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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
February 22, 2007
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Intimations of Conversations By Jeff Rosenfeld
With two premieres and a West Coast premiere of intriguing, California-made music, there was plenty to talk about after the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble concert on Thursday in Mill Valley. As it turned out, the performers also engaged in plenty of musical conversation on the Throckmorton Theatre stage.
A most inviting and thoughtful musical banter pervaded Sextet for Six Friends by retired UC Berkeley professor and composer Andrew Imbrie. The give and take between instruments (violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, and clarinet) has a penetrating clarity and an ingratiating sense of timing. The first movement flows easily, with short pauses enhancing the civilized air of discussion. The concluding chord seems to wave, “ ‘til we meet again,” and indeed each of the subsequent two movements refers back to that gesture.
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble The sextet constantly seems to develop simple correspondences, as in the second movement, where the low registers of the oboe and clarinet speak in sequence and where a harmonic relationship between violin and viola is restated by pairs of winds. The last movement is a witty negotiation between the strings and winds. A repeating note figure passed from flute to cello, a rift between a bow-wow figure in the winds, and a corresponding staccato pattern in the strings ultimately get resolved as both sides of the sextet swap material. The agile and confident performance made the most of these and other felicities in the 85-year-old composer’s new work.
Miguel Chuaqui’s Desde el Limite (From the border) is also an exchange of ideas and influences among the same instruments, but the conversation seems less intimate and more expansive with the addition of electronics. Chuaqui, who grew up in Chile, studied with Imbrie at UC Berkeley and now teaches at the University of Utah, explained that the electronic sounds — generated with computer modeling procedures to approach mathematical limits and break down in unusual ways — represent an uncomfortable society in which an immigrant searches for a new identity. The electronics are certainly not comfortable listening, opening with a small explosive sound and a tunneling effect. They eventually blend with the instruments in long tones. The acoustic instruments and electronics together explore various agreements and disagreements, whether it is a violin solo over a plucking beat in the electronics, or a prancing pattern in the clarinet that eventually is taken up by the ensemble and electronics, or the return toward sustained notes in the last pages of music. It is near the end, actually, that the ensemble finally begins to enrich the harmony, rather than merely poking at countermelodies and juxtaposed patterns. Ultimately, the music reaches an uncertain resolution, as if nothing is really gained or lost in the dialogue between individual and culture. Somehow, Chuaqui imbues the electronics with a more vibrant personality than the six players, who, in this performance, were ably coordinated with the technology by conductor George Thomson. While sometimes mysterious and otherworldly, the synthesized effects usually sounded like an electric guitar. If anything, I think the piece could have a brighter future as a concerto for that instrument, though this might invert Chuaqui’s programmatic intent.
Ross Bauer’s Piano Quartet, in its West Coast premiere, also pits the one against the many, according to the composer, in this case three strings versus one pianist. As if to emphasize this dynamic, the piano is often stripped down to a single line, eschewing its full sonority and harmonic complexity. This limits the encounter between strings and keyboard, but it also makes the simplified dialogue concentrated, even when it gets chatty. The first movement features solos in which the violist, cellist, and pianist each take turns musing with minimal interference, and the second movement offers extensive space to an achingly beautiful violin solo (played by Ana Presler). By contrast, the third movement has the most tension, both rhythmically and timbrally, with dancing, fidgeting passages in the piano, and wailing tones in the strings. Bauer’s 15-minute quartet has moments of promise, such as a beautiful texture with a high cello line in the last movement, but ultimately the limitations of the piano writing make it unsatisfying. At one point Bauer, who teaches composition at UC Davis, has the pianist reach inside the instrument to pluck a string — an exploratory moment — but given all the other strings available for plucking, it seems like a wasted effort; meanwhile more traditional sonorities remain untapped. The instrumental discussion seems heavily censored. The Schumann Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Opus 47, which closed the program, suffers no such constraints. Perhaps the fleet and ebullient performance made it seem unfettered, as the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble seemed to open floodgates of emotion. The music poured out with ardor, including the gush of notes beginning the second movement, in which pianist Eric Zivian and cellist Tanya Tomkins seemed to blurt out a long-kept secret in a deft run of notes. While the new works often seemed to portray the sounds and dynamics of conversation, the venerable Schumann Quartet shifted the topic to the spirit of conversation, achieving that astonishing invigoration possible only when sound bridges the space between minds.
(Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World's Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.)
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