Last night in the Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) presented the San Francisco performance of the third program in its 26th season. The title of the program was The Sound of Nature; and the primary “media” for the evocation of “natural” sonorities were cellos and percussion. Indeed, those resources were summoned in full force to conclude the evening with the world premiere performance of Clarice Assad’s “Lemuria,” a concerto scored for two solo cellos, percussion, and a cello choir.
A speculative map proposing the extent of Lemuria in the Indian Ocean (from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
The title is the name of one of those “lost lands” (such as Atlantis), conceived as a utopia and discredited during the nineteenth-century as scientific theory became more mature. It was also known as Mu and was believed to have been located in the Indian or Pacific Ocean. The name seems to have originated with the zoologist Philip Sclater, who had identified lemur fossils not only in Madagascar (which is now the only lemur habitat) but also in India. He concluded that there was once a larger continent, which he called Lemuria, that served as a land bridge across the Indian Ocean, most of which deteriorated. Any thoughts about Lemuria being utopian did not originate with Sclater but subsequently emerged among theosophists.
Regardless of what one may think about what Lemuria might have been, there was a consistently engaging other-worldliness in Assad’s score. Born in Brazil, Assad’s instrumentation recalls an earlier Brazilian composer with a keen ear for cello ensembles, Heitor Villa-Lobos. However, her voice as a composer is very much her own; and the music itself is characterized by distinctively panoramic qualities. By constantly shifting the way in which she partitions her ensemble, the cello choir establishes an ongoing flow of changing sonorities, against which the solo parts, taken by Tanya Tomkins and Leighton Fong, alternate between blending and contrasting, supplemented by “punctuations” from percussionist Loren Mach commanding a widely diverse assortment of instruments.
That accounts for the specification of Assad’s scoring as it appeared on the program sheet. However, a few elements were missing. Assad herself sat behind the cello choir with a microphone. Those who know her as a performer know that she is capable of a prodigious variety of vocalized sonorities; and she engaged those sonorities to add highlights to the other-worldly context established by all of her instrumental resources, capably conducted by Matilda Hofman. Those highlights were further enhanced by wind sounds, which the audience was requested to provide on cues given first by Tomkins and later by Hofman. The result was an unanticipated blending of the vocal and the instrumental that made for a thoroughly engrossing listening experience.
Mach had two further opportunities to apply his percussion resources to connotations of the natural world. He gave a solo marimba performance of the second movement of Evan Hause’s “Fields,” which was particularly effective for the composer’s exploration of the deep reverberations of the lowest pitches on the instrument. Mach then joined with guitarist Michael Goldberg to perform George Crumb’s Mundus Canis (a dog’s world). This is a five-movement suite with each movement provided a miniature portrait of a dog the composer had kept as a pet. There were many moments of witty “sound effects;” and Goldberg would sometimes complement Mach’s work with percussive sonorities from his guitar. The whole experience was as delightful as it was imaginative. Far more serious was Kurt Rohde’s “credo petrified,” an evocation of Petrified Forest National Park for solo cello (played by Fong). This piece, too, was distinguished for the wide diversity of its sonorities but ultimately succumbed to the risk of devolving into a parade of special effects.
Tomkins began the program with a solo performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1007 suite in G major. This had little to do with the overall theme of the program; and, sadly, it did not do very much by way of justice to the composer. Tomkins seemed to be having trouble with consistent bowing, leading to sonorities that impeded the account of many of the pitches. Since there is no such thing as a “tone that does not matter” in a Bach score, the overall sense of most of the movements was blurred, sometimes beyond recognition. Furthermore, among the five dance movements, only the Courante and Gigue seemed to capture any sense of what the dance was, which constituted yet another blurring of the composer’s intentions.
No comments:
Post a Comment