San Francisco Classical Voice

"Coming Soon, to a church near you--new and classical music!" The phenomenon of churches becoming musical venues keeps growing and growing A first visit to the Noe Valley Ministry Sunday afternoon was rewarded two-fold. The church itself, now in its eighth year as home for Sunday afternoon recitals, is a welcoming place, attracting folks from that gracious neighborhood and from farther afield. Their second of the season's six events featured special visitors, the Empyrean Ensemble from UC Davis. It played up a storm, with three new works and the classic Ravel Piano Trio in A minor.

The musicians are well-known here, heard in orchestras, contemporary and other chamber ensembles here, and they're good. The difference is the Empyrean programming--Sunday's three composers had not been encountered previously-- and the director Ross Bauer's clear, sure conducting. In otherwise well-formed performances of the two new mixed septets, the only, but not insignificant, problem was balance. In the church's live acoustic, the horn so overbalanced the other instruments as to be a real distraction.

This took heaviest toll on Cloud Collar (1997) by Allen Anderson. The work is so loaded, the textures so active and contrapuntal that the domination of horn even with subsidiary material keeps turning the listener's attention topsy-turvy. The strength of the work, and a clearly imaginative talent, lies in the richness of the ideas, the energy of the material and its almost constant interaction. But the violin, viola and particularly the cello were being blown away. Even allowing for that however, I did feel the need for moments of repose, relief, contrast, some breathing of the structure.

Hayes Biggs' When You Are Reminded By The Instruments (1997), is in no ways as windy as the title. There is a sense of Stravinsky about it, with its eccentric rhythmic design, whimsical and scherzo-like at first. When it turns from chordal movement to long unison lines marked by sharp bell-like accents, also eccentric and unpredictable, there's a feeling of an Asian influence or reference. The style and the work are fresh and distinctive, the shape and sense of achievement at the end very satisfying.

Joshua Garrett then stepped forward and skillfully brought off Eric Chasalow's Winding Up (1992) for solo horn, the title possibly a play on the antique usage of the verb, to sound by blowing. Sound he did. While tonal and not harmonically far-reaching, the piece keeps the hornist leaping melodically on fast, widely disjunct lines, stuttering between natural and stopped notes, bending the stopped notes, doing everything but multiphonics. There is interesting interplay, almost duetting, with passages in natural tones answered by answers in stopped tones. The whole thing is a lip-buster, and Garrett was up to its virtuosic demands.

Some might have thought of Garrett's performance as redemption for the overbalancing complained of earlier, but responsibility for that rests more with the composer, who may have miscalculated in writing the part and who was present and must have heard the performance on the day before at UC Davis. He and Bauer might have moved the horn away from the reflecting surface behind and placed a curtain or box with sound-absorbent material back of the instrument's bell-- and required softer playing.

The final work, not contemporary, was a treat, the Ravel Piano Trio, which has been quite a play around here recently. This was a lovely performance led by the acclaimed new faculty cellist at the San Francisco Conservatory, Jean-Michel Fonteneau, formerly with the Ravel String Quartet. Clearly the Ravel Trio is mother's milk for him. All the suaveness and elegance of this gorgeous work, the weightlessness of the phrasing, the lilt and the refinement of nuance that paints the phrases as if in watercolor, were captured in this performance. The second movement, Phantoum was fierce, the Passacaille deep and moving. (Unfortunately, an unbreakable prior commitment compelled my reluctant departure before the finale.)

There were a few imperfections. The violinist, Terrie Baune, is excellent and followed Fonteneau's lead devotedly, but does not match the exquisite finesse of his bowing. The Empyrean's pianist, Gwendolyn Mok, played sensitively, not her fault that the piano's low register was less than good in tone and tune. No matter, it was music that made time stand still and thoughts and feelings float.

(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)

©1999 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved