Boston, MA
Connecting With Boston Composers – The Boston Musical Intelligencer
The Whitman sampler that Winsor Music proffered Friday on the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Middle yielded some candy morsels. Structured round a theme of composers with largely strong connections to Boston (and some not so strong), it sought to bundle new flavors with outdated favorites—or no less than what the ensemble wish to be outdated favorites. Co-Creative Director and violinist Gabriela Diaz said the purpose succinctly as specializing in the more-heard-about-thank-heard “Boston Six” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these being, in alphabetical order, Amy Seashore (1867-1944), George Chadwick (1854-1931), Arthur Foote (1853-1937), Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), John Knowles Paine (1839-1909), and Horatio Parker (1863-1919). Of those, Seashore, Foote, MacDowell and Parker featured. Into this combine, with one different historic entry within the type of Florence Worth (1887-1953), Winsor nestled three premieres, two by native eminences Eric Chasalow and Yu-Hui Chang, and one by Afghani Milad Yousufi.
Seashore and Foote have been represented by short-ish duo works, the previous’s 1893 Romance for violin and piano, op. 23 and the contemporaneous “Pastorale” motion from the latter’s Three Items for oboe and piano, op. 31. The Romance is type of an prolonged track with out phrases, premiered on the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and shows Seashore’s immense present for supple melody joined to typically daring, although by no means obtrusive, chromaticism in concord. Diaz and pianist Yoko Hagino projected tender ardency. The Foote, although written for oboe, is most frequently heard in its alternate scoring for flute, and we’re grateful for its welcome look right here in its unique type, particularly as expounded by the redoubtable Peggy Pearson, with Hagino. A comparability of the 2 variations is instructive: with their distinct timbres, even with all the identical notes they arrive throughout as two distinct items, with the oboe by far the extra pastoral in high quality. A revisit to this composition in its entirety can be welcome.
The primary of the brand new items was the Ghost Songs by Chasalow, who together with Chang is a mainstay of the Brandeis composition school. He detailed their considerably convoluted evolution of their present scoring for mezzo-soprano, clarinet and piano as recompositions from a collection of 5 for voice and piano, and symbolize one thing of a Covid lockdown mission. The composer wrote his personal texts in a burst of inspiration, he mentioned, to specific emotions of loss; and, certainly, as the general title and the person ones (“First Ghost,” “Two Ghosts,” “Ghosts of Key West”) point out, haunting absence is the prevailing motif, although they current as something however lugubrious. In truth, drawing to a substantial diploma from his work together with his spouse, Barbara Cassidy, as a pop duo (shades of Bolcom and Morris), in these items he has embraced a pop, jazz, and within the closing track Latin, sensibilities one seldom encounters in his electronics-heavy oeuvre. The primary of the songs additionally presents a textual content that’s in itself a type of minimalist piece, with regularly evolving riffs by repeated strains, sung with a plummy Broadway-cum-pop magnificence by Sonja Tengblad, in opposition to a fragmented piano line (Hagino) to which the clarinet (Co-Creative Director Rane Moore) contributes, forming with the piano a indifferent commentary to the vocal line. The second track shades modal folksiness with the Broadway vibe, whereas the jauntier finale provides in a Latin beat spicing up extra normal “classical” idiom (there’s even counterpoint!). That is, general, a really worthy contribution from Chasalow that should be heard once more.
The reason for the second premiere maybe took longer than the piece itself. As a part of its commissioning program, Winsor requests the commissionee to supply, within the season after the “foremost” work, one other quick one in every of hymnic mien on themes of peace, love, brother/sisterhood, and suchlike. Yousufi, now age 27, whose biography and fee/efficiency/awards listing can be spectacular for somebody twice his age, is now a grasp’s scholar with Dalit Warshaw in New York (his chief connection to Boston appears to be the fee he obtained from Winsor). His entry, Love Story, Music for the Spirit is a deceptively easy, almost diatonic piece offset with some intelligent chromatic slides in parallel concord. In a real innovation in live performance annotation, its one-page quick rating constituted its personal program word. After a run-through by the whole Winsor ensemble (Tengblad, Pearson, Moore on bass clarinet, Diaz, Jan Müller-Szeraws on cello, and Hagino), the viewers was invited to take part on the following spherical. Fittingly for somebody (the composer) who amongst different issues teaches music notation utilizing the Sibelius program, the sound of this hymn, to those ears, got here with a Sibelian accent.
In her remarks prefacing the debut of Resurfacing, Chang additionally invoked pandemic confinement as an overhang to its genesis, by which she thought-about the that means of “normality” (who was it wrote “’Regular’ is what different persons are, and you aren’t”?). Scored for oboe, bass clarinet, violin and cello (Pearson, Moore, Diaz and Müller-Szeraws), the devices largely stake out ostinati or different attribute patterns, and because the work unfolds, they battle and eventually succeed, provisionally, in acquiring a type of collective regularity, which partially dissolves however partially doesn’t. Life’s type of like that. The ending is kind of beautiful, with an enthralling and by no means “regular” chord development. In sound and construction Resurfacing is kind of totally different from what we have now heretofore recognized of Chang’s fashion (full disclosure: Chang was a co-artistic director of Dinosaur Annex throughout our lengthy affiliation with that group); afterwards, we requested her if this was her “new regular,” and he or she demurred, however frankly we’d love to listen to extra prefer it.
As soon as upon a time, MacDowell’s “To a Wild Rose,” the primary of his ten Woodland Sketches for piano (1896), occupied the highest spot on the chart of the preferred music in America. Primarily based on a melody taken from a Wisconsin offshoot of New England Native American tribes, it was as well-known and ubiquitous as Mendelssohn’s “Spring Music,” although we don’t know if it ever scored a Loony Tunes. MacDowell’s setting insinuates superior concord into the easy tune however doesn’t overpower it. A lot anthologized and now most likely largely restricted to scholar efficiency, it was given a simple studying by Hagino that didn’t appear so as to add something to our understanding of it.
Regardless of Diaz’s recreation try and shoehorn Florence Worth into the Boston Six as its seventh member (she studied at NEC with Chadwick however made her profession mainly in Chicago), there are different composers who have been extra carefully related, for instance Frederick Converse. However, from an esthetic standpoint Worth, the huge bulk of whose work is simply now being rediscovered and who’s having a particular second, might rightfully be mentioned to be the end result of the late-Romantic American fashion most carefully related to Our Honest Metropolis. The set of seven songs sung by Tengblad and accompanied by Hagino coated an attention-grabbing vary of texts and underscored the number of Worth’s moods, notably within the central “4 Encore Songs” that performed up her humorous vein; Worth had a weak point for Ogden Nash, it will seem. Worth’s settings of African American poets, with Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “The Sum,” Langston Hughes’s “Bewilderment,” and Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.’s “An April Music” got here from her extra typical vein. There, the gravitas and cadences of the Black expertise got here ahead, seasoned with harmonizations from the world of Chadwick and MacDowell (thought-about very a lot out of date within the Thirties when these items have been written). Tengblad returned to the art-song vocal fashion with impeccable richness and suppleness of tone and tight vibrato management. Besides within the “humorous” songs, although, her expressive voice and face went unmirrored in her fingers and physique, the employment of which might most likely have enhanced the general impact.
The live performance closed with one other one-movement excerpt from an extended work, Parker’s Suite for Piano Trio in A Main, op. 35 (1904). Take a second to shed a tear for Parker, as soon as hailed as America’s best composer, and whose opera Mona ran on the Met; he’s now remembered, if in any respect, because the trainer whom his scholar Charles Ives damned with faint reward (“a effective technician”), and whose meticulously crafted stentorian oratorios evoke Mark Twain’s comment about Wagner’s music being “higher than it sounds.” When he was not taking himself with utmost seriousness Parker might create glowing, pleasant and evocative items like his music for the opera Fairyland and this trio, the place he takes harmonic liberties considerably suggestive of what his vexatious scholar was doing a half decade earlier. Diaz, Müller-Szeraws and Hagino rendered the sprightly, melodically partaking finale of the Suite with an elan that calls for fleshing out the whole work; Mistral, one other native ensemble, has carried out so.
Vance R. Koven studied music at Queens School and New England Conservatory, and legislation at Harvard. A composer and working towards lawyer, he was for a few years the chairman of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble.