Sonic Diversity … if not Luxury

Last night the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble offered the last of its five streamed programs that constituted its 28th season. The title of the program was Sonic Luxury; and there was definitely imaginative diversity, if not luxury, in the instrumentation of the four compositions on the program. The program began with a solo performance of Clara Schumann’s Opus 20 set of variations on a theme by her husband Robert presented by LCCE pianist Eric Zivian.

Regular readers probably know that I have not taken well to the flood of physical mannerisms that Zivian exhibits, presumably to convey his personal attachment to the music he is playing. The good news is that the video direction judiciously led the cameras away from those mannerisms for the most part, preferring instead views of the piano from different angles. This allowed the viewer to focus on the music, rather than the musician; and, through the shots of the keyboard and the inside of the piano, one had a better sense of Schumann’s sensitive approaches to both polyphony and sonority.

Zivian then accompanied clarinetist Jerome Simas in a performance of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s four-movement sonata entitled “Nachtlieder.” In his opening remarks Simas suggested a connection to the four pieces for the same instrumentation that Alban Berg had composed for his Opus 5. The author of Berg’s Wikipedia page refers to the “aphoristic poetic utterances” that Berg set in his Opus 4 Altenberg Lieder collection. That sense of aphorism seems to have lingered into Opus 5 and was subsequently appropriated by Salonen. One might almost view “Nachtlieder,” composed in 1978, as a “reflection” of (or on) Berg’s Opus 5, which was composed in 1913.

The remainder of the program shifted attention to larger collections of strings. Derek Bermel’s “Soul Garden” amounted to a concerto for viola (Kurt Rohde) and a quintet of two violins (Anna Presler and Phyllis Kamrin), viola (Matilda Hofman), and two cellos (Leighton Fong and Tanya Tomkins). This was followed by Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s Opus 10, a quintet for clarinet and string quartet in F-sharp minor. Neither of these was given a particularly compelling account, almost as if the players were too buried in their score pages to allow any of the expressiveness in the music to emerge.