Commissioned works, particularly those commemorating a special occasion, rarely enjoy a shelf life longer than that of a birthday or anniversary card. Nevertheless, the Skaneateles Festival audience kept its hopes high – if not fingers crossed – during Friday evening's eagerly anticipated premiere of a work by Carter Pann commissioned by the Festival to celebrate its 30th anniversary season.
Turns out, you could have left the rabbit's foot home. Carter Pann's Summer Songs proved to be an engaging and well-crafted work that weaves in and out of several stylistic temperaments while maintaining a fresh, inventive (and original) harmonic language that defies the listener's ability to predict what's coming next.
Scored for violin (Nelson Lee), clarinet (Jose Franch-Ballester), cello (David Ying), piano (Elinor Freer) and narrator (Thom Filicia), Summer Songs is a suite of five movements based upon the spirit (albeit not the actual words) of poems selected from five Central New Yorkers. Yet while its genesis may be provincial, its appeal is likely to be universal: Here's one commissioned work I expect will be around for some time.
There's a serene quality that pervades the gentle first movement, a three-part (ternary) form based upon David Hitchcock's poem, 'First Swim.' The music begins with the cello and clarinet mirroring each other in slow, scalewise passages that take the players in opposite directions (a similar use of scales sounding in contrary motion is used to great effect by Pann in his orchestral showpiece, Slalom). Following a splashy, colorful contrasting section, the movement returns to its opening restful atmosphere, only now with all four instruments, bringing the movement to a close.
Mary Gardner's 'Showing at the State Fair' is a brief but humorous poem set in metric verse to which Pann framed within a wild, tongue-in-cheek concoction of pop and parlor music. The hectic, screwball musical delivery might have made a worthy musical companion to an old Keystone Cops silent film.
Pann's gently paced setting of David Manfredi's nostalgic 'I come down in the morning' produces unhurried chord changes over a slow and dreamy tempo, couched in a harmonic language that often conjures the color and suggestion of Impressionism. Over this tender backdrop, the clarinet sings its lonely tune in much the same spirit as the elegiac English Horn solo in Sibelius' tone poem, The Swan of Tuonela.
Ten-year old Rose Keady's descriptive poem, 'When the midnight musicians play,' uses powerful verbs to depict the sounds animals and insects in the forest (an allusion to Brook Farm evening concerts, perhaps?). Pann responds with a jazzy potpourri of styles that takes the listener on a brief but enjoyable journey from light swing to parlor music, ending with a wild clarinet glissando that recalls the opening lick in Gershwin's iconic Rhapsody in Blue. The four instrumentalists at times mimic the forest animals' calls with a variety of hissing and clucking sounds, no doubt a homage to the descriptive French chansons of Renaissance composer, Clement Jannequin.
In the suite's final movement, based upon a poem of Jeffrey Powell, Jr. titled 'Dragonflies,' Pann returns to the peaceful manner of the opening movement as the dreamy timbres of clarinet, violin and cello float over a rich harmonic anchor provided by the piano. A final flurry of trills and grace-notes in the clarinet calls the listener's attention to the poem's final words, 'Freedom at last.'
Prior to the playing of each movement, Filicia – a Syracuse native and interior design expert perhaps best known for his appearances on the 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' television series – recited the poem from which that movement was inspired. An alert and enthusiastic quartet of instrumentalists gave Pann all he could possibly hope for, sounding as if they had performed this work a dozen times prior to Friday's premiere performance.
Included on the program were three works by John Novacek, who also provided the piano accompaniments to six of the seven works performed.
Novacek's Steven Foster Fantasy for Piano Trio is a three-part setting of Foster tunes that begins with a wistful treatment of the lyrical I Dream of Jeanie before giving way to the blues, funk and rag of Camptown Races. But it was Novacek's Intoxication Rag for Piano Trio that proved the show-stopper – a musical episode that lay somewhere between a rag and a hoe-down. Violinist Meg Freivogel, the Jupiter Quartet's second violinist, let her hair down for this performance and ripped into the relentless sixteenth-note passages and kinetic rhythmic energy with panache. Her effort was smartly complemented by cellist Daniel McDonough and Novacek.
Samuel Barber's Sonata for Cello and Piano (Op. 6), which opened the concert, dates from the composer's student days at the Curtis Institute of Music. The three-movement work, written in typical fast-slow-fast structure, is a serious work couched in a deeply expressive style that nevertheless suggests the composer had not yet found his voice.
I enjoy watching David Ying perform. He immerses himself deeply within the music, playing with facial expressions and eye-movement that at times suggests he is in the throes of an out-of-body experience. His expressive phrasing in the vocalise-like Adagio movement was especially pleasant, as were his careful dynamic shifts in the opening movement.
Ying's instrument, however, tends to produce a pronounced mellowness of tone that, while perfectly suitable for string quartets, often results in a muffled tone during the more exposed textures endemic to a sonata – particularly when the cellist digs in hard with the bow to produce the depth of sound Barber calls for in this work. Novacek provided a sensitive piano accompaniment, bringing out the warmth and breadth of the effusive outer movements.
If Barber's Sonata is at times overly expressive, Rachmaninoff's Piano Trio No. 1 ('Elegiaque'), with its ultra-passionate writing and strong influence of Tchaikovsky, is downright lugubrious. As such, it takes a great performance to shake off the syrupy exterior and arrive at the meaningful emotional core of the piece.
The synergistic combination of Novacek, Freivogel and McDonough produced an endless string of beautiful moments in this work, as the three reached deeply into the music to capture the essence of Rachmaninoff's intensity of expression. Novacek's versatility was apparent in his wide range of delivery, from the zeal of the rapid scalewise passages to the gentle touch of the Chopinesque sections. The final lyrical phrase between McDonough and Freivogel, playing together ever so softly an octave apart, was breath-taking in its execution.
By David Abrams
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