By Mike Greenberg
Express-News Senior Critic

Web Posted : 03/21/2002 2:53 AM

When the UTSA New Music Festival focused on San Antonio composers Wednesday night, the most arresting music came from a surprising locale - the University of the Incarnate Word.

Six composers, all of whom teach at local universities, shared the bill in the second of three festival concerts in the UTSA Recital Hall. Today's free concert, set for 7:30 p.m. in the recital hall on the Loop 1604 campus, includes Igor Stravinsky and Somei Satoh.

From the home turf Wednesday night came polished neoromantic songs by David Heuser and Joe Stuessy, and a more sinewy set of character portraits for piano by James Scott Balentine. Timothy Kramer of Trinity University contributed a work for harpsichord and guitar.

But the music that sticks most in the memory came from the Word. Misook Kim's innocently titled "Seven Little Pieces for Two Pianos," heard for the first time in this concert, packs a very big punch. Some of the pieces are densely scored, filled with aggressive gestures and violent incidents; one is frenetically jazzy; another is like the slightly melancholy chiming of church bells. Several deploy repeated notes, either in rapid fire or slowly. All share a distinctive voice - urgent, intense, edgy, anxious perhaps, but ultimately fearless.

The performance, by the composer and Eun-Ju Oh, carried as much conviction as the music.

Ken Metz's "Playscapes" for solo piano, composed in 2000, is a set of four short pieces inspired by the composer's childhood memories. The music is at once childlike in its melodic content and sophisticated in its working out, familiar but constantly surprising, with a deliciously cockeyed sense of rhythm. Patricia Martelloti.gave a spirited performance.

Kramer's four "Fingerpaintings," composed in the 1980s, anticipate the depth and emotional undercurrents of his later work. The most interesting is the last, an essay in nervous fits and starts, with inflections of jazz and R&B.

Balentine's "A Trilogy for Friends" is a set of three musical eulogies, given a very fine first performance by pianist Kasandra Keeling. The most pertinent and poignant of them was the second, "Remembering Reed," for Reed Holmes, who created the UTSA New Music Festival. Balentine's delicate music admirably evokes Holmes' witty, personal and expansive approach to minimalism.

Heuser "Lilian's Chair," to a poem by Olga Cabral, and Stuessy's "Solomon's Songs," to Biblical texts, are conservative, lyrical, romantic, well tailored to their texts and to the voice - in this case the gorgeous voice of soprano Linda Poetschke, assisted by pianist Christine Debus.

In Tuesday's concert, composer-guitarist Matthew Dunne of UTSA performed four of his own Jazz Etudes, a melding of Bachian counterpoint and rich, finely nuanced jazz harmonies.

The King William Winds offered excerpts from Elliot Carter's "Eight Etudes and a Fantasy," rhythmically vibrant and completely delightful music from the ancient world of 1950.

Brain Killer, a duo of pianist Jacob Koller and trombonist Brian Allan, closed the Tuesday concert with three of their own pieces in an astonishing style, a rough-edged but formally disciplined hybrid of jazz, dada and punk classical - all frightful and compelling as a train wreck.

mgreenberg@express-news.net

03/21/2002