SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE
October 22, 2002

BluePrint: A Bold New Music “Season”
By George Thomson

A large new music enterprise is afoot, six months long, under the auspices of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, launched at last Friday’s concert at Old First Church. Nothing as broad as the BluePrint New Music Festival under Nicole Paiement’s direction has been attempted here. It was all laid out in an eye-catching and rather thick program book — an entire season's worth of diverse programs, to be held in the Bay Area over the next six months.
The Festival draws on a wide spectrum of compositional voices and performing forces comprising the Conservatory’s New Music Ensemble and the Parallèle Ensemble — a faculty-and-student ensemble now also in residence there. Paiement writes that one of the goals of the Festival is "shaking-up and mixing-up [sic] the new music scene" with the active involvement and interaction of composers, performers, and students. Judging by Friday night's fine effort, featuring works by Messiaen and some of his pupils, the "scene" is due to get some very salutary shaking and mixing.
Messiaen was a devoted teacher, and did not impose a conformity of style on his many students. If there was anything that united the four works on Fridays's performance it was perhaps what Messiaen might have called an ear for color (not a contradiction for Messiaen, who associated color and sound so closely) and a penchant for the brief, readily-apprehended motif. Otherwise, the pieces — Messiaen's own Oiseaux Exotiques and works by Jean-Louis Florentz, Gilles Tremblay and Michèle Reverdy — owed relatively little to one another, each approaching the organization of horizontal time and vertical texture rather differently, often compellingly.

Mesmerizing effect of the colors
Florentz' Second Chant de Nyandarua for 12 cellos (1994) opened the program. Though the cello ensemble affords a composer a broad timbral range, this work lies mostly on the sonorous upper strings — for quite a while there was not a C-string to be heard. The opening gesture, a simple motif in unison, is arresting; from here short statements unfurl into richer harmonies, until a sort of thick current is achieved, sometimes flowing sumptuously together but just as often containing eddies of sound that move back and forth against the prevailing direction. A gesture that upwells from the bass to a keening solo for the top cello recurs frequently amidst other contrasting episodes — a flurry of short separate notes, a fast, ornate solo figure taken up heterophonically, or a passage evoking the buzzing of insects. The mesmerizing effect of the colors was mitigated a bit by some rather diffuse intonation from the dozen Conservatory student cellists, sometimes struggling to find the center of the pitch on the notoriously hard-to-hear-across "stage" of Old First Church.
Placing the spiky Oiseaux Exotiques after the darker-hued Florentz work served both pieces well. Commissioned by Boulez, Messiaen's 1956 work is terse and angular, the birds of the wild assembled in a chrome-glass-and-steel birdcage. The 48 birds of his aviary (hmm . . . twelve times four?) are given voice by an ensemble of winds, brass and percussion with piano solo. Soloist Jacqueline Chew is well known locally for her performances of Messiaen, and she brought to this work her characteristic combination of big tone and incisive clarity, undaunted by the clangorous acoustics of the space. The Conservatory New Music Ensemble under Paiement's direction gave an ardent performance, with real rhythmic vibrancy and good ensemble. This is music that is vitally temporal, right down to the final avian hammerblows (the call of the White-Crested Laughing Thrush, apparently; better hope your cat never tangles with one).
The second half of the program featured another in what is now a long and distinguished series of excellent student string quartets from the Conservatory. This, the "Modern Quartet" — violinists Seyoung Lee and Beatrice Kohlloeffel, violist Ryan Mooney and cellist Corry Rankin — gave the 2001 String Quartet of the Canadian composer Gilles Tremblay a vivid and commited American premiere. The work is characterized as much by the éclat of its individual gestures (scraping and swooping; insistent tantrums on one pitch; an amazing sort of catfight for the two violins while the lower instruments wait) as by a discursiveness, increasingly difficult to follow on first hearing, as allusion and self-reference take the place of trajectory. The young performers, assisted no doubt by Tremblay (who was present), had a firm grasp of the work's singular rhetoric. They seemed completely given over to the work and sometimes carried the listener along on faith.

Visceral sense of anticipation and momentum
The closing work, Reverdy's 1994 Concerto pour Orchestre, was a knockout. Written for a large ensemble (eight strings, eight winds, four brass, percussionists and piano) that filled the small stage, the work was here given its American premiere under Paiement's crisp direction. If the previous work was in some respects non-linear in its unfolding, this one was all about trajectory. In a series of huge arcs, textures are gradually "populated" by the groups of instruments in turn, creating a visceral sense of anticipation and momentum. The composer's stated goal of "giving everyone a voice" is brilliantly realized, but not in solos so much as in a colloquy in which new layers are always joining.
Particularly compelling was the last great arc, which began with an amazing extended passage for log-drums, to which other murmuring timbres were added — bass clarinet, bass flute, violas in tremolo, muted brass, and so on — layer upon layer, higher and wider in pitch. It seems inexplicable that such a thrilling work had to wait this long for a U.S. performance; happily, the New Music Ensemble under Paiement will be recording the piece this year. Reverdy, who was present for the performance, shared in the audience's hearty ovation.
Upcoming concerts of the BluePrint Festival will feature works of San Francisco composers, works of Milhaud and Bay area colleagues, a celebration of Chou Wen-chung's 80th birthday, and a program of "World Women in Music Today." It looks less like a Festival per se than a Season — a bold and enterprising one. Perhaps the word "Festival" suggests a unique event. But wouldn't it be nice if this were but the first of many such seasons?
(George Thomson is Associate Conductor of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, and Director of its "Under Construction" new music reading concerts. He is also Director of the Virtuoso Program at San Domenico School in San Anselmo.)
©2002 George Thomson, all rights reserved