Curiously pallid display of talent
One of the noteworthy undertakings of Curious Flights, the ambitious fledgling concert series created by clarinetist Brenden Guy, has been its initiative to bring littleknown contemporary English music to the attention of local audiences. That’s a goal that has worked out more effectively in the past than it did during Saturday’s lackluster program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
The evening’s ostensible focus on this occasion was Simon Dobson, a composer, conductor and trumpeter whose music — especially for brass ensemble — has drawn more attention in the United Kingdom than it has here. Yet I suspect audiences could have been given a more robust introduction to Dobson’s work.
Instead, the evening began with two blinkandyou- missed- them snippets from the composer’s notebook: “Crystal,” a tiny fanfare for eight trumpets that has the opening to Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” very much on its mind, and “A Modulation on Plymouth Sound,” a commissioned world premiere.
The latter piece combined Guy’s solo clarinet playing — a vivid burst of oratory, lightly layered with electronic processing — and taped sounds of rushing water, recorded at various locations. The two veins seemed at first to have little enough to do with one another, and the poorly adjusted balances between them meant that the water sounds kept threatening to drown out the clarinet.
But then the two strains began to intertwine in a compelling kind of counterpoint — and just as suddenly, the piece was over, having run about five minutes. The impression it left was of a capable composer dashing off something without much care or devotion.
Dobson’s abilities left a more telling impression at the end of the program, when he led the San Francisco Wind Ensemble in “Another World’s Hell.” Inspired by a scene from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” this was an attempt to replicate the musical culture of the novel’s dystopian setting, and its strains of otherworldly jazz — all gleaming anxiety and weirdly dislocated eroticism — sounded eerily plausible.
The presence of the wind ensemble prompted the inclusion of two premieres by local composers. In “The Wireless,” Noah Luna offered a tribute to old radio technology with a pasticheladen stroll through oldtime jazz, and Robert Chastain’s “Metanoia” unleashed big ensemble explosions and sinuous, scaly counterpoint.
The evening’s most successful elements came from composers whose work is already familiar. Samuel Adams’ “Tension Study No. 1,” in a slinky rendition by guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson, offered appealingly trippy textures that bent in and out of focus. “Red River,” Mason Bates’ evocative travelogue through the American Southwest, sounded especially assured in a performance by the Curious Flights Chamber Ensemble.