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SYMPHONY REVIEW
The Women's Philharmonic
May 28, 1999
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By Michelle Dulak
The primary mission of the Women's Philharmonic has always been the performance of music by women,
whether newly-composed or rediscovered. Music Director Apo Hsu, in her two years at the podium, has
intensified that focus; now the orchestra performs only music by women (her predecessor, JoAnn
Falletta, generally allowed one token "man's piece" per concert), and there is a greater emphasis on music
drawing on non-Western musical traditions. Friday's concert (May 28) at the Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts, the final one of Hsu's second season, exemplified her new approach to programming.
The first half of the concert featured two living composers, both of them white, but drawing on non-Western musical sources. Hilary Tann, Welsh-born but now resident in New York, based her From
Afar in part on Japanese court music. The dramatic unison lines and restive woodblock interjections
that dominate the major structural climaxes of From Afar powerfully allude to Japanese
gagaku without copying or parodying it, although the occasional whiffs of a "Princess of the
Pagodas" pentatonicism left me feeling less comfortable. Nor was the overall trajectory very clear; it was
too easy to lose one's place in the narrative, and ultimately to wonder at its length.
The performance was confident and powerful, though not without rough edges. Intonation in the arching
unison lines was a particular problem. A line played in unison by -- say -- flute, oboe, and trumpet would
not only begin with a wide variance in intonation (which is excusable), but remain so all the way through
(which is not). The odd acoustical properties of the Yerba Buena theater may be partially to blame, but the
impression here and elsewhere in the program was of an orchestra not listening carefully enough to itself.
Tina Davidson's program note for her They Come Dancing painted an alarmingly New Agey
picture of a piece inspired by her reading of the Lakota seer Black Elk -- a vision of native men
("handsome and strong") and women ("beautiful and voluptuous") dancing ("with ever-increasing passion
and heat"), barefoot, in the prairie grass. To my relief the music, though strongly pictorial, was not at all
naive.
Davidson has a fine ear for instrumental possibilities and a harmonic palette that is non-abrasive without
being bland. They Come Dancing begins with near-silence -- a shimmering murmur built from the
tapping of fingers on strings and the toneless blowing of air through wind instruments -- and grows very
gradually into an frenetic, mixed-meter dance. Hsu's practiced command of the shifting metrical patterns
wasn't quite matched by the orchestra; the "fuzz" of not-quite-synchronized attacks was all over the place.
Still, the performance was strong enough and dedicated enough to make a good case for the music.
Apo Hsu is strongly committed to the music of the African-American composer Florence B. Price (1887-1953), whose Third Symphony rounded out the program. Two more works by Price, Mississippi
River and The Oak, feature in the orchestra's 1999-2000 season, and they, the Third
Symphony, and the First Symphony (first programmed by the orchestra in 1989) are all to be recorded for
future CD release within the next year.
According to the musicologist Rae Linda Brown, professor at UC/Irvine and responsible for the
performing edition of the Third Symphony used here, Price was the first African-American woman to
achieve widespread renown as a composer. She studied composition with George Whitefield Chadwick,
probably the best-known American composer around the turn of the century. Price eventually settled in
Chicago, writing orchestral works for the Michigan WPA orchestra and the Chicago Woman's Symphony
Orchestra as well as the Chicago Symphony.
Brown and Hsu both make very strong claims for the quality of Price's music. I have to say that I was
frustrated by its mixture of extreme sophistication and high craft with embarrassing crudeness. Price's
command of chromatic harmony is marvelous -- as is, often, her orchestration. The very opening of the
symphony combines the two: a sonorous and chromatically slippery passage for low brass that sounds like
an out-take from Wagner's Ring.
In the Allegro that follows, the local twists and turns of the harmony remain fascinating. But the main
theme is disappointingly foursquare and banal (a quality that only gets worse as it is reiterated over the
course of the movement). And an irritating orchestrational tic soon kicks in: Price reinforces the rhythms
of her more emphatic passages with a stroke of the snare drum per note. The finale of the symphony has
the same faults, but is unrelieved by the expansively lyrical second theme that buoys the first movement.
(Brown can be forgiven for hurrying over this last movement in her program note.)
The inner movements are much stronger, beautifully scored and full of memorable themes. I am not sure
that Hsu did the second movement any favors by remarking that it is "very beautiful, like Dvorak." All too
like, actually; those few who would not already have connected the flat-laden key, the oboe solo, and the
soulful, pentatonic theme to Dvorak's "New World" Symphony now had no excuse. Still, if the movement
is an instance of "sincere flattery," it is skillful flattery, too.
The scherzo movement is titled "Juba," after a nineteenth-century African-American dance form. Hsu
described juba as a predecessor to ragtime; to modern ears, Price's rendition had all the characteristics of
ragtime except the ordinary rag structure of small, repeated sections. It is appealing music, with an easy
rhythmic swing and harmonic inflections that, at this remove, are more strongly reminiscent of Gershwin
than of anything else. A slower trio section, featuring the brass, alludes fleetingly to the habanera.
The audience cheered wildly after the symphony, and even more when Hsu announced a reprise of the
"Juba" as encore, though a few people's attempts to clap along to the music quickly faded out. (Hsu
clumsily shortened the movement for encore purposes by stopping the orchestra, in mid-phrase, just before
the trio, and then starting up again on the other side.)
I left, though, with mixed feelings. I am in Hsu's, and the Philharmonic's, debt for the opportunity to hear
Price's music. But the story plain to read in that music -- one of very great musical gifts stunted by a
straitened life -- saddened me. And the absence of sorrow in the audience saddened me more. Hsu talked
about Price, and the audience responded to her, as though her orchestral music really were a trove of
masterpieces cruelly suppressed and at last brought to light. There are sparks of genius in the Third
Symphony, but it is no sort of masterpiece, and it is cruel to pretend otherwise. The tragedy is that, in a
different world, it might perhaps have been one.
(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)
©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved
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