Last night at Heron Arts, One Found Sound (OFS) presented the second “chapter” in its season of three concerts organized around the overarching theme of storytelling. The title of the “chapter” was Divergence; and, if there was no sense of a narrative thread across the three selections of the program, there was certainly one of departure from expectations. The “underlying expectation,” so to speak, was the “conventional standard” for organizing a concert program to consist of an overture, a concerto, and a symphony. While that standard was honored, each of its elements had its own way of establishing a divergence.
The opening selection, “Teen Murti,” was by Reena Esmail, born in Chicago in 1983 of Indian ancestry. Her musical training followed Western traditions, taking her bachelor’s degree at The Juilliard School, followed by graduate work at the Yale School of Music. She currently teaches in the Precollege division of the Manhattan School of Music. As a composer, however, she has adopted her Western training to explore her Indian roots; and “Teen Murti” shows how she can take a Western genre, such as a concert overture, and rework it to provide a more interdisciplinary perspective.
Teen Murti was the name of the New Delhi residence of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. It translates into English as “three statues;” and Esmail’s score is structured into three major sections, inspired, by her own acknowledgement, by the plan for Modest Mussorgsky’s suite Pictures at an Exhibition. However, as is the case in the Mussorgsky suite, those sections are linked by interstitial material that says as much about the spirit of the locale as the “statue” sections do.
Each of those sections amounts to a raga, which is introduced by a somewhat improvisatory approach to laying out the underlying gamut of pitches. During that introduction, every member of the OFS string section had her/his individual part. Within the overall fabric of those melodic lines, one could detect exchanges between individual voices along with a shared sense of “warming up” that one encounters in traditional raga performance. While the depiction of each of the “statue” sections may not have been as clear as Mussorgsky’s suite movements (at least to an American listener), even those unfamiliar with traditional Indian practices could appreciate the interplay among the performers and the dialectic of unity in the ragas themselves and diversity in the interstitial material.
The concerto selection was actually a concerto grosso by Swiss composer Frank Martin with decidedly unique instrumentation. The concerto instruments were a collection of seven winds, a “standard” wind quintet of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn, to which were added a trumpet and a trombone. Accompaniment was provided by a string orchestra to which were added timpani and percussion.
Martin was clearly interested in the individuality of each of his solo instruments; and, over the course of the concerto, he explored the sonorities that would arise as they played in different groups. (Any student of combinatorics will recognize just how many of those groups could be formed. Fortunately, Martin did not attempt an exhaustive exploration of all of them.) The outer movements both reflected the composer’s capacity for high spirits, saving the playfulness of his percussion writing for the final gestures of the third movement. The middle movement was based on a “tick-tock” ostinato (which may have involved a prankish poke in the ribs at Joseph Haydn’a Hoboken I/101 symphony in D major). The prevailing rhetoric is cheerful with occasional ventures into the sardonic and perhaps even the sinister.
Most impressive about the concerto, however, was the throughly imaginative fabric of the composer’s rhythms. Indeed, it was through those rhythmic patterns that the accompanying strings could establish their own identity in the face of so many “competing” soloists. These days Martin tends to be known more by his name than by his work. This concerto was unabashedly tonal at a time when the pendulum had swung into atonality, meaning that many “in the know” were quick to dismiss it as unfashionable. From our present vantage point it is easier to appreciate just how imaginative the music was, as well as the freshness of Martin’s capacity for rhetoric.
The opening measures of Mozart’s K. 183 (Breitkopf & Härtel edition, from IMSLP, public domain)
The “divergence” of the symphony also involved a gentle poke in the ribs. When one thinks of the G minor symphony of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, K. 550 almost immediately comes to mind. Last night’s selection, however, was K. 183, sometimes known as the “little G minor symphony.” K. 183 has the usual four movements; but they are definitely on the shorter side. The instrumentation involved an interesting approach on limiting the winds: two oboes, two bassoons, and four horns. The result was a vigorous account, which may have been a bit scrappy from time to time but still amounted to a delightful account of Mozart’s capacity for invention at the age of seventeen.
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