Legato Arts presents Music of Dana Dimitri Richardson
Simon Mulligan and Craig Ketter, piano; Jacqueline Milena Thompson, soprano; Frank Picarazzi, vibraphone; Karen Lindquist, harp; Sunghae A. Lim, violin; Luih-Wen Ting, viola; Greg Hesselink, cello
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall; New York, NY
Sunday, September 25, 2016
A nearly-full hall greeted the Legato Arts presentation of the music of Dana Richardson, on a sun-filled, cool, early autumn afternoon. These enthusiastic souls were treated to an afternoon of his music, what he called a “summation” of his life’s work. He has created for many sonorous combinations: piano solo, violin and piano, vibraphone and other instruments, voice, and more traditional chamber groupings, always with a very fine ear for sonority. He has even created a syntonal rock-music album.
The ear for sonority serves him well, for his main preoccupation, since his early college years, has been as advocate for, defender of, and user of, a compositional system he calls syntonality (or biscalarity, they are not-quite synonymous). In syntonality, two different scale systems, separated by a tritone or a half-step, are fused together to create one seamless melodic/harmonic super-canvas. It is not the same as bitonality (think Milhaud). “The registral fusion of the two constituent key-streams creates a new and beautiful surface on which neither key is perceptible.” All this can be read in a lengthy thesis posted on the Web (http://dana-richardson.org/syntonality8.pdf )but really, none of this would matter if the music was either not high-quality, or didn’t communicate emotion successfully to its audience. Luckily, I can report that Mr. Richardson’s does satisfy on the latter two points.
In fact, I attended this concert, after my preparation, which involved reading the theory behind syntonality and listening to an example on YouTube, with one impression of what to expect, but I found to my grateful delight, that the actual sounds made were much nicer than all the theorizing would lead one to believe. Added to this, Mr. Richardson found a handful of excellent chamber players to perform his works, each one of them playing in the finest, most committed and persuasive style.
The afternoon began with Mr. Richardson’s Invocations for solo piano, played brilliantly by Simon Mulligan. They were prompted by the death of Mr. Richardson’s mother four years ago, and are based on four of Franz Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, adding syntonality to Liszt’s characteristic textures. Three of the four I thought were splendid re-imaginings, only the Bénédiction dans la solitude for me missed the mark a little, sounding more like pastiche than something transfigured. (And why did he leave “Dieu” out of the title?)
Next was the Theme and Variations for violin and piano, given a beautiful reading by Sunghae A. Lim and Craig Ketter. Mr. Ketter highlighted some wonderful counterpoint with his characteristic warmth and clarity.
Prior to intermission the Mysterium for the unusual combination of vibraphone, cello, and harp was performed, again with complete mastery of sonority and gesture. The vibraphone definitely imparts an otherworldly touch to the ensemble, but the piece itself raised a doubt that began to nag at me for the rest of the afternoon: Is syntonality in some way “limited”? Variety was lacking in many of the themes and gestures. I can imagine that it makes the composer have a much harder time finding a “sense of ending” or “inevitability” without ramping up the sensitivity to texture, speed, and volume, to compensate for the harmonic “blur” that often results.
For all Mr. Richardson’s intent to revitalize the language of classical music, and despite the extremely warm reception he was given, I have to say that much of the music sounded like early Alban Berg, or other late-Romantics, with a sort of “film” over it. Why doesn’t Mr. Richardson just call himself what I gathered he is from this concert—a good, sincere neo-Romantic?
Three Preludes for Sophia opened the second half, with Mr. Ketter again performing beautifully. Mr. Richardson’s program notes state that the outer two use textures from Chopin Preludes (again, like the Liszt), with syntonality added to them. These truly were pastiche, down to the octave leap that opens Chopin’s Op. 28, No. 4. The third piece was based on the middle section of Op. 28, No. 15 (the obsessive repeated G-sharp), with whiffs of the Second Scherzo and even the Etude Op. 10, No. 11. With all due respect, I felt he had “painted moustaches on the Mona Lisa” here. There wasn’t enough originality, and Chopin said it so much better, and briefer. Mr. Ketter’s pedal foot was extremely noisy during the rapid middle piece.
An ambitious group of songs followed, based on excerpts from William Blake’s Songs of Experience. Soprano Jacqueline Milena Thompson has a lovely sound, but ninety percent of her diction was lost, and I was only in the seventh row. The ten percent that was clear was when the music turned somewhat parlando, then it was perfectly clear, but when she started to “be a Singer” again, it was mushy. (Texts were provided, however.) Also, uncharacteristically, Mr. Ketter wildly overbalanced her in the climactic The Tyger, where her voice simply didn’t have enough fury or power to match his. (And his pedal foot again was annoyingly loud in the penultimate song.)
The program ended with Mr. Richardson’s Piano Quartet No. 2, conceived beautifully for the combination of instruments and played with great unanimity, though the cellist was apparently a substitution (perhaps not “last-minute”). The best movement of the three was the middle one: Theme and Variations, where the variety of textures was pleasing and the music sounded most transparent and original. Otherwise, the limitations that I alluded to earlier caused a feeling of meandering, and there were sextuplets traded among the instruments that sounded like demented Hanon exercises. Other sections sounded like good old-fashioned bitonality. The piece is cyclic, material from the beginning returns at the end, a time-honored practice used by many (think Franck). Richardson’s music is most successful when he is conjuring rapt moods of mystic contemplation or elegiac meditation—when he tries to get rambunctious, the textures often grow confused, hectic, and turgid.
Mr. Richardson’s many allusions to the past anchor him firmly in music history, despite (or alongside) his desire to innovate. I do hope that this “summation” will not be the last that is heard from him, for his emotional and musical sincerity is a rare quality in our age, or any age.
