Samuel Adler tribute concert:
An American pragmatist and his progeny
February 28, 2008
An intriguing concert Wednesday night in UTSA's recital hall brought together composer Samuel Adler and three generations of his musical progeny, including David Heuser of the UTSA faculty and young Niccolo Athens, a current student of Adler's at the Juilliard School in New York. Adler himself, seeming far younger than his 80 years, was present and spoke briefly to the audience about his four works on the program.
Though he is a prolific composer, my exposure to Adler's music is limited to a smattering of Jewish liturgical pieces (he used to be music director of Temple Emanu-El in Dallas), recordings of a few chamber works and the items on Wednesday's program. To judge from this small sampling, Adler is a composer of the classic American pragmatic type, one with a distinctive way of navigating the breadth of contemporary musical language, but resisting placement in any particular niche. His mature works are smartly crafted, pleasurable to perform and to hear, mentally stimulating but not rarefied.
Most delightful of Wednesday's menu was Music for 11, a 1964 work for six woodwinds and five percussionists, nicely performed here by a mixed student and faculty ensemble. Adler said he had assembled the piece from incidental music he had composed for stage plays in Dallas -- and from music he had composed for a Zales commercial! The disciplined use of percussion to sketch a rhythmic background of constantly varying texture, together with the frequently staccato woodwind foreground, gave the piece a deliciously lapidary quality that unified movements of very distinct character -- a portentous processional that might have served a Greek tragedy, a bouncy harlequinade, a pastoral that closed with spare percussion alone, and a celebratory finale with a particularly suave interweaving of voices.
Canto XIII for unaccompanied piccolo (Rita Linard) alternated fairly direct statements of a Gregorian Kyrie with varied elaborations -- the first suggesting flamboyant birdsong, the second a jaunty march, the third a whirligig in triple meter.
Two very early works, a Praeludium for brass choir and timpani and Four Poems by James Stephens for soprano (Linda Poetschke) and piano (Christine Debus), revealed less of an individual profile.
Heuser was represented by "Lilian's Chair," a setting of Olga Cabral's poem about the death of an old woman. Heuser's tender vocal line and economical, suggestive piano support are deeply sensitive to the nuances of the text, as was Poetschke's radiant performance, with Debus.
Athens paired soprano (Poetschke again) with viola (Allyson Dawkins) in a setting of John Keats's "To one who has been long in city pent," composed last fall under Adler's tutelage. The piece was most interesting for the viola line's elaborate, sometimes spiky response to the more direct lyricism of the vocal line. The viola is Athens's instrument, and Adler's.
The third Adler student was Don Freund, who now teaches composition at Indiana University. His "Feux d'artifice -- Tombeau" for piano was his response to the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Much of the music is a rapid, rhythmically complex skittering that suggests (to my ear, though not necessarily to the composer) the disintegration of the shuttle and its crew. This highly textured material gives way to a massive, fortissimo chorale at the work's apex. Though not very long in duration, the piece somewhat sprawls.
Mike
Greenberg
