Zephyr Highlighting American Composers

There are electrifying performances and there are electrified performances. The musicians of Zephyr want to combine both in a concert of American music Saturday at The Met.

“We’re doing two American music concerts this year,” says pianist Kendall Feeney, Zephyr’s artistic director. “We’ll do a program of South American music in the spring, but this concert is music of North America. We selected composers who have successfully brought together folk and popular elements into their classical chamber music.”

Zephyr is a chamber music series specializing in 20th-century music, using local and visiting performers. Feeney’s cohorts for Saturday’s concert are three Spokane Symphony players, violinist Tracy Dunlop, clarinetist James Schoepflin and cellist John Marshall, and percussionist Robert Rees, the Young Artist winner of the 1993 Music and Allied Arts Festival and a senior percussion performance major at Eastern Washington University.

Feeney will begin Saturday’s program with three works by Scott Joplin. “Joplin’s piano rags were hugely popular during his lifetime, but they were replaced by new popular music during the ‘20s and ‘30s,” Feeney says. “It wasn’t until the 1950s that performers like Gunther Schuller and William Bolcom began to awaken a new interest in Joplin.”

Bolcom, a Washington-born composer and pianist, was a Pulitzer Prize winner. He will be represented in the concert by his “Ghost Rag,” a setting for violin and piano of the composer’s tribute to his father. Originally for solo piano and entitled “The Graceful Ghost,” Bolcom arranged it for violin and piano at the request of violinist Sergiu Lucca.

Ragtime strikes again in “Estampie” for piano and percussion by composer Robert Xavier Rodriguez. “This is a recent piece that reaches far into the past and combines a 14th-century dance tune with some funky ragtime,” Feeney says.

Rodriguez wrote “Estampie” in 1983 on a commission from the Dallas Ballet. “We wondered at first how it might work without dancing,” Feeney says, “but it works great because it has such musical vitality that it doesn’t really need dancers.”

The most recent music on Zephyr’s program is “Mango-Tango,” a 1992 work for violin and piano by Daniel Michalak, a composer and pianist who lives in Bloomington, Ind.

The electrification in Saturday’s program comes in the concert’s finale, Paul Schoenfeld’s “Three Country Fiddle Pieces” for amplified piano, electric violin and percussion written in 1987. “We did one of the three pieces from this suite with my Contemporary Music Ensemble at Eastern Washington University last year,” says Feeney. “It was such a hit with our audience, I was determined that we needed to do all three on a Zephyr concert.

“Besides, I’m always interested in combining new technologies with traditional instruments, and we definitely have the old and new in this piece,” Feeney adds.

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MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Concert Zephyr will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday at The Met. Tickets are $12 and $14 ($8 for students), available at G&B Select-a-Seat outlets or call (800) 325-SEAT.