San Francisco Classical Voice

While affirmative action may have been temporarily defeated in the California polls, it remains alive in the artistic venue. The Women's Philharmonic continued to pursue its important mission in behalf of the music of women composers as it opened its 17th season in Herbst theater Saturday.

Of the four works that music director Apo Hsu conducted, Joan Tower's Piano Concerto No. 2, bold and energetic, was the success, with its massive eruptions of sounds, cascading sheets of unisons and jarringly brilliant rhythmic strokes that constantly threw things off balance in an exciting way. The work seemed to be grouped around slowly changing seed tones that in turn generated sets of pitches to be enunicated in varying orders.

Pianist Angela Cheng matched the orchestra 's energy with virtuoso bursts of rapid notes that would continue unabated until their force was spent. The first of two cadenzas made stunning use of the piano's loud pedal to echo back the remnants of a sustained assault on the high range of the instrument. A finely played cello solo introduced the middle section of the work. In this this work, Tower has achieved something difficult in this part of the twentieth century, a style neither modern nor non-modern, yet relevant, non-derivative, and fairly at home with itself.

The concert opened with "The Queen of the Amazons" (1753) by Maria Antonia Walpurgis, a composer, singer, keyboard player, painter, writer and poet. Written in the familiar classical period idiom, it nonetheless contained refreshing touches of originality that gave it a compositional style of its own. The opening movement, with passages of lyrical spontaneity, was played with gusto (except by the back stands of violins). The winds sounded out in left field, the uncomfortable balance with the strings not entirely due to the high Haydnesque tessitura of the horns. Walpurgis' second movement was stately and charming, and the third, suffering from rhythmic flabbiness in both violin sections, never quite took shape.

The first of Three Movements for Chamber Orchestra by Catherine Urner(1891-1942), a work that had been substantially reconstructed from the composer's incomplete manuscript, was affecting. Written in 1933, it had a particular charm founded on a tender, evocative aesthetic that went astray only when it didn't stay honest to itself. With effective use of instrumental color and a fine sense of counterpoint, it failed only by not reaching a true climax. When in doubt, the composer simply reverted to a lush D-Flat Major sonority.

Urner's second movement was like an essay in trying out for size a particular structure, with the result that form overwhelmed the content. The performance was also not successful. The third movement was a sterile fugue that ended with insufficient preparation and suffered from dissenting intonation in the violins. Possibly a consequence of the reconstruction process, there were uneven patches throughout the piece.

Elisabetta Brusa's "Sinfonia Nittemero" (1988), a large-scale work, wanted a performance by a larger, more responsive and virtuosic orchestra. The work's defining character and ultimate weakness is that it obsessively explored the dark qualities of the key of B-flat minor. The first movement remained in an agitated state reminiscent of earlier movie music, its choice moment when a spiraling trumpet solo was sustained by arpeggios in cellos and piano. The second movement was suspenseful, best in its penultimate minutes. Fine rhapsodic interludes aborted in performance, while a descending passage by clarinet and oboe was eerily effective. The final movement labored unsuccessfully to separate itself from the prevailing mood of the two preceding movements.

All four works deserved a hearing, but as to the question of whether a work by an other than first-rate composer merits only a less than first-rate performance, this listener feels that every work, regardless of of stature or worth, deserves the best performance possible. This demand should not be blurred by the worthiness of the cause that brought about the performance.

(Joseph Bloom is a concert pianist and teacher, member of the San Domenico School music faculty, formerly on the Rutgers University and Bennington College faculties, and former WXQR classical radio host.)

©1998 Joseph Bloom, all rights reserved