Jaqueline FitzGibbon, Michael Garson Team Up for Stimulating Oboe-and-Piano Miniatures at St. Paul's Cathedral November 2

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon (Saturday, November 2) I went to a live concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral featuring Jacqueline FitzGibbon on oboe and both alto and soprano recorders and Michael Gorman on piano. The program consisted of 15 “miniature” pieces by a wide range of composers, including Béla Bartók, Henry Cowell, Leos Janáček, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Darius Milhaud, Maurice Ravel, Ennio Morricone, Ernesto Júlio de Nazareth, and Astor Piazzola. There were also pieces by lesser-known names like James Oswald (1710-1769), Madeleine Dring (1923-1977), Alan Richardson (1904-1978), and the one still-living composer represented, Sofiane Pamart (b. 1990). Sofiane Pamart is a young man living in France, and he’s perhaps best known for his dramatic appearance in the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, in which he was on a barge floating down the Seine River playing a piano that looked like it was being engulfed in flames. Pamart has also worked on rap and techno records, though the piece of his played last night, “Medellín” (after the city in Colombia that was home to at least one of the most deadly drug cartels in the world? Inquiring minds want to know!), was a quiet little concert waltz. The performers grouped the pieces they played in blocks of three (five songs in the first block, six in the second and four in the third), and asked the audience not to applaud until the end of each group. That discomfited many people there and caused a lot of fidgeting in the audience after each selection, though the audience broke protocol only once: after the first piece in group three, “Medellín,” which (like three other pieces on the program) Gorman played as a piano solo. FitzGibbon gave announcements only between the groups, which I liked (I still rather like it when performers at St. Paul’s and elsewhere go old-school and don’t say anything to the audience at all, letting the music speak for itself and relying on the printed programs to let us know what they’re playing), and Gorman was allowed to announce the pieces he played without FitzGibbon.

During the announcement of the last group, FitzGibbon said, “The last piece on the program is Piazzolla’s ‘Oblivion,’ and I hope it’s not indicative of the results of next Tuesday’s election.” That set off a groan from the audience; while I doubt there were very many Donald Trump supporters there, I suspect most of us wanted a quiet, pleasant evening away from politics! The concert began with a piece FitzGibbon played on solo alto recorder, “What Shall I Do to Shew [sic] Her That I Love Her?” by James Oswald, who was primarily a music publisher in London but did some composition as well and based this one on a folk song of the time. Then there was “The Watermill” by Ronald Binge, played by FitzGibbon on oboe and Gorman on piano. After that there was a piece called “First Irish Legend: The Tides of Manaunaun” by American composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965) for solo piano. Gorman explained that Cowell was famous for his use of “tone clusters,” a term I have only vague memories of hearing before, but once he began the piece it became clear that it meant banging a lot of keys on the piano at once and pressing all the way down on the sustaining pedal to get a wealth of overtones. I remember doing the same sort of thing myself when I’d toy with my father’s upright piano as a kid! Then FitzGibbon played two pieces by Madeleine Dring on alto recorder with Gorman’s accompaniment, “Elizabethan Dance” and “Cake Walk.” Dring came from a family of musicians and seems not to have been taken seriously enough because she was a woman (not that old story again!), and the pieces were pleasant fluff and “Cake Walk” showed a bit of jazz, not surprisingly given the title. The last piece on the first group was “Roundelay” by Alan Richardson, played on oboe and piano, which was also the combination for the first piece in the second group, Bartók’s “An Evening in the Village.”

Then Gorman played two piano solos by Janáček, “A Blown-Away Leaf” and “Good Night.” I’m a big fan of Janáček’s orchestral music, especially vocal works like the Glagolithic Mass and instrumental pieces like the Sinfonietta, and I like his piano works too but not as much. Afterwards FitzGibbon and Gorman reunited for a beautiful version of Marietta’s big aria from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt (“City of the Dead”), about a young man visiting the city of Bruges, Belgium where he sees either the ghost of his dead girlfriend or a living woman who looks astonishingly like her, he isn’t sure which. Then FitzGibbon took up the soprano recorder for a couple of French pieces, Milhaud’s “Exercise Musical” and Poulenc’s “Villanelle,” which she explained were published by a French company seeking to put out relatively easy short pieces for amateurs. The second group closed with Ravel’s amazing “Pièce en forme de Habañera.” The third group opened with Gorman’s quite lovely performance of Pamart’s “Medellín” waltz and then reunited him and FitzGibbon for “Gabriel’s Oboe” from Ennio Morricone’s score for the 1986 film The Mission. The Mission is set in the 18th century and is about a battle between the Spaniards and the Portuguese for control of the land of the Guaraní Natives in Paraguay, and Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons), a priest sent by the Spaniards to convert the Guaraní to Christianity. In an early scene, Father Gabriel narrowly avoids being lynched by the Guaraní when he plays his oboe for them; one of the Guaraní breaks the oboe in half, but at least the tribe spares his life.

“Gabriel’s Oboe” is the cue Morricone wrote for this scene, and FitzGibbon had so much reed trouble (throughout the concert, actually, but especially in this piece) she actually stopped and started it again from the beginning, after making a few squeak-like noises with the reed to clean it out. She even joked that she’d imported the very same reed the original Father Gabriel had used. The last two pieces were Nazareth’s “Confidensias,” played as a piano solo very much in the same vein as Scott Joplin’s quieter pieces like “Solace,” and Astor Piazzolla’s “Oblivion.” I first encountered “Oblivion” quite recently as part of a two-CD package I was reviewing for Fanfare magazine, Horn Trios from Mozart to Piazzolla and Beyond, Volume 1, in which I called it “surprisingly delicate” and also compared it to Joplin’s “Solace.” I quite liked the concert despite the quirky intonation problems that beset FitzGibbon through much of the evening, which I suspect were due more to the limitations of the oboe as an instrument than any fault in her playing. (She certainly had no intonation problems when she was playing her recorders!) The oboe is a peculiar sort of reed instrument in which the player must put the reed directly into their mouth without a mouthpiece in place, the way clarinet and saxophone reeds are held, and throughout the concert (I was sitting in the front row) I could see FitzGibbon moistening the reed – essentially licking it – in order to get it loose enough to sound. All too much of the concert reminded me of Danny Kaye’s famous jibe that the oboe is “an ill wind that no one blows good,” and while that’s very much unfair to FitzGibbon’s musicianship, it is an indication of the limits of her instrument and may be more true when the oboe is heard on its own than when it has a full orchestra to cover for it.