Cactus Pear 4:
Two auspicious new works close festival
July 21, 2008To close its 2008 season, the Cactus Pear Music Festival unveiled two new works by San Antonio composers, a delightful opera for children by the veteran David Heuser and a very brief but very impressive Huapango for mixed septet by young Colin Sorgi. The concert Saturday drew a near-capacity audience to Travis Park United Methodist Church.
Heuser's "The Golden Ax," to a libretto by Gary Albright, is based on Aesop's fable about a poor but honest woodsman, his self-seeking, dishonest brother and the water nymph who heaps riches on the first and scorn on the second.
Heuser created a deft, sparkling neoclassical score for wind quintet, and the vocal lines fit the singers nicely and carried the story well. The music was direct enough for young attention spans, but not namby-pamby. It was nice to hear music for kids that doesn't treat kids like idiots.
Baritone Timothy Jones, who portrayed both brothers, made a lot more of the villainous one, both vocally and theatrically. His virtuous brother, with a somewhat higher tessitura, was a tad bland. But Jones was in splendid voice -- bright and limpid, and with admirably clear diction.
Soprano Susan Lorette Dunn's instrument was so rich and buttery that for a moment I thought the Nymph's abode was not a lake, but a vat of dark chocolate mousse. No complaints about that, nor about Dunn's willowy, watery movement.
Sorgi, a student at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, is also the son of San Antonio Symphony violinist Craig Sorgi, the director of Cactus Pear's Young Artists Fellowship program this year. When seven high school musicians were selected for fellowships through an audition process, the elder Sorgi had a problem: He could find no music for the full contingent, a string quartet plus flute, clarinet and horn. So he recruited his son, then age 20, to write something.
The results were far better than anyone had a right to expect. Colin Sorgi's Huapango lasts just a little more than five minutes, but it packs a lot of musical interest into that compact frame. The piece is based on the lively Mexican dance form, and the writing for strings borrows from the mariachi tradition, but there are also intricate lines in delicious counterpoint, witty "wrong" notes and wonderfully varied colors. The composer showed the discipline to handle all these materials without messing them up. It's a very well-made piece, fun to hear and challenging to play. The young musicians did a fine job by it. They were Sam Almaguer (clarinet), Eric Bowser (violin), Joshua Horne (horn), Sean Kelliher (cello), Kate Lemmon (flute), Sylvia Oh (violin) and Julian Tello (viola).
The concert opened with luscious performances of Mozart's Quintet in E-flat for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet and horn and Francis Poulenc's Sextet for piano and winds. Pianist Jeffrey Sykes's robust, clear-eyed musicianship was both rudder and propeller in both works. His wind colleagues, the same ensemble that played for "The Golden Ax," were absolutely top-drawer. They were Allison Garza (flute), Rebecca Henderson (oboe), Ilya Shterenberg (clarinet), Sharon Kuster (bassoon) and Jeff Garza (horn).
Violinist and Cactus Pear artistic director Stephanie Sant'Ambrogio joined marimbist Sherry Rubins in Michael Colgrass's "Hammer and Bow," a conversational piece in which the two instruments sometimes echo, sometimes amplify and sometimes provoke each other. The writing is admirably lean and tough-minded, but on first hearing the piece didn't seem to have a clear destination. It was beautifully played.
Mike
Greenberg
