San Francisco Classical Voice

Dana Hanchard

Nina Flyer

The Women's Philharmonic offered the gamut of rich and rewarding selection of works at Herbst Theater Saturday night, from the most exciting, The Slough (1998) by Jing Jing Luo, the most dramatic, Early American Portrait (1962) by Esther Williamson Ballou, the most stylistically mature, Vigil for Cello and Chamber Orchestra (1990) by Augusta Read Thomas, to the most heart-felt, Elegy for String Orchestra (1998) by Judith Lang Zaimont.

Jing Jing Luo's Slough is a compelling and kinetic work. She begins with a clearly occidental musical framework, but then gradually disassembles from that context certain elements that can later fit back into traditional Chinese musical practice. These elements included pizzicato glissandos, pitch distortions, and the acceleration of the moment of change from one pitch to another. Having isolated these practices within a Western musical milieu, she then reassembles them into more traditionally Chinese sounding melodic elements. This procedure allows her to create a combination of Western and Chinese elements that is more than just a superficial blending or juxtaposition of styles.

In Luo's rich palette of orchestral sound techniques, one particularly effective procedure begins with a number of violins joined together sustaining a single pitch. While this note continues, the individual violinists, first one then another, depart from the sustained note by executing an upwards directed glissando that vanishes at its top. The components of the sustained sound gradually evaporate until no one is left playing the originally unison note.

Another of her techniques is to create densely packed clusters of trills, similar to what Bartok does in the middle of the third movement of the Music For Strings Percussion and Celesta , but more complex and dense.

Her most exceptional technique in Slough is the use of pizzicato chords in which the individually plucked pitches are changed during their brief duration. The whole pizzicato chord then shifts in pitch. The effect is reminiscent of the use of "tones" in spoken Chinese, but here applied at once to entire chords.

Admirable too was Luo's strength in sustaining a climax for an exquisitely long duration, far beyond the point when the listener would begin to look for relief from the intensity. The piece received a good performance. The inner pace at the very opening did not quite catch the implied flow of the work, but it soon recovered. The hall lacked the resonance to allow all of the subtle effects to come off well.

Curiously, the most literal statements of Chinese melodies, in the Flute and English Horn, were played in a style that was notably un-Chinese, remaining well within the standard Western wind playing tradition. Slough is a work of great promise. Luo has a fine musical vocabulary; it remains for her to practice using this vocabulary in developing a sustainable writing style.

The surprise of the evening was Esther Williamson Ballou's Early American Portrait, a work originally for voice and piano but later orchestrated by the composer. This is a neglected minor masterpiece in an original style that loosely fits within the boundaries of music inspired by American folksong idioms. Its five movements conjured up strong dramatic and emotional settings for poetic texts drawn from a work entitled American Frontier by Elisabeth Sinclair Peck.

The first movement was a superb evocation of wonder, longing, fantasy and motion, as a person in a Kentucky log cabin hears the sound of wild geese flying southward. The second movement, "The Loiterer," contained a marvelous section in which singer and orchestra engaged in a dialogue over the onomatopoeia in the syllables of "whip-poor-will". The third movement, Buffaloes suffered from uninspired orchestration, but is probably effective its original voice-piano setting.

The Christening contained several moving moments, including the voice's first entrance on the words "Little one, you sleep, and I keep thinking how your feet will some day dance". The last movement, Democracy begins with the text "Pat, pat! ... You can hear all the feet ... on the beat on the left handed fiddler as he plays for a seat in the state legislature". This gem is up there with the humor evoked by settings of similar texts by Ives and Copland.

The soprano soloist, Dana Hanchard, sang very musically, but her voice sounded far too small to balance with the orchestra. Her high notes, G and above, were oddly diminutive. This work merits many more hearings, and deserves to be placed in the company of such works as Copland's two books of American Folk Song arrangements.

The most stylistically mature and coherent work on the program came from the youngest of these composers, Augusta Read Thomas. Vigil for Cello and Chamber Orchestra was written when the composer was only twenty-six. (She is now thirty-five).

Thomas has a fine ear for orchestral sonorities and their movement through time. Though the interior instrumentation could vary widely from one moment to the next, its overall effect remained fluid and evolving, never rambling or disconnected. A great moment occurred when a solo in the violin, at its conclusion, settled down onto a high D-Sharp, thereby joining with a flute which had been sustaining a high D-Natural. The full effect of this point of stasis on a dissonant interval was diluted because the violin pitch was a little low. One brief reminiscence of the third movement of Varese's Octandre was delightful.

The intended character of the solo cello line never really emerged in the performance, so that the counterpoint of mood, feeling, rhythm and tempo between the solo line and the orchestral line could not be fully appreciated. One moment that worked superbly between soloist and orchestra occurred at the end of the piece where the cello threaded its way around a tritone being sustained in the orchestra. The solo part was played accurately by Nina G. Flyer, the orchestra's principal cellist. Thomas is a musical, experienced composer with a lot to say, all of which is very worth hearing.

Elegy for String Orchestra by Judith Lang Zaimont is a work of understated beauty and honest emotion. The work is largely chordal but with clear underlying counterpoint. Single notes move in motivic fragments, and around them, chords will often settle. From within the chords, other notes will arise that become the seeds for other melodic impulses. Zaimont moves fluidly between dissonance and consonance. Tonal chords do not sound "exceptional" as they would in Ives, for instance, nor do they leave lingering key implications. They are merely part of an extended harmonic vocabulary that gently encloses both consonant and dissonant harmonies.

At the ends of sections the music settles comfortably onto major chords and then moves on. It seemed fitting that the work concluded on a C Major chord, momentarily unstable in the second inversion, but then coming to rest in root position without having passed through a dominant chord, obligatory in a conventional cadence.

The orchestra performed fluently in the Elegy though with a certain angularity. A brief double bass solo was beautifully handled by Karen Horner. The treatment of the basses in general, independently of the cellos, was very effective.

If I felt any limitation in the work, it was one I sometimes feel generally about music composed in our era. With the avant-guarde having "been done", and tonal fields long since thoroughly explored and exhausted, contemporary composers live in an inherently infertile period. New styles, if any, have not yet clearly emerged to provide a new orientation for the old cellular units of sounds.

Also on the program was the Faust Overture (1880) by Emilie Mayer, the program's single 19th century work. Mayer's musical idiom put one in mind of early and middle Wagner. A surprisingly original opening section benefitted from some very good playing by the orchestra. This was followed by a more prosaic allegro that contained an interesting second theme, unfortunately followed by a mundane tutti chorale. A later return of the first theme was helped by better orchestral playing and made a more convincing rhythmic statement. The traditional idiom of the work struck a responsive chord with the audience, which seemed to be applauding as much for "tonality" as for the work itself. The work merited a hearing, but probably should now be put back on the "historical" shelves.

(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.)

©1999 Joseph Bloom, all rights reserved