Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 28, 1995 TAG: 9504280025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The staid chamber music organization, whose mostly older audience is accustomed to hearing string quartets and piano trios by the likes of Haydn and Mozart, will sponsor a performance of George Crumb's radical "Vox Balaenae," or "Voice of the Whale."
The Trio Fedele, a flute, cello and piano ensemble from New York City whose leader loves alternative rock music, will end its Saturday night performance with the unorthodox piece.
"Vox Balaenae" evokes the passage of eons of time in the eerie, dehumanized world beneath the sea's surface. The 66-year-old West Virginia-born composer was inspired by a 1969 recording of humpback whale songs. Crumb directs that the piece be performed with amplified instruments in deep-blue stage lighting as the players wear black masks.
The work brims with strange sonorities not normally heard from a classical music trio: glassy-sounding glissandos from the cello that resemble whale songs, exotic sounds from the flutist who is instructed to sing as he plays, and washes of gray sound from the piano, whose strings are strummed with a chisel as a glass rod vibrates on them.
The "Emperor Quartet" it ain't.
"The reason it gets me so good is it's like watching a movie - you feel as if there's a bunch of movements," said flutist David Fedele. "You go through all these different experiences, you let it wash over you. There are sad parts and free-sounding parts, and really scared parts and lovely parts and romantic parts -there's anger and danger and fear and love in it."
Fedele said he was surprised and delighted by two things about his visit to Salem: one, that the Chamber Music Society expressed no qualms about the piece, and two, that he was allowed to place it where he believes it belongs in the program: at the very end.
"Presenters like to put things like this before intermission because it gives the audience something to talk about. But this is the perfect presention. Even though the concert doesn't end with a `Carmen Fantasy' showoff kind of thing, it's something that'll send you home in some kind of alternative state. "It ends like a dream, just ethereal," said Fedele.
The 29-year-old flutist was raised in Charlotte and began studying the flute because he found a pennywhistle in second grade and quickly got good at playing it. He began lessons with the principal flutist of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra and later took degrees from the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School of Music.
When asked if he thought he might be playing a different instrument today if he'd encountered something other than a pennywhistle in grade school, Fedele sounds wistful.
"I sometimes think that what made me stick with the flute was that I'd put work into it and get results. But I often think that I might have played another instrument or even another kind of music entirely."
Like what?
"I could see myself as a rock musician," said the flutist.
"I've been listening to Pearl Jam lately, I like Nirvana. I discovered rock with punk rock and post-punk and modern rock and grunge, it's mostly that vein that I like."
Fedele says he knows lots of classical musicians who like jazz and blues and even bluegrass, but not many, like him, who go for Seattle grunge bands. The band Yes is about as far as most classical musicians ever get into rock 'n roll, said the flutist.
Saturday night the Trio Fedele will not venture quite as far into performance theatrics as Crumb directed they could. Specifically, they will not use the masks, which not only interfere with playing and seeing each other but which Fedele says no longer serve the purpose of de-personalizing the players.
"It dates the piece, it just doesn't have the same effect," said Fedele. "Back in 1970 it was really cool and bizarre, but now I think it draws more attention to us as players instead of to the music itself."
However, the group does plan to amplify the flute, piano and cello with electronic pickups, and it will perform the piece in deep blue light designed to simulate the undersea world.
The flutist acknowledged that "Vox Balaenae" has puzzled some conservative audiences, but says he generally has good luck with it.
"The last time we played it, it went over great. I mean, hell, the piece is what? Thirty years old? I mean, come on, let's all grow up!"
Except for the Crumb piece, the Trio Fedele's Roanoke College program is fairly conservative, with a Haydn piano trio, a Copland duo, a Villa-Lobos duo and Francois Borne's popular showpiece, "Fantasie Brillante on Themes from Bizet's Carmen."
The Fedele Trio: Tonight at 8 in Olin Hall at Roanoke College. Tickets, available at , are $11 for adults and $7 for students and can be bought at the door or reserved by calling 375-2333. For concert information, call 774-2899. The concert will be followed by a meet-the-artists reception.
by CNB