Baroque Choral Guild: Reviews, May 2004

Composing From the Inside, Conducting From the Outside

May 16, 2004

The California Symphony produced a creative variant on the season closer Sunday night in Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center. Music director Barry Jekowsky coupled a new work by its composer-in-residence to the standard go-to finale, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Conveniently, Kevin Beavers’ Songs from the Discovery calls on tenor and baritone soloists and chorus, all right at hand of course.

Judging from these two pieces, Beavers composes from inside himself, creating from what he’s assimilated and made his own. It’s become increasingly rare to encounter one of his generation who is really composing and not generating music by parody, procedural format, conceptual gimmick or postmodern pose. Even his choice of poems (by Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska) was driven by musical considerations, the images as well as the rhythms inviting and igniting the settings.

Both poems speak to the challenge of human accomplishment, but very differently. “The Acrobat” characterizes the daring flight, artistry and beauty of his solo moment, the music setting shimmering textures, evanescent sonorities within which distinct lines appear. In his light, narrowly focused tenor, Kevin Gibbs sang easily the well-paced, shapely phrased lines of the poem. The chorus, Sanford Dole’s Baroque Choral Guild, underlined and iterated the text, mostly in unison or octaves, and the clearer for that. The music captured the weightlessness and grace, rounding off with the poem’s sense of a completed moment.

A sound of its own

“Discovery” is as darkly contrastive as Beavers predicted when he addressed the audience (that now-de rigeur introduction, the necessary reassurance to a possibly wary audience that the composer is a breathing, living creature, even as you and I). The textures are thick and scored in dark sonorities, the music pursuing a continuing course with the sureness of his harmonic sense. The language of it is neither new nor startling, and if it recalls the vocabulary of the 20th-century American modernists that they worked out empirically rather than systematically, it does have its own sound, is not derivative.

“Discovery” is the terrible credo of a scientist who makes a great discovery and then, unflinchingly, destroys every trace of it lest it fall into the hands of evil government. Each line states a conviction about the necessity for this destruction, usually beginning, “I believe . . .” Anton Belov, a Russian-born, now American baritone (not to be confused with the hockey player and the basketball star of the same name) sang it with somber intensity and depth. He has a keen dramatic sense. The chorus conveyed the same conviction, its music in four-part writing, open and clear. The fine diction Dole enforces makes all the difference.

Beavers has a composing talent of considerable promise. In these pieces, there is not much rhythmic energy or contrapuntal excitement, but the music sounds like it comes from one person.

If as much thought and preparation had gone into the first three movements of Beethoven’s Ninth as into the finale, it might have been memorable. Jekowsky simply had put all his bets on the famously brilliant, guaranteed-inspirational choral movement. However thrilled that ending may leave its audience, to treat the preceding as overture was, for a musician, sacrilege. There is so much expressive detail and nuance, needing explicit attention, needing to be etched clearly; there are so many sudden dramatic pianissimos and striking key changes, rhythmic figures wanting intensification, all crucial to this supreme dramatic architecture, that to pass over that is simply to lose the whole point and, certainly, the greatness.

It takes intent, focused conducting

Of course, the California Symphony musicians, ranging from highly competent to skilled, know this music, and both intuitively and by experience. They understand the phrasing in this work and the style and what’s wanted, but to get them playing to the same level, explicitly and focused, takes intent, focused conducting. It’s called inspiration. Just one of a hundred examples, the Adagio movement’s great violin variation — a double fault: Jekowsky ignored it, and concertmaster Roy Malan failed to lean into its expressiveness and physically pull his section along with him.

It’s far from enough to set the right tempos and windmill through the music. The players will keep the pulse; the conductor should have more important things to attend to, every second. This was equally true for Mozart’s Overture to the Magic Flute, which opened the evening, preceding the Beavers. It was a very nice, dependable reading. So too, Jekowsky presided over the first three movements of the Beethoven Ninth and conducted the fourth. To be sure, that finale was grand; the bold and assertive recitative for cellos and basses was splendid, Belov’s solo stentorian, from the soles of his feet. Dole’s Baroque Choral Guild sang like blazes, with ample power, clear, unstrained sopranos at the top. If the 20 or 30 men had an open sound, not as focused and muscular as could be wished for, they carried their part with the thrust the Ode to Joy must have. The chorus sang with belief.

The solo quartet is basically auxiliary to the chorus, though you’d never know that from reading reviews, but it still must be strong and true. Courtenay Budd, a real find, probably in her debut here, sang the soprano part exactly centered, effortless, with a gorgeous liquid high range. Wendy Hillhouse was strong and resolute in the alto role; Gibbs, keen and on the mark as the tenor; Belov, sturdy and firm on the baritone. Jekowsky drove the finale for all it was worth and, as if out of nowhere, the program ended in a blaze of glory. They’ll have another go at this program tonight at 8:00 p.m.

Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965–93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

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