San Francisco Classical Voice

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble continued its season a week ago Monday with three world premieres by young composers and a standard of the chamber repertoire, the Brahms Piano Trio, Op.8. In typical Left Coast fashion, a near-full house in the Green Room was treated to an evening of committed playing in which untried works received the same degree of attention and passion as the venerable masterwork.

The opening work, Laurie San Martin's three-movement Circus Maximus , had much to offer. The middle movement, "Waltz-like," was particularly compelling, the strings with beautiful long lines in finely balanced counterpoint. Here, in contrast to the thicker texture of the outer movements, the composer achieved a clarity of line and restrained orchestration that made each instrumental statement deeper and more vital than the last. The piano's brief, graceful phrases brought especially poignant accents.

The faster outer movements framed this lovely music in a variety of ways.The final movement made for a strong conclusion, a skillful balancing act between the piano's motoric arpeggios and the strings' heavy accents in softer unison phrases, mirroring the piano with fragments of its material. The first movement, with its dense instrumentation and collage-like alternation of ideas, was less effective, perhaps due to the sheer amount of information presented at the piece's opening. This movement might have been more effective placed later in the piece, after the composer's language and approach had become more easily assimilated. Given the movement's brevity, a reduction in the rate at which ideas were introduced, or else a longer movement to elucidate the composer's thinking, would have brought me into the orbit of the piece more completely. Still, I'll look forward to hearing more from San Martin, whose technique is already accomplished and whose musical statements seem destined to broaden and deepen.

The ensemble's director, Kurt Rohde, a familiar figure on many Bay Area stages, presented two of his recent Three Fantasy Pieces for viola, cello, and double bass, with the composer himself on viola, guest artist Julian Hersh on cello, and bassist Michael Taddei. As always, Rohde's writing for strings revealed an expert approach to the ensemble, and he found real depth in the course of two short movements. I disagree with Rohde's title for his first movement, Abrupt Fragments, which he characterized as "self-explanatory" in his opening remarks. I heard a very clear and organic development taking place, with arching phrases growing longer and longer, answered by tutti harmonics, emphatic repeated notes, and rapid lines voiced again in harmonics.

The second movement, Solstice, was another brief but rich traversal of the trio's timbral palette, with upper-register passage work in the cello and bass answered by pizzicato and harmonic passages. It was a pleasure to hear the instruments explored by someone who knows them so well, like finding new pathways leading off of familiar roads. The evening's third premiere was Justin Merritt's The Day Florestan Murdered Magister Raro, a work that won the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble's annual composition competition this year. (The names in the title are fictitious characters Robert Schumann worked into his writings.) Made up of three short movements for violin, cello, piano and clarinet, it has strong qualities. The 25-year-old Merritt has a fine ear for instrumental color and knows how to exploit the virtuoso resources of an ensemble as fine as this one.

In the first movement, traditional development was largely replaced by a sort of music of interruption, in which one flourish or pattern--trills, clarinet squeals, rumbling lower register piano--is rapidly replaced by another, and rarely returns. The third movement offered a similar approach, this time alternating a collection of textures rather than replacing them entirely, and moving the process along at an increasing rate of change. The search for effective proportions between alternating patterns presents an exciting challenge, but with continuous replacement of ideas so often being the music's premise, this opportunity was largely unexplored.

The second movement, though more restrained in terms of the sheer amount of material and filled with beautiful and inventive textures, also attempted to make something happen through sheer accumulation of activity, rather than a more organic development. In all fairness, Merritt's opening remarks on the piece indicated that this is what he had in mind, joking about cartoon music and writing for audiences with short attention spans. He succeeded at what he set out to do, but with more room to be heard, every one of his ideas could have been more compelling.

In all three premieres, the ensemble played with an unwavering command of and commitment to its material, bringing the same attention and level of communication to new works that it brought to Brahms in the evening's second half.

Instead of program notes for the concert, bios and spoken introductions by the evening's living composers were provided. This offered a chance for the artists to speak at length about their work, but with the exception of Rohde, who was more anecdotal and perhaps more comfortable on his home turf, the composers' brevity was disappointing. With such an obvious opportunity, it would have been nice to hear more about the ideas behind the music.

Prefacing his piece, explaining the presence that evening of several guest musicians, Rohde mentioned that two married couples in the Left Coast Ensemble were taking care of new infants. Despite the unusual lineup, the unity and intimacy of the music didn't suffer. The Brahms trio was marvelously balanced and focused. Although this work is marked by the composer's ability to develop grand gestures across a large scale, much of the most beautiful playing came in quieter passages, when communication among the players was at its highest point.

(Benjamin Frandzel is a Bay Area musician and writer. In addition to writing concert music, he has collaborated with dance, theater, and visual artists, and has written about music for many publications and musical organizations. He is currently a graduate student in composition at San Francisco State University.)

©2000 Benjamin Frandzel, all rights reserved