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.
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