I met a local musician, a few years ago, who was both celebrating and lamenting his 1,000th paid performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. While grateful for the work, he was uninspired by the restrictive repertoire that mainstream audiences support.
The inspiration of new challenges likely motivates Cyril Deaconoff, the conductor and artistic director behind Voices of Silicon Valley. His semiprofessional choral ensemble performs rarely heard music, with emphasis on works requiring technology. I adore this underlying mission, but the execution in Saturday’s concert featuring Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in San Francisco fell flat.
The evening began with Missa Luba. This “Mass in Congolese Style” was composed in 1958 by a Belgian missionary and orchestrated for chorus, tenor soloist, and three percussionists. It combines traditional Western sacred music with indigenous drumming and singing.
The performance seemed stiff. The three percussionists were wearing buttoned-up, black oxfords, for example, as though they were prisoners who had just escaped from the pit of a ballet or opera. The piece invites both improvisation and movement, yet all but one performer stood stationary: Everyone looked and sounded like they were trying too hard. Both the circumstances and the acoustics prevented tenor soloist Alexander Frank from being heard clearly.
Most listeners seemed to enjoy the work’s exotic novelty; similarly, the ensemble’s website described Missa Luba as “beloved.” Even in concept, though, the piece disturbs me deeply. It reeks of colonialism, and anyone who has ever read Heart of Darkness rightly associates the Belgian Congo with adjectives such as “brutal” and “horrific.”
Music that ignores or denies reality honors neither divinity nor humanity.
Deaconoff himself arranged Kontakion for Pascha (Easter). This hymn for Eastern Orthodox services was scored for chorus, piano, percussion, flute, and solo soprano and was well done.
The first Bay-Area performance of Stimmung since 1974 took up the concert’s second half.
A wildly inventive composer, Stockhausen influenced musicians ranging from Frank Zappa and The Beatles to French spectralists and electronic composers. Stimmung (1968) is for six vocalists — though about twice as many performed it this weekend — and tape. Its avant-garde, psychedelic vibe befits the 50th anniversary of San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” (1967), a time when benign, tripped-out hippies descended like locusts upon Haight-Ashbury.
Stimmung is typically translated as “tuning,” but a better English equivalent would be “temperament.” That word has the same dual meanings of pitch calibration and inner disposition that Stockhausen intended to convey.
The piece is tuned in “just intonation,” which means frequencies of pitches always relate to each other via perfect integer ratios. While these perfect ratios sound pure, today we use a different tuning system, because in just intonation, most instruments can’t readily move between keys.
Stockhausen built Stimmung in 51 short movements, on the overtones of only one pitch. It should sound otherworldly. Just intonation is tricky, however, because it requires absolute precision: Being off by even a little creates pulsations in the sound. By doubling the ensemble, Deaconoff also doubled the difficulty. On Saturday, the group did not rise to the task.
The engineers from Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) provided world-class amplification. Two screens flanking the performers projected images that struck me as mildly sophisticated screen-savers, cheap and distracting. From what I could tell, the images did not change in correspondence to changes in the music.
This ensemble boasts not only a great mission but also great vocal talent. After programming and execution catch up to these strengths, I can imagine meeting an inspired member who explains to me how fortunate she is to sing with Voices of Silicon Valley.