Musical Charms, Spoken Words

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The Adorno Ensemble broke new ground at the de Young Museum on Friday, May 30, presenting musical, scholarly, and literary “Odes to Neruda.” The Koret Auditorium, part of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, is a comfy little venue with giant padded seats. It feels like a library reading room that has been tiered steeply toward a stage. Cynthia Mei, Adorno’s violinist and emcee for the evening, also played the role of stage manager, corralling various performers and presenters for an eclectic evening.

Up first was Hipermilonga, by Pablo Ortiz. His music often has the conscious aim of circumnavigating a whirlpool of formal development (building action, climax, and denouement) in favor of alternative types of musical drama. This piece doesn’t shun development so much as it break it up into short, surging cycles of vibrant rhythmic lines.

Adorno Ensemble

Photo by Bob Adler

Tonal phrases with degrees of dissonant ornamentation would begin on a unison and expand outward like an accordion, intensifying with each new phrase. Jeff Anderle handled these unisons exceptionally well, at one moment leading the ensemble and at others hiding in the seams, holding together the disparate timbres of a violin and a piano.

Poetry took center stage with students from Poetry Inside Out, a creative writing program with an emphasis on translation. The young poets read their own works, as well as translated works by Neruda, speaking in both English and Spanish. Not only did these poems have a nice sense of flow, but also they were expressive and economical — for example, Maggie Gallagher’s “To Speak With the Dead,” which was striking for its imaginative treatment of weighty subject matter. I was astonished to read in the program that the poet is only 11 years old, causing me to wonder about my own level of maturity, both at that age and now.

Transfixing Treatment

Of the two “less new” pieces programmed — George Crumb’s Madrigals Book I, and Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms No. 9 for violin and tape — the latter seems to have aged more gracefully, though Lucy Shelton’s supple treatment of the text of the madrigals was both graceful and transfixing.

In Synchronisms, Mei’s commanding violin passagework overcame the undeniably dated sounds emanating from the tape part, and her keen sense of timing made synchronization seem effortless and wonderfully expressive. At the very end, those unfamiliar with electro-acoustic music could clearly hear her successfully traversing its obstacles: After a long pause, the final, short note she played matched beautifully with the recorded part.

Gabriela Lena Frank’s Odes to Neruda was the evening’s premiere. The poetry recitations, as well as commentary by John Felstiner, supplied a rich background for the piece. Frank set a selection of three poems from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s series of odes, and all three worked quite well together. The “Oda a las Papas Fritas” (Ode to fried potatoes) was a skillful musical treatment of the text, with Loren Mach providing the frying sounds by quickly tapping gongs with his fingertips and interspersing soft mallet strikes.

Soprano Lucy Shelton matched the sharp attacks with an incredibly controlled and oddly rubbery delivery of the text that, well, made my mouth water. The two outer odes contrasted the single-mindedness of this one with a lush, gregarious sound world. In a particularly memorable passage in “Oda a la Silla” (Ode to a chair), Mei and Bill Everett produced impossibly deep, orchestral sonorities on violin and double bass that Loren Mach continually lopped off with razor-sharp punctuation on the piano.

“Oda a la Cama” (Ode to the bed) had an effervescent charm and a sort of Rondo-like finale, though the relentless Neoclassical drive made it less effective than the other movements. Yet overall the piece worked well, and I hope Adorno will continue mixing different forms of artistic expression that both inform and reinforce one another.

Jonathan Wilkes is a graduate student in theory and composition at UC Davis. He earned a B.A. in music from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Piano Performance.