By Mike Greenberg
Express-News Senior Critic
"New" is a relative term, especially in music. Some works are new because they were completed just a few days ago; others remain new after 50 or 100 years.
The 2001 UTSA New Music Festival included both sorts of newness, and everything in between, in three nights of concerts devoted to "The American Century."
The festival included first performances of only two works, both by University of Texas at San Antonio faculty composers, and both worth hearing.
In the course of a revelatory solo recital on Thursday, pianist James Lowe gave the premiere of David Heuser's Miniatures for Piano, 10 short pieces composed between 1985 and 1999.
Heuser's idiom is in the modernist mainstream of stretched tonality and clear expressive purpose.
His miniatures reflect back on several important currents of the past century. One is a percussive, rhythmically vibrant homage to Alberto Ginastera; another is a nervous rag. Others are variously jaunty, tender or pensive. All are exceptionally well-crafted, and all contain a lot more music than the term "miniature" might suggest.
Completed a few weeks ago, James Scott Balentine's "to be a Puddle" for cello and piano is almost a miniature — it lasts just five minutes — that leans toward broad lyricism in the cello part and a rhythmically active piano. It's attractive music, unpretentious but well-made, and nicely played by cellist Judith Vander Weg and pianist Christine Debus.
Lowe is a splendid musician, gifted with an agile technique, ample power and, most crucially, an extraordinary sense of rhythm. Seemingly undaunted by the difficulties of George Crumb's Five Pieces for Piano, played both on the keyboard and directly on the strings, Lowe found the evasive pulse of this music and made its many colors shimmer beautifully.
Lowe's rhythmic astuteness and sense of line were put to excellent use again in David Rogers' "skein/bonk," a subtle 1992 work interweaving three distinct lines that follow different drummers, metrically.
Lowe opened his recital with Aaron Copland's Piano Variations, a tough-minded and craggy work from 1930. He closed with three pieces by Charles Ives, all played with great verve.
The festival's first concert held two Copland ensemble works — the famous "Appalachian Spring" from his lyrical, folk-oriented period of the 1940s, and the Piano Quartet of 1950, when he was moving toward a deeper and tougher style. The two pieces commented on one another intriguingly, the later work helping to focus the ear on the essential qualities in the earlier one.
The final concert included eight songs by Ives and three by Samuel Barber, all attractively sung by tenor Gerald Seminatore. He ventured beyond the familiar Ives songs — the wild "The Circus Band" and the pensive "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" — to include several brilliant (or merely charming) oddities.
Soprano Juli Wood applied her dark, rich instrument to four Andre Previn songs, which express their Americanism in open-hearted lyricism and Broadway jazziness.
The last word went to James Mobberley's "Beams," a 1986 work for trombone (David Bruenger) and electronic tape. This deliciously eccentric music seemed rooted in the Bam-Zot-Boing realm of old cartoons.
That's all, folks.