Martha’s Vineyard Times, July 13, 2000: “Rorem Premiere an Honor for Vineyard,” by Dawn Aberg.
In the presence of truly significant music, a listener has much the same reaction as does a witness to a miracle. The experience is, above all, one of simplicity and joy. And then, in its wake, the beneficiary is left to marvel at the genius that has brought it into being, at the complexity only gradually comprehended.
Monday night at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown, Island concertgoers were treated to just such an experience. Launching its 30th anniversary season, the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society premiered a newly commissioned work by Ned Rorem, “An Oboe Book.” Oboist Humbert Lucarelli, who performed the work, called it the most significant music written for the instrument since Francois Poulenc’s Sonata for Oboe was composed almost 40 years ago.
The second half of the society’s program was given over completely to Mr. Rorem’s work, beginning with a set of six songs and a piano toccata, to which the cmoposer himself referred in remarks during the intermission as “early Rorem.” Soprano Jean Danton, accompanied by the society’s co-director Delores Stevens, gave a wonderfully clear performance of the small musical vocal gems, the art song genre fro which Mr. Rorem is best known.
“There is very little a composer can say about his own music that the music can’t say better,” Mr. Rorem engagingly, almost shyly, declared in his remarks from the stage before his work began. In his interview with The Times last week, the composer referred to music as an art form “too precise for words.”
With “An Oboe Book,” this precision begins with the very choice of the oboe as instrument. Since the loss of Mr. Rorem’s life partner James Holmes to cancer in January 1999, he has publicly admitted the melancholy that governs his mood, artistically and personally. The oboe, which the composer describes as “the most poignant instrument, a terribly singular instrument,” is the perfect vehicle for effective presentation of this mood. At no time, however, does the melancholy veer toward the maudlin in this work. Indeed, the composer has created an impressively wide range of expression for what the composer himself has called a relatively inflexible instrument. The suite is further regulated by a conceit of numbers. Mr. Rorem explains, indulging in an affectionate jab at the expense of serial composition and twelve tone techniques of such post-war composers as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg: “Although I’ve never leaned toward the rigidity of the serial killers, it’s clear that simple math does, in some sense, determine the mood of all music.”
Humbert Lucarelli, hailed by the New York Times as America’s leading oboe recitalist, gave a masterful performance of the technically demanding work, a piece that was in fact created for him. The suite begins with a prelude, titled “A Mirror for Bert,” which Mr. Rorem claims was born when he discovered the letters B-A-C-H in the oboist’s name. “I inscribed their musical equivalents,” Mr. Rorem recounts in the program notes, “wove them into a brief toccata, [and] played the toccata backward.”
“Mirror” is perfect as title and perception. The piece sounds like nothing so much as a play of disjointed impressions off a surface, a refraction as much as a reflection of tone. The oboe sings out the marvelously lyrical dissonances and leaps of the piece that give the work a distortedly coherent sense of the listener’s “image,” mixed metaphors of light and sound.
The next piece, “Nine to Three,” relaxes a bit into a more melodic presentation of the obeo’s voice, floated over an undercurrent of shifting, running piano rhythms. Occasionally the oboe line succumbs to the disjunction of the piano rhythms, in small dissonant cascades of tone, before pulling itself back into the tonal line. “Marriage Measures,” which the composer states was written in honor of John Simon and his wife, Pat Hoag, gives a nice sense of the pleasant melancholy of long-term partnership. Built on a harmonic base of major sevenths, the piece conveys the peace that is possible by holding tension in balance.
At this point, the suite pulls back, and the oboe performs alone in “Seventy-Seven Notes for Rosemary.” Written for the composer’s sister on her birthday, the lone instrumental voice moves in extraordinarily poignant intervals throughout its range. The piano returns in “Sixty Notes for Judy,” a piece Mr. Rorem wrote for his friend Judy Collins on her 60th birthday. The 60 notes he chooses are worked into a steady triple rhythm, with key changes subtly enlivening or muting th eprogressions, depending on their tonal direction.
The suite then moves to expressly honor the man Mr. Rorem calls “his dearest friend who is no more.” “A Sarabande for Jim,” with its jazz inflections, is a bit less measured than the pieces that precede it, reflecting a sort of unraveling of emotion even as affection seems to deepen. Then, in “Epitaph for Jim,” the composer moves back to the lyrical dissonances of tritones and major sevenths to memorialize his partner. Mr. Lucarelli was in full control of this extraordinary piece of instrumental virtuosity from the beginning, gracefully meaneuvering through the incredibly difficult rhythmic and technical combinations. Ending on a clear, sustained E-sharp over high C, exquisitely held by the soloist through several measures, the piece received an unexpected accompaniment from the Whaling Church itself, when the note was punctuated with bell chimes. (The chimes were not, in fact, written into the score.)
“Seven Answers to One Question” returned the suite to a more complex tonality, with the theme passed back and forth between the piano and oboe in a variation structure. Mr. Rorem calls the piece a “conversation between the soloists, [which] could as well be named ‘One Answer to Seven Questions.” The piece contains an amazing technical bit which can only be described as a tonal flutter, a trill over a wider interval, which is incredibly difficult to execute on the oboe, but remarkably effective as a soft waft of sound.
Finally, in the postlude “Until Next Time,” the composer moves even deeper into complexity, both tonally and rhythmically. If the songs and piano work that led into the suite were “early Rorem,” the postlude exemplifies the piercingly contemporary and mature Rorem. The frenzied rhythmic figures propel the soloists furiously through the piece, with abrupt stops peppering the way. The soloists are pulled apart in small breaks and slight separations of sound, small opportunities for individual expression, before they are flung back together into intermingled sound, where the piano and oboe voices merge.
“An Oboe Book” will be performed again next month with Mr. Lucarelli as the oboe soloist, in Buenos Aries, Argentina, at an international convention of double reed players, then again on Nantucket (Mr. Rorem’s home) in September. But we on Martha’s Vineyard, thanks to our local chamber music society, got to hear it first. A true honor.
Dawn Aberg 