music

Morton Subotnick

Still from Zenas Winsor McCay’s “How a Mosquito Operates."

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May 23, 2015 Season-closing concerts by the Olmos Ensemble and the SOLI Chamber Ensemble brought a changing of the guard to the former and an enterprising multimedia program to the latter.  In one form or another the Olmos Ensemble has been around for some 40 years, though the name goes back only 20. For that entire time the artistic director has been Mark Ackerman, who retired last year as principal oboe of the San Antonio Symphony. The other shoe dropped when he played his last concert with the Olmos, May 18 in First Unitarian Universalist Church. The troupe he founded continues, however, with Martha Long, the symphony’s principal flute, as artistic director and Renia Shterenberg, a player in the symphony’s first-violin section, as managing director.  Mr. Ackerman and the outstanding collaborative pianist Colette Valentine opened the concert with three brief French works, originally for soprano and piano. His rich tone took on a slightly astringent edge that seemed ideal for his material — Maurice ravel’s “Pièce en forme de Habanera,” Olivier Messiaen’s “Vocalise” and Léo Delibes’s “Les Filles de Cadix.”  Hornist Jeff Garza delivered his customary elegance in Richard Strauss’s Andante for Horn and Piano, composed in 1888 but not published until 1971, long after Strauss’s death. Bohuslav Martinu’s Trio for flute, bassoon (originally cello) and piano served as a reminder of that modern Bohemian composer’s modest but enjoyable virtues — a ready wit and vivacity in the quick outer movements, harmonic Wanderlust in the central adagio. Bassoonist Sharon Kuster joined Ms. Long and Ms. Valentine in a spirited, unified performance.  Much of Ludwig Thuille’s Sextet for winds and piano, composed in the 1880s, sounded like warmed-over Brahms, but the third movement, a Gavotte, proved a delight, its sprightly tune passing adroitly among the players. Oboist Paul Lueders, Mr. Ackerman’s estimable successor in both the Olmos ensemble and the orchestra, joined Ms. Valentine, clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg and the other Olmos veterans in a taut, polished account. SOLI, performing May 19 in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall, offered six works, all composed since 2008.  Three of the pieces were performed with visual projections of one kind or another, and two integrated live performance with taped sounds.  Most successful in the former category was Anna Clyne’s “Rest These Hands” (2009) for solo violin and video. The music, explicitly a modern take on JS Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Minor, was given an energetic, gutsy performance by Ertan Torgul. The accompanying stop-motion animation by Josh Dorman was a sort of codex comprising delicate, very beautiful drawings of flora and fauna, some of which liberated themselves from the scrolling background. Superficially, the music and images had nothing to do with one another; at a deeper level, they shared a feeling of unstoppable life.  Marcus Maroney composed his Scherzo for piano (2008) to accompany a 1912 animated film, “How a Mosquito Operates,” by Zenas Winsor McCay. In the comedic (if alarming) film, a man tries to sleep while a mosquito repeatedly sucks his blood. At the end the engorged pest explodes. The piano score, a mass of busy trills and runs, is musically slight but enjoyable, and appropriate to the film. Pianist Carolyn True gave a spirited performance.  The strongest score on the program was Pierre Jalbert’s “Street Antiphons” for clarinet (Stephanie Key), violin, cello (David Mollenauer)  and piano. The work was commissioned and first performed last month by the Boston Chamber Music Society, and co-commissioned by SOLI along with DaCamera (Houston) and Voices of Change (Dallas). Jalbert, a Vermont native who has taught at Rice University since 1996, is remembered locally for two previous performances. His “In Aeternam” opened a San Antonio Symphony concert under Larry Rachleff in 2004, and  his Trio for piano, violin and cello (1998) was one of the highlights of the 2013 Cactus Pear Music Festival.  Like those works, and as the title implies, “Street Antiphons” pivots between reverent and profane modes. Its first movement is jazzy and propulsive, the third largely calm and quiet, the second a little of each. The music, modal in harmony and rather dark, abounds with ideas and always has something interesting to say. SOLI asked local video artist Gary Wise to create projections to accompany Jalbert’s piece. Alas, he agreed. The results, projected variously on the rear shell, the piano lid and the musicians themselves, were a mere handful of dull moving images — a cloudscape, a sort of kaleidoscope pattern of colorful geometric forms, a pixelated color field, a few mountainscapes — endlessly repeated with no evident relationship to the music. The work was thoughtless and lazy.  Mary Kouyoumdjian’s “Senda Beneath the Sea” and Ryan Brown’s “We’ll Go North When Springtime Comes,” both  composed for  the Redshift Ensemble (New York and San Francisco),  incorporate field recordings of Alaskan wildlife by Kathy Turco. In both pieces, the live ensemble of clarinet or bass clarinet, violin, cello and piano intrudes sparely on the natural sounds. “Senda” complements the howls of wolves with dark and frigid atmospherics. “We’ll Go North,”with a variety of animal and bird sounds, has a similarly self-effacing score, although it springs to life with a clarinet whoop near the middle. Morton Subotnick, the eminence grise of electronic music, was represented by a 2008 work, “Then, Now and Forever,” for clarinet, violin, piano and “ghost box” — actually, in this case, a laptop computer programmed to emulate the real-time signal processing devices that Subtonick developed in the 1970s. The acoustic instruments play music that traces a clear arc from quiet, calm expectancy to a roiling climax and down again. Microphones feed the sound to the computer, which alters the sound in various subtle ways to create a sort of background sheen, heard through loudspeakers.  There results were lovely and, as is usually the case with Subotnick’s music, humane. Mike Greenberg

Pierre Jalbert

Olmos Ensemble; SOLI Chamber Ensemble

Musical chairs, and music plus

incident light

Mark Ackerman