In life, composer Ralph Shapey was the irascible sort, stubborn in his belief that music’s mandate was to stir the soul, and brutally dismissive of the superficial. Looking the part of an Old Testament prophet, he constantly railed against the cultural philistines. So exalted was his view of the purity of art that, for a stretch in the ’70s, he even banned performance of his works in protest of musical politics.
Yet he had a soft side, too, which became more pronounced with age. He was fiercely loyal to his friends and students, and generous with compositional advice. As the head of the Contemporary Chamber Players, which he founded in the mid-’60s shortly after the University of Chicago lured him from New York, he championed pieces from all ideological camps as long as they met his stringent standards.
To a large extent, his music reflected his personality: bold, impassioned, snarly, tender, ardently lyrical, contradictory in impulse yet conciliatory. Not everyone liked his music, (or, for that matter, him) but few would dispute its individuality, its conviction.
Shapey died in June after a long illness. Toward the end, as he frantically tried to finish his remaining commissions, he also was anticipating the memorial concert he knew would be mounted by friends and colleagues. He gave specific requests to Elsa Charlston, the soprano who was his wife and muse for the last 15 years. Those were fulfilled in a recital of four of his chamber works — barely scratching the surface of a prolific career — Tuesday night in Mandel Hall.
On hand were cellist Joel Krosnick and violinist Joel Smirnoff (of the Juilliard Quartet) as well as pianist Gilbert Kalish — Shapey’s longtime favorite players. The program alternated between music and eulogies from a protege (U. of C. professor Shulamit Ran), an institutional representative (U. of C. president Don Randel), a close friend (theologian Martin Marty) and a critic (Tim Page of The Washington Post).
The pieces were presented in chronological order, with the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1954) and “Songs of Life” (1988) framing the Duo-Variations for Violin and Cello and the Krolish Sonata (written for Krosnick and Kalish), both from 1985. An early example of his mature style — pungent and expressive — the cello sonata is filled with rapturous outpouring and dramatic clashing chords in a montage of passion and defiance. The Krolish Sonata three decades later is more coherent and nuanced.
The Duo-Variations starts out forlornly then becomes cantankerous and finally sweetly rhapsodic. “Songs of Life,” surely a work for the ages, is an incandescent celebration of life and art with all its anguish and ecstasy. Soprano Carol Meyer sang with feeling, defiantly hanging on the last word “Eternity” as Shapey would have wanted it.