Found this at the URL http://www.sfcv.org/
Joseph Bloom reviews list member Judith Zaimont's Elegy for String Orchestra:
Exciting to Heartfelt,
The Whole Range
Apr. 3, 1999
The Women's Philharmonic offered the gamut of rich and rewarding
selection of works at Herbst Theater Saturday night, from the most
exciting, The Slough (1998) by Jing Jing Luo, the most dramatic,
Early American Portrait (1962) by Esther Williamson Ballou, the most
stylistically mature, Vigil for Cello and Chamber Orchestra (1990)
by Augusta Read Thomas, to the most heart-felt, Elegy for String
Orchestra (1998) by Judith Lang Zaimont.
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Elegy for String Orchestra by Judith Lang Zaimont is a work of
understated beauty and honest emotion. The work is largely chordal
but with clear underlying counterpoint. Single notes move in motivic
fragments, and around them, chords will often settle. From within
the chords, other notes will arise that become the seeds for other
melodic impulses. Zaimont moves fluidly between dissonance and
consonance. Tonal chords do not sound "exceptional" as they would in
Ives, for instance, nor do they leave lingering key implications.
They are merely part of an extended harmonic vocabulary that gently
encloses both consonant and dissonant harmonies.
At the ends of sections the music settles comfortably onto major
chords and then move on. It seemed fitting that the work concluded
on a C Major chord, momentarily unstable in the second inversion,
but then coming to rest in root position without having passed through
a dominant chord, obligatory in a conventional cadence.
The orchestra performed fluently in the Elegy though with a certain
angularity. A brief double bass solo was beautifully handled by Karen
Horner. The treatment of the basses in general, independently of the
cellos, was very effective.
If I felt any limitation in the work, it was one I sometimes feel
generally about music composed in our era. With the avant-guarde
having "been done", and tonal fields long since thoroughly explored
and exhausted, contemporary composers live in an inherently infertile
period. New styles, if any, have not yet clearly emerged to provide
a new orientation for the old cellular units of sounds.
Steve Schwartz
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