Commissions Present and Past: Da Capo Players, Merkin Concert Hall, New York City, 21.11.2006 (BH)
 
 
Philippe Bodin: Peal (2000)
Stephen Jaffe: A Nonesuch Serenade (1984)
Gene Pritsker: Self Laceration (2006)
Chandler Carter: Conversation Piece (2006, World premiere)
Eric Chasalow: Flute Concerto (Three Love Poems) (2005, New York premiere)
Philip Glass (arr. Robert Moran): Modern Love Waltz (1979/1980)
(All works composed for the ensemble)
 
 
Da Capo Chamber Players
 
 Patricia Spencer, flute
Meighan Stoops, clarinet
David Bowlin, violin
André Emilianoff, cello
Blair McMillen, piano
Guest artists:
Michael Adelson, conductor
Thomas Kolor, percussion
 
 
In its thirty-five-plus years, Da Capo Chamber Players have introduced over one hundred works commissioned to exploit their virtuosity, and last night some of their favorites formed a precisely played and well-rounded program. This is exactly the kind of evening contemporary music needs, played with persuasive confidence by one of the city’s most agile ensembles.

This season Philippe Bodin’s Peal is being performed at least four more times by ensembles in Los Angeles, Michigan, Washington, DC and New Zealand. I’ve now heard it on three different occasions, and it grows more intriguing with each hearing. Born in France, Bodin now lives in New York (and in an unusual parallel world for a composer, he is also a baritone). Formally, Peal is a two-voice canon, with one theme inverted to create the second. But structural concerns don’t begin to convey the sensuous way Bodin uses the five players – flutist Patricia Spencer, Meighan Stoops on clarinet, David Bowlin on violin, cellist André Emilianoff, and Blair McMillen on piano – who over time have shaped the work’s whirring textures into a highly enjoyable romp. If only we had the opportunity more often to hear new works even a second time, much less a third, and this is a prime example of what happens when a group is able to spend more time getting to know a new one.

The beginning of Stephen Jaffe’s A Nonesuch Serenade was inspired by a poem by Harry Martinson Havsvinden, “The Sea Wind”, which Jaffe portrays with corresponding lyricism, followed by a faster second movement with more dramatic, mercurial changes. The final part uses the piano as a “core” around which the other instruments comment, and here Mr. McMillen was center stage in what the composer calls “explosive ensemble chords.”

The first half closed with the world premiere of Gene Pritsker’s Self Laceration, whose title is derived from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which a saint breathes life into a frozen beggar as “self-laceration…as a penance laid on him.” Using a melody that “repeats over and over like an affliction on one’s psyche,” the work’s energetic beginning becomes slower and more dreamlike, with the ensemble ending on a beautiful frozen chord. The work is gentler than the title might first indicate.

Quotations figure prominently in Chandler Carter’s amusing Conversation Piece – fragments from Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Ives, Berg, Webern, Chopin, Mahler and Schoenberg – combined with occasional sprechstimme uttered by the musicians, e.g., “with” or “almost.” Carter adapted the piece from his 2004 chamber opera, The Sister, and whittled down to five people, it becomes a spare, whirlwind ride. The Da Capo musicians added deadpan delivery to some expert playing, and in what might have seemed on paper like a pastiche stunt, they managed to find real pathos.

Ms. Spencer was just the person for the job in Eric Chasalow’s Flute Concerto (Three Love Poems), showing off her considerable range, notably in a lovely soliloquy in the second section titled “eggshell, more like a heart.” The outer movements feel more bustling and restless, as if the musicians are being gently swept around by wind gusts. With the addition of Tom Kolor on marimba, and precisely conducted by Michael Adelson, the Da Capo crew made a strong case for this work, a commission by the Koussevitsky Foundation.

As a final dessert, they waltzed through Robert Moran’s arrangement of Philip Glass’ Modern Love Waltz, inspired by a novel by Constance de Jong who worked with Glass on Satyagraha. Its ebullience and borderline naïveté made a complete and utter contrast to the rest of the program.
 
 
Bruce Hodges