SFCMF Commissions - Helen Grime

Hats off to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival for commissioning so much chamber music each year! Many thanks to artistic director Marc Neikrug, executive director Steven Ovitsky and the Festival's donors that make it possible. I was privileged to hear three of this summer's commisions.

Helen Grime is a 31 year old British composer who was commissioned by the SFCMF at age 29. In the pre-concert lecture Marc commented at length about her being a young composer. And, she is....young....likely with a bright future. Her piece, premiered opening night, was immature and not of the stature of most of the festival's commissions. In the pre-concert lecture she discussed the somewhat programmatic nature of Snow and Snow for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, but I did not hear it in the piece. What I did hear was a throw-back to the academic compositions we all suffered through in the 1970s, which is often the case with the SFCMF commissions. This is not "new music", it is 40 years old, and has been done over and over. Stick a fork in it, it's done! No, I am not a new-music-phobe, in fact, I have commissioned new music. Rather, I prefer not to hear a rehash of the 70s academics: cellos and woodwinds doing triplet plunks and burps, broken up by violins sliding on the finger board, veeeeeerrrrrhhhhhttt. How many times can one listen to that? It has no content, no meaning, and deconstructionism just doesn't make good music. Within that genre, Snow and Snow did not have the maturity, development and structure of many of the Festival's commissions. Headliner clarinetist, Todd Levy, did a fine performance.