The Bow and the Brush in Review
Dan Flanagan, violin
Marc A. Scorca Hall, National Opera Center, New York, NY
October 3, 2022
Dan Flanagan is a true Renaissance man. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, while the rest of us were baking sourdough bread and watching Netflix, he was busy commissioning sixteen short works for solo violin, inspired by the paintings in his own art collection. Most of the composers, and some of the artists reside in the Bay Area near San Francisco, where Mr. Flanagan is an active freelance musician, a faculty member at UC Berkeley, and concertmaster of the Sacramento Philharmonic.
Every aspect of the production was thoroughly professional and of a high quality, yet presented in a relaxed and engaging way. Mr. Flanagan is an excellent violinist, versatile enough to serve as a blank canvas (and I mean this in the best sense) for the diverse styles of all the composers. The selected paintings were displayed clearly on a large screen. Before each composition, the violinist rendered a brief introduction, with personal notes about the visual and musical artists. Marc A. Scorca Hall is a small room, but perfect for this sort of evening, and the acoustics are superb.
Time and space do not permit me to review each of the participants, so I will mention a few highlights: The Collection, by Shinji Eshima, was inspired by a portrait of the violinist by Paul Gibson. Mr. Eshima wove a theme based on the four notes of Bach’s name into an expressive, rhapsodic piece, employing all the basics of violin technique. Raven’s Dance, to a texturally vivid painting of that creature by Nina Fabunmi, led Linda Marcel to create an aural landscape of fluttering, skittering, clawing sound, using a battery of contemporary techniques. I was surprised to learn from the extensive program notes that Oil on Canvas was the composer Michael Panther’s very first piece for solo violin. If so, this is a very impressive partner to another Gibson work called, simply, AB White. Of all the solos, I felt that this one struck the perfect balance between subjective and objective modes of interpretation. It certainly made we want to hear more of Mr. Panther’s work. Equally compelling was Émergence, a haunting evocation of Susan Bostrom-Wong’s Stepping Out. In both works, concrete ideas emerge from a hazy background in a beautifully modulated fashion.
At this point in the program, Mr. Flanagan paused to tell the story behind the next piece, Blue Swan, by Evan Price. In his recounting, to relieve his boredom during lockdown, he developed a new hobby – destroying old string instruments that were already beyond hope. The cello that appears in Sean O’Donnell’s Allegro Non Trollop was in fact, thrown off a fourth story building, and became the model for his sculpture and for Mr. Prices’s bluesy transformation of Saint-Saëns The Swan, from Carnival of the Animals.
James Stephenson, a successful orchestral musician turned composer, chose Armand Guillamin’s Cour de Ferme, Breuillet, as a departure point for an entire vignette with some dark overtones. A demonic country fiddle tune becomes frenzied as the story behind the painting unravels. Mr. Flanagan brought this to life convincingly, as he did in the following solo, Peter Josheff’s Same Old Sadness, and exquisite, shimmering evocation in the alpine regions of the violin of an untitled canvas by Peter Canty. Finally, in Couple au lit, David Mecionis explores the netherworld between waking and sleeping, in a thorny, eerily beautiful and challenging solo.
I must list all the composers and paintings on whom I could not elaborate: Victoria Veedell, Cindy Cox, Elaine Pratt, Maija Hynninen, Rachel Dwan, Nathaniel Stookey, Ludovic-Rodo Pissarro, Edmund Campion, Carrington Arredondo, Emily Onderdonk, Joaquin Turner, Nikki Vismara, Libby Larsen, Robert Antoine Pinchon, José González Granero, and last, but certainly not least, the unassuming star of the evening, Dan Flanagan. His generosity and intelligence informed the entire program, and both of his own compositions affirmed his talent and (especially in the encore) his virtuosity. This presentation is scheduled for an extensive touring season, and I wish it much success.
