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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
November 10, 2003
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By Jules Langert
Monday evening's concert by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players was awash in the trappings of postmodernism. Rhythmic and melodic patterns of all kinds, set off by trills, tremolos, scales, ostinatos, and repeated chords permeated textures in all of the program's four works. Yet one of these pieces stood out from the rest in providing the most imaginative and adventurous experience of the evening, the only one not to use electronically enhanced effects. It was Kui Dong's Fantasia: A Dialogue with Winds (2003), commissioned by the SFCMP and receiving its first performance.
The nine-member instrumental ensemble was treated like a chamber orchestra, with four strings and three woodwinds grouped separately, the harp placed between them, and the percussion located in the rear. The composer's clean, transparent scoring brought out colors and sounds often evoking a Chinese instrumental ensemble, with new ideas and interesting timbres constantly emerging. The piece was built around changes of tempo and momentum, beginning with a jerky episode of brief, sputtering syncopations.
Later, in a section for woodwinds, close, dissonant part writing and long-held tones fading into ornamental arabesques achieved a poignant lyrical mood. After a period of prolonged silence interrupted occasionally by a few isolated, arresting sounds, momentum gradually
returned, leading to a rapid yet unhurried final section. Often tonal and even diatonic in its last moments, this piece maintained its freshness and vitality to the end.
After the intermission we heard Kaija Saariaho's Six Japanese Gardens (1993-95) for percussion and electronic sounds, inspired by her visit to Kyoto in the summer of 1993. In several of these pieces, which were more like studies, an ongoing stream of electronic sound acted as a background out of which percussionist William Winant played a fairly wide assortment of instruments, most prominently drums, sustained cymbals, and a selection of gongs. The composition had a kind of rough-hewn intensity in Winant's performance, the repetitive percussion lending it a feeling of ritual-like urgency. The concert began and ended with music for two pianos, percussion, and electronic sounds. It opened with Philippe Leroux's M (1997), the more engaging of the two works, starting on a piano chord echoed by an electronic haze of sound, from which the rest of the piece seemed to evolve. Crisp interplay between the pianos and two marimbas created dazzling gamelan-like effects. The music's bright-edged liveliness was sustained by virtuosic writing, impressively played by pianists Karen Rosenak and Julie Steinberg,with marimbists Christopher Froh and James Lee Wyatt III. The final work, Magnus Lindberg's Related Rocks (1997), used the same performers. But by increasing the amount of percussion and beefing up the electronics, Lindberg only managed to blur the effect of the pianos, which were generating most of the musical material. The ensuing lack of clear focus led to a muddled finale on an otherwise stimulating concert.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
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Kaija Saariaho