September 13, 2009: New sounds for a "new century"

The title for the first program in the new season of the New Century Chamber Orchestra was Pictures at an Exhibition:  New Traditions, where the subtitle referred to the evening consisting of three familiar works (two by Johann Sebastian Bach and one by Modest Mussorgsky) in new arrangements.  The first of these arrangements was of the concluding chaconne movement from Bach's second partita for solo violin, BWV 1004, a composition that has already received several arrangements, the best known of which are probably the version for solo piano by Ferruccio Busoni and the guitar solo by Andrés Segovia.  While Segovia honored the basic idea of that partita serving as an exercise for the development of both technique and invention, Busoni's transcription is a flamboyant adaptation of "academic" Bach into the sort of spectacle that was so popular in late nineteenth century piano recitals.  The Bach is still there;  but it is Bach in the service of Busoni, quite a different affair from Segovia's aspiration that Bach should serve those who wish to play the guitar as well as he has served generations of violin students so well.

According to the Program Notes by Rosemary Delia, the version of the chaconne that the New Century Chamber Orchestra performed was called "a hypothetical orchestral model," rather than a transcription.  This paragraph attempts to explain just what that phrase is supposed to mean:

[Mark] Starr gives us a version of the Chaconne that Bach himself might have heard using instrumental forces that would have been at Bach's disposal, or one that Bach might have heard in his own mind while composing in order to make manifest what the score inherently implies.  Starr describes his conjectural orchestration in this way:  "[My arrangement of the] Chaconne uses a string orchestra with harpsichord continuo.  This is the same orchestral ensemble that Bach utilized in the Third Brandenburg Concerto in G Major, and also the famous Air from the Orchestra Suite No. 3 in D Major."  Starr has no intention of "improving" Bach, nor does he attempt to compete with the massive early 20th century orchestrations of Stokowski or Ormandy.  "My intention is to show an orchestral aspect of this music that is fundamental to Bach's conception, but that, up-to-now, could only be imagined—but not actually heard in live or recorded performances on the solo violin."

Impressive as these words may sound, I do not think they do justice to the listening experience.  First of all, as a point of fact, if there was a harpsichord continuo, then it was so subdued that its presence made little difference.  I did not find this particularly problematic, because this is a composition for which the continuo concept is superfluous, however one may try to adapt it for an alternative setting.  In this particular case the instrumentation is for a rich and strong collection of modern string instruments played by technically-skilled performers.  For all of Delia's protestations, the ensemble is much closer to the string section of the Philadelphia Orchestra of Stokowski and Ormandy than it is to any performing group Bach would have known.

So we should put theory aside and concentrate on the relationship between what we hear and the listening experience that ensues.  Ultimately, what we have is Stokowski at his finest stripped of his excessive indulgences in modern brass, winds, and percussion.  In other words we have a string section with an awesome display of a mighty sound that teases out much of the harmonic and contrapuntal activity that can only be implied in the solo violin conception.  The reality, as it were, trumps the hypothetical;  and the result was as stimulating as either an accomplished violinist performing the original or a virtuoso pianist jumping through all of Busoni's hoops.

The other Bach composition on the program was a reworking of his BWV 1052 keyboard concerto as a violin concerto in a 1917 transcription by the German violinist Robert Reitz.  In this case one was definitely aware of a harpsichord continuo, most likely filling the same duties that the keyboardist would have provided when not playing the solo passages.  This work gave us a much better sense of what Bach expected from a string ensemble, and it is particularly impressive just how expressive he can be when that ensemble is playing in unison, as much of the ritornello material requires.  The violin solo was as virtuosic as the original keyboard part, if not more so.  Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg took that solo, executing it with a vigorous drive that may have been a bit over the top in Bach's time but seemed perfectly appropriate to the current "new century" setting.

The intermission was followed by the namesake of the program, an arrangement by Clarice Assad of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition for the New Century strings supplemented with parts for piano and percussion.  There were the occasional moments when the piano reflected Mussorgsky's original text, but they arose seldom and judiciously.  Far more interesting was the extent to which pianist Roxanne Michaelian supplemented percussionist Galen Lemmon, spending much of her time playing the piano from the inside, either with various forms of percussion mallets or by plucking the strings.  Lemmon had an extensive array of instruments under his control, but Assad exercised excellent judgment in recognizing when he needed help and eliciting that help from the piano.

The last time the San Francisco Symphony performed this work, they used the most familiar orchestration by Maurice Ravel.  However, in his pre-concert talk, my venerable predecessor on this site, Scott Foglesong, provided a tour of many of the lesser known arrangements of this suite.  In that historical context Assad's contribution was, without a doubt, a unique one, very much in the spirit of the case I made on Friday that we should celebrate opportunities for diversity in our listening experiences.  Her approach exhibited as much understanding of the original piano solo as did any of the examples that Foglesong had presented;  and many of her "coloration" decisions provided opportunities to think about sounds we thought were familiar in a new light.  Whether or not this will lead to a "new tradition" in the performance of Mussorgsky's suite may be open to question;  but there is no doubt that the opportunity to listen to Mussorgsky through Assad's ears was a stimulating one.

August 17, 2009: Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg "together" with the New Century Chamber Orchestra

Together is the name of the first CD recording of the New Century Chamber Orchestra under its new director, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, released on Salerno-Sonnenberg's own NSS label.  This recording is an excellent opportunity to review two of the key performances of Salerno-Sonnenberg's first season with the Orchestra, the Impressions suite by Featured Composer Clarice Assad and Astor Piazzolla's The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires.  It also serves as an amuse-gueule prior to the beginning of the Orchestra's 2009–2010 season in about three weeks' time.

Unfortunately, I was not able to take advantage of Assad's residency with the Orchestra until the final concert of the 2008–2009 season, when I heard the world premiere of her "Dreamscapes," for solo violin (performed by Salerno-Sonnenberg) and string orchestra.  In her own notes for this work, Assad wrote about its "maze of unpredictability and uncertainty;"  and, while I found that maze challenging to negotiate on first hearing, I wrote at the time that it "left me both fascinated and eager to hear it again" (which I continue to regard as high praise for any new composition).  Impressions is a more approachable composition;  or perhaps it just was for me, because I felt that it approached the challenge of composing for an all-string ensemble in the same spirit that Benjamin Britten had brought to his early (1937) composition of variations on a theme by his teacher, Frank Bridge.  Not only is the first movement of Assad's suite an explicit set of variations;  but also two of her movements use forms from the Bridge variations, a waltz and a perpetuum mobile.  Furthermore, like the Bridge variations, the suite concludes by reflecting back on its very opening.  Most important, however, is the way in which Assad may have taken the diversity of sonorities that Britten conceived for his variations and developed a new diversity entirely of her own making.

Similarly, one can guess from its title that Piazzolla's composition (actually four separate pieces subsequently collected and reorchestrated for Gidon Kremer) is a reflection on earlier source material.  The scope of that reflection, however, extended beyond Antonio Vivaldi, including a not-particularly-veiled reference to Johann Pachelbel and a variety of idioms from the violin repertoire extending all the way into the twentieth century.  Those familiar with "Four, for Tango," which Piazzolla composed for the Kronos Quartet, know the wild abandon that he can bring to his composition for strings, high-energy rhythms with glissandi that practically fly off the score pages into the stratosphere;  and this Four Seasons suite is just as wild.

The remainder of the disc consists of two arrangements of familiar works from the early twentieth century:  Béla Bartók's 1915 suite of six Romanian folk dances and "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," from George Gershwin's opera, Porgy and Bess.  The Bartók arrangement was by Salerno-Sonnenberg herself, replacing the instrumental solos that Bartók had conceived for his orchestral version with a characteristic set of string solos.  The Gershwin was a transcription by David Rimelis of Jascha Heifetz' arrangement for violin and piano.  If Salerno-Sonnenberg's orchestration of Bartók is not as colorful as the original, the performance does full justice to the folk spirit of the music, while the Gershwin arrangement reminds us of how successful he was in making the shift from song writer to opera composer.  Taken as a whole, this CD is an excellent celebration of the "new generation" of the New Century Chamber Orchestra.

May 20, 2009: A night of darkness and light

Shadows and Light was the name of the final program in Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's first season as Music Director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO).  My wife and I once took out an NCCO subscription, back when they were led by Krista Bennion Feeney, and I have been meaning to catch up with them since we moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco.  Last night I finally made good on my promise, having spent the whole season with Nadja staring into my bedroom from one of their banners on Franklin Street:

As might be deduced from the title, the program was an offering of different perspectives of night moods, although it is unclear whether or not Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's G major serenade (K. 525), best known as "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik," is night music in any way other than its nickname.  This certainly is not the night of the final act of Le Nozze di Figaro, during which all the machinations of the first three acts finally come to a head of retributions and humbling apologies.  More likely it was prepared as incidental music for a festive evening occasion;  and, as Peter Laki suggested in his program notes, these are the four movement that "survived" the occasion.  The fact that those four movements follow the formal structure of a symphony could be coincidence as likely as a deliberate editorial act.

Laki also referred to the "sophisticated simplicity" of the music.  However, the challenge in performing this serenade has less to do with cultivating either the sophistication or the simplicity and more to do with bringing to life an experience so familiar to just about everyone in the audience.  Salerno-Sonnenberg and the NCCO achieved this by cultivating vigorous energy from the score, particularly giving the strategic applications of crescendo the full "Mannheim roller" treatment.  If this music was never intended to be more than incidental, NCCO made it a point to honor the festivity of the occasion without neglecting the sophistication of Mozart's compositional technique.

In his San Francisco Chronicle review Joshua Kosman viewed this opening of the program as a bookend complemented at the end of the evening by the overture to Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus in an all-string arrangement by Mats Lidström.  Indeed, a grand ball under the blazing lights of an opulent setting is the centerpiece of this operetta, concluding only with the striking of a clock reminding the guests that morning has come.  (That clock is rendered in the overture with a glockenspiel, and Lidström cleverly mimicked that sound with harmonic bowing in the first violins against pizzicato in the seconds.)  However, the whole plot of Fledermaus revolves around all the deceptions that play out in the course of this ball (and the consequences of those deceptions in the "morning after");  so all those blazing lights shine down on a lot of dark acts.  However, while the operetta plays out those acts, the overture pretty much restricts its attention to the dazzle of the bright lights;  and I would agree with Kosman that one good festive setting deserves another.

On the other hand that intensity of energy that NCCO brought to Mozart was also complemented by the suite Bernard Herrmann compiled from the music he composed for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.  Hitchcock's use of black-and-white film made this work a study in the interplay of darkness and light, both of which are taken to extremes to escalate the dramatic tension.  Indeed, I get so wrapped up in this film every time I see it that it had not occurred to me that Herrmann had composed this work only for strings;  and he elicits an extensive palette of sonorities from those strings, even if most of us only remember the agonizing screeches of the shower scene (if we remember any of the music at all).

Separated from the film, this suite provides us with an informative perspective on Herrmann's work as a craftsman.  This music is, after all, even more "incidental" than Mozart's serenade;  but it is also highly functional.  It is not so much the act of composition that we would associate with Mozart and Strauss as it is an assembly of ingredients, not always necessarily of Herrmann's original synthesis.  The forceful down-bowing of the "Prelude" cannot help but invoke the "Danses des Adolescentes" in the first part of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, while the dissonances that enhance the disquieting effects of Hitchcock's moods owe a clear debt to Anton Webern's compositions for strings coming from roughly the same time as Le Sacre.  Then, of course, there are several occasions in which the master of twentieth-century "night music," Béla Bartók, has furnished Herrmann with just the right seasoning to serve Hitchcock's purposes.  This is music which my composition teacher would have dismissed as "impossible to write without the benefit of the New York Public Library;"  but it was still an element (even if not an obvious one) that contributed to making Psycho such a powerful film.  The power of that film could be appreciated by the extent to which this suite summoned my personal memories of Hitchcock's visions.

The contrast of moods between Mozart and Herrmann was reflected after the intermission when the nocturne movement from Alexander Borodin's second string quartet (in its string orchestra version) was coupled with the world premiere of Clarise Assad's "Dreamscapes," for solo violin (performed by Salerno-Sonnenberg) and string orchestra.  In this setting Borodin's nocturne (and the romantic images of Kismet that it cannot help but invoke) was very much a calm before Assad's storm.  There is more to this latter composition than can be grasped in a single listening.  The composer has obviously built up considerable understanding of the phenomenology of dreams and their daunting mix of logic and illogic.  In her own notes for this work, she described the solo violin as confronting "a maze of unpredictability and uncertainty;"  and it is clear that she is going for those same disquieting effects that Hitchcock had mastered in his movies.  However, on a first hearing one can do little more than try to look where Assad is pointing, without necessarily grasping all that she wants one to see/hear.  I am reminded that I once told a colleague that the greatest complement one can give to a work heard for the first time is, "I want to hear that again."  Salerno-Sonnenberg and NCCO performed "Dreamscapes" in a way that left me both fascinated and eager to hear it again.  They also left me realizing that it has been too long since I last heard NCCO, and I hope to make up for that during their 2009–2010 season.