San Francisco Classical Voice

The vibrant, colorful music of Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) was the chief attraction on a distinctly uneven concert of works by Mexican composers, performed on Tuesday evening by the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players. His Homenaje á Federico Garcia Lorca (1936), the final piece on the program, was charged with rhythmic vigor and the pungent dissonance of tone clusters and polytonal harmony, flavored with the acerbic bite of muted brass and the shrill, piercing sounds of the piccolo. There were also pulsating ostinatos with metrical shifts and cross accents, which, in the last of three movements, proved as dizzying and off balance as anything by Stravinsky.

This piece was composed shortly after Lorca was assassinated by right-wing Spanish forces, and a mood of sober reflection was present in the two trumpet solos framing the first movement and in the sighing, lamenting ostinatos of the slower second movement, played by strings and winds. Revueltas' style combines popular and folk motifs with the sophisticated modernism of an ebullient, abrasive Mexican neoclassicist, at times reminiscent of early Milhaud and analogous, in its way, to the crowded, populist imagery found in Diego Rivera's murals. Jean-Louis LeRoux led the ten players in a rousing performance, repeating the third movement as an encore.

Four of the five other composers represented were born in the 1960s and, though their styles were different, something in their use of color,patterns, and rhythm showed a common thread. Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez' Clyde Beatty is Dead (2002) was commissioned for the San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players by the Fromm Foundation. Its ensemble of six instruments began the piece with a few jerky, hesitant sounds that gradually gained momentum, pushing the music into a teetering chain of connected fragments, often breaking apart and then re-forming. Underneath the fractured surface patterns was intricate and elegant ensemble writing,whose clarity of detail and imagination made this piece, after Revueltas'Homenaje, the most successful and interesting work of the evening.

The rest of the program was less satisfactory. Javier Torres Maldonado's Figuralmusik II for ten instruments opened the concert. Texturally based, it was limited to groups of grace notes, accented chords, and sustained tones, punctuated by occasional silences. Though the composer's approach was dynamic, the piece needed a synthesis that Maldonado was unable to find, the musical impetus foundering as the work progressed, undone by its self-imposed restrictions. Danza Nocturna forcello, piano, and percussion by Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon combined the cello's lyricism with figuration for marimba and piano. Maracas added a Latin flavor but the diverse blend lacked a clear focus in this performance and the piece ended unconvincingly. Ricercar III (1993/1998) for large chamber ensemble, by Juan Trigos, in a parodistic, post-modernist idiom, became bogged down in a series of steady, percussion-enhanced, repetitive passages that went nowhere.

Mario Lavista's Marsias (1982) for solo oboe and eight vibrating wineglasses was the strangest, most enigmatic offering. With eight performers sitting at a table onstage, producing an ethereal drone by rubbing their wineglasses, the oboist, Blair Tindall, played a series of free melodic phrases full of multiphonics, pitch bending, and other distortions, evoking the ancient Greek myth of Marsyas and his reed flute. It was like listening to some rare creature uttering strange cries and noises, quirky and surreal in effect, and miles away from the bustling intensity of Revueltas' Homenaje á Federico Garcia Lorca.

(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)

©2002 Jules Langert, all rights reserved