San Francisco Classical Voice

A cash register's announcement of a sale may well be the most inevitable exposure people have of bells in this day and age. Yet, as evidenced in the Handbell Ensemble Sonos' concert Saturday at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, bells can introduce a refreshing palette of sounds to music, offering intriguing expressive possibilities. Led by artistic director James Meredith, Sonos presented an ambitious and collaborative program of which the most important offering was the world premiere of Jaron Lanier's The Navigator Tree.

Commissioned by the NEA and the American Composers Forum, Lanier's work was inspired by a centuries-old, giant redwood tree in the Oakland Hills traditionally called the The Navigator Tree. Apparently, the lining up of the tree with other features in the San Francisco Bay provided a guide to safe passage for ships entering the Golden Gate. At some point in time, and with no known explanation, the tree was unceremoniously felled. According to Lanier, his work is programmatic in that it attempts to depict the tree's last day. Composed for Sonos, the Gamelan Pusaka Sunda, and San Jose Taiko, this unique collaboration also featured Lanier himself on a Chinese harp, with Pusaka Sunda's Burhan Sukarma serving on the Suling flute solos.

A world-renowned virtual reality pioneer and computer scientist, Lanier engaged in some reverse engineering as he composed this work, experimenting with various tuning and scale systems interacting simultaneously. With Sonos' well-tempered bells playing with or against the Indonesian gamelan's five-note scale, the Chinese harp, and the Taiko drums, you would think that listeners would be hard pressed to respond emotionally to such a complex and unexpected tuning scheme.

Nevertheless, The Navigator Tree proved to be surprisingly accessible. The piece opens with an articulate, clean incidental solo on Chinese harp, joined by the fluttering Suling flute. The bells interject, and soon the gamelan is added to the texture. The powerful Taiko drums finally respond, capturing both the mightiness and the fragility of this tree, depicted in a contrapuntal architecture. Lanier's writing is vigorous and graphic. I kept thinking this would be a marvelous and potent piece for a modern ballet.

The concert opened with East Coast composer Karen Lackey Buckwalter's Nocturne in A Minor, composed in 1993 and dedicated to Sonos, and Bisbee's Images. From frenetic trills to tolling of an impossibly soft, cherubic effect, the ensemble's ringers were impressive in their command of dynamics in these opening selections.

William Ludtke's Y Despues, Op. 94, was the first collaboration of the evening, Sonos joined by the San Francisco Choral Artists, soprano Cheryl Keller, and percussionists Rick Hoffmeister and Robert Hamaker. First performed at a Lou Harrison birthday concert several years ago, Ludtke's piece is like a large sonic fresco, reminiscent of a Mahlerian apocalyptic vision, with tolling bells and rumbling timpani juxtaposed against the sung and spoken text penned by Garcia Lorca. While Keller's voice lacked somewhat in transparency, her communicative intent was clearly evident.

James Meredith's 1997 Kodo Tryptich also featured percussionist Robert Hamaker and Rick Hoffmeister. A bravura showcase for Sonos' ringers, this impressive work's first movement, Introduction, allowed the ensemble to demonstrate its technical mastery, flaunting stunts of clockwork precision in difficult glissandi effects, upbeat rhythms in ostinatos traveling seamlessly up and down different octaves.

The icy, distant Nocturne in G, the second movement, rattled irresistibly to a mysterious and sustained tension. The final movement, Dance, was an exotic combination of syncopated and other displaced rhythms set against colorful modal writing. It had an energetic drive toward a frenzied clima and a bravura cadenza for Hamaker and Hoffmeister's percussion set.

Two superb though unidentified encores, one each by Pusaka Sunda and San Jose Taiko, demonstrated unequivocally that these ensembles, like Sonos, perform at a very high professional level and deserve national recognition.

(Ching Chang is a regular contributor to the SF Bay Times and The SF Gate.)

©2000 Ching Chang, all rights reserved