San Francisco Classical Voice

Flutist Paula Robison and guitarist Eliot Fisk are two complete artists who, together, complement each other so well that they manage to make a whole even better than the stellar individual parts. Their duo is a well-polished act, like a Penn and Teller of music. And in a sense, the comparison to the two magicians is apt in another way. At least on Sunday, at San Francisco's Herbst Theater, they made a series of deft transformations of culture and character.

It is a tribute to Robison's complete control of her instrument that she makes the most of the simplest melodic lines and the most cherishable twists of phrasing. Rather than call attention to rapid fingerwork or tricky tonguing, she highlights intimate moments. This definitely seemed to be the case in the biggest and thorniest work on the program, George Rochberg's Muse of Fire, written for Robison and Fisk. Composed during the Gulf War, the 18-minute work is inspired by lines from Shakespeare's Henry V. It captures best the earnest side of that play, and maybe some of its mayhem.

At first I thought this might be an odd choice of subject matter for two seemingly delicate instruments, but in fact Rochberg's work opens with bold fanfares, wends its way through aggressive moments from both instruments, and finds itself concluding with an extended reference to fife-and-drum corps. Rochberg's take on war may not have the depth of Shakespeare's but the piece is a valiant attempt. Most striking in this virtuoso performance of a work filled with seemingly ideal exercise material, however, was the tender passage in the middle in which Robison plays a melody strikingly similar to the American folk tune “Barbara Allen” .

The sheer rapture of Robison's phrasing in this moment was all in the subtleties: her superbly efficient, unassuming use of breath control invited the listener in for closer inspection. Time and time again she did this in the concert, sharing soft, long-breathed whispers that never lost their tonal luster. There were plenty of opportunities, too, for most of the program consisted of settings for folk melodies. In fact, “Barbara Allen” reappeared as the first of the concluding set of Mountain Songs by Robert Beaser. Here, Robison and Fisk traded in the military ruffles of Rochberg for a country guise. This is not to say this music was just simple song. Beaser's settings had striking originality, such as the intricate guitar countermelodies for “Fair and Tender Ladies” or the complex passacaglia of “Hush-You-Bye” that transfers from guitar to flute and back. Some of the Fisk's parts were none too tonal, either, such as in “The Cuckoo,” adding a sophisticated touch to the homespun melodies.

Robison played the flute as if she were singing, too, which made the programming all the more successful. Her eyes and body moved with unspoken texts, and so too did her tone and articulation. Many phrases seemed to stop emphatically on consonants or trail into infinity on vowels, just as they should. The variety of character encompassed the slinky fun of Astor Piazzola's Bordel 1900, which opened the program, and other Latin American moods in a set of folksongs from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Robison also took a turn as a Native American in an Apache and a Cherokee melody, in which she warmly bent the pitch in folk style. Nor did the musical costumes stop there. In her one solo offering, Claude Debussy's Syrinx, Robison sustained the mythical dance of death of the god Pan beautifully as an unending melody in a performance of shimmering nobility. And in one of the two encores, our princess turned into a tree frog, chirping lightly on piccolo in a Puerto Rican melody.

A program with so much folk and especially Latin inspiration cannot help but feature the guitar, and indeed Fisk was an equal partner on Sunday. His playing as an accompanist was flexible and always varied. And Fisk's own solo turn, a pair of flamenco improvisations that melded into a dazzling fantasy, was the most overtly astonishing display of the evening. It was an absolute delight to watch the incredible ease and independence of Fisk's fingers and bask in the complexity and sophisitication of his imagination. At one moment he was Rossini's orchestra; another moment he was a charging bull or a room full of colorful dancers. The performance was a tour de force that made for a stunning counterweight as well as summation of an evening of cultural diversity and melodic sophistication.

(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.)

©2001 Jeff Rosenfeld, all rights reserved