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. (stuff deleted) 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