|
SYMPHONY REVIEW
John Bayless Michael Morgan November 10, 2006
|
Made in America By Jeff Rosenfeld
The question of a native yet classical American music vexed some of the best compositional and critical minds for nearly a century. Until Aaron Copland and the reexamination of Charles Ives settled the question once and for all, a lot of decent but seemingly derivative music was found lacking sufficient Americanness and ultimately forgotten. This Chadwick symphony was too German. That Loeffler tone poem was too French. This Cowell concoction was too radical. That Joplin opera was too lowbrow, and so on.
By contrast, Joan Tower’s new tone poem, Made in America, arrived in the Bay Area this weekend for Friday’s Oakland East Bay Symphony season-opening concert with all the nationalistic hoopla sealed and delivered. Aside from the patriotic nameplate, what could be more American than a whistle-stop tour of 65 orchestras in all 50 states of the Union?
The work is a flirtation with thematic fragments from America the Beautiful, and on her sponsor’s promotional Web site, Tower talks about how the joys of living in a free society inspired her musically. Yet as music, American though it is, this new work is no more a success than dozens of like-minded discards of the bygone “derivative” era.
With any luck, Tower’s 14-minute opus will prove to be the beginning of a steady parade of new and better works commissioned by Ford Made in America, a new consortium of orchestras around the country funded by corporate dollars. The Oakland East Bay Symphony is actually one of the more professional and well-funded orchestras on this new music circuit, which includes some youth and university groups as well as orchestras from small communities in the nation’s interior and on the coasts. The idea of pooling resources for a commission suitable for all of these groups answers several needs. It allows minor orchestras to assemble the requisite funds for a work by a composer of stature. It guarantees the music a fair hearing in an era when few new pieces ever get a second or third performance. And the gimmick of having at least one concert in every state provides a built-in marketing hook for a piece that might otherwise seem like a footnote in musical history. For her efforts, Tower has been toasted by the newspapers and the real cultural kingmaker of the present — National Public Radio, that is — which actually is a good thing, given that few composers of her quality get much time on the airwaves these days. There is safety in numbers, and verification in the mass production of concerts. Unfortunately, the downside of this method is evident in this initial commission. A piece written for so many orchestras of widely varying (if laudable) caliber must necessarily be appropriate for all of them. Perhaps this consideration afflicted Made in America. It fails first and foremost because it lacks the bold color, virtuosity, and sharply etched profiles of Tower’s first works for orchestra, like Sequoia and Silver Ladders, from the early 1980s. Those works established Tower at the vanguard of the new Romanticism, as a composer who didn’t pander to cheap melodic joys but rather challenged orchestras and audiences alike, with new, richly scored sonorities and balanced, rigorous explorations of readily accessible ideas. Her music sounded new and fun at the same time. This latest work has little of that brazen confidence or dazzling effect. Made in America opens cautiously, hinting at the famous tune and at the same time avoiding any big melodic statement. It moves into a relatively unadventurous dancelike episode pitting winds against strings, and then starts working on an idea introduced by trilling vibes. A couple of dances with pairs of instruments are thrown into the mix — a whiff of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, perhaps — before the harmonic complexities and challenges to the “America” tune finally wear out the musical ideas. The listener is left with the impression that the country can’t sing, can’t quite dance, can’t manufacture anymore, and hasn’t got a very certain future. Perhaps this is a sensitive, sophisticated message. But it’s definitely a disappointment after all these years of waiting for the usually reliable Tower to return in full force to the symphonic repertoire.
No better introduction to American sounds could be found than Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony, which concluded the concert. This may not be his greatest work in terms of character or tautness, but as his biggest orchestral statement it is still a thrill to hear. One can readily see why critics and fellow musicians seized on it soon after its premiere in 1946 and declared it the great American symphony: It has sprawling tunes, simple canonical devices, and no-frills unisons and open harmonies punched out with the brawniest of means. Craggy yet tender, ultimately unflinching and lacking in nostalgia, this work requires tremendous virtuosity in the upper ranges of all the instruments, as well as a real command of intonation and sonority to achieve its piercing, supposedly American, directness. As in its excellent performance of the Tower piece, the OEBS under Michael Morgan’s direction outdid itself, particularly the strong and gleaming brass and solid, clean string sections, whose work was marred only ever so slightly by faulty intonation in the wickedly high violin writing of the third movement. Still, this was impressive playing. Virtuosic as well was that more playfully American work, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Here Morgan practically grabbed the audience by the collar and yanked it onto the dance floor with his vibrantly brassy and breathlessly bouncy account. The orchestra played it to the hilt, from Diane Maltester’s snazzy opening clarinet riff onward. Pianist John Bayless, known for his inventive fusion of popular and classical music, was a good choice as soloist. What he lacked in sonorous touch or ruminative generosity he made up for with witty and crazily enthusiastic embellishments of the line, in particular in his furious cadenzas. His evident showmanship didn’t hurt either, such as in the way he crossed his hands in contorted positions on the keyboard and waved off ends of phrases. Ironically, Bayless boiled musical nationalism down to its ludicrously outdated essence — intentionally or not — in an inspired little encore. Had his sweetly innocent-sounding riff, a juxtaposition of Amazing Grace and Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, worked in fragments of America the Beautiful, it undoubtedly would have earned an NEA grant and a barnstorming tour of the country’s concert stages.
(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.)
|
John Bayless
