|
SYMPHONY REVIEW
Chen Yi's Stunning "Gift" To Eleanor For Human Rights
|
By Richard Festinger
Appreciation of a musical work is made more complex when it is informed by a programmatic subtext. And when that subtext encompasses war, oppression and the attendant human sufferings, there is a possibility that the import of the text may overshadow that of the music. This dialectic assumed various hues when, on Thursday evening in Herbst Theater, the Women's Philharmonic presented a concert tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The works performed, selected for their connection with the celebratory occasion, were not all equally satisfying. Under Apo Hsu's baton, the orchestra sounded excellent throughout the evening.
The concert opened with a beautifully played and moving account of
Aaron Copland's "Preamble for a Solemn Occasion", a compact and expressively focused work written in 1949 on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Declaration. The Preamble begins with percussion and brass in forceful, angular music conveying a sense of foreboding, as if to remind us that the issue of human rights is intensely and ubiquitously present. Later, dissonant diatonic harmonies set a chorale-like backdrop for a narration of
a portion of the Declaration's text. Copland's compositional mastery reveals itself in his creation of a context which leads one into a meditation on the meaning of these words, imparting a sense of solemnity and gravity, but finally also of optimism. The expressive narrator was Jean Stapleton.
The evening's centerpiece was the premiere of Chen Yi's
"Eleanor's Gift," for cello and orchestra, commissioned for this concert. This is not program music, despite both title and occasion, and in the printed program the composer says she found inspiration in the image of "a challenging journey to a worthwhile goal." The guiding principle here is musico-dramatic discourse and structure. At the heart of Chen Yi's style is a highly developed sense of the dramatic. In the realm of instrumental music, the concerto idea, which inevitably exploits the inherent drama of soloist versus orchestra, is the ideal vehicle for Chen Yi's dramatic bent.
Cellist Paul Tobias shone with the commanding presence of the drama's star actor. His powerful tone, kinetic charge, and mastery of the score's clear musical purposes added up to a bravura performance. The music moves in gigantic waves with progressively higher crests. With each crest, the
orchestra suddenly falls away, and the cello as protagonist begins the next leg of the journey to the higher crest. Chen Yi's clarity of formal purpose is matched and supported by the brilliance of her orchestration. "Eleanor's Gift" is a stunning work with an exhilarating sweep to it. The orchestra took obvious pleasure in rendering this highly successful new score.
At the other programmatic extreme, Anne Boyd's 1989 Women's
Philharmonic commission "Black Sun" (In Memory of the Beijing Students) is, to use the composer's words, "unashamed in its intention as political allegory," depicting the tragic events that occurred in Tiananmen Square in June, 1989. Intended to be pictorial, the work opens with a leitmotiv representing grief. A traditional Chinese folk song, "The Ancestor of the Dragon," represents the students and their democratic ideals. Percussion and densely voiced brass are meant to evoke the machines of war. Sustained string chords denote death, and an inversion of the grief leitmotiv accompanies the souls in their ascent to heaven.
While the score is often colorful, Boyd seems sometimes to lack the dramatic flair to drive home her musical points. Several times the orchestration pulls back inexplicably at just those climactic moments that call for the hyperexpressive. The music is most satisfying in the extraordinarily beautiful middle section featuring a string trio comprising the solo
principals of the first violin, viola, and cello sections. It was a pleasure to hear concertmaster Terrie Baune, violist Betsy London, and cellist Nina Flyer, all fine players well known to San Francisco audiences, combine their talents in this moving lamentation.
Alan Hovhaness' Symphony No. 1, nicknamed the "Exile", was apparently
chosen because it commemorates the persecution and exile of Turkish Armenians between the world wars. It is more difficult than one might think to find orchestral repertoire explicitly connected to universal themes of human oppression. A few come to mind: the late symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich, Krzysztof Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima", Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand Alone, written for pianist Paul Wittgenstein who lost his right arm in the first world war. Rather than the tedious, plodding and wholly uninventive Hovhaness score, any of these would have served the program theme and musical purpose to more forceful effect.
(Richard Festinger, a composer on the San Francisco State University faculty, is founder of the new music ensemble Earplay. He has for many years promoted the performance of contemporary music in the Bay Area, and has composed extensively in a variety of genres.)
©1998 Richard Festinger, all rights reserved
|