Contemporary music: Two concerts

Penn Contemporary Music presented four pieces for violin and piano composed for Maria Bachmann, with Bachman and pianist Jon Klibonoff providing the interpretations, and I found that my personal favorites stemmed from the minds of the youngest composers in the group.

The two older composers in the foursome were Philip Glass (born 1937) and the late George Rochberg (1918-2005). Glass is one of the best known composers of the last half century as well as a contemporary of this reviewer (born 1936). Rochberg is rightfully revered as one of the leaders in the revolt against the academic dogmas that dominated American music when he started composing.

But Glass's repetitive style didn't evoke the responses this particular soul bestowed on the freer styles employed by Paul Moravec (born 1957) and Jay Reise (born 1950). Rochberg's 1988 Sonata for Violin and Piano seemed mannered compared to the work created by younger voices that had taken advantage of his rebellion.

Scenes from a marriage

Moravec's Three Pieces for Violin and Piano opens with a vignette that takes its title from the double action revolver and grabs your attention with a bang-up, shoot-the-sheriff-on-the-first page opening.

Moravec composed the second piece, Evermore, as a wedding gift for Bachmann and her husband, an amateur pianist. It pairs a dark, romantic violin with a gently singing, not-too-difficult piano part— just the kind of thing a husband and wife could play as they looked forward from the beginning of their life together or backward in their later years.

Moravec's third item, Ariel Fantasy, is a nervous, fluttering display piece for both instruments.

Mysterious bird

Jay Reise described his Flight of the Red Sea Swallow as "something of a response" to Vaughan Williams's well-loved The Lark Ascending. It offers the violinist the same opportunities for controlled emotional display, but it describes a more erratic trajectory than Vaughan Williams's English lark, and it includes encounters with stormier, unpastoral weather.

The Red Sea Swallow is an ornithological mystery. The only evidence that it exists is a single dead bird. Reise's haunting opening and closing create a suitable frame for an ode to a creature that may have disappeared at the very moment we discovered it.

Opportunity for oboes

The Philadelphia Orchestra's latest chamber session premiered another work by a composer who has taken advantage of the revolution initiated by rebels like Rochberg. David Ludwig (born 1972) wrote his Piccola Musica Notturna on commission from the parents of the Orchestra's English horn virtuoso, Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia.

As Masoudnia explained in her opening remarks, the tenor oboe has some wonderful solos in orchestral pieces, but the chamber literature is almost non-existent. Her parents commissioned it in the hope it would give her (and other English horn players) a chamber piece they could play with their colleagues.

Neither Mozart nor Sinatra

Ludwig rose to the occasion with a piece that should prove popular with audiences as well as English horn players. Piccola gets off to a strong start and takes its audience through a ten-minute tour of styles and musical references.

Ludwig blends the English horn and its partners with a sure sense of the special qualities of each voice. That horn is the show's acknowledged star, but every instrument has moments such as the section in which a tinkling harp counterpointed the thunder from the rest of the ensemble.

The title is the Italian for A Little Night Music, but Piccola doesn't produce the moods normally associated with nocturnes. It isn't gay, like Mozart's most famous example, or romantic, like many others. It isn't sleepless and agitated, like Schubert's, or menacing, like Vivaldi's. Or lonely-guy-in-the-night, like Sinatra's. It's definitely a night piece, but there is nothing sentimental or melodramatic about its approach to its subject. That may be its most contemporary quality.