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Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Five New Works by Atlanta Composers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEWS
“New American Organ Works,” Sunday at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church.
Atlanta Chamber Players, Monday at The Balzer Theater at Herren’s.
“Three Premieres for Organ,” Randall W. Harlow, organist, Tuesday at emory’s Schwartz Center.
You can start to feel it. Once rare and isolated, Atlanta composers are coming together as a group. A scene is developing.
With no coordination on their part, three concerts earlier this week presented five world premieres — a snapshot of Atlanta’s classical creators.
The most casual concert came first, Sunday at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church. An hour-long program jammed together five short works for pipe organ, including “Thy Glory Fills Heaven and Earth� a slight, devotional work from 2004 by one of Atlanta’s senior composers, Charles Knox.
The premieres began with Mark Gresham’s three-minute “Lights in the Darkness.� Intriguingly, the music immediately felt like a aural abstract painting. We first notice pools of dark pigment, then follow arpeggios as they breaking up the texture, then our senses land on shafts of stained-glass color. Each brief episode seems ready to tell its own backstory.
Where Gresham was hesitant and modest, Albert Ahlstrom’s 17-minute “Firewalker Suite� is discursive and extroverted. Its three likable sections go from blinding bright lights to a darker, veiled sound (with a hint of kitsch) to a brilliant, French-toccata finale. Ahlstrom has abundant technique, both as composer and organist, but his music could profit from more gravitas, from bundling his many ideas into a tighter package.
— Monday at the Balzer Theater at Herren’s, downtown, Atlanta Chamber Players’ founder-pianist Paula Peace opened her 30th season with classics by Mendelssohn and Schubert and a world premire: Nickitas J. Demos’ “Waltzing through the Endtimeâ€? with texts by Georgia poet laureate David Bottoms. In two sections, scored for a hootenanny of musicians plus narrator and baritone, “Waltzingâ€? could have been a gloriously tangled swamp. Instead, I’d say this is Demos’ most ambitious work and, in important ways, a substantive advance of his art.
From the opening sounds, a clarinet loping along backed by hipster-jazz bass plunks, Demos instantly evoked lost time and space. In elaborating the poetry, the music forces us to tap our own inner history.
Midway into the performance, “Waltzing� seemed to be an early draft of a masterpiece. Actor Tom Key, as the narrator, has a squared-off, front-loaded voice and he reads like it’s street poetry of a madman, which made for unflinching performance but might not be the ideal avenue into Bottoms’ shaded, memory-filled poetry. Demos’ text settings for lyric baritone (Dwight Coleman) lacked suppleness: Some words resisted the melodic phrases into which they were crammed. The final minute, too, dissipates much of the emotional momentum accumulated over the previous 30.
Still, the instrumental interludes grip a listener like nothing else I’ve heard from this composer. By extending the range of his emotions, empathizing with voices both common and unfamiliar, Demos has created a hybrid chamber cantata of remarkable substance and power.
— The third concert, Tuesday in Emory University’s Emerson Concert Hall, was the inspiration of Randall W. Harlow, a graduate student organist. Before taking the bench of the new Jaeckel Op. 45 pipe organ, he mentioned that with 800 years of accumulated organ literature, we’re likely to overlook the contemporary vitality of the instrument.
To remedy this, Harlow had the witty idea to summon new music from two Emory profs, John Anthony Lennon and Steve Everett, and link them to the U.S. premiere of a major new work by the most revered (and often damned) German composer of the past half century, Karlheinz Stockhausen. For all three composers, it was their first work for pipe organ.
In comments before his 11-minute “Misericordia,� Lennon said we’d hear the audible influence of the venerable French and German schools of organ writing, plus American sounds of his California youth including Motown, the Righteous Brothers and the Doors.
Put aside images of rock ‘n’ roll thunder: “Misericordiaâ€? is thoroughly Gothic in ambiance, with the sort of icy, creepy-crawly chords and ominous pedal tones that people associate with phantoms, graveyards and deconsecrated churches. There’s also a rhythmic energy — and an unquenchable search for a good time — that makes it feel concerned only with the present. If Lennon tightens up some slack spots, I suspect the work could find a wider audience. It’s fresh, a little ephemeral and entirely American.
In comparison, Everett’s 16-minute “Vanitas� seems suffused with wisdom of the ancients. It was the most polished, tightly composed and sophisticated new Atlanta piece I heard all week.
“Vanitasâ€? is named after the style of Dutch still-life paintings where a silver bowl sparkles but the flowers and fruit are starting to rot — a reminder that worldly riches cannot stop man’s inevitable decay. Everett, who is primarily an electronics composer, scored his new work for organ (Harlow on the bench) with a computerized processor (Everett at the control panel) manipulating the live sounds. Via electronics, the organ’s life force is decayed beyond its control.
Unlike Lennon’s harmonically tonal music, where you feel a strong linear plot, Everett’s style evokes cool modernism, abstract and serene. There’s no sense of nature, emotion or story; it’s not especially pretty or disorienting; it just is.
And it starts with a drone, like we’re near a particularly pleasant generator hum. That sound delicately opens and unfolds, with a high pip here, an electronic gurgle there. Now a low gong-like boing, now a breathy, fluty flutter — the imagery is poetic, slow moving, contemplative. After 10 minutes the music grows tense, ready to implode. Gradually the pressure subsides and a drop of melancholy colors the mood. A spiky chord — man’s last gasp? — and it’s over.
In the third quarter of the 20th century, Everett’s brand of atonal modernism held cultural power all out of proportion to its anti-populism. Back then, Germany’s Stockhausen, guru of the avant-garde, made it hip to experiment with pure sound. Traditional tonal composers felt themselves bullied by the young radicals.
Now 77, Stockhausen has quit the experiments. His “Himmelfahrt� (Music for Ascension Day), which premired in Milan in May, relies on out-of-vogue “serial� techniques for controlling every parameter of the composition.
Organist Harlow secured the deuxieme for Atlanta and played it with a sure command of the idiom, breathing life into each disjointed phrase and thus making it interesting moment by moment. He was assisted by vocalists Teresa Hopkin and John Bigham, with Everett controlling the sound projection.
Stockhausen is a music-history legend, but this week sounds by Demos and Everett stuck with me after the concerts were over — a healthy sign that at least a few Atlanta composers, once given your attention, can hold it with something meaningful to say.
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