Word: bavicchi
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Friday evening's Paine Hall concert offered works by four student musicians currently enrolled in Walter Piston's composition seminar: Stephen Addiss '57, John Bavicchi 4G, John Crawford 2G, and Nicholas England 1G (the letter D was somehow overlooked). All the music was written, I understand, during the present academic year...
...precisely this problem of balance that tripped up Bavicchi in his Sonata No. 2 for 'Cello and Piano. When the 'cello was playing on the top string, all was well; but again and again the piano writing totally smothered the less penetrating middle strings. The scherzo was stylistically consistent; but the other three movements were episodic and eclectic, the slow movement even starting with homage to Bloch's 'cello rhapsody Schelomo. Bavicchi anchored the first movement on recurrences of a sustained 'cello note punctuated by sharp jabs on the piano, which functioned like the trombone theme in Sibelius' Seventh Symphony...
...Music Club concert ran the gamut from the ridiculous to the nearsublime. Along this scale were works by three B's--not the original trio of Bach, Beethoven and Berlioz (the last of whom a fourth B, Hans von Bulow, changed to Brahms), but a new group comprising John Bavicchi 4G, Bertram Baldwin '58 and David Behrman...
...Bavicchi's Sonata for violin and Piano (1956) received a well-nigh definitive performance at the hands of Ayrton Pinto and Jacqueline Young. The three movement work is admirably written from the stand point of idiomatic instrumental technique. But the outside movements, despite their fast tempo and apparent busyness, indulged in series of effects and cliches, with a resulting lack of cohesion; the finale seemed to be a chain of rousing stretta-like conclusions without a beginning or a middle. Slow movements are normally a major stumbling block for modern composers, even the established ones, but here Bavicchi had much...
Three Pieces for string quartet by John Bavicchi exemplify music in this state of transition. They contain measures of unrelated, ugly chords; plunks and scrapes that communicate little; and involved counterpoint that moves convulsively yet musically gets nowhere. Such passages appear to be willful "modernizing," a stubborn and out-dated refusal to compromises between method and expression. But Bavicchi does create some powerful climaxes. The second piece is touchingly lyrical, recalling the best of his songs. Here the treatment is still dissonant, but it is dissonance that grows logically from the melodic line, and our sensibilities have long ceased...