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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
September 18, 2006
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Musical Imaginings By Jules Langert
For its opening concert of the season, Earplay chose a program of personal, often whimsically inventive, chamber pieces by six stylistically distinct composers. Peter Josheff’s House and Garden Tales, a setting of six short poems by Jaime Robles for baritone, flute, viola, cello, and piano, was a delightful representation.
Jeremy Galyon sang his part beautifully with a firm, bright tone that exuded warmth and color. He took on the roles of a promenading household cat, a flapping bird, and a fiercely excitable chicken. Later, he evoked the woodsy garden with a subtle combination of wonder and detachment. The instruments provided atmospheric background — flashes of brightness and shifts of texture that highlighted Robles’ disarmingly childlike text. Conductor Mary Chun kept discreet order over the proceedings and allowed for plenty of flexibility.
Allen Shearer’s Bagatelles for flute and clarinet blended sinuous, pensive counterpoint with some playful runs, leaps, and an occasional chirpiness to create a thoughtful, fanciful chain of seven short pieces. Composed as studies, they are more than that — a set of imaginative, engrossing, and fully rounded musical sketches, each with its own distinct quality.
The featured soloist, violinist Terrie Baune, played Ronald Caltabiano’s unaccompanied Lines From Poetry — nine movements of varying length, inspired by different poetic images or sentiments. This composition is a series of variations derived from a long-breathed arabesquelike passage that the composer calls “an ever-varying cantus firmus.” In her finely wrought performance, Baune conveyed the work’s poised lyricism with clean, pure sound, and bell-like harmonics. And she took in stride the multivoiced textures and full-bodied chords. However, for all its linear elegance, the piece seemed somewhat redundant and overlong. A few of the variations might be pruned to good effect.
Baune was also featured in Chen Yi’s brief Yangko for violin and two percussionists, in which vocal sounds from all three performers play a constant and important role. The concert opened with Vincent Persichetti’s Infanta Maria from 1960, inspired by a Wallace Stevens poem of the same title. Violist Ellen Ruth Rose and pianist Karen Rosenak gave a warm, expressive performance to this somewhat romantically impressionistic piece — without a trace of the neoclassicism sometimes associated with Persichetti. (The program notes described him as a stylistic chameleon.)
Libby Larsen’s Slang for violin, piano, and clarinet, which closed the concert, was an exuberant excursion into the mixed vernaculars of jazz, boogie, rock and roll, and “new music.” While dynamic and effective, it suffered from an overemphatic, deliberately mechanistic approach. A softer edge and a few surprising changes of pace would have been most welcome. Its brashness was at the opposite end of the musical spectrum from Josheff’s House and Garden Tales, from which it could have borrowed a bit of that gentle whimsy.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
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Terrie Baune
