SOLI Chamber Ensemble
Master thief does it again
March 17, 2009Regarding his practice of incorporating tunes from the remote past into his own music, Robert Xavier Rodriguez has said, “I don’t borrow. I steal.”
The virtue of bold, enterprising theft, and the vice of timid, half-hearted borrowing, were amply displayed in, respectively, Rodriguez’s new “Musica, por un tiempo” and John Williams’s new (but not really) “Air and Simple Gifts,” the bookends of the SOLI Chamber Ensemble’s concert March 16 in Gallery Nord.
Williams’s piece, of course, was composed for the inauguration of President Barack Obama and first performed (well, pantomimed) at that event on Jan. 20. Rodriguez’s piece was commissioned by SOLI with the help of a matching grant from the city of San Antonio’s Office of Cultural Affairs. Both works are scored for clarinet, violin, cello and piano.
“Musica, por un tiempo” is a big, strong, passionate piece that pivots between two realms -- one serene and pensive, built on a broad melody that Rodriguez pilfered from the bass line of Henry Purcell’s song “Music, for a while”; the other a hectic, complex rumba. The Purcell material, which in its original context served mainly to establish the song’s harmonic progression, is just a rising series of similar four-note arpeggios, but when brought to the melodic fore it has a yearning, erotic character, which Rodriguez amplifies and deepens with all manner of textural and coloristic means. The rumba beat, treated to amazing contrapuntal intricacies, raises the erotic temperature to triple digits. (After the performance, someone in the audience asked Rodriguez if this was the sexiest piece he’d ever written. He cited his comic opera “Tango” as a competitor, but in truth there seems to be a strong erotic current in most of his music.)
“Musica, por un tiempo” is intelligently planned and expertly crafted, as one expects from Rodriguez, and both pleasing and challenging to the ear. It should have a long life. The spirited performance was by the core SOLI players -- clarinetist Stephanie Key, violinist Ertan Torgul, cellist David Mollenauer and pianist Carolyn True.
The same crew couldn’t do much to enliven Williams’s score, which, like Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” borrows and varies the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” but, unlike Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” doesn’t do much with it except to muddy the waters.
Much more interesting was Kevin Puts’s “Simaku,” a 1996 work which is loosely in the minimalist camp but pushes the envelope with incredibly complex rhythmic patterns and nervous, edgy melodic contours. A wide color palette and a crystalline effervescence somewhat recall the music of Michael Torke.
Diego Vega’s “hiör u fang axaxaxas mlö” of 2004 is a musical interpretation of a story by Jorge Luis Borges and, aptly, vacillates between other-worldly weirdness and something that sounds a bit like French Romanticism. It’s an ambitious piece, perhaps a little wanting in discipline, but a provocative listen.
Mike
Greenberg
