San Francisco Classical Voice

The concert opened with Australian composer Liza Lim's The Heart's Ear (1997), scored for string quartet, clarinet, and flute/alto flute. Based on a fragment of Sufi melody subtly varied and developed with microtonal inflections and other extended techniques, it was a meditative, delicate work of considerable beauty with a Middle-Eastern flavor. Toshio Hosokawa's Slow Dance used a similar ensemble plus piano and percussion. Here, the instruments are exquisitely blended into a single multi-layered sound. Strings form a a slowly oscillating undercurrent while piano and percussion softly nudge the music along from opposite sides of the stage. Woodwinds sometimes use multiphonics or blow air through their instruments, enhancing the ethereal nature of the piece — which may have lasted a little too long but in this performance, led by David Milnes, was captivating.

Danish composer Bent Sorenson's The Lady and the Lark (1997) is a kind or mini-chamber concerto in five short movements, for solo viola with an accompanying ensemble of flute/alto flute/piccolo, E-flat/A clarinet, two violins, cello, and percussion. Its graceful musical fabric features the viola in a series of brief passages based on fragments of what sound like generic string writing from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furtive and loosely connected, they sometimes elicit sympathetic murmurs from the other instruments, occasionally including a slide whistle. The feeling is dreamlike, an echoing of hazily remembered musical effects and sensations, which Benjamin Simon brought out sympathetically in his playing.

There are comical oddities too. In the second movement some of the viola's insistent grace notes sound like chirping, and soon all the other instruments are chirping like a bunch of mechanical birds, no doubt representing the Lark of the title. This is a poised, fanciful piece, composed with great skill and imagination, a strange but appealing post-modern music box, mysteriously touching and humorous, a little like the art of Joseph Cornell or a story by Hans Christian Anderson.

The final work was Mexican composer J.T. Maldonado's two-movement Claroscuro (2001) for instruments in the middle and lower registers — bass clarinets, trombone, cello, and contrabass. Beginning with some short, sharp antiphonal entrances in a narrow range with only a few pitches bouncing back and forth among them, the sound of these four richly textured instruments was exhilarating, as was much of the first movement. The second movement, stressing continuity and blended sonorities, seemed much less effective, with the sostenutos too drawn out, and the ensemble sounding like cattle lowing in a meadow for much of the time. Of course by then I may have become desensitized to this kind of music after the earlier sonorous displays by Lim and Hosokawa. Besides, it was the last work on a rather ample program. Whom to blame then, the reviewer, the composer, or the programmer? I may have been the only one in the audience waiting impatiently for Maldonado to bring those instruments back from their pasture and end the piece.