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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
Sarah Cahill Eva-Maria Zimmermann Kate Stenberg
February 24, 2007
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New Music From Beyond the Veil By Jason Victor Serinus
Charles Amirkhanian always seems prepared to venture out on a musical limb and, from there, to take an unapologetic leap into outer space. As artistic director of Other Minds, as well as a composer and radio commentator of increasing renown, Amirkhanian masterminded Saturday's extraordinary second-annual New Music Séance. Held in San Francisco's historic Swedenborgian Church, a candlelit wooden structure that, since 1895, has been the host of countless disembodied spirit communications from the other side, the three-concert séance featured a potpourri of contemporary music performed by the same artists heard last year: pianists Sarah Cahill and Eva-Maria Zimmermann, and violinist Kate Stenberg (who together with Zimmermann sometimes performed as the Stenberg-Zimmermann Duo), plus the inhuman Yamaha Disklavier.
While most of the works heard at last year's séance could rightly have been termed trancelike or spiritual in nature, much of this year's music resounded far more of the new than of the transcendent. Nor was the presence of video and recording equipment, plus an obtrusive photographer who insisted on snapping flash photos within seconds of a work's conclusion, conducive to spiritual communion or meditation. A case in point was the premiere of Dan Becker's relentlessly frenetic, incessantly pounding Don't Make Me Go Back to L.A. (2003) for solo Disklavier. Had an audience member chosen to drop dead in the midst of that intentionally headache-inducing work, his or her breathless ghost might still be haunting the halls of the church, convinced that there was no heaven in which to find eternal rest.
To these ears, highlights of the first concert, at 2:30 p.m., included Stenberg dueting with a tape of herself in the premiere of Amirkhanian's Rippling the Lamp (2006-2007). A far cry from the composer's text-sound pieces, much of the music was positively hypnotic, with the spell suddenly interrupted by the violinistic equivalent of sirens. Hearing Stenberg's recorded violin unerringly match her tangy timbre, sonorous in the low range if sometimes thin and edgy on top, was a special delight. Equally stunning, for far different reasons, was Zimmermann's high-volume rendition of Woman Sonata (1923), by George Antheil, the "bad boy of music." The three movements of this early, decidedly nonfeminist work — provocatively titled "Woman (Languor)," "Tree (Prestissimo)," and "Flower (Moderato)" — were, variously, hypnotic, primitive, savage, unpredictable, and downright dangerous. Despite a false start, one of several missteps during an afternoon of otherwise transporting pianism, Cahill transformed Phil Collins' Pleasant Dreaming (2006) into a rapturous reverie. The title, drawn from his wife, Hannah's, favorite sleep salutation during their first year together, indicates a work ideal for Cahill, who excels in creating subtle, lilting poetry out of music written as if in half-light. Equally moving was Peter Garland's beautiful, trancelike Hermetic Bird (1996), the second movement of Bright-Angel-Hermetic Bird, a work commissioned by Aki Takahashi to honor the memory of her late husband, Kuniharu Akiyama. The concert's mesmerizing conclusion, a riveting rendition of octogenarian Hans Otte's Das Buch der Klänge, No. 10, drew deservedly exuberant, prolonged applause from the audience, one of whose members was overheard uttering the deserved word "ravishing." If any of the other 11 pieces that comprise Otte's complete Book of Sounds share the luxuriant minimalism of No. 10, Cahill would be wise to program them in future concerts.
At the 5:30 concert, Eva-Maria Zimmermann almost blew out the candles with her rendition of Frank Martin's Preludes Nos. 7 and 8 (1948). The former, dedicated to pianist Dinu Lipatti, is, in places, quite moving, while No. 8 is a virtual tour de force. Zimmermann's driving, assured energy proved a perfect contrast to Cahill's, who followed with a piece she commissioned, and recently recorded on New Albion, Evan Ziporyn's Pondok, No. 3 "Ginoman" (2001). Cahill played while standing before the piano, one hand depressing the keys while the other reached inside to pluck the piano's strings. Cahill also performed two lovely, quasi-anachronistic works by Percy Grainger, Now, O now, I needs must part (1935) and The Immovable Do (1933; 1939-1940). Grainger improvised the latter after his broken harmonium caused the high C to drone continuously. Ample credit must be paid to Amirkhanian, who made his momentous séance performing debut by sitting to Cahill's right and repeatedly sounding the piano's high C with the surety of a master drone. Cahill concluded the concert with David Maher's La Ciudad de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles (1980), whose gorgeous, shimmering melodies, played as if the aural equivalent of twilight, are redolent with nostalgia; Carl Stone's HO BAN (1984), a looped, layered variation on Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1; and the premiere of parts of James Cleghorn's Cyclus (ca. 1958). After Cleghorn's 92-year-old widow rewarded Cahill with several dozen long-stemmed roses, she seemed on the verge of tears as the audience showered her with appreciation.
(Jason Victor Serinus writes about music for such publications as San Francisco Classical Voice, Opera News, Stereophile, San Francisco Magazine, East Bay Express, and Bay Area Reporter.)
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