Review: "Brightmusic concludes season with delightful St. Paul’s performance"
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 by Libby Price, The City Sentinel
Brightmusic’s final concert of the 2009-2010 season April 20 at St. Paul’s Cathedral was further proof that this is one of the most forward-looking of any local musical organization. It repeated the concert given the night before at Casady School.
One of the reasons for its excellence is that all the musicians are local (or in the case of co-directors Chad Burrow and Amy I-Lin Cheng, former Oklahoma City University faculty now based at the University of Michigan).
With Parthena Owens on flute and Lisa Harvey-Reed on oboe (both OKC Philharmonic first chairs), Burrow added his clarinet and Cheng her piano expertise to the opening number, “Caprice on Danish and Russian Airs” by Camille Saint-Saens, one example of the seldom-heard music Brightmusic schedules.
The four musicians made up almost a choral quartet of varying “voices,” flutist Owens the high soprano, Harvey-Reed the alto, Burrow the tenor and Cheng the percussive bass of the quartet. All had solos, played to perfection, but at the end merged into a flip and a flourish of sound.
Then came a real “Flourish: A Concertino in Moto Perpetuo for Clarinet and Piano” by Kris Maloy actually a world premiere at the two concerts or this work by a former student of Burrow and Cheng. To achieve this perpetual motion of the clarinet, Burrow stood behind four music stands with the music arrayed before him. His performance showed his delight in such an arrangement.
Another friend of the group, Xander, had brought on the music stands and stayed to turn pages for Ms. Cheng as she contributed to piano motion.
William Nield Christensen returned with the group to sing Four Art Songs by Lee Hoiby, starting with the brilliant “Jabberwocky” from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” starting with “Twas brillig and the slithy toves” and recounts the killing of the Jabberwock and a father’s praise, “O frabjous day! Callooh Callay” he chortled in his joy.
Since this offbeat poem was the only one I willingly memorized as a child, I followed it phrase by phrase and would have liked to applaud this one song. However, along with the rest of the audience that filled St. Paul’s, I waited through John Fandel’s “In the Wand of the Wind,” and two tender poems, “What If” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and “Be not afeard” from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and then responded with applause.
Christensen’s fine tenor voice was accompanied by wide gestures appropriate to each poem that Hoiby set to music.
Mendelssohn’s “Concert Piece for Clarinet, Bassoon and Piano, No. 2 in d minor, Op.114” called Burrow and Cheng back to show off his liquid clarinet and her piano base, with Carl Rath, bassoon artist with the Philharmonic, adding his instrument’s fine flair.
Following intermission, a wind quintet returned to 17th Century style with Ferenc Farkas’s” Antique Dances” one of them a Lassu (or slow dance), another “Lapockas” or shoulder blade dance and finally “Ungros” a leaping dance.
Finally the entire company played Francis Poulenc’s “ Sextet for Piano and Wind Instruments” - with Kate Pritchett adding the horn role, as she had in the Farkas work.
Its three exciting movements showed off all hands and Poulenc’s excursion into 20th century music, even sounding somewhat Gershwin-like in harmonies and rhythm.
Before the concert president John Williams announced that Brightmusic had been chosen by the board of Civic Music Association to receive half the annual proceeds from it $200,000 endowment with the Oklahoma City Community Foundation along with Oklahoma City University.
Following the death of Mae Ruth Swanson, CMA’s executive director and the spark of its operations, Civic Music is giving up its concert season next year.
