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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Playing Along In C, And Antheil's Keyboard Extravaganza
June 7 & 11, 2000
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By Sarah Cahill
Now that the San Francisco Symphony's American Mavericks festival has been around for a while, it's become an easy target. Everyone agrees that we're lucky it exists. But the quibbles about who's a true maverick, who isn't, who gets too much exposure, and who's been ignored have multiplied so much that Michael Tilson Thomas opened the entire festival last Wednesday confessing he was "taken aback by the controversy."
Some of the most vituperative dissent sprung up on an improvised music Internet newsgroup, where one composer suggested protesting the festival by sabotaging Wednesday's play-along of Terry Riley's In C. Audience members were invited to bring instruments to join the orchestra in this piece, widely considered to have launched minimalism in the early 1960s. Ironically, it wasn't an irate composer but Tilson Thomas himself who spoiled In C. After rehearsing the piece's process with the audience, and describing how each musician plays each of 53 phrases any number of times, listening carefully to the texture and color of the entire ensemble, Thomas took his place at one of the four pianos onstage. In my seat, I was surrounded by a man with a pennywhistle, a couple with clarinet and saxophone, and a French horn player. Violinists and flutists played in the balconies. Of course, this threatened to become an unwieldy performance. But right away, Thomas started directing the piece, making himself the focus of attention. He signaled for the winds to quiet down, for the strings to play out. He leapt into the audience to single out players for solos. His actions were absolutely antithetical to the democratic concept of the piece. Still, there was a lot that was right. Scores were passed out to the audience. Two screens framing the stage also projected the score. Throughout the festival, these screens have been a tremendous service, showing photos of the featured composers from different periods of their careers, as well as their manuscripts.
Wednesday's "Meet the Mavericks" concert began with Ives' Quarter-tone Piano Piece No. 2, with Alan Feinberg and Julie Steinberg, and continued with a sizzling version of John Cage's Credo in Us, a rather bland Piece for 4 Pianos by Morton Feldman, and the charismatic soprano Lauren Flanigan in Philomel by Milton Babbitt.
Sunday's concert was devoted to the music of George Antheil, the self-proclaimed "Bad Boy of Music," whose Ballet Mécanique once caused riots in Paris and New York. Antheil specialist Charles Amirkhanian (also director of Other Minds, the concert's co-presenter), explained the intricate process of assembling this updated Ballet Mécanique, which involved the conversion, by Paul Lehrman, of original pianola parts into MIDI files for 16 mechanical pianos. The stage was lined with rows and rows of keyboards, a vision straight out of the bizarre Dr. Seuss film The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. Precious stage space was saved by shoving eight uprights up against eight new digital Yamaha Disklaviers, developed only a year ago, which yield a sampled sound of a nine-foot grand, despite their slender 37-inch length. The pianos were augmented by two onstage pianists and a battery of the symphony's excellent percussionists on xylophones, bass drums, and other noise-making devices, along with samples of doorbells, sirens, and an airplane propeller. The propeller sound sputtered pathetically throughout, working up no more verve than a blender on a setting of low. But the onslaught of dense, dissonant clusters clashing on multiple pianos, in a dynamic range that started at fortissimo and just got louder, was electrifying. Two of the uprights defaulted near the end. "Overheated solenoids," muttered the man next to me, who turned out to be Yamaha's Michael Bates, who with Lehrman had gotten this project off the ground. "They're kept so active they just get too hot." Overheated solenoids wasn't a problem with the symphony musicians, who gave a sparkling performance of Antheil's Jazz Symphony, bristling with bits of ragtime, Stravinsky, and solos for banjo, xylophone, and trumpet. We got to hear Antheil not only at his most caustic, but also at his most benign and playful. (Sarah Cahill is a pianist and a music critic for the Express, and hosts a music show on KPFA (94.1 FM) every Friday from 10 am to noon.) ©2000 Sarah Cahill, all rights reserved |
