Although its main job is to present the world’s leading piano competition every four years, Fort Worth’s Cliburn Foundation works hard to maintain a high profile during the long interim between the quadrennial occurrences of the big event.
And one of the most significant ways in which the Cliburn Foundation does this is through a series of lecture-recitals at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, focused on the works of living composers, always with the composer present. Cliburn artistic consultant Shields Collins Bray (who is also principal keyboard player for the Fort Worth Symphony) hosts and often performs as well, allowing audience members to recognize some of the geniuses of our time not only as names on a program, but as real human beings.
Saturday’s installment, titled “Made in Fort Worth,” focused, promisingly, on the music of two Fort Worth-based composers, Martin Blessinger and Till MacIvor Meyn, both members of the TCU faculty. That the program ultimately faltered was the fault of neither the musicians, who were uniformly excellent, nor the lively discourse led by Bray.
Blessinger and Meyn, at least as represented by the four works on the program (two by each), subscribe to a frankly reactionary approach to composition—the weaknesses of which become all-too-obvious during ninety-minute program.
Meyn’s three-movement Brilliant Blue (2012) for saxophone and piano (performed by saxophonist Joseph Eckert and pianist Bray) opened the program with a haunting solo for saxophone leading into a gently jazzy movement, which in turn set a tone of pleasant lyricism that prevailed through the entire concert.
Pleasant lyricism, however, does not sustain an enduring musical aesthetic. Meyn clearly owns a sense of humor, most memorably expressed in a chuckle-inducing quotation of the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the second movement of Brilliant Blue); likewise, he possesses a worthy ability to create beautiful sonorities for the instruments at hand. But, in both Brilliant Blue and in the second work on the program, the three-movement Force of Nature(2013) for flute and piano (performed by pianist Bray and flutist Shauna Thompson), Meyn continued to adhere to mundane harmonies and predictable structural strategies. Tellingly, the high point of Meyn’s portion of the program arrived in the strikingly pretty interaction of flute and piano in “Reflection / Refraction,” the middle movement of Force of Nature.
After introducing composer Blessinger, Bray returned to the piano to again join flutist Thompson, this time for Blessinger’s Diversions and Escapes (2013). The composer admitted, in comments, an admiration for Poulenc and a desire to stimulate an immediate visceral response in listeners—both positive attributes in a composer. He expressed that admiration, however, with harmonies and structures that imitated Poulenc’s gestures without achieving Poulenc’s sense of innovation and intellect.
The concert closed with Blessinger’s four-movement Legend Suite (2013-14) for clarinet and marimba. Clarinetist Ivan Petruzziello and marimbist Andrew Eldridge reveled in Blessinger’s mastery of sound; once again, Blessinger produced plenty of beautiful noise but little to enchant or challenge the listener.
