Cactus Pear Music Festival
At apex of smorgasbord, a strangely beautiful Lorca setting
by George Crumb
July 13, 2009The second Cactus Pear Music Festival concert, July 11 in Travis Park United Methodist Church, offered an unusually generous and wide-ranging program of seven works.
Much of the program was a showcase for the excellent Vancouver-based duo of flutist Lorna McGhee and harpist Heidi Krutzen, who anchored the modern center of the program either on their own (in Gareth Farr’s atmospheric “Taheke”) or in combination with others.
The piece that most sticks in the memory was George Crumb’s “Federico’s Seven Little Songs for Children,” with soprano Mary Bonhag joining the harpist and flutist. “Federico,” of course, was Federico Garcia Lorca, whose poetry had previously given Crumb a platform for a series of important works, culminating in “Ancient Voices of Children” of 1970. He returned to the Spanish mine to set the children’s songs in 1986. A child’s sense of wonder and playfulness pervades these brief pieces, but the music is hardly child’s play. Crumb calls for extended vocal techniques -- often a high, thin, little girl voice, but also sometimes grandly meandering Sprechstimme or breathy whispers, notably in the middle song, “Snail,” with bass flute used to splendid effect. All four members of the flute family make an appearance, and Crumb’s scoring for both flute and harp is highly coloristic -- icy and prickly, with piccolo, in “The Lady of the Fan”; languidly pastoral in “Afternoon,” with the standard C flute. The music is strangely beautiful throughout. The performance was fully attuned to Crumb’s aesthetic and entirely convincing.
Each of the three movements of Farr’s piece, commissioned by Krutzen and McGhee, portrays a waterfall in his native New Zealand. Some of the tone painting might be considered too literal -- in the first movement, inspired by the famous Huka Falls, a flowing flute melody over rippling harp waves shows us the wide river’s calm approach, and the music grows more active as the channel narrows and descends a series of rapids before finally gushing over a precipice in a foamy, violent spasm. Too obvious, maybe, but it’s quite lovely, handsomely made and worthy of close attention.
McGhee and Krutzen also figured in two modern French works, Maurice Ravel’s “Menuet antique,” with violist Dave Harding, and Marcel Tournier’s Suite, Op. 34, with violinist Julie Leven, Harding and cellist Dmitri Atapine. Tournier’s piece shows a strong influence of Debussy and is highly attractive, even if the composer (himself a harpist) resorts too often to swirly harp glissandi.
Bonhag showed herself to be a compelling interpreter in the opening set of Henry Purcell songs, with her husband, Evan Premo, on double bass and Peter Miyamoto on a double-manual harpsichord made by Gerald Self. Top marks go to Bonhag's demure eroticism in the achingly beautiful “Sweeter than Roses.” Her melisma wasn’t as crisply defined as it should have been in this material, but her trumpet-like projection, especially at full voice, was a pleasure to hear.
Violinists Leven and Cactus Pear artistic director Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio, who have been playing duos since they were 13 years old, were reunited in Jean-Marie Leclair’s Sonata in B Minor. Their stylistic differences were illuminating. Leven anchored the music in baroque performance practice, while Sant’Ambrogio brought some American hoe-downy sizzle to it.
The finale was Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, with Miyamoto, McGhee and violinist Nancy Dahn the soloists. The middle movement was interesting for an unusually slow, stately tempo. Miyamoto’s extended solo in the first movement began with a generally slow but very flexible tempo, setting up a giddy accelerando. In both allegros, McGhee played with a sort of above-the-fray composure that made a nice foil to Dahn’s energy and rhythmic punch.
Mike
Greenberg
