San Francisco Classical Voice

UC Berkeley professor Richard Felciano's Primal Balance for flute and bass, the next piece on the program, evoked its title well, full of slithering, fleeting textures, creatures emerging from the primordial soup and slinking back into the shadows. Worn on bass and Emma Moon on piccolo, flute, alto flute, and bass flute had a nice conversational rapport and, as in the Persichetti, gave the gestures a lot of character, so that the piece was more than a mere succession of interesting sounds and textures. To Felciano's credit, the piece was very well paced, with interesting changes coming just at the right moments. And the piece also was wisely held to a relatively short time. Many a textural piece that I have heard in the past has been engrossing for the first several minutes but then has continued for another twenty after the textures have ceased to be interesting. Primal Balance was short enough that the textures never became tiresome or predictable, but remained mysterious, surprising, and captivating throughout.

After two such subdued and textural pieces, Silvestre Revueltas' extroverted perkiness was surprisingly jarring. His 1st and 2nd Little Serious Pieces (a title which must be a joke) for piccolo, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and trumpet were delightful rollicking little pieces. The second one (performed first on the concert) was bouncy and clownish, tonal with some humorous dissonance à la Poulenc or Françaix and, rather like a pathetic clown, left me with the disconcerting feeling that I wasn't sure if the piece had been silly or very sad — or both. The ensemble, conducted by David Milnes, performed clearly and incisively, but to my taste — with the notable exception of bassoonist Andrew Klein — should have been much wilder and less civilized to capture fully the reckless free-spiritedness of the music. Reveultas' other piece, Ocho por Radio, for the whole ensemble was fun and often downright silly, an off-kilter mariachi band, interrupted by odd meter changes and wrong-key interjections.

Alberto Ginastera's Serenata, which encompassed the second half of the program, was not what I expected. Most of what I had known of Ginastera's output was accessible, clear, and very folk-influenced. This piece, however, was hauntingly textural and formally indistinct, following the flow of the three Pablo Neruda poems that it set. The ensemble here provided a shimmering landscape over which baritone Tim Krol intoned the text, the majority of which was recited rather than sung. The poems are romantic and evocative with many references to night landscapes, wind, and night creatures, all captured very inventively in the luminous textures of the ensemble. Krol was a dramatic speaker and his recitation and singing were both very expressive.

The piece also featured a prominent and at times soloistic cello part which was performed a bit too intensely by Felix Fan. He certainly had great technical facility and a rich and beautiful tone, but almost always played with the same extremely fast vibrato and intense sound, which was very effective in the more dramatic parts but jarring and incongruous against the subdued murmurings of the ensemble in many other places — a bit too much like a romantic cello concerto rather than the subtle textural piece that it was. It had a miraculous ending with the singer sighing lower and lower over his lost love, as the ensemble melts away until there is only a pedal pizzicato in the cello and bass, repeating until it suddenly drops a half step for the very last note, one last sighing exhale.

All in all, it was a fresh and interesting concert. It presented a great variety of music, none of it well known but all of it appealing in its own way. The informal, down-to-earth talk at the beginning and the nature of the music itself combined to make for a twentieth-century concert more friendly and welcoming to a broad audience than such concerts often are.