ReviewProfessors combine for engaging show Performers: Karen Bentley Pollick, Craig Hultgren, Adam Bowles, Donald Ashworth, Alexander Volobuev, Lori Ardovino, Patricia Pilon, Laurie Middaugh, Jennifer Cowgill and Kathryn Fouse Charles Norman Mason's whimsical invention met Ed Robertson's sophisticated craftsmanship Thursday night at Brock Recital Hall. Mason, a Birmingham-Southern College professor and 2005 Rome Prize winner, teeters between the avant garde and post-modernism. His music is at once challenging and engaging and, judging from the consistently high performances by BAMA musicians, exciting to perform. "Three Legged Race" served as a fanciful overture -- a short but sweet trio with thorny rhythms that was handled deftly by violinist Karen Bentley Pollick, cellist Craig Hultgren and pianist Adam Bowles. "Blazing Macaw" is also a trio, of sorts. A piano, played by Bowles, is accompanied by two speakers spewing out cascading electronic arpeggios and lyrical gestures that match and extend the piano's expressive range. Perhaps most telling of Mason's work is his string quartet, "Oh What a Beautiful City." Premiered by the Miami String Quartet in front of the Birmingham City Council last February, the quartet, formerly titled "Prelude to Parlay: Mood Music for the City Council," has a new name and was given a shot of adrenaline. Pollick, Alexander Volobuev, Michael Fernandez and Hultgren turned in a sparkling performance, easily trumping the first reading. The work's rhythmic intricacies, Appalachian-tinged folksiness and high energy were vividly realized. Robertson, who retired from the University of Montevallo faculty two years ago, was the 2004 Carnegie Foundation Alabama Professor of the Year. "Chronos," for flute and piano, explores subtle hues through pitch bends and gently rocking rhythms. "Music for Cello and Piano" creates crafty dialogues in alternately meditative and dramatic movements. The composer's best work came in "Three Poems about War," powerful settings of poems by A.E. Housman, Edith Sitwell and Siegfried Sassoon that weep and scream for an end to violence. Although soprano Jennifer Cowgill's uneven reading didn't do justice to the first two settings, the final poem, "Attack" was chillingly rendered in speech-song to shouts of "O Jesus, make it stop!"
Michael Huebner |