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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
March 7, 2004
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By Janos Gereben
"Are these chirps long enough?" George Thomson asked, the expression on his face showing equal parts of
genuine concern and a winning pose in a Keystone Kops comedy. The response from the composer, a resident
in Crowden School's 9th grade, although looking considerably more mature than an average 15-year-old, was
a grave and emphatic nod. Like Thomson, Matthew Cmiel wore an expression of duality — nay, dichotomy
— the frown on his face indicating both the reality and the role-playing aspects of an absurdly
critical situation. "Well, then," Thomson turned to the orchestra, visibly relieved that the issue of
chirps-length had been resolved, "You'll be softer and I'll be faster." Everybody instantly understood
the instruction, which you may have trouble finding in any music-theory textbook.
If only audiences knew how much fun new music can be, Berkeley Symphony's FREE "Under Construction"
concerts would sell like hotcakes, at premium prices. These lively, engaging, downright hilarious events
— with Thomson, the Symphony's associate music director, as ringmaster — certainly counteract
the bad reputation given to "new music" by electronic hisses and pops, self-indulgent, endless exercises
in producing sounds instead of music.
Even when the quality is high — such as it was at New York's The Kitchen (which I was lucky enough
to frequent in the 'Sixties, at the time LaMonte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich & Co. emerged) —
the atmosphere can often be thick with furrowed brows and poses of self-importance. There was none of
that on Sunday, in the resplendent and yet elegantly simple St. John's Presbyterian Church. Thomson ran
the complicated event of talk-rehearsal-performance-discussion smoothly and efficiently, communicating
superbly (and simultaneously) with the composers, the orchestra, and the audience.
Composer No. 1, Young Cmiel, IS actually 15, with a birthday on January 1. His work, entitled Their Darkest Longing, is inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus." Allowing that he is not trying to imagine the sublime music of Orpheus, Cmiel wrote in the program notes that he was trying to express "the thoughts and feelings of the legend's animals before they heard Orpheus . . . their longing (perhaps like my own) to experience transcendent beauty." Well! What I heard in the finely-orchestrated seven-minute piece was a digest of 20th-century music, every idiom in the book, something that could be well (and lucratively) used by a studio as an effectively neutral soundtrack. Hilarity went into high gear with Steven Clark's "The Common Denominator," the last section of his Three Serious Pieces for Orchestra. These variations on a well-known Bach Brandenburg Concerto theme imitated modern digital audio editing and sampling, chopping up the music, looping, stretching, transposing notes. Thomson, the orchestra and the audience all participated in this musical monkey business willingly and with great mirth.
The second part of the evening turned serious, but not solemn, and it also produced some remarkable music. Kent Nagano, arriving late from a Los Angeles Opera matinee, took over as official "host" of the event, and gave a memorable introduction to the opening draft of Naomi Sekiya's Manzanar Project. The Japanese-American conductor spoke of his own family's history before and during the World War II relocation camps. Nagano also sketched out the plan for the full project: a multi-disciplinary art project in three parts, Sekiya writing part one (about early immigration, up to Pearl Harbor) and the concluding epilogue, for a children's chorus; frequent Nagano collaborators Jean-Pacal Beintus and David Benoit writing the middle section, dealing with the war. Sekiya admitted that unlike her student (Cmiel), she did not complete the assignment for the evening, and produced only a fragment to be performed. The four-minute fragment — with boy soprano Nicholas Armstrong — turned out to be the composer's most lyrical and appealing work yet heard in Berkeley, eerie, evocative, beautifully played by the Symphony even on first reading.
The culmination of the evening was especially noteworthy. I've been writing about Kurt Rohde for many years now, tracking his steady, impressive growth as a composer of chamber- and symphonic music. On Sunday, there was a glimpse into his first vocal work, and this mere six-minute excerpt hit listeners in the gut. Sung affectingly by John Duykers, it was an aria from next year's Berkeley Symphony premiere of Rohde's Bitter Harvest. The planned 70-minute music drama is Duykers' five-year-old project, a work about "white rage . . . exploring the psychological roots of life among American farmers," with libretto by Amanda Moody. As rehearsed and performed under Thomson's baton, the "Tender Aria" impressed mightily. Rohde created a unity/divergence between the highly-pitched tenor part (going into falsetto at climactic points) and the unique orchestral sound provided by each instrument having its own music, without a single instance of doubling. Although Rohde spoke at the concert about the influence of pop-rock on his work, particularly The B-52s, all I could hear in the music was the composer himself, a bit of Bartók, a lot of Richard Strauss and early (but post-Gurrelieder) Schoenberg, with strange, stretching harmonies, involving complexity, and yet readily accessible. The composer's description of the orchestral introduction fits well the music of the aria too: "There is something unsettled here, unearthly [even as the text speaks of the banal ingredients of a breakfast], ruminating from below, trying to burn through to the surface." As his dark, brooding and gripping works for chamber orchestra, Rohde's vocal-composition debut is heavy with atmosphere and the eerie intimation of raw emotions. For somebody who until now was "paralyzed by the idea of writing vocal music," this is a stunning debut.
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the
Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janosg@gmail.com.)
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George Thomson
Naomi Sekiya
Kurt Rohde