Zephyr’S Program Worth A Celebration

Zephyr Wednesday, April 22, The Met

Spokane’s classical chamber music series Zephyr celebrated Earth Day with “Music & Nature,” a program of performances which were themselves worth celebrating.

Kendall Feeney, Zephyr’s founder and leader, put together a program of nature-inspired music that was sometimes witty, sometimes challenging and always excellently performed.

The concert began in darkness with Claude Debussy’s “Syrinx” for solo flute. Bruce Bodden played it with such expressive freedom few listeners would have bothered thinking about its tight formal organization. Under Bodden fingers, “Syrinx” simply sounded naturally beautiful.

The same could be said of tonal colors Feeney’s performances brought to two piano works by Maurice Ravel. “Jeux d’eau” (Fountains) sparkled and bubbled and “Oiseaux tristes” (Sorrowful Birds) painted the picture of birds exhausted by jungle heat only to be startled into brief rustling flight.

Continuing the avian theme, Feeney and Bodden brought to life Olivier Messiaen’s “La Merle noir” (The Blackbird) as it sang of nesting, territory, warning, and whatever else blackbirds sing about.

The longest and most difficult work of the evening was George Crumb’s “Voice of the Whale” in which Feeney and Bodden were joined by cellist Cheryl Rand. Crumb is a composer who knows and uses every trick in the orchestrator’s handbook, and some that aren’t, to explore the outer limits of the sounds instruments can produce. The flute sings, gurgles, whistles and moans in imitation of the humpback whale’s song. The cellist makes sounds like the flute, like a seagull or the Japanese koto, or like taps on antique cymbals. The pianist makes the instrument thump, squeal, jangle and buzz.

Whether Crumb’s parade of sound effects crosses the line into compelling music, music to be heard and relished again and again, I have my doubts. But his ability to achieve arresting sonorities is unparalleled. The Zephyr players matched the composer’s challenges at every turn.

The concert concluded with the world premiere of Spokane composer Don Caron’s “Disposable Dances,” a song cycle about garbage. Soprano Ann Fennessy, displaying her usual elan, reeled off the contents of a garbage truck (or maybe it was a landfill) with the relish of a chef reciting a complex recipe. The Zephyr players, along with percussionist Martin Zyskowski, danced wittily around the waste-filled subject with a tarantella, a waltz, a tango, an almost-two-step, a beguine and a can-can (pun intended).

More serious was a deliberately out-of-tune lullaby for a bag lady and a most serious pavane lamenting the death humans inflict on the earth.

Caron’s music can be dense and complex on the inside, but its surface is most often a foot-tapping delight. In both its seriousness and its fun, “Disposable Dances” provided a fine way to celebrate our planet as well as a warning to us inhabitants.