ASPEN FESTIVAL 2005 (I):
Evelyn Glennie gets the Spirit and Marin Alsop muscles up on Brahms; Aspen, Colorado, 3 July 2005 (HS)
The Aspen Music Festival
runs for nine weeks, from late June to mid August, and I am
usually here for a six-week stretch. This year's visit is limited
to four weeks plus a couple of days, and it seemed worth it
to get here in time for a concert featuring the formidable Scottish
percussionist Evelyn Glennie. And it was.
Sunday afternoon (July
3) Glennie gave the U.S. premiere of Spirit
Voices, written by the American composer Steven Stucky
in 2003 on a commission partly underwritten by the Aspen Festival.
Marin Alsop, conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony, led the Aspen
Festival Orchestra in a vital performance.
Glennie on stage is
a marvel to watch. For this performance, she wore spangly
red trousers and a black midriff-baring top. She wears no shoes,
the better to sense the vibrations of the music. Profoundly
deaf, she gets the sound through her feet and any other way
she can feel it.
The music world has
long past gotten over the novelty of a deaf musician being so
good. Now we can just marvel at how many nuances she can draw
from a single drum or gong, how a rhythmic flourish in her hands
takes on a life of its own, how the textures of the sounds she
produces meld seamlessly with the other musicians'. It is simply
musicality of the highest order.
Spirit Voices is one of the many pieces commissioned for Glennie to
take advantage of her musical skills and undeniable stage presence.
It does exactly that, and it does so with beautifully focused
musical means. As the composer said in pre-concert remarks,
"I needed to devise ways for her to move and be dramatic."
He does so by stringing together seven miniature tone poems
in a 30-minute span, each with a distinct flavor of its own,
both for the full orchestra (minus any other percussion, of
course) and for Glennie's array of drums, gongs, mallet instruments and cymbals.
The Singapore Symphony,
the other co-commissioner, gave its world premiere with Glennie
in 2003. Stucky takes his inspiration
for the music from supernatural forces associated with several
cultures. Stucky takes pains to note
that he does not try to imitate the music of those cultures,
but on a first hearing the sources are not hard to relate to
the titles of the various sections.
The first section, for
example, opens with an extended introduction featuring Glennie.
It puts rather a limit on it to call this a cadenza. She begins
with a shout, which she answers with a tattoo on a row of tuned
drum heads. Another shout, answered on another set of drums.
The shouts have a wild, Asian flair, inspired by the Jiu haung ye, the deities of a Taoist
spirit medium cult in Singapore. This is music of abandon, appropriately
loud and percussive both on the soloist's part and the orchestra's.
The next section, titled
Bean nighe, after the spirit that
is the Scottish counterpart to the Irish banshee, slows the
tempo and takes its musical cue from Glennie bowing on the vibraphone.
Using a fiddle bow on the metal keyboard produces a ghostly
hum, which Stucky intersperses with
quiet, sustained dissonances in the orchestra. It's as if the
orchestra is picking up Glennie's,
um, vibe.
Elyllon, the tiny
Welsh spirits ruled over by Queen Mab,
inspire a quick, skittering section strongly reminiscent of
Britten's music for the faeries in his opera Midsummer Night's
Dream with Glennie concentrating on bells. Te Mangoroa
is a Maori spirit, accompanied by a great deal of whooshing
in the percussion and imitative effects in the orchestra. Coyote,
the Navajo spirit known as a trickster, starts out with a vaguely
Latin rhythm and morphs into something more general, Glennie
focusing on the big five-octave concert marimba.
The final sections --
Tengu, a Japanese spirit known to
drive people insane, and Wah'Kon-Tah,
a supreme being in many Native American cultures -- culminates
in a meditation for three different-sized tuned gongs and an
amazingly rich-sounding tam-tam, the final resonating sound
of which Glennie lets die away to nothing at the very end.
This is highly charged,
dramatic music that ebbs and flows in pace and dynamics. Stucky's approach is compact, packing what he has to say into
fairly brief segments. There are dissonances, but it's not harsh
music. It has enough interest that it could easily be opened
up with more extensive solo breaks from Glennie. It leaves us
wanting more.
Alsop, who has
conducted often at Aspen since her days as music director of
the Denver-based Colorado Symphony, opened the concert with
Ragomania, a lively overture of
ragtime music by William Bolcom. A
long-time rag exponent who has written many pieces in this turn-of-the-
(twentieth) -century musical genre, Bolcom
penned this jaunty work in 1982 for the Boston Pops Orchestra,
which gave the premiere under conductor John Williams. Programming
this work was an appropriate gesture for the Fourth of July
weekend, but it could have used another couple of rehearsals
to get the syncopated rhythms in sync. Articulation was sufficiently
sloppy that in spots it devolved into a sonic blur, but it occasionally
came together nicely, particularly for the big finish.
Brahms' Symphony No.
4 concluded the afternoon with Alsop
fashioning a taut, muscular account. Although her tempos were
not fast, this was not an especially spacious performance. What
it lacked in warmth it made up for in propulsion and richness
of sound. It had gravitas. The one exception was the gorgeous
second movement, which hovered in a sort of time-suspension
that let principal horn David Wakefield's statement of the theme
unfold naturally. Principal clarinet Joaquin Valdepeņas
added some wonderful turns of his own.
In the end, this was
solid, no-nonsense Brahms, a bracing finish to an eclectic Sunday
afternoon's music.
Harvey Steiman
