SOLI Chamber Ensemble
East-West conversation goes deep
January 27, 2011San Antonio composer Jack W. Stamps has taken a big stride forward in craft, discipline and sheer beauty with a new piece he created for the SOLI Chamber Ensemble, which gave the premiere Jan. 25 in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall.
Mr. Stamps completed “The Sensuous Terrain” last spring as his dissertation project at the University of Texas at Austin. It is scored for clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello and piano (the core SOLI contingent of Stephanie Key, Ertan Torgul, David Mollenauer and Carolyn True, respectively), plus two percussionists (guests Thomas Burritt and Graeme Francis).
The piece exemplifies Mr. Stamps's wildly diverse musical interests, and particularly his pursuit of a “hybrid” of Western and Middle Eastern idioms. Thus, “The Sensuous Terrain” shares the same philosophical outlook (and the same seven-movement structure) as his “Strange Frenzy,” which was commissioned by Musical Bridges Around the World and first performed last fall.
“The Sensuous Terrain” meets the composer’s stated ideal in a more natural and satisfying way and is a much more compelling work. Several strands of influence are identifiable. One can hear Middle Eastern, and specifically Sufi, rhythms, drones and melodic contours, and some traditional dance rhythms, such as the Turkish karsilama, are quoted explicitly. One can also hear modern jazz harmonies and European modernism. But all these strands usually blend to form an alloy rather than jostling each other, as they often did in “Strange Frenzy.”
Most of the music is transparent and spare in texture, and precisely notated. The first and fourth movements, however, are rendered in graphic score as woozy, wavy, non-aligned staves, and the musicians are instructed to improvise some aspects of the music, including the timing of entrances. In this performance, the first movement sounded a little too much like the unstructured preconcert tuning of an orchestra, with fragments of melody not relating well to each other.
But in the fourth, the results were altogether lovely -- a serene swaying, with a complex but clear layering of rhythmic patterns over slow piano arpeggios in dense harmonies recalling advanced jazz. The sixth movement, essentially a declamatory violin solo over a cello drone, ends in graphic notation to produce a chaos in keeping with the movement’s title, “The End of History.”
The other movements are notated conventionally throughout and are consistently well made. In the gorgeous third movement, the clarinet spins quiet, sinuous melody, to intermittent commentary by the cello and violin, over a diaphanous piano and percussion texture. The fifth often has a tough, aggressive quality that is mitigated by soft hisses from a can of compressed air.
“The Sensuous Terrain” is a strong, appealing piece that demonstrates the promise of a deep conversation among Western and Eastern ideas. It should have a long life, assuming performers who are able to comfortably negotiate the difficult rhythms and frequently changing meters, as the SOLI players were.
The most enticing music on the concert’s first half was the Persian-born Richard Danielpur’s “River of Light” a meditation on the line between life and death, for violin and piano, beautifully played by Mr. Torgul and Ms. True. Edward J. Hines’s “Yeni Makam IV,” for clarinet and percussion, comprised four tightly focused movements -- dirgelike, lively, erotic and swirlingly rhythmic by turns. Iranian-born Behzad Ranjbaran’s “Elegy” for cello and piano sounded sincere but was highly derivative of European Romanticism.
Mike
Greenberg
