Review of Concert

Longitude

Tuesday, April 26, 2005, 8:00 PM
Edward M. Pickman Hall, Longy School of Music ,
Cambridge, MA

Selecting quality contemporary literature that students can play is not an easy task, something that Longitude's season finale made evident. Nevertheless, the concert proved pleasing enough, thanks largely to its performances.

The most intriguing item heard was Jacob Druckman's early Duo (1949), scored for violin and piano. It's a student work that was composed under Aaron Copland's tutelage and shows keen awareness of music not only by Copland but also Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. Despite this, Druckman fashions a piece that forges its own sound world within the baseline neoclassic approach then prevalent. And its three movements are not standard sonata regurgitations.   Crows (2002) by Longy faculty composer John Howell Morrison sets a poem by Chinese writer Xue Di that addresses Vincent Van Gogh's famous painting "Wheat Field with Crows." Morrison's writing for the work's soprano and alto sax pair is arresting and vibrant, filled with close high tessitura dyads festooned with treble figures, though the piece's chain of alternating active and passive sections needs a larger-scale overlay to impart broad structural strength.

For trumpet and piano, Piece (1972) by French composer Serge Nigg tries to find a midpoint between Schoenberg's serialism and Messiaen's towering third-based verticals. Unfortunately, the result is an angular, clotted entry of little charm or appeal. Selected from a call for scores offered to Longy student composers, Three Final Songs (2005) for soprano and mixed chamber group by Gregory Wollenman is a brooding piece that wears its love of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death on its sleeve to the point of quoting several passages from it. Here, one can favorably cite Wollenman's willingness to lay himself emotionally open through the score's pages.

Performances, nearly all by Longy students, varied but were always attractive.   Ensemble director Paul Brust conducted Three Final Songs with skill and sympathy.

--David Cleary