San Francisco Classical Voice

What makes one work stand out among other effective ones can be something as singular as its idiom. Sheila Silver's Dance of Wild Angels (1990), on the Women's Philharmonic's concert Saturday, more modern and dissonant than anything else on the program, was nonetheless accessible. The piece, reveling in exciting orchestral color, had skillful use of percussion and very effective balances of tempo and texture within its overall rondo form.

To open its eighteenth season, the Women's Philharmonic began with Deep Forest by the late Mabel Daniels (1931). The piece is an impressionistic landscape, with string sororities and muted brass that are clear echoes of Debussy's Nuages. Deep Forest starts in a thoughtful, pastoral, melodic style, with flute and clarinet solos. In the middle section, a more angular agitated line rises in the orchestra but is repeatedly broken off before it can fully complete itself. The final dramatic cutoff is extended into an intense, expectant pause. When the music resumes, it is a return to the quiet yet unsettled opening section, which concludes the piece. The use of silence as a crucially expressive gesture imbues this composition with real distinction in spite of its stylistic indebtedness to Debussy. Daniels' orchestral writing is secure and knowing throughout.

The best-known of the four composers on Saturday's program, Libby Larsen, was represented by a group of six songs set to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1988). Performed by soprano Christine Brandes, the poems were set in a clear and spare romantic modernism with no trace of sentimentality or self indulgence. Brandes' voice is bright and burnished, capturing the feeling of authenticity and sincerity in the music. But the poetry has a wordy and rhetorical style tending to a certain sameness of rhythm and expression. After a while, the music seemed to take on a respectful, almost dutiful, stance in relation to the words, suffering a loss of immediacy and spontaneity, and leaving an impressive but not deeply engaging experience.

The final composition was the world premiere of a work just completed by Vermont's prolific Gwyneth Walker, Symphony of Grace. Though in a folk-inspired style reminiscent of Harris and Copland, the ideas in its four movements are strong, the invention fresh, the orchestral writing sometimes dazzlingly unexpected, always extremely effective.

After the infectious energy of the opening movement, came gentle playfulness in alternation with lyrical and dance-like episodes in the second movement (scored only for strings), and an edge of surrealism in the jazzy scherzo (scored only for winds). The last movement provided a compelling finale both to the piece and to this concert of distinctive and unusual music, which the Women's Philharmonic and its conductor, Apo Hsu, performed with admirable conviction and authority. The three living composers, (each around fifty years old), are still working and were present to receive the audience's enthusiastic acclaim.

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

©1999 Jules Langert, all rights reserved