According to the bio for composer Mario Diaz de León in the latest program of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, heard Monday night in Herbst Theatre, he has achieved "fluency with a huge spectrum of musical effects, ranging from the most delicate chiaroscuro to the blinding intensity of the supernova, the black hole, and the eclipse."
I have no earthly idea what any of that means. But I did enjoy listening to his piece
Gated Eclipse, for Pierrot plus percussion and electronics. The drama was provided almost exclusively through crunchy, noise-based timbres that would ease their way into the mix. The acoustic instruments, by contrast, shone most in the moments where the electronics tapered off to reveal their deeper intimacy, sounding at once as if a "pause" button had been applied to the entire ensemble.
At the climax of the piece, the electronics greatly overshadowed the acoustic instruments, in both volume and intensity. While well-paced in a formal sense, conceptually this electronic pride of place shifted the focus from the musical to the technical, making a key musical moment into a (seemingly) accidental celebration of technology. It even brought to mind the question the trombonist explicitly asks in Berio's
Sequenza V after sardonically cutting the music short: "Why?"
This question came up again with Mario Davidovsky's newest addition to his
Synchronisms: No. 12, for clarinet and electronics. He has upgraded his composer's toolbox to include snippets of real clarinet sounds as source material — certainly no groundbreaking technique, but striking nonetheless when compared to the more ascetic backdrop of No. 6 for piano, from nearly four decades ago. In the electronic part of No. 12, more or less "normal" clarinet sounds pop up here and there, though in the acoustic realm it is unclear why the clarinetist is given no corresponding "bag of tricks," such as extended techniques that would mimic or prod the electronic textures.
Ironically, the more "archaic" sounds in the tape part created the most tension and interest, revealing the composer's extraordinary ear for even the smallest details of an instrument's sound color. Especially memorable was Carey Bell's full, resilient tone, able to convey a sudden, incisive lyricism in two or three notes before the line leapt elsewhere.
Mismatched Threads
The concert's theme, "American Mosaic," struck me as funny, as I wondered how exactly Dmitri Tymoczko's
Four Dreams got sewn in with Davidovsky's
Synchronisms. They are surely at opposite ends of the quilt, or perhaps even opposing sides of it. Either way, it's unclear what miraculous thread binds them to the same program.
Performed with bass clarinet, percussion, piano, and electronics that included narration,
Four Dreams reveled in cliche. Where Davidovsky's elusive line hinted at solace in a near-constant state of flittering madness, Tymoczko's artless refrains lingered incessantly on stolid, boxy musical figures that made blunt associations with imagery or action from the text.
Lest my own position on this musical quilt be assumed, I might as easily put it differently: The
Synchronisms have an ambiguous, maybe even uneasy, relationship with musical reference (was that ever-so-brief trill at the beginning a
Rhapsody in Blue reference? Is that a profane question?). Tymoczko's music, however, thrives unapologetically on such references, leading to a lively, often-wry energy that is at times undeniably infectious.
Lei Liang's
Trio was a curious and compelling piece because it seemed to inhabit the space somewhere between the two pieces described above. The ethereal, abstract sonorities it created on piano, cello, and percussion at the beginning and end had little to do with the modal middle section that not only evoked dance rhythms, but
itself danced. The aesthetic distance traversed over the short span was refreshing, owing in large part to the concision and clarity of each individual phrase or figure.
Chris Froh gave a striking treatment to the work's central drum solo, conjuring up one of the more expressive and lyrical bass drum diminuendos I've ever heard. If you think it's peculiar to pair the words
lyrical and
bass drum together, well, then, you ought to go hear Froh play on a concert sometime.
Reynold Tharp's
Littoral, for solo piano, also featured some fitting material for a fine SFCMP player, Julie Steinberg, whose crisp, sensitive interpretation illuminated buried layers of activity, especially as the harmony expanded toward the end. In one beautifully written phrase, Steinberg fashioned a cantabile line built from the lower notes of each sprawling chord, producing a distant, muted song that underlay a bustling musical surface.
Ending the program was Elliott Carter's
Luimen, a quirky piece in which hockets (a kind of musical hiccup) pass as easily from harp to trumpet as they do from mandolin to trombone and back. This is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink piece, and I was informed after the concert that Carter's
Shard for solo guitar, a piece I've analyzed, is actually embedded in the middle of
Luimen. I had no idea, so I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether that says more about me as a reviewer than it does about Carter's compositional aesthetic.