San Francisco Classical Voice

If Sollberger's music memorializes a war through specific sounds and images, Davidovsky's Flashbacks, also on the program, is about the mechanisms of memory in general. Moreover, Morris Rosenweig's Past Light uses, as the program informed us, “musical dialects from other times.” That is, NYNME's performance was as much about the “Moment” as about the past. From this perspective the work of Rosenweig deserves especial mention. Past Light is divided in three equally varied movements, each exploring different ways of organizing the instruments (clarinet doubling on bass clarinet, violin, cello and piano) into groups.

The piece is strong not only in its rhythmic aspects but also in the creativeness and care with which it recollects the past, as no allusion is made overly evident. I was particularly impressed by the fact that the second movement “remembered” a past of central European folk-dances without sounding simple (echoes of Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat came to mind in this respect) and by the way the piano (wonderfully played by guest pianist Christopher Oldfather) was called on to imitate, for instance, what appeared to be the imagining by the composer of a Psalteria (an antique harp that the composer simulates in this work by asking the pianist to play inside the instrument, directly using the fingers to pluck the strings). Actually the piano was used extremely well throughout the piece and Rosenweig's effortless and lyrical melodic writing was enjoyable — these two elements adding touches of elegance to this entertaining and virtuosic work.

Davidovsky's Flashbacks, the work that opened the concert, is rapidly gaining acceptance as a masterpiece, and certainly the performance I heard helped confirm its importance. Flashbacks, in any case, is a mature work that combines sensual and dark timbral textures with a signature Davidovskian narrative: half directional, half static. I was particularly impressed by the work of James Baker, who managed the balances of volume between instruments superbly. This is a fundamental aspect of the effectiveness of the piece, which relies on delicate exchanges of sounds between instruments to create a sense of continuity.

Another interesting composition was David Felder's Colección Nocturna, a duo for piano and clarinet with four-channel tape which in this performance was rendered in stereo. However, beyond what was a fantastic performance by both Oldfather and clarinetist Jean Kopperud — her poignant and bright sound was extraordinarily appropriate to a piece that does not conceive the clarinet as a dolce instrument — the decision to simplify the electronics seemed inadequate, as the piece's expansive romantic gesturing called for a more involving use of the tape. NYNME's concert ended with Steve Rick's Mild Violence, an effective piece by a young composer that suffered perhaps by being too lengthy. I was particularly put off by a long, slow chain of perfect fifths in the piano's low register seemingly intended to symbolize grandeur, as was the rock-inspired writing for the percussion.

Richard Felciano's An American Decameron is an ambitious song cycle intended to interest the audience for an entire evening. It succeeds, if only partly, in that the work is nicely varied, as it balances the differing character of its 10 songs, and because it relies on a set of meaningful texts based on the work of Studs Terkel — a quintessentially American author — that Felciano, through a smart setting, makes musically significant. The song that caused more impact, judging by the audience's joyous participation via laughter, was “Eric Satie For A Cologne Thing.” In this song Felciano smartly transforms the line “I used Eric Satie for a cologne thing,” (which one has to imagine comes from Studs Terkel interviewing a publicist), into a reflection on the superficiality of today's culture. I was particularly attracted to this number's final measures, where the impressive voice of soprano Kathleen Roland was called upon to recite slowly the lines that served to anchor the theme: “The clients didn't know Satie from Roger Williams.” In fact, in coincidence with an important composer sitting beside me, I found many endings to be interesting, and, in retrospect, a lot of the these concluding phrases came through as small but rich resonances of the ideas worked on in the central part of each song.

With all its merits, however, it took a while to become interested in Felciano's Decameron. The writing for the strings was unusually good, but generally, I fely that the composition would have benefited from a larger ensemble. The work, scored for a "Pierrot" ensemble (as above) plus percussion, avoids grandiloquence — an appropriate decision considering the nature of the texts — but Felciano explores timbral and textural contrasts as a way of inciting our interest within a context that provides mostly slow music. In this sense the piece would benefit enormously from access to more instrumental resources. Also, at times the work appeared too respectful of the text, which should be viewed as Polaroid shots rather than as careful portraits. Felciano took every poem, including one dedicated to the “five-gallon flush” in the “outhouse,” as a matter of extreme importance, often extending a piece's scope far beyond the time-frame suggested by the text's transitory nature.

A testament to Felciano's elegant composition, however, is that, as earlier songs began to be recollected by later ones, and the slow pace of the music became the time of reference, more and more the subtleties in each individual piece became enjoyable. Also, the last song, “Joy,” stages a genuine dramatic effect as it sets up what turns out to be an unexpected transformation of somberness, accumulating in songs such as “No Place to Go” (about a homeless elderly person), into genuine happiness and what could ultimately be considered a heartfelt, though tame, celebration of the American people.