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Music Review: IBIS Chamber Music Society at Lyon Park Community Center
Monday, March 2, 2009; 11:22 AM
WashingtonPost.com
Every seat was filled for Friday's splendid concert by the IBIS Chamber Music Society at Lyon Park Community Center in Clarendon. IBIS is a group formed by musicians from the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra. Friday's performance gave listeners a chance to hear these players up close in a chamber group with frequent chances for solos. Far off the beaten path, the program drew music from two relatively obscure composers -- American William Grant Still and William Alwyn of Britain.
A pioneer in many ways, Still (who died in 1978) was the first African American to write a symphony played by an major orchestra and one of the first to compose for film, radio and television. The IBIS provided a glimpse of Still's wide spectrum of styles, ranging from neoclassicism, French impressionism, jazz and gospel in unusual juxtapositions overlaid with unmistakable individualism. Most evocative was his dark-toned "Incantation and Dance," played with molten phrasing by flutist Adria Sternstein Foster and harpist Susan Robinson. Violinist Joel Fuller and Robinson underlined the gospel-infused mood of "Here's One," while Fuller joined with violinist Joseph Scheer, violist Jennifer Ries and cellist Amy Ward Butler in capturing the coloristic exoticism and enticing Latin rhythms of "Danzas de Panama."
Friday's music by English composer William Alwyn (died in 1985), who also wrote numerous film scores, was so firmly embedded in dated neo-romanticism that it had no chance to escape its conservative tonal harmonic cast -- pure pleasantries and that's all. But the audience enjoyed some lovely performances of Alwyn's picturesque "Three Winter Poems" for string quartet, "Naiades," a fantasy sonata for flute and harp, and two movements from "Lyra Angelica," a concerto for harp and strings.
-- Cecelia Porter
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