Music
Angels With Dirty Faces Alias Chamber Ensemble: Jeremy Williams, Zeneba Bowers, Christopher Stenstrom and Christopher Farrell
Odd as it might seem, chamber musicians can enjoy themselves while performing a work that reflects upon the human wasteland of the Vietnam War. Written in 1970, with no end to the war in sight, George Crumb’s Black Angels: Thirteen Images From a Dark Land nonetheless implies the possibility of a more peaceful world, if mostly through an extended journey into a surrealistic graveyard haunted by ceaseless strife and empty slaughter. Crumb’s “good angels” speak evocatively through the piece’s shredded tonal fabric and even more faintly through its homely array of textural effects, such as the ringing of crystal glasses and some tinkling pizzicatos. But these are fragile angels with dirty faces, warbling voices and frazzled wings.
While not calling for virtuosity in the classical sense, the techniques required to play Crumb’s composition are comparably arduous. Noises of insects and creaking doors, inverted bowing, maracas rubbing strings, ukulele-like plucking from the laps of the violinists and violist—these effects all go well beyond the call of duty for anyone trained in a relatively continuous classical repertoire of works from the 18th century to World War II. The broken aura of Black Angels certainly shatters the expectations of unity held by listeners who’ve never ventured far from a conservatory repertoire.
If Vietnam fractured a belief in military integrity and political credibility that had been placed in doubt as early as World War I, Black Angels rides the wave of 20th century art that had become more technically complex even while asserting that the center cannot hold. The members of Alias who performed this work at Turner Hall last Wednesday night—Zeneba Bowers and Jeremy Williams on violin, Christopher Farrell on viola and Chris Stenstrom on cello—enjoyed banging gongs, trilling with finger caps and uttering multilingual Fascist chants and underground whispers. Most of all, perhaps, they took pleasure in relying on their classical discipline to engage in symmetrical permutations and anti-classical modes of playing, demonstrating their own version of military precision. The timing of the various ambidextrous and uncustomary tactics was exacting.
From the very start, some atonal, high-pitched skittering and the somewhat uprooted sound of amplified strings prepare for many such disruptions of Black Angels’ elegiac and contrite tone. No doubt, the Brahms Trio that ended the concert was the counterweight that returned the audience to a sense of security. With Lee Levine on clarinet, Melissa Rose on piano and Michael Samis on cello, the sweeping symphonic gestures of this piece were delivered with a mutual gusto that could have overpowered a much larger hall: the “autumnal” Brahms work was given an unlikely second spring.