Concerto Bewails Losing Earth
The new percussion concerto “Losing Earth” lays out before our ears our bigger-than-life environmental predicaments here and now. Composer Adam Schoenberg, 38, spotlighted the diversity of percussion textures—gentle, ferocious, ear-tingling—far beyond the rambunctious noises mostly relegated to the outer fringes at symphony concerts. His world premiere at the San Francisco Symphony was created with the collaboration of concerto soloist Jacob Nissly, who is not only an old friend but also a year-round principal with the ensemble.
If the instant standing ovation and unbridled audience cheering (bolstered by many music students invited for the occasion) were any indication Oct. 18, the opus was already off to a wild success story.
With added percussionists scattered around Davies Hall’s upper reaches, you felt that the spirit of the late master of spatial composition Henry Brant was back among us. Underlining the three-dimensionality was Nissly himself bounding down an aisle hauling a marching band’s portable multi-drum set with what appeared to be a wake-up call to a broader humanity. Conductor Cristian Macelaru managed a tight coordination between the widely scattered elements of his ensemble, right from the scattered crashing booms portraying the chaos of early Earth and early man’s drumming music. From that start Schoenberg takes us through diverse sounds and episodes into the future to an ultra-mellow, poetic slow movement describing rising oceans flooding the land.
In the space of 25 minutes, he manages to cram in countless aural images ranging from marches to syncopation to horrified brass. The mobile Nissly excites Balinese temple drums, vibraphone, and above all xylophone played at blinding speed as his cadenza, careful to include syncopation in a jazz-improv mode. It winds up with an immense rafter-shaking crescendo as finale, perhaps suggesting a happier environmental ending than most experts are predicting nowadays. Never ones to throw caution to the winds, several of the front-row violinists wore ear plugs, as it’s hard to underestimate the impact of a full percussion fortissimo downstage.
Composer Schoenberg, an Easterner currently a professor in Southern California, annotated his opus effectively and returned afterward to take bows and dispense accolades to musicians. And no, he’s not related to composer Arnold Schoenberg of a century ago.
Also on the program, and considerably overshadowed, was a delicate six-minute opus by the ill-fated Frenchwoman Lili Boulanger who died a century ago at age 24, “Of a Spring Morning.” The intimate tone poem ranging from serenity to playfulness would have impressed much more had it not sounded precisely like some unknown work of Debussy.
The delicacy of the work was effectively brought forth by the players under the new Romanian guest conductor Cristian Macelaru, highly respected for his multiple premieres every summer at the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz.
S.F. Symphony, world premiere of Adam Schoenberg’s “Losing Earth.” Also Boulanger, and Mussorgsky-Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Davies Hall, S.F., Oct. 17-19. For SFS info: (415) 864-6000, or www.sfsymphony.org .
