When Reed Holmes died in 1997, an uncertain future faced his annual New Music Festival at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Happily, to judge from the first two concerts of the latest edition, the festival has bounced back from misfortune.
David Heuser, Holmesâ successor at UTSAâs electronic-music studio, programmed this yearâs festival with taste and adventure.
Pride of place on Mondayâs concert goes to a glistening performance of a 20th-century landmark, Arnold Schoenbergâs quasi-cabaret song cycle, ãPierrot Lunaire,ä to poems by Albert Giraud.
The piece is scored for six instruments and a vocalist who must slip-slide between song and speech.
With her incisive rhythms, crystalline instrument and a fine command of vocal color, soprano Diana Allen made it all seem completely natural. The instrumentalists, conducted by Eugene Dowdy, played their busily interweaving lines with great clarity and spirit. Special lauds go to cellist Judith Vander Weg for gorgeous tone and immense gusto in important solos.
Clarinetist Stephanie Key opened the concert with Elliott Carterâs ãGra,ä a playfully leaping and squiggling postcard to the composerâs great Polish colleague, Witold Lutoslawski.
Heuser himself was represented by ã3,127 Notesä for solo viola (Allyson Dawkins), which alternates between aggressive motoric music and yearning melody.
Both performances were fluent and energetic.
Three of the works on Wednesdayâs concert came from young Austin composers.
Robert T. Smith of Austin offered two works. ãHot Seat,ä for alto sax and piano, was a restless, rhythmically frenetic and eccentric piece, bridging modernism and American jazz and pop idioms. ãEssential Torqueä seamlessly integrated a lyrical, stretched-tonality piano solo with wildly percussive ratatats on stereo tape.
Austin pianist HyeKyong Lee played vividly in both pieces and in her own ãOpposed Directions,ä a serious, virtuosic piece with a Lisztian specific gravity. A growling controlled explosion in the bass is followed by a passage of darting trills and runs in the high register. These two opposed ideas are brought together at the end.
The concert opened with Gregg Koyleâs ãDance Mixä for five musicians playing untuned percussion instruments. They ranged from the traditional drums and cymbals to the untraditional plastic garbage can with plastic liner, into which an object is forcefully thrown.
The roots of this music are in African ritual dance, as filtered through American minimalism. Itâs intricately built, tremendously exciting and great fun.
Baritone Timothy Jones and pianist Christine Debus, who gave the first performance of Joe Stuessyâs ãThree Songs of Friendshipä earlier this month, reprised the work on Wednesday. The sumptuous but muscular lyricism of the first two songs, to texts by Walt Whitman, seemed stronger yet on second hearing.
The festivalâs final concert starts at 7:30 p.m. Sunday in the Fine Arts Building Recital Hall at UTSAâs Loop 1604 campus. The program features major composers, dead and living, from the 20th-century mainstream ÷ Jacques Ibert, Aaron Copland, Libby Larsen and John Corigliano Jr.
Friday, Feb 19,1999