Romanticism rests uncomfortably in the lap of the thoroughly modern. To express an unashamed emotion today seems naive, to submit to unbridled passion a cliché. Yet the very modern audience which filled the Yerba Buena Auditorium on Saturday night responded with vigorous approval to the Women's Philharmonic's surrender to romanticism.

As well they might. The concert was executed with taste, restraint and class, exploring the outbursts of anguish and desire with heart and musicianship in a careful balance. Yet the repertory, though unfamiliar, had a feel to it of chestnuts. These were pieces which deserved to be placed amongst the over-played yet audience-catching works of yesteryear, proving nothing more than the quality of the composers who wrote them.

The sole spark of modernism was Jennifer Higdon's Fanfare, a triumphant shout of rhythmically intertwined but straight ahead orchestral jamming. Sneakily paced passages led into abrupt punches of color, which in turn introduced further suspenseful stuttering. Densely layered yet clearly marked textures were abundant. The orchestra kept cresting against punctuations of long, fevered episodes, until a choral theme broke out amongst the crowd, a bit brass-heavy on top in its balance. Yet this turn of melody offered no release, until it came in the flick of the tip of conductor Apo Hsu's baton on the very final beat.

Fanfare was not just the sole contemporary work, it also was the high point of the show in every regard. The piece seemed to celebrate the excellence of the players, doling out virtuosic, engaging riffs and solos, most notably to percussionist Luanne Warner, whose drum rolls rocked the theater and rattled the rafters. It also underlined the presence of Higdon as a member of a generation of such post-boomer Bay Area composers as Carolyn Yarnell or Sarah Michael whose lack of representation at the orchestral level is as baffling as it is unjust. After the intuition and craft of Higdon's orchestration, the cleverness of the structure, and the firmness of the conception of her piece, what was to follow seemed a bit stuffy and old hat, forcing me as a listener to readjust my expectations.

Even so, the rewards for that effort were not small. The quality of the interpretation brought out what was best about the other composers on the program, particularly Florence Price, an African-American composer of the first half of the 20th century. In Price's The Oak, Hsu's conducting motions were sorcerous, precise, and as graceful as a modern dancer. This is a meditative work which exemplified its creator's roots in the late-Romantic, the Slavic, and the African-American spiritual.

A stark unison melody in lower strings opened out into lusher expressions of internalized longing and rumination, culminating in an intense exploration throughout the fabric of the instrumentation of an emotional world. As in other works by Price which Hsu has recently unearthed, the orchestration was faultless and the use of form expert. Dashes of Ellingtonian harmony interacted with Wagnerian chromaticism, but the thrust of the piece was in the direction of Franck or Dvorak rather than Ives or Copland.

Less focused yet easier to groove with, Mississippi River, in a one-movement medley of melody, showed another side to the romantic, from Little Rock, Arkansas. Part overture, part uninterrupted suite, its themes were drawn from the rich cultural outflow of its regional namesake. It started with unpretentious wind lines emoting in a spiritually open meander between hymnal brass breaks. The mood was artificially lightened by chirping flutes, but managed to get back on its serious course, creating the impression that the unfortunate cutesiness had been added as an afterthought.

The little Indian melody which followed had a familiar up-down pulse, but managed to avoid the more egregious of cinematic excesses. Price couldn't resist injecting some awkward Mahlerian surges, but the innocence of the exposition held on under downward sloping xylophone lines. The setting of Nobody Knows de Trouble I've Seen was unashamedly lush, to a fault.
Yet just when I felt that my patience had been exhausted, Price would embark in a pawky and adventurous direction as far as she could go with 19th century harmony. It was ultimately a travelogue not of location or community, but of the composer herself. Yet images did come to mind within the fabric of the music as it lunged from floodbank to riverboat to choirloft, sometimes blending all three with odd synchronicity.

The Amy Beach Piano Concerto was romanticism of a different strain. To a melodic, key-busting approach akin to Anton Rubenstein, Liszt and Brahms, Beach added heartfelt and rhapsodic flights of highly personalized anguish and redemption. Pianist Joanne Polk was more than up to the task of invoking the presence of this frustrated concert pianist and prolific composer. As a pre-Gershwin American concerto, it surpassed the chilly eccentricities of MacDowell's Piano Concerto No. 1 with honesty and warmth, and both orchestra and soloist interpreted the work with a great deal of affection and vitality.

(Thomas Goss is resident composer for Moving Arts Dance Collective, and is a member of New Release Alliance Composers, the Cabaret Composers Consortium, and sits on the steering committee of the Bay Area Chapter of the American Composers Forum.)

©2000 Thomas Goss, all rights reserved

return to San Francisco Classical Voice reviews links page