SOLI Chamber Ensemble
Small bites, big flavors
December 9, 2010In musical parlance, a bagatelle is a pleasant, unassuming little piece, one or two minutes long. Beethoven wrote several sets of them, for piano. They’re very nice, but, by comparison to the sonatas, they’re ... mere bagatelles. Quite another matter are Scott McAllister’s Nine Bagatelles (1993) for clarinet, cello and piano. Their slight duration aside, there’s nothing “mere” about them.
That very substantial and tough-minded set was the apex of the SOLI Chamber Ensemble’s season-opening concert, Dec. 7 in Trinity University’s Ruth Taylor Recital Hall. The program included three other worthy pieces, all composed between 1998 and 2002, by Alexandra Gardner, Daniel S. Godfrey and David Heuser.
The concert was notable, too, for the unofficial debut of the recital hall’s splendid new Steinway concert grand. The formal inauguration is scheduled for next month, in a recital by SOLI pianist and Trinity faculty member Carolyn True.
McAllister, who teaches composition at Baylor University, wrote his Nine Bagatelles while working on a master’s degree at Rice. In a program note he writes, “Each bagatelle represents a mood and is influenced by popular music, jazz and 12-tone techniques”
Most of the moods are dark. The first bagatelle is zany, almost cartoony in character, but it has an idée fixe -- four repeated notes, most often in the clarinet’s high register, like an insistent cackle -- that retrospectively takes on a disturbed quality in the context of the material that follows. Several of the pieces are mournful, or outright desolate. The sixth and ninth are angry and feverish. The third, for piano alone, is skittish. The fourth, for cello alone, is philosophical and declamatory. The seventh, for clarinet alone, is pensive, but with wide melodic intervals that evoke instability. The eighth, the most obviously jazz-influenced of the set, is bouncy, but the rapid pizzicato cello line suggests a jazz bassist on speed, and with obsesive-compulsive disorder to boot.
All nine are exceptionally well crafted. McAllister fits a lot of music, and a lot of feeling, into his tiny frames without making them seem cramped.
The performance, too, was well made and fully felt. The players were True, clarinetist Stephanie Key and cellist David Mollenauer.
Gardner’s “Crows,” for violin, clarinet, cello and piano, takes its inspiration from poems by Joy Harjo. The music is imagistic, sometimes verging on New Age drones and atmospherics, but often boldly colored or spikily textured. The fourth of its five movements, “Invocation,” has a very beautiful open harmonies and broad melodic lines for violin (Ertan Torgul) and cello.
Godfrey’s “Arietta” for cello and piano is a fairly conservative neoromantic piece. As the name implies, it is lyrical, and it conjures feelings of love with, perhaps, a touch of whimsy.
The concert closed with David Heuser’s “Catching Updrafts” for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. SOLI commissioned the work and gave the premiere in 2000, then revisited it in 2007. It held up well in its third hearing.
Taking the flight of hawks and eagles as a metaphor for human experience, the music pivots between the tumult of the birds’ ascent on a rising airmass and the calm of its gliding on a thermal. As in life, the tumult is more interesting.
Both individually and in ensemble, the four SOLI regulars played with their customary technical assurance and sympathy for the music. Mollenauer’s cello sounded even more radiant than usual in this concert.
Full assessment of the new Steinway will await its official maiden voyage, but the first impression was highly favorable. The sound was luxurious, a little less brilliant than the American Steinway norm, but with wonderful tonal depth from bottom to top.
Mike
Greenberg
