SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE

CHAMBER MUSIC

Voyages of an
English Horn

05/02/04

By Jeff Rosenfeld

A duet from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata BWV 167 (“Ye Mortals, Tell of God’s Devotion”) opened a mixed program of chamber works performed by English horn soloist Julie Ann Giacobassi “and Friends” on Sunday at San Francisco’s Old First Church. Nothing could have been less representative of what would follow, an adventurous slate of new and recent works for unusual combinations of instruments and voice.

Unrepresentative, that is, except for the one indispensable foundation of the evening — Giacobassi’s incomparably mellifluous, long-breathed, unforced, and unerringly tuned playing. Since Giacobassi’s direct, singing style is familiar to San Francisco Symphony fans, they’ll be pleased to know she was in characteristic form on Sunday, a glorious two-hour double-reed marathon.

She immediately established a winning musical personality in the obbligato part of the Bach, and maintained it through the concert's wide stylistic range. Like a beautifully polished blond hardwood floor hand laid across a parlor, Giacobassi’s sound was the burnished, warm, yet somehow lightly appointed basis for every work on Sunday. Her phrasing in the Bach spanned a seamless whole with each note tenderly articulated and fastidiously aligned. Meanwhile, the buoyancy and resilience of Giacobassi’s tone conveyed a primeval angst across space with unadorned, natural soulfulness — no muss, fuss, or mawkishness.

A gravitational force

Giacobassi was a unifying force on Sunday, but she drew together an impressive array of colleagues. The Bach featured two well- matched singers, soprano Deborah Kavasch and mezzo-soprano Delia Voitoff-Bauman. If they seemed a little cautious and metrical at first in their duet, their personalities shone in other works. Kavasch was exuberant in Songs of the Prairie by Robert Sibbing, of Western Illinois University. She seemed born to sing such heartland-wry lyrics and tuneful music redolent of mid- century American tonal optimism and honest humor. As composer and performer, Kavasch went a step further in the same vein with her own delightful settings of the Emily Dickinson poem, “Bee! I’m Expecting You” (the evening’s only piece without Giacobassi) and the Aesop fable, “Fox and the Grapes.” Both feature extended vocal techniques for naturalism and expression, and were performed with all the considerable accuracy, charm and dramatic flair they require.

Kavasch’s husband, John Marvin, is an accomplished English hornist himself, and the concert included two of his newest works. The first was an arrangement of Ratmir’s aria from Act III of Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla. Voitoff-Baumann sang with soulful eloquence, accompanied by Giacobassi, of course, and SFS principal harp Douglas Rioth. This “two contraltos” conceit was repeated in Marvin’s “Tapestry,” a new trio for viola (SFS principal Geraldine Walther), oboe d’amore (Giacobassi), and piano (Cal State Stanislaus’s Stephen Thomas, who also played in the Bach and Sibbing). Marvin’s compositions are usually immediately engaging and tuneful, and felicitously written for instrumentalists. “Tapestry” is no exception. The double variations weave together a crisscrossing pattern of rhapsodic episodes and playful staccato interludes. Despite the basic contrasts, however, the music seemed to have little forward momentum along its roughly ten-minute span. It emphasized harmonious pattern and rich hue, making a congenial fabric — no more, no less.

Richard Felciano’s “Contraltos” featured a similar pairing in a duet for viola (this time SFS’s Adam Smyla) and English horn. The work had more drama, however, charging an eloquent lament in the viola with pointed contributions from the English horn. I wished for more variety from the wind part, especially in the closing minutes of this short piece, but the Berkeley professor’s piece was peculiarly affecting. Smyla and Giacobassi fused pyrotechnics and lyricism into a sustained arc of luminous intensity, in one of the most memorable performances of the evening.

Remote, stylized echoes of war

More meditative, perhaps, was “Encounters XI: The Demise of Suriyodhaya,” by William Kraft (the former LA Philharmonic percussionist, tympanist, and composer in residence). This 20-minute work, composed in 1998 for English horn and exotic percussion, is one of a series with allusions to military terms. The music is more playful than bellicose, though.

In the first movement, “Strategy,” a confident English horn fanfare leaps across wide intervals as if sizing up the various nipple gongs, which echo their response. In “Peace of God,” the English horn alternates a sweetly sung chant with bursts of rapidly articulated intervals. The percussion (vibes and gongs) act as a tentative dance partner, occasionally leading their partner with rapid movements but often content to wait for a safe moment to step in.

The meat of the piece is “Suriyodhaya’s Dream,” from an ancient legend about a Thai queen who storms into the thick of battle to save her husband and country. The movement is an innocently lyrical elegy for the English horn accompanied by vibes (at times stroked with a bow). A burst of snare drum announces a final engagement between the performers, with plenty of virtuosic, pentatonic noodling on the English horn.

Kraft’s writing is tightly disciplined by the strictures of his scales, yet feels expansive. It is not easy to convey the synergy of these instruments, however, and in Sunday’s performance the mutual reinforcement was uneven due to the percussion-heavy balance in the beginning of the last movement and to the excessively static feel to the second and third movements. Nonetheless, Raymond Froelich’s command of the wide array of techniques and instruments made for a good show, and Giacobassi gave the wind chimes a few taps as well, yet another facet of her prodigious workload for the evening.

(Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World's Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.)

©2004 Jeff Rosenfeld, all rights reserved