December 24, 2009: Richard Goode returns to San Francisco Performances

On Friday, January 22, at 8 PM, Richard Goode will return to Herbst Theatre to present a piano recital under the auspices of San Francisco Performances.  For me there will be a strong sense of anniversary to this occasion, both public and personal.  Since this will be Goode's fifteenth appearance with San Francisco Performances, one could not think of a better selection for their 30th Anniversary Season;  but my first reaction to the announcement of this event was the discovery that he would be performing music that I had encountered the very first time I heard him give a recital.  This was a performance at Alice Tully Hall that concluded with Robert Schumann's Opus 16 Kreisleriana cycle;  and this same work will conclude the program he has prepared for his visit to San Francisco.

Those unfamiliar with the significance of the name of this eight-movement composition need look no further than its Wikipedia entry:

The work is intended to represent the fictional character Johannes Kreisler from the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Like Kreisler, each piece has 2 very different sections, resembling the imaginary musician's manic-depression, and perhaps recalling Florestan and Eusebius, the two imaginary characters created by Schumann himself, who said that they represented his impulsive and dreamy sides, respectively. Johannes Kreisler appeared in three books by E. T. A. Hoffman, most notably in Kreisleriana (1813).

Composed in 1838, the work was dedicated to Frédéric Chopin.  Not only is it one of Schumann's most sophisticated compositions;  but also it captures the spirit of Hoffmann's literary imagination far more perceptively than the music we usually associate with him, either Jacques Offenbach's operatic setting of his tales or the usual narrative line for Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet.  The last time I had to write about this music was another San Francisco Performances event, a recital by Jonathan Biss.  On that occasion I used my blog to provide a basic sense of the spirit behind both Hoffmann and his literary creation:

I first encountered Kreisler in my college days. A mathematics professor I knew had pointed me in the direction of Hoffmann's Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst Fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler. This purported to be an autobiography of a cat (Murr), who was kept by Kreisler. Unable to find blank sheets of paper, Murr decided to write this autobiography on the opposite side of pages that Kreisler had used to document his own life. The resulting text is an oscillation of disconnected fragments as the "editor" (Hoffmann) reproduces both sides of each sheet of paper in the order in which he found them. Those fragments were enough to convince me that Kreisler was one scary character, so it did not surprise me that one of Hoffmann's working titles for his Kreisler material was Lucid Intervals of an Insane Musician.

The successful execution of Schumann's fantasies on Hoffmann's creation thus requires just the right combination of confidence and guts to situate the listener on that brink between lucidity and insanity without ever providing even a breath of security.  The young Goode I heard about a quarter-century ago had both the confidence and the guts;  but the overall narrative arc of the music eluded me, leaving me more with a sense of each nightmarish tree than of the entire forest.  Thus, I am looking forward with great curiosity to how Goode's approach to this music (and my own listening skills) will have matured with experience.

This recital may also provide further opportunity to consider the impact of Johann Sebastian Bach on Schumann's compositions.  Most likely Hoffmann never studied Bach's music as scrupulously as Schumann did;  but, in the literary world, he had Kreisler perform the Goldberg Variations at tea parties, presumably to rather uncomprehending ears.  Goode's ears are far more comprehending, and thus they serve us well in our own efforts to grasp the Bach listening experience.  This is particularly true in his approach to negotiating the complexities of Bach's counterpoint by invoking the metaphor of a social conversation of "statements" and "responses" embellished by some of the social cues (like nodding in agreement) through which understanding arises.  Thus, his selection of two prelude-fugue couplings from the second book of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier (BWV 883 in F-sharp minor and BWV 884 in G major), should provide excellent preparation for how we, as listeners, approach intricate details and the overall structure of Kreisleriana.

Schumann's studies also included the keyboard music of Joseph Haydn, and it is likely that he came to know Haydn's sonatas before his first exposure to Bach.  One might even speculate that Haydn's coupling of often highly unorthodox invention with a mastery of formal structure may have provided an initial stimulus for the dialectical relationship between Schumann's Florestan and Eusebius.  Thus, Goode's decision to include three Haydn sonatas  (Hoboken XVI/21 in C major, Hoboken XVI/20 in C minor, and Hoboken XVI/40 in G major) on his program may provide us with as much preparation for Kreisleriana as his Bach selections will.  In addition, Goode will be giving a free pre-concert talk on Haydn at 7 PM, one hour before his recital begins.  I would not presume to speculate whether Goode will explore any "Schumann connection" in this talk, since any one of these three sonatas provides more than ample material for discussion on its own!

Tickets for the concert itself will be $49 and $32.  Further information may be obtained from San Francisco Performances at 415-392-2545.  Tickets may also be purchased through the Web page for this event.

December 18, 2009: An abundance of chamber music by Antonín Dvorák

The latest collaboration between the Alexander String Quartet and lecturer Robert Greenberg will be a series of four 10 AM Saturday concerts on January 16 and 30, February 20 and March 27 at the Herbst Theatre, presented by San Francisco Performances, devoted entirely to the chamber music of Antonín Dvorák.  Dvorák is hardly a stranger to San Francisco chamber music fans, and it would probably be fair to say that he is one of the favored composers among both faculty and students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  However, these Saturday morning events will provide the opportunity to supplement performances of the music with Greenberg's insights in his capacity as Music Historian-in-Residence for San Francisco Performances.  Those insights are sure to touch upon his nationalist influences, his relationship with Johannes Brahms (an equally prolific composer of chamber music), and, of course, the impact of the time he spent in the United States.  The complete schedule for this series of concerts (with some background on the music being performed provided by San Francisco Performance) is as follows:

Program 1
10 AM, Herbst Theatre, Saturday, January 16
String Quartet in D minor, Opus 34; String Quartet in E-flat Major, Opus 51

This program features the first two compositions that caused Dvorák’s sudden burst to fame in his late thirties. By 36, he had labored for years in obscurity, supporting his young family by giving music lessons, playing the viola in orchestras and the organ in church, and trying to compose. He was known in Prague but almost nowhere else. Dedicated to Brahms, who helped alert European publishers to Dvorák’s talent, the “String Quartet in D minor” (1877) is a little-known jewel, full of lovely music and showing some unusual thematic relationships.

As his fame grew, Dvorák was encouraged to give up his Czech identity and write music in the mainstream German tradition. The “Quartet in E-flat Major” (1879) shows how the composer found himself trapped between these two worlds; even as he writes for German performers and audiences, he insists on using Czech rhythms, sounds and forms.

Program 2
10 AM, Herbst Theatre, Saturday, January 30
Terzetto in C Major for Two Violins and Viola, Opus 74; Piano Quintet in A Major, Opus 81
(With Roger Woodward, piano)

An unusual combination of two violins and viola, Dvorák’s “Terzetto” (1887) is as genial and good-spirited as anything he wrote. Faced with the challenge of writing for three high voices (string quartet minus the cello), he provides a full harmonic palette and bass line.

Not long after completing that four-part piece, Dvorák composed what is universally acclaimed as one of his finest works, the “Piano Quintet” (1887), tremendously vital music full of fire, sweep and soaring melodies. For the Quintet, accomplished pianist Roger Woodward, currently a professor at San Francisco State University, joins the Alexander String Quartet.

Program 3
10 AM, Herbst Theatre, Saturday, February 20
String Quartet in F Major, Opus 96 “American”; Viola Quintet in E-flat Major, Opus 97
(With Andrew Duckles, viola)

While serving as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York in the late 19th century, Dvorák composed what is known as the “American” Quartet (1893). The artist claims to have composed “in the spirit” of American music and national melodies; listeners will have to decide for themselves.

The “Viola Quintet” (1893), is said to be directly influenced by the uniquely American elements of Iroquois drumbeats and locomotives pounding along New York City’s rail lines. Joining the Alexander for this piece is Southern California-based violist Andrew Duckles.

Program 4
10 AM, Herbst Theatre, Saturday, March 27
String Quartet in A-flat Major, Opus 105; String Quartet in G Major, Opus 106

Dvorák composed the “String Quartet in A-flat Major” (1895) as he was leaving the United States to return to his native Bohemia. The piece, with its general mood of celebration, reflects the composer's relief at being home — it is saturated with Czech musical forms and the spirit of Czech music. Similarly, “String Quartet in G Major” (1895), his first work after returning, reflects Dvorák joy at this homecoming.

Tickets for individual concerts cost $36 and $24;  and the "package rate" for all four programs is $128 and $86.  Further information may be obtained by calling San Francisco Performances at 415-392-2545.  There is also a Web page for the entire series of events.

December 17, 2009: The Isserlis-Gerstein duo returns to San Francisco

On Sunday, January 10 at Herbst Theatre, cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Kirill Gerstein will give a recital at 7 PM under the auspices of San Francisco Performances.  This will be their second duo appearance for San Francisco Performances, the first having been in May of 2007 (which, coincidentally, was one month after Marino Formenti gave his first series of piano recitals for San Francisco Performances).  However, neither performer is a stranger to San Francisco.  When Gustavo Dudamel made his debut conducting the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall in March of 2008, Gerstein was the soloist in the first half of the program, performing Sergei Rachmaninoff's first piano concerto (his Opus 1).  While many dismissed this as a rather disappointing way for two such capable artists to present themselves to the Davies audience, I looked through the other end of the telescope at what I called "a work that is not 'up there' among the recognized masterpieces."  I felt that taking on a work that lacked such "masterpiece credentials" was a real test of performance skill;  and Gerstein (as well as Dudamel) emerged from that test with flying colors.

This past September Isserlis was here under somewhat more amenable circumstances, performing Joseph Haydn's C major cello concerto (Hoboken VIIb/1) with Philharmonia Baroque under its Music Director Nicholas McGegan and conducting a Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music based entirely on movements from three of the unaccompanied cello suites by Johann Sebastian Bach, all music with impeccable "masterpiece credentials!"  The program he and Gerstein have prepared for next month will involve somewhat less familiar material:

• Benjamin Britten:  Sonata for Cello and Piano in C Major, Opus 65
• Robert Schumann:  Violin Sonata No. 3 (arranged for cello by Isserlis)
• Sergei Rachmaninoff:  Sonata in G minor for Piano and Cello, Opus 19

Note the ordering in the Rachmaninoff sonata.  When this work was performed in the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral last October, I noted that its Wikipedia entry cited a remark by record producer John Culshaw claiming that Rachmaninoff disliked calling it a cello sonata because he thought the two instruments were equal.  Personally, the work struck me more as a piano sonata with cello obbligato;  but it would not surprise me if Isserlis and Gerstein, both strong personalities, will achieve the sort of equality of voices that Rachmaninoff supposedly had in mind.

The decision to arrange Schumann's last violin sonata is particularly interesting.  While Schumann's cello concerto holds a secure place in the repertoire, he never composed a cello sonata.  Indeed, his only solo instrument sonatas are the three he composed for violin;  and the third is his last piece of chamber music.  The work is seldom performed;  so the opportunity to listen to it will be welcome, even if the experience will be mediated by its arrangement for cello.

The Britten sonata is also seldom heard, and I know it personally only from the Etcetera CD recording by Alexander Baillie and Ian Brown.  Perhaps the deepest impression the work made on me had to do with my interest in the "raw materials" of sound and the approach that Britten took to having the cello arpeggiate through natural harmonics.  I was also struck by the observation in the anonymous notes for this recording that the work was composed in January of 1961, which probably puts it closely before Britten began work in his War Requiem.  In this case I feel I am long overdue for listening to this work without the intervention of recording technology.

Tickets for this recital are available for $49 and $32.  Further information may be obtained by calling San Francisco Performances at 415-392-2545.  The link for purchasing tickets online may be found in the January area of the Calendar Web page for San Francisco Performances.

December 16, 2009: Marc-André Hamelin presents the delights of the nineteenth century

In his program for San Francisco Performances last night at Herbst Theatre, pianist Marc-André Hamelin communicated an understanding of the nineteenth-century aesthetic that is regrettably rare in the current crop of concert offerings.  It is an understanding that subordinates the performer to the music itself and the demands made by that music on appropriate performance technique.  His casual appearance and cool disposition make it clear that the program is not about him;  it is about the nineteenth-century perspective on both composition and performance.

This perspective is best appreciated if we again invoke the concepts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric behind the medieval trivium.  It is through grammar that we understand how a composition is structured, not only as an assembly of building blocks but also as a prioritization of that assembly through which some blocks serve to embellish others (as adjectives are used to embellish nouns).  As with sentences, musical compositions may be ambiguous about structure, in which case it is up to the performer to clarify how (s)he wishes to communicate that structure.  Clarification often comes through identifying a logic behind the structure, which may be facilitated by regarding the performance as a journey through time for which there are clear points of departure and arrival and a well-defined path connecting the two.  Put in more blunt terms, logic concerns the question of what, in the composition, the performer expects us to listen to in order to justify the commitment of sitting there for the duration of the performance.  Having established that justification, one then applies rhetoric to keep the listener engaged in that commitment to listen.

The application of this framework to Hamelin's performance may best be appreciated in the major work on his program, the collection of four consecutive etudes from Charles-Valentin Alkan's Opus 39 collection that he chose to call a "symphony" for solo piano.  The tempo markings make it clear that these four etudes are assembled in the structural plan of a four-movement symphony:

1. The Allegro moderato follows the conventions of an opening symphonic movement.
2. The Andantino is marked Marche funèbre in a clear nod to Ludwig van Beethoven's use of a funeral march as a movement in both a piano sonata and a symphony.
3. The Menuet indicates a basic ternary form movement, which is probably more in the spirit of a scherzo.
4. The Presto is also marked as Finale, following the convention of a fast-paced conclusion.

The listening experience is thus very much a symphonic journey along which one encounters many features that had established themselves in the eighteenth century.  Rhetorically, however, the sense of etude is invoked from beginning to end in the virtuoso demands that must be met in the interest of proper execution.  This is where flamboyance comes into play;  and, by keeping his own cool, Hamelin allows those on the audience side to appreciate that the general journey is very much about taking a traditional structure (probably dismissed as outmoded by many of Alkan's contemporaries) and illuminating it with fireworks, rather like a low-tech version of one of those hokey Son et Lumière productions that were so popular as tourist attractions in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Hamelin's appreciation of this nineteenth-century aesthetic is so acute that he can also apply it equally effectively to eighteenth-century music.  This was most apparent in his performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's A minor sonata K. 310.  Composed in 1777 when Mozart was 21, this is a highly turbulent and expressive work that goes beyond the exuberant displays of a "show-off kid."  Mozart scholar Maynard Solomon has even seen it as a foreshadowing of the entire framework of grammar, logic, and rhetoric that would define nineteenth-century composition;  so, in many respects, all Hamelin was doing in his (decidedly non-period) approach was allowing the music to cast its shadow forward to the nineteenth century in the manner of Solomon's assessment.  In other words the performance had less to do with any sense of Mozart's own grammar, logic, and rhetoric and more to do with how the nineteenth century received Mozart's legacy.

The set of F minor variations on an Andante theme by Joseph Haydn, Hoboken XVII/6, is another matter.  Haydn was always trying to invent ways to push the envelope of composition;  but he also had the good sense to pay attention when his patron, Prince Nicholas Esterházy, would let him know (usually gently) than enough was enough.  With Esterházy's death in 1790, however, those constraints were lifted;  and Haydn was once again free to explore new ways to invent.  This particular work, composed in 1793, actually has the subtitle "Sonata – Un Piccolo Divertimento," which is a bit deceptive, considering that it is a single movement (making it "piccolo").  Its double variation form, which would figure so significantly in the fifth and ninth symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven and much later in the fourth symphony of Gustav Mahler, was a radical departure from what variations were expected to be, matched only by the outrageous turn-on-a-dime progressions in a coda that, when used at all, had previously been intended to return the listener to the simplicity of the theme after a journey of embellishments.  This music is less a foreshadowing of nineteenth-century thinking as much as it is one of the first clear and explicit statements of that thinking, making it the perfect way for Hamelin to introduce his program.

All this attention to the Haydn and Mozart offerings that began Hamelin's program and the Alkan that concluded it should not detract from the middle of his own journey (or, for that matter, his encore).  Between Mozart and Alkan we had Franz Liszt, the Venezia e Napoli supplement to the second "year" of his Années de Pèlerinage, and Gabriel Fauré's sixth D-flat major nocturne (Opus 63).  In these cases Hamelin was again the quiet center of control, whether it was the roiling energy of Liszt at his most "Lisztich" (not necessarily in the pejorative sense that Johannes Brahms had intended) or Fauré's intricate interleaving of voices, which only makes sense through a clear rendering of the interplay.  The performance was all about the music, and the performer was simply the channel for that performance.  This was also true of his encore, the second of the Opus 27 nocturnes of Frédéric Chopin (also in D-flat major), whose ternary form frames some of Chopin's most elaborate embellishments between outer sections of deceptive simplicity.

On a broader scale San Francisco Performances has used the past two weeks to offer us an impressive piano journey of its own.  First we had Marino Formenti guide us through many of the complexities of the twentieth-century aesthetic, after which he led us just as capably into the twenty-first-century aesthetic of Bernhard Lang.  Then, last night we could fall back into the nineteenth-century with a more informed sense of what it was, where it came from, and where it would eventually lead.  If this program planning was less a matter of design and more one of happy circumstance, we should still celebrate the benefits of that circumstance!

December 12, 2009: Haydn variations

Last night Marino Formenti performed the second of his two Aspects of the Divine recitals for San Francisco Performances at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco.  The title of this second part was Seven Last Words;  and the central work, performed after the intermission, was a piano transcription (presumably Formenti's own) of Joseph Haydn's oratorio, The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross.  This was preceded before the intermission by a single work, the United States premiere of Bernhard Lang's Monadologie V—7 Last Words of Hasan.

In a statement reproduced in the program book, Lang described his Monadologie compositions as follows:

Perhaps the Mondadologies can best be characterized in the following points:  they utilize tiny introductory modules, which are used to generate the entire musical fabric.  These introductory elements are for the most part "samples" from existing musical material.  The scores are created through cellular automatons [sic];  in other words, they are created mechanically and themselves represent mechanical abstractions in the Deleuzian sense.  The cells pass through discrete states as complex differentials, appearing as constant mutations.

In Monadologie V the "existing musical material" comes from Haydn's oratorio and Formenti's own comments in the program book reflect on the relationship between Lang and Haydn:

His [Lang's] way of obsessively dissecting and reassembling (and therefore obsessively questioning) models and modules, based here as in his other works on "historical" material, would also recreate an authentic, partly violently true "anti-music."

The concept of "seven last words" also undergoes transformation in Lang's reworking of Haydn.  In Haydn's case, the "words" are actually seven phrases from the Gospels that Jesus uttered from the Cross.  Haydn's oratorio was written for a Good Friday service in the Cathedral of Cádiz in Spain to provide music for meditation by the congregation after each of these phrases was pronounced during the ritual.  Lang has transformed Jesus into Hasan-i Sabbah, first known by the West through the tales of Marco Polo.  Hasan himself was not a martyr;  but he led the cult of Shiite Arab Hashshashins (the Assassins), all of whom embraced martyrdom as part of their cause.  The legend is that, on his deathbed in 1124, Hasan whispered seven words just before dying:

Remember, nothing is true;  everything is permitted.

To the extent that cellular automata have provided a fundamental mathematical abstraction in an area of research known as "artificial life," Hasan's words have striking relevance:  The world of abstraction transcends the concept of truth.  The question of whether or not anything is true is replaced by the question of whether or not all the propositions of the abstraction are consistent among themselves.  Truth no longer matters;  and, while everything is not permitted, the constraints of internal consistency allow for a generous approximation to everything!

Thus, as had been the case with the music of Olivier Messiaen at the first Aspects of the Divine recital last Saturday, Formenti presented a program of music based on a considerable theoretical infrastructure.  However, as was the case on Saturday, it was clear that he approached his performance with more attention to practice than to theory.  From this point of view, he seemed to take that comment about "partly violently true 'anti-music'" (perhaps in response to Hasan's dying conviction that nothing is true) as a point of departure.  There was definitely an outburst of violence in the flood of notes that began Monadologie V, pounded out with such spontaneity that Formenti began playing as he was taking his seat on the piano bench;  but, for all of that violence, I am not sure I would call Lang's music contrarian.

What was fascinating about the organization of the program is that Haydn's oratorio is not a particularly familiar work, even in his revision of the music as a string quartet (sometimes performed by a string ensemble).  Thus, one could not count on extensive recognition of the modules behind this particular compositional process.  One was simply aware that, in the midst of an onslaught of violent dissonance (the earthquake of the coda to Haydn's oratorio?), fragments of eighteenth-century rhetoric would emerge, swept away by the dissonances almost before they could be recognized.  Yet I suspect that Formenti anticipated that those fragments would register, even if subliminally;  so they would be recognized when they emerged after the intermission in the Haydn source text.

Since I have heard several performances of the oratorio (all recorded, unfortunately), I had the advantage of recognizing those fragments when Lang revealed them.  However, as I listened to Formenti's piano transcription of the Haydn, I realized that another bond had formed between the two compositions on the program.  Lang's "discrete states" were realized through an intensely driving pulse;  and that pulse figures significantly in Haydn's rhetoric.  In Haydn, as one might imagine, the pulse serves primarily as a background element, which adds emotional tension to the foreground melodic line and the poignancy of the text being sung.  Thus, much of Lang's own architecture arises from the way in which he has taken background material from Haydn and moved it into the foreground.  In Lang's music the emotional tension is still there;  but it is now revealed with far sharper edges, providing Formenti with a basis for that "violent truth."  However, by performing his transcription of Haydn after Lang's mutations, Haydn's pulses no longer receded to that background for which they had probably been intended.  In other words the context of Lang's music had disrupted the usual conventions of foreground and background that we would apply to listening to Haydn;  and Formenti's performance seemed designed to let that disruption run its course, providing an "aspect" of Haydn more revolutionary than what one would gather from most accounts of his work.

The whole evening was thus thoroughly alien to the usual traditions of the piano recital, even in the ways in which Haydn was presented.  Nevertheless, the conception of the program was certainly true to its overarching theme.  After all, just about any "aspect of the Divine" must, by its very nature, be alien to mere mortality.  Those aspects of the Divine that Formenti addressed through Messiaen last Saturday were presented as sources of awe and wonder.  Haydn's music may have been intended for silent meditation;  but Lang's transformations restored those impressions of awe and wonder, thus shaping any meditations that occupied our minds when Formenti allowed Haydn's voice to speak through his transcription.  Meditating on the Crucifixion during Advent may have put time a bit out of joint, but meditating on aspects of the Divine is suitable for any period in the religious calendar.

December 6, 2009: A child's garden (or aviary?) of Messiaen

Any suggestion that pianist Marino Formenti would follow Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus, performed yesterday evening without intermission at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, with a San Francisco Performances Family Matinee event, apparently conceived with elementary school children in mind, about Messiaen would probably have been greeted with, at the very least, Spock's raised eyebrow.  However, Formenti appears to believe (as I do) that there is no need to simplify music for the sake of performing it for young audiences.  One may be more selective in what one offers;  but there is no reason to assume that any music, whether by Messiaen or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is less accessible to kids than it is to adults.  If anything, young audiences have fewer biased assumptions about what music should or should not be;  so, when someone like Formenti stands in front of them and tells them that you can make music from bird songs, they do not find that as peculiar as their more educated seniors.

Formenti selected four movements from last night's recital for his Matinee program:

• Regard des hauters: the view from the heights (or the view of the birds)
• Regard de l'Esprit de joie:  the image of the spirit of joy
• Regard des Anges:  the view of the Angels
• Regard de l'Eglise d'amour:  the image of the Church of Love

Kids could relate to the first three with little difficulty, particularly when Formenti preceded each performance with examples:  the songs of birds that Messiaen and his wife, Yvonne Loriod, had meticulously recorded and documented in music notation, the dance-like qualities of that "spirit of joy," and the "voices" of angels expressed through the intimidating sounds of their brass instruments (as in the Last Trumpet) and the massive bells of the churches (which, according to at least some sources, embodied the voices heard by the Maid of Orléans).

The result was fascinating to experience.  Initially restless, the kids in the audience were quickly drawn to the examples presented to them.  If there were any child-sounds competing with the descriptive explanations, those noises vanished when Formenti began to play.  In all probability most of the audience had never heard anything like this before, and their curiosity got the better of them.  Only the extended meditation on the Church of Love turned out to be a bit beyond their "listening grasp;"  and restlessness got the better of them.  On the whole, however, this was an audience more receptive to Messiaen than some Davies audiences have been for Anton Webern.

The success of this event probably had much to do with Formenti having a very high comfort level in talking with the children, rather than talking at them.  I would not be surprised if he could present the idea of listening to silence to them just as effectively and then treat them to a performance of John Cage's 4'33".  Last night's audience was religiously attentive, which was as true to the spirit of the entire Vingt Regards as one could wish.  Today's attentiveness came from the curiosity of childhood, and Formenti's performance reminded us of just how important exposure to music at an early age is.

December 6, 2009: Christmas with the devout Messiaen

Marino Formenti's second visit to San Francisco under the auspices of San Francisco Performances began yesterday evening at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley.  His two recitals were conceived under the general title Aspects of the Divine, and the subtitle for yesterday's performance was Twenty Glances.  This nomenclature could be taken as his personal reflection on Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus, whose twenty movements were performed without intermission over the course of about two hours.  Messiaen was certainly one of the most devout composers of the twentieth century, serving for the greater portion of his life as organist of Sainte Trinité in Paris.  He claimed (and there is no reason to doubt him) that his Catholic faith sustained him during the Second World War when he was held prisoner in the German Stalag VIIIA.  Whether or not the Vingt Regards were explicitly intended as a celebration of Christmas through mediation on the newborn Jesus (the work was composed between March 23 and September 8 of 1944), Formenti's decision to select this music was certainly seasonally appropriate.

The extent of Messiaen's devotion is evident immediately in the three and a half pages of notes provided to introduce the 177-page score of Vingt Regards.  Each movement offers a topic and brief text for meditation, and for many of the movements Messiaen gives a brief account of his compositional strategy.  Musically, the work is structured around three primary "themes."  The first theme represents God as a progression of five chords where most of the "action" takes places through subtle movements in the inner voices:

The second theme represents the entirety of the life of Jesus by standing for both the Star of Bethlehem and the Cross:

Finally, there is a "theme of chords" that Messiaen refers to metaphorically as his "rainbow" for the way in which, in the course of the cycle, its composition is broken apart and reassembled:

The pianist is therefore obliged to maintain a command of a fair amount of preparatory material before turning to the score itself.

Formenti certainly had a command of that material, as he did of each of the twenty movements.  I have no idea what his own religious convictions may be, but in yesterday's church setting he certainly performed in a way that honored Messiaen's devotion, whether or not Formenti himself embraced it with Messiaen's level of intensity.  Indeed, when he reached the half-way point of the tenth movement, "Regard de l'Esprit de joie," the look on his face made it clear that this spirit of joy figured significantly in his approach to the music.

Still, the idea of sitting in a church for an uninterrupted two hours of music in a flood of notes that run a gamut from the quietude of silent prayer to the roaring of both natural and Divine forces is liable to be daunting to many.  Fortunately, the pews at St. John's were comfortably padded;  so the physical demand was not that different from many other concert experiences.  More important, however, is that Formenti established a sense of pace as the individual movements formed a journey through Messiaen's wide diversity of meditative approaches one may take to the Nativity.  For much of that pace he could draw upon Messiaen's own intuitions for selecting and ordering the movements;  but it is clear, even from the audience side, that any actual performance (as opposed to a recording), requires scrupulous energy management if one is going to have anything left for the final burst of glory in the "Regard de 'Eglise d'amour," with its message that the "Church of Love" is the ultimate essence of a progression of faith that began with the Nativity.

Messiaen clearly never wanted to draw a firm line between what one does in a concert and what one does at a church service.  Yesterday evening's recital reinforced his position, bringing his music to speak in a church during the period of Advent.  This is music that deserves to become a Christmas tradition to be celebrated with the same annual consistency we now expect of George Frideric Handel's Messiah.  Furthermore, if we can accept the teaching standards at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as a benchmark for what we can expect of new pianists, there should be no reason why more and more venues would be not able to pursue this tradition every year around this time.

Joy to the world!

December 5, 2009: Schubert the serious

I would not want to accuse Franz Schubert of lacking a sense of humor;  but in both his songs and his instrumental music he shows a strong inclination towards over-dramatization, often making it a point of getting as close to going off the deep end as possible without actually doing so.  Thus, for example, one can make a case for interpreting the Opus 15 piano fantasy ("Wanderer") as a descent into insanity (at least to the extent that insanity was understood in Schubert's time).  When it comes to setting texts, however, Schubert often seems to reject any authorial intention of irony in favor of depicting yet another protagonist wearing his heart on his sleeve.

I have a former colleague from the Music Department at the University of Pennsylvania to thank for first pointing out that Schubert missed this boat of irony in what may be his most memorable song, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem, "Der Erlkönig."  This was originally conceived as a simple ballad to open his 1782 Singspiel Die Fischerin (the fisherwoman).  The melody for this ballad, as it was first performed, was composed by the actress playing the lead, Corona Elisabeth Wilhelmine Schröter.  In his Grove Music Online entry for Schröter, Ronald R. Kidd describes her setting as "simple, folklike and strophic;"  and anyone who has read Goethe's original German text independent of any musical setting will realize she was basically following the straightforward three-beat meter of the words.  Had Schubert not immortalized it, we would be quick to dismiss it as doggerel;  and Goethe probably would not have challenged the judgment.  In her performance Schröter apparently sang it at a spinning wheel, cranking away in time to that three-beat meter.  Upon reaching the end, her first spoken text is something like, "That's the umpteenth time I've sung that damned thing tonight!"

Nevertheless, in 1815 Schubert turned "that damned thing" into high drama.  The first thing he did was to cast the song in a four-beat meter, depicting a raging storm with triplets on each beat that does not let up until a concluding recitative phrase describing the death of the child.  In the midst of the storm, the musical setting of the text scans more like prose than poetry.  It is almost like a dramatic reading (declaimed in that exaggerated style that John Barrymore could do so well), rather than a poem, let alone a piece of doggerel.

My guess is that Schubert went against Goethe's grain for two reasons.  The more important is that he did not think an audience in the early nineteenth century would buy into that self-mocking humor that Goethe dished out in the late eighteenth century.  With this as context, I would suggest that the other reason was that he just couldn't honor the original spirit.  When we consider how much music he did compose, it is not hard to imagine that he simply could not bring himself to set a text with the same tediously repetitive doggerel in which it was authored.  He would no sooner write music that way than he would jump off a cliff (even if such a suicidal act held promise of being immortalized in a canvas by Caspar David Friedrich).

It may be valuable to bear in mind this hypothetical view of Schubert's character next month when San Francisco Performances presents the recital debut of Nathan Gunn at 8 PM in Herbst Theatre on January 12.  For this recital Gunn has chosen to perform the song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin, accompanied by his wife Julie.  The cycle depicts a narrative of unrequited love where things just keep getting worse and worse for the protagonist, rather as they do for the imagined protagonist of the "Wanderer" fantasy.  In the early nineteenth century making up poems for this narrative had become a bit of a parlor game;  and Wilhelm Müller got so good at it that he published his results, a cycle of 23 poems.  Schubert, however, dispensed with any ludic context and any pursuit of irony as part of the game, discarded three of the poems, and set the remaining twenty to his first extended song cycle.

Once again, his reason for extracting high drama from ironic trivia may be that he could not do it any other way.  In the grand scheme of music history, we are probably all better off that Schubert made this decision.  The result is a challenge to both musical and narrative skill, and any hint of triviality is transcended once we get beyond the strophic structure of the first song.  Since Gunn is no stranger to intense drama, having made the lead in Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd one of his signature roles, we have every reason to expect that the full intensity of Schubert's dead seriousness will win out over any frivolity that may have laced Müller's original conception.

The tickets for Gunn's recital are available for $49 and $32.  Further information may be obtained by calling San Francisco Performances at 415-392-2545.  Further information, including a link for purchasing tickets, may be found in the January area of the Calendar Web page for San Francisco Performances.

December 4, 2009: The joys of simplicity

There was very little adornment in The Cherry Tree, the program of Christmas songs, carols, and ballads prepared for last night's performance by Anonymous 4 at Herbst Theatre.  The content consisted of a selection of early American songs and hymns supplemented by their medieval "roots" in liturgical sequences and carols.  The melodies were straightforward;  and even the polyphony was relatively moderated (certainly by contemporary standards).  The vocal ranges of the four singers (Ruth Cunningham, Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek) were close, although not strictly identical;  and the performance setting was nothing more than four music stands on the stage.  The whole affair was a refreshing alternative to the flamboyance of all-too-many Christmas pageants.

One reason why this simplicity is important is that the words matter.  The music is there to deliver a message, not to overwhelm with its own artistry.  Thus, there is as much emphasis on liturgy as there is in the performances by our own Schola Adventus;  but, in this particular selection, that emphasis tends away from ritual within the church toward the more personally-felt liturgical values of folk material.  Consequently, the texts are as straightforward as the music;  so, even when the text is Old English (complete with those characters subsequently dropped from the current alphabet), the utterances sound familiar enough that one rarely has to consult the translation column.  Anonymous 4 clearly recognized this verbal priority, which is why it was so important that their clarity of diction rose to the same standards as their sense of pitch.

Equally important was the distinct sense of context that they brought to the two sides of the evening's repertoire.  Precision was at its sharpest for the Latin liturgy.  The Old English carols were more relaxed, but with a firm sense of every note to its own pitch.  When the music crossed over into early America, particularly into the southern mountains, a slight sense of portamento began to season the melodic lines, just enough to call attention to the significant shift of both time and place beyond the language of the text.

A more formal liturgical presence only emerged at the end of the evening's program.  After taking their bows, the singers stepped in front of their music stands to face the audience directly.  They then intoned a polyphonic setting of "Ite Missa Est" (the Mass is ended), then responding on behalf of the "congregation," "Deo Gratias" (thanks be to God).  The audience seemed to appreciate the way in which they delivered this farewell.

December 2, 2009: Looking better on paper

It appears that both my fellow SF Classical Music Examiner, Elizabeth Morgan, and I were equally impressed with the way in which Angela Hewitt conceived the program for her recital last night at Herbst Theatre.  Morgan was particularly attracted by the connection between the dance pieces that constituted most of the movements of the two partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 825 and 826) and the "Tänze" part of the title of Robert Schumann's Opus 6, Davidsbündlertänze.  I, on the other hand, saw this program as an opportunity to explore a more general picture of the influence of Bach on Schumann, focusing more on both what John Daverio and Eric Sams, in the Grove Music Online article about Schumann, called "the genre of the keyboard miniature" and the impact of Bach's contrapuntal "grammar."  Alas, what looked good on paper never really emerged in Hewitt's performances, making last night's event a somewhat perplexing experience for the serious listener.

Beginning with the most successful part of the evening, the Schumann Opus 22 piano sonata in G minor is a monster of challenges to the performer.  It begins with the tempo marking "So rasch wie möglich" (as fast as possible) and provides few opportunities to catch one's breath, whether one is the performer or the listener.  In the midst of that same flood of restless energy that pervades the much more mature Opus 63 D minor trio (performed so excellently yesterday by the Tilden Trio), Hewitt took a secure and confident approach, basically letting the tumult speak for itself but never giving in to it.  All that was missing was a sense of that cadenza (marked as such in the score) in the final movement, which provided as much of a link to Bach (through, for example, the fifth Brandenburg concerto) as did Schumann's contrapuntal dexterity.  However, given the pace at which Schumann required the pianist to hurtle through that final movement, it is easy for that sense of cadenza to get lost amidst all those demands for faster tempo.  Similarly, at those speeds, counterpoint, no matter how elaborately structured it may have been, reduces to texture, rather than any sort of "conversational interplay" among the voices.  This idea of counterpoint as texture was actually very popular throughout much of the twentieth century, having been promoted early in the century by Donald Francis Tovey;  but more recently pianists have begun to apply the conversation metaphor to excellent effect.  In Frank French we in San Francisco have one of the better examples of a pianist who makes the most of this metaphor.

This brings us to Hewitt's approach to Bach.  She is definitely in the more recent camp;  and, in the two partitas she performed, her keyboard technique was excellent for providing the listener with a clear sense of both how many voices were in play and how those voices "conversed."  The problem had less to do with technique and more to do with what was being conversed, as it were.  Hewitt had a tendency to milk every note in ways that conveyed a sense of affectation rather than significance.  This is a practice that flourished in the nineteenth century and would certainly be consistent with the spirit of Franz Liszt.  Thus, had she decided to perform some of Liszt's transcriptions of Bach organ music, her approach might have rung true to the source text;  but, if one is committed to working with any of the editions of the partitas accepted as authoritative, that kind of affectation distorts the underlying syntax, rather than clarifying it for the listener.  Whether or not one accepts Morgan's claim about the dance-like nature of the movements (which I personally do not), that "genre of the keyboard miniature" depends heavily on such clear syntax, meaning that that partitas that began and concluded Hewitt's recital were ultimately disappointing.

The same can be said for the eighteen miniatures of the Davidsbündlertänze.  One would think that Schumann's apparent affinity for the Sturm und Drang movement would have found compatibility in the affectations that Hewitt brought to her performance.  However, just as those affectations ultimately distorted any sense of Bach's syntax, they also undermined any sense of the miniature in each of those eighteen movements.  Thus, what could have been a highly dramatic narrative unfolding from the coded presences of Clara Wieck and Schumann's two fictional personalities, Florestan and Eusebius, quickly devolved into Winston Churchill's famous characterization of history without narrative, "one damned thing after another."  To be fair to Hewitt, she is far from the only pianist to have foundered on these extended multi-movement compositions, particularly from Schumann's early period, that offer few, if any, clues to the nature of the journey from beginning to middle to end;  but, to be fair to those of us on the listening side of the hall, there are any number of sources she could have consulted to address the problem, possibly even including the narrative of the choreography conceived by George Balanchine for this music.

Where the spirit of affectation paid off was in the one encore that Hewitt took, Mary Howe's transcription of the "Sheep may safely graze" aria from Bach's BWV 208, the secular cantata Was mir behagt, is nur die muntre Jagd!  While active in the first half of the twentieth century, Howe's approach to composition is described in her Wikipedia entry as neo-romantic, which is consistent with both her affiliation with Leopold Stokowski and her approach to this particular transcription.  The Ebook30.com page that summarizes Hewitt's CD of Bach arrangements (illustrated above) describes this particular selection as her favorite encore;  and she certainly performed it that way.  Nevertheless, did we have to wait the entire evening before the spirit of Hewitt's approach to performance was revealed in a positive light?

November 17, 2009: Joyce DiDonato returns to San Francisco

Since I am always interested in how to think of an evening's program as a journey in its entirety, I was delighted to see that Joyce DiDonato explicitly declared the structural strategy of her San Francisco Performances recital last night in Herbst Theatre with accompanist John Churchwell.  At the highest level the intermission divided the evening into an Italian side and a Spanish side (which provided DiDonato the opportunity to sport two different "geographically appropriate" gowns).  The Italian portion began with a selection of Arie Antiche, all of which predated the nineteenth century, which was then ushered with a scene from Gioacchino Rossini's Otello, composed in 1816 when he was twenty years old.  The section then concluded with I Canti della Sera, a cycle of four songs composed by Francesco Santoliquido in 1908.  The "Spanish" section should probably have been called the Catalan section, since its three composers were based in Barcelona (although the texts themselves were in Spanish), and was entirely twentieth-century.  It began with the first volume of Canciones Clásicas Españolas, a collection of seven songs by Fernando Obradors from the early twenties.  This was followed by the three "Maja Dolorosa" songs from the 1910 Tonadillas collection by Enrique Granados.  The section then concluded with four songs from Cinco Canciones Negros, scenes of Caribbean life by Xavier Montsalvatge composed in the mid-forties.

What was most striking about this collection was how unfamiliar most of it was.  Among the Arie Antiche, "Se tu m'ami" (falsely attributed to Giovanni Pergolesi) was the most likely to be known through its appropriation by Igor Stravinsky.  The Rossini excerpt was included on DiDonato's latest CD, Colbran, the Muse, but probably most appealed to the curiosity of those in the audience who had seen or were planning to see Giuseppe Verdi's Otello next door in the War Memorial Opera House by way of comparison.  On the Catalan side Obradors' "Del cabello más sutil" shows up on the recital circuit;  but this was the first time I heard one of his volumes (the first of four) sung in its entirety.

DiDonato alleviated the unfamiliarity with more than the usual amount of cheerful chat, which was probably a good way to encourage the audience.  Such encouragement was very much worth while, since I would be hard pressed to identify any selection from her program that was not a gem in its own right.  To the extent that I could play favorites, my past love of early music particularly resonated with "Amarilli mia bella" by Guilio Caccini, whose Florentine "new music" of expressive chromaticism was as daring as the work of his Venetian contemporary, Claudio Monteverdi.  Similarly, having worked on several of the Obradors songs with a baritone friend, I found myself drawn to Montsalvatge by my unfamiliarity and was particularly struck by his jaundiced view of Cuba "liberated" by the Spanish-American War.  Tasked with having to manage such a rich abundance of selections, DiDonato performed with an excellent sense of pace, gently ushering our attention from one discovery to the next, always dutifully accompanied by Churchwell.

At the end of the evening she took two encores, the "Tanti affetti" finale from Rossini's La Donna del Lago, another selection from her Colbran CD, and Harold Arlen's "Over the Rainbow," ending an evening of intensive exploration with an easing gesture of sentiment.  Susanne Langer completed the Foreword to her Philosophy in a new Key by quoting J. M. Thorburn:

… all the genuine, deep delight of life is in showing people all the mud-pies you have made;  and life is at its best when we confidingly recommend our mud-pies to each other's sympathetic consideration.

In recommending this rich collection of songs, DiDonato was probably more like a beachcomber, discovering a treasure trove of fascinating shells, than a mud-pie maker;  but she certainly did well to recommend her discoveries to our "sympathetic consideration!"

November 5, 2009: We wish you a non-standard Christmas

Now that the Christmas season begins after Halloween (at least as far as television advertising is concerned), I have begun my annual search for Christmas concerts that depart from the usual beaten path.  Two of these events take place very soon after Thanksgiving Day (the "old school" initiation of the Christmas season).  One initiates the Holidays with the Symphony series of programs at Davies Symphony Hall, and the other is a fortuitous programming decision on the part of San Francisco Performances.

The Davies event is the performance of the Christmas Oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach under the baton of Ragnar Bohlin, Director of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.  The soloists will be soprano Malin Christensson, contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, tenor Lothar Odinius, and baritone Anders Larsson.  As the Wikipedia entry makes clear, this work was not intended to be performed in its entirety on a single occasion:

The oratorio is in six parts, each part being intended for performance on one of the major feast days of the Christmas period. In modern performance, the piece is generally either presented as a whole, or split into two equal sections. The total running time for the entire work is nearly three hours. In a similar fashion to Bach's other oratorios, a tenor Evangelist narrates the story.

The first part (for Christmas Day) describes the Birth of Jesus, the second (for December 26) the annunciation to the shepherds, the third (for December 27) the adoration of the shepherds, the fourth (for New Year's Day) the circumcision and naming of Jesus, the fifth (for the first Sunday after New Year) the journey of the Magi, and the sixth (for Epiphany) the adoration of the Magi.

Indeed, if one wanted to be true to the spirit of the time, one of the cantatas (BWV 36, 61, or 62) for the first Sunday in Advent, which happens to be the date of the final Symphony performance, would have been more appropriate.  However, the six parts of the oratorio actually work quite well together in terms of a "narrative arc" of reflections on the Nativity;  and, as far as I am concerned, this music never seems to receive enough good concert performances.  So this is the perfect way to get the Holiday Spirit in gear.  There will be three performances, November 27 and 28 (Friday and Saturday) at 8 PM and November 29 (that First Sunday in Advent) at 2 PM;  further details can be found on the Web page for this event at the Symphony's Web site.

The San Francisco Performances event is a recital by Anonymous 4 entitled The Cherry Tree:  Songs, Carols and Ballads for Christmas.  Anonymous 4 is the four-woman a capella group with a name only a musicologist consumed by the Middle Ages could love, but for this event their repertoire ventures beyond the Medieval period.  According to the Web page for the event, the program will feature different settings of the Nativity narrative from the 15th through 17th centuries;  and, according to the press release, the music will come from both England and America.  This is thus likely to be a delightful "music history without tears" event, through which we can experience the evolution of music for unaccompanied voices over a two century period.  This recital will take place on one night only, December 3 at 8 PM in Herbst Theatre.

Nowel syng we bothe al and som!

September 30, 2009: Thomas Hampson celebrates American song

Last night in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, baritone Thomas Hampson offered one of the most interesting preview events I have ever attended.  The preview was for his Song of America recital, which he will give tonight to inaugurate the 30th anniversary season of San Francisco Performances;  and it was entitled "Song of America – A Diary."  Literally speaking, this was probably not the most accurate title.  With my credentials as a veteran of Silicon Valley, I could make a case that "technology pitch" would probably have been more accurate a choice than "diary;"  but Hampson is clearly so personally invested in this effort that what turned out to be a demonstration of a technology about to be launched was tightly woven with his own personal narrative of his involvement in the project.

The technology was developed under the Song of America Project, which is a product of Hampson's collaboration with the Library of Congress under support from the Hampsong Foundation.  The primary "deliverable" will be a Song of America Web site, whose URL (www.SongOfAmerica.net) has already been reserved but which currently offers only a "Coming soon!" page.  Hampson spent about an hour with his Macintosh laptop showing us all what to expect, after which he introduced three of his major Library of Congress colleagues:  Susan H. Vita, Chief of the Music Division, Loras John Schissel, Senior Musicologist in the Music Division, and Suzanne Hogan, Special Assistant to the Librarian of Congress.  Brad Rosenstein, Curator of Exhibitions & Programs at the San Francisco Museum of Performance & Design then moderated a question-and-answer session with the audience.  Hampson had more than his fair share of encounters with Murphy's Law while giving his demonstration;  and, as a skilled performer who seems to be able to work his way through any adverse situation, he always knew how to keep the presentation moving forward.  If his personal enthusiasm led him down more paths of digression than I could count, he always returned to the main path, keeping the entire evening on message.

That message was that, for Hampson, the scholarship behind his preparing American songs for his performing repertoire has been (and continues to be) a wild and wooly adventure, as exciting and satisfying as performing the music itself before an audience.  Hampson now sees the Internet as the perfect venue for having those adventures;  and the Library of Congress has committed itself to enabling such adventures in a variety of topic areas.  Now, with the support of the Hampsong Foundation, it will soon be enabling those adventures that most interest Hampson's professional side as a performer.

I have sat through so many technical pitches that it is hard for me to approach any of them without a thick skin of skepticism.  From a musicological point of view, they tend to follow a ternary form:  a gee-whiz exposition, followed by a "development" section about monetization and business strategies, concluding with a gee-whiz recapitulation.  Somewhere during the follow-up questioning, it emerges that this is all vaporware waiting to become substance once the business plan is up and running.

Last night's presentation did not follow this pattern, nor did it need to.  That Library of Congress commitment to enabling scholarly adventures is part of both its charter and its budget, and Hampson's foundation can supplement that budget in the interest of those musical adventures that mean so much to him.  This is what many of us have wanted from the Internet since those early dark days (about fifteen years ago) when academics were raking in government grants for digital library projects that never seemed to have professionally qualified librarians (or any other form of "context expert") on the research staff.  Will this really be the dawn of a new day?  Who knows?

The good news is that the Hampsong Foundation has offered to help recruit beta testers when the first round of content is opened to the Internet.  Hampson invited those wishing to volunteer for beta testing to send their request to songofamerica@hampsong.org.  I intend to be one of those volunteers.  There is not a review that I write that does not depend on some level of adventurous research;  so I have a dog in this hunt, whether Hampson (who may well be on the receiving end of what I write) likes it or not!  I also need to do this out of a sense of fairness.  I have put a lot of effort into writing about how the Internet offers concert experiences through cyberspace.  If there is now an opportunity to enhance those concert experiences by seeking out useful context through the Internet, that should be recognized as yet another path towards our all being better listeners and examined as such.

April 24, 2005: American women's voices (and others)

Every now and then a concert is presented with a title that usually (but not always) spares me the mental exercise of figuring out whether or not the works being performed have any unifying theme.  Last night's performance by members of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in Herbst Theatre (presented by San Francisco Performances) was entitled American Voices and covered a span of music history from 1795 to 2006.  This would have been enough to make for a unique evening, but even more interesting was that one of the works was a setting of the 1850 journal of a pioneer woman and another was the 1908 piano quintet of the first major American woman composer, Amy Beach.

The pioneer woman was Margaret Frink, and passages from her daily journal constituted the libretto for Vignettes:  Covered Wagon Woman by Alan Louis Smith on a commissioned for mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and pianist Warren Jones by Music Accord, Inc., a national consortium of presenters of which San Francisco Performances is a member.  Blythe and Jones were joined by two other Chamber Music Society members, violinist Ani Kavafian and cellist Pricilla Lee.  The work was composed in 2006 and first performed at Lincoln Center on February 22, 2008.  Presumably the current tour is providing an opportunity for the consortium members to present the work to their respective audiences.  In addition Blythe and Smith gave some introductory remarks about an hour before the concert began.

Blythe decided that the text would not be provided to the audience during the performance.  As she explained in her remarks, the prose text is particularly clear;  and she was confident that her diction would deliver that prose with equal clarity.  Ruth Felt, President of San Francisco Performances, repeated this explanation to the entire audience, announcing that texts would be available in the lobby after the intermission.  Blythe was certainly right about her diction, and her subtle use of posture and gesture definitely enhanced the clarity of the text.  She wanted all eyes on her, and those who obeyed were rewarded with the full impact of this composition.

For that matter I would have to say that the composition itself was rewarded by her commitment to its performance.  There was a little too much sentimentality for my usual tastes;  and the process of getting from Martinsville, Indiana to Sacramento, California tended to feel like the long journey it actually was.  (I sometimes call this the "Lindbergh effect," particularly in the context of Billy Wilder's Spirit of St. Louis film, when it feels like Jimmy Stewart has been peering forever in search of his first glimpse of French soil.)  True to the title of the composition, each movement was a relatively brief vignette;  but I still found myself wondering, even with Blythe's sureness of pace, if we needed all thirteen of them.

I had no such wondering where Beach's Opus 67 piano quintet was concerned.  As I had already indicated in my preview for this concert, I have heard this work three times within the past twelve months and blogged about each of those performances.  Eric Bromberger's program notes provided a useful context for the newcomer:

Beach composed her Piano Quintet in 1907–08, and she was the pianist at its first performance on February 20, 1908 in Boston.  The world of music was in ferment in 1908:  in that year Mahler composed Das Lied von der Erde, Schoenberg his Second String Quartet, and Scriabin his Poem of Ecstasy.  There is not the slightest trace of these new directions in Beach's Piano Quintet, which remains firmly rooted in the 19th-century musical traditions with which she had grown up.  Brahms himself would have felt comfortable with the form and grand sonority of her Piano Quintet, though he might have been surprised by the chromaticism of her writing.

Actually, while that chromaticism might have surprised Brahms, one of my earliest impressions was that it felt right at home with the chamber music of Gabriel Fauré;  and, in one of my blog posts, I singled out Fauré's first (Opus 13) violin sonata and the first (Opus 15) piano quartet as sources for orienting the ear to Beach's own chromatic language.

More interesting was the way in which the members of The Chamber Music Society (pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, violinists Ani Kavafian and Lily Francis, violist Paul Neubauer, and cellist Pricilla Lee) situated this music in a light quite different from that of my previous listening experiences.  All of those past experiences were at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (although the first involved William Wellborn and the Ives Quartet, rather than any students);  and I was impressed with how Beach had conceived of a work for five "equals."  This constituted a different kind of departure from Brahms than Bromberger's observation about chromaticism, since Brahms' piano virtuosity would often make his chamber music sound like a "concerto for piano and very small orchestra."  That "Brahms effect" was more present in the Lincoln Center performance than in the past performances I had heard, possibly because the spirit of Brahms' virtuosity seemed to thrive in McDermott's approach to the piano part.  This is not to say that the rest of the ensemble was reduced to insignificance.  Each member of the quartet had a major say in the "journey" of this composition;  and I particularly appreciated Neubauer reminding me of how much I enjoyed Beach's characteristic approach to the viola.

It is also important to note that those four string players worked very well together as a quartet.  The Beach quintet was preceded by their performance of George Gershwin's 1920 "Lullaby," which was never published in his lifetime.  This puts it eight years before his meeting with Maurice Ravel but about seventeen years after Ravel had composed his string quartet.  So it would not surprise me if Gershwin had been exposed to Ravel's quartet before undertaking his own.  The "Lullaby" is much shorter;  but it definitely shares Ravel's keen ear for the rich palette of sonorities that violin, viola, and cello are capable of delivering.  It is also a miniature study in syncopation with a slight hint of ragtime applied with a subtlety that Ravel never quite grasped in his own efforts to honor the innovations taking place in the United States.  The performers were clearly comfortable with Gershwin's approach to both color and rhythm, providing a bit of calm before the more Brahms-like "storm" of Beach's quintet.

Bromberger also observed that it is a bit of a stretch to call John Antes, whose D minor trio for two violins and cello (Opus 3, Number 2) opened the program, an "American voice."  He was born in Pennsylvania in 1740, the son of Moravian immigrants, crossed the Atlantic in 1764, and never returned.  He did missionary work in Egypt (which Bromberger called "a disaster") and lived primarily in Germany until he became business manager of the Moravian community in Fulneck, England in 1783.  The three Opus 3 trios were published in 1795.  Antes was aware of Joseph Haydn's visits to London in the 1790s and may have corresponded with him.  Haydn seems to have liked this particular form of string trio and composed about twenty works for it, but the last of them was completed in 1768.  I am not (yet) familiar with these Haydn compositions;  but I have become very aware of his sensitivity to the characteristic colors of instruments in the string family.  Antes' trio is particularly interesting to the extent that it shares that sensitivity to color, not too surprising given that, as a teenager, he was responsible for making some of the earliest string instruments constructed in America.  Francis, Kavafian, and Lee performed this work with the same loving attention they had given to Gershwin's sense of color, leaving the listener eager to hear more of this rarely-performed Moravian from Pennsylvania.

April 22, 2009: A vocal recital of maturing texts

Given the focus of my preview piece, I cannot conceal my disappointment that physical indisposition prevented mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, accompanied by Karel Košárek, from concluding her San Francisco Performances recital at Herbst Theatre with the seven "early songs" of Alban Berg.  However, the rest of the program remained intact;  and the chronological ordering of the composers turned out to offer a fascinating perspective on a growth of "maturity" in the texts those composers selected.  Kožená also has a diverse operatic repertoire, through which she brought a keen sense of dramatic interpretation of those texts to her performance;  but, since this was a recital, she realized that interpretation through facial and bodily gestures that were minimal but effective.  Through her understanding of those texts, I found myself thinking about them from new points of view, making this recital more than just an experience of the music itself.

For example, whatever musical challenges face the soloist who wishes to perform Henry Purcell, inevitably that soloist must contend with the "eccentricities" of John Dryden's way with words.  Consider the text of the innocuously titled (and frequently performed) song "Music for a while:"

Music for a while
Shall all your cares beguile:
Wond'ring how your pains were eas'd
And disdaining to be pleas'd
Till Alecto free the dead
From their eternal bands,
Till the snakes drop from her head,
And the whip from out her hands.

Since the program listed this as "A Selection of Love Songs," those last four lines seem a bit kinky, if not downright loopy.  At the very least we should wonder just where this text appeared in the 1692 production of Dryden's Oedipus, for which the song was composed.  However, the incongruity between the beginning and ending of the text is then accompanied by Purcell's decision to set the word "drop" several (some would say too many) times, as if to portray those snakes dropping off one-by-one.  If a composition of music is a "temporal journey," then this risks coming off as a journey from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Kožená recognized the challenge of this text and treated it with poise.  As the snakes began to drop, she offered just a hint of a wistful smile, as if to say, "Yes, these words are a bit much;  but isn't the music heavenly?"  Of course she was right.  The music was heavenly;  and the "love" of these "love songs" was clearly in the music, rather than the words.

We then progressed from the 1692 of Purcell and Dryden to Robert Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben song cycle from 1840 (Opus 42), set to texts by Adelbert von Chamisso.  Were it not for Schumann, Chamisso would probably be remembered more as a botanist than as a poet;  but, to the extent that these poems offer a relatively straightforward account of a young woman's experience of love and marriage (Schumann's accompaniment even includes a brief wedding march), they indicate an emergence of a vérité grounded in the psychology of the human heart, in sharp contrast to Dryden's classical allusions.  Chamisso was thus as much a "naturalist of the soul" as he was of the plant world, which made him a perfect source for Schumann's efforts towards the connotation of human emotions in his music.  Here Kožená could be dramatic without being apologetic, but again her minimalist approach was sufficient to invoke Schumann's emotionality without overplaying it.

With the Berg cut from the program, the evening concluded with a set of five songs by Henri Duparc.  As the notes in the program book indicated, Duparc preferred the texts of the French Parnassians, a brief school of thought that intervened between Romanticism (as represented by the German Chamisso) and modernist Symbolism.  These are, again, psychological texts;  but the psychology is always connoted through the skilled use of tropes, rather than denoted through the sort of direct descriptions Chamisso would invoke.  Duparc's musical language thus matches the "rhetoric of connotation" of these poems;  and the resulting emotions are all the more intense for being more subdued than they had been in Schumann's treatments.  Once again, however, Kožená kept her minimalist poise, letting Duparc's music "do all the talking," so to speak.

Was she as "physically indisposed" as we had been told at the beginning of the evening?  Yes, there were some rough spots in her sound;  and the Berg songs make heavy demands on the lower register, where she tended to be weakest.  However, as the old cliché goes, we each have to play with the cards that have been dealt to us.  Kožená played her hand with the skill of a performer determined that none of the music on the program be short-changed.

April 18, 2009: Jonathan Biss in concert and conversation

Yesterday evening pianist Jonathan Biss gave his own preview of the recital he will be playing this evening in Herbst Theatre.  The event (in the "Concert with Conversation" series organized by San Francisco Performances) took place in the modest setting of the Community Music Center at 544 Capp Street in the Mission District.  The selections from the recital that Biss performed here were Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 457 sonata in C minor, five pieces from György Kurtág's  Játékok (Hungarian for "games"), and the Opus 59 mazurkas of Frédéric Chopin, followed by his Opus 27, Number 2 nocturne in D-flat major.  The spirit of the event was set by the humorously self-deprecating (because Biss probably wrote it himself) "Meet the Artist" handout, which made for a refreshing change from the usual list of impressive performances and awards.  (This statement joked about Biss first being influenced by music as a fetus;  one wonders if his parents had also been reading aloud from Woody Allen's New Yorker essays at that time.)

Since I shall be at Davies Symphony Hall this evening, I was very eager to attend this event.  For one thing I have been consistently impressed with Biss, both when he performed the Mozart K. 482 E-flat major piano concerto last year with Herbert Blomstedt conducting the San Francisco Symphony and in his San Francisco Performances solo recital the preceding season.  Equally important, however, is that I have been fascinated with Kurtág ever since I was exposed to him when San Francisco Performances presented Marino Formenti's "San Francisco Piano Trips" recitals in April of 2007.  Games seem to be a major preoccupation for Kurtág, as in the ludic nature of the "12 Mikroludien Für Streichquartett" that constitute his "Hommage À Mihàly András," performed this past fall in the first of the Chamber Music Masters concerts at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  Another preoccupation, which was the focus of the first of Formenti's "piano trips," is with the full scope of Western music history.  Yet, with such broad interests, Kurtág is a master of what I recently called the "architecture of brevity."  Thus, Biss compared the (currently) seven-volume collection of Játékok with the miniaturist Mikrokosmos collection of Béla Bartók;  and, as I previously observed, the very word "Mikroludien" is most likely an invented word that provides a "mash up" of Mikrokosmos, the plural of the German for "prelude" that we find in the scores of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the Latin ludus for "game."

Needless to say, such music cannot be performed without a strong sense of wit.  Biss displayed that wit first in introducing the music to the audience and then in performing it.  For those of us who tend to overdose on piano recitals, Kurtág's playfulness was most obvious in "The girl with flaxen hair in a rage" (title translated from the Hungarian), which might invoke a rather inadequate music student wanting to play Claude Debussy in the worst way (as Abraham Lincoln put it in describing his dancing with Mary Todd).  Someone once said that comedy is about being fearless enough to take a pie in the face, and Biss approached this particular composition with that kind of fearlessness.

It was also interesting to see him offer Kurtág immediately after the Mozart C minor sonata.  A week ago I was writing that every Mozart composition in a minor key "is a gem in its own right," while grousing that last week's performance of the K. 491 C minor piano concerto at the San Francisco Symphony never really got into the "minor spirit" of the work.  Biss had no trouble at all capturing that "minor spirit."  Introducing the work to the audience, he stressed that "turbulence and tension" (my words, not his) that I found missing last week as critical factors that would surface again in the piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven.  He also pointed out one motivic fragment that may well have served as a trigger for  The second movement of Beethoven's Opus 13 ("Pathétique") sonata (also in C minor).

Biss is not afraid to experiment with new ways of listening.  Thus, he chose to play the three Chopin mazurkas almost as if they were a single continuous composition, rather than just three works collected under a single opus number.  He observed that, because these works are relatively late, he was drawn to their introspective nature.  Thus, it was as if he decided to treat the collection as a single meditation, which, for this particular set, worked quite well (without detracting from the power of the D-flat major nocturne to stand on its own).

The "conversation" part of the evening was a brief question-and-answer session following the music.  Biss was as comfortable with this as he had been with providing introductory remarks.  Many people in the audience were eager to question him on a variety of matters, and he was always ready with a friendly and informative response.  This was the first "Concert with Conversation" event I have attended.  If they all come off as well as this one, then San Francisco Performances has come up with a great way to combine education and community outreach;  and I shall make it a point to cover similar events next season.