BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY CHAMBER ORCHESTRA, de Jong Concert Hall, Harris Fine Arts Center, Brigham Young University, March 27
At Tuesday’s Brigham Young University Chamber Orchestra concert we heard two very new pieces sandwiched between two very old ones. The concert began with a Rossini overture and then moved straight into a student composition, The Six String.
The Six String is Curtis Smith’s first symphony, and I have to say that it’s a success. The first movement was a play on an orchestra tuning, and I was worried at first. It seemed to go nowhere fast. But gradually, beautiful textures emerged from the orchestra, and Smith showed the stature of his craft.
The symphony was a homage to the guitar (Smith’s primary instrument), but there were no guitar parts in the work itself. Rather, the orchestra craftily imitated guitar techniques throughout the piece. In the “Sonatina” movement, the violins had a pizzicato tremolo reminiscent of Spanish guitar music.
“Camp Fire Songs” was full of intonation games, with the different instruments sliding in and out of pitch. The climax of this play was in a solo passage where the clarinetist seamlessly slid up and down the instrument’s entire range. Shortly thereafter, the orchestra joined together for a surprisingly moving and subtle setting of “Kumbaya.”
The last movement I’ll comment on is titled “Dance!” Often in contemporary music, pieces titled “Dance” rarely inspire one to get up and, well, dance. (I’m thinking specifically of Philip Glass’ dances for organ, which are great pieces, but not very dance-like.) But Smith’s dance was a wild, raucous, and thoroughly good time. There were traces of habaneras, waltzes, and tangos. My favorite moment was when three members of the orchestra stood up and began clapping in imitation of Spanish castanets.
The Six String won the 2011 Barlow Prize in composition.
After intermission, the orchestra played a piece by Christian Asplund which was a commission by the Barlow Endowment. It was a setting of his wife’s (Lara Aspland’s) poetry for tenor and orchestra, titled how to be spring. I was quite taken with the overture. It weaved in deeply satisfying sonorities in surprising ways. It remained mostly in the upper register of the violins and relied heavily on dissonances, and while that is the trope for horror movie scores, it managed to transcend that cliché and become a thing of beauty.
Lara Asplund then came to the microphone to read her first poem of the evening. She had the pervasive problem of speaking too close to the microphone, so every plosive jolted the sound system. It’s a paradox, but nonetheless true, that often authors aren’t the best readers of their own material. When William Faulkner delivered his monumental Nobel Prize acceptance speech, no one could understand what he was saying. Only the day after, when the speech was published in the newspapers, did the public realize what they had missed.
But I digress. For the most part, I felt the setting was a little too earnest, a little too serious. The poems were already so abstract that I was hoping the music would help make them more accessible, but it largely did not. Also, it was a constant struggle to hear tenor Lawrence Vincent above the orchestra.
All that said, the last section of the piece was great. The Asplunds finally had fun with the verse, and in a jazzy mantra, the whole orchestra joined in chanting “put your oo in my / picnic basket,” all with the accompaniment of a pizzicato bass. It was definitely catchy: I found myself involuntarily snapping out the rhythm of the song as I was writing this.
Conductor Kory Katseanes, who possesses all the sincerity and frankness of Jimmy Stewart in a Frank Capra film, then bid farewell to the departing members of his orchestra and introduced the final piece of the evening, Mozart’s 40th Symphony. He said that Mozart’s typical and unrelenting optimism was missing in this symphony – that it was a symphony of struggle, ending as it began, in G minor.
Perhaps the idea of struggle in a symphony got me thinking about Beethoven. Mozart’s 40th sounds much more like a Beethoven symphony than a Mozart. The way Mozart obsesses over the rhythm of the first movement anticipates Beethoven’s own rhythmic obsession in his Fifth Symphony.
At any rate, the chamber orchestra did a phenomenal job with its interpretation and precise playing. Those musicians in the orchestra for whom this was their last concert have every reason to depart pleased and proud.