Not for the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble are dry academic exercises or
wild excesses in juvenile attempts to shock the audience.  For 10 years
now, and specifically on Monday night in the War Memorial Green Room,
LCCE reflected the eminently "centrist" music of its founder-director,
the violist Kurt Rohde.  Perhaps even more than at previous concerts,
with this 75th birthday tribute to Donald Erb, the Left Coasters offered
an entertaining, novelty-filled but substantial program.

Entertaining? How can you do that with contemporary music? By trying your
damnest to communicate.  That's exactly what's missing from academic and
in-your-face music - the commitment to speak to the audience, with music,
in words, in intention.  That's exactly what was present Monday night,
overcoming even the acoustic horror of the Green Room.

The non-musical portion of the intention to communicate consists of such
simple, often overlooked items as good program notes, noting the time of
each piece (it's new music, after all, so how would you know otherwise
what to expect?), and speaking to the audience when necessary - without
overdoing it.  And so, when Erb, who came to San Francisco for the
occasion, had to be hospitalized with an infection, Rohde spoke before
he took part in the performance of the String Quartet #2, adding words
from the performer's point of view to the program notes and explaining
the reason for the birthday celebrant's absence.  When the tenor Paul
Sperry noticed that only the French text was printed for Ravel's Chansons
Madecasses, he provided a quick spoken translation "for the few people
whose French is not perfect."

Communication in music doesn't necessarily mean easy accessibility and
the West Coast premiere of Harold Meltzer's Exiles was a good case in
point.  Clearly more "abstract" than the rest of the program, the work
came across well, nevertheless.  Conducted by Meltzer (artistic director
of New York's Sequitur ensemble) and featuring Sperry, who commissioned it
last year, the work is written for tenor, flute (Stacey Pelinka), clarinet
(Jerome Simas), violin (Anna Presler) and cello (Leighton Fong, who played
brilliantly all evening long, in every piece).  Exile uses the text of two
poems by the same name, by Conrad Aiken (about a desolate landscape) and
Hart Crane (about the "voiceless" endurance of denied love), material -
according to the composer himself - that's "pretty sad," and yet the music
is rather robust and energy-filled.  It has a stunning opening, the voice
appearing as a string instrument and the strings playing individual
"voices" until they meet in a rather operatic ensemble.  Sperry, who is
on the faculty of the Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music and the
Aspen Music Festival, sang both Exiles and the Ravel songs with exemplary
phrasing and diction.  He was accompanied in Chansons, excellently well,
by Pelinka, Fong and Eric Zivian, piano.

Rohde has been at work now for some time, writing small pieces for various
cellists.  One of these, called Play Things for cello and piano, received
its world premiere at this concert by Fong and Aglika Angelova, a young
transplant from Bulgaria with fingers of titanium and very short hair
fashioned as a peacock feather.  Can a three-minute musical fragment make
a "statement"? Rohde's certainly has.  Brutally percussive and filled with
the rhythmic excitement that characterizes much of his work, Rohde's "play
thing" is no kid stuff.  The more he moves away from the "Bartok sound"
(the thing that struck me when I heard his work first years ago), the
closer Rohde gets to Bartok's essence.

The 11-year-old Erb quartet (with Presler, Rohde, Fong and violinist
Phyllis Kamrin) is arguably the composer's best work.  It's best heard
without seeing the many unorthodox methods it employs - struck strings,
use of chopsticks (yes, really, to avoid the players' reluctance to use
the wood of expensive bows), a wordless chant at a climactic moment, and
so on - because the resulting music is rich and meaningful, has nothing
to do with all the otherwise distracting shticks.  It is flowing,
attention-gripping, dramatic, complex music, performed here to the
highest standards.

In a decade of encountering Rohde's ensemble, I cannot really say that
I ever HEARD it, and this concert was no exception.  The Green Room is
dead, noisy (street traffic, including sirens constantly intrude) and
echo-filled.  Why has it served as the venue for Left Coast and many
other chamber groups? Yes, you guessed it: money.  At about $800, it's
the least expensive rental in town.  With a full house (as it was at this
concert), the audience of 100 pays $1,500 in admission, meaning that after
taking care of the rent, the ensemble has $700 for fees, administration,
advertising, helping to pay the way of visiting musicians.  The worst part
of this is that this valuable group, so well deserving of being HEARD,
cannot possibly perform in a decent space, such as Herbst Theater, in the
same building, because the rental there is $2,000 and up.  The only other
space used by the Left Coast, the Forum at Yerba Buena (almost as bad as
the Green Room for sound), tripled its rent to almost $3,000.  Money
problems for the arts have been with us as long as the arts themselves,
but this issue of finding an affordable, decent concert space should not
be a matter for brain surgeons.  The city, which owns a number of good
performance spaces, directly or through third parties, should provide a
helping hand.

Janos Gereben/SF
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