SOLI at Blue Star:
Six living American composers, most borrowing (or stealing) from the past
January 11, 2008Maybe it’s just coincidence, or maybe not, that the most arresting music on the SOLI Chamber Ensemble’s all-living-American program Thursday night was produced by composers who came of age in the 1960s.
It was a heady and disruptive period, in nearly every way. Young composers-in-training were listening to some crazy music by their figurative older brothers, who felt an obligation to make the world afresh with every fractious piece.
Much of that sense of adventure apparently stuck to San Antonio native Robert X. Rodríguez, represented by “Gambits” for horn and piano (2000), and Bill Douglas, whose “Suite Cantabile” for woodwind quintet (2007) closed the concert.
Rodríguez titled each of his six movements with chess references. The piece begins with a an exciting fanfare or call to arms (“White vs. Black”) that requires the hornist to produce rapid repeating notes and, by manipulating the hand in the instrument’s bell, startling sounds like the trumpetings of an elephant.
The horn waxes lyrical over a calmly flowing piano part in “Giouco Piano.” The last four movements give the composer an excuse to draw from various national styles -- “Muy Ruy” is a dark, mysterious evocation of Spain; “French Defense” recalls Satie; “Sicilian Defense” is pure oregano in six; “Copa Capablanca” is a swinging Cuban dance.
From that description, you might think the music is derivative. It isn’t. Though Rodríguez cheerfully admits to “stealing” much of his material, he always manages to make it his own -- witty, surprising, personal, humane and very much of the present.
Jeff Garza delivered the daunting horn part with total assurance, and pianist Carolyn True was a supple partner.
Douglas’s piece, co-commissioned by SOLI and 32 other ensembles, was memorable for the complex, eccentric, biting rhythms and crisp textures in three of its four movements -- one was a placid pastoral -- and for a fine sense of instrumental color throughout.
Each of the eight movements in Leslie Bassett’s “Metamorphoses” for bassoon, composed as a tribute to bassoon teacher L. hugh Cooper, begins with a quote from the familiar orchestral repertoire -- passages that bassoonists might prepare for audition.
The composer quickly departs from each quotation, taking the line far afield while retaining much of the sensibility of the original context. A clever concept, well executed by Bassett and stylishly played by Brian Petkovich.
The forever-young Elliott Carter’s “Retrouvailles,” a sort of albumblatt for Pierre Boulez’s 75th birthday in 2000, was a muscular, crystalline piece, brief but hardly little. True played it with conviction.
John Harbison’s “Six American Painters,” a 2002 work for oboe, violin, viola and cello, was rather a dreary piece. The squiggly oboe line, played nattily by Stephanie Shapiro, was interesting, but the strings usually played chordally in an idiom that seemed trapped in early 20th-century expressionism.
Gunther Schuller borrowed some tropes from George Gershwin for the “Romantic Sonata” for clarinet, horn and piano, dating originally from 1941, a few years after Gershwin died, but revised in 1983. The finale even recognizes Gershwin’s Francophile proclivities in the lyrical Ravellian center, between spirited slices of Tin Pan Alley rye.
If Blue Star’s acoustics are a little too in-your-face, the gallery can usually be counted on for an intriguing visual backdrop. Behind the players on Thursday was Virginia Fleck’s wonderful pair of mandalas made of plastic bags from Target, Best Buy, Home Depot and other retailers -- the consumer culture transmuted into spiritual meaning. Or vice versa.
Mike Greenberg
