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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
November 8, 2005
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By Jules Langert
Strata, the brilliant instrumental trio of violin, clarinet, and
piano which has made several appearances with Composers, Inc. over the years,
was in the Green Room again on Tuesday, this time with a full recital of
magnificently played music, some of it composed expressly for this
ensemble. Though the program may have contained an overabundance of extroverted,
flamboyant music, it hardly seemed to bother Composers Inc.'s
audience, who leapt to their feet at the end of the concert in an exuberant standing
ovation.
One of the musical highlights, Maryland composer Robert Gibson's
Twelve Poems, was an evocative set of short character pieces, by turns
moody, colorful, and dynamic, as performed by its dedicatees, violinist
James Stern and pianist Audrey Andrist. In each piece Gibson was able to
translate a descriptive title into an appropriate sound image, from
which the musical shape could evolve. In Wind Chimes it was sliding string
harmonics against bell-tones for the piano that made the connection.
Reflection was opaque and contemplative, in the form of a palindrome.
Waves emulated the patterns of growth and decay that we associate with sound
waves, and Cloudburst combined intricately chromatic runs for the
violin with short, percussive tone clusters in the piano. With Hommage the
music took a detour into a quasi-Debussyan soundscape. Quatrain and Octave, the last two pieces, used their respective intervals prominently, ending the
work with a rush and a clarion flourish.
Texan Dan Welcher's Dante Dances for clarinet and piano was a
group of ingenious variations composed as a suite of mock dances whimsically
linked to characters from Dante's Inferno. Clarinetist Nathan Williams and
Andrist brought out its humor and fantasy without stinting any of the
piece's considerable virtuosity. The opening work, Robert Maggios's
attractive Riddle was a set of variations based on the folk song I
Gave My Love a Cherry (also known as The Riddle). The first of its two
movements had the piano playing the theme over its entire keyboard range in a
fragmented, continuous, rapid, and exhilarating cascade of notes.
Meanwhile, the violin and clarinet wove a lively, often lyrical chain of
thematic duets, at times interacting colorfully with the piano. The
second movement, slow and plaintive, was another set of variations on The
Riddle, but these seemed more conventional and less interesting overall.
Andrist had her own solo turn in Pierre Jalbert's Toccata, a robust display piece with a brooding, virile keyboard style that exuded strength and vitality. Frank La Rocca, a founding member of Composers, Inc., was represented by In This Place, unique to the program in its simplicity and its slow, meditative, quasi-Renaissance style. Characteristically for La Rocca, it was based on a fragment of plainchant and restricted to a narrow, modal range of sound. This composition was well served by standing in such sharp relief from everything else on the program. Its subtle interplay of violin and clarinet often in their lowest registers, the hints of modally derived dissonance, the occasional muted thud of a plucked piano string, added a welcome edge to the texture, saving the music from a studied blandness. It was also an agreeable contrast to the ongoing razzmatazz in the other pieces. At the end, a slow-moving mensuration canon in several voices brought the work to a serene and satisfying conclusion. For their finale, Strata played Trio, by Paul Schoenfield, in four movements. Essentially based on several Chasidic tunes, it reveled in the kind of manic, tipsy, hilarity usually associated with klezmer music, and with aspects of Chasidism itself. Schoenfield filtered the ethnic elements through a haze of wrong-note dissonance, multiple glissandi, and much else to create both a parody and an homage at the same time, a remarkable achievement in its way. Strata let out all the stops for this one in an amazing performance that prompted the aforesaid standing ovation.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who lives in the East Bay.)
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