Joy To The World

By D. Kern Holoman 

San Francisco Classical Voice, December 7, 2004

Santa Rosa SO�s December holiday concert was exuberant and plenty brilliant, as these events seem destined to be. There was a chorus, a big percussion battery, and an awful lot of brass � perilously close, one scroogishly felt, to Christmas at the Pops. Yet nary a traditional Christmas tune was to be heard. All four works, moreover, were from the last hundred years (1910, 1965, 1990, 2004), and the new commission, by the engaging young composer Kevin Puts, had drawn a certain number of afficionados to make the trip north in both the literal and, it turned out, poetic senses.

But it was the opener, Vaughan Williams� Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, that ended up defining the evening. For one thing, the sonority achieved by the large cohort of strings players � standing, Gewandhaus-fashion � was very beautiful indeed: despite the complex harmonic and contrapuntal fabric, it was virtually flawless in tuning, thoughtful and assured in its treatment of the music�s often stern riches, eloquently shaped by Jeffrey Kahane. The echo ensemble of nine players positioned behind the main ensemble looked and sounded as they were supposed to, and there was lovely playing from the front-desk soloists, notably the principal viola. And it was positively eerie how that particularly idiomatic sound world seemed referenced, later the same evening, both in the Kevin Puts work and in the great string recitative that precedes the last of the Chichester Psalms.

I have to summarize Christopher Rouse�s pop-classic Karolju as Orff-ul: maddeningly derivative, right down to the long Amen at the end, lifted chord-for-chord, if memory serves, from the corresponding place in the Berlioz Requiem. (Rouse: except for �a sm all homage� to Orff and �a four-measure phrase� from The Nutcracker, �all the music in Karolju is by me.�) Still, everyone involved in the transaction � composer, conductor, players and singers, and of course the audience � was having a terrific time: these are, after all, fantasy carols for a four-year-old. The Santa Rosa Symphony Honor Chorus, numbering about 100 (with something like a 3:1 ratio of women to men) clearly reveled in their nonsense lyrics in eight �languages,� to which Hebrew would be added later in the evening. All the dancing-on-the-green music grew wearisome, in a folkish way, but there were good birdcalls and, in the �Italian� carol at the end, a fine oboe solo.

A Substantial Work

Kevin Puts, b. 1972 and currently working at UT-Austin, is the kind of composer who rises to the top from solid technique, a contagious delight in sound, and, I would guess, an inborn certainty that his music had better be tuneful for people to like it. Vespertine Symphonies, in three movements, takes its title from an album by the Norse superstar Bj�rk [Gudmundsdottir] (Elektra, 2001; notably tracks 5 and 6). Aside from the gamelan-style opening and obvious affinities of color and layering between the CD and the orchestra score, the deeper debt is to Sibelius, whose idiom is directly evoked in the short, fiendish second-movement scherzo and the brassy six-minute crescendo at the close. It was a fine performance, with a superb cello duo and very nice solos (when the brass and percussion managed to let up) from the principal woodwinds. The audience stood and roared approvingly. Vespertine Symphonies struck me as something that will, like the composer�s marimba concerto, prove a sturdy title. Indeed it has already been taken by Marin Alsop to the Cabrillo Festival (August 2004) and by Alaisdair Neale to the New World Symphony in Florida (September 2004).

The Magnum Opus Project, which commissioned Vespertine Symphonies, was established in 2003 by Kathryn Gould, 50-something venture capitalist from the Silicon Valley, and in its initial phase funds nine works for round-robin premieres by the Marin, Oakland East Bay, and Santa Rosa orchestras (see Richard Scheinin�s May 2003 story for the San Jose Mercury News, on the web). (For details on the project, click here). There�s a catch, which is that the patroness finds �much of the new music of recent decades . . . harshly atonal or dully trance-inducing;� and the selection system, where Gould and any of the three music directors (currently Kahane, Alasdair Neale, and Michael Morgan) can veto any nomination, seems certain to produce a string of like-minded works that will be broadly appealing but not especially likely to foster, as Ms. Gould says she wants, �another Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, or Schubert.� Still you can�t deny the grandeur of the gesture, and NoCal orchestra circles are certain to profit mightily from it on a number of fronts.

Bernstein�s Chichester Psalms are, similarly, a comfortable kind of �modern� music. What�s not to like about the 23rd Psalm sung in Hebrew by a boy alto? . . . impeccably delivered in this case by Andy Gutierrez of the East Bay , who says he hopes to become a great choral director. (He�s also a Kung Fu medalist.) I thought the r�union des th�mes, where the stern �Lamah rag'shu� interjections (�Why do the nations rage?�) are tamed by the reprise of the lad�s �Adonai,� to be the spiritual highlight of the evening. I would have preferred the interplay of major and minor triads in the first movement delivered with more clarity from the chorus, and for real bel canto at the peaks of the splendid soprano billows in 5/4 in the last movement. Here, too, we cannot help being drawn into a fabric of allusion and homage, as we nearly always are with Bernstein, specifically to Stravinsky�s so precedent Symphony of Psalms.

The SRSO concerts these days are attractive all round, with good publications, committed audience, a hopping lobby, and a very clever use of a limited stage space I imagine they find vexing. Young people were everywhere, both playing and singing onstage and listening raptly in the house. (Kahane and his orchestra are justly admired for their many career launches.) I thought the pre-concert conversation between conductor and composer a model of its kind, made very Now by talk of Icelandic temptresses and a good deal of fiddling with an I-pod.

(D. Kern Holoman is Barbara K. Jackson Professor of Music at the University of California , Davis , where he conducts the UCD Symphony Orchestra. His most recent book is a history of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra: The Soci�t� des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828�1967, University of California Press , 2004.)

�2004 D. Kern Holoman, all rights reserved