Pasa Reviews Serenata of Santa Fe and Lobby Hero at Adobe Rose Theatre
Serenata of Santa Fe, First Presbyterian Church, Sept. 11 Lobby Hero, Adobe Rose Theatre, Sept. 9
Some 50 intrepid souls braved Fiesta road closings on the afternoon of Sept. 11 and made their way to First Presbyterian Church for the season-opening concert of Serenata of Santa Fe. They were rewarded with an elegantly conceived program well performed. The concert was designed with its date in mind. Though none of the pieces explicitly involved the attacks of 2001, most of them had a memorial cast that supported the event’s title, Shades of Gray.
Serenata’s core musicians eke out their ranks as needed to address specific chamber repertoire. The players — individually and as a group — have sometimes projected tentativeness in their playing, but on this occasion they all performed with admirable security and adhered to high musical standards. Participating in this concert were violinist David Felberg, violist Shanti Randall, cellist Sally Guenther, and pianist Yi-heng Yang.
The works fell into pairs. First up was Mahler’s Piano Quartet, or rather what would have been the first movement of the multi-movement piece he apparently intended when he wrote it in about 1876, while he was a student at the Vienna Conservatory. I can’t agree with the program note’s assertion that he played in its premiere on Sept. 12 of that year. There is no evidence that it was ever performed during Mahler’s lifetime. In fact, its first documented performance did not come until 1964, and the pianist on that occasion was Peter Serkin, who recently paid a visit here through the graces of Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Anyway, this febrile work would count as an accomplished achievement for any composer, let alone one who was sixteen years old. You would never guess it was by Mahler, adhering as it does to a mainstream German style that recalls Humperdinck. Mahler did continue with about 30 measures of a minor-key scherzo, but then he seems to have abandoned the piece. Those minor-mode measures, however, served as inspiration for the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke. In 1988, he developed them into his own single-movement Piano Quartet, which grows in its dense harmonies and parallel dissonances into something haunting and, at places, terrifying.
In his scherzo fragment, Mahler kept the viola busy with an undulating motif that recalls the accompaniment to Schubert’s famous song “Gretchen am Spinnrade.” This served as a conceptual bridge to the concert’s other composer-subject: Franz Schubert. Felberg and Yang offered a skillful, good-humored reading of his D-major Sonatina, a pleasant work from 1816. This paired with John Harbison’s November 19, 1828 — Hallucination in Four Episodes, the title referring to the date of Schubert’s death at the age of 31. Harbison is a fine composer, but cheerfulness is not part of his arsenal. That made him well suited for the serious task of this piece. Like Schnittke, Harbison grapples with unfinished work — in this case, a rondo theme Schubert sketched and then abandoned and also a fugue he had been planning to develop when he died. Yang offered impressive fugue-playing at the keyboard before ceding that movement to her string-playing colleagues, who helped lead the work to its enigmatic ending.
Another pair of works for piano quartet did not adhere to the central idea of completing uncompleted works. Both were short, and neither was of much consequence: Pavel Karmanov’s Cambridge Music (post-minimalist nattering with little payback, from 2008) and Judith Weir’s Arise! (a sweet, folkish piece from 1999). Surely their place would have been more profitably occupied by Schubert’s Adagio and Rondo concertante, his only piece for piano quartet, contemporary to his D-major Sonatina. Nonetheless, the playlist was well enough centered, and all the pieces were adeptly performed.
Pairs also motivate the play Lobby Hero by Kenneth Lonergan, which is running at Adobe Rose Theatre through Sept. 25. In this thought-provoking play, first produced in 2001, one pair of characters consists of an apartment security guard and his supervisor, the other of a rookie policewoman and her more experienced partner. All of them strike uncomfortable stances when balancing ethics with self-interest. The police contingent fared best, particularly Merritt Glover as the rookie, who showed more breadth than her colleagues. Vaughn M. Irving, as her partner, upheld his part sturdily. The haphazard direction by Staci Robbins and the rest of the acting were at the level of community theater, which is not up to the standard we have grown to expect of Adobe Rose. Lonergan’s script specifies that the security supervisor be portrayed by a black actor, which it was not in this production. Apart from doing a little something to rectify casting imbalances, it would likely add a layer of intricacy to the character’s relationship with the police. The company’s lukewarm success, combined with its apparent inability to cast as required, left one feeling that this was not the right play for Adobe Rose to attempt just now. — James M. Keller