Review: In ‘Mosaics’ concert, chamber ensemble Camarada soars with precision and intensity

By Luke Schulze, San Diego Union-Tribune

San Diego is in the midst of a fertile period, as local music lovers feast on the offerings of numerous homegrown collectives who design thoughtful, curated programs as accessible as they are engaging. The decades-old ensemble Camarada offered an example of this civic-minded sophistication Sunday evening in the most recent chapter of its artistic residency at the newly remodeled Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park.

The concert, titled “Mosaics,” featured a diverse but focused set of chamber music miniatures drawn from the 20th and 21st centuries, most of them offering a particular view of the blues-jazz strain in American music. Mosaic is an ancient art form that builds a central image from a vast number of tesserae — individual pieces of glass or tile — each of which acts as a tiny but important part of the larger whole. Just so, the pieces on Sunday’s program were artfully chosen to fit together to assemble a larger, unified musical image over the course of the evening.

Composer Stefan Cwik

The brevity of the movements in William Grant Still’s “Folk Suite No. 3" belies their power: Each of the three vignettes presents a concentrated, insider’s view of Still’s Americana, from spiritual shouts and cries to folk dance.“Soliloquy,” for flute and piano, by Jake Heggie, showed pianist Dana Burnett’s gift for clarity of voicing and line as it presented a series of lyrical variations on the familiar prelude from Bach’s first cello suite. Burnett shares the role of artistic director with flutist Beth Ross Buckley, whose command of tone and judicious vibrato was compelling.

The finale movement from Dirk-Michael Kirsch’s “Trio Pastorale” — which added an English horn to the stage ensemble — presented a European survey of American jazz idioms combined with supple, impressionist harmonies and virtuosic contrapuntal part-writing that made clear that the members of Camarada share a knowing, practiced intimacy with each other’s temperaments and musical mannerisms.

Blues riffs act as episodes in Adrienne Albert’s “Nightfall,” a movement from the larger work, “Circadia.” The larger sections in Albert’s piece use iconic, emotional melodies to shape the structure. There is a film-score quality to the music, and the subtle transitions into blues gestures were gracefully wrought by bassoonist Ryan Simmons and pianist Burnett.

Camarada includes (from left) Dana Burnett, David Buckley and Beth Ross Buckley. (Courtesy photo by Jesse Sutton)

The composer David Baker a movement from the larger work, “Circadia.” The larger sections in Albert’s piece use iconic, emotional melodies to is lesser-known to those outside the cognoscenti of Midwest jazz performance and education. In that world, however, his broad scholarly and creative interests and prolific output are justifiable revered. His “Blues (Deliver my Soul)” a movement from the larger work, “Circadia.” The larger sections in Albert’s piece use iconic, emotional melodies to for violin and piano is an intense and moving exploration of African American musical genres, seemingly written, again, with experts in mind: the piece catalogs an array of blues tropes — country blues, vocal gestures, gospel, guitar-based textures, drones, even making clear a connection to Ravel’s second violin sonata, a movement of which is titled “Blues.” Violinist David Buckley a movement from the larger work, “Circadia.” The larger sections in Albert’s piece use iconic, emotional melodies to rendered stylistic gestures into vivid relief, shaping melodies and highlighting familiar elements with clarity and purpose.

San Francisco Composer Stefan Cwik a movement from the larger work, “Circadia.” The larger sections in Albert’s piece use iconic, emotional melodies to had two works presented and was featured in a pre-concert interview with Robert Hughes. Cwik’s “Sketches from the Sword in the Stone,” for English horn and piano, began life as a concerto for the English horn. A later arrangement of the work for English horn and piano, the composer said, fit the materials more appropriately: references to both specific characters in T.H. White’s 1938 a movement from the larger work, “Circadia.” The larger sections in Albert’s piece use iconic, emotional melodies to book and a general musical portrait of English folk traditions, like jigs, are numerous and winning, intermingled with more modern touches like asymmetrical meters and whole-tone scales.

Equally impressive was his larger work, “Eight Miniatures — Homage to Stravinsky.” The composer spoke about being guided by the DJ tactic of “remixing” music, layering motives and melodies from extant pieces to create new pieces. Cwik’s work in this regard was deft, especially considering the specific pitfalls waiting here: To begin with, copying Stravinsky’s musical style is an often ubiquitous — and not always openly admitted — phase in the development of young composers.

Moreover, Stravinsky himself had a curious and often problematic relationship to other music, sometimes borrowing for ironic, rhetorical effect — as in much of his neo-classical work — and then cribbing shamelessly, as in the use of folk melodies in “The Rite” or the finale of his “Symphony of Psalms,” which is an almost exact transcription of a work — “Solace” — by Scott Joplin.

Cwik manages, however, to weave a virtuosic musical fabric out of moments from Stravinsky’s music and to combine them with a craft that reveals a deep understanding of Stravinky’s aesthetics and methods. The members of Camarada answered the complexity of Cwik’s language with the precision, intensity and regard for sound that characterized the entire evening.

Schulze is a freelance writer.