Ives Quartet's 'With an American Voice' is perfectly timed – Mercury News February 1, 2009
By Richard Scheinin
Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony veered, musically speaking, from Aretha Franklin to Yo-Yo Ma. Many American voices were heard — including the music of the president’s own oration.
What good timing, then, for the Ives Quartet’s new program, “With an American Voice.” It explores the “voices” of several American composers and premieres a song cycle based on texts by and about Abraham Lincoln, who was born 200 years ago on Feb. 12 — and whose words, ideals and political style inspire the 44th president.
Friday at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, the Ives, an exceptional group from the Bay Area, began with a composer whose voice mostly has been forgotten. Quincy Porter was a New Englander, born in 1897. He taught at Yale and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954.
The Ives (named for another New Englander, composer Charles Ives) has been trying to draw this faded star back into the firmament. It has unearthed some of Porter’s works from the Yale Library and is recording his nine string quartets for the Naxos label.
Friday’s program (which repeats Feb. 22 in San Francisco) focused on Porter’s early opuses. “In Monasterio” recalled Renaissance chant, simple, open and innocently reverent. A setting of a Ukrainian song, showing off the Ives’ lush sound, preceded a “Scherzo” in which Porter began arriving at his mature style, with sharp-elbowed rhythms and tart, stacked harmonies. One could hear the emergence of a voice.
Joseph Gregorio, born in 1979, is definitely an emerging voice.
His “The Fullness of Peace,” the Lincoln-inspired song cycle, touches on musical theater, matching rhythms of language to song in the smart manner of Stephen Sondheim or Adam Guettel. Gregorio’s texts are often amplified by just the right glimmering harmony in the strings, or a bit of vocal melisma, stretching a syllable, or a recurring melodic motif to underline, say, Lincoln’s pleas for unity.
Raised in Gettysburg, Pa., Gregorio has Lincoln-esque roots. The piece, in seven movements and lasting 40-plus minutes, sets one of Lincoln’s favorite fables from Aesop and several letters, one written to his wife when he was a congressman, another by a girl advising Lincoln to grow a beard. There are words penned by Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman and Julie Gregorio, the composer’s sister, who selected the texts.
Initially, the piece glows with charm and awe. But it needs editing. Vocal lines, ably sung by baritone Austin Kness, have a sameness as the piece grows too earnestly “American” in its goodness, its Copland-y reflection of Lincoln’s rural roots and humility. One can imagine Gregorio composing the piece during the Obama campaign, feeling the weight of the historical moment; ultimately, one feels the weight too much.
The program ended with Dvorak’s “American” Quartet (String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96), which the Czech composed in 1893 while summering in Iowa. In a way, this was the night’s most authentically “American” piece.
It exults in African-American spirituals and still exudes a pioneer spirit, as well as a dancing Bohemian energy. The Ives — violinists Bettina Mussumeli and Susan Freier, violist Jodi Levitz and cellist Stephen Harrison — played it with passionate, almost raucous, zeal.
Contact Richard Scheinin at rscheinin@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5069.