Performing Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat: Eric Gratz (violin), David Reinecke (percussion), Ilya Shterenberg (clarinet), David Milburn (bass), Sharon Kuster (bassoon), John Carroll (trumpet), Steve Peterson (trombone) and Timothy Jones (narrator).
Miguel del Aguila
Photo: Donna Granata
incident light
Viet Cuong
respond
A soul sells, and -isms go begging
music
May 19, 2017
Two extraordinary concerts on
successive evenings: On May 15 the
Olmos Ensemble offered a superb
performance of Igor Stavinsky’s
L’histoire du soldat (1918), abetted by
Timothy Jones’s theatrically astute
narration. The next evening, the SOLI
Chamber Ensemble capped a
contemporary program with the world
premiere of a fascinating work by
Miguel del Aguila.
Stravinsky collaborated with the Swiss
novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz to
create A Soldier’s Tale, a theatrical
work in which a soldier on leave sells
his violin (that is, his soul) to the devil
in return for a magic book that will
make him rich.
The piece was originally conceived for
two actors, portraying the soldier and
the devil, a narrator, and a female
dancer representing a princess, plus a
mixed instrumental ensemble of seven.
It has been performed in many guises –
with one, several or no dancers; with
and without actors; with complete or
abbreviated text; staged or in concert
form; with or without a conductor.
For this performance, in the sanctuary
at Laurel Heights United Methodist
Church, the Olmos Ensemble opted to
forgo a conductor and dancers. Mr.
Jones delivered both the narration and
the actors’ lines, complete, in an
English version by Michael Flanders
(of the beloved Flanders and Swann
comedy team) and Kitty Black. Mr.
Jones customarily performs as a
singer, a fine operatic baritone with an uncommon sensitivity to the meaning and emotional content of the text. Those qualities served him well in this non-singing gig as he marshaled his vocal tools to delineate the speaking roles and hold the audience’s attention during the long segments without music.
That music is, of course, wonderful – crispy-crunchy, tart, sardonic, often rollicking, always bracing and (at some remove) jazzy. It marks a complete break from the familiar ballet scores of Stravinsky’s Russian period and foreshadows the harmonic strategies of his neoclassical period.
The musicians, all principals or assistant principals with the San Antonio Symphony, were first-class all around. With its frequent changes of meter, this music is a challenge to hold together without a conductor, but this performance was precise, totally confident and faithful to the style.
First among equals was violinist Eric Gratz, whose playing was both technically impeccable and ferocious – caution to the wind, digging into the strings like a miner swinging a pickaxe, horsehair flying from his bow. He wasn’t just playing the music; he was living it. His colleagues were Ilya Shterenberg (clarinet), Sharon Kuster (bassoon), John Carroll (trumpet), Steve Peterson (trombone), David Milburn (bass), and David Reinecke (percussion).
The only fault to be cited was the absence of microphones for recording. It’s a shame such a splendid performance will live only in memory.
Speaking to the audience before SOLI’s concert in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall, Miguel del Aguila said his Disagree! had an explicitly political point. Taking a cue from the election season’s clangorous war of words, he had assembled the 10-minute work’s “15 or 20” unrelated themes “with no effort to make them smoothly flow.”
As it happens, the program as a whole made a complementary political point with a more positive spin. One would be hard pressed to characterize any of the five works, all composed in the past five years, as showing fealty to any received harmonic ideology or stylistic -ism. Each composer spoke with a unique voice that drew pragmatically from many sources. The only unifying threads were freedom and instrumentation — four of the pieces were composed for SOLI’s core ensemble of clarinet (Stephanie Key), violin (Ertan Torgul), cello (David Mollenauer) and piano (Carolyn True); one made do without a clarinet.
Disagree! was, in a sense, the most conservative work on the program. A native of Uruguay, del Aguila made use of Latin American dance rhythms that gave the listener something familiar to hold on to as the piece proceeded on its whipsaw course, episodic as a Roadrunner cartoon, sometimes punctuated with tantrumesque foot-stamping. Despite its title, the piece was hardly disagreeable to the ear, even if it sometimes had an angry edge.
The young Vietnamese-American composer Viet Cuong devised the evening’s most challenging and entrancing sound world. His Wax and Wire (2014) pits insistent, complex rhythms, mainly on piano and cello, against what he calls “smears” – microtonal slides or siren-like wails – on clarinet and glissandi on violin. The piece is generally playful, varied in texture, and it never loosens its hold on the attention. Apart from a resemblance to the strictly repeating patterns of traditional gamelan orchestra music in some passages, the piece represents a sui generis aesthetic.
Michael Gilbertson’s Low Hanging Fruit (2015) is a sprightly piece, much of it deploying melodic wisps and squiggles on clarinet, cello and violin around a rapidly repeating C on the piano – perhaps accounting for the harmonic rut it seemed stuck in.
The one trio on the program was Dan Visconti’s Lonesome Roads (2012) fro violin, cello and piano, represented by just four of its seven short movements. The idiom owes much to various styles of jazz and blues, expressed sometimes in meditative piano work under quiet glazes of high violin and cello harmonics, sometimes in more raucous fashion.
Pierre Jalbert’s Street Antiphons, a SOLI co-commission first heard here two years ago, made a welcome return. Its three movements pivot between jazzy, propulsve, rhythmically complex material (presumably representing the “street”) and plaintive melody, mainly for clarinet or, in the middle movement, bass clarinet. Reverent plainchant is evoked explicitly in the final movement, but it, too, shows a wild side.
Mike Greenberg
Olmos Ensemble, Timothy Jones; SOLI