October 12, 2018
As the Girl Scouts sing, “Make new friends, but keep the old.”
So welcome to the local scene Agarita, an excellent piano quartet with an unusual approach to programming. It gave its official debut concert for a large and enthusiastic audience on Oct. 8 in the McNay Art Museum’s Leeper Auditorium. But we can’t forget the SOLI Chamber Ensemble, which has been performing recent and new music, including dozens of world premieres from major composers, for more than two decades. SOLI opened its new season with a pair of concerts on Oct. 1 (at JazzTX) and 2 (in Trinity University’s Ruth Taylor Recital Hall). I caught the second night.
Agarita comprises two roster players from the San Antonio Symphony, associate concertmaster Sarah Silver Manzke (violin) and Marisa Bushman (viola), plus Spanish native Ignacio Gallego (cello) and San Antonio product Daniel Anastasio (piano).
Their inaugural program was designed to complement the McNay’s Pop
América exhibition, an exploration of pop art from throughout the Western Hemisphere. Thus it was not surprising to hear instrumental arrangements of popular songs by Mexico’s Manuel Ponce and by Argentina’s Carlos Guastavino and Alberto Ginastera, or “Autumn” from Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires – all easily appealing music with roots in the bars and salons.
But Agarita also included the first movement (only) of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s String Trio, heavily influenced by the chromatic expressionism of Arnold Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. Some Brazilian folk elements were pulled into the mix, but this was challenging – and exciting – music. To judge from this program and the one for a Dec. 4 concert in the Little Carver, Agarita doesn’t mind playing just one or two movements from a much longer work, in the interest of limiting concert length while covering a wide range of music. Still, it was a shame not to hear the entire Villa-Lobos piece, especially the lovely, delicate andante.
In a stroke of daring, if not derring-do, the ensemble took a dive into the 20th-century avant-garde of the United States. George Antheil is best known for his Ballet Mécanique (originaly scored for 16 player pianos and three airplane propellers, among other instruments), but his Violin Sonata No. 2 (1923) is fully deserving of notice. This single-movement work is a bizarre congeries of styles – ragtime, sentimental salon songs, early 20th-century high modernism, Antheil’s own repetitive-motion machine aesthetic. Mr. Anastasio had an utterly astonishing solo piano passage that sounded like an extended pummeling by heavy artillery. When that was over, he took up a pair of bongo drums to give quiet rhythmic support to a calm, lovely lyrical passage for violin, the work’s closing statement. In its frequent sudden shifts in style and affect, the piece anticipates the work of another important American composer, Carl Stalling of Looney Tunes fame.
Two other avant-garde works featured bass Cameron Beauchamp, a founding member of the important vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. He opened the concert with John Cage’s haunting, disarmingly simple Experiences No. 2, a solo voice setting (here abetted by a quiet drone on cello) of a text by e. e. cummings. Mr. Beauchamp returned as the narrator of Tom Johnson’s Narayana’s Cows, which is sort of a farmer-mathematician’s version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” In this case, the music expresses the year-by-year increase in the number of cows and their female offspring, from a single cow and her calf the first year to, um, a whole bunch of cows and calfs in year 17. A single note, played in union or octaves by the whole ensemble, represents each cow (longish note) and calf (shorter note). Generations are distinguished by a handful of different pitches. From this description you might think it was a crashing bore, but the audience seemed fully engaged and (to judge by the vigorous ovation) appreciative.
All the performances were splendid – unified, spirited, well prepared. The three string players projected nicely matched timbres, warm and with an attractive grain.
Agarita’s next concert will be Nov. 11 at 5 pm in the Granary at Mission San Jose, as part of the city’s annual Luminaria arts festival. All of the troupe’s concerts are free.
SOLI opened and closed its concert with music by the Syrian-American composer Kareem Roustom. Both pieces were the composer’s deeply felt and finely crafted responses to the long-running violence, destruction and displacement suffered by the people of his homeland. Letters Home (2011) for clarinet (Stephanie Key) and viola (Rita Porfiris) is a compact journey from wild violence to whimpering enervation. Traces (2013) is a much larger work – it lasts about 25 minutes and is scored for clarinet, piano (Carolyn True), and string quartet (violinists Ertan Torgul and Sarah Silver Manzke, Ms. Porfiris, and cellist David Mollenauer). It opens with a horrifying scream, and much that follows suggests a kind of frantic paralysis. The clarinet has a remarkable solo cadenza that evokes the restiveness of a caged animal.
The Leonard Bernstein centennial was acknowledged by his Variations on an Octatonic Scale (1989) for clarinet and cello. Though lasting just seven minutes, the piece covers a wide affective range, from gregarious and witty to inward and dark.
Natalie Draper’s Strains in the Signal (2014) is five fascinating minutes, scored for clarinet, violin (Torgul), cello, and piano. The spine is a more or less steady pulse that passes from voice to voice while the other instruments tug and probe, stretch and fracture the line. The music is constantly surprising and compelling.
Caroline Shaw’s Valencia (2012) for string quartet is named for the orange, not the city in Spain. The piece has some minimalist characteristics, but also an exuberant protean quality that is entirely Ms. Shaw's own.
Jennifer Higdon is best known locally for her elegiacal orchestral piece blue cathedral, played twice (2005 and 2014) by the San Antonio Symphony and once (2012) by the YOSA Philharmonic. SOLI has previously performed her Dash, a delightful little chase scene. The piece on this concert, her Piano Trio of 2003, was less persuasive. The two movements were intended to evoke colors. “Pale Yellow” was all calm, lyrical Americana, “Fiery Red” was fast and, indeed, hot. The two styles seemed unrelated, and both movements struck me as having more notes than they needed.
Mike Greenberg
Singer/narrator Cameron Beauchamp (second from left) with the members of Agarita: Daniel Anastasio (piano), Sarah Silver Manzke (violin), Ignacio Gallego (cello) and Marisa Bushman (viola).
Photo: Suhail Arastu
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Counting cows, and sorrows
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SOLI; Agarita
The SOLI Chamber Ensemble essays Kareem Roustom’s emotionally wrenching Traces.