Other Minds Festival on Rudhyar – San Francico Chronicle September 29, 2010

By Joshua Kosman

The world of 20th century music is replete with hidden treasures, and the Other Minds Festival unearthed one on Monday night with a splendid concert devoted to the music of the little-known modernist composer Dane Rudhyar.

Rudhyar was born in Paris in 1895, came to the United States at 21, and died in San Francisco in 1985 at age 90. In addition to his music, which is both craggy and intoxicating, he devoted himself to painting, literature and an obfuscating mix of spiritualism and astrology.

The music on Monday’s program at the Swedenborgian Church in Pacific Heights was drawn from both of Rudhyar’s periods of composition – the 1920s, when he blended the influences of Debussy and Scriabin with an acerbic and distinctively American tone, and the 1970s, when he returned to music after several decades away from it.

Both groups revealed a creative voice at once pungent and inviting, muscular and unpredictable. Two short piano pieces from the 1920s, “Stars” from “Pentagram No. 3” and “Granites,” found beauty in wiry dissonance and a rhapsodic surface; both of them sounded lean and incisive in a magnificent rendition by pianist Sarah Cahill. The first of three “Poems for Violin and Piano,” from 1920 – similarly willful and arresting – began the evening in a forthright performance by violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg.

When Rudhyar took up composition again in the 1970s, his stylistic palette had expanded to include strains of popular music and more overt invocations of late Romanticism alongside the dissonant modernism of Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell.

The evening’s high point was Cahill’s gorgeous and rhetorically subtle rendition of “Transmutation,” a suite of seven piano movements that touch on a wide range of stylistic bases – from cocktail-lounge music to Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata. Some of the pieces are oddly seductive, others pugnacious and brusque, yet all of them feel deeply connected despite their superficial dissimilarities.

Something similar is at work in “Crisis and Overcoming,” a four-movement string quartet written in 1979 for the Kronos Quartet. Here Rudhyar writes instrumental conversations that sound fugal without actually repeating, and he closes with a little double homage to Ravel and Gershwin. The Ives Quartet (violinists Bettina Mussumeli and Susan Freier, violist Jodi Levitz and cellist Stephen Harrison) played it wonderfully.