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 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 6, 2009: A gift of Brahms that will keep on giving

Regular readers have probably noticed that I have particular interest in covering performances of the music of Johannes Brahms and have been given to writing at length about his compositions and, from time to time, his life.  Therefore, while I do not, as a rule, like to give advice on gifts for the season, I feel it worth pointing out that there are two excellent collections of Brahms' complete works on CD, even if Brahms never wrote anything that we would classify as "Christmas music."  At the going prices on Amazon.com, both of these collections are running at about the same price;  and both offer considerable "value for money" (which is the way I used to talk when I lived in Singapore)!  In terms of recording history, the older collection is the Complete Edition released by Deutsche Grammophon, which had its origins as a series of vinyl releases during the sesquicentennial celebration of Brahms' birth.  As I observed on my blog, the CD version is actually a "second edition" with minor alterations of the original vinyl project;  and, while I miss some of the original recordings that were replaced, I cannot fault any of the replacements.  The other collection is the Complete Works release by Brilliant Classics, which has been building up an impressive catalog of Gesamtwerk offerings.  In this case I used my blog to document many impressions of both the assets and liabilities of this collection.

Either collection provides an excellent opportunity to get to know the full scope of Brahms' compositional efforts.  As might be expected, the Deutsche Grammophon artists are likely to be more familiar than those encountered on the Brilliant recordings (all of which are "reprints," primarily from European sources);  but those who have never heard the Israeli wife-husband duo of Bracha Eden and Alexander Tamir will find their inclusion in the Brilliant collection to be most rewarding, particularly in their performance of the Opus 56b Haydn variations.  Part of the fun of serious listening is discovering new approaches introduced by previously unfamiliar performers.

Where both collections fall short is in providing useful written material.  All one finds in the Deutsche Grammophon booklet is a table of contents.  As is the case with all of the other Brilliant collections, all text resides only on a CD-ROM.  This is great if you have a computer (and, if you are reading this, you probably do);  and it means you can draw upon a search tool when you are trying to determine which CD has a specific composition.  However, the supplementary text is rather modest and does not compare with the printed material that accompanied the original Deutsche Grammophon vinyls.  With all the attention currently being given to scanning archival material, it would certainly be nice if Deutsche Grammophon mounted such a scanning project for their Brahms content.  It might even induce those searching for information about Brahms to purchase their CD offering!

Amazon.com browsers will quickly notice a significant difference in the number of CDs in these two packages.  There does not appear to be a problem of any difference in the actual content.  Since Brilliant is a "reprint" series, for the most part they simply reproduce what they have licensed.  Deutsche Grammophon, on the other hand, has done a relatively good job of "compacting" its sources.  Thus, while the Brilliant Collection takes 60 CDs (plus the CD-ROM), the Deutsche Grammophon package consists of 46.  However, since the prices of the two offerings are now so close and since the packages for both are relatively tight, that actual difference in CD count is not a major issue.  The bottom line, then, is that any choice between these two alternatives will come down to personal taste;  and either is likely to be received as an excellent gift idea by any serious listener!

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.

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 9, 2009: A pivotal composition from the early twentieth century

XM Satellite Radio listeners who have been following the regular broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic on the Symphony Hall channel (XM 78) may have noted with some interest Vivien Schweitzer's review of this past week's concert, which appeared in Saturday's New York Times.  Almost the entire review concerned the second half of the concert, a performance of the "Lyric Symphony" by Alexander Zemlinsky, published under the full title, "Lyric Symphony, in Seven Songs after Poems by Rabindranath Tagore, for Orchestra, Soprano and Baritone."  This work will receive its first XM broadcast on November 18 and will probably be most valuable to anyone interested in the evolution of composition in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

As the above title suggests, it is useful to regard this composition as a pivotal work.  On the one hand, considered only in terms of its content and resources, it is clearly a retrospective reflection on Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde in a variety of ways, the most important being that of a symphonic structure, each of whose movements (seven in this case, six for Mahler) is a song setting.  On the other hand the title suggests (quite rightly) an influence on the "Lyric Suite" of Alban Berg.  Berg not only dedicated this six-movement string quartet to Zemlinsky but also quoted from the third movement of the "Lyric Symphony."  Furthermore, as one of my teachers observed, the rhythm of the first gesture of the "Lyric Suite" is the rhythm of an utterance of the name "Zemlinsky," while the final gesture of the first movement invokes the rhythm of "Alban Berg."  Beyond these explicit connections there is also the fact that Zemlinsky was Arnold Schoenberg's only formal music teacher and was probably well aware of (if not intimately familiar with) Schoenberg's Gurrelieder oratorio.

Zemlinsky selected his texts from Tagore's collection The Gardener, which he probably knew only from a German translation of the original Bengali by Hans Effenberger.  Since radio broadcasts do not provide a program book, one may find these texts at their entry on The Lied and Art Song Texts Page, which includes hyperlinks to English translations.  In addition Brilliant Classics has just released the out-of-print Deutsche Grammophon recording of this work made in March of 1981 by the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Lorin Maazel with soloists Júlia Várady and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

This is one of those cases where familiarity with both the texts and a recording of the music (for which the Web site for the texts will be useful, since they are not included with the Brilliant CD) will enhance listening to the concert broadcast.  On the one hand there is more of an effort to organize the texts around a common theme than one finds in Das Lied von der Erde;  and, at the same time, Zemlinsky has sought out imaginative approaches to taking Mahler's rich orchestral structures to a higher level, while occasionally recognizing Mahler with reflections of some of his rhetorical gestures (most evident in Zemlinsky's approach to the conclusion).  The resources are not quite as massive as those of the Gurrelieder.  However, they certainly come close but are deployed with a transparency that neither Schoenberg nor Berg could command in their orchestral writing.  The result is thus as much an adventure in sonority as it is an exploration of a highly non-conventional set of texts.  Finally, this is a good season for the "Lyric Symphony," since Christoph Eschenbach will be conducting it with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall during the week of April 29, making for a rich set of opportunities to hear a composition that definitely deserves more attention.

November 3, 2009: Order and stasis

I wrote my review of the first concert of the 39th season of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) under the title "The composer as listener."  This prompted a presumably sarcastic comment from reader "duh" about how unlikely it would be that composers listened to the music of others, which then reminded me of Milton Babbitt having published an article entitled "Who Cares If You Listen?"  At last night's SFCMP concert I found myself wondering less about whether or not the composers on the program listened to the music of others and more about whether they listened to their own work.

Perhaps by virtue of that "Babbitt connection," I also found myself reflecting on the pedagogical practices of the Princeton composer Chou Wen-Chung.  A friend of mine once told me about his experience of sitting in on one of Chou's classes.  The man could be a devastating critic.  A student would start to play a new composition, and Chou would interrupt him after only a few minutes.  He would then say something like:

That's enough.  I know where the rest of it will go.  I'm an old man.  I don't have time to listen to any more of it!

I don't want to play the "old man" card;  but I found myself thinking along these lines for three of the four works on the program.  They were all between fifteen and twenty minutes in duration;  but I came away with the impression that each of those works said what it had to say within the first few minutes and then labored under some unspoken obligation to fill a more respectable duration.

Perhaps the title of the evening, Made to Order, was an omen of this listening experience.  It referred to the fact that all of the works on the program came from commissions from SFCMP or, in one case, an SFCMP performer (the guitarist David Tanenbaum);  and it also carried the connotation that composition was a matter of bringing order to one's resources.  One of the composers, Ken Ueno, even harped on the metaphor of "pushing notes around" during the pre-concert discussion.  The problem is that pushing all those notes into some kind of order carries the connotation that the result is a static object, which, in turn, suggests that the dynamics of performance are secondary.  "Who cares if you listen?" has now transmogrified into "Who care if you perform?"

This is not to say that SFCMP was negligent in its performance practices.  It was clear that all the performers, as well as conductor Sara Jobin, took their work very seriously.  However, among my other personal reflections, I recalled going to Kronos Quartet concerts where I would sit behind David Harrington and could see the music on his stand.  There were always pieces (fortunately not all of them) during which I became focused on Harrington turning his pages;  I kept trying to figure out when I was looking at the last page!  From my vantage point last night I could see Jobin's scores, and I realized that I was having exactly the same experience.  Everyone on stage clearly had a sense of beginning and end in each composition being performed, and in some cases there may even have been a sense of middle.  However, on the listener's side that metaphorical sense of musical performance being a journey just did not connect.

Under such circumstances I feel it is unfair to belabor the details of the three compositions that sustained these problems.  The reader can find a PDF version of the program notes on the SFCMP Web site.  I prefer to accentuate the positive and dwell on the Five Pieces for Guitar and Electronics, which was composed by Ronald Bruce Smith on a commission from Tanenbaum.  This was a suite of short pieces, two of which, "Lachrymal" and "Saudade," reflected on past traditions of music for the guitar and its ancestors.  The others came off more as impressions of the composer's own listening experiences, reinforcing the proposition that composers can benefit from being good listeners.  Most important, however, was the smooth integration of the guitar with the digital equipment responsible for both sampling and transforming sounds from Tanenbaum's performance.  The work constituted a perfect example of why the "marriage" of art and technology does not have to be dominated by the technology.  The fact that Smith could make his point in five short pieces, rather than some magnum opus, made his achievement all the more impressive;  and the suite, taken as a whole, provided the most secure anchor point for serious listening in the course of the entire 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 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.

October 6, 2009: Beginning the Russian Music Festival with Rachmaninoff

October is Russian Music Festival month in the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, presumably in honor of the Revolution reenacted in Sergei Eisenstein's film October and the book by John Reed on which it was based, Ten Days the Shook the World.  In the full scope of the twentieth century, the history of Russia may have turned out as the sort of "comedy of distress" that Alexander Pushkin had in mind in his play that Modest Mussorgsky adopted for his Boris Godunov opera;  so it is not surprising that this particular October festival should begin on a note of irony with a recital of the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff, who fled to Beverly Hills after the October Revolution and spent the remainder of his life there longing for the return of the Tsar.  However, the two works on this program, performed by the Fromme Duo (cellist Randolph Fromme accompanied by his wife Shu Li), both predated Rachmaninoff's emigration and may thus be heard as the valedictory evocations of a Russia that, in all likelihood, will never be again.  The major work on the program was the Opus 19 cello sonata;  and it was followed, in the spirit of the "programmed encore" by the Opus 34, Number 14 "Vocalise," with the cello doing the vocalizing.

The Wikipedia entry for the sonata cites a remark by John Culshaw (best known as a record producer for London) to the effect that Rachmaninoff disliked calling it a cello sonata because he thought the two instruments were equal.  That shows considerable generosity to the cello.  The piano is clearly the preferred instrument;  so, strictly speaking, this is a piano sonata with cello obbligato.  Under these circumstances Li was certainly up to the demands Rachmaninoff placed on the pianist while, at the same time, providing the necessary balance to allow Fromme's voice to be properly heard.  Nevertheless, the broad architectural scale of the four movements, particularly the first, is more than a bit of a sprawl.  It is unlikely that either Rachmaninoff's studies or his listening experiences allowed him to examine or appreciate the strategies engaged by either Richard Wagner or Rachmaninoff's own near-contemporary, Gustav Mahler, when it came to matters of structural integrity over extended durations;  and, in this particular sonata the result can easily strain the listener's attention.

The "Vocalise," on the other hand, is a gem of brevity, regardless of the instrument that happens to be doing the vocalizing.  (It was originally the last of a set four songs.)  In this case the piano serves primarily as accompaniment against an extended melodic line that weaves its way through new gestures of content with the same inventiveness that we encounter in similar melodic lines by Bach.  (Rachmaninoff would later paraphrase movements from Bach's E major unaccompanied violin partita, BWV 1006.  He may not have known his Wagner, but in all likelihood he knew his Bach very well!)  In this performance Fromme was much more a soloist in his own right, leaving me to hope that, on the next occasion that the Fromme Duo offers a recital, he will spend more of the time in the spotlight.

October 6, 2009: The composer as listener

Perhaps the most important lesson from the Gustav Mahler:  Origins and Legacies programs that Michael Tilson Thomas prepared with the San Francisco Symphony involved the significant role that listening experiences can play in the act of composition.  Thus, when confronted with "new music," such as the works that the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players prepared for their first concert of the season last night, we need to remember that none of these composers has ever worked in a vacuum.  A composer is as much a listener when composing as (s)he is when performing;  and this involves not only listening to what is being composed but also listening to one's memories.  Contrary to what Harold Bloom proposed, influence is less a cause for anxiety and more a trigger for reflection from which one's thoughts begin to emerge.  The serious listener may, as a result, try to approach a new composition by taking into account the context in which that composition came to be.

This strategy works particularly well with Morton Feldman, composer of the earliest (1972) work on last night's program, part I of The Viola in My Life.  (The decision to print this title in lower case in the program is inconsistent with all the sources I consulted in preparing the preview piece I wrote on Sunday.)  As a member of the New York School, Feldman shared John Cage's acute awareness of the significance of every sound;  and this particular composition comes from a time when he worked almost entirely in soft dynamics and the stillness of isolated moments.  What emerges is a conversation as intimate as we can encounter in the overall legacy of chamber music that we are easily seduced into following, even if the novelty of logic, grammar, and rhetoric in that conversation leave us puzzled over what has actually been said.

The next work in the chronological ordering of the program selections was Steve Reich's "Vermont Counterpoint" (1982), commissioned by flutist Ransom Wilson and dedicated to Betty Freeman.  Here is Reich's own description of the work:

It is scored for three alto flutes, three flutes, three piccolos and one solo part all pre-recorded on tape, plus a live solo part.  The live soloists plays alto flute, flute and piccolo and participates in the ongoing counterpoint as well as more extended melodies.  The piece could be performed by eleven flutists but is intended primarily as a solo with tape.

I had the good fortune to hear Wilson play this in concert with ten other flutists;  but in this performance Tod Brody was the only flutist, playing against the tape.  The work is very much a logical consequence of Reich's earlier compositions in which thick contrapuntal textures were achieved through experiments in phase-shifting.  As is the case with any complex contrapuntal structure, the ear can detect different melodic patterns in the interplay of the voices;  and Reich's "Violin Phase" (1967) required the solo violinist to do just that, creating a solo by enhancing fragments from the texture that were perceived as particularly salient.  By the time of "Vermont Counterpoint," Reich had taken over responsibility for all decisions of choice;  but the earlier spirit is still present.  The flute soloist guides the ear through the thick texture, pointing out melodic passages latent in that texture, somewhat in the spirit of Thomas' recent metaphor of discovering unknown flora on a previously unknown island.

Charles Wuorinen's "Trombone Trio" (1985) was an entirely different matter.  This is a work for tenor trombone, piano, and xylophone and marimba performed by a single percussionist.  (The xylophone is placed behind and slightly above the marimba, creating the effect of a single instrument rather like a double-manual harpsichord.)  The account of Wuroninen's career in the program book was rich with influences, but it also seemed rich with a preoccupation with theory in preference to practice.  Thus, the influences seemed to have more to do with marks on paper than with the different approaches to listening that could be found in Feldman and Reich (not to mention Mahler).  This may well be a work in which each listener must find his/her own way and will only find it through the sort of repeated exposure that most concert series cannot provide.

The remaining works on the program were products of our "new century."  John Harbison's The Seven Ages, a cycle of six song settings of poems by Louise Glück, was composed in the summer of 2008 at the Aspen and Tanglewood Music Festivals.  Harbison is very much a performer with a rich repertoire.  His diversity runs the gamut from preparing regular performances of Johann Sebastian Bach with Emmanuel Music through chamber music in a Wisconsin barn that he refurbished with his wife (as in the above photograph) into jazz gigs with "friends."  However, as was evident in the pre-concert interview, he is also intensely intellectual, attributing his appreciation of jazz to a relatively obscure German critic's analysis of chord progressions.

The Seven Ages was the longest work of the evening, taking almost half an hour while all the other works ran about ten minutes.  Unfortunately, it also felt long.  This may have had much to do with the texts that tended to be long-winded (to a point that would challenge mere recitation) with a tendency for self-indulgence:

Why not?  Why not?  Why should my poems not imitate my life?
Whose lesson is not the apotheosis but the pattern, whose meaning
in not in the gesture but in the inertia, the reverie.

Say what?  By all rights Harbison should have had the performer's chops to make this work.  Bach's tastes in poetry were never particularly distinguished;  and Bach also had a talent for moving his settings along through paths of both instrumental and melodic diversity.  Unfortunately, like Wuroinen, Harbison seems to have been consumed with questions of theory when his intuitions for practice could have done with a few hints from older (as less theoretically inclined) masters.

The most recent work on the program, composed by Edmund Campion for the 2009 Festival Presence in Merz, France, might best be described as anti-theoretical.  Having been commissioned by Radio France, the work was given a French title:  "600 Seconds dans le vieux modèle."  This translates to "600 Seconds in the worn-out model."  The "worn-out model" is the one Campion acquired in his studies, particularly his doctoral research at Columbia University under Mario Davidovsky at a time when it was difficult to distinguish serial composition from research in the abstractions of higher mathematics (particularly, thanks to Milton Babbitt, the study of permutation groups).  Campion thus had to contend with a lot of "influence" in his baggage;  and he chose to relieve the anxiety of that influence through satire.  He thus dished out his own slightly jaundiced impressions of rhetorical idioms that remain as opaque as they were when launched by the theoretical birth-agonies of composers like Pierre Boulez;  but he served up his own version with that "cheery disposition" to which Cage attributed his own success.  If Campion is a harbinger of where music may be going, then the century may be off to a good start!

October 4, 2009: The viola in Morton Feldman's life

I was glad to see that the Sunday Datebook Section in today's San Francisco Chronicle included a featured announcement of tomorrow night's performance by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at Herbst Theatre.  The announcement included a photograph of John Harbison and focused on the inclusion in the program of the commissioned work, "The Seven Ages," a setting of poetry by Louise Glück.  One had to look to the left of Harbison's photograph to discover that he would also be participating in the Contemporary Insights:  Music and Conversation event at 4:30 this afternoon at the ODC Dance Commons.  Unfortunately, limitations of space seem to have prevented saying much else about the program other than "with music by Edmund Campion ["600 Secondes dans le vieux modèle," a United States premiere], Morton Feldman [Part I of The Viola in My Life], Steve Reich ["Vermont Counterpoint"] and Charles Wuorinen ["Trombone Trio"]."  (Content in square brackets was not included in the Chronicle text and is my own.)  In addition to this afternoon's event, tomorrow's performance will be preceded by a talk at 7:15 PM.

Since Feldman died in 1987, he will not be able to speak for himself tomorrow evening.  Therefore, I thought it would be fitting to offer some of his remarks about The Viola in My Life, which Walter Zimmermann included in his anthology of essays by and about Feldman, published by Beginner Press in 1985:

"The Viola in My Life" (dedicated to the Pierrot Players) was begun in Honolulu in July, 1970 and completed after my return home to New York in late August.

Scored for flute, viola, cello, percussion and piano, the compositional format is quite simple.  Unlike most of my music the tempo is quite precise.  I needed the exact time proportion underlying the gradual and slight crescendo characteristic of all the sounds the viola plays.  The rest of the ensemble remains constantly soft throughout.

Since 1958 (not unlike an aspect of minimal painting) the surface of my music was quite "flat".  The viola's crescendos are a return to a preoccupation with a musical perspective which is not determined by an interaction of corresponding musical ideas – but rather like a bird trying to soar in a confined landscape.

Given the focus on subtle changes in dynamics, this is a composition that can make for an intense listening experience.  Feldman is another composer who has chosen to focus on what I have called "the nature of sound itself," taking an approach that transcends "the usual syntactic relationships of melody, harmony, and counterpoint."  Chronologically, The Viola in My Life is situated between Giacinto Scelsi (whose "Hymnos" was just performed by the San Francisco Symphony), of whom Feldman was probably unaware, and Kaija Saariaho, who, in all probability, has been exposed to Feldman's work.  On my Cri American Masters CD, the performance of Part I of The Viola in My Life takes slightly more than twelve minutes;  and, given the extreme durations of many of subsequent works (back in 2007 I used my blog to document my efforts at learning to play "Piano"), this should be taken as accommodating to the listener and preparation for much of Feldman's subsequent repertoire.  Also helpful to listeners getting a first taste of Feldman is a review of the ECM recording of all four Parts of The Viola in My Life on the British Boomkat Web site, which refers to how the music presents "the lead string instrument in a kind of solemnly gradual game of call and response with chords laid down by an ensemble."

Feldman received relatively little attention in his lifetime;  and, with the exception of observations made by John Cage, much of that attention was derisive.  I met him in the early Seventies and expressed great interest in writing an extended piece about him.  He replied that he would prefer that I direct my efforts towards his fellow New York School composer, Christian Wolff.  Whether he had become defensive about what he feared I might write or whether he was genuinely modest, I shall never know.  However, I heard him talk at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at the University of Southern California about fifteen years later (not long before his death);  and that event pretty much confirmed my modesty hypothesis.  I regret have had so few opportunities to listen to Feldman's music in performance, rather than on recording;  and I welcome the opportunity to hear a "real" performance of a work that, until now, I have known only through its recordings.

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.

September 24, 2009: Mahler's memory

If there is one message to take away from this week's Gustav Mahler:  Origins and Legacies concerts by the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of (and extended narration by) Michael Tilson Thomas, it is that Mahler was of man with a prodigious store of memories.  These included memories of music, personal memories, and memories of many ephiphanic moments when the musical and the personal intersected in unexpected (and often ironic) ways.  Indeed, there is so much to derive from the study of Mahler's memories that Thomas prepared a different program for each of the four concerts being given this week.  Since these concerts are being recorded on video for a future Keeping Score program about Mahler, one may assume that even Thomas' spoken material will vary from evening to evening.

If the primary agenda of each of these concerts was to get inside Mahler's head, with Thomas as "tour guide," to gain better understanding of the experience of listening to his music, than the selection of the "Florentiner Marsch" by Mahler's younger contemporary, Julius Fucík, was slightly anachronistic.  This march was composed in 1907, four years before Mahler's death, which is to say at a time when Mahler's "memory banks" were so full that it is a wonder his head had not yet burst.  (Fate had a different ending in store for him in the form of heart disease.)  Thomas explained that he made the selection for its representation of the spirit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which is a perfectly valid explanation.  Personally, I would have preferred something more along the lines of the elder Johann Strauss' "Radetzky March," not only for the dark spirits it evoked from the novelist Joseph Roth but also for its capacity to arouse crowds of drunken enthusiastic tub-thumpers at their worst.  If alienation was a key element of Mahler's character (as he claimed it to be), we would have done well to begin with the context of the sorts of things that alienated him!

It turned out, however, that this need to set context was not that necessary for the three themes that Thomas chose to explore:  Mahler's relationship to nature, his use of funeral marches, and the evolution of his approach to scherzo.  The core of the first theme was a performance of the third movement of the third symphony.  As I observed in a preview piece, Mahler was already at work in "musical landscape painting" in the introduction of his first symphony;  but, by the time he began work on the third, he had set himself up with a cabin at Steinbach on the Attersee, east of Salzburg.  In this setting he could experience nature in its fullest, the nightmarish as well as the pastoral;  and all of those impressions found their way into the six movements of the third symphony (along with a seventh movement that eventually ended up concluding the fourth symphony).  Beyond the immediacy of nature itself, Mahler was also heavily influenced by Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn), an anthology of folk poetry compiled by Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, in which there is a similar cohabitation of nightmare with peaceful innocence.

Each movement of the third symphony has a programmatic title.  The first is "Summer marches in;"  and the remaining movements have titles of the form "What … tells me."  For the third movement the title is "What the beasts of the forest tell me;"  and one of its thematic sources is a Wunderhorn poem setting in the eleventh of the fourteen songs published in the three volumes of Mahler's Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit (Songs of Youth) collection, "Ablösung im Sommer" (Replacement in Summer).  The replacement has to do with the death of the noisy cuckoo and the assumption of his duties by "Mrs. Nightingale" with a decidedly different style.  (The two have a singing contest in another Wunderhorn poem.)  This was sung by Thomas Hampson in an orchestral setting by Luciano Berio before the third symphony  movement was performed.  (Mahler had composed these fourteen songs for voice and piano.  If it was Berio's objective to orchestrate this particular song on the basis of the decisions Mahler made for the third symphony, then he did an admirable job.)  To take another issue with the programming, this would have been an excellent opportunity to Hampson to sing Mahler's setting of another Wunderhorn song, "Das irdische Leben" (The Earthly Life), which is also a thematic source for the symphony movement;  but an exhaustive accounting of the sources for this movement could probably have filled the entire evening's program!

The funeral march topic was introduced with a performance of the funeral march from Gaetano Donizetti's opera Dom Sébastien.  Many who heard Mahler's first symphony last week will probably recognize the connection almost immediately;  and in this presentation Thomas illustrated the point through its connection to the final song in the Songs of a Wayfarer cycle.  When Quinn Kelsey sang this cycle with piano accompaniment in recital last February, I wrote that he approached it "as the mini-opera captured by the narrative that cuts across the four poems in the cycle."  In last night's performance  Hampson's sense of opera was as keen as his sense of art song, and he definitely gave the dramatic its due.  However, from an operatic point of view, this is also an opportunity for the baritone to get even with all those sopranos who dominate the spotlight with their bel canto mad scenes.  Hampson was dramatic;  but, had he let go of himself a bit more and been a bit more "unhinged," he could have brought more of that madness (and its culmination in suicide, which is how I read the text) to the surface.

This brings us to the final theme of the evening, in which Thomas made a case that Mahler's scherzo movement provided the most expressive release when his own spirits were at their most unhinged.  This discussion occupied all of the program following the intermission and took the form of a "Gradus ad Parnassum," where the first step was actually a scherzo by Mahler's fellow student at the Vienna Conservatory, Hans Rott, whose own ending could well have made for its own "mini-opera song cycle."  Here is the Wikipedia summary:

Rott's mind snapped in October 1880, whilst on a train journey. He was reported to have threatened another passenger with a revolver, claiming that Brahms had filled the train with dynamite. Rott was committed to a mental hospital in 1881, where despite a brief recovery, he sank into depression. By the end of 1883 a diagnosis recorded 'hallucinatory insanity, persecution mania - recovery no longer to be expected.' He died of tuberculosis in 1884, aged only 25. Many well-wishers, including Bruckner, attended Rott's funeral at the Zentral-Friedhof in Vienna.

(As a point of chronology, Mahler completed his Wayfarer songs in 1884.)

It would be a bit excessive to assert that every scherzo Mahler wrote was haunted by Rott's ghost;  but it is probably fair to say that Rott planted a seed that yielded fruit far more bizarre than anything he had composed in his own short lifetime.  Thomas followed the steps from Rott's scherzo through the scherzo movement's of Mahler's symphonies, coming to rest at the seventh.  This was a perfect case study, since, while Mahler had excelled in expanding the scherzo to his extended time frames (particularly in the fifth symphony), the seventh symphony scherzo is frighteningly compact.  From this point Thomas resumed the journey and brought it to the Rondo burleske movement from the ninth symphony.  In both of these symphonies, Mahler had moved on from his earlier Wunderhorn inspirations;  but the nightmares of those folk traditions are still with him.  Furthermore, as if the horrors of folk legends were not enough, both of these symphonies were composed after Mahler's heart condition had been detected.  (The ninth was, of course, his attempt to trick Fate.  He did not want death to take him after he had composed nine symphonies;  so he titled his ninth symphony Das Lied von der Erde.  He then felt safe in calling his next symphony his ninth and died while working on his tenth!)

As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, all of this was being documented in video for a future Keeping Score.  Those program are only one hour long.  It is clear that one could spend an entire hour tracing Mahler's personal "journey" through the scherzo form without bringing anything else into the story.  This is the problem that arises when one takes on a composer who (without my intending to sound hyperbolic) was profoundly influenced by everything.  It is hard to imagine how a one-hour Public Television program will be able to do the work that these three weeks of San Francisco Symphony concerts have been achieving;  but it will be sufficient if the resulting video whets the appetite for Mahler in those who had never previously given him much thought.

September 17, 2009: Mahler Festival '09 begins

This year's San Francisco Symphony subscription series has begun with a three-week festival of the music of Gustav Mahler.  Mahler has been so much a part of the Symphony repertoire since Michael Tilson Thomas became Music Director that one might wonder why he should be singled out for "festival" treatment.  However, when we recall Thomas' tendency to invoke the metaphor of a journey when considering the scope of a composer's work, that metaphor is particularly apposite for Mahler;  and, as is the case with any journey, we need to make frequent stops to reflect on where we have been and where we may next be going.  Thus, the programs for these three weeks will cover works familiar to Symphony regulars;  and, on the basis of last night's opening concert, I would say that they will also reveal how Thomas' thoughts about Mahler have progressed.  It would not surprise me if, before the Festival has concluded, we shall have some indicators of where those thought may next lead him.

Consider the settings of the five poems of Friedrich Rückert that opened the program.  These were composed over a period of slightly more than a year between 1901 and 1902, which is roughly the same time frame as his work on his fifth symphony (which will conclude the Festival).  Wikipedia provides a nice summary of when each song was composed (referring to each with both its German title and an English translation:

1. Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder! − Do not look at my songs! (14 June 1901)
2. Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft − I breathed a gentle fragrance (July 1901)
3. Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen − I have become lost to the world (16 August 1901)
4. Um Mitternacht − At midnight (Summer 1901)
5. Liebst du um Schönheit − If You Love for Beauty (August 1902)

The reflective intensity of the texts (already evident in the first lines that served Mahler as titles) is certainly consistent with the usual biographical account of Mahler's own tortured life;  but there are interesting ways in which they depart from the "symphonic Mahler" we have come to know through Thomas' concerts.  For one thing, while all were scored for piano accompaniment, only the first four were orchestrated, receiving their first performance on January 29, 1905.  "Liebst du um Schönheit" was orchestrated in 1910 by Max Puttmann, an employee of the publisher C. F. Kahnt of Leipzig.  More interesting, however, is that Mahler's orchestrations were surprisingly modest in comparison with that of his symphonies, although the notes by the late Michael Steinberg see a connection between "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" and the Adagietto movement of the fifth symphony, which is scored for only the string section and harp.

Mahler's approach to that "reflective intensity" seems to have involved dwelling more on sounds in isolation than on ensemble effects.  The harp connection to the Adagietto is more than an orchestration decision.  Mahler seems to have drawn upon the sound of a single plucked string in the lowest register to embody the "lost to the world" sense of the poem.  One might almost call the result a song for low voice, harp, and orchestral accompaniment.  The same can be said for his use of individual wind voices, particularly in "Um Mitternacht," where the only string instruments are harp and piano.  It is interesting that Steinberg called Mahler's first symphony "the most original First after the Berlioz Fantastique," (that latter having been selected by Sir Simon Rattle to begin this year's Berlin Philharmonic Season) because the heart-breaking oboe glissando drop in "Um Mitternacht" is a clear nod to Symphonie Fantastique.

The fact is that these song settings offer one of our best views into "Mahler-in-the-small." contrasting sharply with the grandiloquence of most of his other symphonic writing.  Indeed, the first time I really listened to these songs, the performance was by the 92nd Street Y Chamber Orchestra and involved a string section about half the size of the one performing last night in Davies Symphony Hall.  Nevertheless, Thomas kept his strings under control, never letting them obscure any of those all-important individual sounds while some solo work by Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik contributed to that mix of individual voices.  All this provided the perfect setting for mezzo-soprano Susan Graham's delivery of the song texts themselves, never overplaying the emotionality but always tapping into the essence of the words with her reliably sure and clear voice.

Following the intermission, we could make the transition from this unconventional "Mahler-in-the-small" to "Mahler-business-as-usual" in Thomas' reading of that first symphony.  Steinberg's "Berlioz connection" goes far beyond departing from the beaten path in original ways.  Like Symphony Fantastique, this symphony begins with an extended introduction, whose only serious precedent is the introduction to the first movement of the Berlioz symphony.  Indeed, the conception of that introduction must have consumed Mahler to such an extent that he never composed another one;  but that introduction is also the "cyclic key" to the overall architecture of the symphony, resurfacing in the final movement to bring the journey back to its point of departure.  That journey ends in both turbulence and triumph with its irregular rhythms that appear to be stammering out their themes and wave after wave of building crescendo passages, almost daring the audience to assume that things cannot get any louder.  Steinberg captured this beautifully in the final sentence of his program notes:

He then goes all the way back to the music with which the symphony began and gathers strength for a second assault that does indeed open the doors to a heroic ending and to its celebration in a hymn in which the horns, now on their feet, are instructed to drown out the rest of the orchestra, "even the trumpets."

It is no surprise that the Viennese press could only react to this with caricature (included in the program book and reproduced above);  but (to paraphrase from an unlikely connection to W. S. Gilbert) there really is beauty in the bellow of this blast.  Vienna may have been going into twilight, but Mahler was in command of exuberant exhilaration.  Thomas understands this;  and, as he always seems to do, he kept his resources under control to invoke that final bellow in all of its inherent beauty.  There could not have been a more festive way to launch this Mahler Festival.

September 4, 2009: The "twin spirits" of Robert and Clara Schumann

Twin Spirits is a new video that will be released by Opus Arte on DVD (OA 0994 D) and Blu-Ray (OA BD7043 D) in the United States on September 29.  It was conceived by John Caird as a dramatization of the relationship between Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck, who would eventually become his wife.  The narrative is based on letters exchanged by Robert and Clara prior to their marriage and a "marriage diary" that they maintained from the first day of their wedded life.  These texts were performed, respectively, by Sting and his wife, the actress Trudie Styler.  Discontinuities in these source texts were supplemented through a narration provided by Sir Derek Jacobi.  Caird further drew upon musical selections to highlight the flow of this narrative, primarily by Robert, in a few selected cases by Clara, and in two isolated cases by Frédéric Chopin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  Caird conceived that these performances would be by two ensembles, one for Robert and one for Clara.  The "Robert ensemble" consisted of pianist Iain Burnside, violinist Sergei Krylov, and baritone Simon Keenlyside;  the "Clara Ensemble" consisted of pianist Natasha Paremski, cellist Natalie Clein, and soprano Rebecca Evans.  The video was recorded at a live performance before a small audience in a studio space at the Royal Opera House in London.

At the very least this is a creative endeavor worthy of some of Robert's more ambitious flights of fancy.  If both Sting and Styler were far too attractive to provide any fidelity to any of the portraits available to us (such as the above example), they nevertheless portrayed more compelling characterizations than were offered up by Paul Henreid and Katharine Hepburn in the 1947 file Song of Love.  The story has a complexity that the Hollywood of the Forties was loath to digest.  The narrative begins with their first encounter in 1828 and Robert's residence in the home of Clara's father, Friedrich Wieck, with whom he studied piano.  It dwells on Wieck's resistance to any involvement between Robert and Clara, which led of a surreptitious courtship and delayed their marriage until 1840.  There followed the years of wedded bliss, during which Clara bore Robert eight children, seven of whom survived childbirth, coming to a tragic conclusion with Robert's attempted suicide in 1854 and his subsequent commitment to an asylum.  The two were then separated (on the advice of the doctors treating Robert) until shortly before his death in 1856.  The selection of texts made this complexity far more digestible than Hollywood seems to have assumed;  and Sting, Styler, and Jacobi delivered those texts at a pace that held the attention, always leaving one ready for what would happen next, even if one already knew the basics of the plot.

No effort was made for the music to follow the chronology of this narrative.  Music was selected for the mood it invoked rather than the time of its composition.  There was also an interesting conceit of performances that would pass seamlessly between the "Robert piano" and the "Clara piano."  If this was, indeed, a "live" performance without editing, then the chemistry between Burnside and Paremski was most impressive, reflecting, at the very least, their ability to realize a shared conception of how the music should sound.  On the other hand the only vocal interaction came when Evans and Keenlyside performed "Là ci darem la mano" from Mozart's Don Giovanni to highlight Robert having presented the score of this opera to Clara as a birthday present.  The most interesting ensemble work, however, came as a finale to the narrative with a performance of the final movement of Robert's 1847 D minor trio (Opus 63) to apotheosize the union of the two souls in heaven (forty years after Robert's death).

This offering will probably not go down well with purists.  The performances of the songs (by both Robert and Clara) and the trio are excellent;  but, as may be gathered from that "dual performance" by Burnside and Paremski, much of the music has been rearranged for the sake of dramatic interplay between the "Robert ensemble" and the "Clara ensemble."  Nevertheless, as everyone seems so fond of saying these days, "it is what it is."  Taken at face value, this is an attempt by Caird to cast the interleaved lives of Robert and Clara in a dramatic setting that is well executed and makes for quite satisfying viewing.