April 12, 2005: Headlines: Figures: COS - Peru: Music: philly.com : Ghosts in the Dream Machine, by the 32-year-old composer Gabriela Lena Frank, was a failure at its Sunday premiere. Put it this way: I'd sooner hear other works by this talented composer than revisit her dream machine
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April 12, 2005: Headlines: Figures: COS - Peru: Music: philly.com : Ghosts in the Dream Machine, by the 32-year-old composer Gabriela Lena Frank, was a failure at its Sunday premiere. Put it this way: I'd sooner hear other works by this talented composer than revisit her dream machine
Ghosts in the Dream Machine, by the 32-year-old composer Gabriela Lena Frank, was a failure at its Sunday premiere. Put it this way: I'd sooner hear other works by this talented composer than revisit her dream machine
Ghosts in the Dream Machine, by the 32-year-old composer Gabriela Lena Frank, was a failure at its Sunday premiere. Put it this way: I'd sooner hear other works by this talented composer than revisit her dream machine
Piece may lean too heavily on the paintings that inspired it
By David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Music Critic
The classical music world is so used to the seemingly effortless translation of visual stimulus to great music in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, you need something similar to appreciate the near-impossibility of such endeavors. That's not to say that the like-minded Astral Artistic Services commission of the piano quintet Ghosts in the Dream Machine, by the 32-year-old composer Gabriela Lena Frank, was a failure at its Sunday premiere. Put it this way: I'd sooner hear other works by this talented composer than revisit her dream machine.
The idea of the piece was splendid. Pianist Simone Dinnerstein and the Chiara String Quartet, who are outstanding Astral artists, were tapped for a piece inspired by four specific paintings by the pianist's father, the well-known Simon Dinnerstein. The paintings, reproduced in the program, meticulously represent scenes and objects in the real world, but their hyper-realism and stylized juxtaposition of visual symbols take them out of reality and into a deeply mysterious place. Urban rowhouses are framed by bare trees looking like aged human hands. A girl sits at the piano in a crowded room filled with a ghostly-looking Matisse painting and an unpopulated dollhouse. Dinnerstein's urban landscapes are often cool and lonely, and feel not unlike Edward Hopper's.
The composer's musical reactions are vivid but all over the place. The piano writing echoed influences from the intense, severe minimalism of LaMonte Young filtered through the emotional openness of Sergei Rachmaninoff. From there, the string quartet entered softly, almost like residual resonance from the piano that grows into a life of its own. The nocturnal stillness of the paintings was conveyed musically with lots of well-placed, long-held notes over which all sorts of activities - some obviously related, some not - took place within the instrumental textures.
All of these elements helped make this Sunday afternoon at the Trinity Center for Urban Life a bit of an event. But I have doubts about how well the music can stand on its own without the Dinnerstein paintings sitting before you. And if Frank's musical pictures are as knit together as Mussorgsky's, that wasn't apparent.
In the conventional repertoire - both in Brahms' Piano Quintet (Op. 34) and Mozart's late-period String Quartet in D major (K. 575) - the Chiara Quartet projected an ensemble blend so tight and warm that when incidental solos popped out, they made a marvelously dramatic impression. In the Brahms, pianist Dinnerstein was the master of a long line, making each phrase build on the last with great cumulative weight but without the slightest distortion of the piece's shape.
Within their engagingly high energy level, the musicians' interpretive choices were fairly middle-of-the road, the exception being the last few minutes of Brahms' first movement. Palpably, the performance kicked into a different zone in which their tempo and phrasing choices became the doorway to a more personal, deeper mode of expression. Such is the kind of freedom that's most possible with talented young musicians who still have little to lose.
Contact music critic David Patrick Stearns at 215-854-4907 or dstearns@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://philly.com/davidpatrickstearns.
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