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Untoward Titles

By Jeff Dunn

The final Music@Menlo concert, given last Thursday, was called “Music Now: Voices of Our Time.” It should have been called “Recent Music That Pulls Your Heartstrings, Wrenches Your Guts, and Then Beats You to Death.”

It began with a flat-out masterpiece for piano quintet, superbly performed, Scenes From the Poet’s Dreams (1999) by Jennifer Higdon. In musically answering her own question, “What kind of dreams would poets have?” Higdon portrays five examples of such with consummate skill. In the first, “Racing through stars,” the poet dreams of flying away from Earth, for which Higdon supplies a soaring tune and an ethereal backdrop. The second dream, “Summer shimmers across the glass of green ponds,” featured sparklings and undercurrents in the piano and a gorgeous melody above surging strings.

The third dream, “I saw the electric insects coming,” was wholly engaging, with string twitters, piano boinks, and pizzicato and sul ponticello effects in the cello. Chase music, a seeming boxing match, and furious passagework jam packed a movement with energy that could supply a city of several thousand inhabitants, insects not included.

Borromeo String Quartet

“In the blue fields they sing,” the fourth movement, which Higdon describes as “perhaps a vision about heaven,” was too suffused with sadness to fit that bill. Its intermittent pedal points in cello and piano underscored a viola melody and passionate accompanying music that sometimes toyed with whole-tone effects. The work concluded with “The fast dancers dance faster!” This featured more chase music between the piano and viola and sophisticated syncopation — a fitting conclusion to a marvelous conception.

The Borromeo String Quartet played flawlessly and with heartfelt commitment. Gary Graffman’s piano was equally effective, except that it came across as too loud much of the time.

Poetry Par Excellence

Higdon’s imaginary poetry was fantastic, but the real poetry of Pablo Antonio Cuadra, a Nicaraguan, was even more heart-stopping in its imagery and drama. Baritone Robert Gardner brought a ton of personality in portraying the Lake Nicaraguan boatman Cifar, incidents from whose life form the subject matter of the series of poems that composer Gabriela Lena Frank is turning into a song cycle and, eventually, an opera. Five selections from her ongoing project, Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea (2004-2008), were performed.

The first was the best, musically. “You gave me, oh God! A daughter” describes Cifar’s thoughts as he watches his daughter row a boat covered with flowers back from Mass with 11 other girls. The refrain “Don’t permit, Lord! That the wind/hurls her as it hurled me/to the ravenous” leaps into panging and self-mockery every time “ravenous” is uttered by Gardner in falsetto.

The other four numbers were highly dramatic, well acted by Gardner, and superbly paced by the composer. There are great lines in Spanish, like those from “Eufernia!,” translated (by whom the program does not say) “Arsenio, pimply,/client from Lalita’s whorehouse,/throws himself into the Lake. And we see/the quick fin of the shark.” Or those in the gut-wrenching “Tomasito, the cook,” where an admiring torturer proclaims “What balls on this guy! He doesn’t talk!/Now Tomás will never talk again!” If only the music that accompanied such lines were more distinctively motivic, less generically descriptive.

There is no doubt that Frank is onto something with her Cifar saga. If she can keep to the quality of the first setting, her subsequent output will be of major significance.

More Questionable Titles

The third voice of our time was that of Kenneth Frazelle, whose 21-minute Piano Trio, commissioned by Music@Menlo and Joan and Allan Fisch, received its first performance by the utterly top-notch musicians Jeffrey Kahane, piano; Joseph Swensen, violin; and David Finckel, cello. The movement’s titles, “Of Water,” “Unto Dust,” and “Into Light” seemed to have meant something to the composer, whose respective descriptions for each (a “reaching, circular shape,” “simultaneously developed” motives, “whirling motions and skittering rhythms”) applied equally well to all movements.

Jeffrey Kahane, Joseph Swensen, and David Finckel

Better titles might have been “Into the Washer,” “Spin Cycle,” and “Bumped in the Dryer,” or simply “Into the Wringer” for all. The music is complex, the passion immense, the intensity high — and the clarity low. Frazelle’s music may well grow in stature with repeated listenings, the best situation being a recording where the listener can take a 10-minute breather between the highly Expressionist movements.

Of the last number on the program, Tan Dun’s Elegy: Snow in June (1991), the less said the better. Tan Dun described it as a “lament for victims everywhere,” including the listeners, who endured 25 minutes of anger and pity, but no substance or beauty, from a large battery of percussion instruments and an amplified, repetitively scraped cello. About one in six audience members must have been garage-band enthusiasts, for they gave it a standing ovation.

Misplaced Diversity

The program notes began with a Pomp and Circumstance type declaration:

The wealth of ideas expressed in music has always evolved alongside the march of history; as we enter the twenty-first century, the breadth of the art of chamber music has never been more expansive. The final program of Music@Menlo’s 2008 season celebrates the rich diversity of the music of our time.

But what diversity was there in Thursday’s festival wrap-up? Four pieces with a rich diversity in terms of the gender and ethnic background of the composers, but with little range in terms of musical style and emotional sensibility. In the two areas where diversity is never welcome — quality of composition, and performance — there was considerable diversity in the former, and, true to the Music@Menlo tradition, absolutely none in the latter.

Altogether, “Music Now: Voices of Our Time” was a worthy endeavor, the last in a series of five historically progressive concerts that exposed patrons to a hefty dose of unfamiliar and often challenging music. As Artistic Director Wu Han said when introducing the proceedings, “Some of you may love, some of you may hate — and it’s all perfectly OK.” But as a representation of what is going on in music today, the concert was a disappointment, as it concentrated exclusively on Romantic/Expressionist/hyperemotional compositions, with a slight nod to world music. Not making an appearance were any of the myriad other schools around today, such as postminimalism, spectralism, postmodernism, “holy minimalism,” electronica, and so on.

Of course, there is no way a single concert can do justice to an era. Maybe in this instance the program title “Believe It or Not, Modern Music Still Can Be Highly Emotional” would have sufficed.

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