San Francisco Classical Voice

In its very name, the third Derriere Guard Festival offers the hope of a balance of the best of past and present, but its opening concert Saturday evening at the SomArts Gallery in San Francisco found tradition well- represented, and innovation decidedly lacking.

The nearest to the group's aim of "fusing tradition with innovation, the past with the present, the Western with the Eastern," was Jake Heggie's cycle The Faces of Love, based on the poems of Emily Dickinson. Soprano Kristin Clayton offered a vibrant and engaging performance, the composer at the piano, and the contemporary harmonic language of the piece offered some relief from the evening's otherwise-bland fare.

Though profoundly traditional in form, style and content, the final scene of Alva Henderson's opera Nosferatu strikes such a balance between the contributions of the librettist, Dana Gioia, and those of the composer that this work becomes more than the sum of its parts. Ably presented by pianist Dwight Okamura, soprano Susan Gundunas and baritone Peter van Derick, the piece moved from agitation to agitation without rest, ending with the simultaneous death of both characters. The addition of van Derick's baritone to the evening's sonic palette was most welcome.

There were indeed disappointing offerings: Stefania de Kenessey's settings of solemn memorial poems of Frederick Turner and Anne Finch in her pieces Daughters of Odessa and In Memoriam were baffling. Even given the wooden performance of soprano Heidi Skok this lightweight, simple stuff might have been more at home in a happy Broadway musical. Neither Gordon Getty's cycle "The White Election" on poems of Emily Dickinson, nor its performance by pianist Kristin Pankonin and mezzo Diana Kehrig (who was substituting for another performer) was outstanding.

Beside the character of the individual pieces, there was a painful, bounded predictability to this choice of offerings. None of these composers seemed to be attempting a synthesis of anything. This was not a fusion, it was a retreat to the safest and most hackneyed bits of the musical vocabulary. If a perfectly conventional composition is very well done, it can be a clever parody, or a pleasant thing to listen to, but that is a far cry from the unique compositional voice that a real reconciliation of historical and contemporary influences would produce.

(Sarah Michael is a composer who writes about music for "20th Century Music" and "New Music Connoisseur.")

©1999 Sarah Michael, all rights reserved