PETER SERKIN
at Orchestra Hall
The one restriction was that the piece each composer wrote (at $5,000 a commission) was to be a brief statement, about six minutes in length. The problem with this otherwise inspired idea is that instead of two or three really meaty pieces that had something important to say, we heard 12 homages to Serkin, all far too much conceived with his sound and technique in mind to find a place in the standard repertoire. As one composer friend of mine observed during intermission, it was as if “they all had been drinking the same water.”
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A couple of the pieces were considerably shorter than six minutes, notably Luciano Berio’s “Feuerklavier,” which was basically less than a minute of atonal banging, with little of the thought and structure that one tends to associate with him. This was not the meaningful brevity of Anton Webern. This was, “Sorry Peter, I’m kind of busy right now. But I’ll take the money and run.”
Even so, there were a few gems. Interestingly enough, the two most effective pieces came from composers with roots in the Far East: Chinese- born Bright Sheng (currently Lyric Opera’s composer in residence), and Japanese-born Toru Takemitsu. Sheng’s “My Song” manages to successfully fuse Chinese folk-song material with a Western style, using more or less the same techniques that Bartok employed with Hungarian and Romanian folk songs. With its shimmering bell-like clusters and use of the pentatonic scale, the work becomes wildly syncopated in its contrasts and colorings. The Takemitsu piece, “Les yeux clos II,” named for a series of lithographs by French artist Odilon Redon, is more reminiscent of the sound world of the quiet Charles Ives, with subtle tone clusters and sudden bursts of color.
Composer-satirist Peter Schickele began things by playing the Invocation and Pastorale from his Spring Serenade while Wincenc entered from the back of the hall playing her flute, a bit of corny theatricality borrowed from James Galway. Schickele’s two excerpts also showed how much the satirical music of P.D.Q. Bach has influenced his supposedly “serious” writing. In truth, I couldn’t hear a difference. The Invocation explored a single note to an extent that would have made Schickele’s old classmate Philip Glass blush; the bright Pastorale was a cross between bad New Age and game-show music. Schickele returned toward the end of the program with his Music for Mary, a three-part piece that also lacked substance and meaning; it explored Romantic arpeggios, repeated “Mary Had a Little Lamb” riffs, and in the last movement used repeated low fourths and fifths and flute overtones to approximate bagpipes. A Schickele encore was his arrangement of Paul Hemmer’s “The Lazy Mississippi,” with its high, bell-like block-chord accompaniment. Schickele has more than demonstrated his compositional facility with his P.D.Q. Bach pieces, but compositional facility and originality are not necessarily the same.
Of the four composers who played, American music legend Lukas Foss, certainly the luminary on the program, was by far the standout pianist. His Three Early Pieces dates from 1944-45 and is very reminiscent of Satie in both its pianism and flute lyricism. But the work cannot be said to be among Foss’s more inspired music from that period. Even Foss, usually a composer of great substance and originality, apparently views the flute as a silly, frivolous instrument. Still, the third piece, “Composer’s Holiday,” cleverly combines a Bartokian sound world with bits from “Dixie.” Wincenc provided a great sound by playing on the edge of her lip, creating nice dissonances and overtones.
