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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
December 2, 2004
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By Janos Gereben
Among the many virtues of violist-composer-artistic director Kurt Rohde: a disarming lack of pretention. Many, perhaps most,
advocates and performers of contemporary music develop an understandable bunker mentality early in their careers, pitched as they
feel they must be against the Philistine masses, who demand such cheap attributes as melody, tonality, accessibility in music.
Rohde, who has played and produced "new music" all his life, handles the burden of being different, a member of the elite, simply
and elegantly. When he stood up in the tiny, pleasant, newly-renovated Throckmorton Theater to introduce contemporary works
performed by his Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, he spoke from the heart, with passion and humor, without a hint of defensiveness, not
even intimating an Us-versus-Them mentality.
For example, György Ligeti's 1968 String Quartet No. 2 was recently described elsewhere in terms of "flight into inner-space . . .
a swirl of myriad glimmering lights, swaths of celestially tinted color, and sweepingly executed gestures of rising and falling,
expansion and contraction." Rohde, on the other hand, spoke of "dense, shrill passages . . . dropping to nothing . . . where it
oscillates in what Ligeti calls micro-polyphony." Both quotes are high-falutin', but Rohde's is much more realistic (and he had the
quartet demonstrate what he meant), and it sets up lower expectations. Though you may not be one who actually sees those glimmering
lights, you can certainly experience "dense and shrill," and thus probably stay with the music until the "celestial" reveals
itself.
Rohde has gone even further in talking about another work on the program, Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez' . . . voici le bateau pour les calanques . . ., commissioned for the LCCE by the Barlow Endowment: "Pitch quickly turns to noise, it's the density of sound that's important . . ." As it happens, in the Ensemble's high-spirited, devoted performance, the brief piece came across as a strong, atmospheric work, with character, and an appealing sense of drama. (And with no conceivable connection with the title, which refers to an announcement that the tour boat is departing for the the calanques near Marseille, those deep narrow inlets, Provençal fjords, in the rocky cliffs along the coast.) Violinists Anna Presler and Phyllis Kamrin, Rohde, cellist Leighton Fong, and pianist Eric Zivian poured heart and soul into the Mexican composer's work, so much so that the four string players, as they went on to perform the Ligeti, then sounded just a bit underpowered in the quartet's more dynamic passages. (Or, possibly, the musicians were concerned with the small size of the hall, and overcompensated in "holding it down.") The thrilling elements of the performance were the precision, the light touch, the unaffected humor in the all-pizzicato movement, and the natural, authentic voice the quartet gave to passages when the music speaks, and then whispers. The work's multiple-voice structure emerged clearly, impressively. Swirling lights were seen by many.
Had he worked hard at it, Rohde could have made some statements of deep structure, explaining why the contemporary works were "balanced" by Dvorák's 1883 Trio No. 3 in F minor, but he did no such thing. The trio instrumentation is piano-and-strings, as in the preceding quintet and (piano apart) quartet; and Ligeti and Dvorák "share a certain degree of wit and irony," Rohde said, leaving the matter at that. Ligeti has said — and it's obvious in the work — that his No. 2 is a kind of condensation of the rhetoric in all string quartets written before, and Ligeti's spoofing of aspects of "the quartet" is very clear, indeed. Dvorák's super-romantic, Wagner-influenced trio also has moments of irony and humor, especially in the Scherzo and the "super-scherzo" of the Finale, the Czech dance called "furiant." The Dvorák performance was hearty and sublime, in turn. Presler (a most impressive violinist), Zivian, and cellist Tanya Tomkins lived and transmitted the drama of the first movement (justifiably called "Brahmsian" in the program); evoked deep emotion with the highly operatic Poco Adagio; and then blazed to glory with the Finale. Listening to the Trio just made one miss all the more the opera that is its contemporary, Dvorák's Dimitrij, virtually unperformed outside the Czech Republic, although it offers the same varied musical treasures as the chamber works (which, admittedly, cost less to perform). If you ever run into the "How does it go?" blues, trying to recall some music, the Internet is very helpful these days. Amazon.com will let you hear just enough of the Dvorák to remember the music: http://tinyurl.com/63ubs. On Naxos.com, both the Ligeti and the Trio are at http://tinyurl.com/4xjj4, but (unlike in the past), Naxos now requires a fee. You get 50 free MP3 downloads before a fee is charged at emusic.com: http://www.emusic.com. For information about LCCE, see www.chambermusicpartn.org.
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the
Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janosg@gmail.com.)
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