Chamber Music of David Conte, the latest CD from the longtime San Francisco Conservatory of Music faculty member, gay composer, and Composer-in-Residence for CappellaSF, exemplifies the best that classical music has to offer. It takes you on a compelling journey through shifting emotions and swelling currents. If, at the end of listening, you cannot summarize your experience in pithy sound-bites that fit neatly into a tweet or two, you nonetheless come away thoroughly sated by the beauty of the music.
The recording is also a family affair. The first piece, the first Sonata for Violincello & Piano (2010) that Conte has composed, is dedicated to a longtime San Francisco Opera Orchestra cellist, the prodigiously talented (could anyone possibly question that he's gay?) Emil Miland. Performing at his side is another Bay Area musical mainstay, pianist Miles Graber.
Conte's String Quartet No. 2 (2010), composed a mere 31 years after his first string quartet, was commissioned by the Bay Area's Ives Quartet, and recorded by another up-and-coming Bay Area ensemble, the Friction Quartet. The final work on the CD, Conte's Piano Trio (2011), finds Miland united with his fellow San Francisco Opera Orchestra member, violinist-concertmaster Kay Stern, and San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pianist-in-Residence Keisuke Nakagoshi.
For gay choruses across the country, Conte has composed 11 pieces since 1986, including an Elegy for Matthew (Sheppard) that was commissioned by the New York City Gay Men's Chorus and performed in Carnegie Hall. If there were ever a question that his specialty is vocal music, choral music, and opera, virtually every movement of his rare foray into the world of chamber music resounds with song. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his unabashedly romantic and lyrical Cello and Piano Sonata. The first movement opens with passages of unsettling chromaticism before transitioning into music of romantic seething. The second movement may include all 12 tones of the chromatic scale, but it's anything but forbidding. Passages filled with heart-tugging sadness and lyrical yearning predominate. With the sonata's third movement, modeled on the songs of Schubert and Schumann, Miland takes flight. His love for Conte's writing shines through his tonally effulgent playing.
"This music fits me like a glove," Miland told the B.A.R. by phone. "David lets the cello do everything the cello's best at." The lied (song) movement may sound intentionally "old-fashioned," but that's precisely the point. All of this makes the more modern-sounding, vigorous fourth movement a perfect ending for a piece from one musical soul brother to another.
Much too soon after the sonata ends (whoever engineered the CD forgot to count to five), String Quartet No. 2 begins. Again, the music alternates between rapid passages of excitement and slower, more mournful expression. Pain intensifies in the fourth movement, an elegy to one of Conte's friends, the late singer Ruth Knestrict Smith. Then it is banished in the final fugue, where the Friction Quartet bows away as though their very identity depended upon it.
"If you listen to the second movement of the Piano Trio, you'll discover how well the cello and violin phrase together," said Miland. "Kay and I didn't need to go over bowings. As two longtime colleagues, our sense of timing came naturally."
Perhaps that's what makes the aching tenderness and touching romanticism of the trio's middle movement so touching. Its quiet ending is simply gorgeous. As for the rest of the piece, hopefully you're sufficiently primed to want to find out for yourself.