Women composers, Bartók, Dvorák among Alias ensemble's winter sampler
by Russell Johnston
"An Alias concert is like a tapas dinner," says Zeneba Bowers, the chamber ensemble's artistic director. "There is a little something for everyone." The menu for Alias' Thursday night concert at Blair School of Music will cater to diverse palates, with musical delicacies ranging from sweet to spicy to bitter. We'll extend the metaphor no further, however tempted we are to pair the night's offerings with avocado.
Besides featuring mainstream repertoire by Dvoák and Bartók, the program continues the Alias ensemble's "Emerging Voices" series, which highlights the wide variety of music by women composers past and present. Bowers conceived the two-season series while reading a general history of women in the Medieval and Renaissance eras. She notes that a significant number of female composers worked in those periods, and she hopes to "bring attention to the fact that women have been composing since the beginning of Western music!"
Such a notion is characteristic of Alias' mission, motivated by both social awareness and a desire to bring the full diversity of chamber music to new audiences. This two-pronged mission is driven by the musicians themselves, who suggest both musical repertoire and charities to receive all the group's concert proceeds. The group has raised more than $16,000 for organizations including the East Nashville Center for the Creative Arts, Dismas House and the Martha O'Brian Center. Thursday's concert will benefit Tennessee Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, which provides legal services and education to low-income artists in the Nashville area.
The musicians—like the staff and board members—donate their services. Most have paying jobs at the Nashville Symphony. New music is high on their agenda: In just seven seasons, the group has presented eight world premieres and numerous other works new to Nashville audiences.
Like the previous concert in the "Emerging Voices" series, Thursday's concert features a living woman composer and a historical one. First up, violinist Alison Gooding and pianist Melissa Rose perform music of Lili Boulanger dating from the very end of the composer's regrettably short life. She was born into a musical family, and her older sister Nadia—who later became probably the best-known composition teacher of the 20th century—fostered Lili's early compositional efforts. The younger sister soon surpassed the older, and at just 19 years old she became the first woman composer awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome.
Her D'un matin de printemps is a buoyant, lyrical work reflecting traces of Debussy's lush harmonic vocabulary. Trio and orchestral versions also exist from Boulanger's hand, and the orchestral version has a companion piece called D'un soir triste: These two were likely her last completed works before she died of Crohn's disease in 1918, at age 24.
Californian composer Gabriela Lena Frank is the other "Emerging Voice" on Thursday's program. If Frank is known as something of a multiculturalist, she comes by it honestly, being of Peruvian-Chinese-Jewish-Lithuanian descent. She has traveled widely in South America, making recordings of Andean folkloric music at the source and working to incorporate elements of what she hears into much of her concert music. Frank has written commissioned works for Carnegie Hall and for Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, and Alias has performed her music in past concerts.
Frank's early piece Manhattan Serenades, to be played by cellist Matt Walker, draws on impressions not of South America, but of the composer's time in New York. The jazz-influenced work calls for improvisation in some sections.
Music by Béla Bartók and Antonín Dvoák (shall we call them "Established Voices"?) rounds out the feast. These men may be enshrined in the Western Canon, but each shared Frank's multicultural bent in his own way, working to bring folk traditions into a concert music identity.
Bartók was a pioneer of what is now called ethnomusicology. He made field recordings of Hungarian folk music as early as 1906, and the tunes he collected became a central source for his own compositional work. Bartók's intricate and spirited Fourth String Quartet is an absolute masterpiece of high modernism—and if you're interested in the pervasive folk influence, an especially obvious instance occurs in the innovative Allegro pizzicato movement, where the plucked strings suggest strummed peasant instruments throughout.
Though hardly an ethnomusicologist, Dvoák also often turned to folk melodies of his native Bohemia for inspiration. His String Quintet in G Major dates from 1875, just when the composer was first gaining some international attention. Originally composed under the title "My People" for a Prague competition (which it won handily), the piece shows off Dvoák's penchant for folk-influenced tunes. Deployment of a double bass, unusual in a chamber music context, creates a full, rich texture. Dvoák removed one of the two original slow movements when he published the Quintet in 1888, but the lovely Poco andante that remains would by itself be worth the price of admission.
Speaking of which, that price is a modest $12, $5 for students—which in itself symbolizes Alias' mission to make classical music as accessible, affordable and enticing as, well, tapas. Alias brings music to area schools and community organizations as well as to more traditional venues. They have an ongoing educational partnership with Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet School, and their audiences range from students at W.O. Smith Community Music School to residents of substance abuse treatment facilities. So if the selections in tonight's concert are Zeneba Bowers' idea of a sampler tray, we can't wait to see the entrées.
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
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