Prodigal Daughter

In the early 1990s, for a short and wonderful period, the composer Chen Yi was a fixture on the musical landscape of the Bay Area. She had a joint residency with the Women’s Philharmonic of blessed memory and the men’s chorus Chanticleer, and once or twice a year local audiences would get to savor the products of her incredible musical imagination. Chen Yi’s work draws a lot on the traditions of her native China, but the integration of Asian and European/American models, which can often devolve into a tired trope in less gifted hands, always sounds fresh and alive with her. Her music is surprising and unpredictable, but always accessible. (At one point the Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll attended a concert of her music on my recommendation, and pronounced it “modern, but in a nice way.”)

We haven’t heard much of Chen Yi’s music around these parts in the ensuing decades, but Saturday’s engaging program by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players brought all the happy memories rushing back. The concert, led by artistic director Eric Dudley, included offerings by a range of composers (living and not), before culminating with Fire, Chen Yi’s brief and fiercely powerful evocation of the title element. The piece, which is scored with translucent vivacity for a dozen instruments, bolts out of the gate and proceeds to consume everything it touches. Rapid bursts of melody fly upwards, only to be overtaken by a new strand from elsewhere in the ensemble. Instrumental sparks strew themselves across the stage. The experience is brilliant, vivid, and frankly just a little scary. And then, just like that, it’s over, leaving what feels like a backdraft of silence in its wake.

Fire offered the evening’s most intense delight, but not the only one. Elizabeth Ogonek, a composer who inspires ever-greater admiration with each encounter, opened the program with Lightenings, a luminous set of variations on a Byzantine hymn with inspiration from the poetry of Seamus Heaney. By turns light-footed and elegiac, each of these short movements creates a distinctive world full of beauty and grace. I also enjoyed the expansive sinew of Justin Weiss’s through depths and shadows (one day soon composers will realize what’s what and bring capital letters back to their titles, but evidently not quite yet), and the roisterous stomp of Viet Cuong’s Electric Aroma, a fast jittery tango for clarinet and soprano saxophone accompanied by piano and percussion.

On a Pacific Aisle - Joshua Kosman