New music from Theatre of Voices provides mixed rewards
The excellent vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices singing new music from three of America’s leading contemporary composers is a highly auspicious setup for a concert. That was the program in Zankel Hall Tuesday night, where Paul Hillier led the U.S. premieres of A Western by Michael Gordon and A Brief Descent into Deep Time from John Luther Adams. For the second half, it was the world premiere of Julia Wolfe’s Italian Lesson.
What was unexpected was that the concert experience proved as frustrating as it was intriguing. These were polished performances that gave the impression that the musicians were delivering what the composers intended. Those intentions, though, went back and forth between clear and affecting and uncertain and noncommittal.
Some of this came down to concept, some to technique. Gordon’s piece was what the title said, a western in song, one that took two alternating paths. Sections with texts about kids wanting to be cowboys and ads for cap guns that emulate the iconic Colt “Peacemaker” revolver were juxtaposed with a narration of the story line from High Noon. Musically, this was a distillation of Gordon’s style, the Theatre of Voices shaping his layered rhythms and syncopations with the words’ consonants, and through their light, blended sound.
There was an intriguing historical connection, with short canons and mixed pulses capturing a Renaissance polyphony style, and the concept much like ancient “L’homme armé” settings.
But the expressive quality of the music hung tightly on the words, and there was a substantial disparity between the two paths. The wisdom of adulthood looking back at childhood, both troubled with and appreciating the attraction of the violent West, offered greater depth. Yet while the music for a kid’s view of pop culture was involving, full of an evocative ambiguity, the High Noon narration was flat and thin. It seemed like the movie was picked for its fame and its clichés—the subject of multiple parodies—but trying to give it musical weight and intensity just didn’t work.
Adams’ subject matter was the geological layers of the Grand Canyon, the words naming the rock layers and epochs. As a descent in time, the music was a series of descending scales, cascading slowly one after another, with an instrumental layer played by keyboardist Vicky Chow, using a synthesizer with an organ patch, and percussionist David Cossin, with bells, tuned percussion, and a bass drum. As per Adams’ style, the music used accumulation as form, one series of scales after another adding musical interest and the weight of meaning to the list of words.
This worked vocally, almost like a siren song of nature, but the instrumental part—mainly interjected notes and sustained pitches—was distracting. At times it was obtrusive, at others underdone, and rarely felt coordinated with the vocal music, or even much needed. The music also built force until about halfway through, where it hit a snag and began to dissipate. It felt like all the elements were there for a real success, but needed to be bound more tightly and succinctly.
Wolfe’s piece was the most frustrating of all. She has created one excellent vocal work after another, exploring the power and tragedy of America’s labor history with drama, passion, and excitement. Italian Lesson is entirely different. Co-commissioned by Carnegie, it sets a recent poem by Cynthia Zinn. The text is in the form of a random Italian lesson, short English phrases followed the Italian versions.
There is no real theme, just impressions, and on the surface, these were lovely. The sheer sound of the Theatre of Voices makes everything at the very least a pleasure to the ear, and there were scattered moments of percussion and comedic gestures delivered by the singers.
But there also wasn’t much sense of what the poem might have meant to Wolfe—she made the words musical through singing, but didn’t transform them into much beyond their literal meanings. The musical intention was unclear also; at times it was poetic, at others it approached theater, with the singers shaking tree branches and tossing pencils on the floor.
But there wasn’t enough of either. Even so at memorable moments there was some gorgeous sound painting with the words for clouds, fog, and snow, “nuvole,” “nebbia,” and “neve.”
The Attacca Quartet plays music by Paul Wiancko and Gabriela Ortiz, 7:30 p.m. May 1. carnegiehall.org
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