On the July 14 afternoon of Joan Tower’s world premiere, the composer let her dry-as-the-Eastern-Oregon-desert humor roll. “Well I’m still alive,” she said, greeting the audience in her unpretentious way at University of Portland’s acoustically attuned Lincoln Performance Hall. Tower is a bit more than a month shy of 86 years old, and this “Incandescence” concert, repeated July 15 at Kaul Auditorium, marked her 11th appearance at Chamber Music Northwest. CMNW shared her premiere’s commission with the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival and Emerald City Music.

Tower and her energetic music have exerted a substantial influence on many American musicians, both in the composing and performing fields. Everyone I’ve interviewed whom she has worked or played with admires her. She is an accomplished pianist, and her sense of humor lifts her over bumps or insecurities that she encounters. “I’m glad my piece wasn’t programmed after Bartók’s and Beethoven’s,” she said. “It would have been like old lettuce, you know.”

Tower’s 20-minute To Sing or Dance was the first on the program to be performed.

The many-textured “conversation” between violin and percussion was anything but droopy and outdated. It was among the freshest CMNW pieces this season, and even Tower wasn’t sure of that until she heard the musicians play it. In rehearsal she came to appreciate her composition, make changes, and allowed her collaborating  musicians to do the same.

Masterful violinist Soovin Kim–who doubles as the CMNW co-artistic director with his wife, pianist Gloria Chien–played the piece with the exciting Sandbox Percussion. Its four musicians (Ian Rosenbaum, Terry Sweeney, Jonny Allen and Victor Caccese) had been performing John Luther Adams’ world premiere, Prophecies of Fire, a few days before in Eugene and in Portland, and that was one demanding piece of music. But their energy, like Tower’s and Kim’s, never flagged that afternoon. 

Tower’s piece was a back-and-forth dialog between “song” (the violin) and “dance” (the percussion).  Many times the percussion sang — it was not always insisting on domination — and other times, the violin was in step with the percussion’s dance.

Tower grew up in Bolivia, South America, and she often makes room for bold percussion in her work. She used a few traditional Latin percussive elements such as timbales, bongos and shakers. She incorporated Tibetan singing bowls, traditional mallet percussion instruments, high-pitched piccolo wood blocks, violin bows that massaged other instruments.

When the piece joyously and precisely concluded, hugs erupted onstage among the musicians and Tower. Most everyone was ecstatic, including the audience.

Chien, an extraordinarily sensitive and talented pianist herself, mentioned that “Joan said the highest compliment she could give to any performer is —`You make me like my piece!’ and that was what she said of Sandbox and Soovin. From the first moment they met, it was a love fest! So much mutual respect and so much laughter. The Sandbox guys were in awe of her, and she could not have been more thrilled with them and Soovin. Joan worked with them for three hours straight on the Friday before the first Sunday performance, and kept making edits up until the morning of the second performance.”

One crazed dance after another

Chien and Kim played the final two pieces, Hungarian Bela Bartok’s Violin Sonata No. 2 SZ. 76 and Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No.9 in A Major, Op. 47 (“Kreutzer”). Kim called the red-hot pieces “two of the most thrilling sonatas” in the Western repertoire.

Could it be (tongue-in-cheek) that the two-movement 20-minute Bartók piece that drew on esoteric 12-tone compositional elements was the “old lettuce?” Played by violinist Kim with Chien on piano, the Bartók was a difficult piece to grasp on intellectual and emotional levels – other than its intensity – for some of us, but it was tribute to Kim’s and Chien’s virtuosity. Even Bartók said that only the very best violinists could find their way through this sonata. And Chien, a phenomenally tuned-in pianist, can play with anyone and make them sound even better, including her uber-gifted and polished violinist husband. The piece was executed beautifully, no argument.

Kim explained in an email, “In just about 20 minutes, Bartók takes us through so many worlds, mostly dark, with some beauty trying to peek its head out. It opens with a beautiful folk-ish melody that reappears throughout the first movement to give the journey some structural points. The mystery and suspense of the first movement gives way to a devilish second movement, where there is very little mystery or suspense and is instead a whirlwind of one crazed dance after another. It builds in speed and intensity beyond belief until it all comes crashing down at the end.”

For me, the piece was more out of reach than 28-year-old Kyle Rivera’s CMNW world premiere on July 17 at The Old Church, titled Grimoire I: Laplace’s Demon. Rivera’s strings, piano and percussion composition was built on obscure mathematical formulas that even Kim admitted not understanding. Kim obviously understood the difficult Bartók sonata and left the rest of us behind, or some of us not well schooled in Bartók’s charms. Some listeners love Bartók for his contrasting and exotic textures, for his folk-song references, for his collage-like originality, but this piece left me in the dark. Not that intellectual understanding has to matter when listening to music. As one patron said when I asked him why he liked the Bartók piece, “I can’t explain.” He just liked it. 

Now for another point of view, a far more informed one than mine, listen to violinist Kim:

Nobody has to like Bartók! But I am fascinated by Bartók. He is without a doubt a hugely skilled and important composer, among the most influential in the 20th century. His devotion to preserving folk music and incorporating it into his own personal musical language inspired a century of composers and musicologists, and this is evident everywhere around us today with the fusion of pop music elements and larger classical structures.

I consider Bartók to be the Beethoven of the 20th century: the energetic precision of rhythm; the development and invention of instrumental sounds for the orchestra, piano, and string quartet; the structures that he builds on tiny simple motifs. Similar to Beethoven’s music, it is extremely difficult to play, and that is why most of the world has not been able to do his music justice until more recently. I recommend listening to Bartók’s own recordings of his piano pieces on youtube. They are truly wondrous and moving.

Chien and Kim then joined on the “Kreutzer,” the 35-minute familiar and fiery Beethoven sonata. I figured the couple had played it time and time again, as if it were part of their DNA. But no, they’d never performed it together, Chien said, though they’d played it with other artists. Shows what skilled and brilliant musicians the two are.

The sonata is known for many things, aside from its nickname. That story: Beethoven was angry at the violinist George Bridgewater over a romantic liaison. Bridgewater premiered the piece with him, but because of Beethoven’s temper tantrum (or hurt feelings), Beethoven withdrew his dedication and “re-dedicated” it to French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, a distant colleague, whose name we now know it by.

Besides that renaming spat, the sonata is famous for its intensity, its catapulting of the violin solo into another realm, its rule-breaking melodies, its full range of dynamics and velocity, its many moods. 

Beethoven’s piano works were highlighted the fourth week of the festival, and CMNW is determined to educate us with challenging pieces. On July 18, CMNW protege Chloe Jiyeong Mun, played Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-Flat Major, Op. 106, known as the “Hammerklavier,” at the Reser. It was 40 minutes long and her first time performing it in a concert setting – by memory, no less. Mun, 28, in 2014 won the Geneva International Music Competition, a highly prestigious honor. Though she is a protege artist at CMNW’s festival this summer, she appears to be well on her way to the big time, as humble a performer as she is.

Even if you’re not a Beethoven aficionado, or you overdosed on his work in the past few weeks at CMNW, you experienced excellent musicians playing his ground-breaking compositions. Even better, there was Tower’s piece to love, and for Bartók fans, his violin and piano sonata, which some of us perhaps will learn to appreciate.