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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
March 24, 2003
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By Jules Langert
The late Gerard Grisey, a leading figure in musical postmodernism, inadvertently provided the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players on its concert last Monday with a milestone, the one-thousandth piece performed by the group since its founding in 1971.
The forty-minute chamber piece in three ample movements of considerable scope and imagination, the anchor or closing piece on the program, deserved the honor.
Grisey, who died in 1998 at the age of fifty two, studied with several of France's most prominent composers, including Messia”n, and taught at UC Berkeley from 1982 to 1986. Vortex Temporum (1994-96) is a stylistic hybrid, combining the microtonal distortions and ametrical, abstract feeling of electronic music, with the angular intensity and textural freedom of late-twentieth-century modernism. There are also strong echoes of minimalism in several of the sections filled with prolonged repetitive patterns.
The piano has the most prominent role in this piece, beginning it with a pseudo-Ravellian arpeggio, from which the rest of the ensemble seems to emerge, first as part of a long sustained sonority, but later, when the arpeggio returns, in a variety of ways. At one point the dialogue between piano and the other instruments produces a cluster of brief agitated motives that echo and reecho across the ensemble. In another place piano figuration is rocked back and forth and then flung out to the flute and clarinet, which dissipate its momentum and pass it along to the strings for further changes. The first movement concludes with a piano solo alternating its highest and lowest registers in a hyperkinetic whiplash of runs and chords.
The brief pause between movements is suffused with a faint, pitchless whisper, as the players slowly and gently draw their bows across the strings. The meditative second movement has the piano playing a continuous chain of quiet, even chords, picked up by the other instruments and subjected to ornamental elaboration. The finale returns to the opening arpeggio and a more fluid, dynamic set of responses, with some wonderfully colorful writing for the strings and a gush of brilliant figuration for the piano. Several times the piece seems ready to end, only to be picked up again and given a new impetus before it finally comes to a halt. David Milnes conducted the performance, keeping everything steadily in focus. The performers were Julie Steinberg, who gave a dazzling account of the often virtuosic piano part; Roy Malan, violin; Nancy Ellis, viola; Leighton Fong, cello; William Wohlmacher, clarinet/bass clarinet; and Tod Brody, flute/piccolo/bass flute, all of whom played impressively. The concert opened with Lutoslawski's Partita (1984) played by Julie Steinberg with violinist David Abel, in a vigorous, tightly knit performance. Though strongly personal, the piece was reminiscent of Bartók in its five-movement symmetrical structure and its insistant motivic use of fast, repeated notes and chromatic triplets. The slow lyrical/declamatory central movement was surrounded by two brief, almost improvisatory movements which seemed like interludes. Also on the program we heard John Musto's Piano Trio (1998), in two movements, a blend of jazz-influenced rhythm and harmony, modernist counterpoint, minimalist figuration, and pop-inflected melodic writing. It was fluently composed, but glib and generic sounding, without any real originality. In the first movement, long, lyrical lines played in octaves by the violin and cello lacked distinctive character, and in the second movement, episodes seemed to start and stop arbitrarily. This was not a piece to withstand the scrutiny of Monday evening's program. Roy Malan, cellist Gianna Abondolo, and pianist Karen Rosenak performed it better than it may have deserved.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
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