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FESTIVAL REVIEW
Evelyn Glennie August 5, 2006
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Percussion Panache
By Scott MacClelland
The dazzling and barefoot percussionist Evelyn Glennie put star power into Saturday evening's vivacious new-music showcase for Marin Alsop’s Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. Glennie, petite and hard-of-hearing, made delicious mincemeat of Ken Puts’ riotous Percussion Concerto, composed for Glennie in 2004.
Asked after the Santa Cruz performance if he found it hard to keep up with Glennie’s spectacular virtuosity, Puts said nonchalantly that he wanted “to keep her busy.” Busy she was with blistering material for xylophone, glockenspiel, crotales, tubular bells, chimes, and marimba — as poetically reflective in quiet passages as she was brilliant at high speed and huge volume. A delicate passage on glockenspiel, doubled on orchestral celesta, was breath-stopping.
Puts continues to enjoy exposure at Cabrillo — this was his fourth year in a row — due to the quality of his compositions. While he says, “I have always focused more on melody and harmony than on rhythm,” his success lies in his formal structure, chord progressions, and preference for pitched percussion. In one long arc, the 25-minute Percussion Concerto falls into clear, discernable sections resembling those of classical models. He uses ritornello — a baroque device of repetition — to separate sections, or to change mood or instrumentation. A big “Rachmaninoff” melody on the strings, with tremolo marimba, gives the piece its romantic high point.
Following the Puts piece, Glennie returned for the 12-minute Konzertstück for Snare Drum and Orchestra (1982) by Icelandic composer Askell Masson — a solo tour de force, opening and closing with ominous portents by the orchestra. The huge solo cadenza demands a seamlessly paced accelerando and diminuendo that Glennie executed with superhuman precision. (Because of its many loud reports and rim shots, Alsop, standing right next to Glennie, protected her hearing with an earplug.)
This first full program of the 44th Cabrillo Festival opened with the West Coast premiere of Transitive Property of Equality, composed in 2003 by Laura Karpman, one of Alsop's fellow Juilliard alums. Lasting 12 minutes and using large-orchestra with tape, the single movement plays with mathematical equations. (The composer describes it as a logical syllogism.) Like a time machine, the piece invokes ghostly quotes from some of Karpman’s favorites, such as Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony, Beethoven’s Ninth, Mozart’s 40th, as well as bits from Rossini, Mussorgsky, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky. Like Karpman and Puts, Michael Daugherty was also present to hear his Time Machine in its West Coast premiere. Daugherty, a festival favorite and widely played for his “American Icon” compositions, contends programmatically with the past and future in the present, with three orchestras and conductors — in this case, Alsop and two of her accomplished students, Carolyn Chi-An Kuan and Jeri Lynne Johnson — that play in different tempi and time. In two movements, "Past" and "Future," each lasting about 20 minutes, the scoring adds considerable percussion, rain sticks, anvils, and glass harmonica effects to large forces in colorful if ultimately dense textures and some long-held final roaring. In "Past," the effect of the three orchestras — Alsop’s strings played in sustained note values while the other two played quicker wind and brass passages — sounded a little like 13th century organum, but out of time. "Future" established a kind of dialectic between the serene, with harp and shimmering crystal glass tones, and the aggressive forces of heavy percussion. Daugherty assigned these to a point in the year 802,701 (apologies to H.G. Wells), with the Eloi enjoying lovely sunshine and fresh air on their surface paradise while the subterranean Morlocks, pounding in their caves, prepare to eat their upstairs neighbors alive. While through-composed to an exceptionally high degree, the piece, especially "Future," could otherwise serve as the score of a sci-fi movie.
(Since 1978, Scott MacClelland has written music criticism and journalism for all the major newspapers on the Monterey Peninsula, and for the Metro papers in Santa Cruz and San Jose. During the same period, he has taught music history for Monterey Peninsula College. In recent years he has contributed articles to Strings magazine.)
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Evelyn Glennie
