, with the ghostly tapping of bows on strings, and a slower episode toward the end, where the melodic line begins to resemble Mahler’s slow, songlike marches from the Third, Fifth, or Seventh Symphonies. Later, a recollection of the opening episode leads to the final, disintegrating climax on which the piece ends.

Marches is a highly skillful, effective composition with solidly idiomatic writing for all the instruments, and a consistently tonal feeling underneath its dissonant, complex musical language. The quartet of players gave a rousing performance of the work, which must have been difficult to put together. Perhaps Lerdahl has achieved for the march what Ravel was able to do for La Valse in 1918.

Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who lives in the East Bay.