If there was any doubt that Houston had a world-class classical music scene, the city's events last weekend put them to rest. Add those to the abundance of opera performances available to audiences this weekend and one's head might spin trying to fit it all in.
The bayou city was fortunate to have two of the most accomplished American female composers, Joan Tower and Augusta Read Thomas, in town last week. Tower was here as a guest of Rice University's Shepherd School of Music, participating in a week of teaching and coaching that culminated in a concert by the school's faculty new music ensemble, Syzygy, which presented a concert including two of her most substantial chamber works. Tower's music is sturdy, powerful and intense, and these qualities have never been more successfully integrated than in her Trio Cavany, which was the finale of the concert. From an extremely inauspicious beginning, the work extracts an unbelievable amount of tension that culminates in a shattering ending. I am a Tower fan, and this work has to be one of my favorites of hers.
Thomas was in town for the premiere of Absolute Ocean by the Houston Symphony. Thomas and the commissioners derived the unusual concertante duo of harp and soprano from the evening's companion piece, Mahler's Fourth Symphony. I don't have as thorough a knowledge of her music as I do of Tower's, but I was present at a lecture she gave where she played excerpts from two recent orchestral works (Helios Chorus and her new violin concerto for Frank Peter Zimmermann). Her music has great consistency of style and seems to concentrate on two soundworlds: arrhythmic gestural passages dominated by high sounds and tintinnabulary percussion and driving rhythmic passages defined by seemingly jazz-derived asymmetrical patterns often articulated in an ensemble's low register by piano. I was eager to hear Absolute Oceans because of the timbral potential of to soloists and of Thomas' chosen orchestra - single woodwinds including auxiliary instruments, small brass and reduced string complements, and an array of percussion heavy on metalophones including celesta and piano. Mrs. Thomas had also chosen three excellent poems by e.e. cummings, including one of my favorites, "who knows if the moon's a balloon". The overall structure was slow-fast-slow, with a harp-dominated instrumental interlude between the second and third movements. I feel that, even with the dedicated soloists (soprano Twyla Robinson and harpist Paula Page), the piece missed its mark. The extremely vivid palette of instruments Thomas had drawn upon weren't exploited. She had even noted that solo woodwinds tend to have more "character" than a section of similar instruments, which I agree with, but many of those soloists were rarely used. Also, despite the overall quicker tempo of the second movement, the text was almost delivered at the same rate as in the slow outer movements, divided by lengthy rests, which made the poem seem to progress far too slowly to be as witty as it should be. Also, I got the feeling that the "interlude" movement was an afterthought - throughout the remainder of the piece the harp seemed subordinate, its part no more prominent or virtuosic than in a Debussy or Ravel orchestral work and, since this work was one in the HSO's series of works commissioned for its principals, the Interlude seemed requisite to give Page her due.
Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, currently running at Houston Grand Opera, pointed up the lack of imaginative timbral combinations in Thomas' work. I heard Absolute Ocean on Saturday night and it was fresh in my ear when I saw the opera the following afternoon. Britten likewise uses a limited orchestra, a percussion section rich in metalophones and adds harpsichord, but he draws infinitely more varied, interesting, and textually appropriate sonorities from his ensemble. My review of HGO's production is up at Concertonet.com.
As if this trio of events wasn't enough, the coming weekend provides even more opportunities to hear great music. Five different operatic productions can be heard: HGO continues Dream and opens Chorus!; Opera in the Heights opens Verdi's Macbeth; and the Moores Opera Center at the University of Houston presents an intriguing double bill: Daniel Catán's Florencia en el Amazonas and the Houston premiere of Mozart's Lucio Silla. Joshua Bell and Jeremey Denk appear Friday evening via Society for the Performing Arts (yours truly will be delivering a pre-concert talk).
