San Francisco Classical Voice

Same church. Same type of ensemble. Decidedly different concert. If the Cypress Quartet last month at Old First Church represented tradition, the Onyx Quartet on Friday exemplified change. None of the music was written before 1998. Allthe music was by the four composers who constitute the New Release Alliance, with guest composer Thomas Goss. In two of the selections the composers served double duty as librettists and in these latter works, the expert players of the Onyx Quartet were joined by the dynamic soprano Laurie Amat. It was here -- when the four became five and the instrumental became vocal --that the sparks really began to fly.

While J.J. Hollingsworth subtitles her "To Go" as "Five Cabaret Songs," they range from folkish art song through very proper vaudeville to acoustic Woodstock. The composer provided the charming tunes and Amat provided the graceful, sweet, and fiery theatricality -- with a wonderful and powerful high and delicate middle ranges. Hollingsworth moved with ease in and out of pop-like material. The jokey-clever accompaniments included delicate ascending-descending fourths that would not have been out of place in the Berg Violin Concerto, and a strange mid-range whole-tone counterpoint supported by solid tonal bass lines and lyric high melodicism. Porcine parodies preceded and concluded: a gentle "Charlotte's Web" upstaged by a bluesy Kronos-Quartet "Love Pig," where Janis Joplin meets the Steve Rifkin take on Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." "Souie! Souie! Souie!"

Graver but as arresting were four selections from "Ocean Beach," with a libretto that showed the composer Thomas Goss as a reverse Samuel Beckett (the Irish dramatist often wrote in French and then translated back into English). Despite the fact that the American Goss began by thinking in his mother tongue, the settings were extremely French in style, even during Amat's rapturous and splendid vocalise sections. The music was mature and melodic, with a hint of something quintessentially West Coast glimmering through in a way that curiously called forth Harry Partch's francophile leanings.

Goss's sparkling writing allowed Amat to become a chanteuse --sensual, sexy, and sumptuous (the singer surprisingly and brusquely shaking a maraca at one point, totally effective and totally out of the blue) as a postminimal-pop Carmen -- and then redefining herself as a nun in the chaste third-movement unaccompanied chant. As at the end of Ravel's "Mother Goose Suite," the music built into a secular spirituality,then tumbled into a hushed finality.

Of the purely instrumental works, Max Simoncic's String Quartet No. 5 proved to be the most closely allied to the previous work, as a series of four miniatures almost as brief as a tonal Webern. His "Contemplation" was clearly for an active, impassioned thinker, "Reveille"--a series of Debussy-Bartók-militarist (if such a thing is possible) fanfares, "Fantasmagoria"--an updated clockwork Haydn that simply stops mid phrase. The longest was "F'te," a little string quartet party with something French, something Russian, something Hungarian--in combination, something Bay Arean.

Sarah Michael's "Fortune, My Foe," Variations for String Quartet concluded as an Elizabethan melody unfolded in a manner akin to Beethoven's in the "Grosse Fugue." The thoughtful interplay of second violinist Phyllis Kamrin and violist Kurt Rohde was particularly lovely, and when first violinist Anna Presler and cellist Leighton Fong rejoined the music's crafty, emotional texture, the results were enchanting.

The evening began with "Lilies," by Elaine Bearer. There were clearly plenty of insects buzzing about in the tremolos, which alternated with flowery outpourings of lyricism.

(Mark Alburger is Editor-Publisher of 20th-Century Music Monthly Journal, and an ASCAP composer published by New Music Publications and Recordings.)

©1998 Mark Alburger, all rights reserved