West Edge Opera: Claude & Marcel preview concert

As an addition to its summer festival, West Edge Opera headed over to the Wattis Theater at SFMOMA to present a preview concert, minimally staged but with singers & orchestra, of next season's world premiere, Claude & Marcel, based on the lives of Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, two (not necessarily in this order): stepsisters, best friends, lesbian lovers, Jews, surrealists, poets, anti-Fascist resistance fighters, & general shapeshifters. For more information on their lives, check here (or buy a ticket next summer to the finished opera); in this space I will be talking about last Sunday's performance.

The preview lasted about an hour & though there was no official announcement of what portion we were seeing, I think, based on a closing surtitle saying it was the end of Act 1, that we were seeing the first half of the opera. Of course what we heard is contingent & in process & incomplete, but I found it powerfully persuasive & am very excited to experience the completed work next summer. Alyssa Weinberg is the composer, Stephanie Fleischmann the librettist, Jonathan Khuner the music director, Elkhanah Pulitzer the stage director, & Chris Steele the dramaturg; Nikola Printz is Claude, Laura Bohn is Marcel, Angela Yam is Charlotte, their maidservant, & there is a chorus made up of Samuel Faustine, Glenn Healy, Laurel Semerdijian, Kyle Tingzon, & Matthew Worth.

When I entered the nondescript grey & black of the Wattis Theater, I was a bit alarmed to note an amplifier on stage, but it is used mostly for what I'll call, for lack of a better term, sound effects used as music, which would not otherwise carry into even a small space: breathing, for example. We open with rhythmic breathing, which summons up not only (obviously) breath, but the sound of a heart beating (the basic things of life) & merges into natural sounds, the breeze & in particular the ocean. In the spirit of its protagonists, anything can be appropriated & turned into art, into music & drama. Even the conventional orchestral instruments take on new colors, often being played in extreme ways, with a skittering & flittering effect that sounds like the frayed edges of music & the natural world; it is a beautiful, liminal world, in an unworldly light – like Debussy on acid. You hear traditional forms being bent, stretched, transformed, making the music a mirror to the surrealist view of the world, & as such, this is the sound world of Claude & Marcel.

Charlotte has music that is much more flowing & melodic; I don't mean it to sound condescending or dismissive when I say her music is more conventional. It's quite beautiful, & mirrors Charlotte's attempts to understand the two strange mesdames who have hired her for a job she desperately needs. The class & social differences between the two artist-outsiders, both from wealthy backgrounds (which is why they can afford a big house on the Isle of Jersey), & their farmgirl helper are examined with subtlety & care. Charlotte clearly is a bit nonplussed by these odd birds, but willing to accept what might even be their scandalous ways (are they just stepsisters? who are very close? or something more?) & to defend them to overly curious villagers, sometimes by dismissing their accurate guesses as to what the two ladies are. The ladies in turn can be, with the authority of their class, peremptory towards servants, though there's also the defensive fear of revealing themselves too far to possibly traitorous outsiders, even if the outsiders are economically dependent subordinates.

The chorus is sometimes villagers, sometimes occupying soldiers from the German (Nazi) Army. The two blend together. The villagers are curious about the very strange women who have moved in. The Germans are as well. There is no sentimentality, either positive towards the villagers or negative towards the soldiers; both groups are shown convincingly as a mixed bag of ordinary people. The extended sound-effects continue, with stamping feet as one of the musical effects, & also much laughter among the soldiers, as another interesting musical effect. The soldiers are not overdone villains: they are bullies who can threaten & sneer & cause serious harm, but they're also boys far from home, in a place that isn't going to feed them the propaganda they grew up on. I'm not suggesting that the presentation of the Germans is sympathetic, but it is nuanced, which is a good thing. Given their presentation as in many ways ordinary young people, you can see why & how Claude & Marcel's subversive acts could sway them; these are not convinced members of an alleged Master Race, but ignorant boys forced into positions of power they aren't suited for.

The relationship between Claude & Marcel is deftly handled: their low-level squabbles, their uncertainty in the face of the looming Nazi threat, their abiding love of each other & commitment to each other & their mutually-made art. I listed the singers above, & if you are familiar with those names, you know the very high level of singing & acting & commitment we were given. There were indications in the surtitles that the staging will involve some surrealist-dream-style dissolves between locations, & as I mentioned earlier the music flows between the natural world (particularly the sea) & the psychological / social reality of the characters. This was a preview performance, so the piece is in flux, & more no doubt can & will be said about the finished product. What I say here is even more provisional than usual. But I found the hour quite absorbing, with many intriguing possibilities; it will be very exciting to see how they play out in the completed work.

Terry Riley at 90: A Piano Celebration with Sarah Cahill

Revolutionary composers (Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams) grow old like the rest of us, but it they & we are lucky they continue to be revolutionary; one such is Terry Riley, who turned 90 last year. Last Sunday at the San Francisco Public Library, pianist Sarah Cahill showed us there was much more to him than the iconic (yes, I'm going to use that overused word) In C.

For me this was one of the too few occasions to hear Riley's music performed live. It was about 10 years ago that I made the mistake of booking two events in Civic Center on the last Sunday in June, completely forgetting that it was the day of the Pride Parade (there were also, unusually, home games for both the Giants & the A's, & BART was a complete, though colorful, nightmare): a matinee of Marco Tutino's brand-new opera Two Women & an evening performance by the Kronos Quartet of Riley's Salome Dances for Peace (the title alone! . . .). What struck me & has stayed with me, other than the resolution never to book anything in San Francisco on the last weekend in June, is that the newly composed opera sounded dull & conventional (& problematic in other ways, which I won't go into here), while the by no means new Riley score felt as fresh as a spring breeze. Since then, he's been one of the composers whose work I try to hear live.

Cahill spoke before each piece. Contrary to my usual reaction to speaking from the concert stage, I found her remarks useful & interesting, & I always find a level of illumination in hearing from a composer or someone who has worked directly with him. At one point Cahill talked about working with him on one of these pieces & he noticed something missing from the printed music, & he asked her permission to write it in, to which she answered, of course (saying to us, I mean, of course, you're Terry Riley. . . ). A little anecdote like that says a lot about his respect for his musical interpreters as collaborators & compatriots. It was pretty charming.

The first piece was Keyboard Studies from 1964. Cahill noted that while many prominent pianists play Glass's music, there are many fewer playing Riley's (she mentioned, besides herself, Gloria Cheng in LA). Parts of this piece had the sort of muscular filigree, between baroque & bebop, that sounds "minimalist", but Riley is a man open to many influences & his pieces often veer off into unexpected directions. Then we had the lovely, dreamy Fandango on the Heaven Ladder from 1994.

There were two tribute pieces by younger composers, which I think were written for Riley's 80th birthday. First was Samuel Adams's Shade Studies. I think I had heard it before, at a Cal Performances recital. I remembered liking it, & I liked it all over again last Sunday. The composer was prompted by childhood memories of lying under the piano while his father, John Adams, or perhaps Riley, played. There was something tender about the soft waves of music. I was reminded of a wonderful Japanese word I learned at the de Young Museum's recent & magnificent Art of Manga show: komorebi, which is "the light that leaks through trees" – you have to love a culture that felt the need to have a single word to describe that effect.

Back to Riley for The Walrus in Memoriam, a kind of fantasia based on that very strange Beatles song, I Am the Walrus; the piece ends memorably with the left hand going lower & lower on the keyboard while the right hand goes higher & higher, until there's no more room on either end & the reverberations die out. That was followed by the second tribute, Danny Clay's Circle Songs. Clay was there & spoke briefly about his composition. He did mention that if he were to write such a piece today he would perhaps emphasize less the In C qualities of Riley's music & concentrate more on its great variety. It's still beautiful, confluent with the Adams piece.

There were two more Riley pieces to round out the program. The first was a brief number dedicated to Pauline Oliveros, The Great Beauty; & by brief, I mean it's officially supposed to be played in I believe 86 seconds, though Riley told Cahill that was a "more or less" number, another example of the collaborative freedom he gives his musical interpreters. Just as she began playing, we could hear a distant chirping sound; "What is that? crickets?" Cahill asked. ("Pauline would have loved that!" asserted someone in the audience.) It sounded to me as if someone had pushed open an emergency exit door. At least the beeping ending before the piece did. The final number was the eloquent & moving Be Kind to One Another. His music is open to many styles, embracing them, including them in something that sounds distinctly his own, something generous & perpetually spring-like, sunny & fresh with reviving life.

This concert was a free program at the San Francisco Public Library. The meeting room was full & the audience was appreciative. This was a compelling tribute to Riley & a memorable gift to lovers of new music. As it was a sunny but cool day, I took a long walk afterwards, trying to replace the caustic & banal beat of the streets with the recollected richness of Riley.

San Francisco Opera: The Monkey King

I was in a packed Opera House for the third performance of San Francisco Opera's world-premiere run of The Monkey King, a kaleidoscopic new work by Huang Ruo (music) & David Henry Hwang (libretto), directed by Diane Paulus. This opera is wildly inventive, wildly colorful, wildly wild, & also substantial enough to be thought-provoking in a number of directions & well worth repeated viewings (I hope it will be revived soon, as I believe the run is pretty much sold out).

The storyline is based on the opening chapters of the very long & episodic Chinese classic novel, Journey to the West; the portion we are given is basically the Monkey King origin story. Sun Wukong, the monkey who makes himself the Monkey King & then a disciple of the Buddha, is, despite his spiritual trajectory, a rambunctious & brassy character, a variant of the Trickster God, but since he is also a King, he has some inherent responsibilities towards others that can lead him into more altruistic directions. The story of the opera is the story of his discovery of some level of selflessness & spiritual enlightenment, as he is guided through adventures & suffering by the compassionate bodhisattva Guanyin & the teachings of the Buddha.

It all makes for an emotionally & dramatically complete work, though (perhaps this is just my enjoyment speaking), as in any superhero-based tale, there is room for sequels. It was several scenes into the work, after seeing the Monkey King go underwater to gain his great weapon, & then ascend to the heavens to see the glittering, corrupt world of the powerful gods, when I started to think of The Monkey King as potentially part of a Chinese-American Ring cycle, an impression strengthened by later hopes expressed by his Buddhist teacher that the Monkey King will function as some sort of redeemer of a corrupt world. As with many of our insights, I realized this one was not unique to me: while reading the program-book on the train afterwards I found in one of the articles this very subject being discussed by the composer & librettist.

The clever & frequently ingenious production owes a lot to the brilliantly eye-catching costumes of Anita Yavich & the puppetry & design work of Basil Twist. Great stretches of iridescent silks turn into waves, or horses, or the clouds supporting heaven; the Monkey King himself is sometimes a puppet, sometimes a dancer (Huiwang Zhang), & mainly & notably a tenor, Kang Wang, who does an appropriately heroic turn in what must be a strenuous role (even with leaping & flying done by dancer or puppet), sounding as fresh & spunky at the end as at the beginning. His lines frequently end with a blazoning note, which I thought was an excellent indication of his character (though I should note a friend of mine, a singer, sympathetically found this aspect of the vocal writing exhausting). There is precedent in the novel for the Monkey King dividing himself, but the staging is seamless, with a leap giving way to a puppet, flying with the aid of black-clad puppeteers, in the style of Japanese theater.  There are scenes in which singer & dancer are both in action, in particular a fight scene with representative of the gods Lord Erland (also portrayed by a singer & dancer: Joo Won Kong & Marcos Vedovetto, respectively), but it's always clear what is going on. I have to give credit to the nerves of our Guanyin, the soprano Mei Gui Zhang, most of whose role is sung while she is suspended on (or, even more nerve-wrackingly, moving on) a golden platform a bit like a lozenge or flame-shaped halo, high, very high, above the stage. The entire cast is very strong (I particularly liked the deep bass of Peixin Chen as Supreme Sage Laojun) & the chorus does astonishingly versatile work.

The visuals (the costumes, &, in particular, the make-up of the Monkey King) & the action (the acrobatics, the choreographed fights) are very influenced by Asian theater, particularly Peking Opera; the music also crosses traditional east-west borders. Though the orchestra (led with assurance by Carolyn Kuan) is largely a traditional European opera orchestra, the percussion battery includes large & medium Indonesian button gongs, a Chinese opera gong, & small Chinese crash symbols, & there is a prominent role for pipa (played by Shenshen Zhang), including a rock-god-guitar-type battle between the Monkey King & one of his heavenly opponents. But the music, though permeated by traditional Chinese sounds, is not aggressively "other" or even "exotic" to non-Chinese ears, which is why I earlier referred to it as a Chinese-American work.

This hybridization of times & cultures applies to the libretto as well, which is often agreeably slangy, a helpful reminder to those dazzled by the fairy-tale qualities of the work that there is a contemporary point underneath the dazzle. "Awesome, JE!" announces the warrior nephew of the Jade Emperor, sent by him with Heaven's latest scheme for controlling the Sun Wukong. The gods sing in chorus of how no one knows how to party the way they do. There isn't much individuality there, or dissent. A corrupt & decadent ruling caste, not only on heaven but, clearly though implicitly, here on the political earth as well. The Monkey King gathers his beleaguered monkey-subjects (or brethren) around him & announces that they will no longer be shoved aside by the powerful; joining together has made them stronger. Suffering increases the strength of the Monkey King. It's a point that applies not only to the racist approaches to Chinese & Chinese-Americans through US history, but to other disenfranchised groups.

But the political suggestions of this opera are secondary to its religious & philosophical explorations. How are we to live? is the main theme, the central & too frequently silenced question of our lives. The work opens & closes with choruses singing Buddhist sutras – the chorus, a collective, expressing poetic, spiritual thoughts in a way that suggests universalism. But during the course of the action, sutra sections are usually expressed in the powerful soprano of Guanyin, that is, not only an individual, but one removed both spiritually (by her status as an immortal bodhisattva) & physically (by her elevation above the stage) from what is happening below. She functions as a sort of musical conscience to the Monkey King. Does he truly understand, & accept, & live by, what she is expressing? Or is he just looking to her as a sort of deus ex machina to get him out of various scrapes? We have gone from the choral universalism of the opening to the individual struggle, in the toils of a baffling & illusory world, to understand, accept, & act on profound sentiments in a profound & meaningful way. As they keep saying in the Journey to the West, Splendid Monkey King! Handsome Monkey King! But after the gorgeous stage-pictures have faded, the unsettling underlying message remains: How are we to live in the world we are given?

West Edge Opera: Dolores

I went to all three operas at this year's West Edge Opera festival, seeing each one twice. First up is Dolores, centered on labor leader Dolores Huerta, with music by Nicolás Lell Benavides & libretto by Marella Martin Koch. I heard West Edge's preview of part of the opera two years ago (my post on that event is here, &, while I have your attention, here is my post on a New Century Chamber Orchestra concert with a different premiere from Benavides). I was very enthusiastic about the work then & after seeing it complete & fully staged I am even more enthusiastic; a few elements that gave me (minor) pause in the preview, particularly the extended victory speech for Senator Robert Kennedy. made sense to me once I saw the whole design. I go to as many new operas as I can & few of them have struck me as so musically & dramatically complete as Dolores. This is a meaty work that audiences will be pondering for quite a while.

I won't repeat (most of) the points I made in my earlier post, so I'll start by discussing the attention given to RFK in the second half of the opera. The day after the premiere, before the first performance of the festival's second opera, I ended up discussing this aspect of the work with someone who objected to the RFK material, wanting more Dolores. First, it's a tribute to the character that the audience wants more of her – much better than wanting less. It's in the spirit of Huerta to be collaborative & to share the spotlight with others, so the opera, by shifting focus, is enacting her personality. And the focus on RFK is necessary because you can't understand why his assassination was such a blow to the farmworkers' movement & to Huerta herself unless you understand the hope he offered: the sincerity, the compassion, the charisma. Though many in the audience clearly remembered the historical events, we are far enough from them so that you can't take for granted that people will grasp who RFK was & what he meant (especially when the name is now associated with the idiot destroying America's public health). When RFK is first mentioned, I heard in the brass subtle echoes of that Virgil Thomson / Aaron Copland "Americana" sound, giving an aural democratic halo to his arrival (though at the first performance – at this point, do I only hear with ironic ears? – I thought I detected a very subtle criticism in this music of the whole concept of "Americana" & political heroes).

References to RFK increase during the first half, but we need to see, hear, & feel him in person, & that's why we need the extended victory speech, in which, along with random little jokes & banalities, you hear him reaching out to what we'd now call marginalized groups (the immigrant farmworkers, mainly Mexican & Filipino; the Black populace) with charm, grace, & inclusiveness. I'm old enough to remember the grape boycott that is a major feature of the opera (my family boycotted grapes, as my mother was a long-time subscriber to Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker paper), but I do not remember RFK & his assassination, or many of the participants in the story other than Cesar Chavez & Nixon. Before the audience can weigh the magnitude of the loss, we have to feel the weight of RFK's presence.

But there is some irony in the treatment of RFK & what is now called the mainstream media. We, attending an opera titled Dolores, know that she is the story here: Huerta, & Itliong, & Chavez, & the workers they fight for.  We learn that they've been struggling for years, getting traction only slowly. When does the press show up? When a glamorous politician, a handsome man from a powerful family, shows up & teases running for the Presidency. That's the story the press cares about: the top levels of power, who's in, who's out, & not those toiling anonymously at the bottom of the pyramid. (There was a bit of this going on at the second performance, when State Attorney General Rob Bonta made an appearance, to much buzzing.)

So the events around the grape strike & the RFK assassination are clearly laid out, as prior knowledge cannot be assumed, but there is a certain memory-play aspect to the opera which works powerfully, freeing it from a documentary / straight narrative style into something more suggestively dreamlike, even, at moments, surreal. The dead RFK will appear to Huerta. There are elliptical suggestions of the lives going on out of view while the work gets done. The repeated choruses of No grapes / strike (in both English & Spanish) are a powerful way of suggesting the passage of time. And the on-goingnesss of any lengthy effort – the boycott has been underway for three years when the opera opens – is a difficult thing to convey theatrically, where activities that last for years, whose essence is their grinding, relentless dailiness, must necessarily be compressed into the two hours' traffic of the stage (this is a problem with pretty much every work-related drama I've seen). These chants rise fluidly from the music & action, from the emotions at play, rather than from specific situations; they echo throughout the action.

A good example of what I mean by the almost dreamlike aspect is the treatment of Tricky Dick. His scenes arrive like great slabs of weirdness in between the scenes of the union struggles. Initially he doesn't directly attack the Union or the boycott. Instead, he sings, in sinuous, insinuating tones, about the lovely tastiness of grapes. As he sings, the projection screens behind him show gloriously lit, sparkling, nearly erotic shots of green grapes. Maybe because of that imagery I kept picturing Tricky Dick as the snake in the garden. His music is sprightly, appealing, with a little touch of Weimar cabaret, & a bit of a lounge singer's louche seductiveness. It is indicative of what a powerful, disturbing creation he is that both times I saw the opera the audience, though clearly all-in for Huerta & the farmworkers, burst into applause at the end of his first scene.

Tricky Dick is on a platform, raised above the action. With each reappearance, his message gets a little more sardonic, a little more direct in attacking the Union, though he remains physically above the fray (he does have one appearance on "the floor" during the first act, but he is alone, spotlit on a darkened stage). By the end of the first act, he has grown more direct; he practically snarls in support of "the squares" & the "silent majority" & speaks with increasing stridency about the need for Order & Discipline. So when there is a moment in the second act, after RFK's assassination, when Tricky Dick & Huerta finally confront each other, face to face, down on the floor of the stage & we see what the opera has been building up to, the moment is breathtaking. She defies him with continued calls for a strike. And though we see him go on to become President, we see that she will continue to fight. As she says, the fight isn't over until we win.

The irony, of course, is that Tricky Dick uses words like Order & Discipline as code words for keeping down the people who are already down. They are, in fact, the ones who live lives of discipline & order: we've seen Huerta, a single mother of a large brood, struggling to support her family, pinching pennies, stretching dollars, continuing to work hard every day in the face of injustice & cruelty. That's real discipline, of a kind the politically scheming climber Tricky Dick doesn't understand, or appreciate despite his political success.

Calling the character Tricky Dick rather than Richard Nixon emphasizes the archetypal, recurring nature of the character: he's practically a trickster god, though on the side of complacency & evil. No matter what he does, the ultimate beneficiary is always meant to be himself (I've read Paradise Lost, I recognize the type.) The naming also allows for the freedom to add some Trumpery touches to the characterization: he holds a Bible, but upside down, as in the infamous Bible photo-op, & along with documentary photographs from 1968 we see video from recent No Kings rallies (just in case anyone was missing the sad fact that this opera, set in 1968, is frighteningly relevant now, in 2025).

Let me spring back to the beginning of the opera to look at the character of Dolores. The opera opens with quiet but tense music, as she is being driven (her car is in the shop & she can't afford to get it out until payday) by fellow labor leader Larry Itliong. She refers to her children, & says that her divorce has been hard on them. It's a normal, workaday conversation, & the only other (possible) reference we hear to the divorce is her passing comment later that her children have seen the effects of farm work, & the way farmworkers are treated, on their father. The opera does not give a Wikipedia-style bio of Huerta, but you will get a clear sense of who she is as a person: strong, resourceful, resilient. And very much a person who is about "people power": the power of unions, of uniting, of forming alliances & coalitions.

Her approach is subtly contrasted with that of her fellow leaders, Itliong & Chavez. Itliong is very much about his own ethnic group (the Filipino workers) & has a short fuse, which is sometimes amusing & satirical (as in his sarcastically chipper number about the politicians who talk-talk-talk, while on the screens behind him the jaws of various politicians waggle back & forth in time) & sometimes short-sighted (as in his angry explosions at Huerta & Chavez when things don't go the way he thinks they should). Chavez is a bit messianic, a bit of a loner (he decides on his hunger strike without consulting the others), very much immersed in Catholic ideas of redemption through self-sacrifice (there is an interesting Catholic undercurrent in the opera: as a link between Kennedy & Chavez, as the source of understanding & strength – Huerta calls on Our Lady of Guadalupe as well as Our Lady of Sorrows, for whom she is named).

Huerta is the one who sees the need to keep the workers going with something more light-hearted than self-sacrifice & righteous anger. She suggests a mariachi band, which leads to some lively music & a contrast in dramatic mood, as well as to a lilting & extremely catchy setting of "Are you registered to vote?" It's very danceable; in face we see the three labor leaders dancing to it. It's so catchy that some political group ought to license the rights before the next election.

But there are also drawbacks to Huerta's collaborative approach: is it wise to put all the eggs in the Kennedy basket? There is a bleak chorus before RFK appears warning her not to count on him, that he will be killed the way his brother was. We hear the news of Dr Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, with a somber chorus to Aeschylus's words from Agamemnon about suffering into wisdom through the grace of God. This chorus will be repeated to powerful effect when RFK is shot (the reference to the great Greek tragedian deepens the sense of world-historical suffering & sorrow here).. After he has been shot but is not yet officially dead, Itliong already wants to come up with a new strategy. This is the sort of cold-blooded calculation politicians need. Huerta, though, cannot bring herself to recalibrate so soon. She is dealing with a deep personal as well as political blow – the loss of the first major politician who seemed genuinely willing to listen to them, include them, & help them with actions as well as words.

We get the social / political / community view of things, but there is also a powerful scene of Huerta's inward reckoning. As she prepares for bed, praying, she reflects, thinking of her children, wishing she were with them, knowing that she needs to keep fighting for them & others. The brass instruments  have been commenting throughout the opera, sometimes inspirationally, sometimes satirically. But for this scene, they recede, & we have a string-heavy section, interior & searching, with a lovely solo violin floating above. Then as Huerta sleeps, the music changes as Tricky Dick appears again, looming on the platform directly above her, as in an evil dream.

There is another string-heavy scene with violin solo: the aria of the busboy Juan Romero, who cradled RFK right after the shooting. He sings of his recent arrival in America, & of how rare it was for him to be treated with the respect with which Kennedy had treated him the night before, when he delivered room service to him & his wife. This scene shows us the genuine empathy of RFK, the ability to connect with people (or just to notice people) that most others ignore. As with Dolores's nighttime reverie, it is meditative, complex, beautiful: the real life of people, as opposed to what the politicians say or the media report. It is in a generous spirit that this moving aria is given to someone who could be seen in the wider sweep of things as a minor character.

(from the second performance: Huerta in black in the center; to her right is Mark Streshinsky, General Director of West Edge Opera)

The entire cast is strong & deserved the enthusiastic cheers they received; I'm just going to list names (I discuss the main performers more specifically in the preview post mentioned above): Kelly Guerra as Dolores Huerta, Phillip Lopez as Cesar Chavez, Rolfe Dauz as Larry Itliong, Alex Boyer as Senator Kennedy, Sam Faustine as Tricky Dick, Chelsea Hollow as Helen Chavez / Ethel Kennedy, Sergio Gonzalez as Juan / a Journalist, Caleb Alexander as Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers: all superb, all memorable. The staging by Octavio Cardenas was masterly & Mary Chun conducted the score with power & tenderness. Dolores Huerta herself was there in person, & spoke after the two performances I saw. She is still powerful, still fighting; the opera ends with her resolution to continue fighting despite the loss of their great ally RFK, & the communal cries of Sí ,se puede ring out so bravely that I felt sure the audience was about to join in (maybe they did, it was hard to tell); the cries end somewhat suddenly, but with the feeling that they are actually still sounding around us. What a memorable event this was! Congratulations to all involved, to West Edge Opera for midwifing, & to Benavides & Martin Koch for producing such a powerful work.

Penultimate Salonen: Strauss, Sibelius, & Smith at the San Francisco Symphony

Thursday night I was at Symphony Hall for Esa-Pekka Salonen's penultimate stand as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony. (I was there courtesy of Lisa Hirsch; check here for her review of this concert.) He was conducting a meaty program bookended by two Richard Strauss tone poems (Don Juan & Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks); in between came Sibelius's 7th Symphony to close the first half & then, after the intermission, the world premiere of a Symphony commission, Rewilding by local composer Gabriella Smith.

As locals are all too well aware, Symphony management made the boneheaded decision, for reasons never really stated beyond the usual "different artistic visions", to let their prize Music Director go. Overt demonstrations are not allowed, but the audience showed its support for Salonen with on-going applause & cheers for him every chance they got – as he walked on, as he bowed after a piece, as he walked off; when the concert ended, the applause extended well beyond the usual.

In recent years I've sort of lost my taste for Richard Strauss, but Thursday's performance made me wonder why, as the lush, dizzying strains of Don Juan unfolded (sounding occasionally like outtakes from Rosenkavalier, suitably enough given the eroticism pervading both works), with just enough of a zing of danger & a shot of the eerie to make it clear this was not just any lover's rhapsody but the story of a specific lover, the obsessive, haunted, & hunted Don Juan. Well, as they say, that's why they play the games. It's always good to give what we think we know a reality check.

That was followed by the Sibelius 7, a relatively compact piece. A few weeks ago at the Symphony, Dalia Stasevska closed her concert with a vigorous Sibelius 5, a work that rises majestically on muscular wings; the 7th, by contrast, seems rooted monumentally in place, like a vast granite mountain, undecorated by frivolous little flowers & suchlike; what chips & fragments skitter away from it come from the same substantial source.

That was a lot to mull over during intermission, with more to come – in fact, with a highlight to come, as a world premiere always strikes me as the highlight, or maybe I should say potential highlight, of a concert. But before we could hear the piece, the composer was brought out to talk.

As I've often said, I dislike such talks from the stage, & though there is a Romantic interest in hearing an artist discussing his or her creation, their comments are as often as not partial, pale, even a bit misleading (pushing us to look for one element over other, potentially to us more interesting, elements). After all, if a piece could be summed up in words, why write the piece? If you're a composer, you must feel that music conveys things words cannot, & this would be true even if you were a composer also gifted in writing & speaking (& not all are, of course; the "talk to the audience" is a bit of outreach, like using social media, that gets foisted on all composers these days, regardless of their level of interest & skill in these tasks, which are tangential to their main interest, which is writing music). And most of the material given in these speeches is usually available in the program anyway, so it's a twice-told tale for me.

Smith started with a gracious thank-you to Salonen & the orchestra; as a local composer, she grew up hearing the San Francisco Symphony, so it was a particular thrill, she said, for her to work with them. For the rest of her speech, she rather brilliantly evaded any discussion of the music (which needs to speak for itself) by telling us what rewilding is. But – I already know what it is. And I'm all in favor of it! (In fact I wondered if I was more of a purist than Smith, who went on about bicycling, as bicyclists do, whereas I feel bikes are industrial products, mostly requiring paved roads, that, while not as bad as cars, are not as good as walking.) So all in favor, & that's all the more reason I don't need to hear about it when I'm in the cramped & uncomfortable seats of Davies Hall, feeling tired, & having already sat long enough so that my joints are hurting. And it's not Smith's problem that some words she emphasized (like "joy" & "community"), while important & powerful, are also trendy PR-ready buzzwords that set my teeth on edge.

Am I the only one who felt this way? Very likely. Is it a bit ridiculous that it took a while for me to let the music, once it started, get past my mild irritation with the speech? Again, very likely. But there it is. These things affect us, just as much as whether the seats are comfortable or how we're feeling physically. And though Smith did talk about a rewilding project she had recently worked on (converting an old airport runway up in Seattle – information which was also available in the program), she did not explain how the concept of rewilding affected the piece or her conception of it. I heard nature in the music, but not nature being reborn, or wilderness coming out of humanity's wreckage.

Not that that really matters. An arbitrary title can direct you for only so long before one's own reactions to the music take over. And once I got past my usual irritation at the talk, & my irritation that I was irritated, I loved the piece, a rich, striking profusion of sounds new & compelling. There is much frittering percussion, & then great swoops of sound, like a rushing strong wind, or maybe a warning siren. Some of the sounds are unusual – a percussionist was snapping twigs at some points. This made a noticeable number of audience members laugh – not in a derisive way, but in a way that still puzzled me. Snapping a twig doesn't seem particularly comical to me, though apparently it did to some in the context of a symphony orchestra, but haven't we learned from John Cage & Co that any sound from any source could be incorporated into performance?

According to the program, Rewilding is (this is very precise) 23 minutes long, making it the longest of the evening's four selections. The time flew by, as did the rich & redolent sounds. Though a made object involving an incredible degree of skill on the parts of both composer & performers, & sophisticated "technology" (in the form of musical instruments), the piece conveyed a refreshing sense of being out in nature, aware, taking in the nature-made sounds around us. Perhaps Rewilding isn't such an arbitrary title; maybe it refers to what happens in the soul of the listener.

Rewilding is exactly the sort of thing – a new, substantial, thoughtful, & gorgeous piece designed for a large orchestra – that I fear we will see much less of after Salonen goes, being swept aside by lush orchestrations of pop hits & live performances of film scores to currently popular movies that already have perfectly fine recorded soundtracks.

After Smith's powerful piece, it seemed like another of Till Eulenspiegel's pranks to detain us longer with his antics, but there it was, & it turned out to be giddy, zingy fun, kind of like (& I mean this as a compliment) the score of the most luxe Warner Brothers cartoon ever.

San Francisco Contemporary Music Players/ARTZenter: Emerging Composer Grant Program Concert

Last night I was at Herbst Theater for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players' performance of six new chamber orchestra pieces from the latest round of the ARTZenter Emerging Composer Grant Program. This admirable program was, founded & funded by Tony Magee of the Lagunitas Brewing Company, & it's nice to see a successful executive do something for the greater artistic good with his wealth. I was at last January's concert (my entry is here) though I unfortunately had a conflict with the last concert (these performances happen two or three times a year).

Magee was ill & could not attend, but a friend & colleague of his opened with some introductory remarks about the program. Eric Dudley, the Artistic Director of the SFCMP & the evening's conductor, then took over, noting that we didn't need more talking (he was right & I was grateful, though I did like having the composers give brief descriptions of their pieces, especially as some of them differed a bit from their statements in the program) so he would just introduce each composer before his piece was performed. It was noted in the program that the order of performance would be given from the stage, & I assume Dudley's deft hand could be seen in the thoughtful arrangement of pieces, with more meditative numbers separating the more rambunctious. All the pieces were gripping & thought-provoking, & I would gladly have heard all of them again.

First was Three Airs by Benjamin Webster, music in three parts based on field recordings he had made around New Haven, Connecticut, which is or was his home (so "airs" is a pun, referring both the the musical concept of an air, as in Bach's Air on the G String, & to being out in the open air).  This was one of several pieces on the program that conjured vividly the sense of walking through a town or city, in a way that made me almost nostalgic, as most urban areas these days are monotonous concatenations of car noise & corporate pop/rap music. Here there was lovely variety, including birdsong. There was a gentle & flowing element amid the urban energy.

Next was Traces in a Shallow Pool by James Larkins. His note in the program compares the effect he was aiming for as an examination of the disturbance even a gentle touch can cause on a smooth surface of water; the ripples cascade out, changing the water far beyond the initial touch. In his description from the stage, he mentioned how words & phrases, sometimes randomly thrust on us, can later reverberate in our minds & therefore our lives. I appreciated that he was giving us something besides what we could read in the program, & Dudley mentioned that it was useful for the musicians to hear these different perspectives after they'd been working on the nitty-gritty of a piece; it reframes the sounds for them. As you might expect from those metaphorical summations, the piece had a relatively calm surface that built & rippled & developed in intriguing ways.

That was followed, & the first half closed with, a more extroverted work, Färgstark (Colorful), which, despite its Swedish (maybe IKEA-derived?) title is by a Brazilian composer, Gabriel Duarte DaSilva. True to its title, there was great play of orchestral colors here, often inspired by birdsong (& given the composer's origin, one imagined brightly colored tropical birds) & the rhythms of Latin jazz bands; there was a lot of lively work among the percussionists. One thing that struck me, amid the swirling shifting sounds, was the composer's rather daring use of extended silences; silence is an important & neglected component of music, so I loved seeing it given some prominence, & fortunately the audience knew enough not to interrupt with "I guess this is over" applause.

After the brief intermission, we resumed with Nanjing Fragments by Daniel (Jingyang) Cui, another city-scape in three parts, though the music is played seamlessly, as if it were one on-going movement, which is part of Cui's point about the lengthy history of his native metropolis; contrary to Saint Paul, here we do have a continuing city. The opening, the first & relatively brief movement, is a fanfare reflecting Nanjing's imperial & political history as the southern capital of China; a magnificent stepping of sound is followed by confident, spreading strings; that is repeated a few times, & gives way to a piece inspired by the Nanjing Salted Duck (which is how Wikipedia refers to it, though Cui described it as "salt-water duck"), a classic dish of the region (despite my love of duck, I have never had it; it seems to be the southern equivalent of Peking Duck, & I love so much the idea of a musical piece based on a way of preparing duck). In his talk Cui said that the duck was a way of exploring the on-going nature of the essential city; if you eat Nanjing salt-water duck today, you are eating basically the same dish you would have eaten centuries ago). This was a quieter, cumulative movement; the salt-water preparation lapped at our ears; woodwinds gently squawked like ducks. The third movement captured the boisterous street sounds of Cui's youth (which wasn't that long ago, actually), the sounds of street vendors & "old Chinese Aunties" & auto traffic: again, a lively street scene, that made me think of when cities were more walkable. Cui said that the authorities have been cracking down on this sort of noise, thinking it old-fashioned & unsuited for streamlined modernity, which is too bad.

That was followed by When . . . Lost by Peter Chatterjee; the ellipsis helps indicate his interest, which is in conveying the effects of trauma & loss on an individual (he suggested in his speech that the pandemic had spurred his consideration of the psychological effects of trauma, saying that he began thinking about these things four or five years ago, though I also thought of the traumatic elections we've had since that time). The piece was sort of a portrait in composition, with odd lapses & reappearances, reflecting the way troubling & tragic memories get repressed or elided but surface nonetheless.

The final piece was Angel Gómez Ramos's Synecdoche, or, to give it its full title, Synecdoche (Bulerías del Sentimiento Oceánico); bulerías is apparently a type of flamenco rhythm, but also derives from a Spanish slang term for "to mock"; so the subtitle seems to mean something like "a dance to / a mockery of oceanic feelings, which can be either feelings about the ocean or vast unfathomable mysteries of feeling), & synecdoche of course means to take a portion of something as representative of the whole. It's a surrealist-inspired piece, about the limits of our perceptions (& I have to admit by this point it was hard to absorb more, given the riches of the evening). It was another lively, entrancing piece. I found it interesting how many of the pieces ended rather gently; I think this was the one that finished with reverberations dying away.

I don't take notes during performances so I hope I've accurately conveyed the nature of each piece. It was an impressive evening; each composer graciously thanked Dudley & the musicians of SFCMP, & the thanks were well-deserved. As I mentioned earlier, I would gladly have sat through all the pieces again. I will say that I was selfishly glad I could sit without anyone else near me, but this enticing music & the marvelous performances deserved a bigger crowd than they got last night. Best wishes to these talented young composers on their life in Art.

San Francisco Opera: The Handmaid's Tale

Last Saturday night, I was at the Opera House for the west coast premiere of The Handmaid's Tale, with music by Poul Ruders & libretto by Paul Bentley based, of course, on Margaret Atwood's famous novel. I was tired when I went in (these things do affect our perceptions; the physical weighs us down, which is one of the themes of the Handmaid's Tale), I was skeptical for several reasons of what I was about to see, but I found myself overpowered by a work I'm still processing several days later.

I don't need to go into why I was tired, but I will broadly sketch my skepticism. The idea felt maybe a bit too obvious, even hackneyed, given the political situation in the United States (the mere fact that anyone, let alone a substantial minority, could still think of voting for Trump tells you everything you need to know about how morally & intellectually & spiritually bankrupt this country is). And the way this material is usually described struck me as self-indulgent: women as perpetual victims, men as oppressors. It's well known that over half the white women who voted in 2016 voted for Trump, & most men I know (including myself, of course) are far from profiting from the current gendered set-up. We've all seen those memes that appeared post-Dobbs about how the wrath of women had been aroused, but all I can think when I see them is Where have they been for the past 45 years? Nothing, & I mean nothing, that has happened has been a surprise. The reactionaries have been announcing for decades to cheering crowds (which included many women, of course) that they were going to pack the courts & overturn Roe v Wade, which is exactly what they did. When Trump was elected, owing to the anti-democratic Electoral College, there was grand talk about "the Resistance", a word which was also highlighted in the publicity for this opera. I dislike the self-glorifying term; it makes it sound as if we're all wearing berets & blowing up supply trains under cover of darkness. Opposing Trump mostly calls for the same boring grind as any other political work, including talking to – &, more to the point, listening to – people who are, in the delicate & lovely euphemism of political writers, "low information".

I just deleted several lines there, because, you know, people care about my political opinions as little as I care about theirs & let's get to the opera. But, for this opera in particular, the political situation is relevant, & our self-deceptions & assumptions are relevant. This opera knows this, & no matter what you go in thinking – & this is the mark of a great political opera, like The Death of Klinghoffer – you will come out a bit shaken in your certainties.

I read Atwood's novel around the time it was published, 1985, & found it strong & convincing – Atwood, of course, is too clear-sighted & complex a writer to produce a simple tale of victimization, & I'm happy to say the adaptation respects that. There is ambiguity & complicity all over in the action & characterization. I did not re-read the novel before the opera (lack of time, mostly) but it came back to me as I watched. The action, which is complicated & not presented in a linear manner, can be followed even without having read the book. The story told in the novel itself is fragmentary, a journal kept irregularly by someone whose fate we never learn, but in the opera the story, until the end, seems less fragmentary than fractured: the pieces are there, just not in chronological order.

Both narrative & music have a lot to accomplish here, & mostly they both succeed brilliantly, though at times I did wish for the expansion possible in a novel – in particular, I wanted to hear more from & about Serena Joy, the wife of the Commander, & Aunt Lydia, the woman in charge of training the handmaidens in their beliefs & duties. They are true believers in Gilead (though I started to wonder about Serena Joy); what are they seeing in it or hoping for from it? But compression & omission are required to convey everything that needs to be conveyed: the violent founding & strictures of the Republic of Gilead, the sporadic concern & opposition before & during the founding, the environmental depredations that make fertility & healthy infants such prized commodities, what life is like under Gilead, & the life (both before & after Gilead) & the tentative moves towards liberation of Offred (the titular Handmaid; her Commander is named Fred, as she is now Of Fred, but also, of course there's the pun on Offered).

The spare, very brightly lit set (designed by Chloe Lamford) & the color-coded costumes (designed by Christina Cunninham) tell a clear story about the relentless surveillance & regimentation of Gilead, & its Spartan lack of softness or luxury, or any kind of sensuality or romance. The time is moved forward a bit from the novel, so it's now happening a few years from our present time (though the surprising amount of cigarette smoking made me think it was still set a few years after 1985). The scenes of life in Gilead are sharply drawn, full of confusion, suspicion, & disappointment. So why would anyone think such a place was a good idea? The music conveys that very well: whenever there's a hymn or prayer or some sort of religious ceremony, the music takes on a gentleness, a harmonious beauty, an ascendance, that is not found elsewhere in the score (in which even Amazing Grace comes across in frantic, fractured distortions). This quality is subtly done; these moments don't jump out from the score, but they do mark a difference in tone from the violent percussion of Gilead's enforcers & the agonizingly high tessiture of the corralled handmaidens. In those early scenes of the handmaidens especially, I was very reliant on the surtitles.

Every aspect of this production is strong: the agile conducting by Karen Kamensek, the sensitive direction by John Fulljames, &, especially, the powerhouse cast: just to mention some of the major roles, Sarah Cambidge as a commanding Aunt Lydia; Lindsay Ammann as the bitter wife, Serena Joy; John Relyea as the opaque Commander; Katrina Galka as Janine/Ofwarren, a friend & ally of Offred; Brenton Ryan as an ambiguous servant of, or enemy of, the Commander & Serena Joy; &, in particular, Irene Roberts as Offred. I realize it's part of the narrative strategy that Offred is not a particularly interesting character: she is a fairly average person, with average interests & concerns, trying to make sense of a horrible situation she is aught up in. Roberts makes her vivid & convincing.

Do you need a spoiler alert if the key plot revelation to be discussed is that there is nothing to reveal? The opera ends, as did the novel, with an abrupt disappearance from the historical record. We do not learn Offred's ultimate fate: freedom, capture, the Colonies? Life, death, imprisonment? Does she reunite with the daughter who was taken from her? The final notes ring out, but the narrative hangs suspended. The point, of course, is that we can try to write the ending for our own time, as best we may, insofar as we can.

San Francisco Performances: Jonathan Biss & Echoes of Schubert #2

Last night at Herbst Theater, Jonathan Biss returned for the second of his three-concert series for San Francisco Performances, each coupling an Impromptu & one of the final three piano sonatas by Schubert with a newly commissioned work for solo piano. The series is turning out to be a very rich experience.

The opening was the Impromptu in A-flat Major, #2, played with Biss's characteristic poetic attention & intensity. Biss writes his own program notes, which do exactly what program notes should do: make us aware of what the artists are doing in & with the music, & give us signposts to listen for. The program notes for the second piece, a newly commissioned work from Alvin Singleton titled Bed-Stuy Sonata, were spoken from the stage by the pianist. In accordance with the composer's reluctance to impose interpretation, Biss invited us to listen for ourselves; even the title, which is apparently unusually specific for Singleton – it is a nickname for the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the composer grew up – is not meant to trigger any sort of association, nostalgic, pictorial, or biographical; when asked by Biss about the title, Singleton replied that his titles were mostly meant for himself & not the performer or the audience.

It is a wonderful, striking piece, clearly virtuosic without empty flash. Solemn, pillar-like notes move forward in a stately procession, their sounds reverberating to the border of silence, to be followed by glittering, muscular but somehow tender, cascades of notes. This dense complexity alternates with the slower pillar-like moments (the piece is all in one movement). The sonata ends with a little uptick in the sound which seems like a question, left unanswered & dying away in the air. The whole thing is redolent of an urban setting, with tall buildings & tumult & grace notes of calm & near-silence. It could also, though, describe a purely interior landscape. Last night was only the second public performance of the piece. I know I keep saying of new music I wish they had played it twice, but, you know, somebody really needs to do that. For this piece Biss used a tablet with the music, which he could forward with a pedal, which audibly amazed the old woman with clanging "artistic" bracelets a few rows behind me.

After the intermission we had the Sonata in A Major D 959. Aside from the obvious beauty of the rolling & swirling currents of sound, I appreciate Biss's emphasis on the psychological & moral complexity of this music; framing it as Schubert's way of processing his impending & very early death, he emphasizes the struggle & the strangeness of what's going on; the silences are as telling as the sounds. The moments of near-breakdown emerge with clarity from the formal structures trying to contain & process them. As with the first concert in the series, the encore was another short piece by Schubert.

The audience was mostly well-behaved, though the first piece was disturbed by a person on the left who kept "whispering" loudly "I can't sit here!" Before the performance some people in that section had been complaining about a high-pitched hum or beep; I didn't hear it so I wasn't sure, but one of them kept saying that high-pitched sounds weren't audible to old people but he could hear it, so maybe there was something. I don't know why the other person couldn't just quietly move to an empty seat during the first piece instead of letting us all know he couldn't sit there. & I've mentioned the woman with clanging bracelets. I will self-righteously note that I was wearing several bracelets, only mine didn't clang, clash, or chime. At least this time there wasn't an idiot who brought his goddamn lapdog in, as happened at the Lawrence Brownlee concert.

The next & final concert in the series, which I am very much looking forward to, will be on 2 May. My write-up of the first concert is here.

San Francisco Performances: Gabriel Kahane's PIVOT Festival

Last Friday was the third & final night of San Francisco Performances's annual PIVOT Festival, held at Herbst Theater & planned this year by Gabriel Kahane, who performed along with the Attacca Quartet & Roomful of Teeth. The three nights felt like one long & wonderful concert.

The First Night: featured Kahane & the Attacca, who began with Ravel's String Quartet, but in a festival spirit of mixing things up, only the first movement; the remaining three were interspersed through the rest of the program. This was a refreshing way to hear what was easily the most familiar music of the evening; breaking the quartet apart gave us a fresh listen to each isolated movement & provided a spine for the rest of the pieces. The Attacca is a lively & intense bunch.

After the first movement came Red Letter Days, a song by Kahane. As with his other songs over the festival, no lyrics were provided. I was OK with this; I think it's within the bounds what an artist can ask of us, his audience. The advantage is that instead of reading along in our program books (or shuffling the pages noisily so we can find the lyrics), we have to commit to listening extra-closely. It does help involve the audience. The disadvantage, of course, is that we're probably not going to catch all the words, particularly if the text is somewhat dense. But even a broken text combined with music & expressive singing (Kahane sounds more like a folk singer than a classically trained singer, but his voice is pleasing) can give us the poetic image & mood.

The song was followed by Part 1 of Paul Wiancko's Benkei's Standing Death (Part 2 came in the second half), an instrumental piece commissioned by the Attacca based on a Japanese legend about the warrior monk Saitō Musashibō Benkei. It's very visual music, especially the second half, with the staccato strikes of the fatal arrows. Then Kahane sang another song, To Be American, followed by the second movement of the Ravel. The final piece in the first half was the world premiere of a revised version by Kahane of his string quartet, Klee, which did for me evoke the painter's strange, slightly surreal figures & patches of color. During the quietest part someone managed to drop an umbrella or something that landed with a loud bang. Other than that, the audience was, for the most part, well behaved.

After the intermission we continued along the path of the first half: first a song by Kahane (Little Love), then the third movement of the Ravel, then the second movement of the Wiancko, then the fourth & final movement of the Ravel, followed by the world premiere of a new arrangement by Kahane of Final Privacy Song, with lyrics by poet Matthew Zapruder, written for Kahane's wedding. He had the words framed up near his piano & finally decided he should set them to music. Again, a verbally complex & thoughtful piece, but the words came through with the music to bring the evening to a lovely & meditative close.

The Second Night: featured Roomful of Teeth. It also featured more talking from the stage than I like, but that does seem to be inevitable these days. The first piece was Caroline Shaw's The Isle; as Shaw is a member of the chorus, the composer was there singing with the rest of the group.  It started with sounds rather than words, murmurs & swells of sound, but when the words started appearing I realized that the isle in question was Prospero's; there were a couple of songs & a couple of speeches from The Tempest flowing along until the piece dissolves back into sounds. (It had been commissioned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC). This was followed by Movement 4 of Peter Shin's Bits torn from words, which the Roomful speaker described as "bonkers", which is a recommendation, I think. I'd love to hear the whole work. The first half concluded with Angélica Negrón's Math, the one which is sweet, which the Roomful speaker (sorry, I don't know which member of the chorus it was) described as a sweet & sassy long song. I would not have gotten any of those things from what I heard. There were ethereal sounds floating from an instrument (maybe a synthesizer?) over a thudding bass – not the sort of monotonous thudding you get with a lot of pop music; more like a stately progression of thuds. The words floated above that. I found it all . . . OK. Sort of a nondescript end to the first half.

The second half was excellent, though: Kahane's Elevator Songs, written so that each of the chorus's eight members had a spotlight number. I loved the variety in the chorus; the voices are obviously all different (though they also blend together quite well), but they each have an individual look. Some dance & sway while singing, others are still. The songs are Kahane's characteristic blend of empathy with off-kilter oddities, somewhere between comic & weird & sometimes very sad. Kahane mentioned from the stage that he wrote the piece specifically for these singers' voices, & it was conceived as sort of a theater piece: in other words, not just some songs strung together, but songs emerging from instrumental & vocal bits, focusing on different people who find themselves in this odd hotel somewhere out in America. A wonderful way to end that evening.

The Third Night: both the Attacca & Roomful of Teeth were on stage with Kahane. This was the best attended of the three nights, & the audience definitely was there (not just physically present, but in the sense "I am THERE for this!") for modern-music makers. We opened with Kahane's song Where Are the Arms, followed by the first of several pieces by one of the Couperins, this time Louis, the Unmeasured Prelude in D Minor, which, like the other Couperin pieces, was a keyboard work which Kahane arranged for string quartet. I love French baroque music & though it's customary & accurate to mention its elegance & sophistication, there was also a very deep sense of joy which the Attacca gave to it.

That was followed by the first of the four movements of Caroline Shaw's Partita for 8 Singers, which, as with the Ravel the first night, was split up over the program, providing a solid spine to it. I had not heard the piece before. It's wild & wonderful. You can hear everything from medieval church music to Tibetan throat singing reflected in it. It's like some loopy celestial chant from a gonzo monastery. That was followed by François Couperin's La Logivières, the second movement of Shaw's Partita, & another François Couperin piece, Le Tic-toc-Choc, & that ended the first half.

The second half was just as satisfying. Opening with the world premiere of Kahane's song Under a Tree, we then had François Couperin's Le Carillon de Cythère, then part three of Shaw's Partita, the final François Couperin piece, the Passacaille in B Minor (8e Ordre), & then the fourth & final section of Shaw's Partita. The concert, & the festival, closed with an arrangement by Kahane for the chorus & quartet of Paul Simon's American Tune. I don't know this song, but as with Final Privacy Song that closed the first night, it capped things off on a lovely & meditative note. Despite the ebullience on stage, that really was the best way to end a program that, to some extent, was trying to reflect a current American mood.

Kahane mentioned, from the stage & in his posted statements about the festival, that what he was mostly trying to celebrate with these evenings was a sense of community: community that comes from making, creating & performing, music together, & from gathering together in a specific space to listen to the people making these sounds. "Community" is not a word I particularly like or trust, but I saw what he was getting at, & he achieved it admirably & memorably. It will be a long time for me before these concerts fade into memory.

San Francisco Performances: Jonathan Biss & Echoes of Schubert #1

Last Thursday night I was at Herbst Theater for the first of three concerts pianist Jonathan Biss is giving for San Francisco Performances. The series is titled Echoes of Schubert & pairs a new work with pieces by, obviously, Schubert.

The program book said the first piece would be the new one, . . . Expansions of Light, for piano by Tyson Gholston Davis, followed by Schubert's Impromptu #1, but the order was switched without announcement, leading some members of the audience to be gratified at how melodically Schubertian the new piece was. I couldn't really blame them, as the idea of the series is that the new pieces will play off Schubert's. When Biss came out after a brief pause following the Impromptu, he explained that Gholston Davis's piece was actually conceived separately from the Schubert series, though it did seem appropriate as its creation was encouraged by San Francisco Performances, which has a long track record of encouraging new music & new creators. Biss mentioned that the more he studied & played the piece, the more he was impressed by its architecture & the meaning behind each choice of a note.

Gholston Davis wrote the program note for his piece. Instead of describing the music directly, he described the Helen Frankenthaler painting that inspired it, Winter Light. (There was no reproduction of the painting on stage or in the program book, but you can find one here.) His description of the washes of color & how they interacted with each other & with him proved to be just as, if not more, effective than the usual musical descriptions of sweeping first themes & playful rondos. He doesn't explicitly link his approach to or name it as synesthesia, though Biss did in his remarks, saying that composers & performers often use the word color metaphorically but in Gholston Davis's case it is more literal. Of course we can bring our own associations & memories to the colors we see or the sound-colors we hear. Both color & sound manifest meanings that ultimately are only found separately in separate individuals.

Expansions is a triptych, with the first & third movements titled Arietta 1 & Arietta 2, in reference to Beethoven's use of that operatic term in his later piano sonatas; the middle movement was titled Interlude in the program but the composer referred to it in his note as Caprice. Something of Frankenthaler's wintery light entered into the framing movements; there was a lot of space around the notes, & their reverberations dying into paleness fit with the frosty light of winter. Caprice is a better title for the middle movement, as it did swirl around in a more playful way than the other more crystalline movements. This piece is one of a series that the composer is writing inspired by Frankenthaler's works, & I hope we'll get to hear all of them.

After the intermission Biss performed Schubert's Sonata in C Minor, one of the three piano sonatas Schubert composed just months before his early death. In the program note he wrote for the booklet, Biss pointed out that Schubert, unlike another prodigy with an early demise, Mozart, was always haunted by thoughts of death (Biss specifically cited Schubert's first great song, the still-celebrated Erlkönig), & the final three piano sonatas explore different approaches to & feelings about the end. He felt the C Minor sonata is an expression of terror at the relentless approach of death. The performance was dramatic & poetic, like some Elizabethan tragedy. There was one encore, the Schubert Impromptu #3, which came on us like balm after the sonata. The audience was collectively swooning.

There are two more concerts in this series, on 14 March & on 2 May.

Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra: Elgar, Wu, & Tippett

Yesterday afternoon I was at Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley for the third & final performance by the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra of their latest program, Voices of War, a topic sadly as relevant as ever; in fact, as Music Director Ming Luke told us, though this concert might be seen as a response to the world's current conflagrations, these pieces had actually been scheduled years ago, only to be disrupted by the pandemic.

The first piece, Elgar's Sospiri, was a pleasant surprise, as it was not listed on the website description of the concert. It is a meditation for harp & orchestra, provoked by the First World War, & I'm surprised it isn't better known, as it is reminiscent of Barber's celebrated Adagio for Strings, with a similar dignified sense of mounting sorrow. Perhaps it's the piece's relative brevity, & its comparative emotional complexity (it doesn't build on a single subject as the Barber does, but moves meditatively around) that render it less suitable for public commemorations. It did seem a very personal statement, despite the large forces involved. I was glad to "discover" it.

The Elgar was followed by the wind blows full of sand, a setting by Sam Wu for chorus & orchestra of Li Po's Lament of the Frontier Guard, as rendered into English by Ezra Pound. Wu did not set the entire poem, but made effective use of large sections & fragments of it, which helped emphasize the dislocated & desolate effect of the work. The setting is bleak but beautiful as a desert is beautiful; waves of sound sweep forward, intersected with fragile, almost scratchy effects from solo strings. The chorus is sometimes united, sometimes halved, singing over & under each other in a sort of call-&-response way. as they contemplate the yellowing grasses & the chilly expanse of bones "white with a thousand frosts". As the words describe the imperial anger & brutal battles that left so many bodies to waste in this distant field, the music grows stridently martial, with the sort of harsh indifferent sarcasm of the marches in Shostakovich's symphonies. The battle recedes but the bones remain; the chorus's final word is forgotten. This powerfully effective piece was commissioned by the BCCO & given its world premiere in these performances. Wu was present & came on stage to an enthusiastic ovation. This piece wsa conducted by the group's Assistant Conductor, Samantha Burgess; Music Director Ming Luke directed the Elgar & the final piece, Michael Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time.

Tippett wrote the piece to express his profound anguish over the events surrounding Kristallnacht, but his aim was to write a piece about the universal underlying situation (the violence provoked by oppressing one group of people, including the violent force used to suppress their resistance) rather than the facts behind this particular situation: thus instead of Herschel Grynszpan, whose killing of a German diplomat in Paris was used as an excuse by the Nazis for a night of terror against German Jews, we have The Boy, & his Mother, & an unnamed power oppressing an unidentified people. They could be Jews, but they could also be Black Americans; the libretto mentions "pograms in the east, lynchings in the west", &, just as Bach used Lutheran hymns in his chorales, Tippett widens his musical & emotional net by using Black American spirituals for several of the choruses.

Tippett wrote his own libretto, at T S Eliot's suggestion. His lines may not have the rhythmic power of Eliot's work, but they make up for any lack of elegance with sincerity & directness, though that's not the same thing as simplicity; given his lifelong interest in Jungian psychology, Tippett references our shadow selves & other underlying psychological structures as he looks forward to some sort of future human reconciliation. Tippett's attempt in his libretto to create a universal situation certainly struck me as superior to Amin Maalouf's similar attempt for Adriana Mater, which has extraordinarily powerful music by Saariaho in the service of a clumsy & reductive libretto. Tippett was wise to write an oratorio, in which the action is interspersed with meditations / interpretations & suggestive emblems, rather than a more overtly dramatic opera.

The BCCO had certainly lined up a powerhouse quartet of soloists: soprano Brandie Sutton, alto Sara Couden, tenor Jonathan Elmore, & bass Kirk Eichelberger. Sutton sang her lines, which included The Mother's, with a soaring & anguished purity; Elmore was the plangent & earnest Son. Couden gave conviction & power to her meditations, & Eichelberger stentorian authority to his. The whole concert was pretty remarkable; I'll admit that I only recently found out about this group, though it's been around for nearly 60 years, &, as this program showed, it does excellent work.

The concert was free & open to the public, which is also a pretty remarkable thing, but though I understand the need to ask for money, I wish that particular speech had been placed somewhere other than right after Wu's piece, as it jolted us right out of the powerful effect he had created. We get bumped back into reality soon enough.

The program book mentioned that Tippett's use of spirituals in A Child of Our Time has "drawn charges of cultural appropriation". I find his use of them respectful & empathetic, & a way of incorporating the history of American racism as part of the universal struggle he is trying to depict. What's his alternative? Ignoring the oppression of Black Americans? Should he, a gentile from England, also not have been moved to compose by the plight of Jews in Germany? Cultural appropriation is a real thing, but also a complicated thing, & it's a term that gets tossed around more easily than it should, without much thought or distinction. The history of culture is the history of "appropriation": borrowing, outright theft, misunderstandings, re-interpretations, revisions, an empathetic realization that a culture that is not your own is saying something to you . . . The alternative seems to be a reductive insistence on a mostly imaginary cultural purity, & of course "cultural purity", unpolluted by foreign influences/appropriations, is a central tenet of fascism. & as the program also mentions, Pound, whose influential version of Li Po's poem was the basis for Wu's powerful work, was a fascist & an anti-Semite. Yet his version (or appropriation) of the Chinese poet speaks with harrowing truth about the effects of authoritarian violence, & Wu, an Australian of Chinese descent now active in the United States, made it the source for an excellent new work. It's a reminder that all we can do is try to make the best we can of a troubled & unsatisfying world.

San Francisco Contemporary Music Players: ArtZenter Emerging Composers Grant Concert

Last night I was at Herbst Theater for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players Emerging Composer Grant Program Round 2 Open Readings, a concert which was free & open to the public, held in cooperation with the ArtZenter Emerging Composers Grant Program. As far as I know, which admittedly isn't all that far, this ArtZenter Program is new (& very welcome); established by Tony Magee of The Lagunitas Brewing Company, it is designed to fund "the creation of new music by emerging composers that explores the power and grace of the traditional orchestral ensemble". As Magee put it in his remarks before the second half of the concert, he is hoping to discover "the next John Adams at 25". Six new scores were performed by the excellent orchestra, conducted by SFCMP Artistic Director Eric Dudley. The six composers were there & each spoke briefly before his or her piece.

I will note, irrelevantly, that I've always disliked the term "emerging" as applied to artists. It conjures up gummy, half-formed larval butterflies semi-emerged from their sticky sheaths. But that state of transformation & surprising development is characteristic of all artists throughout their entire artistic lives. Artistry is not static or stagnant. What are these composers "emerging" from? I assume the answer is really "obscurity", but that's classifying them in an art-world hierarchy that doesn't offer much insight into their art. They know who they are, as do their friends, families, & colleagues. They are, I'm sure, conscious that they're still developing, but already they're at a certain kind of peak, with achievements ready to be unveiled to the public. What I'll loosely & arrogantly call "serious art music", especially of the new variety, is already so marginalized in the United States (not to speak of other cultures) that any resplendently "emerged" fame needs to be seen in perspective (I've referred to the aforementioned John Adams & Nixon in China to educated professionals & received nothing but blank stares in return). I suppose "emerging" is better than "young", though the program did give us the birth years of the composers.

Anyway: I shouldn't carp about the name of an excellent & generous project, one which resulted in an excellent & generous concert. The first piece was Eye of the Earth by Yeoul Choi; she based it on three poems by her father, Minsik Choi, who had always wanted to be a poet though he ended up in a very different (unnamed) profession. The poems were given in the program in the original Korean as well as English translation; the first, I am the Wind, led to an initially soft & reedy sweep of sound that soon developed muscular force as it swept on, leading directly into the other two sections, Cosmic Dust & That Person Is. . . This piece struck me as very well balanced & just the right length. Second was Her Dress Waves by Craig Peeslee; waves plays off the use of the term in physics, as well as conjuring up a more seductive image of a woman's dress ruffled by a summer breeze (the Her who owns the dress is undescribed & was not mentioned by the composer in his notes or his talk). Peaslee mentioned that he was trying for a rippling spatial effect similar to that found on some stereo recordings (he mentioned Pink Floyd, but that's lost on me). He suggested that those in the center of the auditorium would experience the effect better. I was off to the side (I had been more centrally located, but a woman with some kind of scent that disturbed my unfortunately delicate sinuses sat right behind me, fortunately with enough time for me to move) but I could see what the composer was getting at. The first half closed with Not Another Word by Ben Rieke, a piece exploring the difference between our inner lives & what gets expressed, & seen, by others; that might make things sound too abstracted & philosophical but this was another intriguing piece, with moments of near-silent solos giving way to abundance, or (artful) confusion.

The second half opened with Before Dawn, by Sepehr Pirasteh, a work inspired by the traditional dawn song of the Ghashghai people, nomads who lived near the composer's native Shiraz in Iran, a sound & experience he linked to ongoing struggles against political oppression. It is a haunting, almost lumbering tune, passing as in a swaying procession, with an eerie edge to the sound. Interestingly, given the composer's linkage of the music to uprising & resistance, there is no triumphant or affirmative ending; it ends more or less as it continued (which is a frankly more realistic assessment of uprising & resistance). Next up was Beyond the Pacific Ocean by Eda Er. She is originally from Turkey & mentioned the vast Pacific as both barrier & protection from the person she had been in other countries. There was an interesting use of percussion in the piece; perhaps misled by Debussy I was assuming an oceanic invocation would swirl around the strings, but the percussion, which did evoke lashing waves, spoke to the strength of the ocean. The piece ended with several resounding thwacks on a large drum. The final piece was Snap by Cole Reyes. He spoke about the many emotional uses of music: sometimes you need loud & energetic, others soft & inward. Snap has emotional connotations & connections here (as in, he just snapped!). The piece fluidly went from one affect to another. It was a good way to end the evening.

Here's hoping all six composers can continue to do their work.