Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 10, 1994 TAG: 9405100056
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-6 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: When it's a "preview performance," that's when.
That distinction may have been lost on Sunday's chamber music audience in Tech's Squires Student Center. All they knew was that they were the first to hear Victoria Bond's "Dreams of Flying," which was performed by the Audubon Quartet. Bond's piece was the most substantial work in a special Mother's Day concert of works by women composers.
The concert was novel for more than just a premiere. When a big crowd did not materialize for the performance, the performers decided to switch rooms at intermission, which witnessed about 150 concertgoers trekking from the Colonial Ballroom to the better acoustic space in the Squires Recital Salon.
This concert was pretty much a vehicle for Tech's phenomenal professor of flute, David Jacobsen. Jacobsen was featured prominently in three of the four pieces, and his technique and tone were the talk of the crowd.
How to describe David Jacobsen's tone? It's so big and fat that it's almost tangible. Lush, ample, gravid, and with just the right seasoning of vibrato, it seems to hang in the air, heavy and golden. You've heard of speaking voices so good that they'd make even reading the phone book sound good? Jacobsen's tone is so beautiful that he could make even listening to practice scales a sensuous experience.
The concert began with Marlaena Kessick's "Scene di Campagna," or "Country Scenes," which dates from 1976. Written for flute with piano accompaniment, the ten short tone pictures are written in a mostly conventional harmonic idiom. There is nothing more pastoral than a flute in the Italian countryside, and the titles, such as "The Wounded Bird," "Haunted House," "Butterfly in the Sun," etc., pretty much say it all. With accompaniment by pianist Mary Louise Hallauer, Jacobsen made the most of this modest set.
More interesting was Katherine Hoover's "Reflections: Variations on a Medieval Norwegian Chant" for solo flute. After stating the haunting theme, Jacobsen rang Hoover's changes on it, some of them technically demanding.
The first post-intermission work, in the Recital Salon's almost supernaturally good acoustics, was Amy Beach's "Theme and Variations," Op. 80, for string quartet and flute.
This little-known work featured a sinuous, oriental- sounding theme on the flute which was then run through a number of variations, the most interesting of which was a fugue. Though at moments it came perilously close to sounding like high-class salon music, it was a pleasant example of Beach's late-Romantic language.
The most substantial work on the program was "Dreams of Flying" by Victoria Bond, the music director and conductor of the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra. Written especially for the Audubon Quartet, the three-movement piece joins a number of significant works written for or commissioned by the Audubons.
The flying motif, explained Bond in the notes, came about by association from the Audubon Quartet's namesake, the ornithologist John James Audubon. The first, slow movement was titled "Levitation." The second moderately paced movement was titled "The Caged Bird Dreams of the Jungle," and the final fast movement was titled "Flight."
"Levitation" featured long tones on individual instruments rising by major or minor seconds, with the quartet as a whole rising up through the scale, and repeated crescendi which vanished to leave a single instrument continuing the long-breathed phrases. Toward the end of the movement the quartet played with mutes, uttering glassy-sounding straight tones bowed near the bridge. Once cued with Bond's notion of levitation, the effect of rising off the ground was easy to discern.
The middle movement was the bird house in the zoo, with Bond's humor evident in bird-like whoops from both violinists which were accompanied by rhythmically difficult syncopated passages on the cello. In the midst of this avian dream, first violinist Ehrlich would occasionally launch into a "flying" melody which would then migrate to violist Doris Lederer.
The final movement, "Flying," was a fast romp through midair, also accompanied by the occasional bird-like whoops from the violins, which came to an exuberant finish.
The Audubons took two curtain calls before they were joined by Victoria Bond, after which their presence was demanded onstage two or three more times by the crowd.
Seth Williamson produces news features and a weekday afternoon classical music program on public radio station WVTF (89.1 FM) in Roanoke.
by CNB