|
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
October 25, 2004
|
By David Bithell
The term “Classic” can be misleading and is often misapplied. Compositions can be excellent and sufficiently characterized as such, without being nominated for posterity or the extra-long life that the term implies. Nicole Paiement, director of the BluePrint project at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, describes their ongoing series of contemporary music as honoring “music that has transcended novelty to achieve a ‘classic' status” – highlighting on Monday night works by Ligeti, Lutoslowski, Gubaidulina, and Bartók.
I must be upfront with my aversion to this sentiment. With the exception of Bartók (who has clearly entered into the established canon of early twentieth-century music), these are certainly important composers of the mainstream of contemporary music but not necessarily “classic.” Rather than pushing music forward into the music of today and beyond, they have synthesized “novel” ideas with traditional frameworks into a more easily digestible audience-friendly form. This isn't to say that it's not good music. And this isn't to say that it wasn't a valuable program to present: the program was well balanced, well performed and showcased music often neglected by other “novelty seeking” ensembles.
The program featured the brilliant Boston-based pianist Stephen Drury, playing a solo work by Gyorgy Ligeti, and included ensemble pieces by Witold Lutoslawski and Sofia Gubaidulina, along with the opener, Bela Bartók's String Quartet No. 3. The highlight was Drury's performance of Ligeti's Piano Etudes (Book Two). His great ease in playing these is misleading: these are pieces that few people have attempted to play, and his performance of the complete set is an even rarer delight. The compositions are difficult not only in their technical virtuosity but also in their formal single-mindedness. Most explore one idea and explore that idea to its exhaustion. Frenetic ascending gestures continue past the extreme upper end of the piano, “wrapping around” to the bass, motoric rhythms at breakneck speeds – typical Ligeti and typically treacherous. With music like this, performances seem as though they can only be all or nothing – one slip-up and the game is over.
In Drury's remarkable performance, speeds seemed even faster than expected, with his hands often weaving together into a blur of interlaced fingers. What is most surprising about a live performance of these works is that they add to their unbelievability. On CD, the pieces seem more matter of fact – they exist, they are error free, they are clean. But this physical and visual connection to the performer still makes an enormous difference. Drury's calm and underexertion in the first etude, his typewriter-like precision in the last, his increasing sense of virtuosic flare, not to mention his wonderfully humble acknowledgement of his page-turner during his bows (as if she were more important to the performance than he was!) – all made this music step into life. Ending each half of the concert, the New Music Ensemble of the San Francisco Conservatory performed large chamber compositions by Witold Lutoslawski and Sofia Gubaidulina, respectively. It is not often that works of this size get played in the Bay Area – too large for most ensembles and yet too small for an orchestra. This being said, both of these works suffered orchestrationally as if written for orchestra and later arranged for smaller forces (though this wasn't the case for either). Conducted by Nicole Paiement, the ensemble did a good job of handling much of the compositional unevenness. Gubaidulina's Concordanza was written in 1971 for single strings plus woodwind quintet and percussion. Throughout the piece, Gubaidulina experimented with an incorporation of vocal noises (mainly “shhh” sounds made by the wind players), which lacked integration and felt rather like a “novelty.” Most successful in its delicate and eerie gestures, the performance brought out the rich and fluid gestural landscape of the piece, though losing some direction in its fragmented middle and end. Written for a similar instrumentation (though augmented by more brass and a harpsichord), Lutaslowski's Chain I alternated between overlapping gestures and freely spaced musical events forming the chain of the title. Sections of extended solo fragments felt tiresome and overly exposed (here is a place where a full orchestra could have come to the rescue). The ensemble worked best in moments of overlapping gestures, with each instrument repeating figures on its own time, including the final crescendo leading to the end of the piece. Finally, though first on the program, Bartók's “String Quartet No. 3” was given a very strong and committed performance by Michelle Maruyama and Zhao Wei (violins), Charith Premawardhana (viola), and Hannah Addario-Berry (cello). Clearly the evening's “grandfather” work, this piece points back to the intersection between Romanticism and early Modernism. The 3rd Quartet has a direct expressive lineage to Romantic music, and this performance emphasized this through an intuitive and natural understanding of the gestural language. The performers did best in sections of rapidly changing texture, occasionally losing focus in some of Bartók's extended sections of freely contrapuntal writing.
(David Bithell is a composer/performer based in the East Bay whose work explores the connections between music, theater, and language. He is co-director of the sfSoundSeries.)
|
