The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble began its season with a program blending the (relatively) old and the new. Monday night’s concert at the Green Room in San Francisco’s Veterans Memorial offered a group of five pieces featuring the first performance of Wayne Peterson’s distinctive String Trio, composed in 2007, and commissioned by the LCCE.
The trio is in a single continuous movement lasting about 12 minutes, with each instrument maintaining its own fiercely competitive identity. First among equals is the violin, whose fitful, turbulent lyricism drives the music forward much of the time. The tempos are generally fast, with the textures surging onward and upward until, about halfway through, the motion subsides and the music descends into a slower, more sustained, almost tentative change of pace.
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
The calm respite is a kind of interlude, which soon launches the piece into an even more dynamic final section, developing many of the ideas presented earlier. From this point there is considerable contrast, and great rhythmic flexibility. Urgent tremolo figures spread from one instrument to the others, temporarily taking over the texture. A stuttering chain of accented, repeated chords breaks through the contrapuntal mix, turning things in a new direction. Yet there are also graceful melodic shapes that soften some of the music’s frenzied contours, imparting warmth and a kind of impassioned tenderness at times to the score. This piece, the concert’s high point, was beautifully and authoritatively played by violinist Anna Pressler, violist Phyllis Kamrin, and cellist Leighton Fong.
Romantic Revelation
These players also gave a rousing performance of the final work, Dohnanyi’s Serenade in C Major for String Trio, Op. 10, from 1902. The 25-year-old Dohnanyi showed himself to be a brilliantly talented composer in this piece. Its musical style is late Romantic, with lyrically ecstatic passages welling up in each of its five movements. A chromatic motive appears regularly, binding the work together. It is especially prominent in the slow movement as the melodic and harmonic center of a meditative theme and variations. Though Dohnanyi was a childhood friend of Bartók’s, and they both attended the Budapest Conservatory, Dohnanyi never in his long career experimented with the radical modernism that attracted Bartók.
The concert started with Ernest Bloch’s Suite No. 1 for Solo Cello (1956). From its slow, spacious, opening arpeggios to the giguelike finale, this piece is clearly a kind of homage to the Solo Cello Suites of J.S. Bach. Even so, there is originality and emotional depth to the writing, which exudes the ripeness of age; Bloch was 76 years old at the time. These qualities came out strongly in Leighton Fong’s sympathetic performance.
Britten’s Six Metamorphoses After Ovid, for solo oboe, Op. 49, was composed in 1951, the same year he completed his opera Billy Budd. Its fairly short movements reflect a few of Ovid’s mythological characters who were transformed into inanimate nature (Niobe is changed into a mountain, Narcissus into a flower, and Arethusa into a fountain, for example). Oboist Tom Nugent projected the work’s lyrical grace and whimsy with admirable clarity and commitment, though perhaps there is some quirky humor and wonderment below the surface of these pieces that could give them a bit more flair and individuality.
William Beck’s lighthearted Candy for the Witch Mouth (2008) for oboe, violin, viola, and cello takes its title from a remark made by the composer’s young daughter while on her first Halloween outing. Its three brief movements are attractive, deftly composed, and, on the whole, more of a treat than otherwise.
Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who lives in the East Bay.
