April 2, 2009: Music from a "blissful year" in San Francisco

The American Voices program that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has prepared for their April 23 concert in San Francisco at Herbst Theatre, presented by San Francisco Performances, will have a special resonance for those who have studied the musical history of this city.  That resonance will come from a performance of Amy Beach's Opus 67 piano quintet in F sharp minor.  Last fall the Steve Silver Beach Blanket Babylon Music Center, on the fourth floor of the Main Library building of the San Francisco Public Library, hosted an exhibit entitled "Amy Beach:  Her Blissful Years in San Francisco."  Those "blissful years" included 1878, when she visited her aunt and cousin as a ten-year-old, and the period between 1915, when, as an established composer, she participated in the musical activities of the Panama Pacific Exposition (which commissioned the composition of her "Panama Hymn"), through 1916, when the San Francisco Chamber Music Society commissioned and premiered her Opus 80 theme and variations, set for flute and string quartet.  Here is a photograph of the ensemble that gave this premiere (courtesy of the Art, Music, Recreation Center of the San Francisco Public Library):

From right to left, the musicians in this photograph are violinist Louis Persinger (center), cellist Horace Britt, violist Nathan Firestone, violinist Louis Ford, and flautist Elias M. Hecht.

A year earlier, on October 28, 1915, this same organization (called the San Francisco Quintet Club at the time) gave a performance of the Opus 67 piano quintet with Beach at the keyboard.  Thanks again to the San Francisco Public Library, we have a perfectly legible photograph of the program notes for this quintet:

Having heard this quintet several times (and written about it enthusiastically on my blog), I can say that, while the language of these notes is more florid than what we now encounter in program books, it is basically accurate;  and I shall now direct my enthusiasm towards seizing the opportunity to hear again this composition, whose previous listenings had elicited personal memories of Gabriel Fauré and Edward Elgar.

Beyond this specific "San Francisco connection," I must admit that I find the prospect of an all-American concert fascinating.  For many the most familiar work is likely to be George Gershwin's "Lullaby for String Quartet."  I also remember when, about forty years ago, there was a rising interest in music from Colonial America;  and this genre will be represented by John Antes' Opus 3, a trio in D minor for two violins and cello.  Finally, Stephanie Blythe will join the Chamber Music Society for the Bay Area premiere of Alan Louis Smith's "Vignettes:  Covered Wagon Woman," based on the daily journals of pioneer Margaret Ann Alsip Frank.  Blythe will also give a free twenty-minute talk about the composition at 7 PM, prior to the concert itself at 8 PM.  This is all music that deserves to be celebrated.  We should be thankful for the ingenuity of the Chamber Music Society in arranging this program and for San Francisco Performances arranging this event.

April 2, 2009: A rich palette of chamber music

Last night's final Chamber Music Masters concert for the season at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music featured violinist Robert Mann (on his annual visit to the Conservatory), five members of the Conservatory Faculty, ten Conservatory students, and one Conservatory alumnus.  It was an evening of rich diversity, during which the familiar music of Antonín Dvorák and Maurice Ravel served as bookends for the less familiar works of Samuel Barber and Anton Webern.

The evening began with the same work that had concluded the recent recital by the Prazak Quartet with Menahem Pressler (a familiar face at the Conservatory).  This was Dvorák's A major piano quintet (Opus 81), which once again received a passionate reading.  If the Prazak performance had been more nuanced, that was probably because they have been performing together since 1972 and had past collaborations with Pressler.  However, while their performance seemed to be under a "chain of command" (as I tried to argue on my blog), last night's "faculty-student mix" had more "network connectivity."  It is the many opportunities for such "connectivity" that frequently make Conservatory performances so exciting, and this performance certainly made for a stimulating occasion.

Following the intermission (to move the piano, which would no longer be needed), the program continued with Barber's Opus 3 setting of Matthew Arnold's poem, "Dover Beach" for baritone and string quartet.  Arnold was a highly erudite poet;  and "Dover Beach" is rich with his erudition.  However, much of that erudition is Classical;  and Barber had a keen sense of interpreting Ancient Greek material as music.  In the poem Arnold reflects on the human condition from the setting of a shore looking out on a quiet English Channel.  ("The Sea is calm to-night.")  Barber invokes that Sea as an introduction, and maintains its sense of place behind a relatively straightforward delivery of the four stanzas of the poem.  As the Opus number suggests, this is a relatively early work but extremely impressive for its delivery of a highly sophisticated text in such an effective natural voice.  Conservatory students should do this work more often, particularly since a conservatory setting is conducive to bringing a baritone together with a string quartet!

The remainder of the evening belonged entirely to string quartets.  Webern's Opus 5 set of short pieces contrasted sharply with Barber's "calm Sea;"  but, as I tried to suggest yesterday in a blog post about Arnold Schoenberg, the sense of place was just as strong.  This was the "good old Vienna" that Virgil Thomson has cited as the source of emotional energy behind the music of Schoenberg and his pupils.  This was most evident in the use of glissando in the first of the pieces, not as heavy as one would find in Gustav Mahler but pronounced enough to be effective;  but this is not the Vienna of nineteenth-century nostalgia.  It is the Vienna on the brink of that "fall of eagles" that served as the title of Cyrus Lee Sulzberger's book about the radical changes of early twentieth-century Europe.  All of that emotional tension was packed into five short pieces, the fourth of which (with its "three-line" structure) is practically a haiku;  and the students who performed these pieces captured that tension admirably.

Following Webern, the Ravel F major string quartet (composed six years earlier) was very much a soothing emotional relief.  This was the only work that Mann performed, playing first violin to Ian Swenson's second and Jean-Michel Fonteneau's cello.  All of these teachers were joined by student Alexa Beatie on viola.  For all of the recent French interest in "spectral music," we need Ravel to remind us that the richest sonorities reside in the instruments themselves, rather than in the physics of those instruments.  A full palette of those rich sonorities was summoned in this performance of the Ravel quartet as the final course of what had turned out to be an extensive meal, satisfying in its diversity.

March 31, 2009: A darker autobiography?

Having entertained the hypothesis last week that the second volume of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier could "be heard as the only autobiographical account Bach would be capable of telling," it is, at the very least, tempting to pose the same hypothesis to the collection of 24 preludes and fugues that Dmitri Shostakovich composed in the years 1950 and 1951.  Given how little autobiographical data we have about Shostakovich (with good reason), it is an intriguing proposition to explore.  Needless to say, in the political context in which Shostakovich was embedded, such a document would have to be highly encrypted;  and, while Bach's account would have served more as resume than autobiography (being in an and-then-I-wrote style), were Shostakovich to go to all of the trouble of encoding his story, the decoding would probably reveal a series of "… and then Stalin did …" episodes.

Whether or not it occurred to Jannie Lo that her performance of the last of these couplings of prelude and fugue at the conclusion of today's Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco would be interpreted as "dark autobiography" is academic.  She may have felt that this was the best way to complete a program that began with Bach's BWV 904 A minor fantasy and fugue;  and this was certainly an excellent choice, since both of the fugues are double fugues, even if each approaches the idea of a double fugue in its own characteristic way.  Furthermore, after having found myself having difficulty with the clarity of discourse, so to speak, in András Schiff's recent performance of fugues by both Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, I am happy to report that Lo's "sense of fugue" was right on target where both Bach and Shostakovich were concerned.  For my own investment of time, this was far more important than whether or not Shostakovich's prelude and fugue were carrying a scrupulously encoded message about Stalinist oppression!

Placing the eight Klavierstücke (Opus 76, a collection of four capriccios and four intermezzi) of Johannes Brahms between Bach and Shostakovich was also an inspired choice.  Brahms was an enthusiastic subscriber to the Bach-Gesellschaft Edition of Bach's complete works, a 46-volume project whose first volume was published in 1851 and continued until the final volume was published in 1899.  Brahms' Opus 76 was published in 1879, by which time he would have seen (and probably absorbed) the three Clavierwerke volumes that had been released.  These include the Fünfzehn Inventionen und fünfzehn Symphonien, the English and French suites, and (you guessed it) the two volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier.  This is not to suggest that any of these works served as models for the eight Opus 76 compositions;  but his key choices (F sharp minor, B minor, A flat major, B flat major, C sharp minor, A major, A minor, C major) may have involved his following Bach into the regions of less-used keys (if not a statement of his favorite keys from The Well-Tempered Clavier).

Lo is a native San Franciscan, currently working towards a Master of Performance at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg (Germany).  She received a monetary stipend for the study of new music during the current academic year.  Given the clarity with which she can present her understanding of Bach, Brahms, and Shostakovich in a single program, I would anticipate that she would bring the same clarity to any "new voice" she chooses to perform in concert.  It will be a great benefit to San Francisco should she decide to return and make this her home base after receiving her Master's degree.

March 31, 2009: A matter of context

For all of the opportunities to become acquainted with the music performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum last night, even the most sympathetic listener was faced with major challenges.  Harold Bloom may have been "anxious" over poets who were influenced by other poets;  but where music is concerned, whether in composition or performance, influence is more often the fertile soil from which new ideas emerge.  In the case of listening, influence can actually be a two-way street.  Thus Ludwig van Beethoven's dedication of his Opus 2 piano sonatas to Joseph Haydn is, at least in part, an acknowledgement of influence;  but, by the same count, if we are familiar with the Beethoven sonatas, we can hear Haydn's 1790 E flat major sonata (H. XVI/49) as a source of that influence.  The practice of music weaves a thick and extensive social network;  and, more often than not, the "shock of the new" is a matter of getting one's bearings within that network.

As Alessandro Solbiati and François Paris discussed their work (both laboring under difficulties with the English language) prior to last night's concert, there was considerable allusion to the influence of the "spectral music" school of thought but little by way of expository introduction.  To be fair this approach, practiced primarily in Europe since the 1970s, has been well represented in past performances by the Contemporary Music Players;  and one of its pioneers, Gérard Grisey, who died in 1998, taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1982 through 1986.  Such facts do little for the disoriented unwashed (like myself), however.  While it was clear that the works of both Solbiati and Paris (as well as the contribution of Philippe Hurel to last night's program) reflected Grisey's influence, there was not enough "working knowledge" of what that influence was to benefit the hapless newcomer.  If all one needed to know about "spectral music" had to do with working with acoustic spectra as a musical medium, then techniques such as Solbiati's scordatura assignment of the twelve chromatic pitches to the open strings of a cello, viola, and violin in his "Sestetto à Gérard" came across as a rather blunt instrument for manipulating spectral properties.  The same could be said of Paris' use of quarter tones in his "À propos de Nice."  In his remarks Paris said that he wanted to get beyond the "compromises" of traditional tuning systems;  but, if his objective was a tuning system with fewer "compromises" to the natural harmonics, there is a relatively simple mathematical demonstration that quarter tones do not function as well as, for example, third tones.  (The "bottom line" is that the quarter tone tuning helps you get a far more "natural" tritone;  but the other "natural" intervals are not as well served.)  Finally, Hurel's "Loops IV" was composed for solo marimba, whose spectral properties are relatively rigid and thus afford few opportunities for acoustic manipulation.

The other composer represented on the program was Tristan Murail, who, like Grisey, was a member of  the Groupe de l'Itinéraire and shares Grisey's status as a "pioneer" of spectral music.  Murail was represented by two short piano pieces, "Cloches d'adieu, et un sourire …" (Bells of farewell, and a smile) and "La Mandragore" (The Mandrake).  Orientation to Murail's piano music is facilitated by familiarity with the solo piano music of Olivier Messiaen, an excellent case in point being his Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus.  In these twenty short compositions, the very sound of the piano itself is always a key element;  but Messiaen arrives at those sounds not through spectral manipulation but through meticulous instructions to the pianist.  Given the extent to which "Cloches" acknowledges Messiaen's influence, my guess is that Murail took the same approach in both of these works.

Whatever the listening challenges may be, the approach of the Contemporary Music Players is to be as faithful as possible to the intentions of the composer and let the music speak for itself.  (I have called this the "stare decisis approach" in some of my past writing about Messiaen.)  There is no questioning the sincerity of their performances, and their institutional relationship with the composers they perform suggests that their authenticity is also unquestionable.  In the long run listeners can only be served by more exposure to such music.  However, between the rehearsal time required to "let the music speak for itself" and the expense associated with performances like this one, increasing the "exposure level" is neither physically easy nor economically feasible.  So the best thing we can do is take what we can get.  Orientation will come.  I know.  I have been there with other "disorienting" instances of "new music," which would later become "old friends!"

March 30, 2009: The second monument

On October 20, 2008 I wrote a blog post entitled "The First Monument," giving an account of András Schiff's performance of Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 57 in F minor ("Appassionata") in the course of his series of concerts covering all 32 of Beethoven's piano sonatas.  Last night at Davies Symphony Hall Schiff undertook the "second monument," the Opus 106 in B-flat major ("Hammerklavier").  I had been looking forward to this performance, even to the point of blogging about my expectations;  and last night I was reminded that high expectations often lead to disappointment.  Since my explanation for that disappointment led to a long and involved journey far beyond the scope of a review, I chose to take that journey on my blog, using this space to account for the virtues of the rest of last night's program.

Opus 106 was preceded by the E minor Opus 90 and A major Opus 101 sonatas, both of which are highly unconventional in their respective formal structures.  (All three sonatas were played without an intermission, followed by two encores, the BWV 903 "Chromatic" fantasia and fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 574 "Eine kleine Gigue" in G major.)  Opus 90 is the lighter of the two, consisting of a relatively traditional sonata movement followed by a rondo.  The tempo marking for the first movement, mit Lebhaftigkeit und Durchaus mit Empfindung und Ausdruck,  has more to do with feeling (Empfindung) and expression (Ausdruck) than pace;  and Schiff has a skill in teasing out these introspective qualities without sacrificing the technical demands of the structure.  While the sonata opens energetically (mit Lebhaftigkeit), the following rondo progresses to a coda in which the last thoughts of the theme almost dissolve into silence.  This is a Beethoven with whom we can sympathize, in contrast to subsequent brash Romantic stereotypes of him.

Opus 101 is more of an experimental adventure.  From a structural point of view, it seems more interested in teasing out small ideas, playing with them, and later reflecting on them than in the usual formal traditions.  There is also an emphasis on mood swings between relaxed (and sometimes nostalgic) reflection and bursts of energy, first in the form of a march (definitely not for parade purposes) and a final contrapuntal allegro, which, after many false starts and stops eventually culminates in a pianistic blaze of glory.  This is what learning theorists, such as Lloyd Rieber, like to call "serious play," although Pete Seeger took a less dignified approach when he called it "goofing-off."  Schiff approached the performance with just the right balance between the "serious" and the "play."  Thus, any disappointments I may have had with Opus 106 were more than adequately compensated by the rest of his program.

For more info: Past performances in the cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

March 29, 2009: Two monuments and a labor of love

Tonight András Schiff performs the first of his final two recitals in his cycle of the complete piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven in which he will play the "monumental" Opus 106 in B-flat major ("Hammerklavier");  but this afternoon at Herbst Theatre the piano trio of Jaime Laredo (violin), Sharon Robinson (cello), and Joseph Kalichstein (piano) prepared the ears with a stimulating reading of the Opus 97 ("Archduke") trio in B-flat major, which probably counts as the "monument" of the piano trio canon.  Completed in 1811, this trio precedes the opening sonata of tonight's program (Opus 90 in E minor) by about three years and is one of Beethoven's great adventures in exploring conventional structures prior to departing from them in his final piano sonatas.  For my ears the high point of this trio is its theme-and-variations third movement, where Beethoven departs from choosing a simple theme in favor of what I have previously called "a more elaborate structure unto itself, which could then be mined for variations from many diverse perspectives."  The trio thus honors the usual conventions while preparing us for the ground that Beethoven would concentrate on breaking in only a few years.

While the work itself may be monumental, Laredo, Robinson, and Kalichstein avoided placing it on any pedestal.  Their approach was affable and accessible.  Beethoven was not trying to provoke but to please in this trio.  The "revolutionary" insights come only with later reflection;  and the musicians knew how to draw us into the most receptive spirit that the music deserved.

They took the same approach with the equally "monumental" second trio in E minor (Opus 67) by Dmitri Shostakovich, even though this work is far more provocative, beginning with the cello introducing the first subject above the normal playing range of the violin and progressing to a final movement based on Jewish folk material, which would have been an extremely daring move to make in 1944 Russia.  This trio is remarkable for the way in which Shostakovich compresses his usual orchestral thinking into the capacities for a wide range of sonorities in these three instruments.  One can only listen in awe as he turns one trick after another, even setting aside one in the second movement that invokes Beethoven's thematic material from the sonata canon.  The only way this trio can be approached is with firm confidence and conviction;  and that is exactly what the performers delivered, giving what may be one of the most memorable works of the twentieth century the best imaginable platform for presentation.

This storm was preceded by a rather unique calm to open the program.  This was the WoO 39 allegretto movement in B-flat major (the same key as the "Archduke").  This movement was written in 1812 for the nine-year-old Maximiliane Brentano as a model to instruct her in proper composition.  In 1820 this same Miss Brentano would be the dedicatee of his Opus 109 E major sonata (which will open the second of the coming Schiff recitals).  It is clear that Beethoven had much affection for her, and the performers brought out that affection in the subtleties of what could be mistaken for a rather simple exercise.  The result was an overall experience in the compositional scope of two major composers that made for a truly memorable San Francisco afternoon!

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.