July 30, 2009 : Summer Music West 2009: the first chamber music recital

As Doris Fukawa, Ensemble Programs Director for Summer Music West 2009, observed in introducing this afternoon's program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the performance of chamber music is a major challenge for the young. Her comparison of chamber music to basketball was appropriate: Every individual counts, but counts not only for individual actions but also for how those actions mesh appropriately with the actions of others. At the risk of sounding too clinical, this means that proper performance has much to do with child development. Soloists can begin to emerge as they acquire the skills for the technical mastery of their respective instruments, but the development of the listening skills required for chamber music takes place along a cognitive path that is quite separate from that of the physical capacity for technical development. That latter development can be enhanced through both exposure to others playing chamber music and efforts to play it oneself, but the nature of listening is so poorly understood that few educators have the gifts to cultivate it in others. Those of us who accept the theories of Piaget do not even know whether or not there are "stepping stones" along the path to acquiring listening skills, subgoals that must be achieved as prerequisite to the final objective.

I write all this as preface to the obvious recognition that there was considerable variation of skill in this afternoon's recital. To some extent that variation was instrument-related. The wind players, in general, seemed more capable of managing the "dual awareness" of both the music they were playing and what their fellow performers were doing. The string players, on the other hand, seemed to be at an earlier stage of getting their fingers around the notes; and their awareness tended to be the weakest. In between we had the pianists, some of whom never really connected while others "got it" with truly compelling performances. It thus seems appropriate to focus on the positive surprises, rather than the weaker cases that may ultimately be resolved as child development runs its course.

Most impressive was probably a performance of the first movement of the G minor piano quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (K. 478). The students' attentiveness to both the music and each other was all the more outstanding in light of the fact that the viola part was taken by a violin student (playing a violin). Even with this acoustic shortcoming, each part in the quartet spoke with its own characteristic voice, even if the piano tended to reflect Mozart's own inclination to show off at the keyboard.

The pianist took on even more virtuosic demands at the end of the program with a shift to the two-piano repertoire. In this case the music was the set of variations that Witold Lutoslawski composed on the same theme that Sergei Rachmaninoff had used for his Paganini rhapsody. Lutoslawski composed these variations in 1941 to play with his friend and fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik while they were trying to survive during the Second World War by performing in Warsaw cafés. Needless to say, café audiences tended to be more interested in entertainment than in musical sophistication; so it is reasonable to assume that Lutoslawski wrote the music to twit Rachmaninoff, whose rhapsody had already achieved warhorse status. His Warsaw audiences probably consumed his low humor (with or without the high virtuosity) with gusto. Thus, if the summer students were to be criticized at all, it would be for approach this music too seriously; but this can be forgiven, since getting through Lutoslawski's welter of notes at all is a pretty serious challenge! Whether or not they appreciated the composer's sense of humor, they knew enough to bring the program to its conclusion with an impressive display of fireworks.

July 31, 2009: Summer Music West 2009: the second chamber music recital

As was the case with yesterday's recital, there was considerable variation across this afternoon's extensive program of offerings. Once again, however, there were positive surprises, the most impressive of which was a truly stimulating reading of the first movement of Franz Schubert's C Major string quintet D. 956, scored for two cellos rather than two violas. This is another gem from Schubert's final year, which, as I have previously written, was "a time when he was as adventurous in composition as he was prolific." The added weight on the cello side is just the beginning of the adventure, as is the two-measure crescendo from piano to forte that opens the movement that the students performed. This was decidedly a case in which all five students were intimately connected to both Schubert's score and each other. Admittedly, I may have some bias, having come to this recital after having endured some rather lackluster readings of Schubert in cyberspace; but, since this is a piece I know very well, I feel I can have some objectivity in saying that this was a reading well worth the wait of most of the afternoon.

There was also a somewhat more evident sense of wit in this second recital, particularly in a wind quintet performance of Malcolm Arnold's setting of three sea shanties. Arnold begins with a truly inebriated paraphrase of "The Drunken Sailor" and from there goes madly off in all directions (as James Thurber once said). Wind players cannot get away with smiling while playing; so the fact that they "got" the humor of Arnold's approach had more to do with the fearless renditions of his most raucous gestures, particularly coming from the horn, which gets out of line with all sorts of Whitman-like yawps. If yesterday's effort to make fun of Rachmaninoff may have been lost in the performers' seriousness, Arnold's particular approach to humor could not be suppressed.

December 13, 2009: End-of-semester opera at the San Francisco Conservatory

The full-length opera prepared for the fall semester at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.  Since this is a one-act opera that takes less than an hour to perform, three of Purcell's songs were performed as an "overture" to this afternoon's performance:  "Nymphs and Shepherds Come Away," "Man is for the Woman Made," and "I Attempt from Love's Sickness to Fly."  These were sung to harpsichord accompaniment, while the music for the opera was provided by a string quartet with guitar and harpsichord continuo.  The production was staged by Richard Harrell, Director of the Opera Program, assisted by Heather Mathews;  and music direction was by Kathryn Cathcart.

Working with relatively minimal resources, Harrell's staging was most effective.  As Mathews had done in the Family Opera staging of Hansel and Gretel, he tended to play up the comic side of the malevolent forces behind this tragedy, a contralto Sorceress and the two witches that assist her, both sopranos.  Both the witches and their supporting chorus sang with nasal voices that made of an eerie sound;  but Harrell endowed the witches with a playful quality, somewhat reminiscent of Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein, particularly in those moments when he was straining Gene Wilder's patience.  This comic relief is a great asset in the context of the libretto by Nahum Tate, which rarely rises above the tedium of inflated language and overly predictable rhyming schemes.  Consider this bit for Aeneas in the grove scene that takes place after a successful hunt at which he had killed a stag:

Behold, upon my bending spear
A monster's head stands bleeding,
With tushes far exceeding
Those did Venus' huntsman tear.

For those who know the word only as the diminutive of the Yiddish tuchis, "tush" is an archaic English predecessor of "tusk."  Comic relief goes a long way when the author is laughable when trying to be serious, and there is good reason to believe that Tate actually intended some his scenes in such a comic sense.  Most critical is that the announcement that Aeneas and his crew are setting sail for Italy, the crucial decision that will lead to Dido's suicide, is delivered as a drunken sailor's song.  Finding the right mood of delivery for each episode in the libretto is thus a bit like walking a tightrope, and Harrell negotiated that tightrope excellently.

The successful staging provided some compensation for shortcomings in the musical performance.  This was primarily a technical problem of inconsistent intonation, most evident in the sharp distinctions of tone between the two violinists.  Fortunately, the singers could usually rely on the harpsichord for pitch;  and their delivery was far more secure in both solo and group passages.

Baroque opera can be a risky business.  For all the musical virtues, the dramatic elements tend to come across as archaic to modern day audiences;  and, when the libretto is in English, that archaic sense is even more pronounced.  Similarly, while the melodies and harmonies are readily accessible, getting the sound right can be challenging, particularly to those who spend most of their time cultivating a nineteenth-century repertoire.  Today's performance may not have hit on all cylinders, but the staging was successful enough to throw the whole affair in a most positive light.

December 12, 2009: Family-style opera

Every year at this time the Opera Theatre Department of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music presents a "Family Opera" production.  Last year Heather Carolo staged a production of a "condensed version" of Die Zauberflöte in an English translation by Marcie Stapp, intended, as Director of the Opera Program Rick Harrell put it, for "children of all ages."  This year (now Heather Mathews) she directed a similarly condensed Hansel and Gretel in the Constance Bache translation (with revisions by Hamilton Benz) that honors all of the rhymed couplets of the original German text by Adelheid Wette.  Engelbert Humperdinck's score was performed (presumably from the Schirmer vocal score) by Music Director Darryl Cooper.  The English text being sung was projected on a screen to the right of the stage.

While the story is one of the traditional fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, its subject matter is far darker than the quest story of Zauberflöte.  In the first act we have extreme hunger and at least suggestions of parental abuse;  and in the third act we have a child-devouring witch who ultimately suffers the same fate as the children she has captured, being baked in her own oven.  The best way to make this more kid-friendly is to play down the sinister qualities of the witch;  and Mathews achieved this by turning her into a clown-like character, played full out by a tenor in outrageous costume.  (In the current Metropolitan Opera Production, shared with the San Francisco Opera, the witch is portrayed as Julia Child, which is not the sort of joke that kids are likely to get.)

However, the greatest asset to a kid-friendly production is a plot line that keeps things moving at a brisk pace.  By sacrificing many of the Mozart arias we love so much, Carolo achieved that pace in her Zauberflöte.  Mathews banked on the wealth of folk tunes adopted by Humperdinck, but one could sense kids losing patience with some of the songs going on too long.  Fortunately, she found a better sense of pace in the final act and kept the entire production to about an hour's duration.  If the kids were a bit restless at the beginning, Mathews had them hooked at the climax and final celebration.

This annual project is an excellent idea.  It provides the Conservatory students with an alternative take on opera production;  but it also fosters a spirit that the Conservatory has a way to give back to the general community, rather than appealing only to specialist interests.  The day's rather nasty persistent rain did not seem to interfere with the house being full;  so there is every reason to hope that the community appreciates the Conservatory's efforts.  We should hope that this tradition will continue in the coming years.

December 11, 2009: End of semester at the San Francisco Conservatory

The last two chamber music recitals of the semester at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music took place yesterday at 4 PM and 8 PM.  Both were in the String and Piano Chamber Music division, although the piano appeared only once.  The 4 PM concert consisted entirely of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, traversing his early, middle, and late periods in three works.  The 8 PM concert moved forward in time to the turbulent transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth with two compositions by Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg, respectively.

Yesterday's review concluded with the somewhat wistful observation that "We'll always have Beethoven;"  but the real issue is whether we shall always have performers that will keep the experiences of listening to Beethoven rich and alive.  On the basis of yesterday afternoon's recital, it would be fair to say that the San Francisco Conservatory is one of the institutions that will assure us of having at least one more generation of such performers.  The program was cleverly structured as a précis of the development of Beethoven's "chamber music voice," beginning with the rather non-standard Opus 25 serenade in D major for flute, violin, and viola and proceeding through two string quartets, the first in the "Razumovsky" set, Opus 59, Number 1 in F major, and Opus 132 in A minor (which, in the wake of a rather extraordinary performance in New York earlier this week, may now deserve to be called "the Four Quartets quartet," in recognition of its impact on T. S. Eliot).

Recently, Conservatory students have been encouraged to preface performances with some remarks about the music.  Because the recital program is almost always a single sheet of paper providing nothing more than the compositions and the performers, this provides an alternative to a program book and prepares students for the sometimes challenging task of accounting verbally for what they are doing.  The introduction to Opus 25 emphasized the uniqueness of the flute-violin-viola combination but mistakenly situated the work's historical context between the first two symphonies.  While the music was published in 1802, Thayer puts its composition in either 1795 or 1796, which would mean not too long after the Opus 2 piano sonatas.  This was a time when Beethoven acknowledged the inventive wit of his teacher, Joseph Haydn, usually by trying to do Haydn one better.  The serenade is thus a product of Beethoven at his most genial;  and, while the remarks made no mention of his wit, the performance certainly demonstrated awareness of the sense of play with which Beethoven approached this rather traditional (if not outmoded) structural form.

By the time we get to the Opus 59 quartets, we are well into the Beethoven of energetic and emphatic expressiveness.  (He had only recently completed his third "Eroica" symphony, Opus 55.)  This work was presented without remarks but with a raw and gruff energy that well illustrated Beethoven's sometimes tense relationship with polite society.  This made for a valuable perspective in the context of the many performances these quartets receive that are far more polished and polite.  Opus 132, on the other hand, is a highly introspective work.  Personally, I do not find Eliot's use of the noun "gaiety" particularly apposite;  but his phrase about "the fruits of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering" are most perceptive, particularly in light of the central role of the extended middle movement, the Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart.  One might argue that this is a work that demands far more maturity than one can expect from students;  but, while that maturity may have been missing in the prefacing remarks, the students brought far more than sufficient music understanding to the performance itself.

The evening recital began with Debussy's only string quartet in G minor.  This work is frequently compared or coupled with Maurice Ravel's F major quartet;  but the two are markedly different, particularly on rhetorical grounds.  Ravel greets you with an accessible affability, which better disposes your receptivity to the subtleties that shimmer beneath the surface.  Debussy begins with sharper edges;  and, while his Andantino movement is "doucement expressif," the tone of the entire work is entirely assertive.  This is not to say that his rhetorical stance is hostile, but it is not afraid to show little tolerance for traditional conventions.  To a great extent the Conservatory students caught this rhetorical spirit;  and, while it was not as rough-and-ready as the approach taken by the "Razumovsky" students, it certainly did justice to Debussy's spirit.

The major evening event, however, was Schoenberg's Opus 21, Pierrot Lunaire, which was also the only occasion for a piano.  In this case spoken remarks were replaced by a silent PowerPoint Slide Show of background text supplemented by appropriate images.  The PowerPoint projection then remained to provide English translations of the German texts (which, in turn, had been translated from Albert Giraud's French poems).  This work was conceived as a cabaret-style performance with the texts delivered in the Sprechstimme style by a soprano accompanied by five instrumentalists, the pianist, a string player alternating on violin and viola, a cellist, and two wind players, one for flute and piccolo and the other for clarinet and bass clarinet.  Schoenberg described the work as "three times seven poems," meaning that it has three major sections, each of which presents seven poems.  The first may be loosely described as a celebration of moonlight that descends from the manic to the depressive.  The second takes place in the darkness of night as a venue for crime and punishment.  The final section is an awakening from the nightmare of its predecessor with the moon serving as a reminder of a sense of loss.

This is clearly not your usual cabaret entertainment.  Indeed, it is more a grotesque reflection on such entertainment;  and the capturing of that grotesque was probably the most salient element of the student performance.  The text was delivered with all of the wild emotional swings demanded by the score, all of which were firmly reinforced by the rich diversity of Schoenberg's instrument technique.  (No two movements use the same combination of instruments.)  Taken as a whole, the composition is a major and ambitious journey;  but the students were not daunted by that journey.  Those of us in the audience were thus the benefactors, receiving the gift of an opportunity to hone our Schoenberg listening skills.

Readers will note that none of the students participating in these recitals were referred to by name.  These are free events that are not announced on the printed Conservatory Calendar.  Those of us who sit in the audience do so as guests of the Conservatory, invited to observe the work-in-progress that is the daily activity of those students.  These performances have clearly progressed beyond the early rehearsal stage;  but they are not necessarily offered as finished products or "professional" ones.  Thus, the Conservatory is a "safe place" in which the exploratory processes of discovering a performance may be conducted.  It would be unfair to any student to call out any false moves and attach them to specific names, and it seems just as appropriate to refrain from calling out those whose moves are more positive.  I can only hope that those who find their way to particularly effective performance will be able to bring their results to a more public venue.

December 8, 2009: 1919: a good year for the viola

Music from 1919 was the title of the Faculty Artist Series recital given last night by violist Jodi Levitz with her accompanist Keisuke Nakagoshi at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Recital Hall.  The year was particularly significant in the life of composer and violist Rebecca Clarke, as is clear from the following passage in her Wikipedia entry:

Having been kicked out of the house without funds by her abusive father for criticizing his extramarital affairs,[7] Clarke supported herself through her viola playing after leaving the Royal College [of Music in London], and moved to the United States in 1916 to perform. Her compositional career peaked in a brief period, beginning with the viola sonata she entered in a 1919 competition sponsored by patron of the arts Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Clarke's neighbor, tying for first prize in a field of 72 entrants with a piece by Ernest Bloch. (Coolidge later declared Bloch the winner. Two judges of the contest remarked to Coolidge that though they had favored Clarke, it was good that she did not win, to avoid the appearance of Coolidge favoring her neighbor and friend and destroying the reputation of the then-new contest.) It was speculated by reporters that "Rebecca Clarke" was only a pseudonym for Bloch himself, or at least that it could not have been Clarke who wrote these pieces,[1] as the idea that a woman could write such a work was nearly unheard of. The sonata was well received and had its first performance at the Berkshire music festival in 1919.

To provide musical substance for this passage, Levitz framed her recital by beginning with Clarke's sonata and concluding with Bloch's competition-winning suite.  Between these two "competitors," she programmed Paul Hindemith's 1919 sonata in F major, his Opus 11, Number 4, speculating that it, too, may have been entered in the Coolidge competition.  (All competitors were kept anonymous except for the two that tied for first prize.  According to a passage from Clarke's memoir that Levitz read, one of the judges declared that breaking the tie would require choosing between a philosopher and a poet.  Levitz joked that she had no idea which was which, but my own bet would be that Bloch was the poet.)

This was my first opportunity to hear Clarke's sonata performed in its entirety, although I had heard Elizabeth Prior Runnicles perform its first Impetuoso movement last September at Old First Church.  That movement alone might have led me to hypothesize that Clarke was the poet of the two competitors, but I would suggest that the philosopher emerges from the overall plan.  The Impetuoso is followed by two movements, Vivace and Adagio;  but each movement is its own microcosm of variations in both tempo and mood.  Thus the sonata is very much the work of a formalist exploring a new syntactic foundation for sonata structure and seeking out rhetorical devices through which the "sense of a sonata" would still prevail.  One could understand why that anonymous judge, who was probably well steeped in the traditions of sonata form, would have judged this composition to be the work of a philosopher.

From the performer's point of view, however, proper delivery of the rhetoric counts for far more than understanding the underlying syntax.  Levitz mastered the mood swings of each movement and thus tapped into the "voice" of the entire sonata.  As a student of Lionel Tertis, Clarke had clearly cultivated an intense love for the viola;  and that love was more than evident in Levitz' performance of her sonata.

Bloch's suite was composed in New York after he had settled in the United States.  Both the tempo markings and their organization are far more traditional.  However, Levitz disclosed a set of more "programmatic" titles that he had apparently considered for the four movements:

1. In the Jungle
2. Grimaces
3. Night in Java
4. In the Sun Country

The second of these is certainly consistent with the Allegro ironico tempo marking;  but these titles are suggestive of a poetic imagination that we find in many of Bloch's other compositions, even if there is no evidence that he was ever near a jungle in the Indonesian archipelago or anywhere else!  As Bloch's daughter Suzanne once made clear to one of my own music professors, the greatest hazard in performing his music is the risk of lapsing into sentimentality.  The music may be plain-spoken, even when it is "ironico;"  but it always speaks for itself.  Levitz understood this (perhaps because of her own experiences with Suzanne Bloch, who taught at Julliard);  and the result was one of the most satisfying performances of Bloch I have heard for some time.

Hindemith was still in Europe, playing viola in the Amar Quartet (which he had founded), when he composed his F major sonata.  This was a time when, aware of the work of other composers, such as Arnold Schoenberg, he was seeking out new directions of his own.  Those directions would eventually get him into trouble with the Nazis;  and he was publicly denounced by Joseph Goebbels as an "atonal noisemaker."  He left Germany for Switzerland in 1938 and came to the United States in 1940, where Yale University became his primary base of operations.  Around the time of his departure from Germany, he began to give as much attention to theory as to practice and is still known today for an elaborate system laid out in The Craft of Musical Composition, which departs from both the traditional practices of harmony and counterpoint and from the alternative approach being pursued by Schoenberg.  Unfortunately, his preoccupation with theory tended to blunt some of the sharper (and more interesting) edges of his earlier "raw" creativity.

The F major sonata comes from that "pre-theory" period.  With its primary focus on variations on a theme, it rests on a solid formal bedrock;  but it also has much of that intensity of rhetoric that Levitz teased our of the Clarke sonata.  Levitz' decision to pair these works before the intermission displayed them as an excellent pair of companions, both intensely serious about seeking new directions, both drawing upon rhetorical techniques to clarify those directions, but each proceeding in its own unique directions.  1919 was, indeed, a most impressive year in the history of the viola repertoire!

Levitz probably had her students in mind in selecting her encore.  Those students most likely know Hans Sitt for the challenges of his many etudes (100 of them in his Opus 32 and another fifteen for good measure in his Opus 116);  so there is a good chance that she wanted her students to know that he also composed music that was not strictly pedagogical.  She thus concluded the evening with a selection from his Opus 39 Album Leaves, believed to have been published around 1885.  One could take this as an example of the traditions from which those 1919 compositions had chosen to depart, presented in a manner through which we could understand both the value of those traditions and the efforts of a new generation to move on from them.

December 1, 2009: Getting to know the chamber music of Arnold Bax

Until last night my knowledge of Arnold Bax was limited to two sources:  the Chandos recordings of his tone poems performed by the Ulster Orchestra under the direction of Bryden Thomson;  and Ken Russell's docudrama The Secret Life of Arnold Bax (with Russell himself as Bax and Glenda Jackson as Harriet Cohen, his second wife and champion of his piano music), when it was broadcast on the Ovation Channel.  I had no idea of either the abundance or the richness of his chamber music repertoire.

Introducing last night's Faculty Artist Series concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, violist Paul Hersh as much as admitted to having little more than a passing knowledge of Bax.  However, he had a student, clarinetist Brenden Guy, who needed a sponsor for an Independent Study project about Bax;  and Hersh accepted that responsibility.  The concert was thus, in many ways, a presentation of the results of that project, introducing each of the four works on the program with background knowledge about Bax.  The works preceding the intermission were written in his twenties, and those following the intermission were written as he was approaching and then turning into his fifties.

This list of Bax' compositions on his Wikipedia page is, indeed, prodigiously long;  and the chamber music section is impressive not only for the size of its share but also for the instrumental combinations he explored.  The two works in the first half were both trios:  a single-movement work for piano, violin, and viola, which was one of his earliest compositions, and the Elegiac Trio for flute, viola, and harp.  Note the use of the viola (performed by Hersh last night) in both of these trios.  In addition to three works for viola and piano (the earliest of which comes from about the same time as the early trio), Bax also composed a "Fantasy Sonata" for harp and viola.  Both of these instruments assumed very significant positions in the Bax canon.

In introducing the single-movement trio, Hersh cited an observation by Ralph Vaughan Williams about the first works of young composers tending to be too long because they think they have so much to say.  This composition cannot be faulted for being too long;  but Bax certainly crammed more themes into it than one would expect from the usual sonata-form movement.  On the other hand one would not expect such a conventional form to be rudely interrupted in mid-course by a waltz that is almost mocking its own indulgence in sentimentality.  In that context the decision to structure the coda as a fugue almost comes across as an apology for bad manners.  The point is that, early as it may have been, this trio was very much the sound of an original voice with great spirit;  and Hersh, along with pianist Teresa Yu and violinist Philip Brezina, made sure that those of us on the audience site were caught up in that spirit.

The Elegiac Trio was completed in 1916.  Observing the strong influence that life in Ireland had on Bax' development, Hersh suggested that the elegiac mood may have been intended as a reflection on the Easter Uprising.  If so, then I would suggest that it has less to do with those who actively engaged in the Uprising and more to do with what poet and playwright Arthur Williams once called "people who got in the way."  The sound of the harp evokes the mundanity of Irish life, rather than the political struggles;  and the sadness of the work seems directed at those who tried (often unsuccessfully) to go about their lives while others were caught up in "the cause."

Chamber music lovers will be quick to recognize that the combination of harp, flute, and viola is the same one used by Claude Debussy in his second sonata.  This sonata was completed in 1915.  My guess is that Bax was unaware of it and not influenced by it.  While some of the interplay, particularly between flute and viola, triggers memories of Debussy, the text for harp has a decidedly individual rhetoric.  For this performance Hersh was joined by faculty colleagues Timothy Day on flute and Emily Laurance on harp.  Once again, the music was all about spirit;  and these performers recognized and captured that sense of elegy that gave the work its title.

Since Guy is a clarinetist, the late works for the second half of the program were selected to illustrate Bax' writing for this instrument, a D major sonata for clarinet and piano from 1934 and a nonet, completed in 1930, for string quartet, bass, wind trio (flute, oboe, and clarinet), and harp.  Both are two-movement compositions;  and both begin with a Molto moderato movement followed by a faster pace (Vivace for the sonata and Allegro for the nonet).  In many ways the nonet reflected the same richness of orchestration that Bax brought to his tone poems but distilled it down to what he may have felt was the bare minimum for the colors he sought.  (He did omit any use of brass or percussion.)  Beyond any questions of formal structure, the work is very much an interplay of "between" and "among" for this particular selection of instruments.  Thus, we have relationships between strings and winds that emerge from the "string quartet relationship" of the strings and the "wind trio" relationship of the winds.  In this setting the bass serves somewhat as a reinforcing continuo, while the harp speaks in an independent voice that colors the emerging harmonies.  An instrumental collection of this size and variation is best coordinated by a conductor, and Andrew Whitfield did an excellent job in leading the all-student performing ensemble.

The clarinet sonata was written about four years after the nonet was completed.  While it was the first of the two works to be performed in the second half of the program, when compared with the nonet it gives some impression that, having completed the earlier work, Bax felt he still had things for the clarinet to say.  This is particularly true of the Vivace movement, which almost seems to emerge from the clarinet part for Allegro of the nonet.  Here one might make a case that Bax may have been exposed to Debussy, specifically through the latter's 1910 rhapsody for clarinet in the version with piano accompaniment.  Like Debussy, Bax recognized the scope of sonic coloration that a clarinet commands;  and even if only two instruments are involved, this is very much a work of instrumental color.  However, while many of Bax' rhetorical devices suggest Debussy, it may be just as likely that he came to those devices through his own invention.  Accompanied by student pianist Hsueh-Ching Chen, Guy provided a reading of the sonata that captured both the introspective and spirited sides of the score.  This was definitely an Independent Study project that deserved the light of a public performance.

November 20, 2009: Learning from the visitors

This was Berlin Week at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  Prior to giving their first concert tonight in Davies Symphony Hall, members of the Berlin Philharmonic, including Principal Conductor Sir Simon Rattle, devoted Wednesday evening and Thursday afternoon and evening to pedagogical sessions for the benefit of the next generation of performing musicians.  Five members of the orchestra led Master Classes in trumpet (Gabor Tarkovi), trombone (Olaf Ott), French horn (Stefan de Leval Jezierski), double bass (Janne Saksala), and flute (Emmanuel Pahud).  Finally, yesterday evening, Rattle spent two hours in a Orchestral Workshop with the Conservatory Orchestra.

The constraints of my schedule limited me to a very small sample of the Master Class work;  but that sample provided considerable insight into how the music actually "works" (as opposed  to more populist myths about "how the magic happens").  I spent about 40 minutes observing Saksala work with a student on the double bass recitative at the beginning of the final movement of the ninth symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven, Opus 125 in D minor.  There are any number of anecdotes about "killer rehearsals" of this passage, usually involving conductors with the most volatile personalities, such as Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini.  So it was nice to blow away the clouds of emotional baggage and observe a master of the instrument work through this passage with a student who had clearly cultivated his own experience base.

Over the course of his session, Saksala approached these fifty-odd measures from a variety of points of view.  Most important was that every detail in the score mattered.  This may be a recitative passage;  but it is written in three-four time.  That is how the rest of the orchestra is playing, and the recitative must mesh with it properly, often in ways that are very precisely notated.  Then, at the level of the notes themselves, there are the ones that Beethoven marked with staccato dots.  Why did he choose those notes, and what role do they play in the overall flow of the recitative?

However, Saksala did not limit himself to the score.  Ultimately everything depends on the sound of the instrument.  He gave a pop quiz on why the bass sounds so good when it is plucked.  The answer turns out to be a miniature physics lesson.  Each string has so much mass that plucking it introduces a lot of energy that is converted to the vibrations of the sound, which are then further enhanced by the resonances of the cavity of the instrument.  This turned out to be a lesson in bowing:  The priority of bow work is to let the string resound with the same energy it receives when plucked.

With these nuts and bolts in place, Saksala could then work through the passage from a "musical" point of view.  He would criticize phrases after listening to them, talk the student through alternative approaches, and occasionally demonstrate on the student's instrument.  However, his underlying strategy basically involved putting the student in a position conducive to his finding his own way, what many in the education profession have come to call "active learning."  The entire session was intense and demanding, probably as much for those of us in the audience as for the student.  However, I doubt that any of us there as observers will ever listen that passage by Beethoven quite the same way again, no matter how many myth-like anecdotes we hear about it.

This theme of finding your own way was also present throughout Rattle's session with the Conservatory Orchestra.  He frequently emphasized that he was not going to beat off every pulse with his baton or emote the rhetoric of every passage being played.  The orchestra had to discover and cultivate these things for themselves.  The conductor was there to make sure that everyone was properly coordinated.

The object for Rattle's session was music by Richard Wagner from his opera Tristan und Isolde.  In an orchestral setting this opera is best known by its opening prelude and an orchestra-only version of Isolde's final aria (the "Liebestod").  Rattle chose, instead, to work with a synopsis of the entire opera, based on an arrangement that Leopold Stokowski prepared for the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1936.  Stokowski's idea was to provide through music the basic narrative that links the opening notes of the opera to the final ones.  His version of this narrative includes the taking of the potion in the first act, Isolde's anticipation of Tristan returning from an evening hunt (represented by off-stage horns) to spend the night with her, the night itself ("Liebesnacht"), and the warnings from Brangäne keeping watch for their safety.  Stokowski's arrangements have often drawn criticism for meddling with their sources, but this is probably about as clear a telling of Wagner's opera in strictly orchestral language as one is likely to find.

For Rattle this opera (if not most of Wagner's music) is a matter of unbridled passion.  Almost all of his rehearsal involved prying the students away from the notes in front of them and pulling them into that world of passion.  There is no doubt that the word most frequently heard from Rattle's lips during his two-hour session was "more!"  Fortunately, however, he had a wealth of technical advice to offer dealing with just how one achieves that "more."  Some of it would probably raise more than a few eyebrows.  His approach to the "Liebestod" climax could be described as "barely-controlled chaos," with the strings fingering each note in strict time but each player bowing in his/her own way;  but, as Rattle put it, "This is Wagner!"  Wagner wanted to transcend the conventions of musical performance.  If one wishes to play his music, one has to dare to take such transcendent strategies.

Indeed, on the audience side, we also transcended.  For all the interruptions, for all of the many tactical approaches Rattle took to getting the Conservatory students to dare along with him, there were moments when we in the audience we transported beyond the technicalities of rehearsal to the fullness of performance itself.  To return to Saksala's Master Class approach, for the students it was all about the techniques and insights required to make the music "work;"  but the rest of us could not resist giving in to those final measures of the "Liebestod" and just letting the "magic" happen!

November 15, 2009: The bitterness of exile

During the First World War many artists sought exile in Switzerland.  This provided refuge from the madness of combat;  but, with the rest of Europe in turmoil, times in Switzerland were physically safe but economically hard.  For artists life in exile was a far cry from "business as usual."

Two of those artists were the composer Igor Stravinsky and the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz.  In the spirit of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney,  the two decided that they might be able to scrape up money by "putting on a show" that would be easy to take on tour, keeping the number of people involved to an absolute minimum.  Ramuz conceived The Soldier's Tale as a retelling of the Faustian legend reflecting the tenor of the times:  A soldier fortunate enough to avoid becoming cannon fodder is on the road for a short leave at home.  He is tempted by a capitalist Devil, succumbs, recognizes the value he has lost, briefly prevails over the Devil, but is eventually marched down to Hell.  With its capitalist overtones the script was an early form of agitprop, making it one of the venerable ancestors of the productions that our San Francisco Mime Troupe mounts here every summer (also by taking a small number of people on tour around the Bay Area).

Stravinsky complemented Ramuz' sardonic text with incidental music as scornful of stylistic traditions as Ramuz had been of socioeconomic conditions.  Only seven musicians were required, not counting the conductor:  a violinist (who serves almost as a concerto soloists), a clarinetist, a bassoonist, a trumpeter, a trombonist, a bass player (the only other stringed instrument), and a percussionist in charge of a modestly equipped battery.  The sound was raw, playing up the sharp distinctions among the instruments, rather than going for any kind of blend.  The structures were frequently repetitive, with little, if any, variation, often pushing the patience of the listener.  Traditional forms of dance, march, and chorale were warped almost beyond the point of recognition.  The finished product was first performed on September 28, 1918.

Today the music is best known through concert performance of a nine-movement suite that Stravinsky extracted.  However, last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the BluePrint Project collaborated with the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) to present a staged version of the English version of Ramuz' text by Michael Flanders and Kitty Black.  The venue was the Recital Hall, rather than the Concert Hall, which was far more conducive to the spare resources required for production and provided better opportunities for the imaginative use of space.  Staging was conceived by Giles Havergal of A.C.T. with choreography by the Conservatory's Michael Mohammed.  As in all BluePrint events, music direction was by Nicole Paiement.

The result was about as true to the spirit of the original project as one could hope to get.  Dramatically the agitprop spirit was honored without being overplayed.  One nice bit of irony is that the Devil's instrument of temptation is a red book that makes one rich and mighty, precisely the color that would get under the skin of any die-hard Maoists!  Musically, this is a score that demands the utmost precision and clarity.  Stravinsky was rarely big on letting performers apply too much of their own expressive interpretation.  Paiement brought her musicians up to the task of satisfying Stravinsky's demands for a real gem of a performance.  With the madness of war once again part of our daily life, there was much to be gained from this jaundiced view of circumstances from almost a hundred years ago.

November 10, 2009: Mack McCray at the San Francisco Conservatory

Last night's recital in the Faculty Artist Series at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music featured a performance by Mack McCray, Chairman of the Piano Department;  and, like his Piano Month recital in the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral this past August, it reflected the breadth of his appreciation of the piano repertoire, not only in the program he prepared but also in the encores he selected.  The way in which McCray arranges his programs seems to hint that he takes as much pleasure in teaching his audience about the delights of diversity in that repertoire as he does in providing his students with an education in the necessities of technique and interpretation.  For those of us who had been at Old St. Mary's, last night began with a "return visit" to Joseph Haydn's G major sonata, Hoboken XVI/6, a very early (probably pre-Eszterháza) work.  Not enough attention is paid to early Haydn, even in this bicentennial year, perhaps under the assumption that there is so much more "meat" in his later periods;  but McCray made it clear that Haydn was already flexing all of his creative muscles in this sonata, whether in harmonic invention, overall structure, or a rich repertoire of embellishments, which probably reflected his eager study of the Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

To provide us with an alternative perspective on inventiveness, McCray then swung us from the mid-eighteenth century of Haydn to the early twentieth century of Claude Debussy, performing the three movements of his Estampes.  I had the good fortune to observe McCray working with one of his students on this music during an Open Classroom Day at the Conservatory;  and the "Pagodes" movement was prepared by another Conservatory student for a Master Class given by Paul Roberts this past February.  Before McCray began his class, I was able to chat with him a bit about the confusion between the Chinese connotations of the title and the clearly Indonesian tone of the music.  McCray's performance last night, however, reminded me that, whatever the cultural influences may have been, they were being thoroughly reworked by Debussy's own imagination.  Thus, while the Indonesian sounds that inspired Debussy depend heavily on a steady pulse that changes very infrequently (if at all), McCray brought out so much diversity in tempo that I had to go back to my score to confirm that he was following Debussy's instructions to the letter!

McCray also has a great interest in paraphrases, which received a fair amount of attention in his August recital.  One of his August selections, Alexander Siloti's treatment of the E minor prelude from the first volume of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, was taken as an encore last night;  but two other instances appeared on the main program.  The intermission was preceded by the "Concert Arabesques on Motifs by Johann Strauss' 'By the Beautiful Blue Danube'" by Andrey Schulz-Evler, which was very popular in virtuoso piano recitals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  (Josef Lhevinne gave a performance for "capture" on a Welte-Mignon Piano Roll on October 6, 1906.)  However, Igor Stravinsky applied a strong shot of steroids to the very nature of virtuosity with his 1921 transcription of three movements from his 1911 ballet Petrushka.  If Stravinsky used his four-hand version of The Rite of Spring (recently performed by ZOFO) to work out (perhaps for himself as well as his listeners) distinctions between foreground and background in the orchestral complexity of that ballet, the Petrushka transcription is an almost defiant effort to cram as much as possible from the orchestral score into the ten fingers (and two pedal-pushing feet) of a single pianist.  McCray's command of Schulz-Evler's "old school" virtuosity was impressive;  but his approach to Stravinsky was as awesome as (I suspect) Stravinsky had wanted it to be.

These two feats of transcription were separated by two short selections by Frédéric Chopin, both completed in 1846, the first of the Opus 62 nocturnes in B major and the Opus 60 barcarolle in F-sharp major.  While the latter is relatively familiar to those who follow Chopin recital selections, the two Opus 62 nocturnes receive comparatively less attention, except among pianists deciding to traverse the complete canon of nocturnes.  The B major nocturne goes beyond the usual rhetoric of virtuosity with some intriguing inventiveness in both melodic and harmonic ambiguity.  One might go so far as to call it one of Chopin's "experimental" pieces, particularly since we do not associate him with such experimentation.  If McCray wanted to bring our attention to unjustly neglected repertoire, he certainly succeeded with this selection.

McCray's Siloti encore was preceded by the only piano composition that Johannes Brahms called a "romance," the fifth (in F major) of his Opus 118 pieces.  Brahms used the term frequently in his vocal music;  but the Opus 118 romance is definitely pianistic writing, following the ternary form of most of his short piano works.  Written late in his life, this, along with the other Opus 118 pieces, is sensitive and reflective, almost as if McCray wanted to remind us that encores deserve the same serious listening as the rest of the program.  Taken as a whole, then, the entire evening was very much a "grand tour" of repertoire, that may well have been as exhausting as it was stimulating.

November 6, 2009: Three perspectives on chamber music

One of the (many?) outstanding features of the Beaux Arts Trio, of which Menahem Pressler was founding member and pianist, was the extensive breadth of repertoire.  Now that the trio has disbanded, Pressler has entered a new phase of his career in which he continues to enjoy the diversity of repertoire by other means.  Those means include an annual one-week residency at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he gives a public Master Class and works with both faculty and students to prepare a program in the Chamber Music Masters series.  This is the week in the Conservatory academic year for Pressler's visit, and his recital took place last night in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall.

The diversity covered relatively familiar works from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century.  The one weakness occurred at the beginning of the evening with the eighteenth-century offering, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's second piano quartet in E-flat major, K. 493.  Having had the opportunity to observe Pressler in both a wide variety of recitals and several years' worth of Conservatory events, including several of the Master Classes, I have come to the conclusion that the eighteenth century is his least comfortable element.  Last February I was even bold enough to suggest that he may have missed the point of a Joseph Haydn piano trio he was coaching at the Conservatory.  The problem then surfaced again last night and basically involved giving too much priority to the piano.

The result was the sort of discontinuity that is more evident in chamber music than in an orchestral setting.  We had a string trio of students, among whom there were rich channels of communication and a keen sense of balance (even if the violin was somewhat on the weak side);  and then there was Pressler at the piano.  For all of visual signs of attentiveness, it felt as if he was playing in a world apart from the students.  As a result, the quartet fractured into a trio and a piano solo;  and the spirit of the intimate conversations of chamber music was lost.

Once the program moved on from the eighteenth century, Pressler seemed to be on more secure ground;  and it may also be that he was more comfortable performing with faculty members.  The Mozart quartet was followed by Claude Debussy's 1915 cello sonata with cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau.  This past September the prodigious fifteen-year-old Tessa Seymour performed this sonata in a Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral;  and she happens to be one of Fonteneau's students.  Last night thus offered an opportunity to compare her voice with that of her teacher.  This particular sonata provides an excellent point of comparison, since it is both highly cerebral and intensely emotional.  It was the one portion of Seymour's recital in which I saw a spontaneous physical gesture interrupt her highly focused concentration.  Fonteneau's gestures were much more under control, resulting in a somewhat higher level of precision that facilitates listening to a composition in which even the slightest of the auxiliary notes contribute to the expressiveness of the whole.  In this respect Pressler was an idea partner, bringing that same sense of both the entirety and the richness of every detail to complement Fonteneau's conception of the solo voice.  As a student, Seymour is clearly in good hands with Fonteneau.  As the master, Fonteneau has much to offer to not only his students but those of us who can only appreciate him from the audience side of the hall.

Following the intermission, the program reverted to the nineteenth century and a composer for which Pressler has always had great affinity, Antonín Dvorák.  The work offered was his Opus 87 piano quartet in E-flat major, which Pressler performed with violinist Axel Strauss, violist Paul Hersh, and cellist Michelle Kwon.  Kwon was the only student member of the ensemble;  but she is already building up an impressive resume of professional appearances (one of which will be tonight with the Picasso Quartet).  Thus, while she may have been the "junior member" of the team, she was definitely holding her own in a conversation among equals.  This was particularly important since the nineteenth-century tradition of highlighting the slow movement with a rich cello passage was clearly operative in this particular composition;  and Kwon has cultivated an impressive track record of performances of such passages.  Most important, however, was that the entire ensemble was united in an integrated approach to the journey through the four movements of this quartet, from the opening Allegro con fuoco gesture (with particular emphasis on the "fuoco")  to the three massive forzando chords that close off the Finale.  This highlighted both the energetic and introspective sides of Dvorák's character with stimulating effect, leaving any weaknesses in the eighteenth century as a distant memory at the end of the evening.

October 27, 2009: A Schubertiad for Brahms

Last March Paul Hersh organized a Faculty Artist Series concert last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music around the concept of the Schubertiad, defined in The Oxford Companion to Music as "an informal meeting of friends to sing, play, and listen."  That program consisted entirely  of Schubert's four-hand piano music, which Hersh performed with several different partners.  Last night in the Conservatory Recital Hall, he brought the concept to life again but this time with an evening of the music of Johannes Brahms.  The "friends" consisted of fellow faculty member pianist Yoshikazu Nagai, a vocal quartet of alumni (soprano Ann Moss, mezzo Amalia Martin, tenor Alan Cochran, and baritone Anders Froehlich), and three instrumental students, all of whom have been building up impressive professional resumes:  pianists Jeffrey LaDeur and Ian Scarfe, and cellist Michelle Kwon.  The works on the program were the Opus 56b Haydn variations, the two-piano setting performed by Nagai and LaDeur, an arrangement of the Opus 114 A minor clarinet trio with Hersh on viola taking the clarinet part, joined by Scarfe and Kwon, and the first set (Opus 52) of "Liebeslieder" waltzes with LaDeur and Hersh accompanying the vocal quartet.

As can be seen from the opus numbers, the evening covered two different periods of Brahms' life.  The outer works come from the period after the success of the 1868 German Requiem, which finally brought Brahms the recognition that he deserved (and that had been predicted by Robert Schumann, who had died in 1856).  The trio, on the other hand, is situated near the end of Brahms' life.  When this work was performed in the clarinet version in August, I wrote the following:

… Brahms composed his trio in 1890.  This was a time when he had been ready to give up composing until he met Richard Mühlfeld, clarinetist with the Meiningen orchestra.  This trio turned out to be the first of four works composed for Mühlfeld, the others being the Opus 115 quintet and the two Opus 120 sonatas.  All of these compositions have a sense of twilight about them, not only through the use of minor keys but also in a gentleness of rhetoric that can easily be taken as a valedictory reflection on past experiences.

Reflective as this trio may have been, Hersh observed in his comments before the performance that the work has prospective seeds that would develop in later compositions.  He had Scarfe play the closing theme of the first movement, which would emerge as the opening theme of the first of the Opus 121 Vier ernste Gesänge;  but also the piano's first motif in that movement is a triplet pattern that later emerges as and second theme in the fourth (rhapsody) of the four Opus 119 solo piano piece.  The trio is thus very much a pivotal moment in Brahms' final thoughts about composition.

Hersh also made some remarks about the struggle that had gone into preparing this performance.  Unfortunately, there were clear signs of that struggle, particularly in his own efforts to find the proper fit for the viola against the soaring passions of Kwon's cello and Scarfe's command of Brahms' pianistic rhetoric.  It may simply have been that the "formula" that enabled the translation of the Opus 120 sonatas from clarinet to viola did not apply as well to the instrumental and contrapuntal fabric of this trio.  The result was that the listener was left with glimpses of the potential of this composition but without a sense of that potential being realized.

Far more successful were the performances of the outer works of the program.  Here again the heart of the music owes much to that contrapuntal fabric.  By composing for two pianos, rather than the "Schubert style" of four hands on one keyboard, Brahms could weave the voices controlled by the two instruments closely among each other.  This never distorts the clarity of the theme or the strategy of each variation, but it results in a sophisticated blend of sonorities that is strikingly different from Brahms' conception of this work in its orchestral setting.  These sonorities tend to be more subtle than most recording systems can manage;  but, in last nights physical setting, Nagai and LaDeur could reveal them spatially, which made it clear just how ingenious Brahms had been in his setting.

This weaving of voices was also evident in the Opus 52 waltzes.  While the four vocalists have obviously different ranges, Brahms frequently brings them into close proximity.  Also, over the course of the eighteen waltzes in the set, he takes different approaches to deploying solos, duets, and trios, in addition to working with the quartet as a whole.  It is also worth noting that, while the waltzes are many, each one is brief.  The waltz form is probably the shortest of the structures Brahms engaged in his compositions, and it is probably only slightly hyperbolic to declare that every waltz he composed is a gem unto itself.  In the brief confines of that ternary form behind the minuet movements of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Brahms could tease out any number of harmonic twists among the turns of his contrapuntal lines, all with a lilting three-beat that totally changed the approach to music intended for dance.  Everything about this performance was a delight, from the broad range of vocal expressiveness of the quartet to the sure foundational support provided by the four-hand work of LaDeur and Hersh.  The Schubertiad concept could clearly do as much justice to Brahms has it had done for Schubert!

October 16, 2009: Two kindred spirits and an acolyte

The first Chamber Music Masters residency took place at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music this week with cellist Kenneth Slowik filling in for originally-scheduled Paul Katz.  While much of Slowik's reputation owes as much to his viola da gamba work as to his cello performances, he has a solid command and appreciation of all centuries of the cello repertoire.  This was presented in last night's recital with both students and faculty members, in which Slowik participated in performances of Felix Mendelssohn's Opus 49 piano trio in D minor before the intermission and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 593 string quintet in D major for the second half of the evening.  The Mendelssohn trio was preceded by an all-student performance of Joseph Haydn's B minor string quartet, Opus 33, Number 1.  In terms of a logic for the entire evening, Haydn and Mozart provided the framework for the occasion;  and Mendelssohn both honored that framework and departed from it.

This framework may best be appreciated as a conversation conducted between Haydn and Mozart through the medium of their respective approaches to composition.  This conversation began with the publication of Haydn's Opus 33 quartets in 1781.  As John Spitzer observed in the program notes:

Mozart, who had just moved to Vienna, studied them, played them (he was the violist), and three years later issued his own set of six string quartets, which he dedicated to Haydn, as the "Father, guide and friend" of his string quartets.

Mozart's dedication indicates that this metaphor of conversation was not only through composition but also about composition (rather in the manner the that Opus 2 piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven amount to a conversation with Haydn-as-teacher reflecting on differences between what Haydn taught and what Beethoven learned).  As Spitzer's notes observe, Haydn had much to say about composition in Opus 33:

There was much about the Opus 33 quartets that must have appealed to Mozart:  their balance of seriousness, imagination and wit;  the way all the instruments participate in the musical discourse;  the flexibility of roles, where a player can be an accompanist in one bar, a soloist in the next;  the tight construction in which every melody is broken down into its smallest parts and reassembled in a hundred different ways;  and, finally the way that the four movements fit together into a logical and satisfying whole.

Actually, the first of these quartets begins with small parts, that only gradually come together to give a sense of a coherent whole.  Indeed, the very opening fragment in the high strings barely suggests that the movement is in a minor key.  The tonal focus is only established with the second fragment, which is the first time a motif is performed (by the cello) against a harmonized background.

It is not hard to imagine the sense of adventure that a composition like this must have prompted in Mozart;  and, where performance is concerned, that sense of adventure may be even more important than an appreciation of that "logical and satisfying whole."  The student performers last night (violins Liana Bérubé and Philip Brezina, violist Jason Diggs, and cellist Michelle Kwon) have all built up experience on the professional side.  Thus, they could combine a secure sense of performing for an audience with that enthusiasm for learning that must have captivated Mozart when he was first exposed to this quartet.  (One assumes that, when opening the published Opus 33, he began with the first quartet in the set.)  No mere "opening act" before the guest of honor took the stage, this was a performance that firmly established the spirit for the rest of the evening.

On this program Mozart's "reply" to Haydn came not from one of the quartets he dedicated to Haydn but from his K. 593 string quintet, composed in December of 1790, one year before his death.  It is very much an acknowledgement that the spirit of those Opus 33 quartets was still with him and that Haydn's "flexibility of roles" could be taken to a higher level by introducing a new "role" for a second viola.  We also encounter experiments in the structural level, such as the return of the Larghetto introduction to the first movement, which probably set Beethoven to thinking about other ways in which introductory material did not have to be confined to the beginning of the movement, as in his Opus 13 C minor ("Pathétique") piano sonata.

In this performance the "second" parts were taken by students (Bérubé again on violin and Hannah Nicholas on viola), while Slowik was joined by faculty members Axel Strauss on violin and Paul Hersh on viola.  Nevertheless, there was never any doubt that this was a conversation among equals (the very essence of Mozart's chamber music), made all the more interesting by the ways in which Mozart would form different trio combinations from the full ensemble to offset the different structural elements of his movements.  As to the other conversation, between Haydn and Mozart, Haydn certainly had many ways to reply, such as in the "Salamon" quartets of 1793 (Opus 71 and Opus 74).  These were replies that Mozart would never hear but would have an impact of their own on Beethoven.

Last month I raised the problem that "Mendelssohn is one of those composers whose listening experiences can easily be influenced by the company his music keeps."  While that music is rarely short on spirit, it does not always rise to the level of logic that we find in Haydn or Mozart (or, for that matter, Franz Schubert, who provided the context in which I first started thinking about this challenge that performances of Mendelssohn face).  Last night's program took a productive approach to presenting Mendelssohn on his own terms in a favorable light in spite of the "context of monuments."  By selecting the Opus 49 trio, the performers introduced Mendelssohn as the only keyboard artist on the program;  and one could listen in terms of the challenges of the relationship between piano and strings, rather than within a string ensemble.  Because Mendelssohn has such exuberant virtuosity in his piano composition, this was a serious challenge, since it is so easy for the piano to dominate the whole affair.  This is probably why my companion for last night got a bit nervous when she saw the piano lid raised to full-stick height.

In this respect it is important to give particular attention to how pianist Jeffrey LaDeur (a master's student with considerable professional performance experience) approach this virtuoso challenge in the company of Slowik and violinist Ian Swensen.  His strategy can best be described as light and dry, resisting the temptation to overplay the damper pedal.  The result was a crisp cleanliness to all of Mendelssohn's overabundance of notes, which always found their proper place in the dynamic blend of the overall trio.  The result was one of those rare and delightful occasions when one hears the familiar in an entirely different setting and all one's expectations of the routine simply evaporate.  Perhaps if more performers approached Mendelssohn with such a keen sense of differentiation, he would be less challenged by some of the company imposed on him by program planners!

October 11, 2009: Illusions and realities of the twentieth century

According to the cover of their program book, the mission of the BluePrint Project at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is "building new music for the city."  This should not be construed strictly in terms of building up a repertoire, but also a cultivation of the performing and listening practices necessitated by that repertoire.  The theme of this year's BluePrint season is Crosscurrents … where arts converge.  Artistic Director Nicole Paiement explained this in her Welcome statement:

We have chosen to cross the currents of art through collaborations with actors, dancers, stage directors, media artists, and even puppeteers.  We open with an homage to the art of illusion with works by Allen Strange, John Adams, Darius Milhaud, and Ronald Caltabiano.

Paiement has experimented with bringing additional media to past BluePrint concerts, even in subtle ways such as choosing lighting appropriate for the music being performed.  Nevertheless, at last night's opening concert in the Conservatory Concert Hall, the relationship of her program selections to that "art of illusion" was not always easily apprehended.

It was at its most explicit in the opining work, Strange's "King of Handcuffs (Ragtime for Harry)," composed in 2001.  The "Harry" in the title is Harry Houdini;  and Strange described the composition as "a continuous set of dances with texts taken from various police testimonials regarding the handcuff and jail cell escapes of Harry Houdini."  The texts are delivered, some spoken others sung, by a single tenor, who works with minimal props and costumes.  In many ways this was a conception similar to some of the music/theater creations of Harry Partch but with more traditional instruments;  so it was no surprise that Partch was one of Strange's composition teachers.  Even without Partch's unconventional tuning system, the interplay between voice and pitched percussion was delivered with a rhetoric very much in the spirit of Partch's "hobo cantata," "Barstow."  Like "Barstow," "King of Handcuffs" is an evocation of another age, whose construction of reality was significantly different from our own.  As such it was an excellent selection to launch Paiement's "mission."

This was followed by Caltabiano's "Concertini" that, in his words, "comprises a series of short movements and features the alternation of solo and tutti sections."  It was originally commissioned for the San Francisco Symphony, which performed it in 1991;  but Caltabiano also prepared a version for fifteen instruments:  flute doubling piccolo, B-flat clarinet doubling E-flat clarinet, oboe, bassoon, two horns, trumpet, trombone, piano, percussion (vibraphone, marimba, and timpani), and string quartet.  Whether or not this was a work of illusion, it was definitely another evocation of past times, those being the times before the virtuoso concerto had displaced the concerto grosso genre.  It was also another example, in the spirit of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players performance at the beginning of the week, of a composer who is very much a listener.  Each of the ten movements of "Concertini" was dedicated to a twentieth-century composer who had positively influenced Caltabiano;  and that influence was particularly evident in at least some of those movements, one of the most striking being the brass homage to Peter Maxwell Davies.  There also appeared to be some acknowledgement of Gustav Mahler;  but that may have been an "illusion" induced by last month's Mahler Festival at the San Francisco Symphony!

On the other hand it was hard to recognize any sense of illusion in Milhaud's cantata, "La mort d'un tyran."  One sentence from David Bernstein's note for this work says it all:

It portrays the terrifying response of a people subjected to the reign of a cruel and capricious dictator.

The "people" are a mixed chorus, alternating between singing and rhythmic declamation (as they had done in Milhaud's opera Les Choéphores), accompanied by six percussionists, piccolo, clarinet, and tuba.  As the instrumentation suggests, this is very much a work of extremes, first performed, ironically enough, only months after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany.  In the spirit of Giambattista Vico's "poetic wisdom," this work draws upon artistic conventions of both the ancient and modern worlds to disclose a horrifying reality at its starkest.

The evening concluded with John Adams' "Gnarly Buttons" for clarinet and chamber orchestra.  This returns us to the world of illusion, as Adams explains in his own notes for the work, reproduced in the program book:

The three movements are each based on a "forgery" or imagined musical model.  The idea for this goes back to the imagined "foxtrot" of my 1986 piece, The Chairman Dances, music to which Madame and Chairman Mao dance and make love, believing my foxtrot to be the genuine article.

In "Gnarly Buttons" the illusion of "the genuine article" is enhanced by sampled sounds, which include not only instruments but also a cow (the "Mad Cow" of the second "Hoe-down" movement).  As the program notes make clear, this is very much a personal memory piece, in which memory blurs the boundary between the forged and the genuine (as it always does).  However, like many of Adams' other compositions, it is also a work of wit;  and Paiement's ensemble captured the wit as effectively as the interplay of illusion and reality.

September 26, 2009: Partitas old and recent

The juxtaposition of two partitas, separated by about a quarter of a millennium, on either side on the intermission for violinist Ian Swensen's Faculty Artist Series recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last night could be seen as a pedagogical strategy for the listener as much as the music itself could be seen in terms of the pedagogical challenges offered to the soloist.  As the online edition of The Oxford Companion to Music observes, "partita," like many musical terms, went through a variety of meanings, ultimately converging on the seventeenth-century German convention of using it as an alternative for "suite."  We know this convention best through the music of Johann Sebastian Bach;  and Swensen's pre-intermission selection was the first of three partitas (BWV 1002) that Bach composed for unaccompanied violin.  Like the third partita in this collection (but not the second), all the movements are based on dance forms.  However, unlike any other Bach partita, this composition consists of eight movements based on four dance forms (allemande, courante, saraband, and bourrée), each followed by a "double" movement.  The "double" offers a variation of its preceding movement, usually at a more rapid tempo (but not necessarily involving twice as many notes).  When all repeats are taken in all movements, the listener is thus presented with the opportunity to hear material that becomes more familiar as its progress evolves.

Whether Bach ever thought of having listeners as beneficiaries, as opposed to honing the performance skills of the soloist, is academic.  More important is that Swensen performed these eight movements with a clarity that made for a listening experience as keen as the performing challenges were.  This is particularly critical at the beginning of the composition, which is the one case that strains the usual "double" convention.  The reason is that the "double" section is much more consistent with usual allemande conventions, while the movement that introduces it (the first thing the listener hears) is heavily laced with less "standard" rhythmic patterns, punctuated with multiple-stop chords.  This is Bach at his most opaque;  and, given the way in which transparency emerges in the "double," one can assume that the opacity was deliberate.  However, Swensen's sense of this composition as a whole made him the perfect guide to lead those of us on the listening side through both the shadows and the brightness in this music.

While all of the notes of this partita are written out in full detail, the effectiveness of Swensen's performance was due in no small part to his recognizing the extent to which the manuscript reflected Bach's improvisatory nature.  I was reminded of a piece I wrote on my blog last year, in which I described Bach "as a master improviser, the likes of which never really surfaced on such an extensive scale until John Coltrane came along to stretch our expectations regarding the durations of jazz improvisation."  Bach's scale was probably at its most extensive in the final chaconne movement of the second partita in the set (BWV 1004 in D minor);  but, even within the conventions of the dance forms, Bach has a tendency to turn away from closure as if he just remembered something else he wanted to say.

This improvisatory spirit may provide the listener with the best link to the second partita on Swensen's program, composed for violinist Pinchas Zuckerman and pianist Mark Neikrug in 1984 by Witold Lutoslawski.  As the program notes observed, "The work consists of three main movements, Allegro giusto, Largo and Presto, separated by ad libitum, a perfect example of controlled aleatoricism."  This was a technique that Lutoslawski developed in which the musicians would take specifications in the score and realize them through their own choices of both pitches and rhythms.  Thus, the concept of the "double" had been replaced by opportunities for free improvisation, not necessarily as wild as Coltrane's inventions but definitely beyond the bounds of formal musical structure.  Similarly, Lutoslawski's "main" movements were no longer tied down to eighteenth-century dance forms (or, for that matter, more recent musical forms);  but they were still grounded in a structural integrity of his own sense of syntax.

This all makes for a challenge for the listener's "ear-mind coupling" that approaches, if not matches, the technical challenge facing the performers.  One again, the listener was provided with excellent guidance by Swensen, this time along with his accompanist Eric Zivian.  Nevertheless, this is not the sort of composition that can be appreciated in a single listening, any more than Bach (and, for that matter, Coltrane) can be so appreciated.  I would hope that Swensen's performance will inspire some of his students to take on Lutoslawski's partita, providing the rest of us with opportunities to hear more of this work in the not-too-distant future.

Lutoslawski's interest in aleatoricism was inspired by his exposure to the work of John Cage, so it was nice to see that Swensen chose to begin his recital with an early Cage composition that actually predates his first experiments with chance procedures.  Six Melodies for Violin and Piano was composed in 1950 through a process described in the program notes as "using the gamut technique by first creating independent collections of pitches and intervals, called gamuts, and then sequencing them to form melodies."  (Much later in life, Cage would synthesize this gamut technique with his use of chance procedures for an extended solo piano composition entitled "Cheap Imitation.")

The context in which these six short pieces were composed is nicely described in the Wikipedia entry for Cage:

The composer was experiencing a growing disillusionment with the idea of music as means of communication: the public rarely accepted his work, and Cage himself, too, had trouble understanding the music of his colleagues. In early 1946 Cage agreed to tutor Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the US to study Western music. In return, he asked her to teach him about Indian music and philosophy.[37] Cage also attended, in late 1940s and early 1950s, D. T. Suzuki's lectures on Zen Buddhism,[38] and read the works of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.[23] The first fruits of these studies were works inspired by Indian concepts: Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, String Quartet in Four Parts, and others. Cage accepted the goal of music as explained to him by Sarabhai: "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences".[39]

Swensen and Zivian nicely captured this underlying motivation of the quieted mind;  and perhaps some of us may have achieved Sarabhai's goal of becoming "susceptible to divine influences."

The program concluded with Sergei Prokofiev's D major sonata, Opus 94a.  This work was originally conceived and performed in 1943 as a flute sonata, but David Oistrakh convinced Prokofiev to rework it as a violin sonata.  I have heard both versions and find them equally satisfying.  This being Prokofiev, however, the virtuoso demands on the piano accompaniment tend to match those for the soloist;  so one of the primary virtues in the performance by Swensen and Zivian resided in their ability to maintain a sense of balance, each enjoying the spotlight while giving most of their attention to the integration of the duo.  In contrast with the Lutoslawski partita, this sonata is a familiar part of the repertoire and provided the listener with a conclusion to the evening on somewhat more reassuring ground (hopefully without diminishing curiosity for the new).

September 15, 2009: A cello master class with Steven Isserlis

In conjunction with his visit to San Francisco to perform with Philharmonia Baroque, Steve Isserlis offered a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last night under the auspices of the Conservatory Baroque Ensemble.  The scope of the class was narrowed down to five movements from three of the unaccompanied cello suites by Johann Sebastian Bach (the first three movements of the first suite and the opening movements of the fifth and sixth suites) performed by four students.  I have always found these master classes to be one of the Conservatory's most valuable offerings.  I continue to hold to the precept that the essence of a concert lies in the listening (which Igor Stravinsky made a point of distinguishing from mere hearing) experience;  and one can only cultivate one's skills in listening to music by building up one's "experience base."  However, because the enjoyment of music is a social one (rather than being purely subjective), we keep facing the challenge of communicating to others about our experiences, discovering that it is never an easy matter.

Thus, while cello students may seize the opportunity to play for Isserlis in the interest of becoming better performers, the rest of us can enjoy the chance to sit in the audience and witness the communication that takes place.  Isserlis' talent lies not only in his technical skill (or, for that matter, his voracious love of repertoire).  It is also firmly grounded in his own talent for listening, and much of his master class had to do with his communicating observations based on the experiences of listening to these four students.  Thus, while the students (hopefully) become better cellists, the rest of us continue to build up our skills as listeners and reinforce those skills with new thoughts about communicating them.

Isserlis' first comments concerned the courante movement from the first suite, and that strikes me as an excellent way to begin.  Living in the 21st century, we easily forget that "courante" and "allemande" were the names of dances (perhaps because we have so little knowledge of how those dances were actually executed).  For both of the movements he discussed, rhythm was of primary concern. not so much in terms of what the beats were (which one could read from the notation) but in how energy was distributed across those beats.  That distribution of energy has more to do with what distinguishes a courante from an allemande than the fact that the former has three beats to the measure and the latter has four.  By beginning with a sense of distributed energy at the measure level, Isserlis could then escalate to the movement as a whole, talking about how it is "punctuated" into phrases through the use of cadences.  He demonstrated his points through the prosody of texts he uttered concerning a visit from his mother-in-law, a clever analogy, since the impact of prosody often has more to do with connotation through acoustics than the logical denotations of semantics.  Having established that these movements were fundamentally dances structured by their "punctuation," he could then discuss the "journey" of traversing the entire structure.  That discussion involved some rudiments of music theory;  but the theory served primarily to offer a language that facilitated the description of the journey, rather than an end in itself.

Having established his strategy for communication over a dance form (albeit an unfamiliar one), Isserlis could then exercise that same strategy on the prelude movements.  Like the preludes in The Well-Tempered Clavier, these movements are not based on a common formal structure.  Nevertheless, each of these movements still has its own "journey;"  and that journey is still demarcated by the low-level management of rhythm and the phrase-level understanding and execution of proper punctuation.  Thus, one need not hide behind vacuous phrases like "free form" in addressing such movements, because they are as "committed to the journey" as the dance forms (more familiar in Bach's time) are.

This then raises a higher-level question, which Isserlis touched on briefly.  Is there a "journey" in an entire suite?  Is there a "journey" across the set of six suites played in the order of their BWV numbers (which may not have been the order in which they were first conceived)?  Isserlis talked briefly about toying with the idea that the full set of suites unfolded the narrative of the Life of Christ.  He admitted that his best evidence came from the fifth (C minor) suite depicting the Crucifixion, followed by the Resurrection in the final D major suite.  However, he confessed that his argument was pretty shaky;  and, on the basis of what I heard, I would probably agree with him!  Nevertheless, he raised these thoughts as a way of suggesting that the Nativity might provide a useful back-of-the-mind context setting for the first suite.  I certainly sympathize with this idea of a context-setting strategy and often use it as part of the sensemaking that takes place in my own listening experiences.  However, whether I choose to escalate the subjectivity of that strategy to a level of social discourse is a matter of the conclusions I draw from it and whether those conclusions are relevant to what I wish to communicate.  This seems to be how Isserlis approached his Nativity setting, but it is hard to tell whether or not it had any impact on his students.

I hope I have now made the case that there is much to be gained from these master class events, even if one never gets beyond sitting in the audience.  Lest I forget, there is one remaining punch line:  Most of these events at the Conservatory are free.  As Lee Iacocca would have said, "If you can find a better deal for learning to listen, take it!"