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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
April 12, 2005
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By Jules Langert
There was skill and imagination in abundance on Tuesday's enjoyably eclectic concert by Composers, Inc. Three of the five works on the program were inspired by nature — its consoling beauty, its awesomeness, and its mystifying strangeness. But first we heard Chasing Karma (2000), a brief and lively duo for cello and violin by Finnish-American Kari Henrik Juusela. A taut, toccata-like piece, it featured some exciting, pungent string writing by a composer who really knows how to get results from this instrumental combination. Phillip Santos and Lawrence Granger were the capable performers.
Bruce Reiprich's Weeping Willow (1996) sets a poem in Turkish by poet Oguz Tansel, a recently deceased friend of the composer's. Scored for soprano and string quartet, its slow, stepwise motion and low register offer a deeply personal meditation on the poet's feelings and their embodiment in nature, represented by the willow tree. The music's simple, unselfconscious minimalism conveys the text's meaning with directness and genuine empathy. It was affectingly sung by soprano Deborah Raymond.
Stephen Taylor's Quark Shadows (2001) is at another end of the stylistic spectrum. Its instruments are viola, horn, string bass, and piano, and it revels in timbral effects, like the piano's low notes muted to match the sounds of the bass playing pizzicato, or the horn playing next to the piano in order to resonate its strings. In this performance the viola was at a disadvantage, overmatched by the horn and the bright, percussive piano writing; seating the two strings together might have improved the balance. This piece was a winner of Composers Inc.'s annual Ettelson Award for 2004. It takes its cue from the physics of crystals and the collision of sub-atomic particles. The first of its two movements was especially effective in its lively instrumentation and the composer's distinctive flair for creating acoustical surprises.
Kamran Ince's In Memoriam 8/17/99 was the most striking and unusual piece on the program. A piano solo played beautifully and sympathetically by Los Angeles pianist Vicki Ray, who commissioned the work, it was composed in the aftermath of a series of devastating earthquakes on the coast of Turkey. A quiet, hymn-like, sonorous passage at the beginning is immediately followed by a rhythmically unstable, urgent pattern of percussive chords and then a single, isolated low note. These three elements recur and are somewhat developed after a more lyrical, folk-derived middle section, but they remain unintegrated and unresolved at the end — a haunting conflict of moods and textures, perhaps suggesting hope, anxiety, and inevitability in the ongoing riddle of human existence. Derek Jacoby's String Quartet #2 (2003) ended the concert strongly, composed of a seamless, expressive chain of variations. Within the traditional norms of quartet writing the composer managed to fulfill his aims and also to keep the audience thoroughly involved in the music. This was a satisfying and predominantly lyrical work in a distinctly modern idiom, its long-breathed theme first announced and finally recapitulated by the cello, in a kind of valedictory gesture. Jacoby's Quartet made an appropriate finale, bringing us back to the sound of strings and also to the reassuring verities of classical design.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
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Kamran Ince
Stephen Andrew Taylor