Greg Stepanich

Fresh music in unexpected places

In the course of my concertgoing last weekend, I managed to bump into some interesting pieces of contemporary music.

At the Florida Atlantic University wind band concert, the Symphony Band, joined by the FAU Mixed Chorus, performed Sleep, a piece by the American composer Eric Whitacre (b. 1970). A day after hearing the piece, I saw a new disc — Cloudburst, sung by Polyphony, under Stephen Layton (the group on a Britten disc I wrote about a while back — out in the stores of music by Whitacre, including this choral song.

It’s a very pleasant piece, built largely of big, rich chords moving slowly across the musical landscape in service of the words, which originally were supposed to be those of Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The Frost estate wouldn’t permit it, though, so Whitacre used a poem by Charles Silvestri in its place. You can hear where Whitacre must have heard something in his head to go with the last line of Frost — (And miles to go before I sleep) — but the text he had to use worked just as well.

This performance of Sleep has piqued my interest in Whitacre’s work, so I might get the disc and hear what the other pieces are like. Kudos to FAU for programming it, and giving audiences a chance to hear some music that’s currently making the classical rounds.

On Sunday, I stopped by the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Boca Raton for a performance by a 14-flute orchestra called Flute Fantasia, directed by Shaul Ben-Meir, former principal flutist with the Detroit Symphony (must be a connection with the DSO over there; the last concert I saw there featured DSO principal cellist Robert deMaine). It was apparently the third time the group has appeared, and it offered a widely varied program of music from Bach to Saint-Saens.

The flutists (one piccolo; eight soprano flutes; three alto flutes and two bass flutes, all accompanied by a string bass) also programmed music by
Catherine McMichael, a pretty piece called Legend of the Sleeping Bear. This apparently is an American Indian legend from Michigan about the formation of two islands and some dunes in the north of the state.

McMichael’s piece is quite nice, full of color and decent melody, and you can hear the nature pictures she’s trying to paint. It doesn’t break any new ground musically, but there are a lot of composers out there who are happy to just write things using the old, familiar tools from the workshop, and McMichael is one of them.

The group also played an Andante from Suite No. 2 by Kathleen Mayne. This was a brief, direct and again, nice piece, that sounded like movie music, which is not all that surprising given Mayne’s background as a film composer.

I didn’t take very extensive notes on the performances, so that’s all I have to offer about this, but I wanted to mention it in order to show that even in lower-profile concerts at the end of the season, there are plenty of interesting things going on if you know where to look — or in my case, even if you’re just guessing.