One Found Sound Presents Spring Program

OFS musicians in performance (from the banner on the Web page for last night’s program)

Last night One Found Sound (OFS), the local orchestra that performs without a conductor, welcomed spring with a program entitled Sonic Blooms. The “flowers that bloomed,” so to speak, were two new compositions created for this year’s Emerging Composer Award competition. The winer of that competition was Ty Bloomfield with a composition entitled “FLUX // DRIVE,” given its world premiere performance. This was preceded by the West Coast premiere of the runner-up composition, “Shubho Lhaw Qolo,” by Sami Seif. This featured a solo viola performance by Sam Nelson. The second half of the program paired the Adagietto movement from Gustav Mahler’s fifth symphony with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 550 (40th) symphony in G minor.

The highest form of praise for a new work is a desire to hear it again. This was the case for both of the pieces in the first half. Not only does OFS perform without a conductor, but also they do not provide program notes. Each work receives an oral introduction; but, where the new pieces are concerned, that provided little material for either anticipation or reflection. As a result, there is little I can report about how either of these composers cultivated their respective rhetorical stances, let alone how those stances were established through approaches to instrumentation. Those that attend concerts frequently know that the capacity for listening is usually cultivated through program notes! Nevertheless, I would welcome the opportunity to encounter both of those new works in subsequent performances.

Fortunately, program notes were not necessary for the second half of the program. Both selections are frequently encountered, meaning that, probably for the most part, listeners knew what to expect. The Mahler movement was given a thoroughly engaging account with a better view of the contributing harp performance than one tends to encounter at Davies Symphony Hall. Sadly, there was no account on the OFS Web site of who that harpist was. The Mozart selection could not have been more familiar to most of the audience, but there was a freshness to the performance that sustained attention to all of those notes many listeners already know by heart.