San Francisco Classical Voice

Schwungvoll made one of it's all-too-rare appearances at the Berkeley City Club last Tuesday with a varied program for winds, piano, and voice. The intimate setting was ideally suited to two deeply personal vocal works along with a group of finely detailed instrumental pieces.

The program featured vocal music by two Bay Area composers, performed with great sensitivity by soprano Cheryl Keller. The first such work, Peter Josheff's Remembering, for voice, clarinet/bass clarinet, and piano, offered a thoughtful and original approach to music written in memoriam to the late Carolyn Grew-Sheridan, a San Francisco furniture designer, at the commission of her husband, John.

Remembering — a setting of two Pablo Neruda poems, "Ode to the Chair" and "Ode to the Spoon," favorites of the dedicatee — begins with a soulful, dancelike solo for bass clarinet, celebrating a spirit and its journey more than mourning it. The unhurried, lyrical text settings and their restrained but effective accompaniments created a mood of direct communication and emotional development ideal for the work's purpose.

William Ludtke's setting of Lorca also displayed an inventive approach to the text at hand. Act II, Scene III of El Maleficio de la Mariposa, from Ludtke's operatic adaptation of Lorca's first play, found Keller singing in duet with Martha Stoddard's sensitively varied flute playing. This approach, with vocal and flute lines gradually unfolding and growing more elaborate, was a haunting mirror for the mysticism and morbidity of Lorca's language. In tandem with the circular reappearance of the butterfly's words, Ludtke referred to his opening phrases at the end of the work, complementing the haunting text with the not-quite-resolved character of his music.

The evening was bookended by American wind quintets, both by unjustly neglected composers. Irving Fine's Partita is perhaps the only work by this composer to have entered the standard repertory of any ensemble, despite an ability, at his best, to stand alongside the standard bearers of American Neoclassicism. Fine's contrapuntal mastery and careful phrase construction were beautifully handled by the musicians. Their attention to dynamic balances brought out the shifting colors of the work, making this quintet a rich listening experience.

Ruth Crawford Seeger's Suite for Wind Quintet, this great composer's final work, is strangely absent from the standard wind quintet repertory. Her reputation rests on a few better-known works, such as the String Quartet, but her penchant for thorny counterpoint and delight in forceful rhythms are ideally suited to the wind quintet idiom. The members of Schwungvoll had a strong feeling for these aspects as well as for the music's warmer moments, especially in its slower sections. A particularly exciting component was Wendy Young's well-controlled playing of the bassoon's propulsive, perpetual motion lines near the work's conclusion.

The ensemble dipped into the Neoclassical bag again for David Diamond's Partita for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano. Young, oboist Dana Bauer, and pianist Hadley McCarroll played with all the rhythmic incision and high level of energy that Diamond's music requires while also conveying enjoyment of the instrumental possibilities often apparent in Diamond's music.

The evening's only real disappointment was Martin Butler's Down-Hollow Winds, for the full wind quintet. This young British composer's five-movement suite was full of lovely motives that were lost in the static nature of his writing. Despite fine ideas, the work suffered from a lack of variety in tone color. And the contrasting character of the quintet's instruments, always a great challenge for composers, had a tiring effect. Framed by the color and invention of the Fine and the Seeger, Butler's piece suffered, despite a committed performance by the ensemble.

(Benjamin Frandzel is a Bay Area musician and writer. In addition to writing concert music, he has collaborated with dance, theater, and visual artists, and has written about music for many publications and musical organizations. He is currently a graduate student in composition at San Francisco State University.)

©2000 Benjamin Frandzel, all rights reserved