A year of research. Over 100 works by Swedish composers examined. Only four chosen. For the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players' "Shimmers and Thrills" concert, the anticipation generated by Executive Director Adam Frey's Swedish quest was similar to that found in Beth E. Levy's wonderful program notes on one of the four finds,
Truffle Hymn: "The ground itself gives way when, at the last, the long-sought treasure is unearthed: Is it an aroma? A taste? A transfiguration?"
Or maybe a shrug? Fortunately, at least one of the
other works on the awkwardly themed program, Yan Maresz'
Entrelacs (1997-1998), brought the shimmers and thrills that Henrik Strindberg's
Cheap Thrills and Liza Lim's
Shimmer Songs could not. The Frenchman's studies in Paris with Tristan Murail, the leading exponent of the
spectral school, bore rewarding fruit in his piquant use of sound combinations and clarity of orchestration.
A scurrying piano part consisting almost entirely of 32nd notes provided a host of delightful fluttering and shimmering effects, while pairs of winds (flute and clarinet/bass clarinet) and strings (cello and bass), along with a vibraphone, contributed concurrent effects that were consistently arresting. Above all, the piece contained an inner logic to go with its aural pleasures, making for a highly satisfying musical morsel.
Anders Hillborg, the most famous of the chosen Swedes, is by far the best known in the Bay Area, having had several of his orchestral works performed in San Francisco and a string quartet recently premiered in Napa. His contribution to the concert was a five-minute tidbit of program music, the aforementioned
Truffle Hymn (2002). Three quarters of the music concerns itself with busy rootings (marked "frenetic" in the score) of a porcine truffle-searcher, depicted by flute, violin, cello, and piano.
Squeaks, scrapes, lots of pizzicato, and violin meows provide sound effects to the nuzzling. With the fungus found, the music suddenly halts, concluding with deliberate, single notes on the piano. Whether this is meant to represent savoring of the prize is not certain: The sound may be considered pungent by some, but would be repugnant in church. No hymn, this.
Maniacal Lullaby
Even less liturgical was Jesper Nordin's
calm like a bomb (2000). The frustratingly nonrhyming title comes from the rock group Rage Against the Machine, and rage this piece did — against persistence of the light, and anything pleasurable to the ear. I doubt that, on first hearing, even astute listeners could detect that the piece was based on a lullaby written by Nordin's father, and contains, according to the composer, a connection with Swedish folk music material that "has never been as obvious to me as it is in this work." Instead, it sounds like
A [Last] Day in the Life of a maniacal virtuoso violinist who relishes playing frantically on or near the bridge of his hapless instrument.
Like the Beatles' song, an electronically produced accompaniment develops an overwhelming crescendo of Armageddon-size proportions. Violinist Graeme Jennings, a newcomer to the ensemble, displayed his impressive skills, but the implied lyrics were missing: "I'd love to turn you offfff-----."
Henrik Strindberg, a student of Brian Ferneyhough's "new complexity" movement while at Stockholm's Royal College of Music, seems also to be a fan of sly allusions. During the preconcert interviews, he refused to answer directly whether he was related to the famous playwright, instead responding, "In Sweden, all Strindbergs are related." In
Cheap Thrills (1993), Strindberg explains the title with a similar circumlocution: It is a play of references "to famous musicians, working methods, attitudes," including Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa, and Bennie Maupin.
The interviews conducted before the concert began would have been a perfect time to illustrate these connections with examples from the score, but, as usual, giving concert attendees a better chance to understand the music itself was forgone in favor of blab. (To be fair, a program called "Contemporary Insights" was offered the day before concert, during which one piece on the upcoming program was examined and partially performed in detail. Strindberg's was not the one chosen, however.)
In any event, the references were not apparent to me. Instead, I was reminded of John Williams' score for
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, due to the nonthreatening, "spacey" electronics accompanying the alto flute, bass clarinet, piano, and percussion, as well as the use of descending major and minor thirds. None of the amassed sounds seemed new, and little that was memorable ensued, yet the work may have in it buried potential.
Stretching Time
Tommy Zwedberg's
Enso (1993) for flute, clarinet, alto saxophone, trombone, marimba, and piano, was interestingly described by annotator Levy: "It is difficult to pinpoint, for example, the precise moment at which the ensemble's momentum begins to build." To me, it was never. A single, banal thread gets passed from instrument to instrument note by note, while the rhythmic accompaniment relentlessly changes meter. Then a few unisons occur. This goes on monotonously in a quasi-minimalist fashion, making its nine minutes seem like 18.
Lisa Lim's
Shimmer Songs (2006) was the other non-Swedish entry on the program. Lim is a Chinese Australian much taken with Aboriginal music. Her piece for string quartet, harp, and percussion dealt with the ritual obscuring of iridescence, optical effects, and bright hues that are sources of power in Aboriginal culture. To my ears, she spent far too much of her own power on the obscuring, and too little on the shimmering.
Her main obliteraters were two pairs of
guiros (serrated wooden tubes) and
reco-recos (springs fastened horizontally on wood blocks). Rasping noises were generated incessantly by stroking these instruments with sticks. Lots of jeté (bouncing bows) on the strings, double stops, and squeaky-door sounds were also fine obscurers. In keeping the idea of shimmer (in Lim's words, "indicator of another spiritual reality") "veiled or made dull in order to protect onlookers from those same forces," Lim was totally successful.
No question at all: The best truffles grow in France.