Last night the musicians of the Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival, led by Founder and Director Ian Scarfe, took their work to San Francisco for the first of two performances of their latest program, American Spring. This was inspired by the decision to perform Aaron Copland’s music for Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring” using the original score for an ensemble of thirteen instruments. This involves only three winds, flute (Gina Gulyas), clarinet (Matthew Boyles), and bassoon (Dan MacNeill). The string section is basically a double quartet with two instruments for each “voice” as follows: first violin (Sam Weiser and Alicia Choi), second violin (Theo Espy and Stephanie Bibbo), viola (Stephen Fine and Ivo Bokulić), cello (Kendra Grittani and Joseph Howe). The remaining musician was Kody Thiessen on bass. Scarfe led from the piano.
Each of the performers had a separate stand. To the best of my ability to observe, there seemed to be passages in which each of the quartet “voices” was subdivided. The result is an elaborately woven texture, and there is much to be gained in approaching Copland’s score as “pure music” without giving much thought to Graham’s choreography. In fact, last night’s performance played the suite that Copland extracted from the full score. For the most part, the only significant excision is that of the preacher’s fire-and-brimstone sermon, originally danced by Merce Cunningham. Copland himself conducted the complete score with this original instrumentation for a Columbia album that is now included in the Sony Classical anthology released this past February.
Much as I enjoy that album, I have to say that there was a lot to be gained in being able to see who was playing what. Since the music was originally performed in an orchestra pit to allow Graham and her dancers full use of the stage, last night made for a somewhat special experience, enhanced by the intimacy of the Monument space in SoMa. (There will be a second performance at 3 p.m. this afternoon at the Century Club of California, which should have about the same intimacy.)
By way of an “overture,” Scarfe began the program by playing two of the movements from Samuel Barber’s Excursions suite, which was composed around the same time that Copland composed his score for Graham. Barber had a somewhat aristocratic upbringing on the Main Line outside of Philadelphia, but his music often served up engagingly rough edges. Scarfe began with the opening movement, an ostinato that warps traditional boogie-woogie. He then moved on to the third movement, a mind-bending complex of polyrhythms weaving around the tune for “Streets of Laredo.”
The second half of the program was devoted entirely to a six-movement suite by Sam Reider entitled Hyampom. This is the name of a town in the Trinity Alps, which the composer had known from his childhood. The music thus amounted to a memoir, capturing six different aspects of his memories. (These were all enumerated in the notes he provided for the program sheet.) Reider also joined the ensemble, playing the part for accordion that he had composed.
The recent Columbia release also recorded excerpts of the composer rehearsing his “Appalachian Spring” score. He cautions his musicians about being too sentimental. Reider followed that same caution in composing Hyampom. His memories are genuine, but his rhetoric is never mawkish. One could say that both of the selections on the program could be classified as “Americana;” but the perspective is established through clarity, rather than sentimentality.
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