San Francisco Classical Voice

If that all sounds like an awful lot of noise, well, it was and it wasn't. It came off more like the plosives in a plosive-heavy language; it was all articulation, emphasis, chiff. And the piece itself (beyond being just a little too long for its own good, I thought), was a hoot: a bright, gaily-syncopated rondo with episodes that were (true to the concert's theme) all about colors. If it has a fault beyond its length, it's that it's so relentlessly in rhythmic unison that you end up longing for contrapuntal mayhem that never shows up.

Maurice Ohana's 1990 ballet suite Sundown Dances was brother to the Campo in an odd way. The idioms were nothing alike. Ohana suggested something between a Herrmann film score and late Ellington. That was partly the instrumentation (violin, flute/piccolo, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, bass, and percussion), and partly the brooding, dense, low chords. But these moved around in slinky parallel motion, and in fact most of the piece, just like the Campo, was in rhythmic unison, or at least almost all the players in rhythmic unison against one independent line.

And Dutilleux? The program didn't really showcase him as "Master Craftsman of Color," apart from the opening Les Citations, a 1991 piece for oboe, bass, harpsichord, and percussion. That really was a demonstration of what can be wrung out of the oddest ensemble. Each instrument had its time in the sun, beginning with the oboe (Rebecca Van de Ven), and proceeding to the harpsichord (Katherine Heater, playing wonderful dense chords with great vigor at the bottom of the range, and surely grateful that she wouldn't have to do the tuning later), and then the bass (Stan Poplin), who in fact spent the second half of the piece, including his fierce solo, up in what string players generally call the "rosin zone." The percussion (Matt Cannon) was initially little sparks of marimba and little taps on the tam-tam and suspended cymbals, but it too branched out as the piece went on, adding instruments as the music got fiercer (the oboe part involves some multiphonics later on).

Next came the flute-and-piano Sonatine from 1943, which sounded just like a Paris Conservatoire test piece — and, whaddaya know, it was one. It's very attractive music in that vein — roughly early Milhaud in a good mood — and the genial way flutist Katrina Walter and pianist Leesa Dahl (the latter is on the SFCM faculty) had with the first movement was such that it took awhile to realize that nearly the whole thing is in 7. Making odd meters seem natural is terribly difficult, at least for classically-trained musicians (for people steeped in, say, Bulgarian folk music, another story), and Walter and Dahl were brilliant here. As they were throughout a piece that was designed to require brilliance.

Then after intermission came faculty cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau, playing the 1976 Trois Strophes pour Paul Sacher — the outcome of a commissioning project of Msistlav Rostropovich, in which a dozen composers were asked to write pieces for solo cello in honor of Sacher (one of the great commissioners of the 20th century, the man to whom a dozen or more masterpieces owe their existence). The catch was that every piece had to use the letters "SACHER" in musical form. (S is "Es," which is E-flat in German; A and C and E are normal note-names; H is the German name for B-natural; and there's no "R" in music, but Rostropovich made it stand for "re," which is D.) Dutilleux runs with that, runs with it in fact forward and backward and in any number of octaves. Matters are made even more difficult for the cellist by the scordatura (non-standard tuning): the bottom string is tuned down a half-step, so that the player can get in the odd very deep "H." Fonteneau knows this piece of old, and he played it with his customary combination of flair and concentration.