When one prepares a program of relatively recent compositions, most (if not all) of which are likely to be unfamiliar to the audience, there is always the risk that one of the offerings will overwhelm all of the others. Preparing any performance of such music will almost always involve some degree of experimentation, so it is no surprise that organizing a full evening of such experiments will also have an experimental side. Since no experiment is ever guaranteed to produce the results the experimenter desired, a high level of risk is inevitable.
Last night's sfSound recital in the Old First Concerts series at Old First Church presented such an overwhelming offering just before the intermission. This was "Trio Largo," originally composed in 2005 by sfSound founder matt ingalls (honoring what appears to be his recent decision to spell his name without upper-case letters). This work was originally conceived as a trio for oboe, clarinet, and trumpet, accompanied by an ensemble of improvisers serving as a "backup band." A saxophone part was recently added to the solo voices, but ingalls still calls the work a trio because it is in three sections. The largo part of the title speaks for itself with each of the four parts consisting heavily of individual pitches sustained over considerable durations. In the notes he prepared for the program, ingalls wrote: "Tonight's performance does not include the background improvising group so that … we can take full advantage of the church's reverberant acoustics."
What this description does not capture is a level of dynamic intensity pushed to extremes, if not beyond them. As the composer Eliot Handelman put it, back when he was one of the leading voices on the rec.music.classical discussion group, this was music to melt the wax in your ears. Yet, in the midst of that onslaught of sheer volume, one encountered those subtle variations in sonority that emerge from the individual performers' respective respiratory systems. As is the case in so many recent works, the spectrum of the signal itself became an invigorating focus of attention; and ingalls' decision to let the Old First Church acoustics replace any improvisatory background was definitely a good call.
For all of its force, however, there were no connotations of violence in "Trio Largo." Rather, the work was awe-inspiring, reminding us that one does not need the full force of a symphony orchestra or all of the stops pulled out on a pipe organ to evoke the presence of something far greater than oneself. The overall experience was one of exhilaration, so exhilarating as to obscure memories of what had come before and disrupt the present of more subtle offerings that would follow.
This is not to suggest that the rest of the program was, or should have been, forgettable. A much earlier work, Brian Ferneyhough's 1966 "Coloratura" immediately preceded "Trio Largo;" and, in its own way, laid down some preparatory groundwork. Having once heard Ferneyhough speak at a musicale in Los Angeles, I know that he is given to flamboyant language in discussing his own work. The final sentence of his description in the program book is representative: "The resulting form might be seen in two ways: as the centrifugal divergence of two ultimately irreconcilable personalities or else as a problematic search or a provisional and transitory mutual accommodation."
Fortunately, Ferneyhough's music speaks for itself through its sonorities far more eloquently than Ferneyhough does through his words. The listener would do better to take the title of this music at face value and treat this composition for oboe (performed by Kyle Bruckmann) with piano accompaniment (by Christopher Jones) as a somewhat warped reflection on the relationship between a bel canto soprano and her accompanist. The semantics of the "bel" part may be put under some strain; but the "canto" side is as clear as day. Ultimately, this is music that leaves us pondering the act of singing itself, rather than just the nature of what is being sung.
Equally interesting was the approach that sfSound took to three of Christian Wolff's fourteen "Exercises." The Wolff scores I examined in my student days all took relatively limited approaches to what was specified through notation, allowing for considerable liberty in how performers would interpret their respective parts. The parts for these exercises are primarily melodic lines; and the performances by sfSound had a decidedly chorale-like quality (without any intimations of traditional harmonies).
The offerings that tended to have the hardest time were the ones that explored subtle relations between sound and silence. One was the world premiere of Erik Ulman's "Ocean;" and the other was the American premiere of Mathias Spahlinger's "fugitive beauté." Both of these works would have fared better in the company of less "assertive" works; and both tended to occupy a duration that overstayed its welcome.
The other American premiere was "Fast Medium Swing" by Matthew Shlomowitz for a "combo" of oboe (Bruckmann), bass clarinet (ingalls), alto saxophone (John Ingle), and piano (Jones), with obbligato sampled sounds (evoked from a laptop by sfSound cellist Monica Scott). This was another composition that left many decisions to the performers, including both the instruments to be used for the trio and the sounds to be sampled. While the sense of a combo provided a jazz connotation, the title actually comes from cricket, referring to a specific type of bowler. In the context of our own cultural background, however, there seemed little lost in preferring the jazzier semantics of the title.
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