Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Weisberg's 'Fives for Five' debuts in Florida

Here's a late dispatch on a good new piece of chamber music.
Arthur Weisberg, one of the more venerable names in contemporary music, debuted a work for woodwind quintet Jan. 30 in a concert at Florida Atlantic Universityin Boca Raton. Weisberg's Fives for Five was part of an excellent concert by FAU's ensemble-in-residence, the Florida Woodwind Quintet. Also on the program were French and Czech works from the 19th and 20th centuries (Ibert, Lefebvre and Reicha).

Weisberg was the bassoonist for the quintet. He still has a home in Boca Raton, the consequence of having taught bassoon and been the conductor at Boca's Harid Conservatory for some years. The music division of the Harid (also a dance school) was taken over in 1999 by Lynn University, also in Boca, and which as a result now has a music department.

The newly appointed chief of the Lynn department is Jon Robertson, fresh from his duties as head of the music department at UCLA. Weisberg now teaches bassoon at Indiana University.

As a composer, Weisberg's idiom is freely tonal but anchored in traditional harmonic practices. Here's the portion of my blog review that concerned Fives for Five:

Fives for Five takes its name from the size of the ensemble and the compositional conceit of the work, which is replete with five-note motifs and quintuple meters. Weisberg has a clear grasp of architecture that was clear right from the beginning of the piece: Each player weighed in with a five-note gesture that led into a polyphony of intersecting lines that increased in complexity until the listener could find his aural feet with a much slower five-note motif hammered out by horn and bassoon.

This useful bit of construction helped orient the movement as well as its auditors. It foreshadowed the few moments of unison playing of five-beat measures, as well as a five-part sequential chord at one of the climaxes, in which the players rattled off triplets in sequence as they threw up a tower of powerful sound.

Oboist Robert Weiner began the second, slower movement in tender fashion with a plaintive, barely moving five-note melody that again was taken up by each of the instruments, before hornist David Peel inaugurated a faster section with a martial-flavored theme. The third movement was centered around a quintuplet that hinted at Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, though used in a very different way.

This was music of great difficulty and admirable transparency at the same time. The language was stark and modern without being forbidding, and Weisberg's ideas were clearly laid out, easy to follow, and full of narrative interest. It was a piece that would bear repeated hearings, and it received what sounded to me on just the one hearing to be an exceptional performance.

The other members of the quintet are clarinetist Paul Green and flautist Elissa Lakofsky.

Weisberg told me after the concert that he's just finished a sextet for piano and woodwind quintet. It will be premiered June 7 at the International Double Reed Society's 34th annual convention, which will be held this year in Austin, Texas.

Again, it was a piece well worth encountering, and a good challenge for an enterprising group of woodwind players looking for some attractive repertoire.

posted by Greg Stepanich 3/06/2005