Fabulous new-music choral group Volti is having an open rehearsal this Wednesday, 7 October, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco (1187 Franklin Street, right up from Van Ness Avenue, across from St Mark's Lutheran and near the Cathedral). The group and composer Tonia Ko will be working on a piece based on Virginia Woolf's short story Monday and Tuesday. Ko is Volti's Choral Arts Laboratory composer for this season (this is a program which gives a young composer the chance to develop choral-writing skills by developing a piece with the group).
The event is free but reservations are recommended and you can make one here.
Showing posts with label Volti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Volti. Show all posts
04 October 2015
20 May 2014
Volti: Mechem, Dunphy, Hearne
Last Sunday I went to Berkeley to hear Volti doing what they do, which is present enticing new choral music.
The venue this time was the Marsh Arts Center, which I had not been to before. I found it poorly ventilated, but I guess it had been hot earlier and I had a mild headache anyway, which made it mildly uncomfortable for me. I was the first person in the auditorium. I took my seat, and then after about ten or fifteen minutes someone from the Marsh (not Volti) told me to move since they were going to reserve those spots for wheelchairs. I moved. No wheelchairs showed up, but two women who came in right before the concert started slipped into the chairs. So much for arriving early to get your choice of seats.
Other than that irritation, it was another excellent afternoon with the talented twenty choristers who make up Volti (along with Bob Geary, their conductor and artistic director). The first half opened with two pieces by Kirke Mechem. The first, We can sing that!, in the premiere of a revised version, was a brief, witty display (with lyrics by Mechem) of the emotional range of a chorus – kind of like a less sardonic version of A Wandering Minstrel I, ending on a sanguine note, claiming harmony, in senses musical and otherwise, as the soul of the universe, hoping that humanity would sing along. This was more than an amuse-bouche of a sentiment; it heralded the more overtly political nature of the pieces that followed.
The second Mechem piece, Winging Wildly, set three different bird-related poems. Richard Collier, a former English professor at Cal, read each poem before the performance, which is a great idea. Stephanie Blythe did the same thing at her recent recital here, and announced that "soon everybody will be doing it," and, not that I am one who would doubt Stephanie Blythe anyway, but I guess she was right. The first poem was Sara Teasdale's Birds at Dusk (the original title is Dusk in June), in which she hears the birds singing joyfully as dusk descends and hopes that she, too, can sing before night falls (which is suggestive poetry-speak for hoping that she can give voice to her artistic vision before death takes her). The second poem was a more somber reflection on the need for artistic expression in the face of repression: Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Caged Bird (which is the source of the famous line "I know why the caged bird sings"). The set concluded with Sigfried Sassoon's Everyone Sang, in which the joy felt at the end of the first world war freed the everyone of the title and filled them with exultant song like birds let loose from their cages. Collier prefaced this one by saying that it was written about the armistice, which was useful because that is not immediately apparent when you hear the poem out of context. He might also have pointed out that Dunbar was an African-American who lived in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, which has much to do with what he's saying and why he's saying it in traditional forms. The settings are vivid. You can feel the voices beating like wings, throwing themselves against cages. This chorus is just consistently excellent; you know this if you've heard them, and if you haven't, you can get some CDs here, though of course that's not quite like the live thing. It's inspiriting to hear singers as accomplished as they are adventurous.
The first half ended with The Oath of Allegiance by Melissa Dunphy, this year's Choral Arts Laboratory Composer for Volti, which means she is a young composer commissioned to create and workshop a new piece with the chorus. She talked briefly beforehand, first praising the chorus and then describing the context of her piece: born in Australia, she became a United States citizen in 2008 (in time to vote in the presidential election, she noted). Realizing that most Americans are not even aware of the oath new citizens must take, she decided to set it to music. I was a bit skeptical of this idea, and of the political framework she put it in – that is not a coded way of saying I disagree with what she expressed of her political views, which are apparently identical to mine (anti-militarism, pro-equality, general support of tolerance and skepticism about the role of the US in the world); in fact, it's exactly when the politics are the same as mine (and, we can pretty much guess, the rest of the audience as well) that I'm skeptical of the purpose of "political" art: isn't it just patting ourselves on our collective backs for our superior enlightenment? But her piece turned out to be fascinating – beautiful and emotionally probing. Just as some baroque composers would set texts about twittering birds and purling streams by imitating bird and stream, so she reflected the more abstract words and phrases of the oath: The opening "I" repeated individually, a multiplicity of times, reflecting the many individuals all taking the same oath; the way the opening phrases ended with a strange wistful downward curlicue, as if looking back on the native lands being left behind; the word "freely" floating upward, untrammeled; the majestic granite sound at the first mention of the United States of America, the militaristic marching of "bear arms on behalf of the United States," with the phrase shortened into a repetition of arms, arms, arms: it was an interesting perspective for a native son to hear the emotions of someone who chose to believe in American idealism enough to become a citizen.
After the intermission came Ted Hearne's Sound from the Bench. Hearne has recently been named this season's New Voices composer (the residency is shared by the San Francisco Symphony, the New World Symphony, and music publishers Boosey & Hawkes), and just as in Homer the sea is always wine-dark and Hector the tamer of horses, so "recently named the New Voices composer" now inevitably follows Hearne's name, his very own Homeric epithet. His five-movement piece is based on texts from Corporate Relations by poet Jena Osman, in which, using modernist techniques of collage and "appropriation" (Hearne's word), she pares, cuts, and juxtaposes a variety of sources (generally dryly instructional or legal) into a truly poetic and provocative examination of the American history of seeing corporations legally as people (with an emphasis on the notorious Citizens United case). In his remarks before the performance Hearne was very enthusiastic about the text, and urged us to buy a copy of the book (and what Osman did was interesting enough so that I would indeed buy the book). He was clearly interested in getting the words across, and not just in using them as the basis for musical pyrotechnics; his handling of them was by and large – I don't want to say straightforward, but clear, as if sung in a block (as opposed, say, to the rising beating combinations of phrases that evoked the fluttering bird-wings in Mechem's piece), so that the words could come through, though he certainly also played with them at other times, as when the phrase "these corporations have a lot of money" ended up, in another evocation of martial marching, as a repetition of money money money (which reminded me of Money Makes the World Go 'Round from Cabaret).
The first movement of the cantata, how to throw your voice, is taken from a 1906 book with instructions for aspiring ventriloquists. The second, mouth piece, taken from the case First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, is just the phrases No mouth. / The very heart. The third and longest section, (ch)oral argument, is taken from Citizens United. The fourth, simple surgery, is a poem by Osman about seeing a drop of water fall one foot in front of a piece of metal and, her eye eliding the distance between the two, misperceiving the drop as a chip in the metal. The fifth, when you hear, is taken from the book on ventriloquism used in the first movement: "when you hear that distant sounding drone, / you know you have your mouth as it should be" – in its original context the drone is a vocal technique when making your dummy talk, but in the context of today drone is also an implicit reference to the remote-controlled death/spying machines we send with increasing frequency out into the monitored world.
Unlike most of Volti's pieces, this one is not a cappella; Hearne brought with him percussionist Ron Wiltrout and two electric guitar players, Taylor Levine and James Moore. I have realized over the years that I mostly dislike electric guitars, and not just because I lived in too many apartments in Boston where I was tormented by Berklee College of Music's aspiring rock gods: I find them perversely anti-human, taking an intimate instrument and turning it into a stadium-shaker. But that's part of Hearne's point. Usually I don't get much out an artist's statement of purpose, feeling that the work should speak for itself, and if we're not interested in figuring it out, then the work has failed (or, equally possibly, we have failed the work) – but in this case I was glad to have Hearne offer the context of the tension between the electric guitar and the human voice to guide me out of my prejudiced dislike of the instrument and into an openness to what he was doing with them. And he does get interesting sounds out of both instruments and chorus. He doesn't keep it a simple division, though; it's not just a bad/good opposition, and at times it's not an opposition at all. The lines blur. Sometimes (as in the money money passage referred to earlier) it's the voices that sound mechanical, while the guitars (which are of course designed, built, and played by humans with the intention of expressing musical ideas and emotions) can offer subtle washes of sound and poignant melodies. The drums can sound like a heart-beat. The voices rise above the instruments, and sometimes the instruments drown out the voices. It all ends with a soft, mysterious, distant drone.
The venue this time was the Marsh Arts Center, which I had not been to before. I found it poorly ventilated, but I guess it had been hot earlier and I had a mild headache anyway, which made it mildly uncomfortable for me. I was the first person in the auditorium. I took my seat, and then after about ten or fifteen minutes someone from the Marsh (not Volti) told me to move since they were going to reserve those spots for wheelchairs. I moved. No wheelchairs showed up, but two women who came in right before the concert started slipped into the chairs. So much for arriving early to get your choice of seats.
Other than that irritation, it was another excellent afternoon with the talented twenty choristers who make up Volti (along with Bob Geary, their conductor and artistic director). The first half opened with two pieces by Kirke Mechem. The first, We can sing that!, in the premiere of a revised version, was a brief, witty display (with lyrics by Mechem) of the emotional range of a chorus – kind of like a less sardonic version of A Wandering Minstrel I, ending on a sanguine note, claiming harmony, in senses musical and otherwise, as the soul of the universe, hoping that humanity would sing along. This was more than an amuse-bouche of a sentiment; it heralded the more overtly political nature of the pieces that followed.
The second Mechem piece, Winging Wildly, set three different bird-related poems. Richard Collier, a former English professor at Cal, read each poem before the performance, which is a great idea. Stephanie Blythe did the same thing at her recent recital here, and announced that "soon everybody will be doing it," and, not that I am one who would doubt Stephanie Blythe anyway, but I guess she was right. The first poem was Sara Teasdale's Birds at Dusk (the original title is Dusk in June), in which she hears the birds singing joyfully as dusk descends and hopes that she, too, can sing before night falls (which is suggestive poetry-speak for hoping that she can give voice to her artistic vision before death takes her). The second poem was a more somber reflection on the need for artistic expression in the face of repression: Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Caged Bird (which is the source of the famous line "I know why the caged bird sings"). The set concluded with Sigfried Sassoon's Everyone Sang, in which the joy felt at the end of the first world war freed the everyone of the title and filled them with exultant song like birds let loose from their cages. Collier prefaced this one by saying that it was written about the armistice, which was useful because that is not immediately apparent when you hear the poem out of context. He might also have pointed out that Dunbar was an African-American who lived in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, which has much to do with what he's saying and why he's saying it in traditional forms. The settings are vivid. You can feel the voices beating like wings, throwing themselves against cages. This chorus is just consistently excellent; you know this if you've heard them, and if you haven't, you can get some CDs here, though of course that's not quite like the live thing. It's inspiriting to hear singers as accomplished as they are adventurous.
The first half ended with The Oath of Allegiance by Melissa Dunphy, this year's Choral Arts Laboratory Composer for Volti, which means she is a young composer commissioned to create and workshop a new piece with the chorus. She talked briefly beforehand, first praising the chorus and then describing the context of her piece: born in Australia, she became a United States citizen in 2008 (in time to vote in the presidential election, she noted). Realizing that most Americans are not even aware of the oath new citizens must take, she decided to set it to music. I was a bit skeptical of this idea, and of the political framework she put it in – that is not a coded way of saying I disagree with what she expressed of her political views, which are apparently identical to mine (anti-militarism, pro-equality, general support of tolerance and skepticism about the role of the US in the world); in fact, it's exactly when the politics are the same as mine (and, we can pretty much guess, the rest of the audience as well) that I'm skeptical of the purpose of "political" art: isn't it just patting ourselves on our collective backs for our superior enlightenment? But her piece turned out to be fascinating – beautiful and emotionally probing. Just as some baroque composers would set texts about twittering birds and purling streams by imitating bird and stream, so she reflected the more abstract words and phrases of the oath: The opening "I" repeated individually, a multiplicity of times, reflecting the many individuals all taking the same oath; the way the opening phrases ended with a strange wistful downward curlicue, as if looking back on the native lands being left behind; the word "freely" floating upward, untrammeled; the majestic granite sound at the first mention of the United States of America, the militaristic marching of "bear arms on behalf of the United States," with the phrase shortened into a repetition of arms, arms, arms: it was an interesting perspective for a native son to hear the emotions of someone who chose to believe in American idealism enough to become a citizen.
After the intermission came Ted Hearne's Sound from the Bench. Hearne has recently been named this season's New Voices composer (the residency is shared by the San Francisco Symphony, the New World Symphony, and music publishers Boosey & Hawkes), and just as in Homer the sea is always wine-dark and Hector the tamer of horses, so "recently named the New Voices composer" now inevitably follows Hearne's name, his very own Homeric epithet. His five-movement piece is based on texts from Corporate Relations by poet Jena Osman, in which, using modernist techniques of collage and "appropriation" (Hearne's word), she pares, cuts, and juxtaposes a variety of sources (generally dryly instructional or legal) into a truly poetic and provocative examination of the American history of seeing corporations legally as people (with an emphasis on the notorious Citizens United case). In his remarks before the performance Hearne was very enthusiastic about the text, and urged us to buy a copy of the book (and what Osman did was interesting enough so that I would indeed buy the book). He was clearly interested in getting the words across, and not just in using them as the basis for musical pyrotechnics; his handling of them was by and large – I don't want to say straightforward, but clear, as if sung in a block (as opposed, say, to the rising beating combinations of phrases that evoked the fluttering bird-wings in Mechem's piece), so that the words could come through, though he certainly also played with them at other times, as when the phrase "these corporations have a lot of money" ended up, in another evocation of martial marching, as a repetition of money money money (which reminded me of Money Makes the World Go 'Round from Cabaret).
The first movement of the cantata, how to throw your voice, is taken from a 1906 book with instructions for aspiring ventriloquists. The second, mouth piece, taken from the case First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, is just the phrases No mouth. / The very heart. The third and longest section, (ch)oral argument, is taken from Citizens United. The fourth, simple surgery, is a poem by Osman about seeing a drop of water fall one foot in front of a piece of metal and, her eye eliding the distance between the two, misperceiving the drop as a chip in the metal. The fifth, when you hear, is taken from the book on ventriloquism used in the first movement: "when you hear that distant sounding drone, / you know you have your mouth as it should be" – in its original context the drone is a vocal technique when making your dummy talk, but in the context of today drone is also an implicit reference to the remote-controlled death/spying machines we send with increasing frequency out into the monitored world.
Unlike most of Volti's pieces, this one is not a cappella; Hearne brought with him percussionist Ron Wiltrout and two electric guitar players, Taylor Levine and James Moore. I have realized over the years that I mostly dislike electric guitars, and not just because I lived in too many apartments in Boston where I was tormented by Berklee College of Music's aspiring rock gods: I find them perversely anti-human, taking an intimate instrument and turning it into a stadium-shaker. But that's part of Hearne's point. Usually I don't get much out an artist's statement of purpose, feeling that the work should speak for itself, and if we're not interested in figuring it out, then the work has failed (or, equally possibly, we have failed the work) – but in this case I was glad to have Hearne offer the context of the tension between the electric guitar and the human voice to guide me out of my prejudiced dislike of the instrument and into an openness to what he was doing with them. And he does get interesting sounds out of both instruments and chorus. He doesn't keep it a simple division, though; it's not just a bad/good opposition, and at times it's not an opposition at all. The lines blur. Sometimes (as in the money money passage referred to earlier) it's the voices that sound mechanical, while the guitars (which are of course designed, built, and played by humans with the intention of expressing musical ideas and emotions) can offer subtle washes of sound and poignant melodies. The drums can sound like a heart-beat. The voices rise above the instruments, and sometimes the instruments drown out the voices. It all ends with a soft, mysterious, distant drone.
01 May 2010
fun stuff I may or may not get to: May
Here it is May Day already. Do you know why America celebrates Labor Day in September? The capitalists had to give the workers something, but they didn’t want May 1 to be a worldwide day of worker solidarity. So into September it went, where it now mostly signifies the end of summer, as if summer matters in a country with criminally small amounts of time off for most workers. Years ago someone gave me that bit of information about the move to September – such casual mentions are what we used to have instead of Wikipedia, which I’m not going to bother to check. On past May Days I would occasionally wear a red tie and red socks to work; just another of my little jokes which no one realized I was making, which is probably just as well (though someone in Boston did once think the socks were a baseball reference, so I went with that). Anyway here's what I'm seeing or wouldn't mind seeing in May, and some of these are coming right up! Internet failure and migraines delayed my posting. So rush out there to celebrate the Art workers among us by purchasing tickets – remember, culture costs.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra closes its season with a world premiere violin concert, Romanza, by this year's featured composer, William Bolcom, with NCCO Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as soloist; the balance of the program features Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings and Copland’s ever-fresh Appalachian Spring in its original version, along with the Hoe Down from Rodeo. That program takes place May 6-9, four times in four different locations. There is also an open rehearsal on Tuesday, May 4, at 10:00 a.m. in Berkeley.
On May 2 and 4, the California Symphony in Walnut Creek presents Silicon Blues, a world premiere by Mason Bates, at the conclusion of his three-year tenure as the orchestra’s sixth Young American Composer-in-Residence. The program also includes the Beethoven 5 and Sarina Chang in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Pezzo Capriccioso for Cello and Orchestra. (Yes, she plays both piano and cello.)
The Oakland East Bay Symphony closes its season on May 14-16 with the Beethoven 9, featuring soloists Kristin Clayton, Layna Chianakas, Thomas Glenn, and Bojan Knezevic, along with Jake Heggie’s The Deepest Desire: Four Meditations on Love, based on poems by Sister Helen Prejean. Chianakas is also the soloist in the Heggie piece and Music Director Michael Morgan is the conductor.
Volti will close its season with Nocturnes, a new song cycle by Morten Lauridsen, who will accompany the chorus himself on the piano. These concerts also include works by Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, and Robin Estrada. There are two performances, May 14 in Berkeley and May 15 in San Francisco. Be advised that the May 14 concert also features a whole mess of high school choirs. You can also buy Volti's latest CD here if you can't make it to the concerts.
Cal Performances presents Laurie Anderson in Delusion on May 7-8, and jazz great Sonny Rollins on May 13, as part of his 80th birthday tour. I heard him at Cal a few years ago and he was amazing.
SF Performances presents baritone Eugene Brancoveanu on May 16, in works by Sviridov, Bellini, Schubert, Loewe, and Duparc.
Incidentally Cal Performances is announcing its next season on May 4, and San Francisco Performances makes its announcement on May 11. I’m hoping both of them will come through for local audiences – that is, the local audiences who go to the theater for something besides the bland comforts of familiarity. Everyone else seems to be dragging out every over-familiar standard they can, which wouldn’t be so annoying if they all didn’t keep insisting on how very innovative they are.
SF Ballet closes its season May 1-9 with Helgi Tomasson’s version of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which of course is based on what the Ballet’s website rather bizarrely describes as Shakespeare’s “phenomenally crafted tale.” By the way, I’m glad the Ballet is reviving The Little Mermaid next season, since I missed it due to poverty. Not that I'm expecting to be richer next season, but after hearing Lera Auerbach’s San Francisco Performances recital, I’m eager to hear more of her music. I’ve also heard knowledgeable friends praise the theatricality of John Neumeier’s choreography.
The San Francisco Symphony has Dalbavie’s La Source d’un Regard, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and the Brahms 2 conducted by Eschenbach on May 5-8. The Dalbavie presumably takes the place of the Thomas Larcher commission announced in the concert schedule. The Symphony has an irritating way of disappearing pieces and performers from its website without even a note mentioning the substitution, so that, for example, if you had a vague memory that last year’s announcement included Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette, you could gaslight yourself searching the website, because it’s gone without an explanation. The excellent young pianist David Fray is the soloist in the Beethoven. I heard him last December with the New York Philharmonic in an exciting performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto, and it’s to his credit that it wasn’t completely swamped by my memory of Martha Argerich’s performance of the same piece with the San Francisco Symphony earlier in the year (my post on that is here). His publicity photos are all male-model stylish angularity, but in person he’s quite tall and thin, with an endearingly bird-like gawkiness. Unfortunately the Friday concert is one of those silly 6.5 affairs, at which they drop a piece of music and substitute the conductor blathering from the podium, so that those who are there only for whatever fading social cachet attaches to “attending the symphony” are relieved from being forced to listen to so much actual music. I assume the Dalbavie is being dropped, but the website doesn’t specify that, so I’m just guessing based on past experience.
May 19-23 Tilson Thomas conducts Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe and Stravinsky’s Threni, Lamentations of Jeremiah. That looks promising.
UPDATE: I've just been informed that due to visa problems the Stravinsky is being rescheduled to some future season. Instead the Symphony and its Chorus will be performing Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. My excitement over this concert has just cooled considerably.
And May 27-29 he conducts the Schumann 3, the Rhenish, and then the orchestra is joined by soprano Erin Wall for Mozart’s Bella mia Fiamma – Resta, o cara, and Robin Holloway’s Clarissa Sequence. I’m especially eager to hear the Holloway, since Clarissa is one of my favorite novels. (I’m still angry over the BBC dramatization from approximately twenty years ago, which was so awful I couldn’t get past the first hour. I took one look at the actors and knew they weren’t going to do it right.) The Symphony programmed the work a few years ago, but the singer got sick and unsurprisingly no one else knew the piece, so if I'm remembering correctly they tried substituting a solo violin for the vocalist, and the performance had a somewhat endearing yet disappointing air of the slapdash about it. The piece is drawn from Holloway’s opera, which I would love to see, but I’m not holding my breath. At this point I'd settle for a recording.
And I have to mention the New York Philharmonic’s May 27-29 performances of Ligeti’s opera, Le Grand Macabre, because it’s killing me to miss it. I considered going to New York to hear it but reluctantly had to abandon that plan. My reaction to the American premiere, back when San Francisco Opera used to be exciting, is here. This is really a piece to hear and see live – my only reservation was that the music was almost too sheerly gorgeous for the comic grotesqueries of the story. The performances coincidentally were right after the re-election of war criminal George W. Bush and his gang of thieves, and in the miasmic despair of those sickening days, only this wonderful piece of theater managed to lift my spirits even briefly.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra closes its season with a world premiere violin concert, Romanza, by this year's featured composer, William Bolcom, with NCCO Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as soloist; the balance of the program features Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings and Copland’s ever-fresh Appalachian Spring in its original version, along with the Hoe Down from Rodeo. That program takes place May 6-9, four times in four different locations. There is also an open rehearsal on Tuesday, May 4, at 10:00 a.m. in Berkeley.
On May 2 and 4, the California Symphony in Walnut Creek presents Silicon Blues, a world premiere by Mason Bates, at the conclusion of his three-year tenure as the orchestra’s sixth Young American Composer-in-Residence. The program also includes the Beethoven 5 and Sarina Chang in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Pezzo Capriccioso for Cello and Orchestra. (Yes, she plays both piano and cello.)
The Oakland East Bay Symphony closes its season on May 14-16 with the Beethoven 9, featuring soloists Kristin Clayton, Layna Chianakas, Thomas Glenn, and Bojan Knezevic, along with Jake Heggie’s The Deepest Desire: Four Meditations on Love, based on poems by Sister Helen Prejean. Chianakas is also the soloist in the Heggie piece and Music Director Michael Morgan is the conductor.
Volti will close its season with Nocturnes, a new song cycle by Morten Lauridsen, who will accompany the chorus himself on the piano. These concerts also include works by Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, and Robin Estrada. There are two performances, May 14 in Berkeley and May 15 in San Francisco. Be advised that the May 14 concert also features a whole mess of high school choirs. You can also buy Volti's latest CD here if you can't make it to the concerts.
Cal Performances presents Laurie Anderson in Delusion on May 7-8, and jazz great Sonny Rollins on May 13, as part of his 80th birthday tour. I heard him at Cal a few years ago and he was amazing.
SF Performances presents baritone Eugene Brancoveanu on May 16, in works by Sviridov, Bellini, Schubert, Loewe, and Duparc.
Incidentally Cal Performances is announcing its next season on May 4, and San Francisco Performances makes its announcement on May 11. I’m hoping both of them will come through for local audiences – that is, the local audiences who go to the theater for something besides the bland comforts of familiarity. Everyone else seems to be dragging out every over-familiar standard they can, which wouldn’t be so annoying if they all didn’t keep insisting on how very innovative they are.
SF Ballet closes its season May 1-9 with Helgi Tomasson’s version of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which of course is based on what the Ballet’s website rather bizarrely describes as Shakespeare’s “phenomenally crafted tale.” By the way, I’m glad the Ballet is reviving The Little Mermaid next season, since I missed it due to poverty. Not that I'm expecting to be richer next season, but after hearing Lera Auerbach’s San Francisco Performances recital, I’m eager to hear more of her music. I’ve also heard knowledgeable friends praise the theatricality of John Neumeier’s choreography.
The San Francisco Symphony has Dalbavie’s La Source d’un Regard, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and the Brahms 2 conducted by Eschenbach on May 5-8. The Dalbavie presumably takes the place of the Thomas Larcher commission announced in the concert schedule. The Symphony has an irritating way of disappearing pieces and performers from its website without even a note mentioning the substitution, so that, for example, if you had a vague memory that last year’s announcement included Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette, you could gaslight yourself searching the website, because it’s gone without an explanation. The excellent young pianist David Fray is the soloist in the Beethoven. I heard him last December with the New York Philharmonic in an exciting performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto, and it’s to his credit that it wasn’t completely swamped by my memory of Martha Argerich’s performance of the same piece with the San Francisco Symphony earlier in the year (my post on that is here). His publicity photos are all male-model stylish angularity, but in person he’s quite tall and thin, with an endearingly bird-like gawkiness. Unfortunately the Friday concert is one of those silly 6.5 affairs, at which they drop a piece of music and substitute the conductor blathering from the podium, so that those who are there only for whatever fading social cachet attaches to “attending the symphony” are relieved from being forced to listen to so much actual music. I assume the Dalbavie is being dropped, but the website doesn’t specify that, so I’m just guessing based on past experience.
May 19-23 Tilson Thomas conducts Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe and Stravinsky’s Threni, Lamentations of Jeremiah. That looks promising.
UPDATE: I've just been informed that due to visa problems the Stravinsky is being rescheduled to some future season. Instead the Symphony and its Chorus will be performing Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. My excitement over this concert has just cooled considerably.
And May 27-29 he conducts the Schumann 3, the Rhenish, and then the orchestra is joined by soprano Erin Wall for Mozart’s Bella mia Fiamma – Resta, o cara, and Robin Holloway’s Clarissa Sequence. I’m especially eager to hear the Holloway, since Clarissa is one of my favorite novels. (I’m still angry over the BBC dramatization from approximately twenty years ago, which was so awful I couldn’t get past the first hour. I took one look at the actors and knew they weren’t going to do it right.) The Symphony programmed the work a few years ago, but the singer got sick and unsurprisingly no one else knew the piece, so if I'm remembering correctly they tried substituting a solo violin for the vocalist, and the performance had a somewhat endearing yet disappointing air of the slapdash about it. The piece is drawn from Holloway’s opera, which I would love to see, but I’m not holding my breath. At this point I'd settle for a recording.
And I have to mention the New York Philharmonic’s May 27-29 performances of Ligeti’s opera, Le Grand Macabre, because it’s killing me to miss it. I considered going to New York to hear it but reluctantly had to abandon that plan. My reaction to the American premiere, back when San Francisco Opera used to be exciting, is here. This is really a piece to hear and see live – my only reservation was that the music was almost too sheerly gorgeous for the comic grotesqueries of the story. The performances coincidentally were right after the re-election of war criminal George W. Bush and his gang of thieves, and in the miasmic despair of those sickening days, only this wonderful piece of theater managed to lift my spirits even briefly.
14 March 2010
Volti
Volti’s concerts are always fun and interesting. What was most interesting to me about the one I went to a couple of weeks ago is that I’ve now heard them often enough so that I am past the “hey, that was nice!” stage. It takes practice to listen to new music as well as familiar. This concert was billed as “Asian and Latin Influences” which I guess was fairly accurate, but a joint concert with the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir is what it really was (Robert Geary directs both choirs). There were lots of beaming parents and grandparents crowding the pews of St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley.
I really enjoyed the first half of the concert. One highlight was Ligeti’s characteristically witty and whimsical Ket kanon (Two Canons), sung by the children in their pure high voices. The program opened with Pronto Desapareceremos (Soon we will disappear), a setting in Nahuatl of some ancient philosophical lines on the transitoriness of existence. It began with a soloist (if the program gave her name, I couldn’t find it, but she was very good) standing in front of the church and the rest of the chorus answering her solo from the back. A number of pieces that evening used such spatial sound effects.
The transitoriness of life was a theme picked up in Being: Two Collins Song, a Volti commission and premiere from Yu-Hui Chang. She was one of the composers there that evening, along with Jean Ahn and Mark Winges. Right before the concert they had a panel discussion moderated by Geary. This was a mixed bag, as such things usually are. The composers made some interesting points about the importance they place on communication and having the texts performed clearly (something at which Volti excels, in my experience), but ironically the discussion was a little hard to hear; the audience was getting settled and moving and whispering and church acoustics are designed for singing and preaching and not really for conversation, even one aided by a microphone. The two Billy Collins poems are The Night House and Shoveling Snow with Buddha, and despite Collins’ reputation for accessibility these are fairly dense and subtle texts, which Chang and the chorus handled beautifully.
I really liked Jean Ahn’s Zeteo, the final piece of the first half, which was also a premiere and a Volti commission. To paraphrase the program, the text is based on three major Greek words from Deuteronomy 4:29: zeteo (to seek), kardia (heart), and psyche (soul). The final phrase, “And you will find him,” is in English. I liked the buzzing waspy sound of the consonantal flurries, followed by the elongated, elegant vowels.
As you may have gathered I did not enjoy the second half of the concert as much. It opened with the west coast premiere of el sonido dulce de tu voz by Orlando Jacinto Garcia. This piece also spreads out the chorus to add a spatial dimension to the sound. A glockenspiel plinks while the singers intone various words from the phrase “regresare en la noche al oir el sonido dulce de tu voz suave” (I will return in the night upon hearing the sweet sound of your soft voice). The composer dedicated the piece to his wife, which is lovely and makes me feel like a bit of a heel for finding something too stereotypically “Latin” about hearing words like noche and dulce whispered in urgent murmurs. Just a personal reaction to that burden of “the passionate” that half my ancestry carries.
The next piece was Ikikaiku (Eternal Echo) by the Finnish composer Olli Kortekangas. It’s based on a section from the Kalevala, and that sounded great to me until Geary informed us that we were supposed to join in and sing back to the chorus at the end. Not to get too Louis Quatorze here, but: No. If I am paying to hear you sing, then I do not expect you to demand that I sing to you. Sing for me, my minions! Dance and play your twangling instruments! Make me smile, and I will pay you and applaud you!
That’s the natural order of things. Besides, there’s something about sitting on a hard pew waiting for the main event to start while the choir director fixes us with that look both demanding and pleading as he insists on rehearsing us in something we don’t want to sing – well, it just brings it all back. I half expected Mother Manuela to come hissing down the aisle threatening a demerit in religion for anyone caught not singing, not that she, a tiny old-school Spanish nun, would have set foot in an Episcopal church anyway without a papal dispensation.
The final piece of the evening was Luna, Nova Luna, a brand new piece by Mark Winges for both choirs. It’s a collage of texts on the moon, some by the composer, who apparently has the same thing for the moon that I have. Yes, the moon is indeed lovely and poetically useful. There were for my taste too many passages designed for the children to act cute or make funny sounds. The piece was fine but just did not really grab me. Volti always has a reception after their concerts, which is quite nice of them. They really do great work, and if the occasional piece doesn’t appeal to me much, I just figure that helps me appreciate the other pieces even more.
I really enjoyed the first half of the concert. One highlight was Ligeti’s characteristically witty and whimsical Ket kanon (Two Canons), sung by the children in their pure high voices. The program opened with Pronto Desapareceremos (Soon we will disappear), a setting in Nahuatl of some ancient philosophical lines on the transitoriness of existence. It began with a soloist (if the program gave her name, I couldn’t find it, but she was very good) standing in front of the church and the rest of the chorus answering her solo from the back. A number of pieces that evening used such spatial sound effects.
The transitoriness of life was a theme picked up in Being: Two Collins Song, a Volti commission and premiere from Yu-Hui Chang. She was one of the composers there that evening, along with Jean Ahn and Mark Winges. Right before the concert they had a panel discussion moderated by Geary. This was a mixed bag, as such things usually are. The composers made some interesting points about the importance they place on communication and having the texts performed clearly (something at which Volti excels, in my experience), but ironically the discussion was a little hard to hear; the audience was getting settled and moving and whispering and church acoustics are designed for singing and preaching and not really for conversation, even one aided by a microphone. The two Billy Collins poems are The Night House and Shoveling Snow with Buddha, and despite Collins’ reputation for accessibility these are fairly dense and subtle texts, which Chang and the chorus handled beautifully.
I really liked Jean Ahn’s Zeteo, the final piece of the first half, which was also a premiere and a Volti commission. To paraphrase the program, the text is based on three major Greek words from Deuteronomy 4:29: zeteo (to seek), kardia (heart), and psyche (soul). The final phrase, “And you will find him,” is in English. I liked the buzzing waspy sound of the consonantal flurries, followed by the elongated, elegant vowels.
As you may have gathered I did not enjoy the second half of the concert as much. It opened with the west coast premiere of el sonido dulce de tu voz by Orlando Jacinto Garcia. This piece also spreads out the chorus to add a spatial dimension to the sound. A glockenspiel plinks while the singers intone various words from the phrase “regresare en la noche al oir el sonido dulce de tu voz suave” (I will return in the night upon hearing the sweet sound of your soft voice). The composer dedicated the piece to his wife, which is lovely and makes me feel like a bit of a heel for finding something too stereotypically “Latin” about hearing words like noche and dulce whispered in urgent murmurs. Just a personal reaction to that burden of “the passionate” that half my ancestry carries.
The next piece was Ikikaiku (Eternal Echo) by the Finnish composer Olli Kortekangas. It’s based on a section from the Kalevala, and that sounded great to me until Geary informed us that we were supposed to join in and sing back to the chorus at the end. Not to get too Louis Quatorze here, but: No. If I am paying to hear you sing, then I do not expect you to demand that I sing to you. Sing for me, my minions! Dance and play your twangling instruments! Make me smile, and I will pay you and applaud you!
That’s the natural order of things. Besides, there’s something about sitting on a hard pew waiting for the main event to start while the choir director fixes us with that look both demanding and pleading as he insists on rehearsing us in something we don’t want to sing – well, it just brings it all back. I half expected Mother Manuela to come hissing down the aisle threatening a demerit in religion for anyone caught not singing, not that she, a tiny old-school Spanish nun, would have set foot in an Episcopal church anyway without a papal dispensation.
The final piece of the evening was Luna, Nova Luna, a brand new piece by Mark Winges for both choirs. It’s a collage of texts on the moon, some by the composer, who apparently has the same thing for the moon that I have. Yes, the moon is indeed lovely and poetically useful. There were for my taste too many passages designed for the children to act cute or make funny sounds. The piece was fine but just did not really grab me. Volti always has a reception after their concerts, which is quite nice of them. They really do great work, and if the occasional piece doesn’t appeal to me much, I just figure that helps me appreciate the other pieces even more.
30 January 2010
fun stuff I may or may not get to: February
San Francisco Performances has an evening of modern music with Midori on February 6, and their annual subscriber concert on February 9, featuring 2009 Naumburg Competition winners Trio Cavatina.
Cal Performances presents Ragnar Bohlin conducting the Swedish Radio Choir on February 28.
It’s a big month for choral concerts: Volti performs new music on February 26-28 and Magnificat performs old music on February 12-14.
The San Francisco Symphony presents Schubert’s Mass No. 2 with A Concord Symphony, Henry Brant’s orchestration of the Ives sonata.
Berkeley Opera presents Eugene Brancoveanu as Don Giovanni in its new venue, which has got to be an improvement over the Julia Morgan Theater.
ACT presents Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in a new production directed by John Doyle, who did the recent Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd (you know the one: Patti Lupone plays the tuba!).
The San Francisco Ballet presents Program 2, a mixed program featuring works by Jerome Robbins, Christopher Wheeldon, and Paul Taylor, and Program 3, which is all Balanchine.
Cal Performances presents Ragnar Bohlin conducting the Swedish Radio Choir on February 28.
It’s a big month for choral concerts: Volti performs new music on February 26-28 and Magnificat performs old music on February 12-14.
The San Francisco Symphony presents Schubert’s Mass No. 2 with A Concord Symphony, Henry Brant’s orchestration of the Ives sonata.
Berkeley Opera presents Eugene Brancoveanu as Don Giovanni in its new venue, which has got to be an improvement over the Julia Morgan Theater.
ACT presents Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in a new production directed by John Doyle, who did the recent Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd (you know the one: Patti Lupone plays the tuba!).
The San Francisco Ballet presents Program 2, a mixed program featuring works by Jerome Robbins, Christopher Wheeldon, and Paul Taylor, and Program 3, which is all Balanchine.
27 September 2009
fun stuff I may or may not get to: October
Support your local arts organizations by buying tickets to events that look interesting!
The San Francisco Symphony concludes its Mahler Festival with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Scelsi’s Hymnos and the Mahler 5.
San Francisco Opera presents Il Trittico, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and Salome. Trittico has been getting raves and has an outstanding cast, from rising stars like Brandon Jovanovich to the semi-legendary Ewa Podles; Patricia Racette sings all three soprano roles (click here for Lisa’s interview with her over at San Francisco Classical Voice). Unfortunately most of the performances of this three-and-a-half hour work started at the idiotic time of 8:00 on a work night, so I’m not seeing it until Saturday October 3, the final performance.
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players begin their season on Monday October 5 with the music of Steve Reich, Edmund Campion (the contemporary composer, not the Elizabethan martyr), Charles Wuorinen, Morton Feldman, and John Harbison, with Harbison and Campion (again, not the martyr; it’s not that close to Halloween) giving a pre-concert talk at 7:15.
The touring company of South Pacific is in San Francisco, with Rod Gilfry as Emil de Becque.
Magnificat and the Carter Family Marionettes present La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola d’Alcina by Francesca Caccini (based on the same episode of the Orlando Furioso that inspired Handel’s Alcina). Baroque opera! Ariosto! Puppets! My God, catch me; I’m swooning!
The San Francisco Jazz Festival opens. I was really tempted by ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, but decided Davies Hall was not really the best venue for a ukulele recital. I’m at Salome that night anyway. But there’s lots of other good stuff on their schedule.
As a long-time theater-goer I should probably be slightly embarrassed that I’ve never seen anything by Tony Kushner. Berkeley Rep is offering Tiny Kushner, a night of one acts, so I have to decide if that’s the place to start.
Volti has a 30th-anniversary concert and CD-release party on October 18.
The San Francisco Girls Chorus presents music by Betinis, Holst, and Tavener based on prophetic words and mystic visions from Hafez, Mohammed, and the Rig-Veda.
Cutting Ball Theater officially opens its season with The Bald Soprano. Their previous Ionesco production, last season’s Victims of Duty, was outstanding.
Thick House presents The Creature by Trevor Allen, a re-telling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story.
Jack Curtis Dubowsky has a new opera: Halloween in the Castro, A Horror Opera. This sounds much more fun and interesting than the actual thing. Art so often does!
The San Francisco Symphony concludes its Mahler Festival with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Scelsi’s Hymnos and the Mahler 5.
San Francisco Opera presents Il Trittico, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and Salome. Trittico has been getting raves and has an outstanding cast, from rising stars like Brandon Jovanovich to the semi-legendary Ewa Podles; Patricia Racette sings all three soprano roles (click here for Lisa’s interview with her over at San Francisco Classical Voice). Unfortunately most of the performances of this three-and-a-half hour work started at the idiotic time of 8:00 on a work night, so I’m not seeing it until Saturday October 3, the final performance.
The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players begin their season on Monday October 5 with the music of Steve Reich, Edmund Campion (the contemporary composer, not the Elizabethan martyr), Charles Wuorinen, Morton Feldman, and John Harbison, with Harbison and Campion (again, not the martyr; it’s not that close to Halloween) giving a pre-concert talk at 7:15.
The touring company of South Pacific is in San Francisco, with Rod Gilfry as Emil de Becque.
Magnificat and the Carter Family Marionettes present La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola d’Alcina by Francesca Caccini (based on the same episode of the Orlando Furioso that inspired Handel’s Alcina). Baroque opera! Ariosto! Puppets! My God, catch me; I’m swooning!
The San Francisco Jazz Festival opens. I was really tempted by ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, but decided Davies Hall was not really the best venue for a ukulele recital. I’m at Salome that night anyway. But there’s lots of other good stuff on their schedule.
As a long-time theater-goer I should probably be slightly embarrassed that I’ve never seen anything by Tony Kushner. Berkeley Rep is offering Tiny Kushner, a night of one acts, so I have to decide if that’s the place to start.
Volti has a 30th-anniversary concert and CD-release party on October 18.
The San Francisco Girls Chorus presents music by Betinis, Holst, and Tavener based on prophetic words and mystic visions from Hafez, Mohammed, and the Rig-Veda.
Cutting Ball Theater officially opens its season with The Bald Soprano. Their previous Ionesco production, last season’s Victims of Duty, was outstanding.
Thick House presents The Creature by Trevor Allen, a re-telling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story.
Jack Curtis Dubowsky has a new opera: Halloween in the Castro, A Horror Opera. This sounds much more fun and interesting than the actual thing. Art so often does!
19 February 2009
fun stuff I'm probably going to miss
There seems to be a critical mass of interesting stuff I’m most likely going to miss in the next couple of weeks, thanks to previous commitments or general exhaustion, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take advantage of what's being offered. Some of this is stuff I’ve wanted to see since I first heard about it, like the new Swan Lake at the San Francisco Ballet or Sofia Gubaidulina’s residence at the San Francisco Symphony (I’m hearing at least one of these concerts, but I might miss the first one and the chamber performance), so too bad for my poor planning and poverty generally.
The Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble is performing live music to experimental films tomorrow night, Friday February 20, at Artists' Television Access at 992 Valencia Street. I heard Dubowsky's Eisenhower Address last fall and was really impressed by it and would love to hear it again. Go see what he does with Genet, Jarman, and company.
The excellent local chorus Volti is presenting another intriguing program chockfull of world premieres, at St Mark’s (2300 Bancroft Way, Berkeley) on Friday February 27 and at St Gregory of Nyssa (500 De Haro Street, San Francisco) on Saturday February 28. If you too can't make these performances, you can always go to their website and buy their CDs.
The California Symphony is presenting a new orchestral work, White Lies for Lomax (as in Alan Lomax), by their Young Composer in Residence, Mason Bates, who also has a work coming up with the San Francisco Symphony later this season. Also on the program is the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with a young soloist, Stefan Jackiw, and the Brahms 4. That’s Sunday March 8 and Tuesday March 10 at the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.
And the next Other Minds Festival starts Thursday March 5 and continues for the next two days at Kanbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (3200 California Street at Presidio).
So go, defy the Republican reactionaries by spending what money you have to support the arts, and enjoy. Tell me what I'm missing.
The Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble is performing live music to experimental films tomorrow night, Friday February 20, at Artists' Television Access at 992 Valencia Street. I heard Dubowsky's Eisenhower Address last fall and was really impressed by it and would love to hear it again. Go see what he does with Genet, Jarman, and company.
The excellent local chorus Volti is presenting another intriguing program chockfull of world premieres, at St Mark’s (2300 Bancroft Way, Berkeley) on Friday February 27 and at St Gregory of Nyssa (500 De Haro Street, San Francisco) on Saturday February 28. If you too can't make these performances, you can always go to their website and buy their CDs.
The California Symphony is presenting a new orchestral work, White Lies for Lomax (as in Alan Lomax), by their Young Composer in Residence, Mason Bates, who also has a work coming up with the San Francisco Symphony later this season. Also on the program is the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with a young soloist, Stefan Jackiw, and the Brahms 4. That’s Sunday March 8 and Tuesday March 10 at the Dean Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.
And the next Other Minds Festival starts Thursday March 5 and continues for the next two days at Kanbar Hall at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (3200 California Street at Presidio).
So go, defy the Republican reactionaries by spending what money you have to support the arts, and enjoy. Tell me what I'm missing.
17 December 2007
the varied carols I hear
Occasionally I come across strange subcultures – not inherently strange, but previously unknown to me, and largely unacknowledged by the mainstream. Years ago I had a co-worker who gradually revealed to me her real life – the United States, it seems, is divided into a series of medieval kingdoms, each with its court and attendant social structure, and she was the devoted cook for one of the Northeast kingdoms. She spent huge amounts of time, effort, and research on her work (one of the things she used to do was examine banquet scenes from art of the period to discover how thick their pie crusts were). She candied her own ginger in traditional medieval fashion, and she used to stuff it into dragon-shaped spice cakes. She brought me some ginger once; it was very tasty.
Sometimes these subcultures go mainstream almost by accident (as when Best in Show suddenly made dog shows events that could be televised). This is obviously a desirable result for artistic subcultures, which are constantly struggling for money and attention. I’ve been to small theaters where I’ve realized I was the only one in the audience who wasn’t related to or sleeping with a cast member. It’s a shame so many smaller groups struggle in obscurity, because some of them do work that is consistently higher quality and of greater interest than a lot of what the big established institutions produce. When I lived in Boston I discovered groups like Emmanuel Music or the Cantata Singers through the Boston Globe’s extensive arts coverage; out here, I’ve become dependent on people who are involved in various groups to alert me to things worth attending, which is why I took the suggestion of The Standing Room’s multi-talented M. C- and went to the Volti Concert last November.
I dodged the crowds of drunken students and soon-to-be drunk alumni on their way to the football game and headed for St. Mark’s Episcopal on Bancroft. All those years in Berkeley and I had never been inside. The Spanish mission-style (Carmel, if you want the specific mission) exterior led me to expect more extravagant splendors inside. It’s very handsome in a stripped-down way, just not what I had expected. As usual I arrived absurdly early, despite walking around the block four or five times, so early I thought I was late – the chorus was singing when I stepped into the vestibule, and I thought I had the time wrong. It turned out to be a final rehearsal. A couple of helpful people came out; one sold me a ticket and a CD and I resumed waiting. A woman commented on how early I was – since it was around 7:20 by then, I didn’t think I was that early for an 8:00 concert, but what do I know of the ways of small choral groups? It's been quite a while since I've been exposed to that subculture. The chorus left and the church slowly filled up with choristas.
Music audiences tend to have different conglomerate personalities, even if some of the audience members are the same – the vocal crowd is different from the piano crowd, and they’re different from the string quartet crowd; the early music people rarely see a mainstream opera audience, and the valiant band of modernists is a different set altogether. But small choral groups have some of the intimacy and intensity of chamber music, and their aficionados are similar. Many of them had the sense to bring their own cushions. I’ve been to enough concerts in churches so that I should have known better than to trust to wooden pews, even in an Episcopalian church, but there I was, unpadded. Murmured conversations flew around about who was running which group now and what auditions were being held when. Some velvet-clad couples were just a turkey-leg away from full Renaissance Faire drag; I half expected them to try to sell me handmade scented candles.
The concert itself was wonderful, and I’m glad I bought a CD. Volti does lots of new music; in fact, there were four world premieres at that concert, which puts it about four world premieres ahead of the San Francisco Symphony’s entire season (it would be accurate to note that the Symphony has several North American premieres scheduled, one of which is of a new Magnus Lindberg piece, and also accurate to insist on the larger truth of the Symphony’s lack of commitment to new music). At most concerts you get used to listening in a comparative way; since you’ve heard the pieces so many times before, you can’t help but measure the performance against some ideal, recorded or imagined. With new music you’re out in deep water, and you have to listen in a different way, for different things – it’s kind of like being a novice concert-goer all over again, and that’s a useful place to be. Listening is a skill that needs to be practiced.
All of the pieces were in English except for Morten Lauridsen’s Madrigali, which was in Italian. For that number they projected the translations onto a screen, which I’m all in favor of – I have long wished recitals used these projections. In fact, they might have done it for the pieces in English as well, since choral singing is by its nature more diffuse than solo. I particularly liked Stacy Garrop’s Sonnets of Beauty and Music (part of a series of thematically grouped poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay; I would love to hear the whole series when it’s completed), but that’s not at all to dismiss the other pieces (by Howard Hersh, Richard Festinger, Wayne Peterson, and Alan Fletcher as well as Lauridsen). Many of the composers were there and spoke before their pieces, which I pretty much could have done without. One of the composers turned out to be sitting behind me, and apparently he agreed with me, but he did say to his companion that it gave people a different way into the work, so fair enough, though I find such prefaces tend to the obvious, and are mostly of a “human interest” nature, and we all know that human interest is what you give people who aren’t really interested in the art form. I think there’s too much emphasis on the creative process instead of on the created object.
I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, and contentment doesn’t really lend itself to comment, other than saying I’m looking forward to Volti’s next concerts (March 1, 2, and 3 – go to http://www.voltisf.org/ for venues, CDs, and other information). Afterwards I had the great pleasure of meeting in person both Sid of the Standing Room (and Volti’s bass section) and Lisa of Iron Tongue of Midnight. I would urge you to check them out immediately (blogroll to the right), but if you’re reading this you probably have been reading them already (with one or two possible exceptions – Hi Mom!). So before Clash of the Choirs makes choral singing the next big thing, jump into that subculture and subvert the dominant corporate world of rock/rap/pop by hearing the real live thing from singers who can actually sing. You have now been officially urged to check them out.
Sometimes these subcultures go mainstream almost by accident (as when Best in Show suddenly made dog shows events that could be televised). This is obviously a desirable result for artistic subcultures, which are constantly struggling for money and attention. I’ve been to small theaters where I’ve realized I was the only one in the audience who wasn’t related to or sleeping with a cast member. It’s a shame so many smaller groups struggle in obscurity, because some of them do work that is consistently higher quality and of greater interest than a lot of what the big established institutions produce. When I lived in Boston I discovered groups like Emmanuel Music or the Cantata Singers through the Boston Globe’s extensive arts coverage; out here, I’ve become dependent on people who are involved in various groups to alert me to things worth attending, which is why I took the suggestion of The Standing Room’s multi-talented M. C- and went to the Volti Concert last November.
I dodged the crowds of drunken students and soon-to-be drunk alumni on their way to the football game and headed for St. Mark’s Episcopal on Bancroft. All those years in Berkeley and I had never been inside. The Spanish mission-style (Carmel, if you want the specific mission) exterior led me to expect more extravagant splendors inside. It’s very handsome in a stripped-down way, just not what I had expected. As usual I arrived absurdly early, despite walking around the block four or five times, so early I thought I was late – the chorus was singing when I stepped into the vestibule, and I thought I had the time wrong. It turned out to be a final rehearsal. A couple of helpful people came out; one sold me a ticket and a CD and I resumed waiting. A woman commented on how early I was – since it was around 7:20 by then, I didn’t think I was that early for an 8:00 concert, but what do I know of the ways of small choral groups? It's been quite a while since I've been exposed to that subculture. The chorus left and the church slowly filled up with choristas.
Music audiences tend to have different conglomerate personalities, even if some of the audience members are the same – the vocal crowd is different from the piano crowd, and they’re different from the string quartet crowd; the early music people rarely see a mainstream opera audience, and the valiant band of modernists is a different set altogether. But small choral groups have some of the intimacy and intensity of chamber music, and their aficionados are similar. Many of them had the sense to bring their own cushions. I’ve been to enough concerts in churches so that I should have known better than to trust to wooden pews, even in an Episcopalian church, but there I was, unpadded. Murmured conversations flew around about who was running which group now and what auditions were being held when. Some velvet-clad couples were just a turkey-leg away from full Renaissance Faire drag; I half expected them to try to sell me handmade scented candles.
The concert itself was wonderful, and I’m glad I bought a CD. Volti does lots of new music; in fact, there were four world premieres at that concert, which puts it about four world premieres ahead of the San Francisco Symphony’s entire season (it would be accurate to note that the Symphony has several North American premieres scheduled, one of which is of a new Magnus Lindberg piece, and also accurate to insist on the larger truth of the Symphony’s lack of commitment to new music). At most concerts you get used to listening in a comparative way; since you’ve heard the pieces so many times before, you can’t help but measure the performance against some ideal, recorded or imagined. With new music you’re out in deep water, and you have to listen in a different way, for different things – it’s kind of like being a novice concert-goer all over again, and that’s a useful place to be. Listening is a skill that needs to be practiced.
All of the pieces were in English except for Morten Lauridsen’s Madrigali, which was in Italian. For that number they projected the translations onto a screen, which I’m all in favor of – I have long wished recitals used these projections. In fact, they might have done it for the pieces in English as well, since choral singing is by its nature more diffuse than solo. I particularly liked Stacy Garrop’s Sonnets of Beauty and Music (part of a series of thematically grouped poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay; I would love to hear the whole series when it’s completed), but that’s not at all to dismiss the other pieces (by Howard Hersh, Richard Festinger, Wayne Peterson, and Alan Fletcher as well as Lauridsen). Many of the composers were there and spoke before their pieces, which I pretty much could have done without. One of the composers turned out to be sitting behind me, and apparently he agreed with me, but he did say to his companion that it gave people a different way into the work, so fair enough, though I find such prefaces tend to the obvious, and are mostly of a “human interest” nature, and we all know that human interest is what you give people who aren’t really interested in the art form. I think there’s too much emphasis on the creative process instead of on the created object.
I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, and contentment doesn’t really lend itself to comment, other than saying I’m looking forward to Volti’s next concerts (March 1, 2, and 3 – go to http://www.voltisf.org/ for venues, CDs, and other information). Afterwards I had the great pleasure of meeting in person both Sid of the Standing Room (and Volti’s bass section) and Lisa of Iron Tongue of Midnight. I would urge you to check them out immediately (blogroll to the right), but if you’re reading this you probably have been reading them already (with one or two possible exceptions – Hi Mom!). So before Clash of the Choirs makes choral singing the next big thing, jump into that subculture and subvert the dominant corporate world of rock/rap/pop by hearing the real live thing from singers who can actually sing. You have now been officially urged to check them out.
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