Older readers may recall with fondness Edgar Bergen, a very popular American entertainer who poured his comic routines through ventriloquist dummies named Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. Edgar so loved the performing arts, that he created an annual celebration to showcase classical music, dance, opera, and theater, which continues and thrives to this very day: the Bergen Festival.

Composer Bright Sheng.

^{Courtesy Photo}

Okay, that’s not really what the Bergen Festival is, but after hearing a modern composer with a strong Chinese musical identity—Bright Sheng—prop up Scandinavian folk tunes on his knee, and manipulate them to entertain the public, the spirit of Charlie McCarthy—a bourgeois puppet in top hat and tails, monocle in place, spouting low vaudeville patois—was in the air.

Bright Sheng has had a successful career assimilating Chinese music into a Western classical idiom. Unlike some of his fellow Chinese expatriates who relish juxtapositions of Chinese, classical, and avant-garde music (Tan Dun) or attempt to genuinely merge Chinese and classical music into a new hybrid (Zhou Long), Sheng comes to the table with a strong European classical music sensibility, into which he infuses Chinese traditional music. Historical precedents for similar compositional thought would include Hungarian music and Bartok, American music and Copland, and Norwegian music and Grieg—which brings us back to Bergen (Norway, that is, not Edgar).

Responding to a commission from the Bergen Festival (where the work was premiered), Sheng took Scandinavian folk music as his inspiration in composing a cello and piano work, Northern Lights. To call it a duo would misrepresent the piece, for the cello is always front and center in the texture. Lest one doubt which side of the musical fence Sheng is squarely planted, the four movements are indicated not by descriptive titles, but by abstract metronome markings.

Northern Lights is a substantial work; I didn’t note the duration, but it felt like it was at least 20 minutes long. The cello part displays the influence of the Norwegian fiddle, the hardanger, with its vigorous multiple stops and drones. It suffers from overly long stretches of textural monotony—the cello spends most of the first 3 movements up in the stratosphere, with little registral relief. In the first and third movements, the piano part consists largely of a single-line melody, embellished with grace notes, and spinning out in melodic and rhythmic contrast to the cello’s line. The result is a sputtering kind of counterpoint between the two instruments, but which runs in place without going anywhere. Perhaps in shorter lengths, this lean, fluttery counterpoint would be more engaging, but as heard on Sunday, it eventually overstayed its welcome.

Sheng’s writing for the piano in these movements is sparsely textured, a scrawny part against the cello’s quietly suspended lines or hiccupping melodies. The piano was so bland, so puny in contrast to the cello’s tense upper register, that one wondered if the entire work would not be better served by having an instrumental ensemble accompany the cello. Those stuttering grace notes and off-canter melodies might have more weight on the flute or oboe, the low resonant chords which occasionally anchored the harmonies might take on more depth if sounded with low winds and strings.

The most convincing movement was the last, a furiously sawed dance for the cello, with brusque, sharp single-line punctuations by the piano. Here again, though, the pacing seemed off kilter, too much time spent for such limited material.

In his program notes and during a preconcert talk at Sherwood Auditorium last Sunday, Sheng readily admitted that Norwegian folk materials were new for him, and he hoped that he could comfortably inhabit that musical idiom. One hopes that Sheng has better luck with his next project in this area; or else returns to what he does so well—working with Chinese music.

In Lynn Harrell, Sheng had a most eloquent advocate, a passionate performer who threw himself into his part whole-heartedly. Harrell’s intensity was never less than astounding. Whether the audience was responding to Harrell’s powerful performance, or to Sheng’s folky music would be impossible to tell without surveying the crowd, but I would guess the loud applause at the conclusion of Northern Lights was due more to the former than the latter.

In Victor Santiago Asuncion, Harrell had a dedicated and sensitive accompanist. If he had to take second chair to Harrell in Sheng’s work, Asuncion had plenty of opportunity to dazzle listeners with his riveting account of Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in G minor for Cello and Piano. Yes, it’s a cello sonata, and yes, Harrell played just as intensely as he had in Sheng’s preceding work, but the piano part to this work is likely the most difficult ever composed up to that point—1901—for a cello sonata. Asuncion played Rachmaninoff cleanly and forcefully, without ever sounding strident, and conjured a heavenly cantabile tone for the sumptuous slow movement, a lovely complement to Harrell’s throbbing vibrato. After Northern Lights, this listener was struck by how Russian Rachmaninoff sounded without even trying in his Sonata, in contrast to Sheng’s conscious, but flawed, evocation of Scandinavian music.

Beethoven’s string quartets are such monuments of chamber music that his other efforts in writing for small string groups are unfortunately overshadowed. The String Trios, op. 9, and the String Quintet, op. 29, are every bit as worthy of inclusion into the chamber music pantheon as Beethoven’s quartets, and yet, because they have one less or one more instrument than Beethoven’s string quartets, they rarely figure in articles or discussions of Beethoven’s chamber music. Add to this the paucity of professional string trios and no professional string quintets, and this translates into few opportunities to hear these marvelous works in the concert hall.

Fortunately, festivals where chamber music specialists are amassed, such as Mainly Mozart or Summerfest, are occasions to perform compositions in less standard configurations. Take a distinguished string quartet like the Borromeo Quartet, add an equally superlative violist like Paul Neubauer, and you have an opportunity to hear how Beethoven’s Quintet, op. 29, forms a sturdy and wonderful bridge between his six early String Quartets, op. 18, and the middle-period Razumovsky quartets, op. 59.

The Borromeo has always impressed with their uncanny sense of cohesion and unity; as a great pianist plays a solo work with complete control and purpose, so too do the members of the Borromeo Quartet (Nicholas Kitchen, Kristopher Tong, violin; Mai Motobuchi, viola; and Yeesun Kim, cello) subsume their personalities into a marvelous gestalt which brings to life the notes of composers. Into their close-knit musical community slipped violist Paul Neubauer, merging seamlessly into this group-mind as if the five of them played together every week. The result was a magnificent account of an infrequently heard masterpiece.

The concert began with the world premiere of Anthony Newman’s Sonata Populare, given an arresting performance by violinist David Coucheron, ably accompanied by the composer on piano. In the preconcert talk, Newman said that the work’s title referred to its accessibility to a typical classical music audience, as opposed to a sonata that uses popular music materials. In five concise and clear movements, Newman took the audience on a musical journey which was conventional in form, but revealed many surprises and diversions along the way in the form of unexpected bitonal or chromatic chords in the midst of an 18^th or 19^th-century harmonic route.

Newman’s compositional objectives may not seem very ambitious on the surface, yet the way in which he securely accomplished his goals is indicative of a competent craftsman. His melodies are alluring, the harmonies surprising when first encountered but in retrospect appropriate, and his writing for both instruments is confident and secure.

The first movement of Newman’s work starts off uncannily like an 18^th-century Italian violin sonata, but polytonal chords color the harmonies, and the violin part itself sounds almost Romantic, not unlike a Fritz Kreisler pseudo-Baroque composition. The second movement is a kind of bouree or gavotte with the specter of Ravel or late Debussy hovering around the entire proceeding. The third movement features constantly shifting meters and octatonic scales. The last movement suggests Stravinsky in his neoclassical phase channeling J.S. Bach, with humorously grotesque harmonic detours.

Almost half a century ago, Leonard Meyer, in Music, the Arts, and Ideas, observed that composers were exhausting all possible musical innovations, and once that happened, contemporary music would reach a historical plateau in which any and all styles would be used. I agree that composers over the past 100 years have mapped out all the musical frontiers, and composers today are free to choose from any style.

So why is it that when a composer such as Newman intentionally evokes an old musical style, there is something disturbing about that appropriation? Why shouldn’t a composer be able to write a violin sonata in the style of Geminiani or Vivaldi? Or in the style of neoclassical Stravinsky? Or Ravel? This isn’t a musical forgery—Anthony Newman proudly signs his name as the composer of this pleasant sonata. The simple juxtaposition of styles from movement to movement makes it clear that we’re listening to a contemporary composition which intentionally reaches back. So why does this sound wrong to me?

Better composers than Newman have been pilloried by critics and colleagues for committing similar sins. In the 1920’s, George Antheil was belittled for imitating Stravinsky (in Antheil’s case, it was often went past imitation to become out and out appropriation). Harold Shapero, considered by many the most promising American composer of his generation, was roundly smacked down for sounding too much like Beethoven or Haydn. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, George Rochberg incurred the wrath of academia with his sincere attempts to recapture the musical language of Mahler and Beethoven.

I don’t have the time to examine why appropriation of older styles should be considered wrong. Newman’s Sonata Populare irritated me, but irritation is frequently a good thing. There is something in the work inviting reexamination, and that is an essential quality if a composition is to survive at all past its premiere.

Why shouldn’t a composer be free to use any musical style which attracts him or her? We may claim to be in a postmodern era, but until these feelings of impropriety are dispelled, we apparently have a way to go before we truly arrive at Leonard Meyer’s musical plateau.

For a copy of the program, click here.