Folk tunes at core of new cello concerto
In the wonderfully evocative central movement of his new cello concerto “Tangle Eye,” composer Dan Visconti has the soloist fluttering lightly across the fingerboard, creating a light, shimmery web of sound. Then the orchestra joins in, with the basses in particular sliding up and down the strings, and the hall fills with a musical texture that is both elusive and rich.
This is a powerful passage in its own right, and it becomes even more so in light of Visconti’s extramusical inspiration. The movement is a gloss on the old American folksong “Shenandoah,” and it’s not a stretch to take the music as a sepia-toned, slightly sentimentalized image of the river itself, with mists rising off the water in a swirl of tenderness and longing.
“Tangle Eye,” which had its world premiere at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek on Sunday, May 7, marks the conclusion of Visconti’s three-year stint as the Young American Composerin-Residence with the California Symphony. The performance, by the orchestra, Music Director Donato Cabrera and soloist Inbal Segev, revealed a work full of ideas, worked out to varying degrees of depth and specificity.
Perhaps another way to phrase this would be to say that the composer and I respectfully disagree about the relative urgency of some of those ideas. “Tangle Eye,” which is in three movements
that run altogether about 25 minutes, takes its inspiration from the American folk music tradition, as documented by the great folklorist Alan Lomax and others.
The love ballad “Black Is the Color” forms the basis of the first movement, and a Delta blues number called “Tangle Eye Blues” provides the material for the finale (as well as the work’s title). For the most part, these source references don’t provide actual musical substance for Visconti’s creation so much as mood, timbre and spirit.
In practice, that means that the proportions of the various movements are oddly out of kilter. The first movement takes up nearly all the space, pursuing a large number of melodic and dramatic strategies in ways that don’t always cohere.
Conversely, the finale proposes some of the concerto’s most creative inventions — in particular, the use of the cello as a twangy, pizzicato-driven standin for the blues guitar — and then vanishes in a puff of smoke before any of them register fully. There’s a lot of musical bounty left on the table here.
The heart of the concerto is that lovely middle movement, with its purehearted simplicity and its Goldilocks-like balancing of depth and form. Segev’s playing, brisk and expert throughout, was at its most eloquent here, and her encore — the Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3 — was a welcome addition to the program.
Cabrera and the orchestra showed once again the unanimity and dramatic cogency that they’re capable of in works of the standard repertoire. The concert opened with a taut, assertive account of Beethoven’s “Coriolan” Overture, marked by rhythmic drive and a keen ear for the composer’s protean dramaturgy.
Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony, which occupied the second half, got to a thrillingly fine beginning, making me all the more unhappy to have to miss the tail end of the performance because of a scheduling conflict as the concert ran long. Cabrera got big, buoyant playing from his forces in the opening movement, and the expansive slow movement — with its stately urgency and upholstered string playing — has rarely sounded so affecting.
The finale proposes some of the concerto’s most creative inventions — in particular, the use of the cello as a stand-in for the blues guitar.