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Review of Festival Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival Friday-Sunday, July 8-10, 2005 The northern Vermont towns of Irasburg and Newport saw several guests arrive during the second weekend in July. One, the remnants of Tropical Storm Cindy, was decidedly unwelcome. However, the host of performers and composers who made the trek were a major asset to this year's Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival. The catchphrase for Friday evening's concert was "eclectic yet enjoyable." Songlines for mixed quartet is yet another winner from Martin Boykan's pen. While Atlantic Seaboard dissonant, it's graceful and well-spoken even at its most intense, mindful of color and texture and structurally sound. Henry Cowell's string trio Seven Paragraphs consists of just over a half-dozen tonally oriented character pieces--brief, but purposeful and chock-full of personality and craft. There was much to like about Linea Negra by Laurie San Martin as well. For solo marimba, it proves short and smart, cleverly building a solid ternary edifice from repeated octaves and fast unison material festooned with grittier elaborations. Various Roses shows William Anderson fracturing borrowed material ranging from the Rolling Stones to Schubert, rearranging it all into an economic little charmer for violin/guitar duo that combines pointillism and tonality without seeming daft. Your reviewer has now listened to Avoidance Tactics #1 for piano and percussion by Curtis K. Hughes on three separate occasions and would gladly hear it several times more. Redolent of Lee Hyla and others wowed by John Coltrane's ultra-raw oeuvre, it manages to shine with its own bright sense of self and persuasive feel for form and balance. Other items pleased less. Spinoff by Charles Wuorinen is succinctly described as Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat interpreted by a beatnik serialist. There's lots of enjoyable intensity in the writing for violin, contrabass, and congas, but less contrast and long-range shape. William Pfaff's moderately dissonant Coriolis took the evening's prize for oddest scoring: alto flute, bass clarinet, guitar, and electric bass. Regrettably, the work's earnestly chugging feel comes across as square, and its closing pages, consisting of a bass cadenza and atmospheric coda, seem from another planet. And even though it sports two melodic ideas of personality, Erik Nielsen's heartfelt string quartet That Silent Land swings capriciously between tonal and polytonal idioms, unfolds confusingly, and lacks able architecture. Saturday afternoon's event pleased even more. Echoes' White Veil for solo piano shows Jason Eckardt veering more uptown from Coltrane to Ferneyhough's maximalism. This wonderfully dramatic and clangorous composition benefits enormously from a sophisticated use of binary contrasts ranging from small sections to large-scale overview. Originally written for viol consort, Boykan's Motet makes the jump surprisingly well to a soprano and mixed trio scoring. Lovely and expressive, it nicely mixes deft East Coast ensemble textures and cadenza-like cello writing. Allen Anderson's brief but ravishing soprano/piano item At Half Past Three is an affectionate birthday tribute to Boykan. There's plenty of variety within its warmly etched confines. While Designs and Suite by Ursula Mamlok are early serial 1960s violin and piano duets of brief duration, there's plenty of difference between them. The latter weds Webernian brevity and Wolpe -like intensity, while the former shows influence of Ralph Shapey's manic/depressive bleakness and anger. Both pleased greatly. Gunther Schuller's early Fantasy for Violoncello Solo, Op. 19 is almost a bit too fanciful for its own good. But a closer look reveals that its wildly contrasting snippets show motivic relationships to each other. Had the piece also contained long-range clumping, it would have been an essential entity. That evening's concert saw only strong selections. For flute and piano, Yehudi Wyner's All the Rage reverses the slow-fast arrangement commonly found in bipartite pieces. Its opener is a bouncy, jazzy scherzo which appends a surprisingly reflective coda, leading to a tragically anguished finale. Bizarre it may be, but it works. Hyperblue, a piano trio by David Rakowski, is even more enamored of scherzando writing; here, the composer surrounds a wistful centerpiece with active, kinetic bunkmates stuffed with profile and personality. Both this work and Wyner's revel in non-standard yet satisfying movement formats. Mamlok's wonderful mixed Sextet deftly organizes its material into palindromes and other sophisticated procedures while cloaking all this craft in music of fleet-footed, sparkling beauty. It's an absolute must-hear. Sara Doncaster's Supernatural Songs for tenor, two sopranos, mezzo-soprano, and 13 players has been several years in the making—parts of it have appeared on past Warebrook installments—but it proved well worth the wait. A lengthy setting of Yeats's poetry, it's sizable not just in duration but also in scope and depth, every bit a match for the weighty text. Doncaster takes full advantage of the large forces, penning colorful music of much variety. Her writing for voices is superb, as is her handling of harmonies that find a compelling niche between tonality and atonality. In brief, this is a terrific piece deserving to be programmed many times over. The closing concert on the following afternoon regrettably saw a minimal amount of essential fare. The best item was Elliott Carter's Figment for Solo 'Cello , which proved to be as showy as the aforementioned Schuller opus, but was tighter in its generative material and more structurally sound . Bravura dissonant writing dominates here, leavened with a few pensive moments. The highly conceptual December 1952 by Earle Brown received a mellow, special-effects-heavy realization by a trio consisting of cellist and two percussionists. It was most enjoyable. For violin and cello pairing, Eric Sawyer's Pas De Deux is attractive enough if splashy to the point of being a bit facile and lacking a clear overall format. Trio Op. 201 by Alan Hovhanness is certainly more ambitious than much of this composer's formulaic output. It consists of ethnic-sounding spun melodies containing a surprising amount of pitch bends and microtones, accompanied by spare pizzicato ostinati. Unfortunately, there's no contrasting music here to lend depth to this material. Ingolf Dahl's Concerto a Tre for clarinet, violin, and cello is boilerplate Neoclassic stuff much too enamored of Stravinsky and Copland to demonstrate a compellingly unique voice. Despite carefully worked out canonic pitch textures, Robert Morris's guitar solo Apres Vous is dry, arcane serial fare that shows no contrast at all to delineate its composer's promised variation structure. And Tainted Thrice , a piece for three cellos by Stefen Freund, is an earnest but forgettable piece of Bartok-steeped juvenilia. No one can fault the performances encountered at the festival, though. Highlights included arresting solo efforts by pianist Marilyn Nonken (sporting flashy finger work and picture-perfect pacing in Eckardt's piece), marimbist Tim Feeney (featuring charismatic stage presence and a sound both round and intense in the San Martin), guitarist William Anderson (showing an aristocratically focused tone and spot-on technique in both hands in Morris's opus), and cellists Rafael Popper- Keizer and David Russell (demonstrating exquisite interpretive skills and pinpoint control in the Schuller and Carter respectively). There were also compelling presentations by the intelligently polished Concordia String Trio (Marcia Henry on violin, Leslie Perna on viola, Darry Dolezal on cello) and appealingly intense Primary Duo (Sarah Bob, piano and Aaron Trant, percussion); a brief but atmospheric cadenza offering by electric bassist Christopher Doncaster; and clairvoyantly sensitive chamber playing by all the soloists mentioned above as well as Damien Blattler and Mark Margolies (clarinets), Sarah Brady (flutes), Heidi Braun-Hill and David Fulmer (violins), and Brendan Kane (contrabass). Tenor Jon Garrison's gripping, vibrant singing was sensational in the Doncaster, as was Susan Davenny Wyner's evocatively musical conducting in both that work and the Mamlok Sextet . --David Cleary |