Listening at the Biennial

By Elizabeth Lauer, Music Editor

A particularly thrilling and varied hour at the NLAPW Biennial took place in the Priscilla R. Tyson Cultural Arts Center, a double event. Members’ art works — approximately 70 — were displayed along the walls of the spacious, high-ceilinged, light-filled hall; a few pieces showed Biennial Art Competition prizes. 

Saturday, at five o’clock, a concert of performances of four prize-winning compositions was initiated by remarks from Co-Chairs Darlene Yeager-Torre and Bev Goldie; the latter’s post-performance comments transitioned well between works. Attendance was excellent. There were six performers, arrayed in the first row of seats, kids’-recital style. Attesting to the professional quality of each player were the bios printed in the informative, attractive eightpage program. The unfurling of the hour of sound attested to the wide range of musical ideas and experience that is represented in the music category of NLAPW’s three arts.

The savvy Biennial organizers elicited the generosity of the Johnstone Fund for New Music to support the performances. Five professional players were engaged, each of whose skills and experience gave full voice to the composers’ thoughts, with clear musical expressivity and instrumental confidence — words that were personified by flutist Erin Torres and pianist Suzanne Newcomb. Their spot-on ensemble connection in projecting Betty Wishart’s “Oracles” was exemplary. 

The piece, in three contrasting movements, lasts about five minutes. It opens with “Peace,” a gentle setting-out of the flute’s lyrical powers, spooling in freely moving melody, enhanced by subtle keyboard support. “Exhilaration” — a one-minute romp — rapidly skips and capers and trills, nonstop, true to the title. (Audience murmurs of appreciation were heard.) Contemplative sounds initiate “Remembrance.” The instruments gradually become entwined in lyrical counterpoint, the most involved duetting of the work. “Oracles” concludes in quiet contemplation.

A solo piano piece, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Elizabeth Swift was performed by the youngest musician, Clara Rudy. The pianist, who is in her third year at Ohio State University, gave an assured accounting of the sixminute work, the title of which is a Robert Frost poem. The short, touching lines were recited by Yeager-Torre before the performance. 

Overall, the piece features an uninterrupted flow of fluid piano sound. It starts in the middle of the instrument — a simple, quiet expression, an eminently singable melodic line in the alto range, accompanied by gentle movement. This leads to an expansion of the keyboard reach — a more instrumental aspect — and finally to a satisfying, serenely intoning resolution.

One may wonder what the audience expected from reading the listing of Michelle Green Willner’s first-prizewinning work, which concluded the program. The title — “Reverberations” — has more than one application. The instrumentation — violin and viola — is centuries old. However, the subtitle — in memoriam Elie Wiesel — and the instrumental modifiers, amplified violin with delay pedal, indicate a broad, probably new listening experience for most. So it was. 

The first requirement of “Reverberations”: a violinist for whom the 24th Paganini Caprice is a cakewalk — a given for Arkadiy Gips. He brought an enormous range of technical skills and instrumental color to his work, plus a seamless handling of the electronics, all in service to expressing the musical content.

The second requirement: a violist who, in the final moments of the nine-minute piece, can enter, intoning smooth, soothing sounds of balm. Vanessa Ripley beautifully filled her part. The composer’s subtitle and the violinist’s remarks about the Holocaust notwithstanding, a composition rises or falls on its musical acumen. 

“Reverberations” traverses the full range of the violin with klezmer-inspired fiddling, searing double stops, stratospheric rapid-fire articulation: plunging, soaring, sobbing, buzzing — in mesmerizing quicksilver shifts of volume and speed. 

Of note: The violin finishes on the unadorned open G string; the viola’s entrance is a warm half-step higher (A flat). The viola has a necessary mission to fulfill: a straightforward kind of incantation, smooth and calm, an invitation to the violin to join. “Reverberations”— in live, first-rate performance — is a prime example of the power that music has in expressing the ineffable. The audience expressed its enthusiastic response to the work and its performers.