MUSIC REVIEW : UCSD CONCERTS HAIL ERICKSON’S WORKS

Evaluating the work of contemporary composers is risky business. Midway through J.S. Bach’s musical tenure in Leipzig, that city’s resident critic dismissed the old man’s music as old-fashioned and hopelessly convoluted to the cultivated ear.

Over the past week, the UC San Diego music department presented five concerts devoted to the compositions of Robert Erickson, one of that department’s founding pedagogues. Though the specific occasion for this celebration was Erickson’s 70th birthday and his retirement from the university, it was difficult to quell the suspicion that the process of a composer’s canonization begins with such honorific festivals.

Other members of the UCSD music faculty may have garnered more awards and public attention over the years, but this was a clear attempt to rally the troops around the Erickson flag. The department’s performing faculty, graduate students, and various departmental ensembles collaborated to perform a generous cross-section of both vintage and recent Erickson. The sole exception to this campus effort was the festival’s opening concert March 1 by the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet.

“I feel when I am working with sound, I am the apprentice to the materials,” Erickson said in a pithy statement printed in the program book. It is a fitting motto for his work, for sonic experiment has been this composer’s calling card, and the by-products frequently exhibit the less-than-finished quality of an experimenter’s handiwork.

The Erickson festival ended Sunday afternoon with a concert of his larger works in Mandeville Auditorium. “Mountain” (1983) is a short work for chamber orchestra, women’s chorus and soprano solo; conductor Thomas Nee led a confident reading of this fragment, and Carol Plantamura gave the solo clear definition.

“Sierra” (1984) is Erickson’s unbridled salute to his adopted state, in which the baritone soloist declaims a litany of California Gold Rush towns and heroes. Philip Larson handled this vocal tour de force, shifting with evident ease from falsetto to basso profundo. An icon of Erickson’s style before he came to California was provided by the 1963 Concerto for Piano and Seven Instruments. Like the Second String Quartet, which Kronos performed, its texture was more linear and its pace more aggressively structured than those of later works. Even Erickson, a composer who eschewed trends, at that stage paid homage to the pristine silences of Stockhausen and others.

John Silber conducted the concerto, and UCSD music department chairman Cecil Lytle realized its bristling, angular solo keyboard part, a prefiguring of the virtuoso solo pieces Erickson would create for the cadre of UCSD performers between 1969 and 1985.

Many Western composers reached a certain spiritual clarity in their final string quartets, and Kronos’ deft playing of “Corfu,” a quartet Erickson wrote for them in 1986, brought such elevated comparisons readily to mind.

If Erickson regains his health, “Corfu” will not be a valedictory piece, for several important commissions await his completion, including a work for full orchestra for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.