Subversive Sounds

J. Edgar Hoover probably popped a girdle button when he heard about this trip: in 1949, the noted African-American singer Paul Robeson traveled to the Soviet Union, where he performed and met with cultural apparatchiks. The famed FBI director already considered Robeson a subversive, but when he learned that Robeson had called himself a “firm deep friend of the Soviet people” and had performed—in Russian—the “People’s Battle Song,” Hoover likely had a hissy fit.

Both Hoover and Robeson have long fascinated composer Michael Daugherty, so when he discovered a rare recording of Robeson’s 1949 concert in Moscow, he created Paul Robeson Told Me for string quartet and tape. Members of the Alias chamber ensemble performed the piece last week at the Blair School of Music.

Lasting all of 10 minutes, Daugherty’s two-movement quartet opens with an amplified recording of Robeson speaking in Russian and singing the “People’s Battle Song.” A quartet of string players soon enters with a jagged, gypsy-like melody. Fragments of that tune are then developed and subjected to every conceivable combination and permutation.

In his perceptive program notes, Daugherty writes, “The insurgency of Robeson’s voice—its powerful energy—interests me, and I want to explore its timbral possibilities as well as its political implications and ambiguities within American culture.”

Politics and insurgency are common themes in Daugherty’s chamber music. Hoover was the inspiration for his first quartet (Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover) while the king of rock ‘n’ roll—whose every move was scrupulously detailed in the FBI director’s fat files—was the genesis for the second (Elvis Everywhere).

Daugherty no doubt felt Robeson was a logical next subject, and indeed his quartet successfully explores the singer’s ambiguous place in American culture. Robeson may have been an American icon, but in this piece we only hear him singing in Russian (and saying great things about the Evil Empire, no less). Likewise, the great singer may be justly honored today as a civil rights pioneer, but he was also a willing recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Daugherty uses these contradictions to play with our emotions, and it’s both fascinating and unsettling.

Yet the composer is less successful with his sonic experiments. Classical composers always have a hard time blending acoustic instruments with electronics. In Paul Robeson Told Me, the taped segments often seem like gratuitous white noise—in fact, the tape stops playing after the first movement, and you never miss it. (Balancing the dynamic level between tape and acoustic instruments is also tricky, and Alias had the volume on its speakers set too high.)

Fortunately, there were no deficiencies in the acoustic performance. The players—violinists Zeneba Bowers and Jeremy Williams, violist Christopher Farrell and cellist Christopher Stenstrom—played with energy and precision throughout the reading, maintaining a taut ensemble even in the most rhythmically spiky passages.

Alias specializes in contemporary music, and for its final concert of the season it played one other recent work, American composer Kevin Puts’ And Legions Will Rise for clarinet, violin and marimba. What’s the main challenge of this piece? “We have to play exactly not together,” says marimba player Christopher Norton.

Actually, this piece requires even more precision than Daugherty’s. Puts often has the musicians play the same melody, only he arranges the notes so they never match up. For instance, the marimba player will begin a tune of blistering sixteenth notes, and the violinist will take up the same melody exactly two notes later. On a difficulty scale of one to 10, that’s an 11. But to their credit, Norton, Bowers and clarinetist Lee Levine gave a rendition that was both note-perfect and brilliantly atmospheric.

Musicians are often tempted to perform J.S. Bach’s sacred cantatas with an overblown cathedral grandeur, so Alias’ intimate chamber arrangement of the Cantata, BWV 199, “Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut” came as a welcome change. Soprano Barbi McCulloch, the lone vocal soloist, sang with a remarkably plummy voice and with deep feeling. Her able accompanists, a sextet of Alias musicians, proved both sensitive and unflappable—even a cell phone playing the exposition of Mozart’s Sonata in C major, K. 545 failed to faze them.

Alias closed its concert with Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet. This piece is a real Romantic charmer, and a quintet of Alias musicians—violinists Williams and Sylvia Samis, violist Kathryn Plummer, cellist Michael Samis and pianist Leah Bowes—played the piece with just the right amount of heart-on-their-sleeves emotion.