NOVA Chamber Music Series’ Dance in the Desert concert (March 10) was perhaps the season’s most challenging for the musicians but the set of five magnificently performed works, which included a world premiere, also was among the most easily accessible for the audience.
For the concert finale, the world premiere of Laura Kaminsky’s Desert Portal was a delightful celebration. As a multimedia piece of dance theater, every component fit perfectly and clearly marked the natural transitions during a day in the desert — from the six musicians to the visual projections of work by internationally renowned artist Rebecca Allan and to the quartet of dancers.
As noted in the preview at The Utah Review, Kaminsky composed the piece for the planned 2020 inaugural of Arizona State University’s desert humanities initiative but it was scrapped when the pandemic shut down all in-person events. The work was set to be performed as a procession with desert rocks being carried by audience members, which would be signaled and led by a drummer. Dancers and musicians would walk in rhythm to their places, and would encircle the audience members, while projections of art images by Allen would provide the visual entertainment before the event began.
For its Salt Lake City premiere, Desert Portal, which was conducted by Gabriel Gordon, took on a new form that can easily be replicated in future performances. The one suggested note is that much of the opening professional ‘vamp’ can be cut. The seven musicians processed and were spread across the stage, with the two percussionists flanking them at each end. This arrangement worked beautifully, as the dancers processed into the performing space and then moved, slithered, twirled and crawled on stage. The three dancers (Sarah Lorraine, Fiona Gitlin and Tawna Waters), along with Myriad Dance Company’s Kendall Fischer, who also performed and led the collaborative choreographic efforts, did a fabulous job on capturing every transition throughout the day, from predawn to a brief storm and to midday heat and the brightest sun and finally to twilight and nightfall.
Likewise, the musicians (which included Lisa Byrnes and Mercedes Smith, flute; Katie Porter, clarinet;Sam Elliott, trombone and Walter Haman, cello) were equally cohesive, cogent and explicit in transmitting the imagery of Kaminsky’s music and Allan’s art through sound. And, kudos to the smart, infectious vamps from both percussionists (Keith Carrick, and Eric Hopkins) at the beginning. Every component gelled with the theatrics in this compact piece, including the lighting design by Logan Bingham that enhanced Desert Portal’s easy accessibility for audience members.
Pianist Viktor Valkov opened the concert with fiery virtuosity, as he launched into the opening capriccio of Brahms’ Seven Fantasies, Opus 116. It is a late Brahms work, which the composer wrote in the year before his death, and Valkov’s interpretation finely juxtaposed the counterpoint of emotions represented in the entire set. The emotional character within each of the seven pieces swings back and forth, frequently and dramatically, but also the structure in each movement links each piece together, constantly reminding us that the first piece’s theme is never far away. Valkov masterfully delineated the emotional contrasts while emphasizing the integrity of the continuity within the entire set of seven pieces.
Gordon also did a fine job in conducting the mixed sextet for Jessica Rudman’s The Time Before We Became Strangers. Rudman, a composer who is on The University of Utah faculty, was commissioned to write the 2015 work for the Ensemble Mise-En. In the nine minutes of the piece, the musicians (Byrnes, flute; Porter, clarinet; Stephen Proser, horn; Elliott, trombone; Alex Martin violin and Andrew Keller, bass) excelled in extruding the reckonings of a short but intense romantic affair. The score would make a marvelous soundtrack for a short film.
The second solo work on the program was just as dynamite in its execution, as Valkov’s rendering of the Brahms set of seven short pieces: Shawn E. Okpebholo’s On a Poem by Miho Nonaka: Harvard Square, performed by flutist Mercedes Smith. The work requires the flutist to step up to the plate to deliver a grand slam.
The soloist must use expanded effects, including various types of tongue rams, which means the player should ram their tongue into the hole to stop the sound. For example, as noted previously in The Utah Review with Okpebholo’s explanation, “the composition begins with the flute playing bamboo tones, a way for the modern western flute to, by using nontraditional fingerings (which I notated in the score), sound like a shakuhachi flute, a Japanese bamboo flute.”
Exceptionally lucid in its imagistic character, this 2011 work by Okpebholo stands out among many solo works for flute that have been composed in the 21st century and which typically reflect heroic technical demands as examples of complex and even dense music. But, On a Poem by Miho Nonaka: Harvard Square truly captures the lyrical essence of its source material. Smith did a superb job in making the piece’s daunting technical demands into a miniature treasure that achieves its proper poetic luminescence. Highly recommend exploring Okpebholo’s catalog more extensively.
Just as gorgeous was the performance of Lili Boulanger’s diptych for chamber trio: D’un Matin de Printemps (Of A Spring Morning) and D’un Soir Triste (Of A Sad Evening) (1918). The trio (Martin, violin; Haman cello and Valkov, piano) championed the unique genius of how the composer leveraged essentially the same harmonic and thematic material for both pieces, to achieve two entirely different emotional epiphanies. Boulanger, who was as ambitious and adventurous a composer could be, completed the works just before she died at the age of 24 in March 2018, less than two weeks before Claude Debussy’s death at the age of 56.
The next NOVA offering will be the first of the season’s Gallery Concert Series, on March 24, in the G.W. Anderson Family Great Hall at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The Fry Street Quartet continues exploring Benjamin Britten’s chamber music in juxtapositions with various composers. This time, it is Schubert, including a set of lieder for voice and piano and Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 959, one of three such works he composed in the final year of his life, before his death at the age of 31. Meanwhile, the two Britten works are Phantasy Quartet (1932), which he wrote at the age of 19 and it is scored for oboe and string trio, and the lovely Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain (1954), scored for tenor, horn and piano. Among the featured performers are tenor Thomas Glenn and Lauren Hunt on horn.
For tickets and more information about the remainder of the 2023-2024 season, see the NOVA Chamber Music Series website.