|
EVENT REVIEW
January 28, 2007
|
Awash in Sound By Jason Victor Serinus
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, freed from its geographic exile from virtually all things central to San Francisco’s cultural life, officially celebrated the opening of its sparkling new downtown facilities on Sunday with a gala reception, dinner, and concert. Although ticket prices, starting at $1,000, put the concert out of range of all but the SFCM patrons for whom it was intended, the evening included two important world premiere commissions by Steve Mackey and Aaron Jay Kernis. The three-hour evening also included Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, narrated by former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown; the opening Allegro of Mendelssohn’s youthful Octet for Strings in E-flat Major, Op. 20, performed by a group of faculty, alumni, and students; and the final Allegro of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony in F Minor, Op. 36, conducted by none other than Michael Tilson Thomas.
The inaugural concert took place in the largest of the Conservatory’s three performance spaces, the not-yet-officially-named 445-seat Concert Hall. Acoustically engineered by Larry Kierkegaard in close cooperation with the SMWM architectural firm, the hall represents the culmination of years of planning. Unfortunately, Kierkegaard had not had an opportunity to evaluate the hall’s acoustics until the dress rehearsals. While a hard-to-move architectural half shell was immediately created to support the small ensembles heard in both premieres, it did seemingly little to ameliorate glaring acoustic problems that sabotaged the evening.
First on the premiere plate was Mackey’s Measures of Turbulence for six amplified classical guitars flanked by electric guitar and electric bass. Written at the request of its conductor, guitar master David Tanenbaum, the work helps fulfill mostly retired guitarist Mackey’s “moral responsibility to expand the repertoire for guitar.”
Focusing on the electric instruments’ gonglike harmonics, created by special fingering that Mackey has tended to favor in improvisatory contexts, the work focused far less on melody or eventfulness than on what Mackey termed “nuances of ensemble texture.” In his mind, Mackey imagined the concert hall elevating in the middle of the piece, complete with light show. That I experienced nothing of the sort may have less to do with the music itself, which seemed mainly a sequence of remotely interesting effects, than with the vagaries of amplification and acoustics, which couldn’t even get politician Willie Brown’s imposing voice to sound good. Yes, the electric instruments gonged, albeit far from resoundingly, and there were some mildly involving mandolinlike sounds with harmonics reminiscent of Chinese classical music, but the short work seemed dismayingly earthbound.
Pulitzer Prize winner and SFCM alumnus Aaron Jay Kernis charmingly introduced Two Awakenings and a Double Lullaby. The three-song cycle, dedicated to the composer’s nearly four-year-old twins, Jonah and Delphine, was expressly composed for Kernis’ “dear friends,” high soprano Hila Plitmann, violinist Axel Strauss, and guitarist David Tanenbaum. With Tanenbaum’s left hand still in a cast from an injury, guitarist Gyan Riley did the guitar honors. Kernis on piano completed the quartet. Kernis’ choice of exquisite metaphysical poetry, Thomas Traherne’s “The Salutation” and Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Light Gatherer,” was complemented by a lovely double lullaby consisting of an English translation of Humperdinck’s “Evening Prayer” from Hansel and Gretel and the traditional American spiritual Angels Watching Over Me. The music may have been equally exquisite. I say “may” because the acoustic left the sometimes astounding Plitmann sounding like she was singing in the shower, and Kerrnis’ piano horribly overresonant and unfocused. Riley’s guitar, with its little amp facing the audience, fared even worse. Pitches were completely lost when he played along with more than Plitmann, leaving only a series of incongruent, percussive thunks that sounded like someone hammering away at the wrong time. (I learned afterward that Riley could hardly hear himself, let alone the other performers.) Strauss’ violin, on the other hand, soared with gorgeous freedom and force, unintentionally upstaging Plitmann. Plitmann’s physical histrionics, with outstretched arms and folded wings, worked great in her performance of David Del Tredici’s over-the-top Dracula at a recent Cabrillo Music Festival, but seemed ridiculous and totally out of place in music of apparent refinement. Exalted in intent, perhaps transcendent in composition, the work crashed and burned through no fault of the composer or performers. As for other works on the program, the KDFC-like serving of Mendelssohn’s Octet suffered from first violinist Donald Weilerstein’s occasionally insecure intonation, slurred runs, and lack of soaring tone. Once the Conservatory Orchestra tuned itself — after no less than six soundings of pitch — they and MTT gave Tchaikovsky a rousing workout, with a loud climax that the acoustics rendered noisy. Word has it that Kierkegaard is back at work on the hall. While he’s in the area, perhaps he could also revisit Lincoln Theater in Yountville, which at last year’s Festival del Sole left the Russian National Orchestra sounding like the bands heard in shortwave Toscanini radio transmissions from the 1940s.
(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.)
|
