Astral Artists' "Musical Tapestry'

A few days ago on WPRB (103.3 FM, Princeton) I came across a recent work by the American composer Charles Wuorinen. To my ears, Wuorinen's style has changed very little since he arrived at Columbia University in the mid-1960s at about the same time I was leaving; he is still writing in the same intense and fragmented atonal idiom that made so many listeners so uncomfortable back then.

Hearing Wuorinen's music also made me remember the strange 20th-Century phenomenon of audiences gritting their teeth through joyless concerts of uncompromising music, played by performers who didn't feel it their responsibility to reach out to their audience. How different things might have been if, at a concert of this post-Schonberg-Webern-Berg super-serial music, musicians had said something like, "I know this is challenging music, different from what you're accustomed to, but I love it, and I'd like to tell you why."

How things have changed!

Vera Wilson's vision

I don't know what was more unusual about the "Musical Tapestry" presented by Astral Artists: that it was a concert consisting of music exclusively for cello, alto saxophone and piano, or that its program featured six composers born between 1870 and 1940: one American (John Harbison), one Argentinean (Alberto Ginastera), one Italian (Luciano Berio), one Frenchman (Maurice Ravel) and two Russians (Edison Denisov and Sergei Rachmaninoff).

All the music on this program was unfamiliar to me, and, with the exception of the Berio, there was probably none that I would have made a special effort to seek out beforehand. And indeed if the concert had been performed by unsmiling and remote musicians, it could have been a dreary affair, no matter what the level of musicianship.

But it is clearly part of Astral founder Vera Wilson's vision not only to nurture promising young artists as they start their careers, but also to insist that they understand that they are ambassadors— that part of their job is to be a sales force for their repertory.

Disjointed squeaks and blats

Doug O'Connor, as his personal website makes clear, is on a mission to recruit converts to his instrument and its unusual repertory. He preceded the Berio with a warm and welcoming lecture on how an uninitiated listener might approach Berio's disjointed, silence-filled assortment of squeaks and blats.

In the Q. and A. session after the concert, I asked O'Connor whether the Berio included some elements of chance. He answered that, no, it was completely notated, and, as his eyes lit up and he began to describe the other Berio Sequenzas, some of which are indeed aleatory, it struck me that this kid regards the avant-garde music of the mid-1900s not merely as weird experiments, but as repertory to be studied and mastered like any other.

Similarly, both O'Connor and cellist Susan Babini spoke lovingly of Edison Denisov's experimental quartertone music, explaining what quartertones are, and thanking their audience for joining them as they explored this strange sonic world.

A cellist you remember

This is, if memory serves, the fourth time I've heard Susan Babini perform. I have heard her play Bach, Kodaly, one of the two cello parts in the Schubert C-major Quintet, the Beethoven Cello Sonata Op. 69, a work by Eliot Carter, Saint-Saens's The Swan, and now, Ginastera, Denisov and Rachmaninoff. In other words, when Babini plays something, you tend to remember it, not just because she plays this amazing range of repertory beautifully (which she certainly does) but because, with body language and facial expression, she so thoroughly sells her listeners on every note she plays.

I must confess that after the beautiful and enigmatically brief Ravel Habanera for sax and piano that followed the intermission, I found the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata something of a letdown. I've tried and tried with Rachmaninoff, I really have. But I simply can't abide the unrelenting, foggy grayness of his music, despite its virtuoso piano writing and the occasional beautiful melody. But I know this is a quirky minority view, certainly out of step with audience sentiment at this concert.

In his recent BSR exchange with Tom Purdom about classical music programs, Beeri Moalem wrote: "I want to be challenged with new viewpoints, new languages, new approaches. I get the most out of a concert when I come out feeling puzzled, intrigued, provoked, inspired to investigate further."

I think Beeri would have been very pleased with this concert.