San Francisco Classical Voice

January 29, 1999

Ross Williams

Alison Buchanan

For the Oakland East Bay Symphony's tenth anniversary, music director Michael Morgan has prepared a five-concert season consisting entirely of twentieth-century music. Patrons to whom that is a scary prospect needn't fret, though. Morgan's twentieth century has a heavy emphasis on its first fifty years. The two newest works on the menu, both immediately accessible, were performed last Friday, and the most recent piece remaining is Bernstein's Chichester Psalms (1965).

It was the season's newest piece, ironically, that made the greatest impression in the Oakland E.B. Symphony's season-opening concert last Friday. Joseph Schwantner's 1994 Percussion Concerto confirmed the composer's reputation for writing, in the strict sense, "effective" music--music that aims at a brilliant effect, and achieves it. Designed very deliberately as a showcase for a virtuoso, this concerto fulfilled its assignment to the letter.

The essence of the concerto idea is the image of the lone soloist against the orchestra, the protagonist outlined against the background. It is an easy image to sustain when the soloist is a pianist or violinist or flutist, when the lone individual also has a unique, identifiable instrumental voice.

A percussion concerto poses a different and difficult problem because the soloist speaks in as many voices as he has instruments--and for the full display of his virtuosity, he must have as many instruments as possible. Only the listener's knowledge that the dizzying variety of sounds is coming from one person crams those sounds into the idea of a soloist's role. And in Schwantner's concerto, this was made yet more difficult by the composer's orchestration. The orchestra's own percussion section functions as an adjunct to the soloist's part, amplifying and multiplying his gestures.

It was the actual sight of the soloist--running from one side of the stage to the other, swiftly exchanging one pair of mallets for the next, moving purposefully from marimba to crotales to bass drum--that made this concerto work as a concerto. Ross Williams is barely out of Oberlin Conservatory, where, in 1997, he was the first percussionist in the school's history to win the concerto competition. For that he played the Schwantner, as he did Friday.

The piece might have been made for Williams. It was not just that its technical hurdles seemed keyed to his skills (though they did), but that it demanded a kind of visual theatrics that he was able and eager to supply. His slender, taut figure ranged to and fro among the instruments with a sort of brusque grace. As he played Schwantner's many not-quite-ostinato passages on the marimba, he projected, in his stance and in his entire repertoire of motions, the intricate cross-rhythms of the music. The overwhelming impact of the third movement's cadenza, a tour de force centered around the bass drum, owed almost as much to sight as to sound.

Which is not to say that the music itself lacked interest. On the contrary, the piece was full of beguiling textures and timbral effects. The first movement's marimba passagework, reinforced by the Oakland E.B. Symphony's percussion and piano, was just sufficiently unstable not to sound like minimalist wallpaper-music; it fascinated the ear. A slowly broadening and deepening two-part fantasia for strings, beginning as a dialogue between the violin sections but gradually drawing in the violas, cellos, and basses, dominated the central movement. It was punctuated by drum-strokes as if by gunfire.

The finale begins, according to Schwantner's own program note, with the soloist "improvising" on the shekere (a large beaded drum that sounds like a mutant maraca). What Williams actually played, though, was emphatically rhythmic and regular--of a piece with the rest of the movement.

There was something almost unnaturally vivid about Schwantner's concerto--a kind of Technicolor glow--and the rest of the program had trouble standing up to its brilliance. Adolphus Hailstork's "Celebration!," commissioned by J. C. Penney for the American bicentennial, opened the concert. The composer is quoted in the program as aiming to produce "music for men's spirits and not merely for their ears or intellects." "Celebration!" did what you'd want a short, hortatory overture to do; it was rousing, rhythmically propulsive, and festive. It did leave one puzzle in its wake: why would a piece in honor of the bicentennial be so full of castanets? The performance, disconcertingly slovenly in ensemble, did the composer few favors. (The admirably tight performance of the Schwantner, following immediately after, made clear where all the rehearsal time had gone.)

Strauss's "Four Last Songs," after intermission, featured the English-born soprano Alison Buchanan. She possesses a gloriously round and full sound, and at the top of her range she was spellbinding; unfortunately, the orchestra often all but buried her in the lower register. Nonetheless, they played at times with great grace. One high point was Nathan Rubin's introspective violin solo in "Beim Schlafengegen," played almost as if to himself. It was as distant as possible from the typical grandstanding of a concertmaster.

The concert ended with Ravel's "La Valse" in a slightly cautious rendition which nevertheless made an impressive effect. Morgan powerfully conveyed the central conceit of the piece--the stealthy buildup of menacing energy, beginning from the bass-line and spreading insidiously into the rest of the orchestra. Basses, bassoons, bass clarinet, and tuba, separately and together, created an atmosphere of undefined foreboding that colored the entire performance.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1998 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved