Dolce Suono: Trios by four composers

Back to the future:
When modern composers go Baroque

TOM PURDOM

Dolce Suono's opening chamber concert was a great advertisement for music by living Philadelphia composers, as intended. But it was also an unexpectedly seductive introduction to an unfamiliar form: the trio for flute, cello and piano.

During the pre-concert panel, the three composers who could make the event noted that the combination has attracted many of their contemporaries. Flutist Mimi Stillman, Dolce Suono’s director, called it one of the richest genres in the flute repertoire. I must confess, however, that this was the first time I’d heard an entire program devoted to it. I can’t even remember any examples I may have encountered in the past.

Musicians have partnered the flute with a plucked instrument (like the harp or the guitar) for as long as people have been plucking and blowing. Debussy advanced the relationship into a whole new world when he added a darker, bowed voice and created his path-breaking sonata for flute, viola and harp.

The flute-cello-piano combination takes the process one step further: It substitutes the piano for the plucked instrument and introduces all the percussion and sound effects possibilities that modern composers like to exploit when they write for the piano. The cello adds extra depth and body and even increases the range: Modern cellists can move their hands all the way down the fingerboard and create melodies that compete with the violin.

The ensemble can be viewed as a variation on the standard piano trio (violin, cello and piano), but the link with Debussy is more significant. Debussy was, in fact, the composer the panelists mentioned the most. The special characteristics of the high-pitched wind instrument, the bowed string and the varied effects possible with the piano create big contrasts and offer the composer the kind of color experiments historically associated with French music.

A showcase of creativity

Every item on the Dolce Suono program showcased the creativity of the four composers represented. The opening Ned Rorem trio began with a Largo misterioso that resembled Debussy’s sonata, but it was fully competitive, with a sound all its own. The flute occupied center stage during the first two movements, but then, just as I was beginning to wonder if this “trio” was essentially an accompanied flute piece, the cello broke into a moving, singing solo. The finale was a high-speed interaction, with all three voices playing staccato, interrupted by an interlude of whirling patterns for the flute and cello.

Curt Cacioppo’s Snake Dance Trio is based on American Indian music. Cacioppo gets the proceedings off to a good start by reversing our natural expectation that the flute will play some kind of Indian melody. Instead, the piano plays the melody and the flute and cello provide the rhythm section. For most of its length, the piece is another fast-paced, very complex interaction between the three instruments, with a final showy passage for the flute and the piano doing the drumming.

Pianist Charles Abramovic was the program’s only performer-composer. For him, composing is a sideline, even though he’s done it since childhood. When he composes, Abramovic noted, the piano is the instrument that gives him the most difficulty, possibly because he has so many standard piano patterns engraved on his mind. He has also found that he has trouble practicing his own pieces because, he joked, “I wrote it; Why should I have to practice it?”

More than musical sound effects

From where I sat in the audience, the piano part in Abramovic’s Beasts sounded just as challenging and inventive as the piano parts in the other pieces. Beasts comprises three pieces about the creatures (real and imagined) described in a 12th-Century bestiary, as translated by T.H. White. Abramovic gave us sounds like the screech of the monstrous, flesh-eating manticora and the lutes that accompany the sweet singing swans (with the lute music provided by the plucked cello). But Beasts is much more than a simple set of evocative musical sound effects. Like the program’s other pieces, it presents a stream of creativity that highlighted the form’s potential.

The musicians presented George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) exactly as Crumb specified: The performers worked under blue lighting and wore black masks across the upper half of their faces “to symbolize the powerful forces of nature dehumanized.”

Vox Balaenae is based on the recordings of whale songs that became famous in the 1960s. It opens with the flutist humming a long vocalise into the flute and ends with all three instruments playing a ringing melody that paints a vivid picture of an open sea spread beneath a peaceful sky. In between, Crumb plays with all the effects that have become his trademark. As with all his best music, Crumb’s strangeness works because it has a purpose. We know what he’s telling us, and we know he’s inventing a personal musical language so he can express it as effectively as possible.

A historic creative outburst, here and now

During the Baroque period, hundreds of composers created thousands of scores— a musical library we’re still exploring. After reviewing new music for almost 20 years, I’ve concluded that we’re living now in a similar period. We just don’t realize it, because modern advances in transportation and communication obscure the reality.

Baroque composers, by contrast, were isolated in space. Every duke or prince had to support a court composer if he wanted music for his musicians to play. To be sure, a lot of music was published, but printing and engraving were expensive processes. In our world, our perceptions are skewed by the idea that every composer must be a Beethoven or Bach to deserve our attention. Once you escape that bias, concerts like this one can leave you feeling you’re surrounded by a historic outburst in musical creativity.



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