REVIEW: PATRICK NEHER AND COMPANY/ARIZONA BASS PLAYERS FESTIVAL

posted by James Reel

    UA professor Patrick Neher opened his Arizona Bass Players Festival with the impish sort of concert that often ends festivals and summer music camps. It was so full of little musical pranks that you couldn’t help wondering if the one ostensibly and seemingly serious work on the program was just an example of Neher taking advantage of our credulity.
    The festival is a series of master classes, workshops and concerts for bass players of all inclinations, but it’s a safe bet that few of these specialists were familiar with the composer Luigi Negri (1837-1891). Neher strode onto stage in a billowing black 19th-century cloak and hat, and even when he tossed those off he was still costumed: He wore a bushy gray wig and mustache, and addressed the audience in a garlicky Italian accent, playing the part of composer-bassist Negri, now long dead. Assuming, that is, that he ever lived. I’ve found no biographical entries for Luigi Negri in the standard sources, no recordings of his music, nothing on him in the University of Arizona or Library of Congress online catalogs. I would strongly suspect that Negri is, in reality, Patrick Neher, if it weren’t for the fact that Neher’s two Negri offerings so precisely adhere to the style of 19th-century Italian performer-composers.
    Neher and pianist June Chow-Tyne opened the program with Negri’s Capriccio on Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore and Reminiscence of Rossini’s Stabat Mater. Both works alternate Italianate lyricism with shameless virtuosic display, including several long passages of harmonics, especially in the Donizetti-inspired work. It’s not the sort of thing we can take very seriously anymore, and Neher happily hammed it up with some Gary Karr-style visual shtick and a few schmaltzy little slides. In the beginning of the concert, Neher’s notes were not always dead-center—a problem endemic to the bass, where the notes are distressingly far apart—but he seemed most accurate in the tough passages that sent his left hand hurtling up and down the fingerboard.
    Next came a composition that Neher did claim as his own, the engaging Antiphonal Dance for eight double basses. It begins with a pizzicato line that sweeps from one end of the ensemble to the other and back, and proceeds with strong, syncopated rhythms that propel the music back and forth across the stage. This is, above all, a tricky act of timing and coordination, accomoplished with confidence by Neher and students Noel DaSalla, Robbie Matheson, Joe Schumacher, Ethan Sobotta, Jason Roederer, Megan Simpson and Georgia Taylor.
    DaSalla and Matheson remained on stage with Neher and were joined by Humberto Colón-Rivera for a parodic work by Daryl Runswick, Suite and Low. The first movement, “Nursery Grind,” manhandles “Pop Goes the Weasel”; the second, “Strauss in the Doghouse,” is a cheeky medley of bits of the “Blue Danube” waltz, the “Radetzky” March, “Die Fledermaus” and other pieces; “American Basses” conjures up Warner Bros. cartoon composer Carl Stalling having his way with the likes of “Dixie” and “Camptown Races.” Runswick tosses in some passages of extended technique for comic effect, but he’s quite serious about maintaining clear lines by, for the most part, keeping each instrument in a particular range, as if he were writing for the voices of a conventional string quartet. Neher and company gave it all a crisp, together performance.
    Neher’s particular interest has long been improvisation and theater, which showed up in the hour-long concert’s final item, Juste Melodie et Plus. With the stage lights dimmed, Neher played a broad, American-sounding theme of his own devising, then fragmented it into brief successive utterances, some only tangentially related to the opening material. As he improvised this music, Adrienne Alexander slowly approached the stage and took her place amid an array of electronic equipment. She began to enhance the sonic texture first with what seemed to be heavily manipulated delays of elements of Neher’s playing, and then with fresh input. The sound thickened and grew more dissonant, climaxing with Neher diving into a whole catalog of pizzicato and bowing techniques and slapping the body of his instrument. It all subsided into what sounded vaguely like Bruch’s Kol Nidre, which evolved into a somewhat Middle Eastern melody, perhaps an homage to Neher’s teacher François Rabbath, who is participating in the festival.
    This certainly seemed like a serious work, but considering what Neher had been up to earlier in the program, perhaps he was partly mocking our intellectual pretensions. At any rate, ambiguity is not a bad thing, and there are plenty of more straightforward performances to come from bassists Rabbath, John Clayton, Brian Bromberg and Kristin Korb as the Arizona Bass Players Festival continues through Oct. 9.