San Francisco Classical Voice

The Women's Philharmonic presented a typically adventurous program Friday night, concluding its season with one U.S. and three world premieres among five works. The theme of voyages across boundaries united an otherwise-diverse evening. Nonagenarian composer June Kirlin's Odyssey portrayed her lifelong journey, while Tomiko Kohjiba's music evoked the passage of the soul from life into death. Janika Vandervelde took as her inspiration both the playing and the border-crossing life of pipa player Gao Hong. Like Kohjiba, Vandervelde mixed musical cultures, evoking Hong's migration from China to the United States and her absorption of many musical genres. With so many new works, the evening inevitably produced uneven results, though sometimes brilliant and almost always worthy.

The two largest works were the most memorable. Minnesota composer Vandervelde's Pacific Transit, a new concerto for the pipa, the Chinese four-string lute, was unveiled by soloist Hong and the precise, spirited orchestra. One of the most striking features of the pipa is its vocabulary of articulations, providing an enormous timbral palette through different plectrum techniques, string bends, and varied vibrato.

Vandervelde was particularly inspired bringing the orchestra into this coloristic world -- as in the beginning with harp, flutter-tongued flute, and cello tremolo -- and in matching the pipa with a more Western vocabulary -- the pentatonic melodies in the strings accompanying a pipa tremolo later on. These textures were effective in framing the varying soloist/orchestra relationship -- dialog on one hand, shared development on the other.

Many inventive ideas followed, as when the percussion section matched a particularly percussive pipa flourish or the highly chromatic string lines supported pipa glissandi. The central cadenza was composed by Hong herself, bringing this work closer to the 19th century collaborative model of the concerto. This was a marvelous few minutes of virtuoso playing. Hong brought out complex counterpoint between high and low voices within a furious strumming texture. She surprised the ear with many degrees of note-bending and tremolo of varying speed, and provided high drama with rapidly rising and falling dynamics.

Vandervelde concluded the work quite effectively, as a big orchestral buildup dissolved into fragments of the opening music, finally returning to the opening texture. This colorful, original work deserves a place in the growing repertory of new works for pipa by both Chinese and Western composers.

The evening's second half was given over mostly to another work mixing Eastern and Western music and ideas, Tomiko Kohjiba's The Transmigration of the Soul (1995). Reorchestrated from its original setting for nine players and soprano voice, this Buddhist-based work follows the soul's journey from death into readiness for rebirth. It uses wordless vocal lines and a text derived from the Sho-Ma, a chant normally reserved for Buddhist priests. This was a presumptuous choice, for what was normally sung only by men in austere chant here was sung with in an operatic vocal timbre.

The sparest moments were the most powerful. Soprano Kendra Colton must be thanked for her moving, fittingly majestic performance. The opening movement was compelling, as Colton, offstage and unaccompanied, wailed through wordless, sorrowful, melismatic lines. Equally strong was her onstage entrance in the third movement, accompanied only by sparse timpani and the Japanese bells she carried with her. The reduced forces focused the ear, and the mingling overtones of the voice, bells, and timpani produced a spellbinding effect.

Paradoxically, only when the musical forces grew did the piece's power diminish and its theme seem further in the background. After such revealing orchestration, the added instrumentation seemed a bit too lush. Even the brief movement breaks seemed an interruption to the soul's imagined progress. I wonder if this work, with such an intimate theme, might have been stronger in its original chamber setting.

Both works revealed Apo Hsu's many strengths as a conductor. Her characteristic energy, musicality, and feeling for tone color and balance were evident throughout the evening, especially in these two challenging works.

Hsu began the concert's second half by presenting the second JoAnn Falletta Woman Conductor's Award to Ann Krinitsky, the Berkeley Youth Orchestra's conductor and also a Women's Philharmonic violinist. The previous year's award-winner, Sara Jobin, then took the podium for the American premiere of Zip and Zoom for string orchestra by the young Uzbeki-Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin.

Jobin gave an impressive performance, bringing forth cohesive, well-balanced playing and shaping the work's evolving counterpoint with precision and feeling. The work itself is a propulsive, ongoing exchange of minor-key themes that appear, disappear, and return, recombining and repeating for varying amounts of time. While this approach was probably effective for choreographic purposes, it proved too redundant for a concert setting, although most of Kats-Chernin's ideas were initially strong.

The evening began with two works that provided a sharp contrast to the program's later developments through their adherence to tradition. Mary Jeanne van Appledorn's Meliora, the latest in the orchestra's ambitious series of fanfare commissions, approached the notion of a fanfare in the most traditional sense. Big, bold brass lines and martial percussion, though played very well, offered no surprises and were reminiscent of countless symphonic band pieces.

June Kirlin's Odyssey is a more ambitious work, a tone poem in the narrative mode of many late 19th century works. Depicting a life's journey through a series of orchestral episodes, the piece, like van Appledorn's, is very much in the mode of older music. It often recalls the late Romantic language of Rachmaninoff, though controlled within cleaner, more classical proportions. Kirlin is still actively composing at 90, and the standing ovation she received was genuinely touching. But these opening works, though competent, didn't leave as strong an impression as the concert's adventurous music.

(Benjamin Frandzel is a Bay Area musician and writer. In addition to writing concert music, he has collaborated with dance, theater, and visual artists, and has written about music for many publications and musical organizations. He is currently a graduate student in composition at San Francisco State University.)

©2000 Benjamin Frandzel, all rights reserved