White Granite (2010)

Tower’s White Granite lasted 17 minutes but seemed to go by in a flash. She has a gift for keeping listeners on the edge of their seat. Her engrossing dramatic gestures are like small adventures around every corner. The piano part, played by André-Michel Schub, is brilliant. The others in the ensemble were violinist Margaret Batjer, violist Paul Neubauer and Roman.

Tower’s White Granite, however, made the strongest impression, exploiting elements that could be described as simply as melodies going up and going down, and passages of unrelenting harshness juxtaposed with those of aching softness.

For her new Piano Quartet, Joan Tower chose the name White Granite, an apt description of the dense, chordal structures that majestically move through the 17-minute work, as well as a fitting tribute to her influential, minerologist father. Tower may have four decades of experience over young Shepherd — and the intricacy of her tightly layered instrumental lines demonstrated that proficiency — but her sound is every bit as fresh and invigorating.

I liked the way Tower used trills in the piano and violin — typically flashy, decorative melodic elements — as solid building blocks by sustaining them in long passages at high volume. Instead of using the four instruments to cover the widest possible span of pitch levels, she tended to compress them into a single, dense level, moving up or down together in parallel motion: solid and granite-like, but never plodding or impassive. Like her fellow American composer John Adams, Tower works with constantly shifting tonal and modal centers, a trait that avoids the predictability of traditional tonality as well as the unsettling quality of atonality.

Trained as a pianist, it is not surprising that she gave the keyboard the integrating and grounding role in the ensemble, executed Friday by André-Michel Schub with depth and authoirity. Cellist Joshua Roman gave his solos improvisational flare and a suitably warm color, while violinist Margaret Batjer and violist Paul Neubauer added a shimmer that suggested light glinting on the granite surface. White Granite received its world premiere last summer at St. Timothy’s Summer Music Festival in rural Montana, one of the three festivals including La Jolla SummerFest that commissioned this work.