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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
October 12, 2004
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By Jeff Rosenfeld
No matter what you expect from concerts exclusively devoted to contemporary music, you rarely can hope for a full house. But that — and more — is what Composers, Inc. produced Tuesday for the first concert of its 21st season. The Green Room of San Francisco's Veteran's Building was packed with young and old eager for a good show — maybe the free chocolates and drinks, too. For the most part, they got it all, including a good show.
Whether they liked what they heard, however, may have depended on what they expected from the music, for contemporary programs these days can defy all preconceptions. Composers, Inc. seemed to do it in every way possible. Take what was perhaps the most refined piece of the evening, Allen Shearer's Outbound Passenger. The short three-movement work is mainly a display of an idea: that an unlikely quartet of flute, bassoon, viola, and cello can work mellifluously together. The superb performance by Tod Brody (flute), Steven Dibner (bassoon), Ellen Ruth Rose (viola), and Jill Rachuy Brindel (cello) was burnished and mellow, and Brody's flute, the only bright object in this dark collection, was particularly sensitive to balance with the more recalcitrant instruments. The interaction in this composition is delightful. The middle Liberamente is plain, with a series of solos, but midway through the finale Andante con moto the instruments start finishing each others' sentences with elegant timing.
Tuneful and harmonious, Shearer's work banished any fears that new music has to challenge the ear. The same could be said, to a lesser extent, for Deniz Ince's Turn It Up! and Frank La Rocca's Credo. The latter seems to be one of those rare contemporary works that actually settles for a traditional title. La Rocca has set the traditional Latin text rather tamely, as a reverential but pleasant vow of faith. The San Francisco Bay Area Chamber Choir performed creditably under David Stein's direction. I wish the piece were a minute or two shorter, because it doesn't build and release tension as much as create a mood. Rhythm and polyphony take a back seat to a generalized lushness only rarely punctuated with dissonant tang.
Ince's trio for clarinet, violin, and piano is more harmonically interesting and far more lively too. The opening movement is an abrasive but bouncy village dance with an attractive melody. William Wohlmacher (clarinet), Terrie Baune (violin) and Ellen Wassermann (piano) conveyed the zest of the music suitably. Most interesting was the third and final movement, in which Ince contrasts the violin and clarinet against the piano. The pair often hold long notes, creating a stasis in the melodic line while the piano rumbles in the lower registers. The contrast between movement and stillness and high and low tones helps the work register its profile with utmost clarity.
Less clear, yet more challenging and exciting, were two highly original works, Robert Greenberg's Crazy Levi and Martin Rokeach's Ninth Avenue Hustle. The latter takes a daring combination — bass trombone and piano — and makes it succeed beyond expectation. Who would have thought a one-movement sonata, for this pair, could have such variety and be fun, yet deadly serious, at the same time? In part due to Rokeach's ever shifting time signatures and rhythms, and in part due to David Ridge's superb work with that unwieldy contraption with twisted, sliding tubes, Ninth Avenue Hustle sang, purred, and danced, all the while tightly reinforced by its atonal but memorable motifs. Lino Rivera provided the sure-handed impetus from the piano. An even more overworked pianist, however, was the spectacular Matthew Laurence Edwards in Crazy Levi. This thorny ballad — some 20 minutes of vigorous, complex tone painting — was an intriguing case of the accompaniment being more compelling than the solo part. Not that soprano Laura Bohn didn't do her best. She acted several parts, and sang them as well, with obvious conviction. Her voice was focused and plush, and on pitch, too, despite the demands of Greenberg's expressionistic writing. The story, by Yiddish poet Rokhl Korn, is about a tragic consequence of lost love. Greenberg stretches the poem out, however, and often disrupts the vocal part in mid-stanza to highlight the dense, richly varied piano part. In doing so he leaves the soprano with the thankless job of trying to maintain tension and line in spurts, over nearly 20 minutes. Though the work is a mixed success, it's ambitious and undeniably powerful. Surprisingly lacking in power was the one work devoted to percussion: Strike, by Jeffrey Miller. Whereas in the Greenberg piece I strained to keep track of the complex combinations of pitches, in the Miller I yearned for every microtonal modulation of bells, blocks and cymbals. Not surprisingly, the work is more about rhythm — two basic patterns, really, played off one another by a duo of performers (Galen Lemmon and Ward Spengler). I wish the piece were more — more surprising, more complex, more driving, more contemplative…anything, really. More can be done with two percussionists to engage an audience, even if that means letting loose a bit. Then again, maybe I'm expecting too much.
(Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World's Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.)
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Frank La Rocca