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SYMPHONY REVIEW
A Fine Premiere, A Limp Rediscovery
March 10, 2001
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By Michael Zwiebach
The Women's Philharmonic renewed their fruitful association with composer Chen Yi on Saturday night at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The premiere of Chen's latest Philharmonic commission, a violin concerto titled Chinese Folk Dance Suite, was the chief attraction of the concert, which also featured music by Emma Lou Diemer and a disappointingly bland rediscovery, Impressions of the Ardenne, by Juliette Folville.
The conditions for launching new music could not have been more auspicious. The audience was in a festive mood even before the orchestra had played a note, repeatedly interrupting Board President Leyla Bernstein's sales pitch with applause. And the orchestra itself was in solid form, displaying a high level of technical accomplishment and bright sound, although the deep luster of great string sound was lacking, especially in climactic passages.
In Apo Hsu, the Philharmonic has an excellent conductor. On the podium she is direct and unfussy, her beat and cueing crisp and marked. She has a fine control of dynamics, although in the small Yerba Buena Center, a true pianissimo is hard to come by. And she showed sympathy for a wide range of music and communicated the variety of expression in each of the pieces.
Chen's Chinese Folk Dance Suite, a violin concerto with the concertmaster Terrie Baune as its impassioned soloist, occupied the place of honor on this short program. It was a sensational and uplifting experience. The three dance/rituals that form the core of the work are cleverly chosen both to create maximum contrast with each other and to match the traditional divisions of the concerto. The raucous tramping of the "Lion Dance" first movement got things off to a showy start and used extra percussion, with the violin imitating Chinese trumpet tunes. The rhythmic energy of this concerto was exhilarating, even in the slower second movement, where, under a lithe and undulating solo, the orchestra drove the music forward with vocal percussive noises articulated by the orchestra members. For the only time in this concert, formidable compositional technique was joined to inspired material. The scope of the final movement alone brought down the house. The dance melody here sprang forward on the combined strength of the violins and soloist Baune, with various heterophonic variations. As answering material enriched the texture, always clearly delineated in the orchestra, the dance reached a summit of power, and a long violin cadenza broke the momentum, developing its own virtuosic contrasts. The long coda took up some of the soloist's contrasts, and the piece whipped to its conclusion in a burst of polyphony. Hsu and the orchestra were perfect partners to Baune during the whole piece, made more delightful by the composer's own enthusiastic commentary before the start of the performance. The Women's Philharmonic remains an exemplary organization for the commissioning and performance of contemporary music, and in Chen's piece they backed another winner. The evening's first work was the three-movement set of symphonic sketches by Folville. Born in 1870, in Liège, Belgium, she was a conservatory professor, pianist, and composer. Impressions of the Ardenne (the famous Belgian forest), only one of two of her orchestral scores that have come to light, cannot, then, be held representative of her music, especially since it is undated. But it is not at all a piece that inspires hopes for future discoveries.
The music's late 19th century style is of a piece with the clichéd program Folville appended ("Way up high . . . the old rock appears, menacing, fantastical, evoking legends and chivalrous epics"). Folville used basic techniques of thematic transformation in this piece, lots of harmonic sideslips by thirds, and the characteristic orchestral sonorities of late Romantic nature paintings. The trouble is that the work doesn't have a single really arresting idea, except perhaps for a trombone theme in the first movement. And it is rhythmically docile, even in the third movement, a country dance that never bounces. There is too much competition in the realm of Romantic musical portraits of nature for this work to stand much chance of revival. Emma Lou Diemer's Suite of Homages, a Women's Philharmonic commission from 1985, is a curious work. Its five movements are each written in the style of a different (male) musical giant of the 20th century. Some of these evocations are so dead-on that, while they are humorous, Diemer's own personality seems to disappear. And the concept is too reminiscent of a compositional exercise for students. She needed to adopt the musical styles with a lighter touch. And so the best movements of the piece (the Stravinsky and Prokofiev parts) ended up being the ones that were the least successful as imitations. (Michael Zwiebach holds a Ph D in musicology from UC Berkeley, specializing in opera, and is a lecturer for the San Francisco Opera. ) ©2001 Michael Zwiebach, all rights reserved |
