|
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
Empyrean's Celebratory Closer
June 2, 2001
|
By Jules Langert
The Empyrean Ensemble had a truly grand finale for their last concert of the season at Berkeley's Julia Morgan Theater Saturday. The program included first performances of two striking ensemble pieces by Mario Davidowsky, present for the occasion, and a dramatic, engrossing song cycle by the Ensemble's director, Ross Bauer. There was also a demanding three-movement work for the group's ten players by Andrew Imbrie, performed in celebration of the composer's 80th birthday and of his singular contribution to music in Northern California over the past 50 years.
Soprano Susan Narucki's distinctive timbre and penetrating lyricism were vital to the performance of Bauer's Ritual Fragments (1995), which uses texts from an anthology of Native American songs and poems translated and edited by William Brandon. Filled with nature imagery, the texts are grouped around cycles of day and night and of the seasons. A greatly varied landscape of moods and textures was evoked by the accompanying six instruments, supporting and intensifying Bauer's expressive vocal writing. The music was continuous, welded into an unbroken chain of nine songs by a series of imaginative and vibrantly scored instrumental interludes.
Though Narucki's words were often unclear and some of Bauer's melismatic vocal writing seemed overly elaborate and difficult to sing, Ritual Fragments was a beautiful and original work, heard in a performance imbued with poetic feeling and commitment.
Yields Stunning Quintet Soprano Narucki also sang in Davidowsky's Cantione Sine Textu (2001), commissioned by the Empyrean Ensemble. Her voice was blended with four instrumentalists to create a unique quintet. The single-movement piece had great poise and lyric intensity, and Narucki was stunningly effective in her quasi-instrumental role. Opening the program was Davidowsky's Simple Dances, a suite of six fairly short movements, each tenuously related to a different preexisting dance form. Though Davidowsky's musical language is highly modern and his style abstract, a few of these elegant, supple pieces more closely approached the mood and spirit of the original dances to which they refer. A good example was the slow Sarabande. With the low flute solos accompanied by the cellist (often playing on the bridge of her instrument) and by discreet touches of percussion, including chimes, this movement conveyed a delicate flavor of the Spanish dance from a former time. The March and Tango were also recognizable as lively and often witty variants of their prototypes. This was a work of great sophistication and artistry. Less successful was Morton Feldman's The Viola in My Life 2 (1970). With Ellen Ruth Rose as the sensitive viola protagonist backed by six instruments, the piece was a static, meditative idyll, beginning slowly with a fragmentary dialogue between soloist and ensemble. This section was beautiful, but Feldman would not or could not sustain the gently exploratory feeling past a certain point, the piece being unable to generate momentum and evolve.
Imbrie's Spring Fever (1996) was the final work on the program. Offering plenty of action, diversity, and occasional musical fireworks, it was a substantial sendoff to the concert and to the season. But while Spring Fever had abundant energy, lyricism, and vigor, its proliferating detail and consistently intricate level of workmanship seemed to hold back its full effect in this performance. The richly motivic counterpoint was always convincing, but sometimes its apparatus restrained a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. A greater variety of tempos throughout the three ample movements would also have been advantageous. Congratulations to the Empyrean Ensemble and its enlightened host, the Julia Morgan Theater, for a fine and stimulating series of concerts. Tonight's program was taped for broadcast by radio station KALW, which will give the event a deservedly wider audience, perhaps even the beginning of a collaboration between local FM radio and Bay Area new music. (Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.) ©2001 Jules Langert, all rights reserved |
