05/04/2006
Mike Greenberg
San Antonio Express-News Senior Critic
The Composers Alliance of San Antonio welcomed one intriguing new voice and bade farewell to another in a concert Sunday at the McNay Art Museum.
In all, six locally based composers were represented by chamber works, four of which were being heard for the first time.
For the past four years Misook Kim has been one of the brightest and most challenging lights among composers working in San Antonio. Each of her works presented thus far has impressed with its fearless modernism, its concision and its strong individual profile.
Her new Trio for Flute, Violin and Cello continues the pattern. It is essentially a conversation in which each player states a sinuous solo melody while one or both of the others play a long sustained note that suggests intent listening.
After the discussion has continued like this for a while, the solo ideas deepening or mutating along the way, the three briefly speak all at once, with wonderful contrapuntal results. The piece was very nicely played by flutist Tallon Perkes, violinist Mary Ellen Goree and cellist Marilyn de Oliveira.
A native of Korea, Kim teaches at the University of the Incarnate Word and Trinity University, but she is preparing to move to Chicago this summer. Too bad for us.
The newcomer to these concerts is Mexico City native Juan Luis de Pablo Enriquez Rohen.
His new "Orbital Mechanics" for flute, viola and guitar is modernist in vocabulary and procedure, but Spanish guitar atmospherics and hints of Latin American dance rhythms are part of the mix. It's an attractive piece, well played by the composer on guitar with Perkes and violist Allyson Dawkins.
Also newly minted was Ken Metz's "785 (Jihad)" for flute and string quartet, a deeply felt and well-made response to last summer's subway bombings in London. Its opening "Mother's Lament," a sort of lullaby with an achingly dissonant but essentially tonal halo, is especially lovely.
Metz teaches at UIW. Violinist Amy Venticinque joined Perkes and the aforementioned string players.
Charles Goodhue's new "Honanki Dances" for string quartet has a lyrical middle, reminiscent of Samuel Barber, flanked by sauntering, rhythmically active outer sections. Goodhue is a second-career composer, retired from work in the sciences.
Two works were gently used, dating from 2005 and 2004.
Trinity University composer Timothy Kramer's "Vanishing Perspectives," for electronically enhanced cello solo (de Oliveira), is a tautly disciplined, beautifully worked-out piece whose germinal idea is a falling half-step interval.
UTSA's David Heuser describes his "Small Blue Marble" (2004) for string quartet as "a travelogue for the planet." Restless, craggy music in the Bartok line alternates with gently lyrical sections to portray this humane work's imaginary circling of the globe.