Review of 3/30/12 Magnetic South concert - in full

BY ADAM PARKER

Judging from the four works presented at Friday night’s excellent Magnetic South concert at the Simons Center Recital Hall, 20^th century classical music was mostly about rhythm — playing with it, distorting it, forcing it to comply with gesture and sentiment.
Even Arnold Schoenberg, during his Romantic years when the Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major was written (1906), made rhythm into something like the warm Gulf Stream, racing along under the alternately breezy and tumultuous surface of the sea.

The other three 20^th century composers featured, including two still living, likewise put pulse at the center of their work.

Stravinsky’s Concerto in E-flat, nicknamed “Dunbarton Oaks” for the estate owned by the Washington, D.C. couple who commissioned the work in 1937, is a rollicking neo-classical jaunt reminiscent of Bach (especially the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3) featuring lots of pluck and verve.

The Charleston Symphony Orchestra musicians, under the determined and vigorous direction of composer Yiorgos Vassilandonakis, played Dunbarton Oaks — Bach-like in the first movement, pastoral in a Russian sort of way in the second, and propulsive in the third — with a light touch, fine balance and somewhat relaxed tempo.

The more polyphonic Schoenberg followed, with its distinctive melodies shining through a dense texture. This was Romanticism at its end, being torn apart by industrialism and the flurry of musical “isms” (Serialism, Nationalism, Neoclassicism, Minimalism) which would consume much of the 20^th century.

Schoenberg’s chamber symphony, offered in one movement with five parts, sparked visions of some imaginary silent film about two lovers meeting in a train station or factory, trying to communicate their passion above the cacophony of the newly arrived century.

The piece marked both the end of a style and the beginning of a genre. Indeed, the concert was titled “Bookends: Chamber Symphony Then and Now,” meant to showcase this particular musical format.

Arvo Part’s brief “Fratres” offered instrumental variations of a folk-like melody set within a triadic harmonic structure, all floating beautifully over a long pedal tone played without vibrato.

Part, a devout Catholic, found his voice when, in the 1970s, he began to experiment with a new tonal style he called “tintinnabuli,” a chant-like circling around a particular pitch often calculated according to a numerical formula.

It seems overly intellectualized, but the effect is lovely. And the musicians succeeded in creating a hushed, almost sacred sound, sharing the shimmering melody among them.

Last came John Adams’ “Son of Chamber Symphony,” first performed in 2007. Adams is typically called a Minimalist, but this is perhaps a misnomer. His music tends to be dynamic, emotional and varied, playing with intense and syncopated rhythms and inserting elements of jazz and pop.

Here he was channeling Leonard Bernstein through a turn-of-the-century prism. Cool angular lines were accompanied by popping percussion, an oft-muffled piano, pizzicato in the strings and a full, jazzy brass section. Only in the third and last movement did one hear clearly the characteristics of Minimalism, with its driving polyrhythms and binary tonal shifts. The Adams piece seemed to reflect the entire 20^th century, with all its pulsating drive and experimental verve.

The Magnetic South series, brainchild of Vassilandonakis and his College of Charleston compositional colleague Edward Hart, is filling a gap in the city’s musical landscape, giving listeners a chance to hear modern music and players a chance to practice it.

A good thing, too, for the concert repertoire of the 20^th and 21^st centuries is vast and important. We should become better acquainted with it.