SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Hartke, Crumb, and Golijov: Dawn Upshaw, soprano, Orquesta Los Pelegrinos, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 29.2.2008 (BJ)


It seemed like a good idea to let the impressions produced by this promising concert marinate for a few days, in the hope that the flavors would somehow come together. But, after careful consideration, I am left with the conclusion that – to mix my metaphors horribly – this particular emperor has no clothes.

55-year-old Stephen Hartke is a composer of some repute and evident competence; George Crumb, at 79, is widely venerated as a modern master; and the Argentinean-born Osvaldo Golijov, still well short of his 48th birthday, has established himself as a power on the world scene. So the omens looked good on the composing side. With regard to performance credentials, Dawn Upshaw is many people’s favorite soprano for the interpretation of contemporary music, while the Orquesta Los Pelegrinos turned out on inquiry–there was not a word about the group in the program–to be an expanded form of Eighth Blackbird, the celebrated Chicago-based new-music ensemble that almost everyone likewise swears by.

And yet, though it grieves me to say so, there was to my ears very little musical invention worthy the name on display throughout the evening, and at least one of the performances left much to be desired. As a curtain-raiser, Hartke’s Meanwhile, “incidental music to imaginary puppet plays,” was lively enough, though even Schoenberg’s Accompanimental Music for an [equally] Imaginary Film Scene, a relatively minor chip from the workbench of a composer I don’t much admire, has more real music in it.

Then came Crumb, in the shape of his Vox Balaenae, or “Voice of the Whale,” for amplified flute, cello, and piano. What Crumb specializes in is beauty of sound, and certainly this 27-year-old composition–which was indeed beautifully played–boasts many moments of quite exquisite delicacy and aural imagination. There is nothing wrong with Crumb’s ear. But he indulges it, rather like the Finnish composer Leif Segerstam, without any concomitant exercise of brainwork. A “row of samples” of beautiful sounds, as George Bernard Shaw mordantly observed about Gounod’s exploitation of certain dreamy chords, is no substitute for composition.

To judge from the advance publicity, however, the main focus of the program was Golijov’s Ayre, a 40-minute cycle of eleven songs written for Ms. Upshaw, premiered by her four years ago with The Andalucian Dogs (evidently another Eighth-Blackbird derivative), and scored for a mixed ensemble of a dozen instruments, including laptop! The program note instructed us that the title, which I thought was simply the English synonym, spelled the old way, for “song,” is “a Medieval Spanish term” and is to be pronounced “EYE-ree,” unlikely though that seems for any word of Hispanic provenance. The music draws on a variety of cultural traditions, including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, of which the composer remarks: “How connected these cultures are and how terrible it is when they don’t understand each other.” Golijov’s aim here seems to be, as the annotator put it, “to build upon the cross-cultural richness of the Pasión segun San Marcos” (with which Golijov, in 2000, achieved a spectacular international breakthrough akin to that of Górecki’s Third Symphony a few years earlier) “in attempting to heal the cultural/religious rifts that threaten the world’s well-being today.”

Well, there’s an ad hominem challenge for any critic. It takes a curmudgeon to object in the face of so worthy a purpose, but I am willing to be that curmudgeon. My own first encounter with a Golijov piece came when the Seattle Symphony, two seasons ago, performed his Last Round for double string orchestra. Contrary to what I was expecting on the basis of what I had read about him, that 15-minute tango-style tribute to Piazzolla proved to be no facile crowd-pleasing exercise, but a predominantly dark-hued composition of impressive tonal logic and emotional force. Aside from a few moments of genuinely touching invention and seductive sonority, nothing remotely comparable with its skill or sheer inspiration is to be discerned in Ayre, where eclecticism totally trumps individual character. It might have helped if we had been told what language Ms. Upshaw was singing in. In common with a very experienced musical friend who was also in the audience, I found it impossible to make out a word, or for that matter even to hear the singer’s voice, with all the instrumental racket that was going on. Furthermore, the sight of the earnest and dedicated Ms. Upshaw trying to make like a pop star, intermittently and a shade listlessly jiggling along with the obviously strongly motivated and expert players, contributed to the sense of embarrassment that emanated from the whole affair.

Bernard Jacobson


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