Greg Stepanich

Review: Roberto Sierra, Sinfonia No. 2

Late last month, composer Roberto Sierra’s Sinfonia No. 2 had its world premiere in Miami, in a concert given by the University of Miami’s Frost Symphony Orchestra, led by Thomas Sleeper.

I’ve finally found some time to listen to the work this week on a recording provided by the school, and the first thing that’s surprising to me is how traditionally minded this 16-minute, one-movement symphony is. Listening to the other music of Sierra’s on his Web site, you can hear a composer eager to use Latin and jazz influences that gives the excerpts I heard a sort of genial populism.

But this symphony is a work with a no-nonsense, serious heart. It's written in a corporate classical, tonal style popular somewhere around the 1940s. I don't say that to write it off as old hat; merely to say that it would fit comfortably on a program with pieces such as the Barber essays and symphonies.

Sierra's focus here, unlike the saxophone and guitar concerti that can be heard on the site, is not on solo display but on pure symphonic composition, building a structure out of the notes of the big, somber theme that opens the work. It's subtitled "Gran Passacaglia,� and Sierra fashions a wide variety of textures out of the dark, strident, brass-heavy opening.

It's more or less a concerto for orchestra in that virtuosic use of the whole orchestral palette is made here, with plenty of whirlwind passages for strings and winds, and aggressive use of the brasses and percussion. There are also much lighter, more tender moments, such as the early episode in which solo flute and horn do a gentle slow dance over the plucking of a harp.

The symphony is a series of variations, essentially, that go from manic to serene and back to manic again, in what sounds like a struggle over the direction of the piece or the meaning of its notes. The music is broken up by large perorations, particularly one all-out climax about 10 minutes in that reminds me of no one so much as César Franck (same thick orchestration, too).

Overall, Sierra brings a notable invention to the music, writing entirely different treatments of the passacaglia theme as if to show how sounds that appear to be completely unrelated can be drawn from the same source. It also sounds to me as though the design of the work falls naturally into two or three parts, the first one ending with a warm horn solo over strings; the third one beginning with a quasi-recapitulation of the opening material about three or four minutes from the end.

As the music builds again from that point, a restless dotted rhythm begins to take over, and eventually dominates, driving the whole orchestra to a rat-a-tat conclusion.

This piece is a strong, interesting composition by a man who knows how to manipulate basic material successfully and make it thematically interesting enough for a listener to follow. It's not particularly original or individual, but it is well-made, and it could serve as an attractive curtain-raiser on a program of new music.

To ask more of it than that, it seems to me, would be to ask for a couple more movements. A subsequent one that maintained one basic mood would contrast well with the turmoil of the first, but that's asking it to be heard on different terms than the ones Sierra has followed here.

Sierra, a native of Puerto Rico who's currently a professor of composition at Cornell University, wrote this work at the behest of the Abraham Frost Commission Series at UM. The school might have been expecting something with more of a Latin flavor, and got instead a very straightforward, somewhat old-fashioned piece much more in line with the European and American compositional mainstream of the first half of the 20th century.

Although it mines well-trod territory without bringing something distinctive or especially memorable to bear, Roberto Sierra's Sinfonia No. 2 is a solid piece of craftsmanship, and in a time when new-music concerts often present a helping or two of triviality, good workmanship in venerable forms is not a virtue to be scoffed at.