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Honoring the legacy of a brilliant musician

By JOHN FLEMING
Published February 17, 2006

The legacy of Robert Helps, composer, pianist and teacher, has been explored in all its richness and complexity this week during the first composition competition and festival in his name. In concerts, Helps' music was juxtaposed with works by composers he adored, ranging from the pastoral lyricism of John Ireland to the spiky modernity of Roger Sessions.

In panel discussions and lectures, experts pondered Helps' ultimate place in the musical pantheon: Was he a genius? An iconoclast? A maverick? The missing link between atonal serialism and the "New Romanticism"? A case was made for all of the above.

And an exciting work was unveiled, a piano trio by the first Robert Helps Prize winner, Cheryl Frances-Hoad.

Most events took place at the University of South Florida in Tampa, where Helps was on the music faculty for more than 20 years until his death at 73 in 2001. Many of the performers in a concert Tuesday in the school's Music Recital Hall had been his colleagues, and they brought an uncanny sense of understanding and fondness to a program that amounted to a multifacted musical portrait of Helps and his influences.

Fittingly, sitting onstage were a couple of Teddy bears, just as in the popular Valentine's Day concerts by students that Helps organized.

One highlight was a remarkably lucid, muscular reading of Sessions' challenging Six Pieces for Violincello by Scott Kluksdahl, a friend of Helps' and the festival chairman. Pianist Svetozar Ivanov demonstrated sensitive feel for the subtle Helps style in Piano Trio No. 2. The program's other pianist, Naomi Niskala, is an excellent player, but her performance of Three Hommages seemed too literal, missing the soulfulness and even whimsicality that exist amid the virtuosity.

Frances-Hoad, an Englishwoman born in 1980, won the $10,000 prize with My Fleeting Angel, inspired by a Sylvia Plath story. In three movements, played without pause and running less than nine minutes, it received a bravura performance from Niskala, Kluksdahl and violinist Carolyn Stuart. Frances-Hoad, who was in residence at USF for a lecture and master class and the concerts, is clearly a young composer with a bright future.

Her trio combines sturdy, compact craft with dashing flamboyance. There are keening harmonies in the strings, a romantic violin solo, a delicious off-kilter waltz, a nimble piano part and a surprisingly large sound at times, all propelled by relentless rhythmic drive. Helps would have loved it.

Frances-Hoad's trio and the rest of Tuesday's program will be repeated Saturday by the same musicians at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City.

The crowning achievement of Helps' career was his Symphony No. 2, premiered by the Florida Orchestra in 2000, not long before the composer's decline from cancer. On Wednesday at the Palladium Theater in St. Petersburg, this harrowing, death-haunted yet strangely buoyant work was given an unforgettable performance by the USF Symphony Orchestra, conducted by William Wiedrich, one of Helps' friends and a great champion of his music.

[Last modified February 17, 2006, 02:15:35]