Barbara Lee, Cathy Payne & Keith Underwood
It was flutes, and lots of them, last night at Hidden Valley Seminars in Carmel Valley as Keith Underwood’s week-long residence of lessons and master classes came to an end. The final event, a “Masterclass Festival Recital,” featured music performed by flutist Underwood, pianist Barbara Lee, guest flutist Cathy Payne and some of the participants in the flute sessions. The special event of the evening was a premiere of a newly-composed work by Nathanael Pangrazio, commissioned by Hidden Valley Seminars.
Since it was a warm evening, a few flying insects made their way into the hall, thus we enjoyed a little sideshow as the performers occasionally swatted the little critters out of their line of vision. However, it mattered little, for the atmosphere of the concert was relaxed and informal. Mr. Underwood was a congenial host who had interesting comments to make about each piece heard during the concert.
For those of us who are not flutists, we learned about the special headjoints on two of the flutes played during the concert, one of them in lovely boxwood and the other in grenadilla, both created by David Chu. We were also introduced to the alto and bass flutes, which we were to hear at various times during the concert.
The program presented by Mr. Underwood began with a recently rediscovered Baroque work, a Sonata in B minor for two flutes, by Telemann, performed by Underwood and guest artist Cathy Payne. Apparently the Russian army that liberated Berlin in April 1945 not only assaulted women of all ages and looted watches by the carload, but they apparently also found time to steal a Telemann manuscript that went missing for 60 years and was only recently discovered in Kiev. Well, the flute repertoire just got a little bit larger, for the work turned out to be charming.
The next piece on the program, a sonata by Bach for flute and keyboard, BWV 1032, was also kind of a rediscovery, for there were some pages missing from the beginning of the manuscript. What we heard on this occasion was a reconstruction by Barthold Kuijken, who cleverly determined the exact number of measures in the original manuscript and then composed something to replace the missing measures based on the thematic materials in the remaining measures. It worked.
There were two pieces on the program by Katherine Hoover, the first of which was quite appropriate to the evening’s battle with flying insects, since it had a lot of buzzing chromatic passages, well, maybe not quite as frenetic as Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee,” but getting there. Actually, the middle part of this piece featured a quieter and lovely expressive section that was beautifully played by Underwood. The “Tango in C” that followed benefitted greatly from the nice solid rhythmic playing of Barbara Lee. Underwood blew us away in this piece as he played a brief and intense cadenza with the piano tacit.
There was one blatantly jazz work on the program, “Ana Maria,” a charming tribute to Wayne Shorter that was lovingly played by Underwood, and there were three “knock em dead” flute warhorses often heard on flute recitals, “the Rigoletto-Fantasie” by Franz & Karl Doppler, the “Carmen Fantasie” by Borne and the Suite by Widor. In these Underwood showed off just about every technical dazzler possible on the flute, and it was a hoot!
Nathanael Pengrazio
The most significant work on the program was the premiere of the commissioned 12-minute piece by composer Nathanael Pengrazio. The composer describes his work as follows: the two pieces, ˜Fish Glimmering in the Sun” and ˜Fish in Blue Depths” are both intended to evoke images of an aquatic landscape and its inhabitants. The solo flute represents a single fish whose journey the audience will follow, through the depths and the shallows, in peaceful stillness or in dangerous waters. The flute choir represents the entire school of fish, which our main character joins with occasionally. The independent movement of the voices when the flute choir enters is intended to represent the patterns created by a large school of fish, the way in which it moves in the same direction but contains many independent motions. The large stacked tertian chords found through the works may be thought of as the depth of the water, and the piano often provides a sparkling minimalist pattern invocative of the way light dances on the surface.
Before he became a composer, and a very eloquent one as you can see by his description of his piece, Pengrazio proved himself to be a very accomplished pianist, and it has to be said that his piano skills (and knowing how to write for piano) contributed greatly to the success of this work. The underlying textures, colors and rhythms forming the background frame of this work are determined by the keyboard part, performed here by the composer and Barbara Lee, and its subtle colors and swirls of sound created a rich lush texture against which the flute melodies and passages sounded lovely and mysterious. At one point a gorgeous, haunting extended flute solo by Underwood made a most moving and powerful impression.
One of Pengrazio’s most important strengths is the logic of his writing. Some composers toy with us, stopping and starting, and interrupting for no reason, other than for effect. Pengrazio, however projects a continuity that pulls us ever so subtly from beginning to end. The greatest compliment you can pay to a composer is the desire to hear the work again. So it was on this occasion.
End
