Jaime Robles is a writer and reviewer. Over the past 10 years she has worked as a librettist for composer Peter Josheff. Their work has been performed by Earplay, Harvest of Song, and as part of Goat Hall productions, StageMedia productions, and the American Composers Forum Salon. She grew up as one of those tiny girls in pink tights and black leotard, and has loved music and dance ever since.
Leon Fleisher is celebrating his 80th birthday with a busy round of activities in his native San Francisco and elsewhere, including concerts with the S.F. Symphony on Oct. 16 and 18 (Davies Symphony Hall) and Oct. 17 (Flint Center, Cupertino), and a 10 a.m. master class at the S.F. Conservatory of Music on Oct. 20. (Tickets are $15-$20.)
Also, Sony BMG Masterworks has signed the pianist to a recording deal, and early next year it will release his first two-hand piano concerto recording in 40 years — a trio of Mozart concertos recorded with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. Fleisher’s career, which began at age 8, was interrupted for decades by focal dystonia, which weakened his right hand so he could perform only works written for the left hand. Having regained use of both hands in recent years, he is playing Mozart concertos on a national tour and recording the No. 23 in A Major, K. 488; No. 12 in A Major; K. 414; and Concerto No. 7 in F Major for two pianos, K. 242, for which he is joined by his wife, Katherine Jacobson-Fleisher.
Fleisher’s Mozart concert tour continues in Detroit, Syracuse (NY), London, Baltimore, New York, Singapore, and Sacramento, but locally, he changed from the planned Concerto No. 23 to the Beethoven Concerto No. 5 (”Emperor”). The San Francisco and Cupertino concerts are conducted by Marek Janowski, and include the Schumann Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61.
A fertile ground for child prodigies, San Francisco has also served as the venue for debuts by Yehudi Menuhin (at age 7) and Isaac Stern (11). A year after his debut, Fleisher began studying with Artur Schnabel, and then made his Carnegie Hall debut (1944), playing with Pierre Monteux and the New York Philharmonic. Over the next two decades, he performed around the world and garnered numerous honors, including first prize at the Queen Elisabeth Piano Competition in Belgium in 1952. Fleisher was signed to Columbia Masterworks in 1954, created a catalog and, in retrospect, in doing so he documented history. Schnabel left a musical imprint on Fleisher’s interpretation of classic works. Masterworks recently issued six of his earliest recordings from the treasured decade of Fleisher’s career between 1954 and 1963.
Leon Fleisher (standing, left) at last year’s Kennedy Center awards program, with fellow honorees Diana Ross, and Brian Wilson; (sitting) Steve Martin and Martin Scorsese
Free chamber-music concerts can be found here and there (for example, see the SFSU item below), but the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music is offering a unique event on Sunday: a seven-hour marathon by some of the Bay Area’s outstanding musicians in Temple Emanu-El, Lake at Arguello.
The Chamber Music Day begins at 3 p.m. with the Allison Lovejoy (piano) and Dave Scott (trumpet) Duo and concludes at 10 p.m., with the Lee Trio. The “Live + Free” event will feature the Left Coast Ensemble, the Del Sol and Cypress String Quartets, soprano Heidi Melton, and others.
Sponsors include Congregation Emanu-El, Greenerprinter.com, New Leaf Paper, Sutros.com, Your Daily Staple, and Zellerbach Family Foundation.
Heidi Melton
SFSU’s free series of chamber music concerts opens its 56th season on Oct. 19, with Quartet New Generation. The 3 p.m. Sunday concerts in the school’s McKenna Theater continue with:
Cuarteto Latinoamericano
Thursday’s fifth (and penultimate) performance of the San Francisco Opera production of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt was a triumph in many ways. Let me count the ways, beginning with something reporters don’t usually consider: the audience.
On this umpteenth day of the dissolving economy, mentioned in the libretto with the aside “The party is over,” precious few of the War Memorial’s 3,252 red plush seats remained unoccupied. A nearly full house, even if many of the $235 orchestra seats were taken up by rush customers at $30 a pop, is truly remarkable, especially for an obscure opera shown here for the first time in its 88-year history.
Not only did people pack the house, this was an outstanding audience: quiet, attentive, and responding with enthusiasm. Other than whatever problems you might have had in your location, the only disappointment was the too-quick applause at the final curtain. Surely, that utterly glorious finale deserves a few seconds of silence. Still, the applause was big and growing, coming equally from newbies, repeaters, and even the echt-Viennese George Cleve for whom this is music coursing through his veins.
Cleve’s colleague in the pit, Donald Runnicles, once again conducted a magnificent performance, overcoming the heroic singers only a few times, letting the poor, overworked musicians of the orchestra engage in delirium seldom heard when Wagner’s name is not on the marquee. Both the volume and the orgiastic nature of the music are reminiscent of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, and wouldn’t it be great to have a staged production of it in San Francisco for all Korngold-widows in the making following Sunday’s last performance?
Thursday’s was the performance to capture for the certain radio broadcast and possible video presentations of the future; I trust David Gockley’s Koret Media Suite was on duty when Torsten Kerl sang a definitive Paul, Emily Magee’s Marie/Marietta was a superlative Brünnhilde-Butterfly, and young Lucas Meachem provided a mature, superbly musical Frank/Fritz.
The production itself — Willy Decker’s, in Meisje Hummel’s revival — now works smoothly, effectively, running the gamut from gripping representations of nightmares to the utterly simple and exactly right conclusion of Paul walking out into light and life, from the dark, suffocating room of the “Dead City.”
Bye-bye, Dead City
Unaccustomed as he appears to be to public speaking, the great pianist Emanuel Ax was struggling Friday night at Davies Symphony Hall to say something that makes sense, and even if he didn’t quite make it, getting there was more than half the fun.
Searching for words to describe the Szymanowski Symphonie Concertante for Piano and Orchestra he was about to perform, Ax came upon the idea that the timpani, “no timpano,” has an important role in the piece. Realizing that he was wrong (there are actually five timpanists involved, with twice the number of instruments), he corrected himself, but the conductor, Peter Oundjian — normally a fine speaker — picked up on the singular/plural bit and suggested, helpfully (and awkwardly), that it’s like having a “spaghetto.”
To which Ax responded that with his diet, it has to be “Spaghetti-ohs” and started pondering the plural, but Oundjian — to his credit — changed the subject. I am not making this up, you know, a truly bizarre low point in the history of the S.F. Symphony’s fine “6.5″ series, Friday concerts that start at 6:30 p.m. and include, supposedly, substantial introductions to the music.
MTT, James Conlon, David Robertson, and others have made these events entertaining and educational. Ax tried to improvise and he fell flat (or worse). It’s a good thing that once seated, he performed superbly; see Jeff Dunn’s review in this edition.
Incidentally, at the concert, I suddenly heard — loud and clear — the main theme of “There’s a Place for Us” in full, from West Side Story, near the end of the Strauss. It would be interesting to find the chronology of Bernstein conducting the Strauss and writing the WSS score. Not that I am suspecting anything …
A comment on the Szymanowski from friend and reader Charlie Cockey in Brno:
Szymanowski often commented on the fact that he wasn’t a virtuoso pianist, and thus that much of what he wrote he played isn’t virtuosic. The truth is that Szymanowski wasn’t a half-bad player. And his music is now easy to play. This still doesn’t make it “virtuoso music” in the manner of Liszt or Strauss, or even, harking back to earlier times, much of Schumann (who is also incredibly pianistic, but his virtuoso stuff is damned difficult).
I have both some of his early work — such as Preludes and Etudes and Theme with Variations, of which at least one variation I cannot play at all — and some of his later, more harmonically spiky stuff, in particular his magnificent Mazurkas: They are just great, and by and large quite approachable, if you’re willing to put in the time on getting the thorns smoothed out.
Karol Szymanowski
Not every music lover is a fan of Pierre Boulez, but it’s hard to imagine anyone involved in music whose interest would not be piqued by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players’ upcoming “Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation” program about Boulez’ Le Marteau sans maître (The hammer without a master). David Milnes will lead the discussion and performance of the early Boulez work (first performed in 1955, when he was 30) of “total serialist technique” with its highly unusual orchestration.
Set to the surrealist poetry of René Char, the work is written for an alto (SFCMP is using mezzo Janna Baty), flute, three percussions, viola, and guitar. Even the venue is unusual: the Presidio Interfaith Chapel, a 1930s successor to the Spanish Presidio’s 1776 chapel. The event is scheduled for Sunday, Dec. 7 at 4:30 p.m. Admission is free, though a $10 donation is suggested.
The work will also be presented the next night (Dec. 8) at the Yerba Buena Center as part of the Contemporary Music Players’ “Furious Craft” concert. The program also includes works by Luca Francesconi, Kaija Saariaho, and Zhou Long.
SFCMP’s next concert “American Mosaic” is on Nov. 3 at Herbst Theatre. The program: Elliott Carter’s Luimen (Moods) (1997); Reynold Tharp’s Littoral (2006), with Julie Steinberg, piano; Dmitri Tymoczko’s Four Dreams (2006); Lei Liang’s Trio (2002); Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms 12 (2006), with Carey Bell, clarinet; and Mario Diaz de León’s 8.8.06 (2006).
Presidio Interfaith Chapel
Everything, if the hula in question is from Na Lei Hulu — full name: Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu, or “the many-feathered wreaths at the summit, held in high esteem.” No kidding.
As we have often stated, Patrick Makuakane’s performing organization is an extraordinary group of singers and dancers; their productions combine the best of folklore and Broadway shows. Even according to the dictionary definition of classical music — “Traditional genre of music conforming to an established form and appealing to critical interest and developed musical taste” — Na Lei Hulu belongs here.
So, the news about the troupe’s show this year: It’s about the legendary navigator Maui, after whom the island is named. As usual, the show features a range of Hawaiian traditions, folklores, and personalities through hula mua, which combines traditional hula movements to non-Hawaiian music, as well as hula kahiko, the traditional pre-Western style of Hawaiian dance.
The place is the Palace of Fine Arts, shows are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., on Sunday at noon there is a one-hour “kid-friendly” version (with $10 admission) before the last show at 3 p.m. on Sunday.
Lola Tortolero, of Na Lei Hulu
Photo by Julie Mau
One includes a bit of revisionist history of the San Francisco Opera’s intendancy: That would be John Rockwell, who says that current General Director David Gockley — “an odd duck, weirdly recessive in person, a curious mixture of bravery and conservative timidity…” — came up with the Stewart Wallace-Amy Tan The Bonesetter’s Daughter that Rockwell “wound up liking a lot more than I thought I would.”
That faint praise is coupled with another round of praise for “old and dear friend” Pamela Rosenberg, Gockley’s predecessor. And once again, Rockwell’s admiration for “her abbreviated tenure” passes over silently the issue of Rosenberg’s virtual bankruptcy of the company. The Fiscal Year 2003 budget was expected to include a $9.2 million shortfall, which was eventually plugged by raiding the Opera’s endowment and a big donation from a fan. But evidence is now emerging that the potential deficit might have been twice that figure, bringing the company to the threshold of a temporary shutdown. That and today’s contrasting fiscal stability don’t get much “ink” from New York and Los Angeles observers.
John Rockwell
The other retrospect of Bonesetter comes from Anthony Tomassini’s Sunday column in The New York Times about new operas in general, in which he expresses the same kind of reluctant negativity I have experienced about Bonesetter all along:
This project was emblematic of a more elusive, frustrating pitfall: that in the search for profundity, otherwise skillful creators may succumb to the temptation of milking music for its nonverbal, elemental power, rather than heeding the specifics of good storytelling. The resulting opera, with music by Stewart Wallace and a libretto by Tan, too often listed into abstract episodes of musical and dramatic vacuity.
The Bonesetter’s Daughter was all the more disappointing because there were engrossing aspects to the work. Here was a worthy project based on an intriguing novel, involving an immense effort from the creative team, full of good intentions and talented artists.
Wallace, whose best known previous opera is Harvey Milk, is a capable and professional composer, though rather derivative. Slipping into a common trap for the creators of new operas, he, Tan and the director Chen Shi-Zheng overly mythologize this richly detailed story about three generations of Chinese women, producing long, hazy, and hokey scenes.
From my reading of a book by the music critic Ken Smith about the making of The Bonesetter’s Daughter, one warning sign came early in the creative process. After a nine-month campaign by Mr. Wallace to persuade Ms. Tan to adapt her novel for the stage, Mr. Smith writes, Mr. Wallace was convinced that “as far as personal themes and dramatic structure were concerned,” he and Ms. Tan “were already on the same page.” But there was one major problem: The composer “had no idea what the opera should sound like.”
San Francisco Ballet is performing at the New York City Center for a week, ending on Oct. 18. The company’s three mixed-repertory programs — most of it from the New Works Festival — mark the Ballet’s 75th season, which includes seven New York premieres.
Program A features George Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15 and the New York premieres of Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour and Yuri Possokhov’s Fusion. Program B has Helgi Tomasson’s Concerto Grosso and Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, as well as the New York premieres of Tomasson’s The Fifth Season and Mark Morris’ Joyride. Program C includes the New York premieres of Tomasson’s On a Theme of Paganini, Val Caniparoli’s Ibsen’s House, and Jorma Elo’s Double Evil.
From Joyride
If an often-played masterpiece is a warhorse, what is its opposite? I had just written about the benefits of unusual programming in the pastures of Arizona when, lo and behold, not one but three peacehorses galloped into the San Francisco Symphony’s Davies Hall, two of them bridled by überpianist Emanuel Ax, and a third paraded magnificently by guest conductor Peter Oundjian.
Emanuel Ax
The symphony didn’t entirely eschew the tried and true. No, a security blanket, Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute, began the concert. But next came Karol Szymanowski’s Symphonie Concertante, aka Symphony No. 4 for piano and orchestra. Szymanowski is the greatest Polish composer after Chopin, but in the entire U.S. and Canada, according to the League of American Orchestras, he’s only programmed about three times a year.
He started off like a Richard Strauss clone, then evolved two distinctive styles. The first was sensuous, almost orgiastic. Toward the end of his fairly short career (he died of tuberculosis in 1937, aged 54), his music became more astringent, Bartókian, and folksy, but the wildness never left. The 1932 Concertante is a barnburner, and benefits from an over-the-top approach, provided the musicians are in peak form.
The last time the Concertante was performed by the Symphony was nine months before Pearl Harbor. At long last, this terrifically exciting number showed up like a P-51 out of the Bermuda Triangle, and the audience cheered to hear the way Ax banged out its conclusion like he was machine-gunning enemy fighter pilots.
“There are many, many notes,” Ax explained at the Friday “6.5” performance, which jettisoned the Mozart in order to provide five minutes of a loosely prepared public conversation between the soloist and conductor. Ax went on to theorize that Szymanowski, who intended that his compatriot and champion Artur Rubinstein perform the work, was forced by financial difficulties to consider playing it himself. A plethora of notes would make errors less noticeable.
All the number of notes did at Davies was allow Ax to score more bull’s-eyes with his impressive technique. The hyperactive orchestration rarely left Ax’s piano exposed, where you might hear a deviation from standard interpretive practice — if you can even refer to a “standard” in music this rare.
On the other hand, the orchestra had plenty of exposed moments and, for the most part, Oundjian did a splendid job of moving the music along and clarifying the many solo and soloistic passages (Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, by the way, was super in the ones that he had). I would have appreciated a little more dynamic variation here and there, and there is a climbing passage for horns about two and a half minutes into the first movement that could have used a little more emphasis.
Thursday, and even more so Friday, the performance crackled, and the first movement elicited whoops despite between-movement protocol. Oundjian’s direction was effective, if slightly too cool, especially compared to the way Stéphane Denève conducted the Russian National Orchestra in this same work at the Napa Valley Festival Del Sole in July 2006.
After the Szymanowski came Richard Strauss’ Burleske. Here was a second piece for piano and orchestra on the same program, and a second way to provide a peacehorse: Perform a rare piece by a famous composer. The Burleske is a fine early work, but is overshadowed by Strauss’ tone poems of the same period, Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration. The last time it graced Davies was 15 years ago.
Ax showed no wear from his earlier workout, and dazzled the audience with his ferocious fingers. Oundjian kept up his slightly cool demeanor. I would have appreciated spikier high points in the development section (the piece is called a burlesque after all), but again the tempos were perfect, the playing exemplary, and the audience thrilled. Principal timpanist David Herbert did his usual flawless work playing the theme that begins the work and generates most of the other tunes, one of which may well have inspired Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” from West Side Story.
By the way, conductors could stay closer to the spirit of the Friday 6.5 series by having the orchestra play a couple of key illustrative passages in the preconcert conversations. This would have helped the audience warm even more to the unknown Szymanowski. And it would have been great to show how the timpani tune at the outset of Burleske is found in the “second” and “third” themes.
After intermission came the third adventure, Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini. This is the evil twin of the composer’s great Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, describing the fate of an adulteress in the second ring of hell in Dante’s Inferno. Like the famous overture, this one has a love theme to die for and has got enough power to defer offshore drilling for many years. Yet it’s played less than one percent of the time among Tchaikovsky’s works. Go figure. If it has a flaw, it’s only a bit more than average of one that pervades all of Tchaikovsky’s music: a penchant for repeating phrases in annoyingly predictable pairs.
But at least Oundjian pulled out all the stops this time, greatly pleasing the audience. The orchestra responded in kind and everyone went home, both nights, alive with the joys to be had from adventurous programming.
Choral concerts organized around a single figure can make for a bland evening if not programmed with restraint and consummate care. But the Artists’ Vocal Ensemble (AVE) made Saint Francis of Assisi the focus of a thoughtful, artfully structured, and surprisingly varied concert in two performances over the weekend.
Artists’ Vocal Ensemble
Photo by H. Tran
Singing works by a dozen composers spanning eight centuries, Music Director Jonathan Dimmock and his ensemble presented a rich and multifaceted tribute to the Italian friar, mystic, bird-lover, founder of the Franciscan order, and patron saint of San Francisco. Credit Dimmock for constructing a program that was as illuminating as it was heartfelt, and credit his 16-voice group with performances that were consistently polished and assured.
Titled “St. Francis of Assisi: Musings on a New World Order,” the program covered a wide range, from 13th-century works to contemporary settings by Fredrik Sixten, Gerald Near, and Morten Lauridsen. Rather than present them chronologically, though, Dimmock arranged them around various facets of the saint’s life, alternating the old and the new in rewarding juxtapositions. As anyone who has experienced Messiaen’s five-hour operatic masterpiece on Francis will tell you, the life of this particular saint is ripe for musical exploration, and the composers included here were apparently inspired through the centuries in deeply personal ways.
Saturday’s concert at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley, which repeated Sunday afternoon at Noe Valley Chamber Music in San Francisco, opened with a processional. Singing the anonymous 13th-century chant, Laudar vollio per amore (I want to praise with love), the chorus sounded uniformly vibrant, and their frank praise for Francis, accompanied by AVE members Allison Zelles Lloyd (harp) and Neal Rogers (percussion), set an exuberant tone for the evening.
Next came Perotin’s Gradual for the Feast of St. Stephen. The connection was tenuous — St. Stephen was a martyr, Francis was not, and although Perotin lived at roughly the same time as Francis, the two men never met — but the singing, with the men providing a dark-hued drone beneath the soaring voices of the women, was glorious.
Francis Poulenc’s Quatre petites prières de Saint Francois d’Assise restored a direct link. The French composer’s settings of Francis’ own words are exquisite: quiet, contemplative, and, under Dimmock’s direction, sung with elegant, pristine tone.
Josquin Desprez’s Ave verum introduced a section of devotional settings, with a trio of voices — Dimmock, soprano Tonia d’Amelio, and alto Celeste Winant — twining in radiant ascension. Sixten’s setting of the same text, sung by the full ensemble, was intriguing in contrast, but somehow not as affecting. But Adoramus te (We adore you) by 16th-century composer Claudio Merulo, followed by Pierre Villette’s 20th-century Adoro te devote (text by Thomas Aquinas), came across in performances of striking beauty.
The first half ended with Palestrina’s rarely performed Nunc Dimittis (The Song of Simeon). Here, Dimmock divided his forces into three mixed groups, stationed around the church, and invited audience members to stand behind the group of their choice. The score, whose text comes from the Gospel of St. Luke, is magnificent, and the chorus delivered it with enveloping, surround-sound power. The work got a repeat performance after intermission, with the singers grouped on the altar this time; their close proximity knitted the sound together in a thrilling way.
Francis’s words, sung in English, were featured next, in Near’s A Prayer of Saint Francis. (This is the one that starts “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.”) The chorus, stretched in a single row across the front of the altar, blended to gentle effect, with the final “eternal life” dissolving into a penetrating silence.
Two settings of “Ubi caritas” (Where there is charity) — the first plainsong, the second by Lauridsen — evoked Francis’s call for compassionate love. Giovanni Gabrieli’s Iam non dicam (From now on, I won’t call you servants), followed by Harris’ Bring Us, O Lord God (text by John Donne), were paired in a pointed meditation on leave-taking.
The program concluded with a recessional: another 13th-century anonymous setting, Sia Laudato San Francesco (St. Francis be praised), with bass Rob Stafford delivering the solo part with articulate phasing and admirable heft.
Throughout the program, Dimmock provided insightful commentary. Saturday’s program was presented in connection with the We Campaign (a project of the Alliance for Climate Protection), which seeks to repower America with 100% of its electricity from clean energy sources within the next 10 years. Saint Francis of Assisi is the patron saint of the environment, too.
There was half an hour to go before the concert, but if you happened to be standing outside St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco at 3:30 on Saturday you could hear them. Just a few highly trained people, a few feet apart, yet formidably strong and utterly fearless — powering through their chosen medium at alarming speed and with frightening precision …
New Esterházy Quartet
What, the New Esterházy Quartet canceled and the Emerson Quartet filled in at short notice? No, silly, I’m talking about the Blue Angels. The six stunt-flying F/A-18 pilots, in town for Fleet Week, appeared to be using St. Mary’s Cathedral (across the street from St. Mark’s) as a sighting landmark, so that early arrivals to the New Esterházys’ all-Haydn program got an unexpectedly, not to say unnervingly, close demonstration of precision diamond-formation flying. The Angels’ performance was over by the time the NEQ’s began, though I gather that the thunder from the skies played merry hell with the quartet’s sound check.
For most people, great string quartet playing isn’t quite as impressive as great formation flying, even where the level of control involved is similarly superhuman. There are good reasons for that. For one thing, most folks don’t listen to string quartets. For another, when a string quartet player does something unexpected on a whim, ordinarily no one dies.
That was a good thing Saturday. Between the mechanical failures (unstable gut strings, slipping pegs) and the not-always-consonant instincts of the players, a precision-flying exposition arranged in imitation of the New Esterházy program would have been the sort of thing for which you’d make sure your life insurance was paid up before attending.
But, then, so would an expedition into any strange and wonderful wilderness. And the New Esterházys, as so often during their trek through the complete Haydn quartets, proved infallible guides even where they were fallible players, through a part of the quartet repertoire where beaten paths are few.
This program, the first of the NEQ’s second season, was titled “Haydn at the Opera,” with the focus being on slow movements that savor of the stage. Two of these — in Op. 33/6 and Op. 1/2 — are pure arias, with the first violin doing the singing. In the other two, though, there’s something more like a full operatic scena, with the diva/first violin breaking into (wordless) recitative.
In the Pantheon of nicknamed Haydn quartets, Op. 17/5 sometimes makes an appearance as “The Recitative.” Op. 20/2 belongs to a set none of whose quartets, astonishingly, has ever gotten a nickname that stuck. (Among the general public, that is — if you refer in the presence of veteran quartet players to “that juicy C-major one with the cello part,” most will know which you mean, apart from a hardcore-Haydn-geek few who will be thinking of Op. 54/2.) The New Esterházys themselves call it “The Mad Scene,” which is apt.
It was this work that came last, as it should have done. Even apart from the slow movement, it’s a piece crammed with riches, beginning with the luxuriant cello solo that opens the first movement and ending with a fugal finale that almost bursts with Haydn’s peculiarly genial sort of ingenuity. (It’s a four-voiced fugue with four subjects, and an al rovescio — that is, inverted, with the bits that went down in the original now going up, the bits originally going up now going down — flourish toward the end.)
And that slow movement is an amazing creation, for its time or any. The theme is a jagged unison line, later harmonized as a cello solo (William Skeen, here, was magnificently poised) with pulsing chords above it, and interrupted continually by theatrical outbursts from either the first violin or all four players. There’s an interlude like an embryo aria, but the unison stuff breaks in there, as well, and after a couple of attempts to restart itself, the music runs directly into the next movement.
Lisa Weiss was the first violinist for both this and the G-major Op. 17/5, which meant that she had the afternoon’s instrumental recitative to herself. If the Op. 20 quartets are beloved of string quartet players, everything before them tends to be written off; I doubt that anyone apart from Saturday’s ensemble has performed even one of the Op. 17 quartets publicly in the Bay Area in the last two decades.
The Op. 20 quartets are special, being uncannily rich. Yet hearing Op. 17/5 makes you realize how much the reputation of Op. 20 depends on its meaty cello parts. This quartet doesn’t let the cello (or the viola) off the leash nearly so much as the Op. 20 quartets do, yet all the quirkiness of Op. 20 is in there: the playful messing around with meter; the abrupt and sometimes jarring harmonic shocks; the trick of doing the same thing just enough times that the first time something else happens, you can’t help but grin.
Kati Kyme was the first violin in the other two quartets, which seemed a fair division of labor: Weiss, the more forceful personality, for the scenes of emotional turmoil, and Kyme, the more suave, for the sweet singing. In Op. 1/2, her aria was (as violist Anthony Martin pointed out in his preperformance remarks) a light thing, almost an open-air serenade. The entire quartet plays a couple of phrases pizzicato at the end of each strain, as though the singing lover at the window had stopped to echo his song on a mandolin. In Op. 33/6 the aria is more serious business, though Kyme remained her elegant, infallibly persuasive self.
For the rest: Well, this was quartet flying in loose formation: both joyous and alert, but never so militantly alert as to stifle the joy. True, there were a few missed leaps and fuzzy unisons and not-quite-together arrivals. There was also the sort of dynamic nuance that implies a lot of thinking about the music. (Menuets, which get played through three times, always got some sort of new shaping by the NEQ the last time through.)
And there were places where everything did come together, and suddenly you couldn’t hear the music any other way. I think I’ll cherish for a long time the NEQ’s insinuatingly feline version of Op. 20/2’s main fugue subject.
If you want to hear Haydn quartets as they were meant to be heard, the only real course is to find three string-instrument-playing friends and perform them yourself. Or, if you want to hear them played immaculately, there are always the quartet-equivalents of the Blue Angels. But if neither option appeals, there is the New Esterházy Quartet — with four concerts remaining to its project. The schedule is here.
I confess that I had not heard of the Santa Cruz Chamber Orchestra until I learned of the concert with which it opened its third season on Saturday. But it was a honey of a program that I wouldn’t have missed for anything. The result was warm and delicious: two cold and austere Northern string orchestra works by Jean Sibelius and Pēteris Vasks rendered rich and resonant in the reverberant acoustics of Santa Cruz’ Holy Cross Church, plus the comforting familiarity of Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings.
SCCO is a small orchestra, with just 14 string players altogether. (In addition to the strings, Sibelius’ Rakastava calls for sparse, almost inaudible backing from timpani and triangle, delicately provided by Laura McShane.) The potential snag with a very small orchestra is that when the composer calls for split parts in a section, some lines may be carried only by a single instrument each, creating an unintended chamber music effect. But that was not a problem here. The richness of the acoustics helped tremendously.
So did the power of the players: Nobody in this group is being carried by the rest of their section. This was most obvious with the sole bassist, Bruce Moyer. No matter how exposed his part, never did he sound like a wayward lone bass fiddler sawing away back there. He was more like Sir Galahad: His strength was as the strength of ten.
The conducting also helped carry the ensemble. Music Director Maya Barsacq favors quick tempos and a clear, dancelike rhythm. She led a lightly introspective performance of Rakastava (The lover), a rarely heard, dark-hued Sibelius work in the mode of his cryptic Fourth Symphony. It’s lyrical, though not conventionally melodic. Complex inner parts, and even solo passages for Concertmaster Laura Caballero and cellist Kelley Maulbetch, blended into the general sound. This was a masterful performance.
Viatore by Peteris Vasks is even rarer than the Sibelius, and was a bit more of a challenge for the players. Although this work is seven years old and has been recorded, this was, amazingly, its first U.S. performance. Vasks is a Latvian composer much prized by lovers of somber, tonal modern music. His work bears a relationship to Eastern European “mystic” composers such as Henryk Górecki and Arvo Pärt similar to that which John Adams has with the minimalists: He has absorbed their techniques into his own, more wide-ranging style.
Viatore, which means “The Wanderer,” is a tribute to Pärt. It opens and closes with a descending scale and a rising portamento slide, both very much in Pärt’s style, the final slide causing the music to disappear into thin air. But the bulk of Viatore consists of repetitions of a richly harmonized, deeply consonant hymn — beginning in the lower strings, gradually growing stronger and more drawn out, and then starting to die away over the course of the piece — alternating with brief sections of weird chitterings and harmonics focused on the violins. This kind of repetitive writing can be awesomely hypnotic. Viatore came close. At 17 minutes it was either too long or not long enough to achieve its best effect.
Had I been planning this concert, I might have paired the Sibelius and Vasks with Dag Wirén’s Serenade for Strings or something wistful by Grieg. But that might have been too much dry Northernness for one evening. SCCO instead closed with the cheerful Op. 22 Serenade by Dvořák. This could have used a bit more rehearsal in places. Yet the quick tempos contributed to a charming, bouncy performance with a wonderful touch of coyness at the ends of the movements.
Only 50 or 60 audience members came to this concert. A few I talked with at intermission proved to be relatives of the performers. What a shame. This orchestra is far too good to be heard only by its relatives. Later performances this season will include works by Giya Kancheli, another noted Eastern European postmystic, and the irrepressible Argentinian Astor Piazzolla. I am marking my calendar.
One of the great experiences in music listening comes when you attend an “interesting” program by a musician you hadn’t known at all, only to find yourself blown away by his flawless musicianship. That was the case Sunday afternoon at Old First Church, as visiting pianist Emanuele Arciuli presented a textbook example of just how well the instrument can be made to sound.
Emanuele Arciuli
Arciuli has it all: scholarship, a dreadnought technique, accuracy, a full palette of colors, intellectual prowess, courage — and oh yes, an amazing program of “American Masterpieces.” The event was jointly sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco and Old First.
Arciuli opened with Charles Ives’ Sonata No. 2, Concord Massachusetts 1840-1860, in its 1947 version, and after intermission he played John Adams’ Phrygian Gates (1977). Those two lengthy works were enough to fill the program, but after wild applause Arciuli added an encore, an arrangement of the pop tune Bill Evans’ Quiet Now.
The artist’s own program notes mentioned Ives’ connection to Mahler. Ives was, after all, in New York during Mahler’s tenure with the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. He undoubtedly heard some of those performances and had contact with Mahler. It’s known, for instance, that Mahler was planning to premiere Ives’ Third Symphony at the time of his death in 1911. Ives almost certainly knew of Mahler’s statement that a symphony should encompass the whole world, and apparently had that in mind when composing his giant Second Sonata for piano.
Each of the four movements in Concord honors a major 19th-century American writer: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau, respectively. Running nearly an hour in length, the sonata can and does turn up virtually anything, in a kind of stream-of-consciousness fashion. The listener hears something akin to a montage texture at play. As far as I know, Ives was the first composer to do that in a serious way. He went far beyond mere parody, which previously was the norm.
The Sonata almost amounts to a spot-that-tune exercise, though none of the quotations hangs around for long, flitting by in seconds. Each of the four movements makes little nods to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but a listener attuned to the music of the time can also pick out a number of traditional hymns and popular tunes: Bringing in the Sheaves; Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean; Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground, and the like.
The piece’s textures can be incredibly dense or can sit in naked simplicity, particularly when Ives turned out a bit of quiet rudiments from New England church services. There are minor hints of Debussy, ragtime, marches, fox-trots, and all else. For a pianist to cope with so many opposites in so compact a form, and often in multiple styles — as Arciuli did — left me agog. I never dreamed it could be managed by a mere human.
Composed between 1909 and 1915, the original work contained a short passage for flute, accompanied by the pianist. That was and is obviously impractical, so a revision was made in 1947, eliminating the flute. I think I smell the hand of Lou Harrison’s influence in that. Harrison was, after all, a major part of Ives’ recognition during the late 1940s after he premiered the prize-winning Third Symphony in New York.
Adams composed Phrygian Gates while on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, back in the days when it was located way out on 19th Avenue. The work consists of a single virtuoso movement about half the length of Ives’ whopper Sonata, and has become his most frequently performed work.
It’s minimalist, of course, but soft-core. What sets Adams apart from most other minimalists is that he is less dogged about sticking to one pattern. He can sense when it’s time to add on to or change the material, as opposed to, say, Philip Glass, who always repeats the same set of notes until they’re well past their sell date.
Adams opens his toccata of whirligigs with repeated notes, then keeps applying new layers of material. Eventually the piece reaches an extraordinary density of sound, always tonal and never harshly dissonant. He pretty much sticks to the ancient Greek Phrygian and Lydian modes along the way. That has helped the work’s popularity, not merely due to its harmonious modesty but also because of its variety and sense of climax. Indeed, I’ll admit that it’s one of the few minimalistic pieces I admire and enjoy.
Both Arciuli performances were astounding. I’ve not heard that kind of keenly polished playing of advanced piano music since the heyday of David Tudor. Arciuli’s forthright renditions covered the widest range of dynamics, and were artistic in every aspect. He played the tremendous chording in such a manner that each note stood out clearly, but with just the slightest emphasis on the most important note in a harmony. That’s most uncommon.
Then too, I greatly appreciated the lack of fake showbiz effects: waving the hands in the air, throwing back the head, swaying with eyes closed, and all that hokum. He must have fingers of steel. He could get orchestral volume from the instrument without lifting his palms from the keyboard, or could turn the volume from one extreme to the other on a dime.
Arciuli, who currently teaches at his alma mater, the Conservatory of Bari in Italy, and as guest faculty at the Cincinnati University Conservatory of Music, has specialized in contemporary music, with emphasis on the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg and company), plus — oddly enough for an Italian pianist — on American music. He’s played the Italian premiere of Adams’ Piano Concerto in Milan; performed Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, with the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic; and recorded major works of George Crumb.
Naturally, he’s played the basics as well … Beethoven concertos in Brazil, Bartók’s Third in Italy, recorded major Liszt too. So it’s odd that he’s so well-known all over Europe and throughout most of South America but hardly known here. I can only hope he’ll return to the West Coast, and often. Make no mistake, Emanuele Arciuli is a major pianist in the proud Italian traditions of Ferruccio Busoni and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.
Classical guitarist David Tanenbaum presented an excellent recital of classical guitar, featured in a variety of chamber music settings, along with one spellbinding solo work on Saturday at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Concert Hall. A faculty member at the Conservatory, where he is chair of the collegiate Guitar Department, Tanenbaum was joined by fellow faculty members harpsichordist Corey Jamason and violinist Axel Strauss, as well as by steel string guitarist Peppino D’Agostino. The program, presented by the Omni Foundation, consisted of well-loved standards, creative arrangements, and compelling new music written by Antonio Vivaldi, J.S. Bach, Astor Piazzolla, Peter Maxwell Davies, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and D’Agostino.
David Tanenbaum
Tanenbaum began with a set of guitar duos with D’Agostino that grew increasingly more intricate. The Concerto in G, by Vivaldi, was originally written for lute, strings, and basso continuo and is well-known and much loved by guitarists. Tanenbaum gave a stylish account of the soloist’s part, adding elaborate ornamentation that amazed and delighted those in the audience who were accustomed to more literal interpretations. D’Agostino combined the continuo and string parts with rhythmic energy and sensitivity.
The English composer Peter Maxwell Davies is currently Master of the Queen’s Music, the musical equivalent of Poet Laureate of England. Concerned about environmental issues, he wrote Farewell to Stromness to protest plans to mine uranium on the island of Orkney, north of Scotland. The slow walking bass line that supports the piece is meant to portray the town’s residents forced to leave their homes as a result of uranium pollution. In a spoken introduction Tanenbaum quoted his son, who called it the saddest music in a major key he had ever heard. D’Agostino and Tanenbaum, in turn, each played the keening melody and its characteristic Scotch snap, with exquisite sensitivity. The lovely tonal contrast between their nylon and steel strings proved an effective introduction to the next piece.
Reich’s Nagoya Guitars is a creative arrangement that Tanenbaum made of the composer’s Nagoya Marimbas. The piece, written in 1994, is similar to Reich’s early work in its use of repeating patterns that occur one or more beats out of phase. The patterns are, however, more complex and change more frequently than in the earlier music. I’ve enjoyed hearing the music on marimba and with two classical guitars but was quite taken by the combination of nylon and steel strings, which made the intricate unison canons clearly audible while highlighting Tanenbaum and D’Agostino’s virtuosic interplay.
The duo concluded their set with D’Agostino’s own work Venus Over Venice. A phenomenally talented guitarist/composer, D’Agostino is influenced by traditional Italian music, classical music, pop, and steel string guitarists like Leo Kottke and Pierre Bensusan. Venus Over Venice featured the composer playing an elaborate series of arpeggiated harmonies and Tanenbaum on a long-lined, lyrical melody. Their finely calibrated diminuendo conclusion was breathtaking.
Bach’s Sonata in F, BWV 529, originally for solo organ, is a three-movement work in three voices. Harpsichordist Corey Jamason and Tanenbaum each played one of the two upper voices while Jamason also played the bass. The opening Allegro featured a two-part theme in invertible counterpoint, with both artists deftly exchanging parts in Bach’s intricate and absorbing texture. The Largo featured two highly ornamented upper voices weaving in and around each other above a steady bass line. The closing Allegro used a more relaxed theme than the opening, though Bach’s elaboration was just as intricate; throughout, Tanenbaum and Jamason maintained their supple and sensitive ensemble.
The high point of the evening was Tanenbaum’s moving rendition of Riley’s Quando Cosas Malas Caen del Cielo (When bad things fall from the sky), performing it on a National Steel Guitar fretted in just intonation. On February 15, 2003, millions of people in almost eight hundred cities took part in protests against the possibility of a U.S. war in Iraq. In Nevada City, California, composer Terry Riley joined a ragtag group of mostly senior citizens in a march down Main Street and was arrested because the marchers lacked a city permit. After spending a night in jail, the composer was brought before a judge, convicted, and given three options for his sentence: Spend another night in jail, pay a fine, or agree to do community service. Riley told the judge he was a 70-year-old composer and suggested that he write a piece of music for his community service. The judge agreed and this powerful antiwar piece is the result.
The first movement, “National Broadstreet March,” depicts Riley and his band of senior citizens in a festive march worthy of Charles Ives. Tanenbaum played the second movement, “La melodia que se sienta solo” (The melody that feels alone), with a mournful sliding from note to note, capturing the loneliness of a solitary night in prison. “Corrente dicta,” the third movement, was a gathering of energy for continued protest. “Quando cosas malas caen del cielo,” the name of the fourth movement as well as of the entire piece, used the extremely dissonant thirds of just intonation to powerful expressive effect.
Tanenbaum is without peer in this music. He captured every mood to perfection — ebullient opening, mournful solo, building determination, and painful conclusion — with an amazing command of color, time, and empathy.
While it would seem to be difficult to follow such powerful music, Tanenbaum and violinist Axel Strauss took Conservatory Concert Hall by storm in Astor Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango. In four movements that depict the characteristic tango of the periods about 1900, 1930, 1960, and 1980, this is a stylistic tour de force that asks a great deal of performers but offers even more to audiences. I have heard many performances, but until Saturday night none had matched the power of a recording by violinist Fernando Suarez Paz, a longtime associate of Piazzolla, and the Brazilian guitarist Odair Assad. Strauss and Tanenbaum accomplished that feat, getting right every stylistic nuance (none is mentioned in the score) and bringing down the house. I hope they are considering a recording.
For those seeking respite from overplayed classics (See Jeff Dunn’s feature), there are a handful of daring ensembles in San Francisco that specialize in new and unusual pieces. While the mainstream presenters lure audiences with Mozart or Beethoven, the marketed draw for sfSoundSeries’ Sunday night concert at the ODC Commons was Gino Robair’s Percussion Potluck.
Gino Robair
The idea behind the Potluck is “found art” — realizing novelty in nonartistic, everyday articles. Robair improvises with a pile of objects provided to him by the audience. The “instruments” submitted on Sunday varied from the metallic to the plastic to the organic, but playing a key role were a pair of mechanical vibrators that looked suspiciously like sex toys. The most unexpected feature of Robair’s performance was his use of a microphone. He crushed the mic into a bouquet of dried flowers, shoved it into the bell of a saxophone, pumped it into some cardboard tubes, and rubbed it against the floor, the table, and any other surface available to him. The vibrators provided an ostinato to the whole performance, rattling, buzzing, clanging, and whispering, depending on which surface they were placed against.
The performance was engaging on a musical level because it had rhythmic drive, sonic variety, and a discernible form. The idea was engaging on a conceptual level, as well — there’s something heartwarming about seeing a respected, grown man sit on the floor and invent toys with the vivid playfulness and rich imagination of a child. Yet Robair also possesses the disciplined know-how of an educated artist. The sounds were new and exciting, and the vibe was entertaining.
Opening the concert was Robair’s I, Norton, a one-act opera about a mentally unbalanced person who fancied himself “Emperor Norton” and gained notoriety in 19th-century San Francisco. The actual Norton made plenty of valid sociological points, but his demeanor and declamations garnered him a quizzical respect. In the opera, the craziness of this character’s mind was translated into music.
The work has an air of humor juxtaposed with terror. Norton’s pronouncements were read by Tom Duff as he paced about the stage distractedly. As the piece went on, his lines became more disjointed, battling the instruments and the electronic alterations of his voice.
Soprano Aurora Josephson’s part was notated in Morse Code–like rhythmic series, combined with a table laying out 64 wordless sounds producible by the human voice. Many of those sounds are rarely heard outside the zoo. Other sounds were at the limits of human capability — guttural sobs, erotic shrieks, and animalistic yelps. The experience was discomforting, as some of these raw noises are not usually shared in public. You can’t get any farther away from bel canto. It was a courageous effort by Josephson.
The instrumentalists also performed a wide array of sounds — glissandos, scratches, trills, tremolos, and, believe it or not, even some conventionally sounded long notes, which, in the anything-goes context, sounded as weird as anything else. The instrumental parts were mostly improvised, their texture chosen by Robair via a set of hand gestures. The orchestra was his palette while he improvised the overall progression of the piece.
Electronics played a huge role in the concert — it still feels weird to see performers seated at laptops alongside clarinetists and violinists. The machine operators busily punched keys as their frowning faces were lit up by their computer screens. At one point, the vocalists imitated the computer-processed snippets of their own voices.
The most surprising aspect of I, Norton was its length: At the end of the performance, 45 minutes had passed. It felt more like 25, a truly time-altering and mind-altering experience.
The concert featured three other pieces. Memnosyne by Eric Ulman (who also performed superbly on the violin) was a small ensemble piece that required a lot of patience late on a Sunday night. It could easily be dismissed as random high-pitched squeaks. But beyond the lack of obvious contrast and the incomprehensibility glowed a delicate statement of understated beauty.
Mathias Spahlinger’s Aussageverweigerung/Gegendarstellung: Zwei Kontra-Kontexte für Doppelquartett (Refutations/Counterstatements: Two contra-contexts for double quartet; 1981) featured tension-filled strikes that grew tighter and tauter in each sequence until finally it all snapped, unleashing a torrent of wild sounds from the unconventional ensemble. Gérard Grisey’s Talea (1986) was a similar exercise in unconventionality and exploration of the acoustic instruments’ sonic extremes.
Medieval secular music has a way of inspiring a startling array of interpretive approaches. There are those ensembles that gussy up their performances with (literally) all manner of whistles and bells, mystical in sound but dubious in authenticity. At the other end are the extreme purists, demanding authenticity to a fault and using only the barest surviving historical evidence to generate “faithful” but lifeless performances.
Ensemble La Rota
Falling somewhere in between is the talented young Ensemble La Rota, a Montreal-based quartet whose credits include winning the 2006 Early Music America Medieval/Renaissance Competition. Historical fidelity is clearly a priority for these performers, as evidenced by their scrupulous study of manuscript sources and organization of a concert program, titled “Heu, Fortuna,” around a series of manuscripts copied during or immediately after the reign of Philip the Fair (r. 1285-1314). But as Saturday’s performance at Berkeley’s St. John’s Presbyterian Church demonstrated, such study can coexist with highly nuanced and sensitive performances, moving beyond the score to accentuate the latent drama and passion contained in this repertory.
Intimacy and subtlety are the hallmarks of Ensemble La Rota’s approach. Trading primarily in delicate-sounding instruments such as the recorder, lute, and harp, the group’s four masterful musicians explored a range of motets, trouvère songs (secular French tunes), and instrumental estampies (dance songs) with unfailing grace. They seem to have settled on a standard performance template, in which a single part or duo begins a piece and other instruments are gradually layered on top during later verses. The effect is supremely elegant, never brash or vulgar no matter how lively the music becomes.
Soprano Sarah Barnes paired a winningly bright tone with engaging stage presence to delightful effect in the solemn opening chanson, Chanterai por mon coriage (I will sing for my heart), attributed to Guiot de Dijon. Communicating a woman’s vow to resolutely bear the absence of her crusader husband, Barnes deftly conveyed the text’s alternating fits of sorrow, fear, agony, and hope. An elegant estampie on this same music followed, arranged by the ensemble’s virtuosic recorder/hurdy-gurdy player, Tobie Miller.
Jehan de Lescurel’s piece titled A vous, douce debonaire, a paean to the noble lady in typical courtly love style, exemplified La Rota’s intuitive dramatic inclinations. Barnes began with a florid, confident declaration of the opening lines “To you, sweet lady, have I given my heart; I will never depart,” ably supported by Miller’s florid recorder accompaniment, Esteban La Rotta’s steady harp, and the sinewy vielle lines of Émilie Brûlé. When these lines recur later in the piece, she gave them a softer, more pleading quality — a touching, highly affective gesture.
The anonymous Dieus! Comment porra/O regina/Nobis concedas (God! How could I give up/O queen of glory/Grant to us) exemplifies the early motet style, in which texts of various languages and meanings are juxtaposed simultaneously, often generating intriguing thematic intersections. Here the idea of brotherhood provided the connecting theme, the French text extolling the virtues of the protagonist’s Parisian friends and the Latin forming a prayer to the Virgin to hear the pleas of her brotherhood. This intertextuality found a complement in the musical styles: more rapid and florid for the secular lines, steadier and more rhythmically regular in the sacred. Barnes’ rapidly flowing declamation of the French blended beautifully with soprano Miller’s sweet, steady interpretation of the Latin, with Brûlé and La Rotta adding unerring instrumental support.
Another highlight was Philippe de Vitry’s Tribum que non abhorruit/Quoniam secta/Merito hec patimur (The tribe that did not shrink/Since the band of thieves/It is fair that we suffer this), a motet declaiming the just punishment given to those taking what did not belong to them. Here Barnes and La Rotta provided the vocals in relatively steady rhythms, contrasted against Miller’s dazzling recorder figurations and Brûlé’s ever-solid support on vielle.
A final note, about the printed program: While photocopies of manuscript sources for the evening’s program offered a welcome addition to the notes, severe misalignments between the order of pieces as presented in the program and how the texts were displayed in the body of the program prompted much frustrated page-turning. Especially on a program sung mostly with a Medieval French accent, where following the text is doubly challenging, this lack of coordination was unbefitting of a program otherwise so finely polished.