Lyric Fest, Astral Artists and a brief rant

I can only review four or five concerts a month, given the constraints on my time. Inevitably, I end up with a nagging list of premieres and other events that I wish I'd mentioned. Here are a few comments (and a brief rant) on three pieces by contemporary composers that provoked exceptionally powerful nags.

Of drugs and clichés

From On the Road. Allen Krantz's new piece had to overcome a high personal hurdle when I listened to the premiere at Lyric Fest's October concert. Krantz set two paragraphs from Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and I've disliked Kerouac and the whole "Beat Generation" mystique ever since I hung around Philadelphia coffee houses back in the '50s.

For me, Kerouac's "generation" consisted of a few hundred people, at most. They didn't represent me or my friends. I resented the idea that any 20-something who lived in a city and frequented a coffee house had to be a Kerouackian roadie, high on drugs and the cookie-cutter clichés that pass for nonconformity in the U.S.

The real individualists in our society, in my opinion, hide in the cracks. They rarely succumb to the delusion that they speak for a generation.

Despite my deep-rooted bias, I liked Krantz's piece, partly because he selected passages that emphasized the "beatific" life-embracing aspect of Kerouac's outpourings. Krantz wrote it for one of Lyric Fest's founders, mezzo Suzanne DuPlantis, and he gave Kerouac's words an inventive, energetic musical setting that exploited the interpretative range that she applies to the art song repertoire.

Simple and tender

Cinder. The Lyric Fest concert featured works by Andrea Clearfield, Kile Smith and other members of the cohort of composers that Philadelphia has acquired in the last two decades. All of them contributed worthy pieces, but I'm most impelled to mention James Primosch's Cinder.

Primosch never writes anything flashy, but his work always stands out when it appears on a new music program. For Cinder, he began with a well-chosen poem by a poet named Susan Stewart. Its subject is the symbiosis of opposites, starting with the flame we use to make the tong that protects us from the flame. It's a simple, tender poem that's loaded with significance, and Primosch gave it the simple, tender musical setting it deserved.

Like watching a river

Au-dela du temps. Flutist Angel Hsiao devoted most of her Astral Artists debut to four flute solos that proved she's a performer with a future. She ended with a trio for two flutes and piano by a contemporary Japanese composer, Yuko Uebayashi, that showcased the composer as well as all three musicians.

Uebayashi's Au-dela du temps is the kind of piece you listen to for the same reason you watch a fountain or a river. Its four movements include bell-like moments for the piano, the unique sonorities created by two flutes, and a finale that ends the trio with a flowing, driving burst of complex sound. Overall, it's a lively, beautiful melding of the French and Japanese flute traditions— two of the world's richest flute traditions.

Public service announcement

I've mentioned Mimi Stillman's "Syrinx Journey" in BSR before. I mention it again here as a public service to people looking for something that can offer some emotional support during the coming year.

As part of her celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Claude Debussy, Stillman is recording Debussy's two-minute Syrinx for unaccompanied flute at a different site every day, wherever her career takes her, and posting the results on her website, mimistillman.org.


Syrinx is one of the major works in the flute repertoire— a two-minute pastoral originally composed as stage music for a Parisian play.

Are you looking for a short, rejuvenating break in your day? Try "Syrinx Journey" for a brief sojourn in a magic alternate universe.♦


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