MUSIC REVIEW : A Hearing for New Compositions From SDSU

Unlike their Soviet counterparts, American composers have never worked in the fear of government censure. Even Dmitri Shostakovich at the height of his international acclaim found new compositions suppressed, and he smarted under the criticism of party ideologues pretending to deliver music criticism.

American composers, however, have suffered the benign neglect of the country’s free market musical economy. University music faculties have been one of the few safe havens for composers, a place where this endangered musical species may survive economically and find a platform for compositions.

In this tradition, the San Diego State University music department presented a concert Sunday evening of recent works by Brent Dutton, head of the department’s composition studies.

It would be easy to characterize Dutton’s style as an overly aggressive revision of neoclassicism, traditionally the most academically respectable idiom for the collegiate composer in residence. For his chamber music, Dutton chooses the favored neoclassical forms, suite and sonata, and he frequently relies on busy, motoric counterpoint to propel his compositions. At least in the five not-so-easy pieces presented Sunday in Smith Hall, Dutton relied on no trendy electronic manipulations or insertions, nor did he require his instrumentalists to perform unnatural music acts on their instruments.

A dark, brooding streak ran through most of Dutton’s works. From the angry wind symphony “Dark Spirals,” to his intense “Hotel Europejski” Suite for solo violin and piano, the composer mined the uneasy state of being favored by the Expressionists of the Second Viennese School. Fortunately, Dutton has a wry sense of humor worthy of Charles Ives. In his “Sonata in Fact” for trumpet and piano, he easily slipped in a trite melodic rondo in the prissy style of Herbert L. Clarke’s turn-of-the-century cornet variations.

Dutton’s most recent offering, “A Rolling Silence” for singer and four percussionists, showed considerable skill in layering a variety of melodic percussion sounds into a telling web of support for several terse Garcia Lorca poems. Would that the vocal line, sensitively interpreted by Jefferey Foote, might have expressed a similar level of invention as the percussion parts. In this case, Dutton’s brand of understated declamation was too little of a good thing.

Violinist Frank Almond III played the “Hotel Europejski” with conviction and a laudably rich tone. Violist Karen Elaine brought equal finesse and warmth to her solo vehicle, “Song of the Sun,” but this rhapsodic fragment had neither the depth, the dramatic impact, nor the structural rewards of the Suite.

Trumpeter Alan Siebert and pianist Karen Follingstad brought fluency to “Sonata in Fact,” but Siebert played through the work’s humor without the slightest alteration of technique or phrasing that might have acknowledged its presence.

Under director Harold Warman, the SDSU Wind Symphony gave “Dark Spirals” a high-decibel run for its life. I must confess no sympathy at all for this odd musical beast: Concert band is to me an oxymoron. I would like to hear the primal scream of “Dark Spirals” played by a traditional symphony before analyzing its musical merit.