DRESHER'S ARRESTING INSTRUMENTAL ARSENAL 
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of June  6-13, 2010
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 109
          San Francisco composer-performer Paul Dresher’s works in both cross-over and electro-acoustic realms merit hearings, quite apart from the exotic instruments that he comes up with. A mostly-Dresher program at the Old First Church June 4 and 6 was an invigorating exercise into relatively uncharted terrain.
            The audience loved his 22-minute violin sonata “Elapsed Time” (1998) in his most accessible (and most traditional) style. The highly consonant work offered perpetuum mobile segments, a middle movement marked by lovely double stops in the violin, and  a very lively finale. Violinist David Abel, who had premiered it and later toured in to Russia with great success, remarked, “I could never interest other violinists in playing it. I have no idea why.”
            But there was no such inhibition by Dresher Ensemble violinist Karen Bentley Pollick, who paired neatly with New York pianist Lisa Moore, though Pollick’s flow would have benefited greatly were she not glued to the score. 
            A more characteristic Dresher emerged in a “Chorale Plus Two” excerpt from 1997, a violin concerto with all the accompaniment coming from electronic instruments such as keyboard, “marimba lumina” (which can produce a wide variety of sounds in response to taps of the sticks) and electric guitar. Here too supremely lyrical sounds emerged in the violin. 
            There’s also a semi-improvised Dresher in “Glimpsed from Afar” (2006), a duet for that marimba and a Quadrachord---a 14-foot-long electric bass that can further set up sound loops continuing well after activation. Dresher plucked and bowed the instrument, and collaborator Joel Davel eventually came over for spirited dual “drumming” on the strings. The sounds were varied---now, horses’ hooves clacking on cobblestone streets, now organ sounds in church, now a metal foundry. The two played up a storm, though the duo admitted that it never comes out the same twice.
            New York composer Martin Bresnick, formerly a Stanford grad student, brought out “Bird as Prophet” (1999), a heavily accented piece with the piano dominating the violin. Going far afield from the Schumann music of the same name, Bresnick still provided fresh new sounds with old instruments---no mean feat.
            Sam Adams of Berkeley, and now New York, gave us a toccata of austerity in the solo piano opus “Piano Step” (2009), where each of the hands ranging wide over the keyboard was envisaged as a dancer, with repeated comings-together and separations.
             Paul Dresher Ensemble, an electro-acoustic septet. Next: Nov. 12-13. For info: (415) 558-9540.

        ©Paul Hertelendy 2010
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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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