Music Chronicle I

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2004 by Clark, Robert S

JOAN TOWER IS A COMPOSER WHO IS HARD TO CLASSIFY. She subscribes to no system and carries the banner for no school. But her music-fluent, measured, and organic-has earned her a prominent place in the American contemporary music community. Her talent was nurtured, during the years 1969-1984, as a founding member of and pianist for the esteemed ensemble Da Capo Chamber Players, and it shows in her achievements as a composer: in the skill with which she deploys the instrumental resources of the widely varied chamber and orchestral groups she has written for. Her catholicity is mirrored in the scope of the works commissioned from her, ranging from a string quartet for the Tokyo Quartet to a concerto for the violist Paul Neubauer. Currently she holds a residency with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, which just extended her term from three years to four.

The commodious and inviting third-floor gallery of the Chelsea Art Museum was the location of a midsummer tribute to Tower in the St. Luke's group's cleverly named series "Second Helpings," which presents repeat performances (and a few premieres) of contemporary music. The program contained three pieces by Tower: Rainwaves (1997) for clarinet, violin, and piano; Big Sky (1998) for violin, cello, and piano (the last played by the composer); and In Memory (1998), for string quartet. The balance of the program coupled two works by Tower pupils with another pair for which she is cited as the inspiration. Rainwaves, Tower told the audience, reflected aspects of rain-drops, sheets, hail. It opened with an allegro that showed the rhythmic spunk associated with the composer, matching it with another signature characteristic: phrases and note combinations that imply but stop short of tonal procedures. Big Sky opened with a soulful adagio that dissipated into passages of rhythmic spikiness. The reflective In Memory was the longest of the program's offerings at almost fourteen minutes. All of this music was delivered with authority and sensitivity by members of the St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble and assisting young musicians. The program closed with works by Casey Hale, Daniel Wohl, Joan Panetti, and George Tsontakis, all with some degree of craft and charm but not Tower's distinctiveness. We are sure to hear more of this gifted artist: for starters, Tower has been named the first composer in the "Made in America" commissioning program launched by the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer, which aims to have a new work performed by each of fifty orchestras during the years 2005-6.

On its sylvan campus in the Hudson River valley ninety miles north of Manhattan, Bard College has constructed the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a new theater building designed by the architect of the moment, Frank Gehry. The past summer the Center's 900-seat Sosnoff Theater housed a production of Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose, his only comic opera, as part of SummerScape at Bard College, a diverse festival embracing not only opera but symphonic and chamber music, theater, dance, and film. The inclusive festival is only in its second year, but its music component is established and well known: for fifteen years the Bard Music Festival has been presenting, over a two-weekend period, the work of a major composer embedded in a potpourri of other artistic activity, lectures, symposia, and the music of contemporaries intended to shed light on the central figure's style and times. This year's focus was "Shostakovich and His World."

The Nose, in three acts with a libretto by the composer based on a story by Nikolai Gogol, was finished in 1928, when he was just over twenty years old. It tells of a minor Tsarist bureaucrat who wakes one morning to discover that his nose has deserted his face, and his quest to capture the wayward organ and restore it to its rightful place. A farrago that involves more than seventy roles, the opera reflects the absurdist doctrines characteristic of the St. Petersburg artistic community that Shostakovich was then a part of. It is Shostakovich at his sassiest. He beefed up the Gogol story with passages from the writer's other works and infused the libretto with the spirit of Vsevolod Meyerhold, whose theatrical innovations were captivating young Soviet intellectuals. Shostakovich was particularly influenced by Meyerhold's staging of Gogol's comedy The Inspector General in a manner the director labeled "musical realism." While working on the opera, Shostakovich spent months as a pianist at Meyerhold's theater in Moscow and even resided with the director for a time. In a nice programming touch, Summer-Scape audiences saw a new staging of the Gogol play by the Alexandrinsky Theater of St. Petersburg.

What Shostakovich achieved in The Nose was utterly without precedent in Bolshevik Russia, and so it was not surprising that it met with audience incomprehension and official Soviet hostility at its premiere in 1930 in what was by then Leningrad. "The subject of 'The Nose' attracted me by its fantastic and absurd content," the composer wrote, and the score mirrors the libretto's lurching, illogical progress in a "single symphonic current" that draws upon a multiplicity of means-ostinatos, canon, fugato, ditties, hints of folk tunes and church anthems, and a kind of atonal parlando that reaches back to Moussorgsky's experiment with speech-song in his unfinished opera The Marriage. Shostakovich's approach was also affected by Berg's Wozzeck, which was given its Leningrad premiere as his work on The Nose began. But if the means are superficially similar, the end products are not. The Austrian's closed forms and elements of vernacular music are employed in a tightly controlled structure of grim hopelessness; the Russian's protagonist endures a string of misfortunes and setbacks yet emerges with his physiognomy intact and a new romance in prospect. Berg's work suggests that the forces confronting Wozzeck are inescapably cruel, but Shostakovich's seems to allow for fate, if utterly unpredictable, to be kind as well as cruel.