The UCSB Ensemble for Contemporary Music (ECM), under the inspired (and inspiring) guidance of Jeremy Haladyna, plays its end-of-quarter concert at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 28, in UCSB’s Lotte Lehmann Hall.
Most of Jeremy’s programs contain a strong element of travelogue, and this one is no exception.
Called the “E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T-I-C T-R-A-N-S-A-T-L-A-N-T-I-C J-U-N-C-T-I-O-N F-U-N-C-T-I-O-N!!”, the music crisscrosses the North Atlantic like a Cunard liner, charting the cross-pollination of the musical culture of both continents.
We begin in America, with John Adams‘ “Hallelujah Junction for Two Pianos” (1996) — which Jeremy calls the “centerpiece,” — then immediately “cross the Pond” to England for Alan Rawsthorne‘s “Oboe Quartet” (1970), then back to the U.S. with Alan Blank‘s “Music for Solo Viola II,” to France for Tristan Murail‘s “C’est un jardin secret … ma soeur, ma fiancée, une source scellée, une fontaine close,” America again and Leo Ornstein‘s “Saxophone Ballade,” to Denmark with Vagn Holmboe‘s “Trombone Sonata,” across the North Sea to the United Kingdom for Benjamin Britten’s “Six Metamorphoses for Solo Oboe, after Ovid,” to France for Olivier Messiaen’s “Abîme des Oiseaux,” and landing back in the USA with Vincent Persichetti’s “Parable for Solo Trombone” (1975).
When Freud first came to America, a missionary for his new technique of psychoanalysis, he stood on the deck of the ocean liner and gazed at the Statue of Liberty. “My God!” he said to Jung, “We are bringing them the plague and they don’t even know it!”
The complex interaction of America and Europe through the medium of the Atlantic ocean has often been the subject of scholars and writers, from The Transatlantic Persuasion (1969) by the late Robert Kelley of UCSB, to H. Stuart Hughes‘ magisterial The Sea Change (1975); from John Malcolm Brinnin‘s entertaining and comprehensive The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the North Atlantic (1971) to Wilfrid Sheed‘s picaresque masterpiece Transatlantic Blues (1978).
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, American artists and intellectuals traveled to Europe as to the well, for training and polish. Some, like Henry James and T.S. Eliot, wound up settling over there, but most returned home to pass on to their countrymen what they had harvested of European culture.
After the abortive revolution of 1848, we got a few thinkers who had fled the Continent and sought refuge on our shores, but, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the rise of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany, the trickle became a flood.
This was particularly noticeable in the world of classical music. During the 1940s, Southern California had more great composers per square inch than the entire continent of Europe.
Rachmaninov and Stravinsky would have been welcome wherever they chose to settle, of course, but Schoenberg was treated better in Los Angeles than he ever was in Vienna.
Jeremy’s program allows us to actually hear this huge engine of cultural exchange in operation, and it will be a fascinating concert in every respect. As usual, his light-hearted annotations make listening more a matter of play than of work.
“The John Adams centerpiece,” he says, “pits two active pianists against one another in what Adams himself has described as a sort of human delay circuit, manifesting at first with a shorn version of the ‘Hallelujah’ cry, which becomes fleshed-out fully towards the work’s conclusion.
“The rapturous title actually comes from a truck stop often passed by John Adams in the California High Sierras on Highway 49. Joining their wits to the formidable task of Adams’ rhythms will be graduate pianists Jared Eben and Pinshu Yu.”
Jeremy Haladyna has long wanted to approach the music of the U.K.’s Alan Rawsthorne, and this concert finally gives his group an occasion to do so:
“On this concert’s chamber docket is the admirable ‘Oboe Quartet,’ for oboe and string trio, written in 1970 shortly before the composer’s 1971 demise. The three movements, lean and taut, are of the utmost sobriety and pathos, with the second featuring cadenza-like passages for the featured woodwind — here oboist Evan Losoya — and playing with him are violinist M.D. Owensby, violist Soha Sadeghinejad and cellist Joshua Kauk.
“Ms. Sadeghinejad goes on to offer a solo American work, ‘Music for Solo Viola II’ by Alan Blank (1925-2013). This New York native was highly prolific and most associated with the state of Virginia, where he taught composition at Virginia Commonwealth.
“The fact that he started his musical training on violin and played briefly as a violinist in the Pittsburgh Symphony logically explains his ingratiating, varied, yet fully sensible writing for a solo string instrument. The work is in three short movements.
“Graduate composer M.D. Owensby, equally adept on violin or viola, takes up the latter to interpret a short work by Frenchman Tristan Murail with an unusually long title, [C’est un jardin secret, &c].
“The secret garden of the title is coupled with a muffled heartbeat, which the composer directs must emerge timbrally in the course of the work’s opening lines. Timbre is indeed the driving force here, with a whole bushel basket of new techniques for the viola on display.
“In the must-hear, ‘discovery’ category is the ‘Saxophone Ballade’ of Leo Ornstein, America’s longest-lived composer (he died at 106 in 2002)!
“This futuristic piano genius, who filled concert halls to bursting during the 19-teens and up to the early 1920s, made a powerful impression on both of his contemporaries, Henry Cowell and Aaron Copland.
“Once retired from public performance, he ran — together with his wife — the Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia, a school whose notable students included jazz great John Coltrane.
“He retired from teaching in 1953. In a much-tempered, calmer style, this ‘Saxophone Ballade’ dates from that same year. It will be played by alto saxophonist Brian Leal with [Haladyna] accompanying.
“The other piano-accompanied work is by the Dane, Vagn Holmboe, whose large output includes some 13 symphonies and 21 string quartets, the last one left incomplete at his death, and finished by his noted pupil, Per Nørgård. Holmboe’s trombone sonata of 1987 is alluringly simple in its modal language, yet finely wrought in surface detail, not unlike the surface features of the Netherlanders in Renaissance times. In this, the second work of Holmboe to be recently given by ECM, Paul Wu does the solo honors.
“Three solo efforts remain for woodwind on this concert, enlisting clarinet, trombone and oboe. The most extensive will be undertaken by ECM oboist Lexie Callaway-Cole and again comes from across the sea. Benjamin Britten’s ‘Six Metamorphoses after Ovid’ have become beloved of both oboists and audiences alike for their crisply drawn portraits of some of the best-known figures in Greek mythology: Pan, Phaeton, Niobe, Bacchus, Narcissus and Arethusa.
“The mini-mythological portraits make every effort to capture both the strengths and foibles of their subjects, and the set was written in 1951 to premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival, with which Britten was long associated.
“Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Abîme des Oiseaux’ has become a staple in the contemporary clarinetist’s repertoire, figuring as it does as the only solo movement in the composer’s landmark ‘Quartet for the End of Time.’
“The ‘abîme’ Messiaen depicts in his 1944 masterpiece, he declares, is time: dreary and brooding. The lively, contrasting music he writes for the birds makes them practically the ‘opposite’ of time; their jubilation and vivacity seem capable of defeating it. Hiroko Sugawara does the honors on this clarinet classic.
“Finally, (crossing again stateside), Nick Mazuk tackles Vincent Persichetti’s 1975 ‘Parable for solo trombone.’ Trombonists have embraced this short solo essay, one of the 25 solo works which Persichetti gave the same title. All seem to have a narrative underpinning stated in music alone.
“This is driven home by tempo changes as well as marked differences in the trombonist’s manner of speaking, compressed masterfully into a duration that is under 6 minutes.”
Tickets to this concert are $10 general admission, $5 for non-UCSB students, and free to UCSB students and children under age 12. Tickets can be purchased at the door, by calling the Associated Students Ticket Office, 805-893-2064, or online at www.music.ucsb.edu/news/purchase-tickets.
— 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.