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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
November 15, 2004
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By Jonathan Russell
Italian Ada Gentile, whose music was featured by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players on Monday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, specializes in very delicate, wispy, insubstantial, at times nearly inaudible textures. Such textures were much in evidence Monday night, but all three of her pieces – In un silenzio ordinato (In an Ordered Silence) for flute, clarinet, two percussionists, piano and violin; Come dal nulla (As if from nothing) for solo bass clarinet; and Canzon Prima (First Song) for E-flat clarinet and three B-flat clarinets – suffered from the same unwillingless to ever settle into any sort of rhythmic or melodic regularity that I could latch onto in any way. I realize that this is the aesthetic; I've heard enough other pieces of this sort before to understand that. It is an aesthetic of subtle color changes and shifting textures, insubstantial, flitting, evanescent.
Fine. But here's the problem: the textures are somewhat interesting, but not that interesting, certainly not interesting enough for that to be all there is. And furthermore, with the exception of the solo bass clarinet piece, there's nothing new here, nothing I haven't heard before in countless other textural flitting evanescent sorts of pieces. Granted, the most recent of the pieces was from 1993, eleven years old; but it was nonetheless surprising how old-fashioned this aesthetic now sounds – especially when compared with Frederic Rzewski's immediate, visceral and comparatively ancient (1972) piece Coming Together that closed the concert.
Come dal nulla, for solo bass clarinet, was the freshest of Gentile's pieces, making much use of the bass clarinet's amazing capacity to produce multiphonics. Bass clarinetist Carey Bell, the young principal clarinetist of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, performed these effects with great skill and delicacy, but even this initially so captivating sound grew tiresome because nothing much ever happened with it. There was one point where the bass clarinet started playing with some short motives in contrasting registers and some wonderful bestial slap tongues, but it never managed to take off or gain any personality, because of Gentile's insistence on always being elusive and fleeting.
The versatile Carey Bell also showed great delicacy and control playing Eb clarinet on Canzon Prima. Eb clarinet is a beast of an instrument, tending to be shrill and out of tune, and I have never heard it played as artfully and beautifully as Bell did on Monday. Bell was ably accompanied by the three Bb clarinetists William Wohlmacher, Peter Joscheff, and Clark Fobes, who created a beautiful blend. The piece did have some nice burbling clarinet textures, and, refreshingly, was the only one of Gentile's pieces actually to get pretty loud a few times, but it was ultimately not memorable. The delicate textural music of the rest of the concert made me appreciate all the more the in-your-face, visceral drive of the closing piece, Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together. The piece is centered around a letter written by Sam Melville from Attica Correction Facility a few months before he was one of the ring leaders of Attica's prisoner uprising, which ultimately ended in the death of some forty people and drew national attention to the deplorable conditions in the nation's prisons. The text gradually reveals itself, as the narrator keeps repeating the opening of the letter, each time adding more and more of the letter until he is repeating the whole thing. Against this, there is a steady bass line groove with unpredictable syncopations that keeps repeating. The music alternates loud driving parts with more subdued sections, though the bass line groove is still always there somewhere. It is a combination of minimalism and rock and roll, with occasional touches of experimental music. The score itself does not specify what the instrumentation should be. The Chamber Players chose to score it for oboe, violin, two bass clarinets, piano, and two percussionists, a fantastic choice (especially those two bass clarinets!) that really brought out the energy and drive of the piece. Robert Ernst was riveting as the narrator, completely changing the emotional inflection of the words each time he started from the beginning of the letter – everything from rage to fear to melancholy to acceptance to defiance. He and conductor David Milnes had a wonderful rapport, with Milnes often getting right up in Ernst's face, egging him on. The ensemble, which had certainly played accurately and with great care on the rest of the program, finally came really alive here. It was especially a joy to watch percussionists William Winant and Daniel Kennedy as they moved their heads to the beat and pounded away with their mallets. The piece also had improvisatory parts where the audience was treated to marvelous virtuoso acrobatics in the oboe and violin and gurgling and yowling in the bass clarinets. Though composed in 1972 and thus the oldest piece on the concert, Coming Together had the greatest freshness and vitality and seemed the most present and relevant piece on the program. The other work on the concert, closing the first half, was Ivan Fedele's lovely Maja, composed in 1999 to an Italian text by Giuliano Corti and scored for soprano, piano, percussion, flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. It was a dramatic and expressive work inhabiting a colorful lush post-Messiaen harmonic world. Soprano Elissa Johnston was dynamic and deeply expressive of the text with some of the best diction I've heard from a singer. The consonants were not merely something that had to be got through so she could resonate on a vowel, but expressive sounds in themselves.
(Jonathan Russell is a Professor of Musicianship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and an editor with PBA Music Publishing. He is active in the bay area as a clarinetist, bass clarinetist, and composer.)
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Ada Gentile
Ivan Fedele