SFCMP: First Round of “Emerging Composers”

Daniel Cui, whose “Nanjing Fragments” concluded last night’s concert

Last night in Herbst Theatre the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) presented the first of two concerts based on the results of this year’s Emerging Composer Grant Program. This consisted of world premiere performances by three of the Program’s composers. In “order of appearance,” the composers and their selected works were as follows:

1. Luca Robadey: Stained Glass
2. Laura Cetilia: unless
3. Daniel Cui: Nanjing Fragments

The selections were all performed by SFCMP musicians led by Artistic Director & Conductor Eric Dudley.

“First contact” experiences are often difficult, since the attentive listener tends to require time to adjust to the context. As a result, it is a bit unfair to account for “brand new works by brand new composers” with little preparatory context. Since the entire program was only an hour in duration, the experience became one of the emergence of first impressions. How enduring those impressions will be can only determined by future performances of the selections themselves.

I have to confess that I found “Stained Glass” to be at least a bit ironic. Robadey delivered a solid command of music for percussion, much of which tended to suggest the glass being broken. I found myself noting in my program that the quality of his rhetoric was more organic than optical. “Stained Glass” was followed by Cetilia’s “unless.” Those familiar with the music of Morton Feldman would probably have detected his influence. However, while Cetilia seems to have captured Feldman’s sense of extended time, her own effort took too long to go nowhere. The final selection was Cui’s “Nanjing Fragments.” He introduced the piece as having three separate movements, but I fear I was never able to parse that structure on a first listening experience. I was more impressed by his command of the full ensemble, even if the harp could never rise to an audible range in the face of a rich brass section.

Whatever impressions may have been experienced, these selections constituted some significant first steps, and what remains to be seen is where those steps will lead!