Network For New Music at World Café Live

If you added a little smoke, last Sunday's Network for New Music concert at the World Café on Walnut Street could have evoked a spasm of nostalgia among audience members who remembered the 1950s. The program's combination of music, poetry readings and a café setting created an atmosphere that recalled the days when disciples of Kerouac and Ginsberg ranted their complaints through a tobacco haze at coffeehouses in Greenwich Village and San Francisco.

The most obvious difference between the present and that legendary past was the professionalism of the Network musicians. The program featured solos by some of the Philadelphia Orchestra's leading chamber players, in addition to work by lights from other sectors, such as the Chamber Orchestra's first flute, Edward Shultz.

The unaccompanied solo must be one of the hardest genres a composer can tackle. The composer surrenders all the opportunities for creative variety offered by multi-instrument ensembles. All the composers on the program rose to the challenge.

Their efforts even included a genuine spellbinder. Louis Karchin's Ricercare harked back to the forms of the Baroque era and received a performance by violinist Hirono Oka that combined virtuoso display with intense expressiveness.

Burchard Tang achieved a similar effect with a viola solo inspired by Poem for a Survivor, by the late Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Justice. The composer, Ingrid Arauco, called her piece Violiloquy, a title that summed up the viola line meditative flow.

Too-personal poetry

The evening's big weakness was the poetry. Most of the contemporary poetry I encounter is so personal that the poet often seems to be the only person who can possibly know what it's about. Most of Sunday's texts reinforced that impression.

One notable exception was the family act led by the flutist Edward Schultz, who played a piece composed by his brother, Robert Schultz, inspired by a poem by their mother, Barbara Burwell. Autumn Squall describes their mother's delight in the way leaves fly around her car. Her son's music captures the images of the poem right up to a final scattering of notes to match the scattering of leaves in front of the car's windshield.

Some of Sunday's composers opted for the most obvious approach: They had the poets read their poems as a prelude to the music. Others integrated the poem with their scores.

For Jeanne Minahan's poem, After the Burial, composer Joseph Hallman opted for a duet between the poem, which he read himself, and a somber solo played by the Philadelphia Orchestra's English horn specialist, Elizabeth Starr Masoudnia. For Arne Running's clarinet piece, Snippets, poet Lamont "Napalm" Dixon followed each of the three short sections with a poem that reflected his response to the music.

"'Lemon shades of green'?

Running's solo, which he played himself, displayed his intimate knowledge of the clarinet's possibilities. Snippets is a five-minute, three-section piece that opens with a jazzy outburst, continues with a section that combines a mournful melody line with a series of final shrieks, and ends with a segment that includes ironic references to "Pop Goes the Weasel."

Dixon contributed the evening's most colorful language. I could relate to most of his poems even when he hyped the language into passages like Blue is the Moon that would be Sun shimmy-dancing in lemon shades of green shadows. I'm not sure what that means, but I can tolerate a little bemusement when it's accompanied by that kind of bounce and vitality.

Dixon's one misstep was a poem on the recent mass killings in Norway. For that piece, he slipped into a flatter style, more suited to editorials, as poets often do when they write about politically charged events.

Gongs and marimbas

For the final piece on the program, Dixon produced a poem that celebrated the event itself and the glory of combining words and music. His musical partner was the Philadelphia Orchestra percussionist Anthony Orlando, who played Portentum for Solo Percussion, a piece that Andrew Rudin wrote for him in 1981.

Dixon could have read the whole lengthy poem before Orlando started playing, but Rudin made a minor change in his score and created a more interesting structure. He broke the poem into three sections and Dixon read the second section in the middle of the piece, over a background inserted for the occasion.

Rudin's music sounded surprisingly subdued after a poetic introduction that spoke of gongs and trumpets, but it matched the basic message of Dixon's verbal gymnastics. The poem celebrates liberated voices, and Rudin's score emphasizes the interplay of all the different voices that Orlando commands as he moves among gongs, drums, marimba and all the other devices in a modern percussionist's sound factory.

In the final moments, the pure tones of Japanese temple bells preceded a conclusion that suggested the mysteries of the special eves that dot the calendar from the end of October to the beginning of the New Year.