Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Cellist gives Florida premieres of works by Moravec, Prestini

Cellist Jeffrey Zeigler gave the Florida premieres Saturday afternoon of works by Paul Moravec and Paola Prestini at the Steinway Gallery in Boca Raton.

Moravec, whose Tempest Fantasy won the Adelphi University professor the Pulitzer Prize for music last year, was represented by a newly reworked version of Walk Away Slowly, a one-movement elegy for cello and piano originally composed in 1989. Written to commemorate the death of Moravec's father, the title is a Chinese expression for dying that Moravec found in the writings of journalist and Sinophile Theodore White.

Zeigler premiered the new version of this piece in January; he told me after the recital Moravec declined to show him the older version, so for all intents and purposes this is the one the composer prefers.

Zeigler is a fine young cellist, technically adroit and possessed of a penetrating, highly focused tone. Joined by pianist Tao Lin, Zeigler gave a committed, passionate performance of this accessible, highly emotional work.

Walk Away Slowly draws its structure and expressive contours from the opening bars, stated by the solo cello. It's a wide-ranging, continuous theme, more or less in D minor, whose initial three-note gesture, spanning a seventh, recurs throughout. The cello is almost never silent, and Moravec calls on the soloist to cover a very large range, peaking in tessitura fashion at the E above high C before climbing down to recapitulate the opening.

Moravec's richly post-Romantic language, as heard here, consisted of sweeping, arching cello phrases floating above a harmonic sea in the piano replete with full, jazz-tinged chords and triplets by the handful. What Moravec has written here is basically a song, albeit a song of a particularly intense and expansive kind. I found it deeply communicative in the best tradition of the late Romantics, and while it can't be said to break any new ground, it is a well-wrought composition that gets its melancholy message across in a memorable, affecting way.

Zeigler also offered a work for solo cello written for him by Prestini, his significant other and a founder of the VisionIntoArt performance company. Prestini's Deja Que Salga la Luna uses a Mexican mariachi love song (often translated as Let the Moon Come Out) by Jose Alfredo Jimenez to build a theme-and-variations-style showpiece.

The work opens with a short explosion of notes that is followed by a gentle statement of the love song. From there, bits of the tune can be heard alternating with moments of furious fiddling and tricky rhythmic patterns, all of it designed to be in keeping "with the loose guidelines of the huapango style," as the composer has written. Among the more effective passages were Prestini's imitations of mariachi sounds: guitar-like strumming and the fat pizzicati of a guittaron.

It seemed to me that Prestini's piece, of which Zeigler gave a suitably bravura performance, was a good, if unconventional, companion to the Third Cello Suite of Bach that also was on the program. The Bach is a collection of dance movements in which strong melodies provide the backbone on which instrumental acrobatics are hung, and Prestini has done something of the same thing here: The mariachi love song is a constant presence throughout the piece, and it provides a reference point for listeners to see what the composer has made of it.

Deja Que Salga la Luna doesn't have the profundity of the Bach suite, but it is an impressive piece of virtuoso writing for a soloist with plenty of chops. I thought the use of this particular source material was refreshing, and that Prestini found several compelling, imaginative things to do with it.

posted by Greg Stepanich 3/27/2005