Jeremy Gill works at Settlement (2nd review)

Jeremy Gill assembled a notably unified program when he combined two of his own pieces with works by Messiaen and Benjamin Britten. Gill's creations and the works by the two older composers worked together because they're all grounded in subjects that evoke deep emotional reactions.

Messiaen's Amen of the Creation for two pianos is a powerful example of Messiaen's cosmic mysticism. Britten's Temporal Variations for oboe and piano expresses his lifelong pacifism.

As the oboist ToniMarie Marchioni explained in her remarks, the three-note theme of Britten's piece is supposed to mean, "Enough." Britten wrote Temporal Variations in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War inaugurated a nine-year descent into worldwide carnage, and his reaction to that historic moment exploits the full range of the oboe's personality, from a passage in which it resembles a saxophone floating over a desolate field to a final imitation of a lonely trumpet call. Other movements feature sarcastic marches, angry comments from the piano, and the hint of a shofar playing the Enough theme.

Moods of a Catholic day

Gill's 2007 work for solo piano, Book of Hours, is based on a devotional book that for centuries guided Christians through the Roman Catholic liturgical day. Its eight movements capture all the moods of the day, from the bird songs and bells that greet the dawn to the final Salve Regina that follows Vespers.

But a journey through one day's moods is also a journey through all the moods of life. Gill's movements may draw their inspiration from a Christian text, but they could also be linked to the well-known Sanskrit Salutation of the Dawn: "Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life. In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence…."

Musically, Gill takes good advantage of a subject that offers a composer endless opportunities for variety. Book of Hours is a lesson in the variety that a composer can achieve with a single piano, played in the classic fashion, without any modern innovations like hand-plucked strings.

Moving musicians

Gill's second piece on the program is titled Soglie, Serenate, Sfere ("Threshold, Songs, Spheres"), and he calls it a fantasy on an aria from a 1687 opera that was "the first work in Western music to explicitly call for the oboe in its orchestration." Its subject is the "prehistory of the oboe," but that means it also delves into war, religion and other areas in which the oboe and its ancestors played a ceremonial role. It's scored for oboe and two percussionists, and its effects include insect sounds, chimes and the drums of war.

Gill underlined his subject's ceremonial nature with a touch of staging. Music stands and percussion instruments were arranged at various places through the Settlement School hall, and the piece began with the oboist playing in the rear and the two percussionists in the front. Then, as the musicians progressed through the three movements, the oboist moved forward and the percussionists back, until they'd changed places.

Weak points

The percussionists, Mari Yoshinaga and Gabriel Glonus-Hoenich, opened the evening with a Steve Reich piece in which they had to play separate lines on two marimbas without the aid of a conductor. In Soglie, Serenate, Sfere they repeated the feat on various instruments, including a bank of snare drums, and stayed with the oboist while they were doing it.

The program's weak points were the Reich marimba opus and, sadly, the Messiaen. The Reich was fun to watch but musically repetitious. The Messiaen is the final movement of his Amens for two pianos, and Gill and Feifel Zhang never achieved the magic that Orchestra 2001 has created in performances that featured Charles Abramovic, Marcantonio Barone and James Freeman in various combinations.

Still, three out of five isn't bad. Jeremy Gill placed his own work side by side with scores by two of the 20th Century's greatest composers and created an evening that tapped the deep currents that run through the classical tradition, generation after generation.♦


To read another review by Peter Burwasser, click here.