Songs of sorrow at core of UTSA's Music Series
San Antonio Express-News, March 2, 2004
The UTSA New Music Series turned to the once-new 1970s on Thursday with three major works, widely divergent in style but all dealing poignantly with parting and sorrow.
Making the strongest impression was Stephen Albert's song cycle "To Wake the Dead," based on texts from James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake."
The literary source is musical in its bones. In Joyce, Albert found a verbal landscape that matched his own musical sensibility.
The soprano solo line — impetuous, often childlike and unfailingly lyrical — weaves through a scintillating, texturally complex and vividly colored backdrop of woodwinds, strings, piano and harmonium.
Structured as six song movements and a brief instrumental interlude, the piece builds to a sublime close.
Diana Allen was the stylish soloist, and the instrumental ensemble under conductor David Heuser was first-rate.
Dmitri Shostakovich's Sonata for Viola and Piano, completed shortly before his death in 1975, is most remarkable for an elegiac final movement suffused with gestures from Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata and hints of much else.
But it's all purely Shostakovich, a great composer taking leave of life and of music.
Violist Allyson Dawkins and pianist Christine Debus were a bit tentative in the first two movements, but they met the challenge of the finale with conviction.
Olly Wilson's "Sometimes" for tenor and tape sounded somewhat dated because of its typical 1970s synthesizer palette of buzzes, beeps, burps and boings, but on the whole the composer's sense of urgency and rhythmic energy managed to transcend those limitations.
The text is the traditional "Motherless Child," and often the music reveals roots in African American gospel, blues and work chants.
Michael Burgess was the committed soloist.
mgreenberg@express-news.net