San Francisco Classical Voice

Composers, Inc. concluded its season in the Green Room last Tuesday with a collection of chamber pieces written during the last ten years by composers from across the United States. This all-American concert wasa rock-solid and included two world premieres, both featuring soprano Christine Brandes.

Supported by an able ad hoc string quartet, Brandes first took the stage for Allen Shearer's At Water's Edge. A setting of R.P. Blackmur's "Of a Muchness," Shearer's work exploits the cool, slippery imagery ("Sweet the cold sea-moss, the old / tide-sounds and sea-change, the folding / of the waters on the earth . . .") by employing a fluid meter and string lines that glide gently over one another, shifting between consonance and dissonance. Shearer relies heavily on the viola, and happily this performance featured David Daniel Bowes, who brought clarity and just enough expressivity to his licks, "lapping quietly at the shore." Brandes' voice has a luster that shines just enough to be precise and clear, and she never gave too much for the piece or for the room (although it was clear that she could have).

For the premiere of Frank LaRocca's Veni Sancte Spiritus clarinetist Diane Maltester joined Brandes and the strings, who switched over to baroque instruments for the piece. Here was one of those neo-ancient pieces in the vein of Pärt, and like many of that composer's works it is enchantingly simple and elegantly made, but leaves one a bit cold. For all the variety of imagery in the 13th-century text, the music was remarkably constant. Part of this came from LaRocca's adherence to the seven notes of the Aeolian mode; part was his desire to create a meditation. As such it succeeds. The performance was careful, balanced and contemplative.

The same quartet (which, in addition to Bowes, included Katherine Kyme and Anthony Martin on violins and Paul Hale on cello) returned later for Margaret Brouwer's Crosswinds (1995). Inspired by the landscapes and indigenous music of Appalachia, this three-movement work is laced with just enough nostalgia to evoke the appropriate atmosphere, but is thoroughly contemporary. Tense dissonances and halting, unexpected rhythms transform the picaresque motives into music that dances with vitality. The players brought it to life in a committed performance.

Pianist Audrey Andrist dove into Frank Felice's roiling Piano Sonata No. 1 (1992) and reveled in its churning modernism. The piece is alternately angular and lyrical and relies on an ABA structure for most of its four movements. Felice has a gift for harmony: the chords follow one another with a reassuring inevitability whether they're angry outbursts or passages of surprisingly tender longing. But there's no denying the darkness of the work as a whole, even though the blackest moments are partially balanced by brief glimmers of bleak humor.

For Evan Chambers' The Fire Hose Reel (1999) and Mark Kuss' Contraband (1992) Andrist was joined by violinist James Stern. Chambers describes his 5-minute piece aptly as a moto perpetuo. Although there is an insistent repetition of notes in a fast tempo, the harmonic rhythm is slow and the melodic rhythms are never varied. Taken together this has the effect of slowing down one's perception of the piece, despite the motion on its surface. Despite occasional pitch-bending in the violin (including a very cool evocation of a British ambulance siren subjected to the Doppler-effect), the harmonies are solidly in the tradition of Milhaud.

Perhaps the evening's most pleasant surprise was the resurrection of Contraband, which Composers, Inc. first performed in 1992 after awarding it the Lee Ettelson Composer's Award. It's a huge work — 25 minutes in five movements. It has a "kitchen-sink" quality but manages to become something larger than the sum of its parts. Sure, the composer's youthfulness shows in the short phrases and (sometimes) underdeveloped ideas, but Kuss brings together his disparate influences (including Namibian folk-music, Beethoven, and Nancarrow) in a purging exercise that succeeds where many pieces of such varied sources do not. Kuss' warning to the audience that the piece was long was unwarranted. The response of this supportive crowd was as near ecstasy as you're likely to see at a concert of this type. Composers, Inc.'s project of bringing back past winners of its Ettelson Award is a worthy endeavor, but I found myself wanting to hear what this composer has been up to lately, whom he had grown into since this early work was finished. As a way of honoring their prizewinners, it might be useful for Composers, Inc. to re-program the early pieces alongside a more recent work, to show us the continuum of creation of which the consortium was such an important part.

(Eric Valliere earned his doctorate in composition from New England Conservatory in Boston, where he has also served on the Musicology faculty. He currently serves as Executive Director of the San Francisco Chamber Singers and administers the Noe Valley Chamber Music Series. His critical writings have appeared in New Music Connoisseur and on Andante.com.)

©2002 Eric Valliere, all rights reserved