Reviews
CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
12/03/07
New Composers and Old
By Jonathan Wilkes
Programming contemporary works with standard repertoire seems tricky: The danger is that the new, unfamiliar piece might easily sound like commentary on the towering masterwork. (Imagine if a writer were forced to publish a novel as a foreword to Joyce’s Ulysses.)
But Monday night, as the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presented three string quartets at the Green Room of the War Memorial Veterans Building, the two living composers, Karl Kohn and Lei Liang, chose to create their own contexts. The dead one, a fellow by the name of Ludwig van Beethoven, was left to fend for himself, and of course did a fine job of it. Kohn and Liang were in attendance for the superb renditions of their works in the concert’s first half. Beethoven was of course present only in spirit, his String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135, completing the evening.
Kohn framed his “Three Pieces for String Quartet” by including program notes about his musical heritage, citing the First and Second Viennese Schools and post-World War II serialism. (Beethoven was absent.) The music seemed to be constantly looking into the past: for example, rich, weighty contrapuntal textures evoking Schoenberg that worked in the ever-ringing acoustical well of the Green Room. On top of this was an ever-present lyricism that evinced a deep regard for Schubert in the distant past, and possibly Roger Sessions in a more recent one.
The first movement possessed a solemn character, with an expansive developmental trajectory. In the second movement, as more voices from the past entered the fold, the texture became more volatile and unpredictable. But throughout the quartet, the sense of forward propulsion was never lost — there remained a consistent treatment of harmony that held the three movements together. Kohn wrote in the program notes that he sometimes parodies music from the past, but if that happened in this quartet, it was well-hidden and integrated into his own musical rhetoric.
Fragments From Mongolia
Lei Liang spoke briefly before the performance of his piece, “Serashi Fragments”. He discussed his background; most noteworthy was that he has championed and preserved the music of Serashi, a Mongolian folk musician who died in 1968. In a way, Liang’s piece began with this spoken preface, and it reminded me of Luciano Chessa’s recital a few weeks ago in which the audience watched the composer “at work” before the performance officially began. Liang’s enthusiasm for Serashi as a musical and cultural figure made it apparent that the music was much more for him than simply source material from a folk tradition.
As a result, the section of the piece most reminiscent of Serashi’s music carried with it an additional layer of meaning. The outer sections that contrasted this soulful moment featured bursts of activity, as if Liang were deconstructing the fiddling style itself — breaking it up into its constituent parts of sharp attacks, noisy overbowing, carefully controlled harmonics, short glissandos, and silence. I was most taken when the fragments finally coalesced into more continuous music, but the overall form was always clear and convincing.
In the Beethoven quartet, what was most memorable was the ensemble’s careful treatment of the introduction in the final movement. The group chose a clear phrasing pattern that lent the motives of the recitative a smooth, speechlike quality. Here I felt the players were providing a fitting context to the work by allowing those enigmatic words Beethoven wrote into the manuscript to really sing, rather than merely emphasize a connection between rhythmic patterns and syllables of the text: (“Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein!” Must it be? It must be! It must be!).
This approach really grounded the movement for me. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t find myself pondering the so-called “anxiety of influence” that normally accompanies performances of Beethoven’s late works (as well as the living composers who share the billing). Rather than towering over the other pieces, Op. 135 moved in a unique direction, with the players considering the implications of their musical presentation with just as much care as had the composers of the concert.
San Francisco Classical Voice
CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
10/29/07
Taking the Pulse of Italian Music
By Jeff Rosenfeld
At one time, Italian music meant throbbing voices soaring unashamedly through ornate melodies, propelled by the pulsating oom-pah-pah of an orchestra masquerading as a massive guitar. In its latest concert, last Monday at the Green Room of San Francisco’s Veterans War Memorial, the Left Coast Ensemble took stock of recent Italian music. The results could not have been further from the distinctively tuneful opulence of Bellini and Verdi. Yet somehow the pulse is still thriving.
For example, Giacinto Scelsi’s “Nuits” for double bass is a 1972 avante-garde gimmick (read: tuneless tirade of mystifying sound) on an ever-evolving drone — basically one note played a dozen different ways, in octaves, in sawing repeated notes, and in sustained tones. The fascinating aspect is the rich subtlety, and the way the instrument responds to different fingerings and bow positions, ranging from ethereal harmonics to the groan of a dilapidated Fiat revving its engine.
But frequently the fingerings of the octaves superimposed a wobble that you might associate with slight intonation discrepancies, but which actually gave this otherwise deceptively drab music an extra splash of color. It was, ultimately, a concentrated and revealing study of oscillations. Michel Taddei made a convincing case for the double bass as a solo instrument: The performance was a tour de force of showmanship, and the sound was mesmerizing.
Salvatore Sciarrino’s “All’aure in una lontananza” (1977) for solo flute approaches this basic premise of pulsation from a different angle. There actually isn’t all that much music to wring from an eight-minute series of unpitched blowing, with occasional microtonal bending, or tones that land somewhere in the nether realms between the standard 12 pitches in the chromatic scale. Thirty years after its conception, Sciarrino’s avant-garde treatment of the flute is still an abuse of an audience’s patience. Either you work hard to stay with it or you zone out, or meditate.
While you can’t hum it, this music does have a satisfying, nearly imperceptible pulse of its own, which was made abundantly clear by Stacey Pelinka’s control of pacing. The result was revealing. The on/off alternations of the work became the salient characteristic, and the windy non-tones infused the gentle waves of sounds and silence with the breath of humanity. The pulse that emerged, though interminably slow, transcended the flute altogether and became a metaphor for life.
The concert was something of a solo recital for Pelinka, who tamed Luciano Berio’s more frantic mid-20th-century landmark for flute, “Sequenza I”, with the same poise and clarity that enriched the Sciarrino. Coolly unruffled scampering played off wafting flutters in perfect proportions in Berio’s pseudo-counterpoint — a throwback to the solo sonatas of the Baroque.
Youth Is Served
Luca Antignani is still in his early 30s, and, on evidence of the richly scored “Il viaggio di Humbert” (Humbert’s voyage), is a master of sound in the vein of Scelsi and Sciarrino. He uses every resource in a large ensemble (a string, wind, and piano octet, with flute doubling on piccolo and clarinet on bass clarinet) to great effect. Striking colors follow one another unabashedly in succession. The flute, oboe, and clarinet sing in unison in high registers, as the bass clarinet growls amid constrasting textures; the strings swoop or pluck, while the piano was modified internally to clang like a harpsichord.
“Il viaggio” would not have beaten out hundreds of other applicants for the 2005 Barlow Endowment Composition Prize if it were only about varying sound, however. It is a confidently paced excursion that drives itself forward with both repetition and variety. While the piece is named as a meditation on “obsession” (Humbert’s in Nabokov’s Lolita), the two-part, 17-minute work never dwells on one idea for long, always finding a new one just as the old one is beginning to wear out.
On the other hand, there is not really much melodic content, just enough of a return to familiar notes and combinations to embrace the listener with thematic consistency and periodicity. The effect is highly dramatic, and the virtuosic performance by the Left Coast Ensemble was spellbinding to hear and to watch (with each member taking a turn conducting where necessary).
Of all the pieces on the program, Bruno Ruviaro’s “seven infinitely short periods of (winter) time” was the most overtly emotional and picturesque, a vaguely operatic series of scenes. Ruviaro, a graduate student at Stanford, spoke before the performance about his difficulties dealing with winter in New Hampshire, where he wrote this trio for clarinet, violin, and (tampered) piano. A Brazilian new to the north, Ruviaro was apparently depressed or frightened by the weather.
Ruviaro’s trio, winner of the 2007 Left Coast Ensemble Composition contest, is a chain of seven brief episodes of escalating despondency and desperation, mixed with enough humor to create an appealing ambiguity. Each movement has a distinctive characteristic and a menacing undertone. The first movement, “Musification,” begins moody and spare but evolves as the violin and clarinet scurry up and down together. The third movement “Basement,” (a reference to a gloomy music studio locale) features high registers in the piano and rough bow strokes from the violin. The seventh (“Final Basement”) shrieks like the shower scene in Bernard Hermann’s music for Hitchcock’s Psycho.
In between there’s darkly comic relief, like a rumination, from solo clarinet (“Snow Down”) and a brief, abruptly ended outburst of scurrying notes (called “What??”). Clarinetist Tom Nugent, violinist Phyllis Kamrin, and pianist Eric Zivian produced a thrilling sound in the Green Room.
As if to remind us how far Italy has come from being the bastion of lyricism, the ensemble programmed two brief interludes of music from the 17th century, by Biagio Marini. They were lusciously played by Pelinka, Kamrin, violist Kurt Rohde, and cellist Leighton Fong in warm, gentle-toned hues. But this music came to life best in the dance movements, where the lilting pulse reminded us of what Italianate used to mean.
San Francisco Classical Voice
CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
02/22/07
Intimations of Conversations
By Jeff Rosenfeld
With two premieres and a West Coast premiere of intriguing, California-made music, there was plenty to talk about after the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble concert on Thursday in Mill Valley. As it turned out, the performers also engaged in plenty of musical conversation on the Throckmorton Theatre stage.
A most inviting and thoughtful musical banter pervaded “Sextet for Six Friends” by retired UC Berkeley professor and composer Andrew Imbrie. The give and take between instruments (violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, and clarinet) has a penetrating clarity and an ingratiating sense of timing. The first movement flows easily, with short pauses enhancing the civilized air of discussion. The concluding chord seems to wave, “ ‘til we meet again,” and indeed each of the subsequent two movements refers back to that gesture.
The sextet constantly seems to develop simple correspondences, as in the second movement, where the low registers of the oboe and clarinet speak in sequence and where a harmonic relationship between violin and viola is restated by pairs of winds. The last movement is a witty negotiation between the strings and winds. A repeating note figure passed from flute to cello, a rift between a bow-wow figure in the winds, and a corresponding staccato pattern in the strings ultimately get resolved as both sides of the sextet swap material. The agile and confident performance made the most of these and other felicities in the 85-year-old composer’s new work.
Emotional Electronics, Impersonal Sextet
Miguel Chauqui’s “Desde el Limite” (From the Border) is also an exchange of ideas and influences among the same instruments, but the conversation seems less intimate and more expansive with the addition of electronics. Chauqui, who grew up in Chile, studied with Imbrie at UC Berkeley and now teaches at the University of Utah, explained that the electronic sounds — generated with computer modeling procedures to approach mathematical limits and break down in unusual ways — represent an uncomfortable society in which an immigrant searches for a new identity.
The electronics are certainly not comfortable listening, opening with a small explosive sound and a tunneling effect. They eventually blend with the instruments in long tones. The acoustic instruments and electronics together explore various agreements and disagreements, whether it is a violin solo over a plucking beat in the electronics, or a prancing pattern in the clarinet that eventually is taken up by the ensemble and electronics, or the return toward sustained notes in the last pages of music. It is near the end, actually, that the ensemble finally begins to enrich the harmony, rather than merely poking at countermelodies and juxtaposed patterns. Ultimately, the music reaches an uncertain resolution, as if nothing is really gained or lost in the dialogue between individual and culture.
Somehow, Chauqui imbues the electronics with a more vibrant personality than the six players, who, in this performance, were ably coordinated with the technology by conductor George Thomson. While sometimes mysterious and otherworldly, the synthesized effects usually sounded like an electric guitar. If anything, I think the piece could have a brighter future as a concerto for that instrument, though this might invert Chauqui’s programmatic intent.
Conversation With a Muffled Piano
Ross Bauer’s “Piano Quartet”, in its West Coast premiere, also pits the one against the many, according to the composer, in this case three strings versus one pianist. As if to emphasize this dynamic, the piano is often stripped down to a single line, eschewing its full sonority and harmonic complexity. This limits the encounter between strings and keyboard, but it also makes the simplified dialogue concentrated, even when it gets chatty.
The first movement features solos in which the violist, cellist, and pianist each take turns musing with minimal interference, and the second movement offers extensive space to an achingly beautiful violin solo (played by Ana Presler). By contrast, the third movement has the most tension, both rhythmically and timbrally, with dancing, fidgeting passages in the piano, and wailing tones in the strings.
Bauer’s 15-minute quartet has moments of promise, such as a beautiful texture with a high cello line in the last movement, but ultimately the limitations of the piano writing make it unsatisfying. At one point Bauer, who teaches composition at UC Davis, has the pianist reach inside the instrument to pluck a string — an exploratory moment — but given all the other strings available for plucking, it seems like a wasted effort; meanwhile more traditional sonorities remain untapped. The instrumental discussion seems heavily censored.
The Schumann Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Opus 47, which closed the program, suffers no such constraints. Perhaps the fleet and ebullient performance made it seem unfettered, as the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble seemed to open floodgates of emotion. The music poured out with ardor, including the gush of notes beginning the second movement, in which pianist Eric Zivian and cellist Tanya Tomkins seemed to blurt out a long-kept secret in a deft run of notes.
While the new works often seemed to portray the sounds and dynamics of conversation, the venerable Schumann Quartet shifted the topic to the spirit of conversation, achieving that astonishing invigoration possible only when sound bridges the space between minds.
(Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World’s Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.)
San Francisco Classical Voice
CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
12/07/06
Taking Cues From Beethoven
By Jeff Rosenfeld
This week and last, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble scheduled repeat performances of “Beethoven and His Legacy,” a program first presented in 2003. It was a welcome opportunity for those who’d missed it the first time around and, even better, a rare chance to revisit new music commissioned by the ensemble.
The sparsely attended concert at 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley (which, thankfully, was duplicated on Monday in the Green Room of San Francisco’s War Memorial) showed three composers working from contrasting perspectives, offering a satisfyingly balanced tribute to the one work that inspired them all, Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, Op.131.
The ensemble put the Beethoven first this time, unlike the 2003 presentation, and that was an excellent change. The three quartets after intermission, by William Beck, Yu-Hui Chang, and Samuel Nichols, would not have been easy to consider, in terms of the pitches and motifs, without the Beethoven firmly in the mind’s ear. After all, Op. 131 is a major work and one that arcs through a huge landscape of brilliant meanderings, all based on a four-note theme that frequently reappeared in this program.
Lyrical flights
Of the three, it was Chang’s string quartet, “Shadow Chase”, that most clearly followed Beethoven’s roadmap. Not that his 10-minute piece is anywhere near as monumental, but it has some of the same soaring, melodic impetuousness, straining against a meticulously plotted, slow-fused line of progress. It starts with the opening four notes of Beethoven’s quartet — intoned in shadowy timbres indeed — and at first proceeds with a kind of nonchalant grace and confidence akin to Beethoven’s opening fugue. Then, like Beethoven, Chang moves into more tender emotions, often with unisons between pairs of instruments, and counterpoints that culminate in a kind of wailing match between violin and cello. Ultimately, as in the Beethoven, there is a furious attempt to pull the world together — in Chang’s case a headlong scamper toward a late-Beethoven indeterminate conclusion.
Whereas Chang amplified Beethoven’s lyrical impulse — his mature, aching humanity — Nichols’ “Variations” seemed to riff off of the central middle movement of the Op.131, which is an extended and somewhat freely conceived series of variations. Nichols opened with a drone on four notes (Beethoven’s theme in freeze-frame?) that created a sense of vastness and possibility. In this one stroke, he captured the essence of Op. 131.
“Variations” maintained that stance for its short seven or eight minutes, but rather than exploiting a wide range of sudden change and far-flung ideas, as Beethoven seems to do, Nichols kept the music tightly under control. The feeling that anything could happen remained, but in fact very little did, only subtle gestures like a heavy or slow tremolo, a glissando, a harmony piled a little higher than anticipated, an instrument seemingly out of phase, and often, a return to droning.
Electronics and grinding gears
Nichols created the (un)expectancy of Beethoven without quite the same sense of risk or effort. William Beck meanwhile took his “Communion” in the opposite direction, trying to give us anything and everything, which is just as much the essence of the highly exploratory Op.131. Indeed, where the older work, at first glance, seems to free-associate, interrupt itself, and switch gears at random, Beck’s string quartet did so, too, with electronics added to the mix.
Mostly, the electronics seemed like an unnecessary diversion, but amid all the plunking, growling, sliding, creaking, and rubbing sounds was a memorable episode at the apex of the piece’s arc, when the electronics (controlled by Nichols) took over the melody with an eerie, lonely, whistling tune. The electronics were actually sampled from a recording of Op. 131, but this was not discernible. Beck, like Nichols (and Beethoven), often seemed to be exploring the slowing of time, so as to grasp one last look at life. As the quartet ended, it devolved into an intoning of that all-pervasive Op. 131 motif.
Beck’s was not the most beautiful work — Chang’s was, at least in conventional terms of melody and emotion — but, like the others, it conveyed above all the plasticity of Beethoven’s great opus, and its ability to shift gears. All three recreated at least part of the endless transformation of Beethoven’s quartet, from a conservative but timeless fugue into an open-ended, cosmic journey of fearlessness.
Fearless, too, was the playing of the Left Coast Ensemble’s quartet, with Anna Presler and Phyllis Kamrin, violins, Kurt Rohde, viola, and Leighton Fong, cello. Not a moment went by in which the sounds were anything but intensely drawn and convincingly full, especially in the new works. Surprisingly, they were almost more confidently and accurately played than the familiar Beethoven quartet. A few transitory notes of uncertain intonation and a general lack of polish in the ensemble sound were small prices to pay in their portrayal of the Op. 131, which was always admirably and confidently paced. No compromises seemed evident in the rest of the program. If anything, the players paced the new works with more patience and measure this time around.
All in all, even at barely an hour’s length, the program seemed full, varied, and well worth repeating.
(Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World’s Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.)
San Francisco Classical Voice
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
05/15/06
Two Triumphs (and a Puzzle)
By Heuwell Tircuit
The final program of the season for the Left Coast Ensemble last week continued its ongoing Companion Commission Project with a fine addition to the string quintet repertory, Philippe Bodin’s “st(r)ay” in its premiere performance. Played in the Green Room of the Veterans Building, Bodin’s piece was written as a subtle companion to Schubert’s great String Quintet in C Major, D. 956, which opened the evening. As filler, the program offered 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Moravec’s eight-year-old “Mood Swings” for piano trio.
Like Greco-French composer Iannis Xenakis, Bodin began his studies in mathematics, architecture, and piano in France, and then ˜-unlike Xenakis - had something of a career as an operatic baritone. That’s a most unusual combination, but it just might account for his balance of proportional sound relationships with a musical understanding of the need for lyrical material. His new piece uses the same instrumentation as the Schubert Quintet: two each of violins and cellos, plus one demanding viola part.
Bodin’s music is throughly modern and, at the same time, avoids the doctrinaire calculations of the Xenakis or Boulez sort. He’s written a 12-minute piece that draws vaguely on the aesthetic values of the Schubert, especially Schubert’s spectacular slow movement, which amounts to one of the most original and expressive movements in all chamber music repertory. Yet I picked up no direct quotations from it.
Bodin began, for example, by using the same textures that open Schubert’s slow movement: very soft, sustained string sounds, punctuated by bits of pizzicato accompaniment, pizzicatos as soft as droplets in a light spring rain. Even his eventual dramatic passages carried a sense of demure elegance. There was no hint of Mahlerian self-pity of the “Please feel my pain” variety, and many thanks for that. This is clearly a composer who knows about formal clarity. One hopes to hear more from him, and soon. On today’s scene, such compositions lie few and far between. I’ve no idea what the commission fee amounted to, but it was money well spent. This feeling was evidently shared by the audience, which gave Bodin such a rousing ovation that it would not have seemed out of order to repeat the whole work on the spot. The only thing that might be held against the piece is its overly cutesy title, a thing much at odds with what is essentially a dignified composition.
I can only assume that Moravec made great strides from his 1998 “Mood Swings” to his Pulitzer Prize win two years ago. Although well-played by violinist Anna Presler, cellist Tanya Tomkins, and pianist Sarah Cahill, this was a raucous piece of quasi-Romantic exaggerations. Perhaps Mood Swings was an early effort of Moravec’s student days; it certainly sounded so. Even basics of organizational technique failed to show themselves. If, for instance, you are going for a big climax, it takes more than making a loud texture get even louder. The inner workings of the score, such as harmonic tensions, must be strengthened. Otherwise, it’s just noise, and Moravec gave us lots of that. Why Mood Swings was programmed leaves me puzzled.
A wonderful performance of Schubert
Schubert’s C-Major Quintet is, of course, one of the great masterpieces of his final year, a year of many such, including the E-Flat-Major Mass, the Schwanengesang song cycle, the last three piano sonatas, the massive Ninth Symphony, and sketches for a Tenth, completion of “Moments Musicaux”, an more. The list is remarkable in itself, but that the man was grievously ill the whole time renders such an output astonishing.
The quintet is long, terribly difficult in terms of capturing its smiling-through-tears mood, and often technically traitorous to play, particularly during the scherzo. (Schubert seems to have had it in for violinists during his closing years; witness the beautiful but nearly unmanageable Fantasy in C Major for violin and piano from 1827.) It’s simply not reasonable violin writing, although, when it succeeds, it’s a wonderfully effective composition. The high violin writing in the Scherzo is downright cruel, but it came off handsomely under Presler’s fingers.
This performance was wonderful, not without minor slips here or there, but far above average. Tempos were flawless, with excellent voicing among the five musicians: violinists Presler and Phyllis Kamrin, violist-director Kurt Rohde, plus cellists Tomkins and Leighton Fong. Those same strings played the Bodin, with the excellent musicianship that had been in evidence throughout the Schubert as well.
When, at the concert, Bodin was asked to say a few words prior to his piece, he related an interesting but alarming little incident from his day. It turned out that he’d been assaulted that very afternoon in the Telegraph Hill area. “I’d expected that area to be safe,” he told the audience, “but that’s what you face when they’re playing new music.” People naturally chuckled, as, happily, Bodin didn’t seem any the worse for what he’d been through a few hours before.
(Heuwell Tircuit is a composer, performer, and writer who was chief writer
for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the San
Francisco Chronicle. He wrote previously for Chicago’s American and the
Asahi Evening News.)
San Francisco Classical Voice
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
3/27/06
The British Have Arrived
By Heuwell Tircuit
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s devotion to neglected music found its forum Sunday evening in the Green Room of the Veterans Building with three string quartet compositions. Although listed as a salute to English music, “The British Have Arrived,” the program really consisted of music by two British composers, plus one of Haydn’s late masterpieces. They opened with Haydn’s Quartet Op. 76, No. 2 in D Minor, the “Quitenquartett” (1797), followed by Thomas Ades’ “Arcadiana” (1994). Following intermission, there was the Quartet No. 1 in D Major, Op. 25 (1941) of Benjamin Britten. Players included violinists Anna Presler and Phyllis Kamrin, violist Kurt Rohde, and cellist Leighton Fong, able musicians all.
Britten’s First Quartet is as much an American work as British, perhaps more so. It was written during his American sojourn, in Escondido, California, in fact, at the request of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the wet-nurse to chamber music in modern America. Written during June and July, the new quartet had a quick premiere that September in Los Angeles. The Op. 25, however, is only Britten’s first published quartet. There exists an early quartet from 1931 and a shorter Quartettino from 1930, plus a fist full of short individual pieces. Britten was clearly prepared to take on this demanding medium at full stride, which he did.
The four-movement Op. 25 brims with fresh ideas and almost casual mastery of craftsmanship. The opening introduction, for example, is devoted to high, soft ethereal sounds from the three top voices against plucked cello tones. That’s memorable, and indeed returns during the course of the first movement. There follows a pixie scherzo and an elevated slow movement featuring all the seriousness of the late Beethoven quartets in its ability to sound noble while utterly free of sentimentality. Only the finale lets down a bit. While in bravura toccata style, the melodic and textural materials seem retrograde to the music Britten had composed 10 years before. It has occured to me to wonder if that might have been brought on by a deadline problem, but who knows.
Haydn surprises
Haydn’s set of six quartets were written on commission from Count Joseph Erdoedy shortly after returning from his second London visit, and indeed they are often referred to collectively as the Erdoedy Quartets. That set contains several of Haydn’s most cherished quartets: the Rider, Emperor (whose slow movement became the Austrian National Anthem), the Sunrise, and this Second Fifths Quartet. As so often, the Haydn nicknames spring from one movement or event among his works. In the case of this D Minor Quartet, it’s the melodic interval of a fifth which occurs so prominently during the first movement that’s guilty. Isn’t it odd that a whole work should be named after so trivial a matter?
Dramatic much of the time, the music must have surprised many listeners when new. The harmonic shifts are frequent and often unexpected, the textures sometimes woven in tight contrapuntal cross relationships, while the rhythmic patterns are often daring. That’s why the rather aggressive third movement is sometimes known as the Witches’ Minuet. Naturally, we’re not confronting Berlioz or Mussorgsky spook music, but in historical context it must have seemed a tad threatening to Haydn’s contemporaries, most of whom doubtlessly expected an elegantly lyrical Haydn piece.
Some of that does turn up, especially in the lovely D Major rondo of the second movement, with its utterly magical coda. But after the witches music, there’s that big storm and stress finale back in the minor mode, brimming with dramatic tension. The piece is not often programmed these days, although clearly influenced much later music, not least Beethoven’s and Schubert’s. Had Haydn written nothing more than the Erdoedy Quartets he would still have to be ranked among the great masters. As it was, he took a medium originally intended for semiamateurs at home into the large halls by demanding virtuosity of the individual as well as the collective body of musicians.
Ades enters
Thomas Ades draws a lot of buzz these days, especially in England. He writes in a style somewhere between the late works of Berg and Britten, with hints of Penderecki’s proclivity for smashed textures. Sounds deliberately seem a bit out of sync, which creates a dreamlike effect. The combination of elements is at least individual, drawing a little from this, a tad from that, which is common to most composers.
“Arcadiana” consisted of seven short movements played without pause. Each reflects some piece by another composer, although I seriously doubt many listeners would notice the references. The opening “Venezia noctturna” shows tiny glimpses of the Berg “Violin Concerto”, to me at least, the next “Das klinget so herrlich” more clearly belongs to Papagano’s song in Mozart’s “Magic Flute”. And so on and so forth through Schubert, Elgar, and so on. Some of the movements are seriously tonal, most are not. Interesting, I found the final “Lethe” uneventfully slow and disappointingly weak. Perhaps Ades should carefully study Haydn’s many superb codas.
Performances were excellent throughout the concert. A minor slip here and there, but the performers are human. But the feeling for style and general dedication offered nothing more to be desired. Following the Haydn, first violinist Presler spoke to the audience, thanking us for coming in such weather, but she need not have bothered. There was only a mild drizzle when I left home, and leaving the Veterans building the sky had had the temerity to clear, save for only a wisp of cloud to be seen here and there. Weather? Bah!
(Heuwell Tircuit is a composer, performer, and writer, who was chief writer for Gramophone Japan, and for 21 years a music reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote previously for the Chicago American and the Asahi Evening News.)
San Francisco Classical Voice
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Double Play
02/06/06
By Benjamin Frandzel
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble has developed a distinctive identity by juxtaposing the music of past and present, exploring the ways music of different eras can interact when played together. On Monday at the Green Room, they applied that approach to an unusually brief time frame in a program called New Voices in Expressionism. Their musical choices suited that rather loose stylistic description to varying degrees, from precisely to rather tenuously. Though the program didn’t always hit the mark with any intent of historical illumination, the ensemble succeeded in the more important task of exploring each work on its own terms.
Both halves of the program began with superb accounts of Webern’s “Six Bagatelles” for string quartet, Op.9. The opening performance was most striking for its dramatic force, as the ensemble played with a collective feeling for the work’s stark, pointed phrases and the power of the silences that pulse through the work. The second rendition struck me more for its understanding of each ephemeral movement as a complete work in itself. With great care, the players brought a sense of internal balance and structure to the individual bagatelles, defining a sense of meaning for each brief movement and, indeed, almost every passing moment.
The repetition of the Webern work as a framing point for the program offered an opportunity for the evening’s diverse works to speak to one another, for the Webern to serve as a touchstone for the later work. This potential was realized with varied degrees of success. The strongest connections to the early 20th century were heard in the two newest works on the program, both entries in the ensemble’s annual composition contest.
And in this corner …
The winner, Carl Schimmel, is a young composer who is completing a doctorate at Duke University and is already gaining some national notice. His “Dempsey and Firpo,” the first movement of a string quartet, is a bold, loud, and exciting piece that capped the evening with great energy. Inspired by George Bellows’ famous painting of the fabled championship fight, as well as the frenetic pace of that contest, Schimmel employs the extremes of the string quartet’s range, vigorous figures for each instrument, and rapid repetitions to build a sense of condensed, explosive drama. The ensemble’s string players addressed the work with forceful precision and clear enjoyment.
The Left Coast players also chose to include their competition’s runner-up, “Imis”, a 2002 work for a septet of piano, strings, and winds by the contemporary Italian composer Massimo Lauricella. This is an appealing work that derives much of its interest from the composer’s attention to ensemble texture, as the work insistently builds up thick, gradually shifting sound masses made up of brief figures and long sustained tones. This approach alternated with short, fiery bursts of ensemble energy and eloquent single-note piano figures played convincingly by guest pianist Karen Rosenak. The ensemble played with great conviction, bringing out the work’s intuitive quality while still delineating its solid structure.
Roberto Sierra’s “Pequeño Concierto” (1998), for guitar, violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and oboe, had some appealing moments but was a bit less successful than the rest of the program. Despite the program’s Expressionist theme, I thought most often of Stravinsky as a historical source for the work, especially during the first movement’s ostinati, pithy wind figures, and asymmetrical accents. In any case, this four-movement work is marked by much beautiful instrumental writing as well as the composer’s carefully calibrated sense of harmonic tension rising and falling. But the ensemble didn’t always seem as well rehearsed as in the rest of the program, and too often there seemed to be an attempt to balance evenly the work’s complex instrumental combinations to the point where a sense of foreground and background was absent. In addition, the Green Room, always a difficult acoustic setting, seemed especially unkind to Sierra’s shifting textures and inventive tone colors.
The concert included also an excellent performance of Takemitsu’s evocative “To the Sea” (1981), for flute and guitar. Guitarist Michael Goldberg and flutist Stacey Pelinka shared a finely tuned sense of the work’s shape, luxuriating in its long phrases and restful silences without getting lost in its pensiveness. The piece occasionally skirts the edge of the “pastoral” character that this instrumental combination tends to bring out, but the composer’s originality and the focus of the players together made this performance well worth hearing.
(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.)
San Francisco Classical Voice
CHAMBER MUSIC
Viola Extravaganza
12/05/05
By Heuwell Tircuit
In my experience, most concerts are good, some merely ordinary, some few a bit weird, others genuinely great and memorable. The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s program in the Green Room of Veteran’s Auditorium on Friday combined a little of all of these, while covering three modern works (including one premiere) plus one overheated Bach Brandenburg Concerto.
The program was titled “The Violas in Our Lives,” and each of the four compositions featured the instrument in some way or other. Yu-Hui Chang’s Perplexing Sorrow (2001/02) for viola, flute and piano opened the event, followed by George Benjamin’s Viola, Viola (1997) for two unaccompanied violas. Following intermission came the premiere of Kurt Erickson’s Self Portrait #43 (2005) for viola duo and piano, and the program was rounded out with Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6. The sizable audience obviously loved it all.
Erickson has been successful in writing choral music (church music in particular), and Self Portrait #43, with its combination of novelty and accessibility, gives some idea why. The sense of melody is basically tonal, but the music is certainly modern in its colorations. There was also a touch of folk color, usually set forth in minimalist terms. Happily, Erickson knows when enough is enough, so he did not hang on his repeated motives ad nauseam.
Besides these qualities, his control of form was strong and original. Portrait opens with a sizable passage for the unaccompanied violas (Kurt Rohde and Phyllis Kamrin), mostly in toccata fashion, before the pianist (Karen Rosenak) tears into a solo that most resembles a small cadenza. Once all the protagonists have been put forward, the main body of the music then continues with the full trio, modern in its voice without ever going overboard with dissonances of harmony or rhythm. (Also, the composer’s program notes informed us that his title is a pure abstraction, neither a self portrait nor anything from a numbered chain of pieces. There are no numbers 42, 41, 40,. . . )
The centerpiece
Of the three modern works, Benjamin’s Viola, Viola was easily the most impressive. The style lies somewhere between Britten and Berio, a most unusual crossover integration but one ultimately rewarding for the ear. Benjamin uses several technical devices dear to contemporary composers, such as deliberately “roaring” the low register into a sort of rasp, playing on the bridge, and the like. These, however, sounded perfectly functional and unobtrusive. Spread amid the general brilliance of the piece are lovely bits of pure lyricism, so the music never jolts the listener. And, of course, the fact that it was marvelously played by Rohde and Kamrin added greatly to the experience.
Chang’s Perplexing Sorrow was composed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, hence the title. Her sonic vocabulary followed all the mannerisms expected of a with-it young composer, but I found it lacking in any sort of personal touch. She employed a slow-fast-slow form for her layout, but the whole did not seem to progress from one idea to the next. It was almost as if you could hear every time she had set down the pencil.
(Heuwell Tircuit is a composer, performer, and writer. He was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years was a music reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, and previously was a reviewer for the Chicago American and Asahi Evening News.)
San Francisco Classical Voice
CHAMBER MUSIC
From Past to Present, and Back, and Through
02/7/05
By Jeff Rosenfeld
One great advantage the clarinet has over most of the orchestra’s instruments is that it can slip comfortably into any stylistic situation from Mozart to Moondog. On Monday the 7th, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble featured the clarinet in a range of idioms nearly as vast. The concert went from one highlight to another, in part because of the consummate skills and ingratiating clear-as-a-bell sound of clarinetist Jerome Simas. The technical challenges of blending with strings and keyboard, which so often seem to stump even the most celebrated clarinetists, were surmounted unerringly. Everything was sweet and true and musical.
Simas was completely at home in the most conservative idiom of the Beethoven ‹ the trio in B-flat major for clarinet, cello, and piano. Perhaps I got the order wrong in the title there: it was pianist Eric Zivian who made the most of his part, adding the requisite combination of power and a twinkle of the eye that keeps early Beethoven vibrant amid all the accents. The density of Zivian’s part sometimes overshadowed the dark, rich cello of Leighton Fong, but Fong frequently captured the ear, anyway, especially in the fervor of the lively dotted rhythms of the brief march variation in the last movement and in his rapturous rendering of the yearning melody that opens the second movement. But ultimately it was all three players, with judicious tempos and unflagging energy and soaring tone, that made this a beguiling Beethoven indeed.
Thomas Adès’s Catch — written almost two centuries later, in 1991 — received an equally impressive performance. The piece is about flirtations and reconciliations, and features some wickedly exposed high registers that Simas, violinist Anna Presler, and Fong mastered with ease. The clarinet is a distant participant at first‹the composer asks the performer to wander on and off “stage” while the pianist, violinist, and cellist play as a trio. At first the piece truly is a trio, with the piano explore guttural low sounds while the strings flutter up high. Usually, the clarinet contributes ethereal long tones to resonate with the others. Everything else is fleeting in sound, if not physical presence‹the sitting trio is intentionally hard to ‘catch’ with its cells of jazzy ideas continually morphing into new elements.
By the end, when Simas sat down with his colleagues, it had become apparent how important his wanderings were to the theatricality of the piece, which previously I had only heard in the very inadequate circumstances of a CD recording. It was something about the Green Room, above Herbst Hall, perhaps, but the music really caught hold of the space.
Brilliant but benign “Contrasts”
A musical flirtation of a different kind ended the program. The performance of Bartók’s Contrasts for clarinet, violin, and piano was a tour de force, if not the most folksy rendition. Simas moved his fingers with fluidity, and his sound yet again vibrated the entire room with resplendent, cushioned clarity at all ends of the sonic spectrum, loud and soft. But the performance didn’t really have a bumptious, silly edge, relying more on seduction and getting sidetracked a bit by blinding virtuosity. The “Recruiting Dance” didn’t quite get drunk enough with its enthusiasm, though the strumming clusters ascending scales in the piano were particularly vibrant. The “Relaxation” was too benign ‹ perhaps the trills didn’t spin up enough intrigue; and the final “Fast Dance” was so daringly fast that I sometimes lost track of the seduction in progress between violin and clarinet. Unlike in the Adès, Simas and Presler simply weren’t evenly matched as acoustic partners — perhaps a quirk of the room that emphasized the overtones of the woodwind.
The pieces that didn’t feature clarinet on this program were hardly an afterthought. One short listen wasn’t enough to penetrate all the glories that may lie within Andrew Rindfleisch’s Two Pieces for Violin and Piano and W. Claude Baker’s Tableux Funebres for piano and string quartet (in which violinist Phyllis Kamrin and violist Kurt Rohde joined the others). For those who weren’t at either the San Francisco or Mill Valley concerts, I can only give first impressions.
Rindfleisch’s piece, winner of the Wayne Peterson Composition Prize last year, received its West Coast premiere at these Left Coast concerts. The Cleveland-based composer described its two movements as a study in the integration of two instruments into one sonority ‹ an appropriate complement to Bartók’s exploitation in the “contrasts” of his trio. Rindfleisch dares his performers to achieve this even while asking for “scordatura” violin (anomalous tuning, here with the lowest string tuned down a half step). This made for yet another interesting parallel, programmatically, since the Bartók has a passage for scordatura violin as well.
Rather than emphasizing the otherworldliness, or awkwardness, of the scordatura, Rindfleisch redoubles the performer and listener’s concentration on simple arpeggios, broken and double-stopped. As the work dissipates its early energy and nervousness, a calm and security emerged with the exposed, tender intervals that form the basis of the violin itself. The piece has a powerful inner direction, as a result, which reveals itself slowly and with grace, moving toward a neo-something simplicity not all that far from Górecki and other East European “spiritualists.” Zivian and Presler drew a comfortable, sustained performance of this shift in idiom.
Drawing, profoundly, on the past
Baker, a composition professor at Indiana University, follows somewhat different traditions in his piano quintet of 2003. It is an inspired pastiche and adaptation of musical and extramusical seeds. Each of the four movements ‹ or seasons ‹ is inscribed by a haiku of dark, night imagery. Baker notes, for example, that the last movement is basically in two parts, corresponding to the colon in the haiku separating the aspirations and crushing disappointments of spring.
While the music has undeniably haunting, bleak textures, what really grabs the ear of an experienced listener is the use of musical quotation. The “Tableaux” are a series of well integrated, surreal frames, in which Baker sets some of the most heart-wrenching moments in music ‹ Mahler’s Lied von der Erde (which is quoted in two different movements), Strauss’s “Spring” from the Four Last Songs, and more. In each, Baker’s setting is exquisitely done ‹ the fanatical desperation of Schubert’s “Doppelgänger” (from Schwanengesang) distilled into an ostinato rapping inside the piano, the flowering of hope in Mahler’s “Abschied” (”farewell”) opulently replayed by the quartet as an archaic relic of sanity, and so on.
Like any fanatical quoter (one thinks of the 1970s-phase of George Rochberg, for instance), Baker runs the risk of stirring his audience to go listen to the real thing. But in this quintet, at least, the settings were just as important as the gems, and the piece sounded like a jewel transcending the mixed idioms of its inspirations.
San Francisco Classical Voice
CHAMBER MUSIC
Old-Fashioned Excellence in New Music
By Janos Gereben 12/02/04
Among the many virtues of violist-composer-artistic director Kurt Rohde: a disarming lack of pretention. Many, perhaps most, advocates and performers of contemporary music develop an understandable bunker mentality early in their careers, pitched as they feel they must be against the Philistine masses, who demand such cheap attributes as melody, tonality, accessibility in music.
Rohde, who has played and produced “new music” all his life, handles the burden of being different, a member of the elite, simply and elegantly. When he stood up in the tiny, pleasant, newly-renovated Throckmorton Theater to introduce contemporary works performed by his Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, he spoke from the heart, with passion and humor, without a hint of defensiveness, not even intimating an Us-versus-Them mentality.
For example, György Ligeti’s 1968 String Quartet No. 2 was recently described elsewhere in terms of “flight into inner-space . . . a swirl of myriad glimmering lights, swaths of celestially tinted color, and sweepingly executed gestures of rising and falling, expansion and contraction.” Rohde, on the other hand, spoke of “dense, shrill passages . . . dropping to nothing . . . where it oscillates in what Ligeti calls micro-polyphony.” Both quotes are high-falutin’, but Rohde’s is much more realistic (and he had the quartet demonstrate what he meant), and it sets up lower expectations. Though you may not be one who actually sees those glimmering lights, you can certainly experience “dense and shrill,” and thus probably stay with the music until the “celestial” reveals itself.
“Noise”? Did somebody say “noise”?
Rohde has gone even further in talking about another work on the program, Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez’ . . . voici le bateau pour les calanques . . ., commissioned for the LCCE by the Barlow Endowment: “Pitch quickly turns to noise, it’s the density of sound that’s important . . .” As it happens, in the Ensemble’s high-spirited, devoted performance, the brief piece came across as a strong, atmospheric work, with character, and an appealing sense of drama. (And with no conceivable connection with the title, which refers to an announcement that the tour boat is departing for the the calanques near Marseille, those deep narrow inlets, Provençal fjords, in the rocky cliffs along the coast.)
Violinists Anna Presler and Phyllis Kamrin, Rohde, cellist Leighton Fong, and pianist Eric Zivian poured heart and soul into the Mexican composer’s work, so much so that the four string players, as they went on to perform the Ligeti, then sounded just a bit underpowered in the quartet’s more dynamic passages. (Or, possibly, the musicians were concerned with the small size of the hall, and overcompensated in “holding it down.”) The thrilling elements of the performance were the precision, the light touch, the unaffected humor in the all-pizzicato movement, and the natural, authentic voice the quartet gave to passages when the music speaks, and then whispers. The work’s multiple-voice structure emerged clearly, impressively. Swirling lights were seen by many.
A Ligeti-Dvorák nexus? Not really
Had he worked hard at it, Rohde could have made some statements of deep structure, explaining why the contemporary works were “balanced” by Dvorák’s 1883 Trio No. 3 in F minor, but he did no such thing. The trio instrumentation is piano-and-strings, as in the preceding quintet and (piano apart) quartet; and Ligeti and Dvorák “share a certain degree of wit and irony,” Rohde said, leaving the matter at that. Ligeti has said ‹ and it’s obvious in the work ‹ that his No. 2 is a kind of condensation of the rhetoric in all string quartets written before, and Ligeti’s spoofing of aspects of “the quartet” is very clear, indeed. Dvorák’s super-romantic, Wagner-influenced trio also has moments of irony and humor, especially in the Scherzo and the “super-scherzo” of the Finale, the Czech dance called “furiant.”
The Dvorák performance was hearty and sublime, in turn. Presler (a most impressive violinist), Zivian, and cellist Tanya Tomkins lived and transmitted the drama of the first movement (justifiably called “Brahmsian” in the program); evoked deep emotion with the highly operatic Poco Adagio; and then blazed to glory with the Finale. Listening to the Trio just made one miss all the more the opera that is its contemporary, Dvorák’s Dimitrij, virtually unperformed outside the Czech Republic, although it offers the same varied musical treasures as the chamber works (which, admittedly, cost less to perform).
If you ever run into the “How does it go?” blues, trying to recall some music, the Internet is very helpful these days. Amazon.com will let you hear just enough of the Dvorák to remember the music: http://tinyurl.com/63ubs. On Naxos.com, both the Ligeti and the Trio are at http://tinyurl.com/4xjj4, but (unlike in the past), Naxos now requires a fee. You get 50 free MP3 downloads before a fee is charged at emusic.com: http://www.emusic.com.
San Francisco Classical Voice
CHAMBER MUSIC
Ably Serving Many Styles
By Heuwell Tircuit 10/25/04
A fine program of two new works, an honored modern classic and a little Baroque masterpiece formed the opening concert for the Left Coast Ensemble’s season last week in the Green Room of the Veteran’s War Memorial Building. Handsomely played and very well received, the program struck like a stick in the eye at the Dumbing Down of American culture. It wore its intellectuality proudly, even a bit defiantly.
Each of the group’s five season concerts features an instrument or coupling. Last Monday’s program highlighted the oboe and, to a lesser extent, chamber music with guitar. Flutist Stacey Pelinka, oboist Tom Nugent and clarinetist Jerome Simas opened with Wallingford Riegger’s Duos for Three Woodwinds (1944), followed by the West Coast premiere of Hanna Kulenty’s Stretto (1998) for three winds and guitar, with Pelinka and Simas again, cellist Tanya Tomkins and guitarist Michael Goldberg. After intermission, we heard Bach’s Trio Sonata in G Major, BWV 1039, by the same quartet that played the Kulenty. To close, there was the premiere of Laurie San Martin’s Concerto for Four (2004), involving Pelinka, oboist Andrea Plesnarski , cellist Tomkins and pianist Eric Zivian.
Riegger’s title Duos for three Woodwinds would seem a non sequitur. The catch is that the work consists of three small three-movement sonatas (sonatinas, if you like), each for a pair of the three instruments. The first is for flute and oboe, the second for oboe and clarinet, the third for flute and clarinet. What is interesting structurally is that the whole work is like one large sonata, with each of the three sonatinas comprising one of its movements
A worthy return
Although Riegger’s music is in his modified 12-tone style, the sound is generally merry and bristles with original handling of woodwind textures. The excellent playing of Pelinka, Nugent and Simas only drove home the undeserved neglect of this important twentieth-century American. Such are current programming policies in America today.
San Martin’s Concerto, written for this ensemble and here receiving its premiere, is roughly based on concepts of the Trio Sonata in Bach’s The Musical Offering. There are even references to the theme Frederick the Great gave Bach for improvisation, which formed the basis for Bach’s Offering. There are, however, only two movements in San Martin’s Concerto, both in relatively fast tempos. Rather brief overall, San Martin’s piece proved to be very effective, relatively light and utterly free of cliches. Hers is a talent of many strengths, including an essential virtue: originality. She has invented a very interesting fresh view of sonic possibilities.
Kulenty, Polish by birth, also combined fresh notions by piling melodies over one another in almost chant-like textures. It was as if instruments were in unison, but actually playing only a hair’s length ahead of or behind one another. The dreamy effects eventually built in to a slightly frantic climax, only to fade back into utter calm, a basic arch form, cliche-free although owing something to the textural concepts of Gyorgy Ligeti.
An apt adaptation
The Bach G major trio Sonata is a major standard, well known to all lovers of Baroque music. The shift here was using guitarist Goldberg for the continuo rather than the more expected harpsichord. That’s no big matter, as plucked instruments were often employed in place of keyboard instruments during the Baroque period. In this case, that was only confirmed by the stylish elegance and uncommon accuracy of Goldberg’s playing.
I do not see how the Trio Sonata could have been improved upon. These musicians are all experienced in early music performance as well and modern styles. Cellist Tomkins, for example, has played with Philharmonia Baroque, La Petite Bande, and the Netherlands Bach Society. It also made for a nice contrast with the three unfamiliar works, a not unimportant factor in good programming.
The Left Coast Ensemble’s next set, in Mill Valley on December 2 and San Francisco on the 6th, will feature music for piano and strings: Ligeti, Dvorák and Carlos Sanchez Gutierrez. A similar pair for February is devoted to the clarinet; March, to flute; and in May, the double bass. The group is well worth keep an eye and ear on.
Good Show
By Benjamin Frandzel
San Francisco Classical Voice 05/10/04
As is often the case, the most memorable aspect of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s most recent program was their sheer sense of commitment to the music they’re playing. Last Monday at the Green Room they brought the same care to a pensive, complex new work, an eclectic, theatrical vocal piece, and music by 20th-Century heavyweights, with almost always positive results.
The evening began with two recent works, both of them very fine. Ellen Ruth Harrison’s Masques et Visages (1998-99), for oboe and stringtrio, received a performance of great sensitivity. The first ofthe two contrasting movements emphasized a series of enigmatic but lyrical oboe lines, built from a carefully controlled set of motives, which the strings supported with sparse but varied textures. Oboist Andrea Plesnarski played gracefully, while the strings displayed a superb sense of ensemble in their quiet but essential role.
The second movement followed a different path, with the strings, still operating as a single voice, taking the lead with a series of staccato bursts before balancing with the oboe, then finally circling back to the pensiveness of the opening. This piece has much to recommend it, but perhaps the strongest element was its confident subtlety. Harrison has enough mastery of her craft to trust insilence and the smallest of gestures, as well as a lyrical impulse that produced a series of lengthy, graceful lines over an exquisitely detailed background.
Songs of the city
The evening’s world premiere, a prerequisite for a Left Coast program, was Beth Custer’s delightful Bernal Heights Suite, five songs for voice and string quartet. Custer’s witty texts take a slice-of-life approach in depicting the inhabitants and mood of her neighborhood, while the music draws on a broad range of styles, each handled with affection and skill. “The General of Godeus,” for example, employs a dissonant, comical march to support a portrait of one of the neighborhood’s characters, while “Big Love on Folsom Street” mixes a sly takeoff on Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady” with some dashing salon music.
Custer,who’s best known as a versatile clarinetist/composer, did the singing, and though she doesn’t have a big voice, she makes the most of her resources. For the most part, she leaned toward a cabaret style, adding variety with some whispery moments and an occasional half-singing, half-talking approach. Her full voice has a sweet expressiveness that was a perfect fit for her texts, and her melodic abilities and rich harmonic sense made this a musically substantial and utterly charming piece, with many affecting moments.
The new works were followed by a first-rate performance of Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, with Stacey Pelinka, Kurt Rohde, and Karen Gottlieb on the respective instruments. Their playing captured each of the mercurial moods in the piece, and tuned into the restless, sometimes dark intensity beneath the gorgeous surface of the music. While the players performed with a sense of detail and awareness of the music as a series of extended, deeply felt moments, they also dispatched succeeding passages with a collective virtuosity that allowed the broader structure of the music to be clearly heard.
Sergei’s surge
This ensemble customarily plays with great energy and drive, and they brought those traits to a concluding performance of Prokofiev’sQuintet for Oboe, Clarinet, Violin, Viola and Bass. The addition of bassist Michael Taddei’s fleet and powerful playing in particular gave an animated underpinning to the music. But with an oftenbiting intensity already built into the piece, originally a circus ballet, the ensemble’s emphasis on forward momentum sometimes threatened to tip the mood from one of urgency to emergency, dropping the graceful sense of line that gave life to the rest of the program.
The muddy acoustics of the Green Room also weren’t kind to this piece. This is such a fine group that normally the quality of the music surpasses the limitations of the space. But with Prokofiev’s penchant for a heavy bottom and the thickest possible textures he can drawout, this is a tricky piece to pull off in such a murky sonic environment. The spirit of each contrasting movement was still present, but a bit dimmed or obscured, something that can rarely be said of this group.
(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.)
CHAMBER MUSIC A Genial Mix
By Benjamin Frandzel 03/29/04
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble continues to craft the kind of programs from which many other chamber groups could learn. I often wishall-contemporary concerts would have some older music to give greater perspective; and, needless to say, there’s the tired sense of hearing a program that would have seemed old a hundred years ago. At their concert last Monday in the Green Room, the Left Coast players chose a typically thoughtful balance of old and new, bringing equal ability and commitment to music spanning fivecenturies, allowing different eras to speak to each other, each piece offering humor, complexity and personality.
The evening began with Moritz Eggert’s Pong for flute, clarinet, piano and string quartet. This young German composer’s piece won thegroup’s 2003 Composition Contest, and the ensemble deserves credit for choosing a work far afield from the typical competition winner. Instead of being a flashy show-off piece for either the performersor composer (as could have been said of some of the Left Coast’s previous competition choices), this work is smart, original, and very funny.
The title refers to the computer game of yore, in which two sliding rectangles on either side of the screen bounce a ball back and forth at what, by today’s hyperactive standards, seems a soporific pace. Eggert evoked the experience by placing the winds at either end of the ensemble, trading single notes, which were “carried” to the other end of the ensemble by means of sliding string glissandos, one after the other, and a sweeping hand clicking on the front of the piano keys.
Perfect pacing
Having played this game as a kid, I can testify that Eggert got the lumpyrhythm of it just right, with the exchanges soon moving along at the faster rate that occasionally occurred in the game itself. Novelty aside, Eggert found a method of development that grew organically from the opening conceit, as the exchanges of notes spread through the entire ensemble and grew more rapid and varied. As harmony entered the mix, Eggert revealed that he has a fine ear for it, not to mention the ability to use changing instrumental texture as an animating feature of the music.
Gyorgy Ligeti’s String Quartet No.1, “Metamorphoses Nocturnes,” followed in a performance that was richly expressive from the opening note. This is an early work, finished in 1954, and far more redolent of Bartok’s influence and Hungarian music in general than the music this composer has written from the late ’50s onward. Still, many of his special traits are present: the ability to take each of his ideas as far as possible and to make the music really move while doing so, not to mention his unexpected humor.
As with Ligeti’s later work, there is a sense that this music holds many inner identities, all compressed into one creative utterance.The piece evolves from a mournful, kind of anguished lyricism,to joking hints of a waltz, and goes on many other tangents, pushingideas to extremes or just touching upon them, then changing pace at a moment’s notice. This is a difficult piece to pull off, being a single movement lasting over twenty minutes. The ensemble’s string players — violinists Anna Presler and Phyllis Kamrin,violist Kurt Rohde and cellist Leighton Fong — handled the work’s many sudden shifts in mood, pacing and technique flawlessly and fully inhabited its expressive world. A particularly luminous moment came near the end, when a single mournful violin sang over rapidly-arpeggiated harmonics produced by the other three instruments, forming a beautiful and delicate web of sound.
Some oldies
Given the program’s stated theme of dissonance (a little silly, despite the concluding presence of Mozart’s “Dissonant” Quartet), it was only natural to include some Renaissance vocal music, performed sans voices by flute and string quartet. Along with a lesson in the development of the madrigal, the selections provided a nice sense of regional styles. There was the close imitation of Josquin’s beautiful “Faulte d’argent,” and the long, elegant lines of Monteverdi’s “Cruda Amarilla” following William Byrd’ssprightly “Though Amaryllis Dance.” Texts were included in the program, and Juan del Encina’s “Triste Espana,” a lament for his nation, proved to be sadly current.
Mozart’s “Dissonant” Quartet in C Major ended things nicely. There wasa quality of evolving discovery to the remarkable opening that gives the piece its name, and an unhurried radiance to the Allegro movement that followed. Each movement shared the same thoroughmusicality and balanced contributions by the entire quartet, bringing the evening to a deeply satisfying close.
(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 at San Francisco State University.)
CHAMBER MUSIC
Themes and Variations
By Fernando Benadon 10/27/03
Properly attuned to the spirit of Halloween, last Monday’s concert of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble was not without its scary moments. It began with Tim Allen, Board president of LCCE sponsor The Chamber Music Partnership, taking to the microphone to address the funding cuts that the arts have undergone in California in recent years. His message, which loomed and lingered like a ghost over the firsthalf of the concert, was revived at the end of the intermission by (Democratic) Assemblyman Mark Leno. In a calm but urgent tone, Leno referred to California’s less-than-3-cent per-capita support for the arts as an “embarrassment.” Over the last twoyears alone, he said, the California Arts Council has seen its budget dwindle from over $30 million to just $1 million. As a result, California ranks 50th among 50 states in its support for the arts, even as studies continue to prove the importance of arts education in bolstering math and language skills, even if the state of California benefits from massive arts-related revenues (almost 17 billion), and even if last year more Californians attended arts events than sporting events.
That such exceptional groups as the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble maybe in danger of extinction sends chills down the spine. This superb concert included the world premieres of four newly commissionedworks, all inspired by Beethoven’s string quartet Opus 131 in c-sharp minor. The concert featured the Ensemble’s string quartet core: Anna Presler and Phyllis Kamrin (violins), Kurt Rohde (viola) and Leighton Fong (cello).
Just prior to the performance, artistic director Kurt Rohde invited each of the composers to stand in front of the audience to share some insights into the technical aspects behind their compositions. These brief presentations were strengthened by the Ensemble’s musical illustrations, providing the audience with a window into the composers’ creative alchemies. For example, what happens when you take the first four notes of Beethoven’s quartet, assign one note to each player to form a sustained chord, and transpose some of these notes up or down an octave? Out of these and other distortions, four very distinct works were created.
Chiaroscuro
Samuel Nichol’s Variations was dark, elegant and captivating. Its slow-moving counterpoint weaved through lush harmonies andfiery outbursts before revealing a forlorn viola melody supportedby resonant pizzicato cello chords. Yu-Hui Chang’s Shadow Chasewas an energetic four-way dialog of shifting textures. The useof two- and three-instrument combinations lent the work a sophisticated touch (the violin duo playing harmonics plus low cello was particularlyeffective). A solidly assembled work, its sections flowed into one another with perfect naturalness.
Such formal clarity stood in sharp contrast to Mark Winges’ Gloss,whose unpredictable fantasia-like construction was colored by gnarly gestures and crunchy microtonal sonorities. Communion byWilliam Beck combined quartet writing with electronically modifiedsounds that the composer borrowed from commercial recordings of Beethoven’s quartet. The piece was at its best during the quieter passages when Beck’s expert handling of the electronics could be clearly heard.
The fact that these works were brilliantly performed did not prepare me for the electrifying performance of Beethoven’s opus 131, consideredby many to be one of the greatest compositional achievements. During the first 25 minutes or so, the Left Coast players paced themselves confidently, boasting impeccable intonation, breathing in synchrony with the music and with each other, blending colors imaginatively, stretching and compressing time with the sharp sense of narrative that the work requires. Then, somewhere along the Presto, the performance was enveloped by an otherworldly force.The players became possessed. Relentlessly and effortlessly, they puffed and swayed as they gathered the momentum of a megaton freight train. When it was all over, I found myself thinking of the vanishing dollars and wondering whether the end of this extraordinary evening was the beginning of another, gloomier end.
(Fernando Benadon is a PhD student in Composition at the University of California, Berkeley)
CHAMBER MUSIC
Tightrope Act 1
By Renato Rodolfo-Sioson 2/08/03
An 1841 Viennese fortepiano by Franz Rausch and a political rally competed for the audience’s attention during the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s concert held on Monday, December 8, the eve of San Francisco’s runoff election for mayor. With a program of familiar 19th-century chamber works presented on period instruments, the Ensemble offered a refreshing aural glimpse into a sound world that Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann might well have recognized. But even without the encroaching clamor, the concert was ultimately marred by continual imbalances among the musicians.
A rarity in the concert hall, the Viennese fortepiano (”fortepiano” referring to the various technological precursors of the modern grand piano) usually appears as a solo instrument, not in chamber ensembles. There are good reasons for this. The most obvious (and audible) one is its relative lack of power (even in comparison with French pianos of the same era). Moreover, there is a fundamental inequality between the top and bottom of the keyboard: the diminished sustaining power of the brittle upper range demanded that melodies be carefully weighted against a potentially overpowering harmonic bass.
Eric Zivian is clearly a fine and imaginative pianist, whose technique was more than equal to the formidable challenges of Chopin’s Cello Sonata (op. 65) and Mendelssohn’s D-minor Piano Trio (op. 49). Nevertheless, Zivian repeatedly demonstrated that habits learned on a modern grand do not translate well when applied to the fortepiano. Booming harmonic bass lines occasionally swamped the overall texture of the piano part, reducing the melody to a ghostly presence. His tendency to overpedal certain passages — most noticeablyin the denser sections of the opening movement of the Chopin — resulted in an occasional muddy wash of sound. I suspect that his touch and his style of pedaling would have been better served by a more “modern” instrument, like a mid-century Érard.(They were, after all, one of Chopin’s preferred pianos). Zivian’s greatest successes were with the leaner textures of the slow movementsand scherzos — in particular, his reading of the Mendelssohn slow movement: it was so exquisitely poised and well-balanced as to avoid the sentimentality that usually spoils the piece.
Power struggle
Given the limitations of the Rausch fortepiano, the string players tended to steal the spotlight. Cellist Tanya Tomkins dominated the outer movements of the Chopin Sonata so completely that the piano partoften dwindled into mere shadowy accompaniment. It is possiblethat, in a similar situation, a 19th-century cellist might haveacceded to a narrower dynamic range. But Tomkins is simply too good a musician to sacrifice such a rewarding interpretation. The sheer authority of her attack, the richness of her sound, the emotional breadth — all these were so compelling thatmy qualms over the balance were transformed into mild regrets.
Ironically enough, this uncompromising attitude in relation to the fortepiano produced the finest performance of the evening. Faced with thefull dynamic range of Tomkins and like-minded violinist Anna Presler,Zivian injected a ferocious impetuosity into their presentation of the Mendelssohn Trio. Under normal conditions, one probably shouldn’t whack at an old keyboard instrument like that. But his ability to spout torrents and cataracts of notes, coupled with the inexorable melodic flow afforded by Presler and Tomkins’ impeccable bow control, produced an unforgettable performance. Certainly,it was potent argument for the use of period instruments in 19th-century chamber music. The Rausch instrument appeared to its best advantage in a sensitive performance of Schumann’s Three Romances for oboe (op. 94). The thin, plaintive tones of oboist Gonzalo Xavier Ruiz’s late-19th-century instrument were an ideal match for the fortepiano’s delicate upperrange. Less fortunate was tenor Michel Taddei’s presentation ofnine Lieder by Schumann, all settings of Heine. In taking sixselections from the Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love), op. 48, out ofcontext, Taddei violated the carefully crafted progression — both tonal and psychological — of Schumann’s greatest song cycle. The tentative (at times inconclusive) endings and even the brevity of most of the Dichterliebe songs simply do not work in a “selected favorites” format. And while Taddei possesses a pleasant enough voice, he simply was not up to the demands of Schumann’s notoriously high tessitura.
In fulfillment of the Ensemble’s mission to commission new works “as companion pieces to familiar works,” the program also included a partial premiere of Zivian’s Suite for Solo Cello with Baroque Bow. (Perhaps a less cumbersome title is in order). Again, Tanya Tomkins conquered all, attacking a score bristlingwith such special effects as multiple stops, artificial harmonics,and left-hand pizzicati. My only concern was how these rhythmically kaleidoscopic pieces coincide with the metrical framework that defines “courante,” “minuet/waltz,” or “sarabande.” Can one truly write a sonnet in vers libre?
(Renato Rodolfo-Sioson has a Master’s degree in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley. He also received the Licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music in piano performance while studying in India and occasionally appears as an accompanist and chamber musician throughout the Bay Area.)
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Masterful Twos and Threes
By Benjamin Frandzel 03/03/03
With the sheer quality of its players as a basis for programming, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble has the option of building a strong program around almost any instrumental combination drawn from its ranks. Last Monday’s concert at the Green Room featured repertoire for the duo of flutist Stacey Pelinka and cellist Leighton Fong.The works offered a showcase for these players on a purely technical basis and gave them a chance to meet formidable aesthetic and ensemble challenges.
The program effectively paired works by established masters with new pieces using the same instrumentation. The duo was featured in works by Elliott Carter and by Davis-based composer Laurie San Martin, whose recent work Zeppelin is an often lovely piece in three movements, with a skillful balance between highly contrasting parts in both fast and slow passages.
Inthe faster outer movements, the players mastered the work’s shifts between stark opposition and intertwining dialogue. In the inventives low movement, the composer used texture as a basis for development, pitting active lines in one instrument against a static series of trills in the other, then reversing roles while maintaining the lyricism that infused even the work’s most aggressive moments. I’ve been hearing at least one new piece by San Martin each year, and each one is more assured in its technical and expressive command, more coherent and affecting. This new work is a welcome addition to an increasingly fine body of work.
Matching work
Pelinka and Fong returned for a sharp rendition of Elliott Carter’s Enchanted Preludes. The duo had a clear understanding of Carter’s aestheticof musical “characters” interacting, and brought to their individual parts the attention to detail necessary to bring his music tolife. They did an exemplary job balancing their shifting roles,always providing a clear sense of the evolving foreground and background.
With guest pianist Sarah Cahill, Pelinka and Fong opened the program with a fine reading of George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae (Voice of theWhale), his exploratory classic of 1971. Each part was sculptedwith great care, through the varied passages, subtle and forceful,that this work weaves together. The score often calls for quiet dwelling on coloristic effects such as cello harmonics, or extended techniques such as scraping the piano strings, and the hauntingcombination of playing and singing through the flute that opensthe piece. The ensemble kept the musical line moving along while evoking a peaceful sense of eternity unfolding — a feeling that Crumb calls for and that the work’s subject suggests.
Despitethe excellence of the playing, some extra care could have been taken in balancing the amplification of the three instruments, as the cello was barely audible in some of the heavier tutti sections near the end of the work. This kind of flaw stands out in a piece that calls for attentive listening at every moment and incorporatessuch delicacy. The players made a thoughtful choice in dropping the masks that Crumb calls for, as they now seem badly dated tothe ’70s while the music remains uniquely beautiful and here received the careful, moving performance it deserves.
Old World echoes
The trio ended the evening with Dmamah, a new work by Israeli-American composer Tamar Muskal that won the group’s 2002 composition competition. In a looser sense than the Crumb, this is a sort of evocativeprogram music. The Hebrew title translates as “absolute silence” and the composer’s notes explained that the work’s roots come from memories of synagogue prayers melding with the sound of church bells in Jerusalem’s old city.
The piece is full of appealing elements: a rich harmonic sense, passages of driving intensity, and inventive textures like the combined flute and cello harmonics over heavy piano chords near the work’s end. Quotes from Jewish liturgical music were used as the basis for a skillfully written section of variations. Despite the quality of her ideas, Muskal packaged all of them into a fifteen-minute time frame too short to really allow them to breathe and develop, and the work had a fairly cramped feeling. The Left Coast players sometimes seem drawn to this sort of aesthetic in choosing new works, and perhaps the desire for an exciting instrumental workout took too much precedence over the ultimate effectiveness of the music.
The ensemble’s regular pianist Eric Zivian appeared for a couple ofsolo works. His own Three Etudes provided a showcase for his tremendous capability as a player, not to mention his considerable compositional skills. Providing exercises in polyrhythms, the sostenuto pedal, and perpetual motion, respectively, the three brief pieces haveplenty of musical appeal plus extreme tests of a pianist’s abilities.The slower second etude was especially compelling, with a dark harmonic palette and extremes of range that brought the Second Viennese School to mind.
With oboist Tom Nugent out with the flu, the ensemble came up withan impromptu replacement for the scheduled Bach G-Major Trio Sonata.Zivian performed three Beethoven Bagatelles, op.33 that seemedfar stormier than necessary. He explained that he had just playedthem on a replica of a piano of Beethoven’s time, and his playing had many hallmarks of an early-music performance, with sharp dynamic contrasts, zipping tempos and almost jolting accents. This approachwas certainly interesting and provided some excitement, but Zivian stirred up a tempest when these pieces could have been more deeply musical with a more relaxed approach. Pelinka rounded out the Bach substitution with a nice straight forward solo reading of a Machaut vocal work.
(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.)
CHAMBER MUSIC
By Any Other Name…
By Jeff Dunn 10/14/02
“Musicand Literature” is an intriguing theme for a concert, but how to carry it out? For the opening concert of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s 2002-2003 season, thought was given to a problem far more complex than it might seem. Even more important, audiences were treated for the most part to terrific performances of great music, new and not-so-new.
Of all the efforts to increase communication with audiences in the last couple of decades, the simplest and, in practice, least effective is to ascribe a “theme” to a concert. When slapped on after a program has been selected, such themes may be innocuous at best. Typical is a concert last year at Gardner Webb University, entitled “Awakening Global Consciousness,” consisting of “nineteenth century romantic piano music from various countries as a tribute to the September 11th tragedies.” Worse is a theme force-fitted untilit loses all meaning. For Michael Tilson Thomas’ celebrated “Maverick” concerts the list of “iconoclasts, pioneers” of 20th-century composers includes such middle-of-the-road or even retrograde figures as Adams, Piazzolla, del Tredici, and even Respighi.
Worst of all is when an ill-conceived theme drives a concert to excess. One can only imagine the result of last April’s Ft. Wayne Philharmonic concert, “Karaoke Opera!” where the threat implied by the theme was described by promotional material: “… an exploration of the beauty and emotions found in great opera music. Audience members will be invited onstage to sing along with the orchestra, karaokestyle, in three selections (lyrics provided): “Mon Coeur S’ouvre” from Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila; “My Dear Marquis” from Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus; and “In quelle trine Morbide” from Puccini’sManon Lescaut [sic]. When everybody’s good and warmed up, the audience will be invited to sing along or come up on stage and sing “Maria,” from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.”
Get those ducks in a row
Tobe most effective, the incorporation of a theme should entailas much or more preparation as the musicians invest in the works to be performed. If a theme is to be introduced to the audience by a speaker, he or she should be trained in the craft and prepare and rehearse carefully. Program notes, while not being excessively long, should explain how the theme relates in some depth to the music to be performed. If the works are new or unfamiliar, an effective technique is to play key passages as part of any spoken introduction, giving audience members advanced sign posts for what is to come.
Consideringthe above criteria, the Music and Literature concert, while not succeeding in all respects, was certainly superior to the norm.Board President Tim Allen gave a short introduction to the concert without mentioning the theme or anything about the music. Later,composer John Schott gave an enthusiastic introduction to his world premiere, but one that could have used more preparation. The works were carefully and succinctly annotated, but little mention was made of the theme except in passing. (Incidentally, a helpful addition rarely seen in program notes was a listing of the duration of each work.) All relevant texts were included. Especially welcome were text excerpts from Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” helping to set the atmosphere for the associated compositions. Since no explanationof the literary theme was forthcoming, the listeners were left to examine the relevance of each work for themselves. Tenor MichelTaddei began the concert by performing Britten’s 1957 Six ChinesePoems for Voice and Guitar. Here the literary aspect was simply that poetry was sung. Fair enough. Unfortunately, Taddei had not memorized his part. His close reading of the score provided littleo pportunity for eye contact or other gesture to the audience, actions that much of the excellent poetry cried out for. Taddei deserves credit for taking on a challenging song cycle, and forthe most part sang well except in execution of some of the higher notes. Michel Goldberg’s guitar accompaniment was exemplary.
An able transducer
In the second piece on the program, Nikita Koshkin’s Usher Waltz, Mr. Goldberg’s skill was even more apparent. The literature here is conveyed musically by the atmosphere of the Poe story, not by any specific words. One commentator referred to it as “voluptuous decay.” I would call the waltz a confection of delicate devilishness. Apparently for Koshkin, the piece has become too famous; he has to play it everywhere he goes. Goldberg, for his part, handled the technical difficulties with ease, though missing a few down beatswhere rubato did not seem called for. Highlights of the performance were his rendering of the “sproing!” climax and the ensuing pedal-point coda.
With Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat suite, arranged for violin, clarinet and piano, the literary aspect is narrative, semi-programmatic in musical terms. The music loses something in translation from chamber orchestra to the trio, exposing Anna Presler’s violin part. “The Soldier’s March” started off slowly but the rest ofthe movements were excitingly played, especially the furious third, “A Little Concert.” Aglika Angelova was a standout on the piano, perhaps too much so. Shutting her piano case might have helped balance the ensemble. Jerome Simas’ clarinet was all that could be asked for.
Next came the premiere of John Schott’s Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again. This breath exerciseof a title is actually the entire content of the poem “The Locust Tree in Flower,” by William Carlos Williams. No words are setfor this work written for the unusual combination of guitar, viola and piano. It is more the structure and process of compositionof the poem that provides the inspiration for the music rather than its bucolic meaning. The 13 words are layered atop one another vertically on the page, and were pared down from an original versionof 35 words. Thus concision and pointillistic setting of varyingatmospheres become the musical goals. Just as each word gets itsown line, each musical thought gets its own space, and they allrelate to each other. In this way, the guitar could say its ownpiece without being obscured by the piano. Goldberg, Angelova and Kurt Rohde on viola evidently had put a lot of work into the preparation of this fine, not-a-note-wasted composition. Schotts hows a lot of promise along the lines of Sebastian Currier in his masterpiece, Microsymph.
The final literary allusion, embodied in Janácek’s String Quartet#1, refers to Tolstoy’s 1889 story of a man’s insane jealousy leading to the murder of his wife. Music is referred to in the story as a provocateur of unreason and untoward passion. “Agitation” is the word used, and if any one word could describe Janácek’sstate of mind during his last decade, in which one masterpieceburst forth after another, it would be that one. Janácek was well acquainted with jealousy, but in his case it was from his wife,and deserved. In the quartet, the progression is more importantthan any narrative. The progressively intense rendition of Pressler and. Rohde, joined by Phyllis Kamrin, violin, and Leighton Fong, cello, did more than any of the performances to merge music and literature into a whole. Luckily there were no murder weapons at hand, for only Tolstoy would have known what could have transpired then had any jealous individuals been in the audience!
(Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in Geologic Education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of NACUSA and a Bay Area correspondent for the journal 21st-Century Music.)
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
All Beautifully Done
By Benjamin Frandzel 02/09/04
In a region with as many first-rate guitarists as the Bay Area, you might expect to discover many nuggets from hidden corners of the classical guitar repertoire. In particular, it would be nice to hear more of the guitar’s chamber repertory, which is full of unknown gems and underheard works by major composers, especially modern ones. As the guitar world is still dominantly committed to the solo recital, it was a rare treat that the Left Coast Ensemble offered its audience for its program last Monday at the GreenRoom. The ensemble turned center stage over to their guitarist,Michael Goldberg, for a chamber recital with flutist Stacey Pelinka and soprano Nikki Einfeld.
The only work to employ all three performers was Barbara Kolb’s Songs Before an Adieu, and it made a superb centerpiece. Kolb is certainly a major composer, but I can’t remember the last time her music was heard in a local program, and this too was a rare occasion.Her music has a bold, dramatic creativity to it, particularly when a text is involved. The five poems she set in this collection, enigmatic modern works by e.e. cummings, Robert Pinsky, and others,form a coherent whole, touching variously upon separation and longing, love and solitude, distance and memory. She approached them with just the right touch, employing her intensely expressive, essentially atonal language.
Kolb’s writing is also outstanding for her ability to tune into the text while creating a provocative interaction among the three musicians. Goldberg and Pelinka were well-matched in this music and in otherworks in the evening. Each possesses a warm and malleable toneon their respective instruments, a nice sense of rhythmic acuity and the ability to gracefully shape a phrase, all at the service of an unaffected, straightforward musicality.
A good match
Einfeld, part of the Merola Program’s class of 2003 and now an Adler fellow, is an exciting discovery. She’s impressively accurate in her sense of pitch and rhythm, and makes any text very clear throughouther range. She has an ability to focus the audience’s attentionon the words she’s singing, whatever their content might be, without dominating the proceedings. Einfeld also controls a wide rangeof vibrato, dynamics, attacks and vocal colors, and seems able to choose any point on these spectra at will. She was certainly the right singer for the Kolb work’s complex poetry, with so many ways of inhabiting the text at her disposal.
It wouldn’t be a Left Coast program without a premiere by a local composer, and the spotlight this night fell to Sean Varah. His Four Neruda Songs, for voice and guitar, deserves a life in the repertory. He chose to set four poems that, like so much of Neruda’s writing, explore love, connecting it to other feelings and to a world of experiences. Varah fashioned a sort of subtle, dissonant, melancholy musical language around the texts, which fit them beautifully. Some brief opening hints of Spanish music quickly moved into more original territory, and Varah found a fitting pace and shape for each text. The only shortcoming in his expressive vocal writing was a tendency to push the voice high into its range very early in a couple of the pieces, leading me to fear that there would be nowhere else to go.
Altogether, Varah created a setting varied enough to accommodate the lengthy texts without any feeling they had overstayed their welcome. Einfeld’s performance again was a model of varied style at the service of great expressiveness, and her diction was remarkably clear. Goldberg made an excellent accompanist, setting a strong mood in each song, assuming the lead role when called for.
From the archives
The evening opened with Ned Rorem’s rarely heard Romeo and Juliet, a 1975 work for guitar and flute. This is a set of nine brief movements, each of them inspired by a fragment of the play’s text, usually just a few words. Given the subject, Rorem’s approach was subtle and surprising, more static and impressionistic than dramatic. Sidestepping the broadest passions of the play, he has crafted a work that seems more to evoke the wide range of psychological states that the play touches upon.
Typically, Rorem’s language was coherent, with a fluent sense of line and careful control of the work’s harmonic tension. While this doesn’t rank with his finest work, it’s worth hearing, especially in such a thoughtful reading. Goldberg and Pelinka gave a soulful performance that skillfully balanced the work’s twin inclinations toward flowing tunefulness and harmonic ambiguity.
The program’s other flute and guitar piece, Roberto Sierra’s Cronicadel Descubrimiento (Chronicles of Discovery), is a three-movementwork meant to evoke the earliest encounters of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the Spanish Conquistadores. Although only the second movement is titled “Noche,” I found the entire work to have an enigmatic and nocturnal feeling, with subtly beautiful explorations of the instruments’ tone colorsand dark, haunting harmonies. Even the concluding “Batalla” (battle), meant to evoke the violence of the period, had the same kind of introspective quality beneath its energetic surface. Goldberg and Pelinka deserve a hand for choosing repertoire that avoids the choice of surface prettiness that seems to overcome many composers who write for flute and guitar, and instead opting for some deeper material.
The program ended on a lively note with four of Manuel de Falla’sgreat Canciones Populares Españolas, transcribed from the original for voice and piano. Each of these pieces, adapted from folk and flamenco sources in Falla’s unique Spanish impressionist style, is a delight. Goldberg and Einfeld dug into each one with plenty of enthusiasm, and found also the sweet mood of the lullaby, “Nana.” Falla’s artful absorption of his folk sources into an impeccably crafted concert piece was honored with an energetic performance, one that made a fitting ending to an unusual and very satisfying program.
(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.)
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, May 20, 2002
San Francisco Classical Voice
By J. M. Bailey
It is hard to review a concert of this caliber without running into hyperbole. The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, with guest artist Krista Bennion Feeney, performed on Monday May 20th in the intimate setting of the Green Room at the Herbst Theater. Although the LCCE has generally concentrated on contemporary music, on this occasion it merged with the Clavion Piano Quartet, the other ensemble of the Chamber Music Partnership, which has traditionally performed older repertoire. (The two ensembles share many personnel as well as an umbrella organization, so this was less a collaboration than a sensible consolidation.) The program consisted entirelyof French works, with music by Ravel, Lili Boulanger Couperinand Chausson. The extent to which the group managed to createa particularly French sound and means of expression was commendable.
The main fare of the evening was Chausson’s unusual “Concert in D Major,” which is scored for violin and piano solo with string quartet accompaniment. Soloists Krista Bennion Feeney and Eric Zivian both displayed virtuosity, musicianship and a true sense of partnership. Feeney’s playing was outstanding for fine singing tone and the almost liquid quality of the rapid passages, while Zivian performed with exquisite clarity and concentrated energy.
The accompaniment by the LCCE Quartet (Anna Presler and Phyllis Kamrin,violins; Kurt Rohde, viola; Leighton Fong, cello) was very sympathetic to the soloists, yet contained plenty of force in the tutti sections. It could hardly have been much richer or fuller had it been afull symphony orchestra. There was also a wide range of tone colors employed for expressive purposes; the quartet suppressed its vibrato in the Grave of the third movement, for example, to create a sense of stillness, as opposed to the richer sound employed for more lyrical movements. Inevitably, in such a small group, there were many outstanding instances of solo playing or duetting with one or other of the soloists, in particular the close interaction between Rohde and Feeney made for some memorable moments in the first movement, as did Fong’s melodic passages with Zivian inthe second-movement Sicilienne.
Elegance and Humor in Couperin
The Couperin trio sonata “La Steinquerque” that opened the concert was less striking than the rest of the program, though performed with commitment and beautifully phrased. For some reason the opening seemed a bit muffled; the choice of viola as the second treble instrument gave the whole ensemble a darker sound, less polarized toward the high and the low. Zivian gave a performance at the keyboard reminiscent of Nadia Boulanger, so appropriately phrased for the music you forgot that the use of the piano was an anachronism. Couperin’s elegance and humor were alike captured well.
Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello was the most demanding item, for listeners and performers alike. Fong and Presler played with astonishing rapport, and took the audience through a wide range of musical experience, from the exultant to the elegiac to the intensely still.
For all of these delights, it would have been worth coming out simply to hear Presler and Zivian play two short pieces (the Deux Morceaux:Nocturne & Cortège) by Lili Boulanger. What a rare gift for communication this violinist has. From the first phrase onwardthe directness and eloquence of what she had to say were in evidence. I cannot remember the last time I experienced so much sheer joy from hearing live music.
(J.M. Bailey has studied and taught music in the Universities of Western Australia and Oxford, and is currently in the States pursuing further studies in music performance.)
©2002J. M. Bailey, all rights reserved
“Left Coast” is Right As Rain
By Janos Gereben
The San Francisco Classical Voice sfcv.org April 1, 2002
Not for the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble are dry academic exercises or wild excesses in juvenile attempts to shock the audience. For 10 years now, and specifically on Monday night in the War Memorial Green Room, LCCE reflected the eminently “centrist” music of its founder-director, the violist Kurt Rohde. Perhaps even more thanat previous concerts, with this 75th birthday tribute to Donald Erb, the Left Coasters offered an entertaining, novelty-filled but substantial program.
Entertaining? How can you do that with contemporary music? By trying your damnedest to communicate. That’s exactly what’s missing from academic and in-your-face music — the commitment to speak to the audience, with music, in words, in intention. That’s exactly what was present Monday night, overcoming even the acoustic horror of the Green Room.
The non-musical portion of the intention to communicate consists of such simple, often overlooked items as good program notes, noting the time of each piece (it’s new music, after all, so how would you know otherwise what to expect?), and speaking to the audience when necessary — without overdoing it. And so, when Erb, who came to San Francisco for the occasion, had to be hospitalized with an infection, Rohde spoke before he took part in the performance of the String Quartet #2, adding words from the performer’s pointof view to the program notes and explaining the reason for the birthday celebrant’s absence. When the tenor Paul Sperry noticed that only the French text was printed for Ravel’s Chansons Madécasses, he provided a quick spoken translation “for the few people whose French is not perfect.”
Communication in music doesn’t necessarily mean easy accessibility and the West Coast premiere of Harold Meltzer’s Exiles was a good case in point. Clearly more “abstract” than the rest of the program, the work came across well, nevertheless. Conducted by Meltzer (artistic director of New York’s Sequitur ensemble) and featuring Sperry, who commissioned it last year, the work is written for tenor, flute (Stacey Pelinka), clarinet (Jerome Simas), violin (AnnaPresler) and cello (Leighton Fong, who played brilliantly allevening long, in every piece).
Bleak texts, Robust Music
Exiles uses the text of two poems by the same name, by Conrad Aiken (abouta desolate landscape) and Hart Crane (about the “voiceless” enduranceof denied love), material — according to the composer himself— that’s “pretty sad,” and yet the music is rather robust and energy-filled. It has a stunning opening, the voice appearing as a string instrument and the strings playing individual “voices”until they meet in a rather operatic ensemble. Sperry, who is on the faculty of the Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Musicand the Aspen Music Festival, sang both Exiles and the Ravel songs with exemplary phrasing and diction. He was accompanied in Chansons, excellently well, by Pelinka, Fong and Eric Zivian, piano.
Rohde has been at work now for some time, writing small pieces for various cellists. One of these, called Play Things for cello and piano, received its world premiere at this concert by Fong and Aglika Angelova, a young transplant from Bulgaria with fingers of titanium and very short hair fashioned as a peacock feather. Can a three-minute musical fragment make a “statement”? Rohde’s certainly has. Brutally percussive and filled with the rhythmic excitement that characterizes much of his work, Rohde’s “play thing” is no kid stuff. The more he moves away from the “Bartok sound” (the thing that struck me when I heard his work first years ago), the closer Rohde gets to Bartok’s essence.
The 11-year-old Erb quartet (with Presler, Rohde, Fong and violinist Phyllis Kamrin) is arguably the composer’s best work. It’s best heard without seeing the many unorthodox methods it employs struck strings, use of chopsticks (yes, really, to avoid the players’ reluctance to use the wood of expensive bows), a wordless chant at a climactic moment, and so on — because the resulting music is rich and meaningful, has nothing to do with all the otherwise distracting shticks. It is flowing, attention-gripping, dramatic, complex music, performed here to the highest standards.
In a decade of encountering Rohde’s ensemble, I cannot really say that I’ve ever HEARD it, and this concert was no exception. The Green Room is dead, noisy (street traffic, including sirens, constantly intrudes) and echo-filled. That the Left Coast Ensemble still uses it can be chalked up to the fact that it’s one of San Francisco’s cheapest venues. Musicians like this deserve better.
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to sfcv.org, is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail addressis janos451@earthlink.net.)
©2002 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved
True To The Untried And True
By Benjamin Frandzel
The San Francisco Classical Voice, sfcv.org, Jan. 24, 2000
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble continued its season a week ago Monday with three world premieres by young composers and a standard ofthe chamber repertoire, the Brahms Piano Trio, Op.8. In typical Left Coast fashion, a near-full house in the Green Room was treated to an evening of committed playing in which untried works received the same degree of attention and passion as the venerable masterwork.
The opening work, Laurie San Martin’s three-movement Circus Maximus, had much to offer. The middle movement, “Waltz-like,”was particularly compelling, the strings with beautiful long lines in finely balanced counterpoint. Here, in contrast to the thicker texture of the outer movements, the composer achieved a clarity of line and restrained orchestration that made each instrumental statement deeper and more vital than the last. The piano’s brief, graceful phrases brought especially poignant accents.
The faster outer movements framed this lovely music in a variety ofways.The final movement made for a strong conclusion, a skillful balancing act between the piano’s motoric arpeggios and the strings’ heavy accents in softer unison phrases, mirroring the piano with fragments of its material. The first movement, with its dense instrumentation and collage-like alternation of ideas, was less effective, perhaps due to the sheer amount of information presentedat the piece’s opening. This movement might have been more effective placed later in the piece, after the composer’s language and approach had become more easily assimilated. Given the movement’s brevity, a reduction in the rate at which ideas were introduced, or else a longer movement to elucidate the composer’s thinking, would have brought me into the orbit of the piece more completely. Still, I’ll look forward to hearing more from San Martin, whose technique is already accomplished and whose musical statements seem destined to broaden and deepen.
The ensemble’s director, Kurt Rohde, a familiar figure on many Bay Area stages, presented two of his recent Three Fantasy Pieces for viola, cello, and double bass, with the composer himself on viola, guest artist Julian Hersh on cello, and bassist Michael Taddei. As always, Rohde’s writing for strings revealed an expert approach to the ensemble, and he found real depth in the course of two short movements. I disagree with Rohde’s title for his first movement, Abrupt Fragments, which he characterized as “self-explanatory” in his opening remarks. I heard a very clear and organic development taking place, with arching phrases growing longer and longer, answered by tutti harmonics, emphatic repeated notes, and rapid lines voiced again in harmonics.
The second movement, Solstice, was another brief but rich traversal of the trio’s timbral palette, with upper-register passage workin the cello and bass answered by pizzicato and harmonic passages. It was a pleasure to hear the instruments explored by someone who knows them so well, like finding new pathways leading off of familiar roads. The evening’s third premiere was Justin Merritt’s The Day Florestan Murdered Magister Raro, a work that won the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s annual composition competition this year. (The names in the title are fictitious characters Robert Schumann worked into his writings.) Made up of three short movements for violin, cello, piano and clarinet, it has strong qualities. The 25-year-old Merritt has a fine ear for instrumental color and knows how to exploit the virtuoso resources of an ensembleas fine as this one.
In the first movement, traditional development was largely replaced by a sort of music of interruption, in which one flourish or pattern–trills, clarinet squeals, rumbling lower register piano–is rapidly replaced by another, and rarely returns. The third movement offered a similar approach, this time alternating a collection of textures ratherthan replacing them entirely, and moving the process along at an increasing rate of change. The search for effective proportions between alternating patterns presents an exciting challenge, but with continuous replacement of ideas so often being the music’s premise, this opportunity was largely unexplored. The second movement, though more restrained in terms of the sheer amount of material and filled with beautiful and inventive textures, also attempted to make something happen through sheer accumulation of activity,rather than a more organic development. In all fairness, Merritt’sopening remarks on the piece indicated that this is what he hadin mind, joking about cartoon music and writing for audienceswith short attention spans. He succeeded at what he set out todo, but with more room to be heard, every one of his ideas couldhave been more compelling.
In all three premieres, the ensemble played with an unwavering commandof and commitment to its material, bringing the same attentionand level of communication to new works that it brought to Brahmsin the evening’s second half. Instead of program notes for the concert, bios and spoken introductions by the evening’s livingcomposers were provided. This offered a chance for the artists to speak at length about their work, but with the exception of Rohde, who was more anecdotal and perhaps more comfortable on his home turf, the composers’ brevity was disappointing. With such an obvious opportunity, it would have been nice to hear more about the ideas behind the music.
Prefacinghis piece, explaining the presence that evening of several guestmusicians, Rohde mentioned that two married couples in the Left Coast Ensemble were taking care of new infants. Despite the unusual line up, the unity and intimacy of the music didn’t suffer. The Brahms trio was marvelously balanced and focused. Although this work is marked by the composer’s ability to develop grand gestures across a large scale, much of the most beautiful playing came in quieter passages, when communication among the players was at its highest point.
(BenjaminFrandzel 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.)
Ensemble Entertains with Style
By Georgia Rowe
The Contra Costa Times, Wednesday, October 6, 1999
NEW MUSIC is alive and well, as long as the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble is around. The San Francisco-based organization opened its four-concert season Monday at the War Memorial Performing Arts Center with an appealingly varied program of all-20th century works.
The featured piece was the West Coast premiere of Eric Zivian’s “Six Significant Landscapes” for Soprano and Piano, with the composer at the piano and soprano Sara Lamar MacBride as soloist.
Also on the program were Ned Rorem’s “Ariel” for Soprano,Clarinet, Cello and Piano; Sergei Prokofiev’s Quintet for Violin, Viola, Oboe, Clarinet and Double Bass; Alfred Schnittke’s Trio Sonata for Violin, Viola and Cello; and Witold Lutoslawski’s String Quartet.
Stylistically,the concert covered a lot of ground, from the acerbic dissonances of the Schnittke and Lutoslawski works to the heady, folk-inspired melodies of the Prokofiev. The Left Coast players, however, made the transitions with ease. This is a flexible, resourceful ensemble, and each work on Monday’s program emerged in an elegant performance made of equal parts depth and dexterity.
Zivian’s 1995 “Landscapes” is a striking set of miniatures setto texts by American poet Wallace Stevens; each is no longer than three minutes, but each makes an indelible impression. With Zivian’sassertive playing creating an expressive framework for MacBride’s angular vocal lines, the six individual pieces came together in an intriguing mosaic. MacBride, however, didn’t always project the texts as clearly as one would have liked.
Zivian and MacBride were joined by clarinetist James Freeman for Rorem’s1971 “Ariel,” in which the composer provides fertile settings for five texts by Sylvia Plath. The trio achieved a fluent blend throughout, with the fourth song, “Poppies in October,”sounding especially vibrant.
The Prokofiev quintet was also splendid. It was written in 1948 as a circus ballet, and one can hear melodies from the composer’s”Romeo and Juliet” and “Cinderella” woven into its six movements. It’s a wonderfully imaginative piece, and the musicians played it with exuberance and spontaneity.
Tonality Vs. Atonality, One More Time
San Francisco Classical Voice, Oct. 4, 1999
By Ronald Catalbiano
A central musical argument of this century has been the use or avoidanceof tonality and the debate continued on Monday at the Green Roomof the War Memorial. There the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presented five works of the past half-century. Serge Prokofiev’s 1948 Quintetand Ned Rorem’s 1971 Ariel represented the tonal defenders. Witold Lutoslawski’s 1966 String Quartet and Eric Zivian’s 1995 Six Significant Landscapes were largely atonal while Alfred Schnittke’s 1985 Trio Sonata moved freely over the spectrum. The dates show that there has been no steady progression toward or away from atonality;the controversy that existed 50 years ago is still at work today.
The two-movement, 25-minute Schnittke Trio Sonata puts this polemic front and center by moving between Brahmsian tonality and Bergian atonality. Sometimes they are immediately juxtaposed and at othertimes a transition is inserted. Similar musical ideas are treated in both techniques, and indeed one feels that we are being lectured on how tonality and atonality can be related. But it is not enoughfor the techniques to share musical material or to bridge from one to the other by adequate technical means. The emotional journey must be direct and the need for it must be explicit. This is wherethe work falls short. The juxtapositions become commonplace and surprise quickly turns into a seemingly arbitrary movement between tonal practices of different eras.
This was no fault of the players. Violinist Phyllis Kamrin, violist Kurt Rohde, and cellist Leighton Fong played the work with skill and passion, clearly defining both the individual elements andthe long line of the composition. Yet even this outstanding performance left me unsatisfied. In a world full of Schnittke fans, I find myself in the minority who believe that tonality and atonality have been amalgamated by Charles Ives more cleanly, by Peter Maxwell Davies more smoothly, and by Joseph Schwantner with better reason.
Ned Rorem’s “Ariel” makes no apologies for its decidedly tonal bent. The musical evocations of five Sylvia Plath poems are accomplished and exhibit Rorem’s typical careful prosody. Yet while charming, the settings have the fault of predictability. Perhaps Sara MacBride’s sonorous soprano could have been more carefully moderated to the chamber setting, and her desire to produce a beautiful legato could have better accommodated the need to articulate the text. Clarinetist James Freeman and pianist Eric Zivian did their best to find color and life in somewhat pedestrian clarinet and piano writing. Only the second and fifth songs, where Rorem singles out particular vocal and instrumental colors, were truly successful.
Zivianwas also represented as a composer, and the west coast premiereof his tightly constructed, nine-minute Six Significant Landscapes for soprano and piano was a relief from the discursive Rorem. Zivian’s composition mirrored his piano playing–elegantly phrased,with just the right amount of color. MacBride was more comfortable in these short and clear character sketches, and her balanced performance added to their charm.
The two earliest works were the least and most tonal. Prokofiev’s seldom played Quintet for the unusual ensemble of oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and double bass was written in 1948. Energized by lively folk tunes and quickly shifting tonalities, the six-movement work is delightful fun, not only in the three fast movements butalso in the somber intervening movements. Oboist Thomas Nugent played especially well in difficult low-register passages, and double bassist Michel Taddei’s bright tone and agile playing were evident throughout.
Lutoslawski’sString Quartet, written in the experimental 1960s, upheld theatonal end of the spectrum with the most honesty and enthusiasm. In fact the lack of tonality is less striking than the work’s aleatoric rhythmic elements. The quartet was originally available without a score in the usual sense. The instrumental parts were written in the four quadrants of a single sheet of paper, rather like Renaissance choral music. (The composer later created a moretraditional score.) Through this technique, and because thereare very few bar lines, the exact alignment of the instruments is a matter of chance.
The players are called upon to listen carefully to each other and fit their musical gestures to the gestures of their colleagues.The quartet of Karen Shinozaki and Phyllis Kamrin, violins, Kurt Rohde, viola, and Kris Yenney, cello, played with remarkable ease and expression. The performance had the edginess of improvisation and the gloss of a precisely prepared score. The composer could not have asked for more.
(Ronald Catalbiano is a composer living in San Francisco and teaching at San Francisco State University.) ©1999 Ronald Catalbiano, all rights reserved
Excerpts fromThe San Francisco Classical Voice
review of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s concert, Jan. 26, 1999
by Charles Cronin
For the complete review, please visit sfcv.org
The reviewer characterized the performance of Robert Schumann’s PianoQuintet as a “heedlessly extroverted reading of this complex work, capturing little of the drama lying in its abrupt textural and dynamic shifts. I heard only traces of the suspense and dread I associate with the slow march of the second movement.”
Hewent on, however, to say that, “I heard sensitive and balanced renderings of not only Davidovsky’s Chacona, but also the premieres of the first movement of Zivian’s String Quartet, and “‘On the Lightness of the Moon Rising out of a Tourmaline Sea’ . .. by Richard Festinger . . .”
Of Eric Zivian’s String Quartet, Mr. Cronin wrote “The players approached this intelligent piece with the same solicitude that they might dedicate to a late Beethoven quartet, and with predictably excellent results. In particular, here–and throughout the program–violinist Phyllis Kamrin played consistently with the polish and confidence associated with members of top-ranked quartets.”
Festinger’s”On the Lightness…” struck the reviewer as “a hastily assembled piece, long on grand ideas but short on execution.. . . The players, however, for whom the work was written, gave it a heartfelt reading . . .”
Mr.Cronin concluded, “With its broadly educated and technicallyexpert musicians, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble is one of the strongest concentrations of musical intelligence I’ve found inthe Bay Area. Such a group gives hope for the survival of serious new music and, in my view, is among the most deserving of financial and institutional support.
(Charles Cronin is a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems. He completed a Ph.D. in Musicology at Stanford in 1993.)
Excerpts from “Left Coast Ensemble’s Taste For New Music”
The San Francisco Classical Voice, Oct. 6, 1998
by George Thomson
The San Francisco Classical Voice, sfcv.org
On entering the Green Room . . . audience members were greeted withglasses of wine and gourmet chocolates. Clearly, here is an ensemble which cares not only about its audience’s edification but also its pleasure–a concern happily borne out in the concert’s first-rate, emotionally committed performances. . . .
.. . The string quartet “Ainsi la nuit” (1978) of Henri Dutilleux, is a brilliant and atmospheric evocation of night-time.. . . The performers wove their way through the nightscape with a clarity of ensemble, sureness of intonation, and sensitivity of timbre that made every gesture seem inevitable.
Benjamin Britten’s “Nocturnal” for solo guitar of 1963, though also cast as a series of short episodes, offers a different view of night, that of Dowland’s lute-song “Come, Heavy Sleep,”which serves as the melodic foundation of the work . . .Guitarist Michael Goldberg’s performance was assured and compelling . ..
Between these two works was the world premiere of violist and composer Rohde’s “DUOS”. . . The composer seeks to give the impression of more than two voices by alternating the extreme registers ofeach instrument. The result is beguiling; the opening, still-breathed texture, which puts the clarinet over the flute, is particularly fine. . . .
After intermission came the west coast premiere of “Autumn Music”by . . . Jennifer Higdon. . . . [The musicians] delivered a robust,sonorous performance; [Tom] Nugent’s affecting melody on the English horn was only one beautiful moment among many.
The program’s closing work offered no deep thematic connections to the rest of the evening’s music, but it did chase away any lingering melancholy. “Till Eulenspeigel einmal anders!” is .. . [a] five-player distillation of Richard Strauss’ eponymous tone poem. All the good bits are there, arranged for violin (Presler),clarinet (Jackson), horn (Garrett), bassoon (Lockhart) and double bass (Michel Taddei). The five showed absolutely no strain at having to do the work of at least twenty musicians each, deftly zooming from prank to prank with an insouciance befitting Till himself. It was a fitting end to a substantial program that offered both satisfaction and pleasure, and an excellent beginning toa promising season for this ensemble . . .
For the complete review, ©1998 George Thomson, visit sfcv.org
Excerpts from “Left Coaster’s Do It Right”
by Joseph Mancini, 20th Century Music, May 24, 1998
A tasty sonic repast of underplayed classics and works by prominent living composers was offered up by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. . . The level of virtuosity, musical intelligence, and commitment was formidable. [In the] companion works, “Dance of the Blessed Sprits”by Gluck, from Orfeo . . . and Thea Musgrave’s “Orfeo III”, flutist Lisa Byrnes brought an impressive technique wedded tofirm understanding of the music’s melos . . . The ensemble in the Gluck was tenuous, and would have benefited from a conductor. .
The program’s second half sailed into more musically uncharted waters,but was graced with the presence of Donald Erb, one of our leading composers, who acted as helmsman. Erb provided pungent, humorous and personal introductions to his works . . .”Sunlit Peaksand Dark Valleys” is Erb at the height of his powers . ..Eric Zivian on piano and Carl Jackson on clarinet were superb interpreters, joined by Karen Shinozaki’s luminous violin .
[In the next piece, ]“In the Still of the Night” for solo viola . . . [violist] Kurt Rohde displayed passion, precision, and flair .
The program’s finale was Erb’s “String Quartet No. 2″ playedby the Onyx Quartet [of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble] . . .Is there a better string quartet working today than the Onyx? In the past tow months I have heard both the Kronos and the Arditti, and in my estimation the Onyx play with more commitment and intelligencethan the Kronos, and more beauty of ton and tighter ensemble than the Arditti. Erb himself, not to mention the audience, was thrilled with there virtuose, passionate account of this energetically thorny work. Intonation, ensemble, and phrasing were all impeccable.
For the complete review, see 20th Century Music, July 1998, Volume5, Number 5, Page 23
East Bay Express, March 6, 1998
Reviewer Sarah Cahill selected the Left Coast Ensemble’s concert at Berkeley Chamber Performances for the week’s Critic’s Choice of classical music, and wrote:
“Too often, performances of new music suffer from minimal rehearsal time . . . frankly, musicians sometimes feel they can get away with it, since they figure we’re listening to a new piece rather than to the performance itself. At the oppositeness of the spectrum is this talented and dedicated group of local players, under the direction of composer Kurt Rohde. Each concert is polished, throrougly conscientious, and revelatory, and their skilled performances enhance the musical content.”
The San Francisco Post/Oakland Post, December, 1997
by Janos Gereban
If I knew what makes Kurt Rohde a truly special young composer, I would bottle and sell the stuff. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s there. The violist gave the world premiere of his `Music for String Quartet’ today at a Left Coast Chamber Ensemble concert in San Francisco’sYerba Buena Gardens Center for the Arts. It confirmed and strengthened the impression he made a few months back when the New CenturyChamber Orchestra premiered Rohde’s `Oculus.’
Strong and yet lyrical, a bit similar to Bartok, with lots of pizzicato but the overarching line always maintained, the best parts reserved for the viola (guess who played), Rhode’s work is short and sweet (only three brief movements so far), and most of it– to use a technical term– is quite beautiful.
Why the title, why not just call it a string quartet? Rohde said he was `scared’ writing `a real string quartet,’ so he tried to get around the name. Something like Mahler writing `Das Lied’ insteadof the ominous Ninth? Can you trick the gods fiddling with the name? In the event, Rohde didn’t need to worry.
The performance, by the Onyx Quartet [four members of the Left Coast Ensemble], was outstanding. Rohde, violinists Anna Presler andPhyllis Kamrin and a dynamo of a cellist, Leighton Fong, alsodid the honors for the concert’s other premiere, Miguel Chuaqui’s`Cuarteto.’ The young Chilean-American, from UC-Berkeley, is teachingat the University of Utah. With clear, clean lines, Chuaqui built an impressive sound structure — and then stayed inside, not reaching out and grabbing the listener the way Rohde managed.
20th Century Music, June, 1997
by Sarah Michael
“Can you imagine a concert . . . played by a dozen performers who are each excellent technicians, excellent musicians, and obviously enjoying themselves? Can you imagine a well-constructed progam–one with variety, beauty, and interest? You don’t have to imagine this; you can experience it first hand at the Left Coast Ensemble’s regular concerts . . .”
Andrew Imbrie has received the New York Critics Award, the Boston Symphony Merit Award, the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award, and was Composer in Residence at the Tanglewood Music Center.He was professor of Music at UC Berkeley from 1949-91. The most recent recording of his work is the compact disc The Chamber Music of Andrew Imbrie (New York, NY: New World Records, 1994).
Mr. Imbrie attended the October 1996 Sonus Imaginorem concert, and then sent us the following comments:”I want you to know that I was delighted with the quality of the performance this afternoon of my piece for clarinet, violin and piano, ‘To a Traveler.’ The three young musicians, Carl Jackson, Kathryn Stenberg, and Eric Zivian played it with fire, gusto, accuracy, sensitivity, and true understanding. The entire program was of great interest, and exhibited the talents of a varied group of highly professional performers.”
JoanTower. Composer Joan Tower’s works have been performed byorchestras in New York, St. Louis, Washington, DC, San Francisco,Tokyo, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Recordings of Ms. Tower’s musicappear on CRI, Summit, RCA, and Nonesuch Records. Silver Ladders,written for the Saint Louis Symphony, won the 1990 GrawemeyerAward. Her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman has been played by 110ensembles since its premiere in 1987 and was recorded on RCA bythe Saint Louis Symphony. In 1994, Leonard Slatkin led the NewYork Philharmonic in Concerto for Orchestra. From 1985 to 1988, she was composer-in-residence at the Saint Louis Symphony.
Ms. Tower, after attending our May 1996 Sonus Imaginorem concert, wrote,”I am still reeling from your group’s performance of my Island Prelude and Turning Points. I could not believe how well-played and how exciting those performance were. I am telling everyone about your wonderful group.”
Jennifer Higdon is a young composer whose work is drawing considerable attention and praise. She won the Composer’s Inc. compositionprize, and recently won the Charles Ives Fellowship from the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters. USA Today’s Classical Choicesfor 1996 named her as as composer of the best new piece ofmusic for that year.
Ms. Higdon writes: “I just wanted to drop a line to let you know that I had a chance to listen to the tape of the October performance of my solo flute piece ‘Rapid Fire.’ I have to tell you that your flutist, Lisa Byrnes, was absolutely fantastic! This piece is so difficult that many flutists are hesitant to tackle it, and once they do, it’s not always a good performance. But knowing what good musicians you have working with you in Sonus Imaginorem, there was enough reassurance that the performance would be spectacular before I even heard the tape. Thank you very much for programming such a difficult work and for giving it such a wonderful performance.”You’ve been one of the most professional groups I’ve worked with. The quality of musicianship was impressive throughout the concert. You have a first rate group and you should be very proud of it.”
Composer Jorge Liderman was born in Buenos Aires and received his musical training at the Rubin Academy of Music and the Universityof Chicago. In 1989 he joined the faculty of the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, where he is a professor of composition.His works have been performed by the Tanglewood Orchestra, Earplay,the London Sinfonietta, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group,the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Arditti Quartet,and many others.
“Liderman has a voice of his own, both coherentand compelling.” The Chicago Tribune.
“Liderman’s musichas both sophistication and primal energy . . .” The NewYork Times.
Sonus Imaginorem performed one of his pieces in October,1996 concert. In 1997, Mr. Liderman wrote
“Last fall I had the opportunity to have my ‘A Cinque’ performed by Sonus Imaginorem [now the Left Coast Ensemble] in San Francisco. I was extremely pleased with their rendition of my work. The players not only showed technical confidence, but also a good understanding of the music which came e across through the highly expressive performance of the work.”Since Sonus Imaginorem was founded, I have always found their program engaging and well thought out, covering a wide and interesting range of musical expressions of our time. The concert on which ‘A Cinque’ was performed was not an exception. It included a beautiful work for two oboes by Kurt Rohde, as well as “Black Angels” by George Crumb. The entire event was an enjoyable experience; both programming and performance were exemplary.”
In the East Bay Express, February 14, 1997, Sarah Cahill reviewed a concert of the Onyx Quartet, which is made up of four musicians of Sonus Imaginorem: Anna Presler, Phyllis Kamrin, Kurt Rohde,and Leighton Fong. The group was assembled to play new works.
“The most impressive aspect of the concert was the quartet itself. Its members violinists Phyllis Kamrin and Anna Presler, violist Kurt Rohde, and cellist Leighton Fong had clearly put as much care and consideration into playing these new works as they would have with Schubert or Beethoven. They balanced their impeccably controlled ensemble playing with a sense of interpretive freedom. All four make their instruments sing with a glorious tone. At no point did the players give any impression that these works were new to them or that they were rough or unformed, as often happens (unfortunately) in performances of new music.”
Speaking of the same ensemble, 20th Century Magazine wrote that
“[The Onyx Quartet] . . . can play anything, and at this stage is as accessible as Kronos was before it began to orbit Earth.”