Arts festival program spotlights new composers

By Paul Sayegh
Correspondent

New-music concerts are a rarity in these parts, where even the occasional premiere of a new musical work is an event of note. Sunday afternoon, the Virginia Arts Festival presented the culmination of this year's John Duffy Composers Institute.

Titled "From Pen to Page to Stage," the program focused on music-theater works by a variety of emerging composers.

The idea of the institute is simple: bring together gifted composers, pair them with experienced masters, let the creative juices flow and enjoy the results.

Listening to new music is also a challenge - sometimes a listener's institute might also seem like a good idea.

When one thinks of how long it took the musical world to take in Mahler, or how even now some audiences still struggle with Bartok and Schonberg, the world of the new composer is filled with resistance.

First on the program Sunday was Anthony Suter's one-act opera "The Most Fortunate Son." A humorous extract depicted a blue-blood couple agonizing over their son's college application to an elite (read: Yale) school, repeating the word "average" over and over. Suter showed an understanding of how musical forms can reflect comedy, and the satire of the scene was made more evident when the boy's last name was revealed to be Bush.

James Woodward's musical "Lady Godiva" was experienced via two scenes. The first was "Coming Home," a lyrical but somewhat generic song for the young heroine. It showed a fluent composer at work, one who made considerably more of the jazzy, swaggering "Forbidden Love."

Jorge Muniz's "Germinal" is a three-act opera presumably based on the novel by Emile Zola. Two scenes revealed the most experienced operatic voice in the program, as Muniz showed the ability to quickly set a scene and a dramatic mood. This was particularly so in the tavern scene, where a quintet of characters expressed mostly unhappy feelings. The two excerpts were given in Spanish, which hampered listeners' ability to experience the words with the immediacy of the rest of program.

Another musical was a retelling of Adam and Eve, "The Eden Diaries," by Kyle Gullings. A clever duet for two women showed Eve speaking with her reflection while "Temptation" was a sly depiction of the moment Eve gives into the Serpent's enticements..

A different experience was provided by Rich Moriarty's dramatic cantata "Young Fellow My Lad." Based on a 1916 poem, this was perhaps the least complex music on the program, yet it also emerged as the most successful blending of words and music. Moriarty's tonal setting powerfully expressed a father's emotions as he waits for his son's letter from the front.

"Two Scenes," from an unfinished opera by George Lam, were effective in their conversational style, but there seemed to be less song in the vocal parts and more drama in the accompaniment.

Gustavo Leone's "The Leader" ended the program. Based on an Ionesco play, it, too, kept emotion reined in, with the voices in a tight range, as befitting the absurdist text.

The afternoon was a triumph for the excellent vocalists: sopranos Signe Mortensen and Tara Davison, mezzo-soprano Julia Tobiska, tenor Sean T. Miller, and baritones Kenneth Weber and Larry J. Giddens Jr. Accompanying them were two highly proficient and hard-working pianists, Amanda Halstead and Bart Kuebler.