Composers in Play X: Plastic Dawn in Review
Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, oboe
Adam Sherkin, piano
Tenri Cultural Institute, New York, NY
April 27, 2024
The Tenri Cultural Institute’s suitability for an ebullient Saturday night recital of living composers’ works included the benefit of bright lighting, the better for digesting fancied-up titles and a ten-page, cell-phone-only program. Canadian pianist Adam Sherkin, the curator of Piano Lunaire (a clever reference to Schoenberg and his mad mascot), named this tenth of eleven concerts for the premiere of his own composition Plastic Dawn, performed at the top of the program. Additional premieres by Mr. Sherkin and his Toronto colleagues were introduced by the composers themselves in attendance or on video projection, and a few oft-performed pieces better known to a niche crowd received their first New York hearings or revivals.
Trained at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory, London’s Royal College, and New York’s Mannes College, Mr. Sherkin shows classical restraint giving way to a philosophical propensity for eerie or even frightening images. He explains the symbolism of Plastic Dawn as a series of “manufactured beginnings” that fits nicely with the “Aubade” genre of his solo piano character pieces but leaves many tentative loose ends. Morning motifs abound in the five-movement oboe/piano work, which opens with a free solo oboe cadenza he describes as a sun salutation. The second movement adds choleric jabs and interjections from the piano, continuing its dialectical opposition until the fifth movement resolves all with glassy, transparent serenity in both oboe and piano. Mr. Sherkin’s piano work from 2022-24, New Aubades, flavors its morning coffee not with a primitive asana but with a joyful transformation of Ravel’s Scarbo, evolving from wild tremolos in two hands to short gestures and flashes, to a closing movement titled “Ineo” (literally, I go in [to something new]) in a more objective and comforting style.
At least two other offerings after 2020 share the Covid-laden premonition of apocalypse. The Tender Scars of Memory, published this year by Harry Stafylakis, unfolds nostalgically from a kind of New Age “Greensleeves” in a clearly organic form, with the composer’s characteristic texture of repeated notes influenced by guitar figures and Greek folk music. The score’s tempo directions range from “Something darker is being dredged up” to “Right back where we started,” although the idiomatic writing for both instruments needs no dramatic cues to make its mark. In the Garden of Endless Sleep, a 2020 tapestry by Kevin Lau, employs improvisational polyrhythms, expansive intervals, and recitative rather than cool 9/8 pastoral meters to capture Lau’s own longing and fear of the unknown. Repeated notes here are used as stationary vibrato, the negation of tonality mollified only by the mournful sighs of the oboe. The work’s closing punchline materializes as an A-minor song over the drone of the lowest note on the piano keyboard, with the dreariness of Shostakovich and the soothing regularity of a Bach prelude.
By default, Alexina Louie’s 2012 Filigree became a traditional repertory piece, although its Tenri performance was listed as a first in the U.S. Apart from exotic instrumental timbres, pedaling, and minimalist reiterations of broken clusters, Asian influences were not as apparent here as in some of Ms. Louie’s other works. Particularly memorable were the surreal opening, a transformation of Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige, the interplay of synthetic scales and fantastic dance rhythms, and the tribute to Messiaen’s Vingt regards in the piano’s magical treble sonorities near the end. A silly encore, Alex Shapiro’s Brat, left us with a touch of humor after the evening’s probing excursions into metaphysics.
At face value as an oboe/piano recital of new music, this successful concert received a rightfully deserved, heartfelt response from Tenri fans, who listened acutely to the latest installment of Mr. Sherkin’s cryptic programming. The playing was elegant and effective, taking advantage of the gallery’s immediate acoustic presence and luminous space with varied articulations, melismatic flourishes (Ms. Broms-Jacobs), growling chromaticism and pointillistic chimes (Mr. Sherkin), and visceral harmonic progressions that always moved forward and never settled into cinematic cliché. Ms. Broms-Jacobs showed her true colors as a principal orchestral player from Manitoba and Winnipeg by delivering a rhythmically crafted, supremely reliable part that was easy to follow and lyrical against the backdrop of every pianistic trick. Overbalancing of piano (conquering oboe) was, actually, an issue, perhaps attributable to where the oboist was standing or to the hall itself, or to the long piano stick.
The concert might have been equally enjoyable with a shorter set of written notes and a press release which could have used better editing. The advertised “Pre-show chat” from 7:30 to 8:00 unfortunately referred only to the murmur of attendees in the foyer. What is “mediative” about In the Garden of Endless Sleep, and what is a Piano Lunaire omission? Is the Columbian-American poet Águeda Pizarro, published by Columbia University Press, a native of Colombia? What would be the expectation of meeting Mr. Stafylakis, a composer who would “be in attendance to discuss his worm”? Composers’ years of birth, normally given with their names, were discoverable through hyperlinks, and their uncaptioned photos available on additional web sites. The external enigma of the evening was Tenri’s presumed need to fill our ears with background jazz recordings while wine and snacks were served.
