Composers Alliance concert: Points of view about order and illness
May 6, 2008The only complaint to be lodged against the Tosca String Quartet's world premiere performance of Jack Stamps's fascinating String Quartet No. 2, May 4 in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall, is that we got to hear it only once.
Granted, it was a busy night for the excellent and enterprising Austin-born ensemble, which had already that evening given the world premiere of S. Beth May's "Witch Hunt" and the U.S. premiere of Dimitar Ninov's "Mountain Stream." The string players got to rest while baritone Timothy Jones and pianist Mark Alexander delivered the world premiere of David Heuser's "Arrows," set to three Tony Hoagland poems about living with "one of those diseases known by its initials." The concert was organized by the Composers Alliance of San Antonio, and all four composers are based in San Antonio or Austin.
In strictly musical terms, the Stamps quartet, dating from last year, had the strongest profile. It lives in two very different worlds, represented verbally by its traditionalist title, String Quartet No. 2, and its Dada-esque subtitle, "sketches from a fakebook landfill." An introduction and two later episodes dubbed "landfill music" are notated unconventionally, with odd graphic devices, as fragments to be played randomly (the introduction) or in a more directed if somewhat open-ended way to sound like a semi-determined chaos, if that term makes any sense. But the bulk of the piece reveals a remarkable compositional discipline -- Mozartean clarity, Brahmsian contrapuntal intricacy -- and a very subtle ear for weaving hints of American pop and jazz idioms through a fresh, vibrant modernist canvas.
Stamps is a San Antonio native who started out in the "alt-rock" field and moved into more-formal composition in 2001. He's now pursuing a doctorate at UT-Austin. If that experience doesn't ruin him, this string quartet promises an important new voice.
One could interpret the two aspects of the Stamps quartet as two different points of view about order rather than as a chaos-order opposition. Somewhat similarly, Hoagland's poems step back from polarities and play with point of view.
In his song cycle, Heuser appropriately ceded the foreground to Hoagland's 's quirky, beautifully observed texts, which are musical enough in themselves. In "Appetite," the narrator anthropomorphizes the virus that attacks him and muses about the effects of the disease. "Brave World" tries to see things from the virus's standpoint, in which the sick person "is a secondary character, whose weeping is almost too far off to hear...." "Arrows" contemplates depictions of the martyred Saint Sebastian, whose heavenward gaze exerts "that power of denial the soul is famous for, that ability to say, 'None of this is real...'"
The vocal line sticks closely to the natural rhythms of the text and is attentive to its colorations, tensions and ironies. The piano is supportive in the Schubert way. In "Brave World," the piano lays down a nearly continuous field of sextuplet waves, which break at strategic moments -- for example, to give a chamber-of-commerce cheer to the virus's desire to "get ahead in the land of opportunity."
Jones was in excellent voice -- or, rather, voices: His lowest notes had a startlingly huge resonance, more like a bass than a baritone. His middle and high registers were stirring and bright, and his sensitivity to the text was, as ever, first-rate. Alexander was a splendid partner.
There is much to like in May's "Witch Hunt." Its eight movements range from weird atmospherics to richly harmonized lyricism. May adds dashes of color from bowed cymbals (suggesting the squeaking iron chains of an old swing set) and crinkling plastic grocery bags (to suggest fire). It goes on too long, however. The whole is rather like an ambitious chef's latest creation, enchanting for four forkfuls, but then fading in its appeal.
Ninov's piece was the most conventional of the evening. Its fast-slow-fast form suggests the rushing of a stream before and after it rests in a calm pool, and some obsessive repetitions in the outer sections suggest the determined motion of the waters. It's all attractive and well made.
The Tosca String Quartet played with panache and craft throughout. Its members are violinists Leigh Mahoney and Tracy Seeger, violist Ames Asbell and cellist Sara Nelson.
Mike
Greenberg
