Music Reviews : CalArts Music Festival

At CalArts’ Contemporary Music Festival, some things remain constant, year to year. Lots of composers are represented, the intermissions are too long and the most important concerts tend to be held in the Main Gallery, where sight-lines are poor and distractions are many.

Nevertheless, most programs will yield two or three memorable works. By itself, Earl Kim’s “Now & Then,” one of seven works on the Saturday evening program by the New CalArts Twentieth Century Players, with guests, made the trip to Valencia worthwhile. Over a sparse but evocative accompaniment of flute, viola and harp, texts by Beckett, Chekhov and Yeats are set to striking and very lyrical vocal lines, effectively delivered here by soprano Catherine Gayer.

Timbre is the organizing element in Mel Graves’ “Watercourse.” The extended performance techniques employed by the composer (such as bassoon multiphonics) did not simply result in a string of special effects , but as a source of fascinating color variation. Bassoonist Julie Feves and bassist Patrick Neher gave an assured reading.

Effective use of color also helped maintain interest in Kathleen St. John’s relatively concise “Heliotrope,” played by a faculty wind quintet and heard in its West Coast premiere.

The prolific German composer Hanns Eisler was represented in selections from “Die Hollywood Elegien.” With clarity and directness, Gayer sang the tawdry Bertold Brecht texts, and pianist Leonard Stein provided reliable accompaniment.

Aside from the catchiness of its jazz rhythms, Ed Bland’s “Paean for an Endangered Planet,” heard in its world premiere, sounds like a dry, academic counterpoint assignment. Also on the program were Craig Bove’s “Nightscape,” (another world premiere) a work sorely in need of variety, and minimalist Harold Budd’s “Madrigals of the Rose Angel,” in which pleasant-sounding sonorities go absolutely nowhere. Bruce Hangen conducted the works by Bland and Budd.