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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
Reflection and Remembrance November 12, 2001
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By Jules Langert
Memorials and an anniversary were on the agenda of Earplay's concert last Monday at the Yerba Buena Forum. Among the works performed were pieces by Henry Onderdonk and Donald Aird, two esteemed composers with deep and long-lasting ties to music and musicians in the Bay Area, who died in August of this year. The second half of the program was devoted to Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
During the almost ninety years since it was composed, Pierrot has retained its position as a leading icon of musical modernism. This cycle of twenty-one songs for soprano and five instruments is still a fresh and vital piece. Soprano Elise Ross showed herself in full command of the music and text. Combining speech and singing in Schoenberg's flexible Sprechgesang, she added gestures, facial expressions, and body language, transforming the poetry's narrative voice into a character whose extraordinary imaginings and emotional range conveyed a harrowing and tormented picture of the human condition.
The ensemble, conducted by Mary Chun, was a model of clarity and finely-meshed sensitivity. This was a remarkable performance on all counts. The only drawback may be that the soprano, needing space for her portrayal, was necessarily placed a few feet away from the instruments. Ideally, the sound should emanate from a single central source; in this case, however, the price was worth paying.
Onderdonk's A Moment of Discussion received a satisfying, expressive performance by violinist Terrie Baune and pianist Marja Mutru. The piece began lyrically, the instruments in a dialogue of interdependent lines which became broken and increasingly fragmented as they evolved. Denser sonorities and accented, incisive rhythms established themselves with these changes in texture. A final section seemed to combine the lyrical and dramatic elements of the piece in a coda, with the tension between their opposing natures held in abeyance but unresolved. This composition was affecting and original, beautifully paced and consistently engrossing. Aird's A Moment of Farewell, played by clarinetist Peter Josheff, flutist Tod Brody, and marimbist Tim Dent, is dedicated to a friend and colleague, conductor Thomas Nee. The marimba has a puckish rhythmic character, interjecting itself like a refrain over the often canonic counterpoint of the other two instruments. This piece's playfully-poised objective stance has the feeling of a musical portrait, perhaps the composer's own. Of the two other works on the program, Iannis Xenakis' Hommage à Maurice Ravel (1987), in a less than completely convincing performance by pianist Mutru, seemed perfunctory in its main idea, a series of quick runs up or down the piano, each one culminating in an accented, held chord. Neither Xenakis nor the pianist did enough with this material to make it come alive, Yinam Leef's thoughtful Yizkor (1995), dedicated to the memory of Israeli leader Yizhak Rabin, was well played by flutist Brody, and added a suitably elegiac presence to the evening's mood of reflection and remembrance. (Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.) ©2001 Jules Langert, all rights reserved |