Loaded chambers

Scott Harris and the Core Ensemble at USM

By Doug Hubley

Both concerts take place at 8 p.m. in Corthell Concert Hall, on the USM Gorham campus. Tickets $10 for Harris, $12 for the Core Ensemble, with discounts for seniors and students. Call 780-5555.

SCOTT HARRIS: wiseguy neo- romantic.

At first glance, two chamber concerts at the University of Southern Maine this weekend have little in common besides the stage on which they take place. But conceptual threads do bind Friday’s program of compositions by Scott Harris to Saturday’s Tres Vidas, a “chamber music theater” piece by the Core Ensemble. In its own way, each concert represents chamber music’s striving for a sort of vital middle ground — a sweet spot — somewhere between the extremes of harsh modernism and grim reverence for the Old Masters, where audiences and aesthetics can both be satisfied.

Moreover, each concert suggests how much such a middle ground relies, or feels the need to rely, on outside references. We’re talking Postmodernism, baby! The program by Harris, an associate professor of music at USM, includes a rearrangement of some Bach and strong allusions to Brahms and two Strausses. In Tres Vidas (“Three Lives”), a tribute to three Latin American women, the Core Ensemble not only pulls in folk and popular music; but theater, history, art and literature.

“People are much more accepting of different types of music when it is attached to a story line,” says Michael Parola, Core Ensemble percussionist. The theatrical component nets the group more work than it would get doing just straight concerts. “The business of just playing contemporary music concerts by themselves,” he says, “doesn’t have much broad-based appeal.”

Meanwhile, Harris’s concert, part of the university’s Faculty Concert Series, is actually something of a mini-faculty series in itself - the largest group performance in years by USM faculty, many of whom double with the Portland Symphony and other top-shelf bands.

Harris, of Portland, wrote most of Friday’s music during a 1999 sabbatical. The program has its heavy conceptual aspects, as you might expect from a music theorist whose projects include a 200-page Web site of ear-training exercises. But Harris assures us that he aims for the heart as much as the gray matter. He favors a clear rhythmic pulse, discernible tonality (the sense that there is a home key) and even, heaven forfend, some melody once in a while.

“The big challenge in writing a whole concert’s worth of music is writing something with enough variety and sweep that it’ll sustain the entire evening,” Harris says. His solution was a program that progresses deliberately from abstraction to a sort of wiseguy neo-romanticism.

The opener is BachStreams, a radical rearrangement of material by J.S. Bach. It stars a Macintosh that cranks out multiples of a single musical line at close intervals. The idea is to set up a barrage of notes where musical coherence phases in and out, just as the windshield wipers go in and out of synch with “Brown-Eyed Girl” on the car radio.

Harris wrote the Sonata for Bassoon and Piano for Ardith Keef, the doyen of southern Maine bassoonists. Virtuosic for both the bassoon and the piano, which is played by Judith Quimby, the sonata spends a lot of time in the bassoon’s difficult high registers. “It’s a rather dissonant and occasionally fairly clangorous piece too,” Harris says.

Dances of Ecstasy, Songs of Despair is an ode to uncertainty. “Especially in the middle movement, I tried to write a piece where nothing seems very solid,” Harris says. “Dances that try to get started and don’t, songs that try to get started and don’t.” Scored for winds, strings, harp and percussion, the piece dies as it lived – that is, inconclusively - which will surely bollix up those folks who like to lead off the applause.

After intermission, Harris waxes melodious. He wrote the Waltz Sequence for Horn and Piano for hornist John Boden, who’ll perform it with pianist Kate Lewis. The piece attempts to sum up 150 years of waltz history, complete with less-than-reverent references to two Strausses, Johann the Younger (the Blue Danube guy) and Richard (Der Rosenkavalier).

The playful streak continues with a finale that Harris describes as a rich dessert. Love’s Labours is based on 16th-century love lyrics set for four voices and two pianos, a format identical to Brahms’ Liebeslieder (“love songs”). “I wanted to create a piece in a popular style for the same ensemble,” Harris says. But where Brahms chose texts dripping with bliss and despair, Harris selects more for humor and sarcasm. (“If simple love be such a curse,/To marry is to make it ten times worse,” says a lyric called “Fie on Love.”)

The singers are Ellen Chickering, soprano; Laurie Lemley, mezzo-soprano; Bruce Fithian, tenor; and David Kravitz, baritone. Quimby and Lewis return on pianos. The musical mood is mostly frolicsome, with nods to Gilbert and Sullivan. “It has its own little overture that’s actually tuneful,” Harris says. “I mean, it’s conceivable, I think, even that somebody could leave humming a tune after hearing it.” Just imagine.

 

The Core Ensemble returns to USM a year after its boffo debut there, consisting of three instrumentalists and an actor hired for Tres Vidas. The topic of last year’s show was the Harlem Renaissance; this year’s tells the stories of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni, and Rufina Amaya, witness to a 1981 army massacre in her El Salvadoran village.

They launched into what they call “chamber music theater” in 1995. And while they’ve done elaborate large-scale projects, the setup you’ll see at USM – three players and a hired actor-singer – is their current format of choice.

Based in Florida, the ensemble sports percussionist Michael Parola, pianist Hugh Hinton and two job-sharing cellists; Amy Barston will perform in Gorham. New York actress-singer Georgina Corbo is fronting the band for Tres Vidas.

That show and Ebony Embers, the Harlem Renaissance piece, constitute the ensemble’s current theatrical repertoire. The shows combine sung and instrumental music from all over, poetry and acting, and stage effects. The form “allows us to illuminate eras, points of view and different characters that people, in many cases, just don’t know about,” Parola says.

New this season, Tres Vidas portrays three women whose powers – political, social, artistic, sexual – were at odds with their times and their cultures. Frida Kahlo, some of whose artworks appear in the show, is likely the best-known of the three, someone whose rebelliousness, sensuality, and drive couldn’t quite transform a tragic life.

Like Kahlo, Argentinean poet Alfonsina Storni railed against the oppressive paternalism that prevailed in Latin America in her time. Her defiance put Storni, who died in 1938, out ahead of the world at large - and light-years ahead of her native land, where even today a woman commencing a tango is expected to let her arms hang limply for the man to lift.

Where creative work gave Storni and Kahlo a forum and some prestige, all Rufina Amaya has is her story. In 1981, U.S-trained soldiers massacred 1,000 peasants in Amaya’s village in El Salvador. Amaya, then 38, is the only known adult survivor; her husband and four children were slaughtered. Since then, she has shared the story of this atrocity whenever it would serve the fight against governmental and military oppression.

The script for Tres Vidas was written by Marjorie Agosin, a Chilean native and an influential writer now living in this country. The music is splendidly varied: It includes new commissions from Latin American composers, folk tunes, and music by tango interpreters Astor Piazzolla and Carlos Gardel.

“We’re very eclectic in our tastes,” says Parola. “We aren’t dogmatic about certain styles, and we actually like to have a broad mixture of styles.” This from musicians who come from the traditional art music establishment. Maine musicians, are you listening?

True, eclecticism has its toll. It may scare critics, who tend to cling to their categories (like “modernism” and “wiseguy neo-romanticism”). Chamber music theater, Parola says, is “a new type of hybrid form, and so it doesn’t fit into an easy description.”

Well, so be it. The proof of the pudding is in the attendance. “The idea that the group goes out and does 12, 14, 16 weeks a year of touring,” Parola says – “that’s a lot of touring for a chamber music ensemble.” n

Doug Hubley can be reched at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net