UC Santa Barbara’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music (ECM), under director Jeremy Haladyna, will play their last concert of the 2015-16 academic year at 4 p.m. Wednesday, May 11, in Lotte Lehmann Hall.
It is no coincidence that this date marks one hundred years, to the day, since the death of the German composer Max Reger (1873-1916), who died of a heart attack in Leipzig, May 11, 1916.
Reger is indeed the featured composer in the ECM concert, which they have dubbed “We Miss You Max!” It is the Year of Reger in Europe, with concerts and commemorative events across Germany and throughout Europe, but in the USA, so far, ECM has Reger all to themselves.
Reger lived intensely and aggressively, composing and performing (as pianist, organist, and conductor) at a prodigal rate. He also held a number of academic posts—sometimes simultaneously, in different cities, when he would commute between them. When the heart attack claimed him at the age of 43, his contemporaries were doubtless shocked, but I daresay they were not surprised.
Reger was a modernist; Hindemith, Bartók and Schoenberg all admired him. Yet if you attend this concert expecting music resembling those three composers, you are in for a big, I hope pleasant, surprise.
Jeremy Haladyna considers him a pioneer neoclassicist, and I think this is a more helpful way to approach him. His music also retains considerable elements of romanticism (his tone poem inspired by the famous Arnold Böcklin painting “The Isle of the Dead” gets much closer to the necrophilic, quasi Wagnerian spirit of the original picture than the much better-known version by Rachmaninov).
Max also was addicted to the fugue, producing many fine examples of it. Most surprising of all — to me, at any rate — is the quiet lyricism of much of his work.
His output was vast and varied, and how you feel about him depends on where you dip in for the first time. We are well-advised to let Jeremy and ECM guide us through this thicket.
The Reger works on the program will include two featuring the clarinet virtuosity of Hiroko Sugawara, the Clarinet Sonata No.3, Op.107 (1909) and the Clarinet Quintet in A Major, Op.146 (1916); a selection of songs from his Schlichte Weisen (Simple Tales), Op.76 (1903-1912), sung by Christina Esser; a movement from one of his 3 Suites for Solo Viola, Op.131d (1915), played by Dana Anex; and his Cello Sonata No.4, Op.116 (1911), with cellist Kathryn Carlson and Haladyna on piano.
“The quintet,” Haladyna said, “an acknowledged masterwork, is like a many-sided crystal, which at one moment has us on the highest spiritual plane and at the next, communing with goblins.”
As for the Cello Sonata: “There is no other piece of music I know that so resembles relishing a well aged wine or sherry. I love playing it,” he said.
Works by two other “fallen composer heroes” complement the Reger selections: the Requiem for Cello Alone (1979) by the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe (1929-2014), rendered by cellist Carlson and the “Dances” from the opera The Two Fiddlers (1988) by the British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, CH, CBE (1934-2016), performed by violinist Sara Bashore and pianist Petra Peršolja.
Finally, violinists Zach Olea and Danica Neuhaus, with pianist Petra Peršolja, will perform two works by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, Für Alina (1976) and Fratres (1977-1992), while trombonist Nick Mazuk, violist Anex and cellist Carson will play extracts from a serenade by Vincent Persichetti (1915-1987).
A generous program, and a lovely one.
Tickets to “We Miss You Max!” are $10 general admission, $5 for non-UCSB students with ID and free for UCSB students with ID and children under 12. Tickets can be purchased at the door, at the A.S. Ticket Office window across from Corwin Pavilion, by calling the A.S. Ticket Office at 805.893.2064 or visiting www.music.ucsb.edu.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.