the Berkeley Symphony plays Ades & Tchaikovsky

Last Thursday I was at the Berkeley Symphony for their second concert of the season, a double bill featuring Asyla by Thomas Adès on the first half and the Tchaikovsky Pathétique on the second. Music Director Joana Carneiro conducted. Cavernous Zellerbach Hall was looking quite filled up; it's great to see a symphony drawing big crowds by featuring contemporary music, as the Berkeley Symphony regularly does. The concert opened with a couple of people speaking, which I mostly tuned out, because if they're not going to listen to me on the inadvisability of stage speechifying when your work-night concert doesn't even begin until the ridiculous hour of 8:00, then I'm not going to listen to them talk about . . . whatever it was they talked about. Acknowledgements, I think, and some stuff about the music, all of which was already in the program book.

I had braced myself for the chatting, because that just seems to be a thing they do over there, but once past that the concert was quite enjoyable. Asyla is a big piece, roughly half an hour of concentrated, forceful sounds. Adès wrote it in 1997, when he was moving from surprising prodigy to steady presence in the British new-music scene. The title is the plural of asylum and, we are told, can refer to an asylum as a place of refuge or to an insane asylum (which is another sort of refuge, if not for the inhabitants, then for the society that no longer has to deal with them). The title is significantly plural; there can be multiple refuges, multiple madhouses. This is part of the dramatic tension of the piece; you never are quite in a final refuge. It opens with fantastic percussion, sounding like a gamelan made out of pots and pans, and proceeds from there. The third of the four movements in particular is intense; it is the only one with a name as well as a number: Ecstasio. There's the emotional ecstasy, but also the drug – this movement is supposed to reflect an uneasy night in a nightclub. It's clear that something is going on here, but I wonder how many people would have figured "drugs in a night club" without the key provided by the program. And I wonder if I would have had the same reaction, which is that I was reminded of why I avoided all drugs after some obligatory and very very mild experimentation in my late teen years: the music portrayed the feeling of being trapped in your body, not in the way we're usually trapped in (or by) our bodies, but as if your body has been taken over by some sort of chemical or virus and you just have to curl up and wait it out (the pounding drums, the insistent high-pitched strings) until it passes. That may make the music sound unpleasant, which is not at all the case – the music is very powerfully capturing what (to me at least) is an unpleasant experience, surrendering control of your own body to something that's taken it over. It's quite stunning, and the players were exceptional.

Listening to the Pathétique in the light of Asyla brought out new elements in the familiar piece. It too oscillates wildly between emotional extremes, sighing out in exhaustion at the end. There was an interesting point in Thomas May's program article, which is that if the order of the final two movements had been switched, the symphony would have moved from the sense of exhaustion and anguish towards a triumphant, idealistic finale. This kind of technical change – switching the normal positions of the two types of movement – may seem like a fairly dry thing, but that's how artists produce discomfiting emotional realities.

The Berkeley Symphony's next performance will be 26 February. Carneiro will conduct Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, the Brahms 4, and the world premiere of the orchestral version of Jake Heggie's Camille Claudel: Into the Fire. The latter will feature the superb mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. You can find more information or buy tickets here.

SF SoundBox

Lisa Hirsch left a comment on my December preview mentioning SF SoundBox, whose opening I had omitted. I started to reply to her comment and realized I needed more space, so here are my thoughts:

SF SoundBox. . . . I went back and forth on including that. My criteria for the things I list is: (1) something I'm going to or (2) something I'd like to go to, given world enough and time. In other words, this list is what they now call "curated." I have a number of swirling thoughts on Sound Box, some of which I will unload here, since you bring it up.

For those who don't know, SF SoundBox is a new initiative by the SF Symphony to create a small informal space for performances. It's in a former (maybe still current?) rehearsal room in Davies Hall. It will rely heavily on a Meyer Sound System. Programs start late in the evening and there will be drinks and snacks (excuse me, "small plates"). I think they also plan to incorporate audio-visuals into the shows. Basically, it's a night club.

I wish them well with it, but it's really not my thing, and not just because the late start times make it a non-starter for someone like me who thinks 8:00 PM is too late to start a show (ironically, I will be in SF that night, but it's much easier to get to Davies from my home in San Leandro than from where I'll be in SF).

I'm put off by the reliance on an electronic sound system. I know it's standard for certain styles of music, and it's creeping more and more into "classical" performances, but I think hearing music in the moment and without enhancement is worth the trouble and enhanced music maybe not so much (as with everything I'm saying, I realize that opinions and tastes will differ on this).

I'm really put off by the self-consciously cool vibe. I assume they're trying for an SF equivalent of NY's Poisson Rouge, which I'm sure is a fun place for many but I always imagine people sitting there self-consciously eating nachos (or other foods that crunch) and deliberately talking during the music to show they "get it." If you really want to listen to music, as opposed to basking in your own coolness, you are OK with sitting there silently. You are also OK with not imposing yourself on those around you. That's something that has evolved in concert halls. Night clubs are different. And that's great, but that's why I don't go to night clubs (or whatever the kids call them these days).

I wonder what kind of research they did on the potential of a place like this, or whether they're just dreaming of a cool involved late-night audience that would of course eat this up with a spoon. As ad agencies and politicians know, you can get awfully far by appealing to how people want to see themselves, as opposed to how they actually have to live, but how many people are going to show up often enough for late-night innovative concerts for this to be worth the expenditure?

Also: though I find it admirable of the SF Symphony to experiment with new types of concerts and concert presentations, I have to say I'm puzzled that most of these ventures, however interesting and worthwhile and fun on their own, do not involve major musical works for orchestra, which is the basic purpose of a symphony orchestra. It seems like an admission of defeat, in a way, as if they feel large orchestras just really aren't what people want these days. But what else are they for? There are already lots of groups that perform chamber music or have interactive concerts etc. (Contrast this with the Berkeley Symphony, which has a major commitment to big new works for orchestra, as opposed to the little tidbits the SF Symphony drops into its schedule).

So: I wish them well, I hope it's a big success, I'm sure I'm missing out, but: this is not for me.

Hungarians and holiness at the Berkeley Symphony

Several Thursdays ago I went to the Berkeley Symphony’s season finale in Zellerbach. They invited me, which was very nice of them, and since they offered me two tickets I was going to take ABW. Her back went out the day before the concert and since she could barely walk to the bathroom she sure wasn’t going to make it across the Bay on BART, so that was a shame. I tried to find another taker, but of course when most people hear that something is on a weeknight and doesn’t start until 8:00 they’ll just turn you down flat. I did end up making productive use of the second ticket, giving it to a friend who was trapped, as he put it, “next to a very large gentleman.” I was glad that I did not also qualify as very large, especially after my beer and pizza dinner at Jupiter, which was not only delicious, but helped to kill at least some of the time beforehand, pizza being one of those things that requires a fair amount of time. After that I moseyed over to Moe’s Books, where I spent about an hour (which still got me to Zellerbach about an hour before the concert started). I walked out of there with a copy of Thackeray’s Paris Sketch Book, Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree (romance among the parish choir!), Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead (relics!), and the New York Times Book Review, which I bought for the cover story on the new edition of Philip Larkin’s poems, an article which, I have just realized, has been sitting unread in the bag since I bought it, because that is the way my life is lived.

The concert was titled A Hungarian Excursion, though that only covered the Bartok and Kodaly works in the first half; the second half was the premiere of Gabriela Lena Frank’s Holy Sisters, Part One. Conductor Joana Carneiro had injured her shoulder in a way that made conducting impossible, so Edwin Outwater stepped in at the last minute and did a wonderful job with what couldn’t have been an easy assignment, especially since there was no way he could have seen the Holy Sisters music ahead of time. I hadn't heard this orchestra before but was impressed by their sound. There were a couple of old women behind me who were the sort who had to comment compulsively on every obvious thing that happens around them but since they managed to keep it mostly under control during the music I was able to find them amusing and colorful rather than the first potential victims of a homicidal rage. They were quite taken with the dapper Mr Outwater and commented several times on how athletic he looked bounding up and down from the podium.

Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta was very attractive, but seemed like a pops piece to me, kind of light and flowing, with scenic countryside music and an ethnic flavor for those who like to latch on to that sort of thing. That was followed by Bartok’s dreamy Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. It seems to me I have heard this music somewhere else recently, but not as well played.

After the intermission we had the Frank piece, in which soprano Jessica Rivera, accompanied by the orchestra and the San Francisco Girls Chorus, sings (I’m quoting from the program) “Biblical texts arranged and adapted by Jose Tolentino de Mondonca (with further arrangements by Nilo Cruz and Gabriela Lena Frank)." The texts all center around women: Rachel, Sarah, Miriam the Prophetess, Hannah mother of Samuel, Mary of Magdala. Frank spoke beforehand. Sometimes an artist’s remarks are illuminating and interesting (and in fact I avoid readings unless the author is going to talk about and around his or her work; I mean, if it’s just reading the words on the page, I can stay home and do that myself). But generally I’m not a big fan of having composers telling us what they were trying to do when we could instead be listening to what they actually did. I also feel that if you’re not going to start your concert until 8:00, you shouldn’t take up time with this sort of thing. Frank seems very genial but I found her talk pointless, since it was all about how the piece came to be commissioned, in the sort of insidery tone that makes me feel very much like an outsider, and which is in any case mostly irrelevant to a listener, and anyway I had already read all the information in the program.

As for the piece itself, I enjoyed it, finding it smoothly flowing with a gentle radiance, but I also found it too unvaried in tone and mood for its length (roughly half an hour) and for the variety of women included. There was some vague reference in the talk or the program to the piece being about “women’s spirituality,” but the notion of some universal, one-size-fits-all spirituality generic to women strikes me as both improbable and uninteresting. Perhaps when Part Two is added the work will go in a different direction. The woman two seats over from me paged through her program for the duration, getting louder and louder with each flipped page. I have no idea what she was looking for, or if she ever found it, or why she was there at all when she was so afraid to listen.

(The pictures are all of the UC Berkeley campus.)