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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
Graeme Jennings
February 26, 2007
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On New Terrain By Jules Langert
Four pieces were on “Controversial Ground,” last Monday evening’s concert by the San Francisco Contemporary Players, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Of these, the last two carried the most weight, and showed the workings of two quite different musical temperaments.
Italian composer Marco Stroppa’s inward, hauntingly atmospheric Hommage à Gy. K., for viola, clarinet/bass clarinet, and piano is dedicated to György Kurtág, one of Hungary’s preeminent composers of the last few decades. With each of its seven fairly short movements, Stroppa changes the placement of the violist and clarinetist on stage, often isolating the players from each other, and adding a visual component to the attenuated sounds. In one of the movements, violist Nancy Ellis looked on from a nearby perch as pianist Julie Steinberg and half-concealed clarinetist Carey Bell performed a duet marked "heavy-handed, menacing." In another, a quirkily animated duo for viola and clarinet, the performers played into the piano strings for added resonance as pianist Steinberg silently observed.
Hommage is a sophisticated, yet accessible piece, transparent in its textures, its coloristic resources enhanced with microtones, multiphonics, and various piano effects. It explores a subtly dramatic dimension, to create a mysterious and musically satisfying experience.
British composer Brian Ferneyhough, currently teaching at Stanford University, was represented by Terrain, a robustly extroverted miniconcerto for violin, solo winds, and double bass, which ended the program with bristling complexity and unflagging energy. The dazzling violin part in Terrain follows its own musical trajectory, and, on first hearing, did not seem to be strongly integrated with the ensemble. At a certain point, this disjunction began to sound like a fault, as the winds became less and less relevant to the violin’s brilliant antics, despite conductor David Milnes keeping things well in hand.
Even so, the amount of sheer inventive skill in the music, and the masterful wizardry of violinist Graeme Jennings, made this an exhilarating finale to the concert. Jennings is an internationally known performer and a recent member of the formidable Arditti Quartet, for which group Ferneyhough has composed a number of pieces. Originally from Australia, Jennings graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music over a decade ago, and currently resides here, performing, teaching, and continuing his engagement with contemporary music. Two American works were also performed. James Matheson’s piano trio Falling (2000), is described by the composer as "a loosely structured set of variations." The spare, quiet, widely spaced opening series of intervals in the piano was recalled later in the piece, as was a jazzy, rhythmic, staccato section led by the piano. The sections that featured duetting strings were the most absorbing, and they too returned in a compressed, altered form. Matheson’s often colorful writing, including string glissandos, harmonics, and pizzicatos, added pungency and vitality to the ensemble sound. Ellen Ruth Harrison’s A White Ray of Time, for seven instruments, has a fast/slow/fast sequence of three interconnected movements. A single motive of three or four notes, played by the piano at the beginning of the piece, is an important, sometimes too prominent, unifying factor throughout the work’s 15-minute length. The attractive lyricism of the first two movements showed a direct, unforced musicality. When the last movement began with a nervous, edgy melodic passage based on the original motive, it seemed like a series of variations. However, after a couple of slow, relatively static sections intervened, interrupting the musical flow, the sense of ongoing direction flagged. By this time, the main motive had grown overfamiliar, further curtailing the level of freshness needed to move things along. As a result, the piece fizzled somewhat at the end, in spite of some lively playing by the ensemble, again led by David Milnes.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
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