Home

CDs by Our Own,
Made Right Here

07/16/02

Julie Ann Giacobassi

By Robert Commanday, Senior Editor

CDs by Our Own,
Made Right Here

Julie Ann Giacobassi, a star on English horn

Julie Ann Giacobassi is one of the stars of the San Francisco Symphony, no news to anyone who listens to that orchestra regularly. But to be that as its English horn player says much about her skill and signature musicality. Beyond orchestral playing, she is an activist for her instrument (and its higher-pitched, order relative, the oboe d’amore), commissioning, promoting through performance and otherwise instigating solo and chamber compositions featuring those alto and mezzo soprano double reeds. A newly released CD demonstrates this handsomely (FCM CD 102, www.fishcreekmusic.com)

The five chamber works make for rewarding, highly pleasurable listening, two of them particularly original and distinctive in their writing for the instruments. John Thow’s Musica d’amore (1986), actually written for the composer’s wife, links the oboe d’amore with the viola d’amore and harp, played here by Giacobassi’s SF Symphony colleagues, Geraldine Walther and Douglas Rioth. This trio gives Musica d’amore the exquisite sensitivity it demands. The harp creates a transparent ground (really a lace) of harmony against which the lucent texture of the music develops, the two d’amore instruments weaving their lines through it, an airy sound. Thow has Walther (SF Symphony principal viola and star) playing through the range of the viola d’amore that is wider or at least more diverse in timbre than the modern instrument; even its harmonics sound different, magical.

Giacobassi has the oboe d’amore also casting its spell, the varieties of its colors along with some pitch-altering devices serving as a palette from which Thow composer traces his ideas. This is in three connected movements, and its effect is haunting.

Richard Felciano, like Thow a professor of music at UC Berkeley, but now retired, wrote Dark Landscape (1985) for Giacobassi. Felciano’s long fascination with “sonority as vocabulary,” here evolves in a six and a half minute solo work that plays with the English horn’s range of colors. He is as much as “orchestrates” the piece, in a way, so that at certain points, there is an illusion of a duet between different instruments. Occasionally, a multiphonic sonority will be produced, but from Giacobassi, it’s not an effect (not a honk as is often the sound of that device) but a kind of chord with a decided musical quality, and the whole piece is poetic.

A harmony of timbres

John Marvin, and oboist/mathematician now composing full time, has two pieces in the CD. Music from the Night (2000), is for two oboes (Evgeny Izotov and Roger Wiesmeyer) and English horn (Giacobassi, of course), in four movements separated by transitions, one by each of the players. It’s finely fitted music, the first movement (“Alarums and Encounters”) playing with a kind of harmony of timbres, the parts interweaving, playing against each other. For the transition following, the English horn (solo) carries on a peppy, impulsive monolog. In “Night Songs,” the oboes dominate in the kind of long lines that that instrument is given to. “A Little Chamber Music (after Mozart)” is a cheerful scherzo, and the finale is, as named, “Intertwinings and Intersections.”

Marvin’s Five Pieces for English Horn and Piano” (1989) is a pleasing work, gracious, putting the English horn to its best uses. Giacobassi is dependably warm and generous in the fluid phrasing and expressive and natural ease of Marvin’s music. The piano complements and supports the English horn, in writing that has contrapuntal interest. The fourth movement, “Romance” tends towards Rachmaninoff, bracketed between a keen Burlesca and a quick concise finale.

The CD leads with a Quintet by Eric Ewazen (of New York and the Julliard faculty) for Giacobassi and string quartet – colleagues from the SF Symphony, Sarn Oliver, Yukiko Kurakata, Adam Smyla, Peter Shelton. Though he was born in 1954, Ewazen does write in a fifties’ style, and very cleanly, well crafted, with a lively syncopated rhythm manner and other qualities that sound of the American music and idiom reminiscent of Eastman School composers a generation earlier. The Ballade is especially ingratiating, Giacobassi playing the lyrical melody over repeated patterns of pillowing harmonies. The melodic style is easy and graceful. Ewazen breaks no new ground or for that matter, in terms of sonorities, no new sound. The performance is excellent. If you admire Giacobassi’s playing half as much as I, you’ll want to keep it near at hand with this CD.