|
CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Noe Valley Chamber Music Emil Miland Sarah Cahill Carey Bell Paul Ehrlich
January 28, 2007
|
The Attraction of the New By Mark Alburger
It's probably time to lay to rest the myth that contemporary concert music is box office suicide. Of course, it still matters exactly what types of "new music" are being offered. The term can be ridiculously broad, encompassing everything under the sun in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Noe Valley Chamber Music concert on Sunday offered a slate of neoconservative — or vanguard (or a combination thereof, depending on the point of view) — composers that filled the Presbyterian sanctuary to capacity. The recital starred the wondrous duo of cellist Emil Miland and pianist Sarah Cahill, and it featured vibrant contributions by clarinetist Carey Bell and violist Paul Ehrlich.
As in the biblical Wedding of Cana (fitting, in a house of worship), where the best wine was saved for last (and fine libations were poured at intermissions), the concert was capped by the revelation of the afternoon: the West Coast premiere of David Carlson's Quantum Quartet. While this work placed the most players on stage, relatively fewer people remained in the audience, and the early escapees missed an exceptional event. The quartet has instrumentation akin to Messiaen's great Quartet for the End of Time, substituting viola for violin, but finds its spirituality in science — in particular, that branch of physics known as quantum mechanics.
The three-movement essay seems to be a product of an updated Enlightenment, its fresh sounds packaged with the clarity and wit of 18th century classicism. Mozart and Haydn came to mind, respectively, in the crisp viscerality of the melodic material and the side-stepping, catch-me-if-you-can structural surprises. You had the sense that the composer, knowing his listeners can follow the arguments clearly, is prepared to throw them for a loop now and then.
The first movement had all the sinews of a traditional sonata Allegro movement, with updated packaging, as in a fine, progressive pop exercise that feels no need to reinvent the song form. The second movement, "Desolato," included prerecorded music by the ensemble — a faint echo along the lines of George Crumb, with the house-of-mirrors aspect found in recent Steve Reich works. The welcome, pulse-quickening finale broadened into a lyrical midsection that ratcheted itself upward into a fugato worthy of Mozart, Mahler, Bartók, or ... you-name-it. In the movement’s coda, once again, expectations first were set up, then were dashed, and finally delighted.
The first half of the program was full of more understated joys. In Suite for Cello and Piano (In Honor of Robert Korns), Lou Harrison processes his East Asian consciousness through a mill of chamber music classicism, to find intrigue in modality and gentle tone clusters. But can tone clusters be gentle? Here they were, in sensitive outbursts from Cahill, with Miland's soulful cello shining alongside. Much of Harrison's music is focused on the sensuality of melody ("I'm a melode," he was given to say). This proclivity translated here into knowingly simple textures, often incorporating surprising unisons or octaves as well as earthy, ostinatic accompaniments. The other offerings with local connections — Carlson is a past and Harrison a passed-on Northern Californian — were short works by Darius Milhaud (who, while of early French fame, taught for many years at Mills College) and by Clare Twohy (a 22-year-old violinist/composer who is about to head off to points unknown for graduate school). Milhaud's 1945 Elegie is probably not in many people's top drawer as a great work (aside from cellists and pianists). Nonetheless it is a minor masterpiece, one of many from this composer who, like certain other Bay Area composers and Alan Hovhaness, had the curse of profligacy, with more than 400 opus numbers to his credit. The world premiere of Twohy's work, Adagio, showcased a promising voice who has at her disposal both lyricism and first-rate contemporary compositional techniques. Britten was the odd-composer-out of the Bay Area pantheon. His Sonata in C for Cello and Piano (1961, Op. 65) displays many of the composer's midcentury concerns. These include sharply characterized motives and a five-movement arch structure that has been part of contemporary consciousness reaching back to Bartók and up to present times in some of Reich's work. Like the Carlson and Harrison pieces, clarity is of utmost importance here. Yet, as in Britten's Peter Grimes, on occasion it is perhaps a bit too self-conscious for its own good — which may explain part of the appeal of this oft-lauded musician. As has been the case in several instances at this concert venue, the printed program lacked information about both the composers and their music. It may be that the presenters believe that by having artists talk about the music before they play it (which Miland did, to engaging effect), they have fulfilled their obligations. But such is not the case. Inquiring minds still want to know more details that might enhance their appreciation of the performance, without having to dig through a New Grove Dictionary of Music the day after.
(Mark Alburger is an award-winning ASCAP composer of concert music published by New Music, editor-publisher of 21st-Century Music Journal, oboist, pianist, vocalist, and music critic.)
|
