Joan Tower's music is known for its energy, color, and diversity, but these qualities did not emerge from the readings by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble on Sunday at Old First Church. Billed as a sixtieth birthday celebration for the composer, the tepid programming and uninspired performances did little to sum up her accomplishments or show the breadth of her considerable catalogue.

The program comprised works written entirely within fourteen years, 1981-1995, and the instrumentation varied only among solos, quintets, and a duo, despite the fact that ten performers took part in the evening.

The key to Tower's music is in the details; in most works, performers must lead the audience through a mesh of short interwoven motives, guiding its ears toward the most significant events, and allowing less important filigree to blend into the background. Yet in the two largest works on the program, "Island Prelude" (1986) for woodwind quintet and "Turning Points" (1995) for clarinet and string quartet, one could hardly distinguish the motives from the passage work, or the significant harmonic changes from those intended only for coloristic effects. It seemed as if the performers had studied their parts completely, but the scores not at all.

Even the leading oboe part in the woodwind quintet occasionally had trouble breaking free from the other instruments, although part of this problem may lie in the fact that the work is an arrangement from the original version for oboe and strings.

The first of two Messiaen-inspired works, "Très Lent" (1994), was played by cellist Emil Miland with the composer at the piano. The work is subtitled "Hommage à Messiaen" and reflects the sostenuto movements for violin and piano and cello and piano in Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," a work much admired by Tower. Tower's musical gestures, however, are weightier than Messiaen's, and the work does not attempt to reach the level of transcendance achieved by Messiaen. Influenced by the solo clarinet movement from the same Messiaen quartet, "Wings," performed by solo clarinetist Laura Carmichael, is a colorful virtuoso piece. It gained popularity quickly after its creation in 1981, and is frequently performed.

The saving grace of the evening was the successful performance of two solo piano compositions by Tower, companion pieces composed in 1994 and both inspired by lines from John Ashbery's poem "No Longer Very Clear." These two short works, the five-minute "Holding A Daisy" and four-minute "or like a...an engine" were presented with graceful coloring and clearly projected structures by pianist Sarah Cahill.

(Ronald Caltabiano is a composer living in San Francisco and teaching at San Francisco State University.)

©1998 Ronald Caltabiano, all rights reserved