CONTEMPORARY CHAMBER PLAYERS
Eaton, who recently joined the University of Chicago’s music faculty after a long, distinguished tenure at Indiana University, is widely acknowledged as a contemporary master of vocal gesture. (He’s also a composer of electronic music, and a synthesizer built by him and Robert Moog after two decades of tinkering will be unveiled at a concert later this month.) A student of Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions, Eaton first caught the music establishment’s ear almost 30 years ago with Holy Sonnets of John Donne, a song cycle for soprano. Since then he’s written a number of vocal works, most of them noted for the textural filigree provided by microtonal techniques, an Eaton trademark. I remember being impressed with the “bending” of pitch and the unusually colored harmonies that enhanced the emotional spontaneity and verite in his operas Danton and Robespierre and especially The Cry of Clytaemnestra when I heard them several years ago. More than any other living American composer I can think of, Eaton has come up with a bold, expressive style that sustains dramatic interest.
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The opening piece of Notes on Moonlight is set to “Romance de la luna, luna” by Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet known for his intense melodramatic flair. In the 1924 poem a boy infatuated with a dancing moon that has come down from the heavens beseeches it to leave so it won’t be caught by marauding Gypsies. It leaves–but takes the boy with it. When the Gypsies return, they’re saddened by the death of the child. In this macabre meditation on love and death, the silvery goddess of the night is at once mesmerizing and menacing. To the accompaniment of violin, viola, and harp tuned a quarter tone flat, soprano Rebecca Berg (the moon) and mezzo Nelda Nelson (the boy) conveyed fear and ecstasy in their high-pitched, quivering duet–an effective translation of the poem’s emotional rapids.
As usual, the CCP program was a grab bag of the classic and the new in 20th-century music. This time the classic was represented by Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, written in 1910 but only discovered almost five decades later. Concise statements of moods, its three “movements” are rather like sketches for the Viennese pioneer’s great works to come. Shapey and the chamber orchestra performed them with ease and clarity. Mysteries of the Horizon is a 1987 Fromm Foundation commission by Eugene O’Brien, a former colleague of Eaton’s at Indiana. In a program note O’Brien says that while writing this one-movement work he came upon an engraving in a 17th-century treatise on architectural perspectives. In the enigmatic illustration was a figure with an alpenhorn raised to his lips standing on a promontory high above a vast plain. The figure makes a striking cameo toward the end of the piece in an offstage horn call, but otherwise the work is mellow and rather purposeless. The music begins lugubriously, clusters of dissonant sounds containing brassy echoes of majestic mountains. Slowly it swells into a brass chorale, where the horn solo makes a welcome intrusion. But before long, it’s dreary business as usual. Shapey and his crew tried hard to apply a glossy veneer, but the only mystery was why he picked this piece.
