San Francisco Classical Voice

The Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players titled their Monday concert at Hertz Hall "Dall' Italia," but perhaps a better title might have been "Da Donatoni," as the dominance of this highly influential Italian composer and teacher permeated nearly all the evening's works.

Good programming and insightful performances demonstrated how Donatoni's voice has suffused current Italian compositional thought and reached across the Atlantic as well. The concert comprised works by Italian composers and by Americans influenced by Italian literary, visual, and musical arts. Even so, the range of ensembles for this concert, utilizing from three to 55 performers, and the unique expressive scope of each composition, invested the evening with an important element of diversity.

Coming at the end of the program, Franco Donatoni's "Ash" (1976) revealed the common ancestry of the works presented earlier. This octet of winds, strings, piano, and harpsichord, showed Donatoni's mastery of technique and structure. The ensemble, under David Milnes' direction, cut a clear path from the pointillistic opening through sections that went from quirky, abortive gestures to cacophonous counterpoint, then to more continuous music culminating in a viola solo. A series of emphatic unisons embroidered by short melodic figures sustained the climax of the work, setting up an exuberant finish.

Two traits associated with Donatoni--supple structures and his technique of working with short groups of notes--could be heard as starting points for Luca Francesconi's trio for clarinet, violin, and piano, "Impulse II," (1985, American premiere). It's similar in large-scale form to Donatoni's "Ash" but more lush in texture. The work grows from a sforzando opening through large waves of contrapuntal gestures into middle cohesive sections. "Impulse II" climaxes with strongly repeated notes before ending in slow counterpoint as melodic strands pass among the instruments with timbral overlaps and quiet echoes. The work was played with delicate virtuosity by Peter Josheff, clarinet, Carla Kihlstedt, violin, and Karen Rosenak, piano.

Donatoni's influence was also heard in the fine surface details of "Etching," completed two years ago by 26-year-old American composer Reynold Tharp. Tharp attributes his primary inspiration to the intricacies of etchings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. One can almost see the fine branching lines of a Tiepolo in the interwoven parts. The work's discrete opening segments bloom in a final section in which mingling lines separate before elegantly dissolving.

Berkeley composer John Thow's "Cantico" is a large-scale work in every way, with its 15 sections totalling nearly 20 minutes, and a scoring for chorus, three vocal soloists, and nine instruments, including organ. Many texts come into play. The music entwines the "Cantico delle creature" (Canticle of All Things Created) by St. Francis of Assisi with English-language folk and literary texts. Premiered at UC Berkeley last May, the work has been revived for a series of performances -- including this one -- by the Berkeley Chamber Chorus conducted by Marika Kuzma.

Although Thow was a student of Donatoni in the 1970s, Donatoni's influence is heard only in the background of Thow's musical language. American traits of clearly stated thematic material replace Donatoni's non-linear gestures, and leading lines are given more emphasis than in Donatoni's European style. Thow's unique voice is superbly displayed in this clearly and tightly constructed work. Although the text is a relatively long 60 lines, there is no haste. No section is stinted, none lacks drama or weight. The St. Francis text in Italian is set for chorus with rich harmonies in varied vocal styles. The English texts are assigned to the soloists. Between the choral and solo sections, the instrumental ensemble cuts brief, striking interludes, but when accompanying the vocalists, its music is carefully lightened.

Luigi Dallapiccola's six-minute "Due Liriche di Anacreonte" (1945), gave an important perspective to the program by showing Donatoni's roots rather than his reach. Although not as lyric in style as Dallapiccola's later 12-tone works, "Due Liriche" was performed with expressivity and precision by soprano Elizabeth Eshleman and an ensemble of two clarinets, viola, and piano.

(Ronald Caltabiano is a composer living in San Francisco and teaching at San Francisco State University.)

©1998 Ronald Caltabiano, all rights reserved