August 2, 2009: Bach at the Proms

There are a variety of advantages to having a "virtual Proms" experience through the BBC iPlayer Web site. For most of us, the cost of travel probably ranks the highest, in addition to which there is not only the price of tickets but also whether or not they are even available (not to mention the amount of time spent waiting in line to find out that they are not available). Finally, there is the luxury of being able to pick and choose both the concerts you wish to attend (perhaps based on a review you have already read) and when you actually wish to have your concert experience.

Having already enjoyed Bernard Haitink's performance with the London Symphony Orchestra at Proms 5, my personal pendulum swung a considerable distance into the past for Proms 17. This was a "late evening" Proms concert of a comparatively shorter duration due to its beginning at 10:15 PM local time. I learned about it through the high praise it received from Richard Faiman in his Financial Times review, but I probably would have been curious without having read the review. The program consisted of four motets by Johann Sebastian Bach, such by the Monteverdi Choir under the direction of Sir John Eliot Gardiner with instrumentalists from his English Baroque Soloists providing the continuo. The reason I probably would have been drawn to this concert regardless of any reviews is that one of the first CDs I purchased was the 1982 Erato recording of these motets with Gardiner conducting an earlier generation of these ensembles. It would be fair to say that I learned these motets from the two CDs in that set, and they remain treasured among all of my other Bach recordings.

The four motets Gardiner selected were "Komm, Jesu, Komm!" (BWV 229), "Fürchte, dich nicht" (BWV 228), "Jesu, meine Freude" (BWV 227), and "Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied" (BWV 225). The BBC broadcast benefitted from Gardiner's observations about these compositions. This began with the announcer leading him on by asking if he felt that the motets were inferior to the cantatas, to which Gardiner replied with a polite but emphatic negative. These are, indeed, impressive settings of sacred texts and may have enjoyed the advantage of not being churned out on a weekly basis, the way the cantatas were.

Most impressive is probably BWV 227, which was also the longest work on the program. It is one of those works that can be admired as much for its overall architecture as for the sensitivity Bach brought to setting its text. The program notes describe that architecture as follows:

‘Jesu, meine Freude’ is the most extended of Bach’s motets. The backbone of the text is provided by six verses of a hymn (1659) of the same name by Johann Franck – Bach twice incorporated verses from this hymn in his cantatas, BWV 81 and 133. Alternating with the hymn verses and their associated melody are five verses from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Chapter 8). Bach’s vocal textures range from three- to five-part writing and are organised in what one Bach writer, drawing upon a Blakean epithet has described as ‘fearful symmetry’.

In his interview with the announcer, Gardiner described that "fearful symmetry" as an isosceles triangle; and this above diagram is taken from the Erato notes to illustrate this point:

The one disadvantage of experiencing this performance only through audio is that, as both the announcer and Gardiner observed, that sense of symmetry was also realized through the physical disposition of the performers. Had there been greater stereo separation, one could have been more aware of this; but such separation would have been an artifact that would have distorted the ways in which Bach integrated his voices. The only solution would have come from visual cues; and it would be nice if Gardiner were to consider making a video document of the complete set of Bach motets, which could then be released in DVD form. Nevertheless, there is still much to enjoy in listening to the recording of this Proms evening; and it provides an excellent opportunity to build up one's experiences of listening to Bach being performed by an expert in that music.

December 30, 2009: Donald Runnicles meets Brahms in Berlin

When I wrote last month that Donald Runnicles would be visiting Berlin in December to conduct a performance of Johannes Brahms' German Requiem that included the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus, soprano Genia Kühmeier, and bass-baritone Gerald Finley, I suggested that San Francisco audiences, particularly those of the San Francisco Opera, would be likely to find this concert interesting through the medium of the Digital Concert Hall.  Opera fans know that Runnicles spent many seasons equally comfortable with the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, and Giacomo Puccini;  but Brahms' composition for both chorus and solo voice is in a class significantly removed from the world of opera.  Thus, while Runnicles is well credentialed in the concert hall, as well as the opera house, we in San Francisco have had few opportunities to appreciate those credentials.  Furthermore, having established, with the recent visit of the Berliner Philharmoniker to San Francisco, that their director, Sir Simon Rattle, is equally at home on both sides of the Wagner-Brahms opposition, I was personally curious as to how the conductor for our new San Francisco Ring would approach the other side of that opposition.

Having now seen his performance through the Digital Concert Hall archives, I am happy to report that Runnicles' command of Brahms is as secure as his command of Wagner.  This included managing the challenge of what was apparently a last-minute replacement of Helena Juntunen for Genia Kühmeier;  but there were no overt signs of this having been a substitution.  For one thing Brahms kept the vocal solos to a relative minimum, two for the bass-baritone and only one for the soprano.  The overall architecture of the composition is dominated by the interplay between chorus and orchestra, most of which involves an intense subtlety on both sides.  In the entirety of this ninety-minute work, there are really only two key elements of climax.

The first comes in two stages in a setting from Corinthians for the second movement.  The first is a stark rendering of the brevity of mortality, followed by a declaration of the power of the word of the Lord.  This requires a gradual building of energy that cannot be expended entirely on the first climax (which, to make matters more challenging, is repeated).  The second climax must shock the listener with the same sort of jolt originally intended by Paul.  This is probably as close to an operatic moment as Brahms gets in his entire repertoire, and Runnicles delivered it with all of the dramatic impact that it demanded.

The second climax comes in the penultimate movement with the same text of the Last Judgment that George Frideric Handel selected for the third part of his Messiah.  Given Brahms' interest in Handel, this could not have been a coincidence;  and, since this is a "German" requiem, it seems appropriate for Brahms to have turned to Handel to lead the way towards an alternative for the "Dies Irae" portion of the Requiem Mass.  However, while Handel focused his attention on the sound of the Last Trumpet, Brahms played down the brass work in preference for the overall agitation of the Judgment itself.  This is, again, highly dramatic material that flourished under Runnicles' direction.

This focus on climaxes should not detract from his overall conception of the performance, however.  In this composition Brahms uncovered subtleties in the alternation of the homophonic with the contrapuntal, selections for instrumentation, and even the underlying sense of a rhythmic pulse that constitutes the very first impression of the music.  That pulse is almost a measure of time in a setting in which time has lost its meaning, the time when consciousness of time has been lost, so to speak.  Brahms cut back on the number of climaxes to facilitate our listening to those subtleties, and Runnicles clearly understood the facilitation Brahms had in mind.  This opportunity to appreciate the talents of a familiar conductor in a repertoire unfamiliar to his audiences here makes a strong case for the value that cyberspace can bring to the serious listener.

December 22, 2009: Goofing off with Handel

In the field of music performance, "goofing off" is a technical term introduced by Pete Seeger.  It was intended to refer to the (hopefully) creative things a musician does when (s)he has better things to do (such as, for pianists, going through all sixty exercises in Hanon's Virtuoso Pianist before getting down to anything else).  According to his Web site, Paul Ayres is a busy man, actively involved in composition, performance, and education;  so any given day probably confronts him with no end of "better things to do."  However, the spirit of goofing off seems to have led him in the direction of "re-composing" familiar classical music.  His first effort involved music that Henry Purcell had composed for the funeral of Queen Mary II, set for a four-voice a capella choir.  Ayres re-composed the work for double choir, describing the result, entitled "Purcell's Funeral Sentence," as follows:

One SATB group sings (nearly exactly) Henry Purcell's setting of the Funeral Sentences, the other group sing newly-written material, commenting, reflecting, accompanying and interfering...

He then progressed from this ten-minute anthem to a half-hour reworking of the requiem setting by Gabriel Fauré, giving the result a title fit for the texting generation, "4A Wreck."

Ayres has now taken on the entirety of George Frideric Handel's Messiah, which, in its performance last night by the Sanford Dole Ensemble filled a two-and-a-half-hour evening.  This time the title is Messyah;  and the spirit of goofing off certainly thrives in the "messy" stem of that word.  (Indeed, "messing around" is often used as a synonym for "goofing off.")  There is nothing pejorative about that spirit;  but, in his pre-concert conversation with Dole, Ayres at least hinted that he may have come to a point where enough is enough.

Messyah may have smashed one of the most popular icons of the Christmas season, but it is hard to accuse Ayres of malice.  He picked up all the pieces and reassembled them, always lovingly, often imaginatively, and occasionally hysterically comically.  In a preview piece in the Sunday Datebook section of this past Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman quoted Ayres posing the critical thought behind this effort:

Why did Handel do it this way instead of that?  What if we took a right turn down that street and see where it goes?

Messyah is very much a composition for those who know Messiah well, and ultimately it provides food for thought over the question of why it turned out the way it did.  However, while Messiah has the coherence of an oratorio setting of a complete narrative of the life of Jesus, Messyah is more a collection of case-by-case studies of the individual sections, each taking its own "alternative turn" with little apparent thought to the overall structure beyond Handel's initial framework.

Sadly, the result is often more tedious than stimulating, particularly when it gets predictable.  By the time one gets as far as "All we like sheep," one just knows that Ayres is going to do something with "gone astray;"  so it is no surprise when the members of the chorus leave their risers and start wandering about the stage "every one to his own way."  On the other hand, when Ayres cuts loose with his few pop settings with jazz combo accompaniment, the joyousness of the result is as true to the religious spirit as was the original setting.

From the performers' point of view, this composition is far more than the lark of a choral conductor having prepared too many Messiah performances.  It abounds with complex counterpoint, much of which is polytonal;  and the entire choir must face several improvisatory challenges.  Dole's choir was definitely up to the entire task.  Whether it involved being true to the source material or following Ayres down his alternative turns, the seventeen voices were most impressive in handling both solo and group material.  Unfortunately, the same could not be said of their instrumental accompaniment.  This consisted of a string quartet, bass, trumpet, two percussionists, and two keyboardists responsible for piano, harpsichord, and organ parts.  The strings were, sadly, the weakest part of the mix.  If the voices could negotiate the twists and turns of Ayres polytonality with a sureness of pitch, the same could not be said of the string section, most notably the two violins.  On the other hand the jazz backup work by percussion, bass, and trumpet was absolutely solid, which had much to do with why these particular departures from Handel's tradition were so effective.

Will Messyah become an "alternative Christmas tradition?"  My own guess is that it will not.  It is more like a series of experiments that Ayres developed to pursue the question he had posed.  The opportunity for an audience to review those experiments is definitely an interesting one, but once is enough.  By way of comparison, one might consider Donald Swann's contribution to the first Hoffnung Festival, where he chose to add a series of extra surprises to the second movement of Joseph Haydn's 94th G major symphony.  Even when Swann's surprises no longer surprise, they are still funny, even on the old recording of the Festival performance.  I am not sure that Ayres' surprises will have such an enduring quality, but it was still a pleasure to be exposed to them.

December 17, 2009: Arvo Pärt and the Word made flesh

As we near the end of the period of Advent, this would be a good time for those still thinking about choosing gifts to consider the latest ECM release of the music of Arvo Pärt.  The disc is entitled In Principio, and it is one of the nominees for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in this year's Grammy Award competition.  More importantly, however, those who were positively impressed by Olivier Messiaen's non-standard musical approach to the Nativity, Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus, as performed by Marino Formenti a little over a week ago may now wish to consider the equally non-standard approach taken in the title composition on this album.  The text for this work for mixed choir and large orchestra consists of the first fourteen verses from The Gospel According to Saint John, whose climax occurs, both musically and textually, in the final verse.  In the translation of The Jerusalem Bible, that verse is as follows:

The Word was made flesh,
he lived among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory that is his as the only Son of the Father,
full of grace and truth.

Pärt is as seriously devout in his Christianity as Messiaen was but in entirely different ways.  While, as was recently demonstrated, Messiaen cast his celebration of the Nativity in a language of subtle harmonic progressions and melodic lines, Pärt's is very much a language of gesture;  and his musical gestures often reflect the gestures of the declamation or incantation of sacred texts.

I have Steve Reich to thank for my first exposure to Pärt.  I had attended a talk he gave in 1985 at UCLA about "New York Counterpoint," which he had recently completed and was about to be performed at the Chandler Pavilion.  In the course of his presentation, he offered what he called his "Minimalism 101" account of how he and fellow composers like Philip Glass and John Adams became aware of new approaches to composition.  During the question period, one bright student piped up, "Which composer do you listen to with the most interest these days?"  Without skipping a beat, Reich replied, "Arvo Pärt;"  and that was enough to get me listening to Tabula Rasa, the first ECM disc of Pärt's music.

Listening to In Principio, however, I am just beginning to appreciate why Reich replied so quickly and so confidently.  One could never mistake the two composers;  but Reich shares with Pärt this appreciation that text, particularly sacred text, has its own inherent musical value.  (Consider how Reich explored this proposition in Tehillim.)  The three settings of sacred texts on In Principio ("In Principio" itself, "Cecilia, Vergine Romana," and "Da Pacem Domine") all take, as a point of departure, John's mystical conception of Word made flesh and follow it through to Word made music.  Thus, it is because the Word that is so important, that the gestures of utterance are so fundamental to the grammar, logic, and rhetoric behind Pärt's music.

This is equally true of his strictly instrumental music.  Indeed, in the case of "Für Lennart in memoriam," commissioned for the burial service of former President of Estonia, Lennart Meri, the Old Russian text for the service was written into the score below the double bass part.  However, the more secular composition "Mein Weg" explores gesture in a manner that departs from its foundation in speech.  This is a composition of "embedded" gestures:  Gestures "in the small" compound to form gestures "in the large" in a manner that could be described as fractal without too great a stretch of the imagination.

In this respect Pärt has a more unlikely kindred spirit in Claude Debussy.  Consider the often discussed influence of Katsushika Hokusai on La Mer, culminating in the decision by Durand to reproduce "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" on the cover of the score:

For an early nineteenth-century Japanese woodcut, this displays a remarkable intuition for the self-embedding of a feature on different scales;  and, when one listens closely to Debussy's orchestral texture, one hears that same self-embedding in motifs played by different instruments concurrently.  As with Reich, one would never confuse Pärt with Debussy;  but each took a shared approach to gesture and pursued it in a unique direction.

In Principio is thus a single recording that reveals Pärt to us in the depth of both his sacred and secular values.  All performances are conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste with a sensitivity to detail that reveals that depth with the utmost clarity.  This makes for an excellent gift for anyone seeking ways to expand his/her listening experiences.

December 14, 2009: Discovering William Walton through the EMI archives

EMI has been in the business of recording music pretty much since that business first emerged.  As a result they have accumulated a rather impressive archive of material, much of which can be as valuable to the informed listener as it is to the serious student.  One of the more interesting offerings of material from this archive is now available in as a 2-CD set.  The package provides an excellent opportunity to hear a broad selection of the orchestral music of William Walton conducted by the composer;  and, not surprisingly, it has been released under the title Walton Conducts Walton.  The selection includes two concertos (for violin and viola, both with Yehudi Menuhin as soloist), one symphony (his first), a partita for orchestra, and the single-movement oratorio, "Belshazzar's Feast."  For those interested in size, that comes to slightly more than two and a half hours of music;  and, since Walton tended to be at his best when working with a full orchestra (even in his film scores, such as the ones he composed for Laurence Olivier's Shakespeare films), the selection presents him in an excellent light.

Curiously enough, the historical scope of this selection is bookended by a single composition.  The viola concerto was completed in 1929 but then revised in 1961.  This work is also one of the most interesting of the offerings in the package.  It was intended for the great Lionel Tertis (whose viola students included Rebecca Clarke, whose viola sonata was performed at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last week), who then returned the score to Walton for being "too modern."  As a result, the premiere was performed by Paul Hindemith (whose own viola sonata was performed at that same Conservatory recital).  Tertis would eventually perform Walton's concerto;  but, at least according to the notes provided by Michael Kennedy, he never really "got it."  The Menuhin recording (which is of the revised version) was made in 1968;  and his chemistry with Walton seems to have been excellent.  I was first exposed to the final movement of this concerto through a master class given at the Conservatory by Misha Amory last March.  Amory tended to focus on the wit of that movement, which I had encountered in many other Walton compositions;  and Menuhin brought that wit to a more enhanced life through its contrast with the opening movement and the rapid-fire scherzo.

The composition in the EMI selection most likely to be familiar to San Francisco audiences is "Belshazzar's Feast," since it was performed by the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus under Vladimir Ashkenazy last March.  While I try to avoid superlatives, it would not surprise me if history were to remember this as the quintessential English-language oratorio of the twentieth century, if not the major oratorio of the century in any language, since the form was not particularly popular.  The work is a feast of orchestral color and rich choral writing that moves forward at a rapid pace, thanks to a libretto by Osbert Sitwell that concentrates on the narrative thread, leaving the reflective texts for prologue and epilogue.  While, with all of these resources, there may be no substitute for attending a performance of this work, the EMI recording team did an admirable job of capturing far more of it than one might expect from 1959 technology.  (My guess is that Walton himself had a hand in the success of the recording through his own scrupulous sense of balance.)

Back in my student days Walton received a fair amount of attention.  Unfortunately, he seems to have gone out of fashion, with Ashkenazy's programming being more exception than rule.  This music does not deserve such neglect;  and the best possible case for it may well be made by Walton's own performances of it.  Here's hoping that, with this new release, EMI will contribute to a revived interest in Walton's music!

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: 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 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 30, 2009: Out of the concert hall

In my blog post yesterday, "Bach in his Proper Setting," I reflected that Johann Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 would not have had to have been abridged for last week's San Francisco Symphony subscription concert had each of the six cantatas been performed separately on its originally assigned date.  I realized that his was not feasible for the organization of San Francisco Symphony concerts, particularly when, as in this specific case, all of the solo voices were visiting artists (three from Europe and one from Canada).  This led me to consider the idea of a performing ensemble with a resident affiliation with a church that provides the appropriate setting for the music being performed.  The Bach Vespers series of services at New York's Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Central Park West (a short walk from Lincoln Center) involved such a resident ensemble committed to performing Bach's cantatas on the days for which they were intended.  I then regretted that San Francisco did not have a similar institution that could maintain the same schedule.

Yesterday afternoon, however, I realized that there is at least one viable alternative, even if its focus is not strictly on Bach.  It is Schola Adventus, described on its Web page as follows:

Schola Adventus is the resident choir at Church of the Advent of Christ the King, San Francisco’s historic downtown Anglo-Catholic parish. There they have quickly established a reputation as one of the Bay Area's premier a cappella choral ensembles, specialising in Gregorian Chant and Renaissance polyphony. In December 2005 Schola Adventus toured the southern England, singing at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, Christchurch Cathedral Oxford, Holy Trinity Church Stratford-upon-Avon, St James’ Church Garlickhythe in London, and All Saints, Margaret Street in London, the first visiting choir to be invited to do so. The tour culminated with a major performance at St John’s Smith Square in London, "Hodie christus Natus Est: Renaissance & Contemporary Music for Christmastide," as part of the annual Hazard Chase Christmas Festival, to much acclaim.

Schola Adventus can be heard every Sunday morning at Church of the Advent during High Mass at 11am, and on the monthly Third Sunday Series at Solemn Evensong and Benediction. In celebration of former music director Paul Ellison's fifteenth anniversary, they commissioned settings of O salutaris Hostia and Tantum Ergo from Bay Area composer David Conte, which were given their premier in October 2005.

Yesterday evening, in the spirit of the season and following the letter of the church calendar, Schola Adventus offered An Advent Liturgy at their host church.  Ellison served as guest director, and organ music for the service was provided by guest organist George Anton Emblom.  There were only eight voices (making "choir" a bit of an exaggeration), performing a repertoire that ran the gamut from anonymous fifteenth-century sources to Benjamin Britten's setting of a thirteenth-century text, his "Hymn to the Virgin."  However, the scale of the ensemble was a perfect fit to the size of the sanctuary, which even provided an appropriate physical setting for the "primary" and "echo" quartets required by the Britten.  Emblom offered a similarly broad repertoire, including four chorale preludes on the Advent hymn, "Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland," two by Bach (BWV 599 and 661), one by Johann Pachelbel, and one by contemporary composer Gerald Near.  He also performed the "Desseins Éternels" movement from Olivier Messiaen's La Nativité du Seigneur.  All music was scrupulously selected to conform to the Advent rite of the service, which was precisely how the music was intended to be presented.

November 28, 2009: Bach's Christmas spirit

The Holidays with the Symphony series of concerts at Davies Symphony Hall began last night with a performance of the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 of Johann Sebastian Bach by the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus under the direction of Ragnar Bohlin.  Soloists for the occasion were soprano Malin Christensson, contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, tenor Lothar Odinius, and baritone Anders Larsson.  As I had observed at the beginning of this month, this work is actually a compilation of six cantatas, each of which was performed at a service for one of the twelve days of Christmas (the first day, the second day, the third day, New Year's Day, the Sunday after New Year, and the Feast of the Epiphany on the final day).  However, while these are six separate works, the Biblical texts cover a single narrative arc of the Christmas story, beginning, as the gospels do, with the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem for tax registration and concluding with the decision of the three Wise Men to return to their own lands without informing Herod of their encounter with Jesus.  As is the case with all of Bach's cantatas, the "lessons" from the Bible are interspersed with music to encourage meditation by the congregation, including solo arias, hymn settings, many in chorale prelude form, and one orchestral sinfonia.  The Wikipedia entry set the duration of the entire oratorio at "nearly three hours."

This is the same time scale as the Saint Matthew Passion, which was originally performed in its entirety on Good Friday.  However, while Good Friday is intended to be set aside as an entire day of intense religious meditation, Christmas is a time of feasts and fellowship.  One still attended church to remember the reason for the feasting, but the time spent there was far more limited than it was on Good Friday.  This is probably the reason that Bohlin chose to present only selections from each of the six cantatas, keeping the scale of the evening at a duration comparable to most Symphony concerts.  This might upset purists who believe that Bach's texts should be honored in every detail of the letter;  but, if they really wanted to be pure about the matter, they would insist on having each cantata performed on its appropriate date.

Those purists would probably also object to Bohlin's decision to have the texts sung in English.  However, this decision also honors the spirit of the music.  Since Bach was not a deep religious scholar, he probably never encountered the passage in Talmud that advises one to pray in the language one understands the best, thus emphasizing the desire to communicate with God, rather than just marking time with the alien babble of ritual.  Since each cantata is essentially an extended prayer, Bach probably would have assumed that non-Germans would pray in their own language.  After all, it was not as if the extra-Biblical texts he selected were high literature.  The author is unidentified, which may be just as well.  The devotional spirit of the music that highlights the text is far more sincere than the superficiality of the text itself.

It is also worth nothing that Bohlin chose the English translation by Henry S. Drinker for this performance.  For those unfamiliar with Drinker, his work was significant enough to earn him an entry in Grove Music Online by Jon Newsom.  Here are a few sentences that represent his contributions:

A lawyer by profession, he devoted himself in his spare time to music and from 1930 to 1960 he held informal gatherings (known as the ‘Accademia dei Dilettanti di Musica’) at his home to study and perform vocal music of the 17th to 20th centuries. (He also conducted larger groups on Sunday evenings.) Concerned that the words should be understood but also fit the music, Drinker began a series of translations remarkable for their craftsmanship and sheer number: between 1941 and 1954 he translated many Bach works (212 cantatas, the St Matthew Passion and the St John Passion, the Easter and Christmas oratorios and the Magnificat), all Brahms's vocal works, all Mozart's choral works, all Schumann's and Medtner's songs, all the solo songs of Wolf, Musorgsky and Schubert and all Schubert's partsongs.

As a Philadelphian I can claim a degree of separation from Drinker of either one or two.  My own choir master certainly knew about those Sunday evening gatherings.  If he never attended one himself, he certainly knew those who did.  I remember his once telling me that Drinker insisted that everyone sing at those events.  He then paused and added, "Including Leopold Stokowski!"  Naturally, most of my experience in singing Bach cantatas involved Drinker's translations;  and I admire them as much today as I did as a student.

This was thus an evening that evoked Bach's own spirit of Christmas.  While it may not have been faithful to every note and word in the original score, the performance by reduced orchestra and chorus served the clarity of the notes that were performed excellently.  The choice of movements was sufficient to move the overall narrative at a brisk pace, and Bohlin's tempo selections maintained that pace.  The four soloists similarly captured this sense of spirit, making for an excellent launch of this year's holiday season.

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!

August 24, 2009: "That's amore!"

It is too often forgotten that the noun "amateur" has its origin in the Latin noun "amator" (lover).  The amateur works for love of the task, without giving much (if any) priority to compensation.  Nevertheless, many amateurs approach their work with a serious of purpose.  Such seriousness may best be viewed through the model of the wedding vows that make it a point to couple "love" with "honor."  This seems particularly appropriate for the amateur musician.  It is not just a matter of "loving" the music (whatever that may mean);  it is also necessary to "honor" the music with a level of understanding that does justice to both the text being performed and the spirit of the composer behind that text.

Last June the amateur members of Symphony Parnassus demonstrated such a coupling of love and honor in the performance they prepared of Gustav Mahler's fifth symphony.  In writing about that performance, I observed:

The fact that the orchestra, as a whole, was able to acquire that same "ear" provided compensation for the occasional missed cue. The flesh may not have been up to every challenge that Mahler set, but the spirits were there in full force. The result was far more stimulating than more routine approaches that never seem to get beyond jumping through all of the requisite technical hoops.

Without the "honor of the ear," some of those missed cues could have turned into train wrecks.  Instead, a proper balance of love and honor justified my use of the adjective "stimulating."

Needless to say, some composers are more conducive to such honor than others.  It is hard to imagine Mahler being particularly generous to amateur efforts.  However, he was from Vienna, which has long been a city in which amateurs practice music, rather than just listen to it.  Thus, for all the prodigious virtuosity that Franz Schubert's music can demand from both instrumentalists and vocalists, when it came to setting a mass, he appreciated that it would be sung by a church choir consisting primarily (if not entirely) of members of the congregation.  Thus, his D. 167 G major mass, scored for soprano, tenor, and bass soloists, mixed chorus, strings, and organ, makes relatively straightforward homophonic demands of the chorus, confining his compositional adventurism (he was only eighteen at the time) to subtle shifts in harmony and rhythm.  Furthermore, the overall scale of the sound is relatively limited, probably because the church for which he composed the music was not particularly large.  Nevertheless, that small scale succeeds just as well in larger spaces, since it never tries to compete with natural reverberations.  In other words this music is perfect for the amateur musician committed to both love and honor.

That commitment was clearly evident in the performance given by the San Francisco Lyric Chorus this weekend under the direction of Robert Gurney.  Indeed, Gurney even honored the "amateur's love" by having two sopranos (Cassandra Forth and Kathryn Singh) alternate in performing those solo parts.  The accompaniment was provided only by organist Robert Train Adams with a selection of stops suitable for the relatively lightweight scale of the setting.  This scale was similar honored by all the performers in the six selections of music by Felix Mendelssohn that concluded the concert.  These included two excerpts from Christus, two from Elijah, a five-part setting of the "Kyrie eleison" text, and the "Beati Mortui" from the Two Sacred Works for Men's Chorus (Opus 115).

The only composer who did not fare well in the Lyric Chorus program was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose K. 339 Vesperae Solennes de Confessore was deprived of that honor that had been given so readily to Schubert.  The key problem probably had to do with the "Solennes" adjective, which, as the program book indicated, carried the connotation of orchestral accompaniment.  This composition is thus a shining example of Mozart's orchestral writing in dialog with his vocal writing.  Whether or not any organ performance could have done justice to the orchestral score is debatable;  but Adams' selection of stops (and, probably, a general agreement over tempo), reduced Mozart's elegant scoring to a blur within the opening measures of the performance;  and that blur was only further exaggerated by the chorus.

I suspect the critical difference is that, while the Schubert composition was, as I observed, primarily homophonic, Mozart could never resist an opportunity to exercise his contrapuntal chops;  and K. 339 saw him at the top of his game.  This work is certainly up there with his requiem setting, his C major mass setting, and the perfectly serene (and homophonic) "Ave Verum Corpus" (K. 618).  Indeed, all the intricacies of its composition would probably put a strain on the acoustics of just about any church or cathedral setting, making the concert hall the preferable environment.  Only in the "Laudate Dominum" movement, in which a solo soprano is accompanied by the chorus, did Gurney succeed in scaling back the resources to honor the sense of dialog among soloist, chorus, and "virtual orchestra."  Mozart deserved better, but we could still enjoy the love and honor given to Schubert and Mendelssohn.

August 2, 2009: Bach at the Proms

There are a variety of advantages to having a "virtual Proms" experience through the BBC iPlayer Web site.  For most of us, the cost of travel probably ranks the highest, in addition to which there is not only the price of tickets but also whether or not they are even available (not to mention the amount of time spent waiting in line to find out that they are not available).  Finally, there is the luxury of being able to pick and choose both the concerts you wish to attend (perhaps based on a review you have already read) and when you actually wish to have your concert experience.

Having already enjoyed Bernard Haitink's performance with the London Symphony Orchestra at Proms 5, my personal pendulum swung a considerable distance into the past for Proms 17.  This was a "late evening" Proms concert of a comparatively shorter duration due to its beginning at 10:15 PM local time.  I learned about it through the high praise it received from Richard Faiman in his Financial Times review, but I probably would have been curious without having read the review.  The program consisted of four motets by Johann Sebastian Bach, such by the Monteverdi Choir under the direction of Sir John Eliot Gardiner with instrumentalists from his English Baroque Soloists providing the continuo.  The reason I probably would have been drawn to this concert regardless of any reviews is that one of the first CDs I purchased was the 1982 Erato recording of these motets with Gardiner conducting an earlier generation of these ensembles.  It would be fair to say that I learned these motets from the two CDs in that set, and they remain treasured among all of my other Bach recordings.

The four motets Gardiner selected were "Komm, Jesu, Komm!" (BWV 229), "Fürchte, dich nicht" (BWV 228), "Jesu, meine Freude" (BWV 227), and "Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied" (BWV 225).  The BBC broadcast benefitted from Gardiner's observations about these compositions.  This began with the announcer leading him on by asking if he felt that the motets were inferior to the cantatas, to which Gardiner replied with a polite but emphatic negative.  These are, indeed, impressive settings of sacred texts and may have enjoyed the advantage of not being churned out on a weekly basis, the way the cantatas were.

Most impressive is probably BWV 227, which was also the longest work on the program.  It is one of those works that can be admired as much for its overall architecture as for the sensitivity Bach brought to setting its text.  The program notes describe that architecture as follows:

‘Jesu, meine Freude’ is the most extended of Bach’s motets. The backbone of the text is provided by six verses of a hymn (1659) of the same name by Johann Franck – Bach twice incorporated verses from this hymn in his cantatas, BWV 81 and 133. Alternating with the hymn verses and their associated melody are five verses from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Chapter 8). Bach’s vocal textures range from three- to five-part writing and are organised in what one Bach writer, drawing upon a Blakean epithet has described as ‘fearful symmetry’.

In his interview with the announcer, Gardiner described that "fearful symmetry" as an isosceles triangle;  and the following diagram is taken from the Erato notes to illustrate this point:



The one disadvantage of experiencing this performance only through audio is that, as both the announcer and Gardiner observed, that sense of symmetry was also realized through the physical disposition of the performers.  Had there been greater stereo separation, one could have been more aware of this;  but such separation would have been an artifact that would have distorted the ways in which Bach integrated his voices.  The only solution would have come from visual cues;  and it would be nice if Gardiner were to consider making a video document of the complete set of Bach motets, which could then be released in DVD form.  Nevertheless, there is still much to enjoy in listening to the recording of this Proms evening;  and it provides an excellent opportunity to build up one's experiences of listening to Bach being performed by an expert in that music.

June 14, 2009: Coming to twilight

The San Francisco Symphony's Dawn to Twilight festival concluded with each of the composers, Franz Schubert and Alban Berg, being honored with a performance of a composition from their respective final years.  The evening began with Berg's only violin concerto with soloist Gil Shaham.  The intermission was followed by Schubert's sixth setting of the mass, D. 950 in E-flat major for mixed chorus and five solo voices:  soprano (Laura Aikin), mezzo-soprano (Kelley O'Connor), two tenors (Bruce Sledge and Nicholas Phan), and bass-baritone (Jeremy Galyon).

As had been the case with Berg's "Chamber Concerto," conductor Michael Tilson Thomas felt a need to orient the audience by exposing them of some of the key materials of the violin concerto.  While this was probably helpful to many, this latter composition is far more a work of depiction than the former.  The "Chamber Concerto" was the result of a student honoring his master, Arnold Schoenberg;  the violin concerto was a memorial piece on the death of Manon Gropius, the "angel" of the dedication, who died at the age of eighteen of polio.  The concerto thus depicts in striking musical language the life of a brilliant and beautiful girl abruptly cut short and liberated to heaven.

The overall structure of the composition is almost narrative in nature, which should not be surprising since Berg was working on an opera (Lulu) at the same time as this concerto.  Thus, while a long chain of academics have celebrated Berg's compositional technique, particularly in light of his use of a twelve-tone row that essentially embodied a return to tonality, the dead moose on the table that is never mentioned is Richard Strauss' Opus 24 tone poem "Tod und Verklärung."  As a teacher Schoenberg knew that one could learn much from Strauss without following his footsteps, so it would be hard to believe that one of his best pupils would have been unaware of this earlier representation of struggle with mortality giving way to transcendence of the soul.  However, Schoenberg also attached great value to traditional structures;  and, from a theoretical point of view, Berg's concerto may best be viewed as a dialectical synthesis of Schoenberg's formal structures with Strauss' more narrative-driven approach.

Fortunately, in listening to Thomas and Shaham (who had performed the concerto here with Thomas in January of 2004), there is no need to take a theoretical point of view.  For Shaham the synthesis had more to do with virtuosity and lyricism than with matters of structure.  As he had done at his last visit, he filled his performance with passionate energy, always playing off the many different ways in which Berg provided orchestral accompaniment.  This time around I was particularly aware of the extensive breadth of Berg's approach to realizing that accompaniment, and I have to confess that Thomas' remarks probably encouraged that awareness.  This was definitely the apex in the entire Dawn to Twilight journey.

That use of the definite article, however, would suggest that there was something anticlimactic in the Schubert half of the evening.  I have already discussed the significance of Schubert's final year as a time when he was as adventurous in composition as he was prolific.  Nevertheless, when we tally up a census of just how prolific that year was, it seems unreasonable to expect that every one of those pieces would be a hands-down winner;  and, while there is no shortage of Schubert's rhetorical agility, one has to wonder whether or not his heart was really into setting the mass yet another time.  There is too much of a sense of the routine in getting from beginning to end, even when Schubert's routine is one of ambitious harmonic and contrapuntal excursions.

This was the first performance of D. 950 by the San Francisco Symphony.  By all rights it could have been a "new Schubert experience."  However, the Berg concerto may have biased the context of the evening.  Once we hear Berg's last words of his angel now ascended to heaven, just about anything would involve coming back down to earth.

June 6, 2009: An alternative string quartet

The lead instrument of the Luna Nova Quartet is a mandolin, played by Ben Brussell, who also seems to manage (and in some cases arrange) the repertoire.  The rest of the group is a conventional string trio of violin (Candy Sanderson), viola (Linda Green), and cello (Alex Kelly).  Their repertoire consists of arrangements of folk sources, both sacred and secular, along with original works inspired by those sources.  In many ways they do for folk music what the Turtle Island String Quartet did for bebop jazz;  so it was no surprise that their repertoire included a cello solo, "Julie-O," composed by Turtle Island cellist Mark Summer.  It also includes two movements from the first string quartet (1983) by Peter Schickele (without his P. D. Q. Bach persona), in which Brussell plays the first violin part on his mandolin (apparently with Schickele's approval).

The arrangement of folk material for a chamber music setting goes back at least to the eighteenth century, when George Thomson commissioned arrangements of his seemingly inexhaustible collection of folksongs from the British Isles from composers such as Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven.  Some of the sources of that material surfaced in Luna Nova's recital last night at Old First Church, having come to the United States in the early days of colonization.  However, the Luna Nova approach is more casual than a Haydn or Beethoven recital;  and that atmosphere is maintained by Brussell chatting up the audience between performances.  Most of the offerings were pleasantly upbeat, although my patience with Jay Unger's "Ashokan Farewell" has run out along with my tolerance of just about anything associated with Ken Burns.  Luna Nova is at its best when all four members get to throw their energy into what they play, and that was best appreciated when they wrapped up the evening with Ervin T. Rouse's train-imitating "Orange Blossom Special."

May 17, 2009: Handel in all his crystalline clarity

Last night Bernard Labadie concluded his visit to the San Francisco Symphony, complementing last week's offering of seldom-heard compositions by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with an evening devoted to George Frideric Handel at his most celebratory.  The object of that celebration was George II on two occasions:  his coronation an October 11, 1727 and his leading of English troops to victory at the Battle of Dettingen on June 27, 1743.  Handel composed four anthems for the coronation, three of which were performed in the first half of last night's program by the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus, "Zadok the Priest" (HWV 258), "My Heart is Inditing" (261), and "The King Shall Rejoice" (HWV 260).  In place of the fourth (HWV 259) anthem ("Let thy Hand be Strengthened"), organist Richard Paré joined the symphony for a performance of Handel's Opus 4, Number 1 (HWV 289) organ concerto in G minor.

At my last encounter with HWV 258 at the beginning of this month, I observed that this was all incidental music but that, where Handel was concerned, even his music subordinated to a specific occasion still deserves serious listening.  Labadie's respect for serious listening, so evident in his nuanced interpretations of Haydn and Mozart last week, again presented itself in full force with a new set of resources, the full mixed chorus and the pipe organ as concerto instrument.  Once again that respect was displayed through his command of dynamic control and pace.
When an occasion is celebratory, the danger is that all the performers burst forth at full force and then desperately try to maintain that level of energy for the duration of the composition.  Handel clearly wanted none of such nonsense;  and this is clear from the very opening of HWV 258, which may be the longest sustained crescendo in the literature until Richard Wagner came along with the Vorspiel to his opera Das Rheingold.  As Labadie conducted it, this was not a simple matter of getting louder over a long duration;  rather, it involved a gradual succession of "crescendo waves," each one slightly strong than its predecessor, until, as the orchestra reaches its peak, the chorus bursts forth with the text describing the coronation of Solomon.  As I have previously observed, that burst runs the risk of drowning out the orchestra;  but Labadie kept his resources under control to make sure that no individual element of this glorious moment was lost.

The problem of balance is probably even more critical in a concerto for organ and orchestra, particularly since most of the organs of Handel's time lacked swell boxes.  Loudness was simply a matter of how many ranks of pipes were connected to the keyboard (i.e., not "stopped").  The organ used for this concerto was, therefore, a much smaller instrument than the Davies pipe organ recently put on display for the organ concerto of Francis Poulenc.  This smaller instrument could support far more dexterity, and this is precisely what Handel wanted.  That same skill in virtuoso turns that we know so well in his operas is on display at a keyboard here;  and, with the more modest resources of the instrument, the ear can easily follow every intricate twist of that virtuosity.  The result is a display of melodic invention that is right up there with the violin writing of Baroque masters such as Antonio Vivaldi and Johann Sebastian Bach.  Paré mustered all of the agility that Handel demanded, always choosing his stops for the most suitable blend with the Symphony under Labadie's control.  Handel-the-organist may have an entirely different character from that of Bach-the-organist;  but that character offers a bright contrast to the more meditative Bach.  Labadie and Paré captured all of that brightness, offering the best possible complement to the celebratory anthems.

The celebration of the "Dettingen Te Deum" (HWV 283), on the other hand, is more military in nature, replete with all the martial sounds of brass and percussion.  Nevertheless, the work also has its reflective moments, the most outstanding of which is a trio ("Thou sittest at the right hand of God") for countertenor (Matthew White), tenor (Frédéric Antoun), and baritone (Joshua Hopkins) solo voices.  I cannot recall any previous encounter with this particular blend of male voices;  and the close harmonies that Handel conceived for them stand out in sharp contrast to most of the other vocal writing, which comes close to our usual expectations.  Perhaps this was Handel's pause in the celebratory spirit to reflect on the Trinity;  or it may be that he just felt that all of his soloists deserved to come together for a "star turn."  Whatever the case may be, we were reminded that Handel always had the ability to surprise, and Labadie knew how to set the context to make the surprise a good one.

May 8, 2009: Handel agonistes

Last night's Handel Fireworks Celebration at Grace Cathedral, the final program in the current season of the American Bach Soloists, provided a sobering lesson in music history.  The lesson was a reminder of just how incidental music was in the eighteenth century.  In just about every social setting in which music was performed, that performance was as much in the background as the architecture and furnishings of the space in which it took place.  The sort of attentive listening that we bring to any performance of music today played little, if any, part in George Frideric Handel's social context.  As far as his "consumers" were concerned, little mattered beyond questions of how he should be fairly compensated for his efforts.

The two halves of last night's program featured two different incidental settings.  The first half was devoted to religious ceremony, consisting of the first of four anthems composed for the coronation of George II in Westminster Abbey ("Zadok the Priest," HWV 258) and the cantata setting of Psalm 112 Laudate, pueri, Dominum (HWV 237), composed while Handel was in Rome in 1707.  The second half then turned to the secular social settings of the Water Music (the second and third suites, HWV 349 and 350) and the Music for the Royal Fireworks (HWV 351), with "fireworks" provided in the form of a laser light show.

Incidental as all that music may be, it can still hold up to serious listening, particularly in the hands of an ensemble like the American Bach Soloists, which gives so much attention to the instruments they play and the performance practices engaged to play them.  My first opportunity to hear these performers reminded me of how little attention I had given to the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach and inspired me to do something about this major gap in my listening experience.  However, in order to listen to this ensemble, one must first hear them;  and in this respect both they and Handel had to suffer the indignities of an acoustic cavern in which any effort at nuance was almost immediately rendered as auditory mush.  Grace Cathedral may have been the right setting to invoke the memory of Westminster Abbey in 1727;  but, as soon as the Grace Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys intoned the first words of Handel's anthem, it became impossible to hear any instruments other than the timpani and occasionally the trumpets.  Balance improved somewhat during the cantata, but only after it was clear that an amplification system had been brought into play.

The Bay Area has earned a reputation for according both respect and love to Handel's music.  One has only to consider the pride of place given to the Philharmonia Baroque by my fellow Examiner, Cindy Warner, in her capacity as SF Opera Examiner.  Next week three of those coronation anthems (including "Zadok the Priest") will be performed by the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus under the perceptive direction of Bernard Labadie, who provided such stimulating interpretations of Joseph Haydn last season.  Davies Symphony Hall may seat more people than Grace Cathedral, but it does not suffocate the sound of music with its reverberations.  It is encouraging to know that we shall not have to wait very long for Handel to get a performance in a space where his music will be far more than incidental.

March 29, 2009: "... a joyful noise ..."

Conventionally, an oratorio is structured around a Biblical narrative that provides frequent opportunities for reflection.  The narrative tends to be delivered through recitative passages, which introduce the reflections in more extended works for solo voices and chorus.  In preparing a libretto for William Walton's "Belshazzar's Feast," Osbert Sitwell turned this formula on its head, providing extended reflective texts for the beginning and ending that serve as bookends for a middle narrative portion.  The narrative is the episode from the Book of Daniel concerning the "great feast" of the Babylonian King Belshazzar, which is interrupted by a disembodied hand that writes the words, "Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin," forecasting the fall of the Babylonian Kingdom.  Sitwell's account is highly abbreviated, saying nothing about the Hebrew Daniel being the only person who can decipher the words and keeping all mention of the Hebrews in Babylonian Captivity to the opening reflective text (using the concluding reflection as a song of liberation).

From a musical point of view, the delivery of the narrative is anything but unadorned recitative.  It is shared by mixed choir and baritone solo, along with orchestral resources whose abundance almost matches the extravagance of Belshazzar's "great feast."  Walton had a keen ear for orchestration, complemented by that sense of whimsy that even the most serious of British composers never succeed in concealing.  In this case the whimsy emerges as the feast is in full swing and all the different gods of Babylonian polytheism are being celebrated.  These are the gods of gold, silver, iron, wood, stone, and brass, each of which is given a particularly characteristic orchestral treatment, not all of which dwell on aspects of shock and awe.  (Had the Babylonians had a God of the Kitchen Sink, I suspect that Walton would have found the appropriate orchestral treatment!)

Whimsy aside, John Relyea brought the perfectly resonant deep voice that the seriousness of the narrative demanded, while Vladimir Ashkenazy led the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus with a keen sense of proper pace for both the narrative and the reflections.  Once we progress beyond the opening lamentations, the whole affair as about as joyful a noise as one can find in a concert hall.  Ashkenazy was never shy about letting the noise get noisy;  but he could keep all of his resources under control to make sure that the joy was joyous, rather than chaotic.

By ending his evening at Davies Symphony Hall with Walton's joyful noise, Ashkenazy complemented the beginning of his program, which was the world premiere of "Music in Dark Times," which he had commissioned from the American composer Steven Gerber.  The work is in six movements and was composed between 2005 and 2008, meaning that it is hard not to associate the concept of "dark times" with all the stories saturating the news media over that period.  However, Thomas May's notes for the program book quoted Gerber as saying that the composition was not "a political or ideological piece.  It just seemed to suit the character of the movements."  The opening and closing movements are fanfares, while the inner movements consist of a pavane (in homage to both Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Ravel, rather than early music), a tarantella entitled "Dance of Death," a dead march, and an elegy.

Each of these movements was relatively brief, leading Joshua Kosman to suggest, in his San Francisco Chronicle review, that each one concluded just as it was about to begin (my words, not Kosman's).  I do not disagree;  but I may have an explanation, which would only make sense if Gerber had been hiding some of his biography from us.  May cited his educational influences as being Robert Parris, Milton Babbitt, and Earl Kim, along with the indirect influences of the music of Béla Bartók and Elliott Carter.  However, the "architecture of brevity" that characterizes Gerber's six movements comes straight out of the blind poet and street musician Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin), whose basic rhetoric also consisted of establishing a mood, enriching it by adding instrumental resources, and then letting it lapse back into the silence from which it originated.  Columbia Records promoted him in the anything-goes years of the Sixties;  but I still remember him at his post on Sixth Avenue just doing his own thing.  It would surprise me if Gerber had never encountered Moondog, but it would not surprise me if Moondog's influence on him was not a conscious one.  Whatever the real history may be, exposure to Moondog greatly enhanced my own listening experience of "Music in Dark Times."

Between Gerber's "dark times" and Walton's Babylonian "darkness," Ashkenazy conducted the young Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin in a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's fourth piano concerto in G major (Opus 68).  In the past I have seen Ashkenazy only as a pianist, and I think his experience as a pianist effectively informed his role as a conductor of this work.  He had a particularly sensitive ear for the balance between the piano and the orchestral resources.  This turned out to be important because Sudbin tended to get pedal-heavy, often when the fingering got more complicated.  Ashkenazy was able to engage his "balancing act" techniques to maintain the overall message, so to speak, of the concerto.  He also seems to have made the decision to have some of the more intricate piano solos supported by a solo cello bass line, rather than giving that voice to the entire section.  Michael Grebanier's strong and rich sound was clearly up to this task, which every now and then seemed to reflect back on the sonorities of Beethoven's earlier Opus 56 "Triple Concerto."  If this sounds like all available resources being engaged to prop up a weak piano performance, it was far preferable to the communications breakdown that had taken place at the recent London Symphony performance of Beethoven's final piano concerto.

March 27, 2009: The art of excerpting

For those (like myself) who are always interested in encountering new approaches to listening to music, San Francisco Performances offered two fortuitous couplings last night at Herbst Theatre.  The first involved the contributions of countertenor David Daniels as guest artist in a performance by The English Concert, directed from the keyboard by Harry Bicket.  The second was the decision to structure the evening in complementary halves (divided by the intermission), the first devoted entirely to Johann Sebastian Bach and the second entirely to George Frideric Handel.  For those who do not keep up with dates, these two men were born within a month of each other in 1685.  However, as the evening demonstrated, they took decidedly different paths;  and music history has always been the richer for that separation.  The two halves of the program also complemented each other structurally, each beginning with an instrumental "overture," followed by vocal selections performed by Daniels with a "time out" for an orchestral interlude.  All of these selections and interludes were excerpted from larger works, and this turned out to reveal an interesting distinction between Bach and Handel.

The Bach selections were all "sacred," drawn from the cantatas, his BWV 232 mass in B minor, and the BWV 244 Saint Matthew Passion.  The texts could all be interpreted as some form of prayer, whether taken directly from the mass or providing a poetic reflection on the relationship between man and God.  There was no spectacle in this music, and Daniels did not try to force any on the audience.  He opted, instead, for a clear delivery through which both music and words could speak for themselves;  and (if we are to believe some of the anecdotes about Bach's work experiences in Leipzig) there was more heartfelt sincerity in these performances than Bach himself probably ever experienced.

On the instrumental side the "overture" was the first of four ouvertures composed as a set and these days called "orchestral suites."  The first (BWV 1066 in C major) was set for two oboes, bassoon, strings, and continuo, beginning with a French ouverture followed by six movements each based on a different dance form.  There continues to be questions over when (and therefore where and for what occasion) this music was composed, which means there is also a question as to whether the dance movements were actually intended for dancing.  However, since our knowledge of how dance (particularly courtly dance) was practiced in the eighteenth century is about as impoverished as our knowledge of the performance of music and dance in Ancient Greece, we probably should not worry very much about whether the music lends itself to dancing as we know it.

What is more important is Bach's skill in weaving together multiple lines of activity in works that are, on the surface, relatively simple binary forms.  There are generally two voices in play, one of which "leads" while the other either "follows" or "observes."  We do not often think about Bach in terms of his wit;  but he can be delightfully sly with his "secondary" voice.  I have always been amused by the way in which the strings, in a "secondary" role in the gavotte movement, keep "intruding" on the primary wind voices with little military fanfares.  If Bach's sacred music austerely addressed the relationship between man and God, these secular ensemble works seem to comment more wistfully in inter-human relationships;  and Bicket achieved just the right balances to make those relationships convincing.

Such relationships are the bread and butter of Handel's secular operas, three of which, Radamisto, Partenope, and Orlando, were represented in the second half of the program.  In contrast with Bach's sacred music, these operas were spectacles with long involved plots entailing complex relationships among large casts of characters.  Contemporary productions, such as last year's Ariodante at the San Francisco Opera, usually impose judicious cuts to give the narrative more of a sense of pace than eighteenth-century audiences would have demanded.  Thus, in the right hands these operas can be as dramatic as any nineteenth century opera;  but I would argue that this dramatic element requires context.  There is a tendency to view key arias as set pieces that can easily be extracted for concert performance, such as the one given last night;  but I have now seen enough Handel operas to argue that such arias only achieve their fullest power when embedded in their surrounding narrative, however complex (if not overblown) that narrative may be.  Thus, while Daniels' delivery of Handel was as capable as it had been for Bach, I found myself missing those past occasions when I had heard him perform Handel operas in their entirety (properly abridged for the sake of production values).

Fortunately, there was no such sense of lack in the "overture" for the second half, the eleventh (A major) concerto grosso from the Opus 6 collection (HWV 329).  As a concerto grosso, this work is more concerned with "accompanied virtuosity" than with the primary/secondary relation that Bach explored.  In this case the virtuosity is covered by two violins and one cello against a full string ensemble.  The reduced resources of The English Concert were ideal for balancing these solo voices;  and the resulting display was dazzling, providing an excellent opportunity to appreciate the differentiating merits of the two composers of the evening.