Dolce Suono's Barber celebration (1st review)

Samuel Barber described his Capricorn Concerto as "cheerful noises." It's a phrase that could have been applied to most of the music Mimi Stillman's Dolce Suono ensemble played at its first concert in a two-part series celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Barber's birth. The program featured two of Barber's own contributions along with works by other composers that showcased the tradition Barber generated at Curtis Institute.

Barber bucked the trend of the first half of the 20th Century by producing music that traditional audiences could relate to. The other composers on the program all followed in his footsteps and helped create the contemporary resurgence of music that evokes enthusiastic applause instead of brief polite claps.

All the musicians were Dolce Suono regulars, and most of them were Curtis grads, so you can assume they delivered first-class performances. The center of interest at this event was the music itself.

The program's first part paired Barber's Summer Music for wind quintet (1955) with Jennifer Higdon's Autumn Music— a piece for the same instruments by a composer who was born seven years after Barber created a work that has become one of the staples of the wind quintet repertoire.

Ignore the title

Summer Music bears a title that promises a certain kind of mood and imagery, but it would be an effective piece if Barber had simply called it Wind Quintet No. 1. You can ignore its title, if you like, and just listen to it as a piece of highly varied pure music that exploits the contrasts of five very different instruments and includes pleasures such as memorably sweet moments for the oboe.

On the other hand, if the section marked by rapid unison fluttering makes you think of bike rides along the Schuylkill River bike paths, there's no reason why you shouldn't look at it that way, too.

In her onstage remarks, Higdon remarked that when she wrote Autumn Music it didn't occur to her that some day it would actually have to follow the masterwork that inspired it. She needn't have worried. Autumn Music is a good example of the kind of music that has made Higdon a phenomenally popular contemporary composer.

Autumn Music bases its structure on the two halves of the fall season. In the first section, Higdon darts through the colors of the wind quintet as if your eye was moving across single leaves and patches of multicolored landscape. In the second section, the oboist and the clarinetist switch to the darker sounds of the English horn and the bass clarinet and Higdon evokes the sparer mood of late autumn.

Gongs from the piano

My favorite pieces on the program were two works that were notable for their brevity— Ned Rorem's trio for flute, cello and piano, and David Ludwig's Haiku Catharsis for alto flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion and piano.

The Rorem opens with gongs from the piano, then erupts into a high-speed allegro that has all three musicians working like mad. It's an intense piece that obviously places big demands on the players and its four short movements are packed with surprises like the beautiful cello passages in the third movement.

In his discussion of Haiku Catharsis, Ludwig joked that he was coming dangerously close to the rule that the commentary shouldn't last longer than the piece itself. Each section illustrates one of the four haikus printed in the program notes. The piano creates simulations of rain drops and temple gongs, but Ludwig's achievement goes well beyond that kind of scene painting. Haiku Catharsis touches on some deep emotions, and it's executed with skill and imagination. It contains beautiful moments for every one of the instruments Ludwig employs.

First-timers all

The finale for the afternoon— Barber's "cheerful noises"— doesn't get played much because of its odd scoring: for flute, oboe, trumpet, string quartet and double bass. None of the musicians on stage had ever played the Capricorn Concerto before. Barber himself noted that his work employs the same scoring as Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto and compared it to a Baroque concerto grosso.

The piece was also influenced by Stravinsky, and the first movement sounds more like Stravinsky's mannered neo-classical works than the headlong exuberance of Bach's allegros. In the second movement, Barber's gift for lyrical writing asserts himself. In the final movement, the trumpet cuts loose, and Barber plays with moods and colors that are uniquely his own.

In his own time, Barber's detractors saw him as a reactionary clinging to an outmoded tradition. Today, he looks like a hardhead who ignored fashion and went his own way— and became, as often happens, a founder of the next big movement in his art.♦


To read another review by Victor L. Schermer, click here.