Music by Gabriela Lena Frank, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Reena Esmail, and Tebogo Monnakgotla
July 27-31, 2023
Overview
Four women with globe-spanning ethnic backgrounds supplied the majority of repertory for this summer’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood. The planners of this festival cannily chose this demographic to offer a built-in unity-in-diversity which turned out to be a richly
varied smorgasbord of musical challenges and delights for the audiences who attended some or all of the five main festival events. Each composer’s work reflected her ethnic background, some obviously, others in more subtle ways. The payoff was that their distinctive musical voices complemented each other and provided a wide-ranging view of what is happening today in the global world of new music through concerts devoted to each of them along with the final TMC program last Monday night that included their works for larger forces.
The diverse geographic and cultural domains that were represented include: Peru, China,
Lithuania and the USA for Frank; South Africa and Sweden for Monnakgotla; India and the USA
for Esmail; and Iceland for Thorvaldsdottir. Only the continents of Australia and Antarctica
remained unrepresented. A corresponding aesthetic and stylistic diversity manifested itself.
Frank’s musical gestures are robust, extroverted, and linked to traditions of earlier 20th century
modernism, while overtly reflecting her encounters with Peruvian music and culture.
Appropriately, she chose to include in her program Bartok’s joyfully folk-inspired “Contrasts.”
Indeed, the subtle presence of Bartok pervaded the festival, offering the model of reconciling
multiple streams of influence with the development of a thoroughly personal style.
In direct contrast, Thorvaldsdottir’s music tends to be subtle and delicate, often approaching
the boundary between noise and silence, regularly utilizing alternate performance methods
such as quarter tones, unusual bow pressure, and blowing through wind instruments with
minimal pitch content. Showing her connection to a predecessor composer, her program
included Hommage à Mihály András by Gyorgy Kurtag, and another of her pieces, Hrim, was
composed as a companion to Gyorgy Ligeti Chamber Concerto. These composers could be
considered late-20th-century Hungarian modernists, both inheritors of Bartok’s influence.
Monnakgotla’s own style seems more traditional; but for her program she chose works of a
more avant-garde character by the Swedish composers Malin Bång and Bent Sørenson, and the
South African Andile Khumalo, reflecting the diverse origins of her parents (Sweden and South
Africa); her choice of text for the large orchestral songs on the final program were poems in
French by the Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, who was also the subject of her 2016
chamber opera Jean-Joseph. A conspicuous influence for these songs seems to be the music of
Debussy, just as the poetry reflects the symbolist influence of Paul Verlaine.
Finally, Esmail’s project for the past decade has been to fuse the classical traditions of North
India and Western music, one which works more organically than previous attempts such as
Ravi Shankar’s sitar concertos. This has been the fruit of collaboration with her “musical sister”
Saili Oak who not only instructed her in the Khyal (North Indian classical) style of singing, but
also participated throughout the performances on Esmail’s program. The general impression is
that her style is fundamentally lyrical and romantic.
A Closer Look
Gabriela Lena Frank’s music had been previewed on the Tanglewood Music Festival Orchestra’s
program the previous Sunday, July 23 (see my review here: