|
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW Lively New Music October 1, 2002
|
By Jules Langert
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players' first concert of the season opened on Monday evening with music by a skilful and ingenious young composer, twenty-nine-year-old Christopher Burns. Scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion, The Location of Six Geometric Figures (2001) began with everybody playing at once in a dense, lively cacophony of independent activity. Gradually, the texture thinned out, leading to a series of quieter episodes, the opening fragments connecting and evolving in a profusion of ways, with occasional accents and flurries of notes sustaining the momentum. This was an interesting, even fascinating composition, though stretching on for too long, given the nature of its material. A fresh impetus from new rhythms and textures would have been welcome at some point along the way.
Two of the four pieces on the program were by Henryk Gorecki, the former Polish avant-gardist of the 1960s who gradually changed his style in the next decade and began composing in a more accessible postmodern idiom. His Genesis I: Elementi (1962) for string trio is a good example of his earlier style. Using indeterminacy of pitch and rhythm combined with unusual string effects, it produced a harsh, eerie, impersonal kind of beauty, partly inspired by electronic sounds of the period. The thick, heavily accented chords;the long, microtonal sliding passages which meander up or down, sounding like jet engines; the rasping and creaking of strings as the bow is dragged slowly across them, are stylistic hallmarks lavishly present in Elementi. On hearing this forty-year-old composition now, however, I thought that its once experimental novelties seemed more like gimmickry and tricks, its expressiveness dated and ineffectual. Perhaps sensing this is what impelled Gorecki to change his compositional style.
The program's final work, Gorecki's Kleine Requiem für eine Polka (1993) for chamber orchestra, was an example of his postmodernism, of which the best known work is his frequently played Third Symphony of 1976, performed by the San Francisco Symphony several years ago. The Kleine Requiem was in a starkly simple, often modal style, the outer movements slow and meditative, like a Requiem, with a few notes endlessly repeated and reconfigured. The two inner movements were faster, with accented, choppy rhythms derived from the “Polka” and treated in a brusquely motoric manner. Perhaps this style too is ready for some serious reevaluation. After the intermission , pianist Thomas Schultz performed Touch (2002) by Christian Wolff, a noted member of John Cage's circle of musicians and composers in the fifties and sixties. Though Wolff's program notes describe the piece as improvisatory and full of flexibility for the performer, what came across was an arbitrary, dry, somewhat lackadaisical work, limited in its technical means and restricted in its imaginative scope. This perception may have resulted partly from Schultz's approach to the score, but I suspect it also reflects Wolff's ideas about the piece, which he associates with the music of Frescobaldi and other seventeenth-century composers of toccatas. Or, as with Gorecki's compositions, this may be another example of a musical style which no longer conveys the message that it was once thought to possess.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
|
Thomas Schultz