San Francisco Performances: Davóne Tines & Ruckus

Last Saturday I was back in Herbst Theater to hear bass-baritone Davóne Tines & Ruckus (who were joined by the Concert Choir of the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, directed by Michael Desnoyers), presented by San Francisco Performances, performing What Is Your Hand in This?, a program (to paraphrase the program notes) celebrating the tradition of dissent in American music, particularly as expressed through questioning this country's treatment of Blacks, from enslavement to Jim Crow apartheid to on-going racist attacks. So the program is a counter-narrative to the more jingoistic (& much more limited & historically blinkered, not to say blind) current celebrations of the founding 250 years ago of the USA. That the irony of the land of liberty holding (certain types of) humans as slaves has long been noted, even before the colonies broke away to form the United States (Samuel Johnson in 1775: "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?") does not make it less urgent to keep pointing out this irony; it seems in fact more pressing than ever, given our corrupt government's attempts to ignore long-time American realities. I had been looking forward to this concert. But what I experienced Saturday struck me as a mixed bag, & left me disappointed.

To start with more positive notes: Ruckus combines modern electric & early instruments, & I liked their free-wheeling approach to baroque music, which highlighted its connections with what is often called Roots music; they can switch easily from Handel to eighteenth-century hymns to Julius Eastman. Tines is always a commanding performer; he was elegantly dressed in a subtly mismatched suit of reddish brown, with a double-breasted jacket (with a very understated pattern of stripes formed by bouclé lozenges; not sure I'm describing this correctly, but the effect was very fine) worn in place of a shirt. He has an extremely expressive voice, & if there were a few rough patches, they passed quickly (he did seem to drink a lot of water during a performance that lasted only a little over one intermissionless hour, with no encore, despite enthusiastic applause; & a cold seemed to be afflicting members of Ruckus: one violinist in particular dropped a few tissues & had to cough into his sleeve a few times). The young chorus sang admirably.

The material was insightfully chosen, & I was delighted to attend a program that was entirely in English, allowing me to set aside (except for one or two brief moments) the printed words. The opening number, Stephen Foster's Beautiful Dreamer, was a particularly astute choice, nodding to the long-standing minstrel tradition exemplified by many of Foster's songs as well as to the dreamers of the beautiful dream of liberty & equality for all that floats, tantalizingly out of reach, over the American project. Tines sold the pretty & somewhat sentimental Victorian ornateness with smoothness & convincing conviction. Another superb choice, for me perhaps the highlight of the concert, was Handel's setting from Messiah of Why Do the Nations So Furiously Rage Together? It was a choice open to multiple interpretations, & I loved the way Tines & Ruckus stretched & played with the lines, varying from baroque ornaments to modern vocal techniques, devolving into emotionally convincing sonic ruptures that caught the never-ending historical cycles of the nations dissolving, changing, & continuing to rage furiously.

So what went wrong, at least for me? To start with, the performers were all amplified. That amplification is an increasingly common & even unquestioned occurrence doesn't make it any better as an experience. Herbst is a small enough theater so that I always have to wonder why amplification is necessary: if your voice or your playing can't fill that space, you probably shouldn't be performing professionally, & if you're drowning out (or drowned by) other performers, you as a group need to work on balances. Ruckus did have some electric instruments, but I've heard those incorporated into ensembles without the need to jack up everyone & everything else (& if that can't happen, maybe just drop the electric instruments?)

Amplification flattens the sound & removes its spatial sense, distortions which, even when or if they're subtle, undercut the experience of live music, those elements of the chance & the human. I sit in the first row for my SF Performances concerts, & usually there's an immediacy & intimacy that comes from such proximity that makes it worth the trouble & expense of buying a ticket & going out, rather than just staying in & listening to a recording. On Saturday I felt the electronic pulpit raised above my head, the music & the words talking down to me.

But I've been to other amplified concerts at Herbst, & generally I can adjust. On Saturday, though, there was also a lot of the sort of obligatory audience participation that I – I'll go with dislike. After his opening song, Tines said Good evening & paused, then repeated a bit more firmly Good evening. Evidently we were supposed to respond, as if at a party. Enough did so that he gave a little smile & said he just wanted to see if we were alive. Is enforced participation genuine participation? Intent, silent listening is, I would think, all the sign of life a performer can really want (& more than many of them get). We were told, at times, to clap in rhythm. We were told to sing a chorus, then to sing it again. We were told to raise our hands if we thought we were living in – I think he said odd times? whatever the exact term, it struck me as a bit cutesy & entirely inadequate to the perilous times burning around us. It's been about a decade since the corruptions of American culture suppurated into our current President; did Tines think we hadn't noticed? that we weren't distressed? that we had never expressed our complicated feelings before we were asked to raise our hands? Why do performers so frequently use these coy evasions ("these days", "our times") instead of directly naming the fascist Republican Party? What was the point of making us literally raise our hands, as if most of us aren't thinking night & day about the rotten state of things? What does it accomplish if we raise our hands? We then just put them back down, & continue doing what we were doing before.

The clapping, the singing, the hand-raising: maybe that sort of group activity works more effectively on other people than on me. (I'm not implying that this makes me superior in any way; it may well be a drawback of mine). I do not identify with groups, maybe in particular with other members of an audience. (This audience was actually better than many, but as usual, a woman sitting near me created dazzling amounts of noise shuffling her program during the performance, & a trio of annoying children not only rustled & whispered during the show, they got up, walked out, & then returned disruptively.)

I'd say I have an instinctive aversion to this sort of forced audience participation, but on Saturday I realized that maybe it is learned, as the on-going instructions from stage flashed me back to school days, particularly to the cheerful coercion of post-1968 high-school civics teachers, expecting us, as students & therefore idealists, to produce the correct, high-minded answers to whatever social question was posed. And I basically agree with all those high-minded liberal pieties. But I couldn't help noticing, as a student, that many of my fellow students who were readiest to produce the acceptable answers (the loudest yelps for liberty. . . ) were the same ones who, an hour later during lunch or recess, were going to continue to ridicule & pick on me. I was given frequent reminders of the disjunction between what people feel they need to say to please their teachers & how they actually treat others when the teachers are away. The appropriate & bien-pensant & regurgitated replies seldom connected with anyone's actual actions.

I felt that again on Saturday, the sense that we are there to hear information & to react in a certain way as if we'd never heard it all before, repeatedly, & that this is all sort of a ceremony that we go through that is set apart from what we mostly do in our lives. Tines introduced some songs with a bit of a lecture about the conditions of slaves & slave-owners (as a side note, I was mildly surprised he said "slaves" rather than the more nuanced & nowadays more frequently encountered term "enslaved people"). Of course we've all heard this before. It doesn't get less horrifying, & the ironies don't lessen. As I said at the beginning of this post, these things still need to be said. Repetition is emphasis, & some things need to be emphasized. Are the people who need to hear these reminders, though, the ones who go to art-song recitals in San Francisco?

As a thoughtful & sensitive Black artist, Tines is almost obliged to say these things. And we, as an audience (mixed, but mostly white) attempting to be thoughtful & sensitive, are almost obliged (&, let me add, also often sincerely willing to) react in a certain way. But it all ends up feeling a bit . . . comme il faut? ceremonial? performative? ritualistic? a Dantean whirlwind we can never escape? a Beckett scene of rote statements & standard responses that will play out endlessly in an unchanging landscape? What was new here? (Did anything need to be new here?) Was I just put off by the amplification, & the silly attempts to get the audience "involved" in a way other than by paying attention? Was I just having an off day for some unrelated reason? Had my anticipation been high enough so that disappointment was inevitable?

Another highlight was the song that provided the program's title: What Is My Hand in This? Tines wrote the lyrics, & before the performance started I had read the program note (the notes in general were attributed to Tines & Ruckus) on this song:

"The idea for the song 'What is My Hand in This' came from an invitation to be part of the entertainment at a Christmas party in one of New York City's wealthiest neighborhoods. Davóne took this as an opportunity not to entertain, but to speak directly and imploringly to a room of the 1% with the subtext 'You in this room have the power to affect great change, so what is your hand in contributing?'. The tune borrows from Black American folk tradition." 

With that context in mind, I was surprised at how effective the song was. Because while it was bold of Tines to add this questioning number to his Christmas program, it was perhaps part of the effect, to be expected, if you are the sort of extremely wealthy person who can hire professional singers for your holiday parties, & you choose to hire a Black singer celebrated for his unconventional, thoughtful & often politically conscious choices, that he is going to bring some of the fire next time directly to your hearth. After all, a reminder no matter how subtle that you should, as they say, check your privilege is a reminder that not only are you, compared to most, incredibly privileged, you might even be the gold standard for privilege. There's a subtle, if unintended, form of flattery there. I thought the song might land a little differently at a public concert of miscellaneous schlubs, some of whom had made a financial sacrifice to buy a ticket.

So, as I said, I was surprised at how effective the song turned out to be. In its simple, direct words, it asks us to consider, as we go about our business, what part we play in what's going on around us: what is our responsibility, or our role, or our connection? Questions, not answers, about our individual share in our collective existence. Unlike the clapping in rhythm, the singing along, & other mandatory fun-type activities imposed on us, the audience, as an undifferentiated group, this song asked us to examine, as individuals – the only way in which such questions can be seriously considered, as the answers will be different, often profoundly different, for each of us – how we are linked to our world & our times, & what can we do about it. I think about this topic a lot, & have come up with little in the way of a satisfactory response. Perhaps there is no satisfactory response, & the continuing questioning is the best we can do (or is that just another excuse?)

Was that the sort of direct, individual, thought-provoking moment I needed more of? Was I just a bit burnt out by the burning dumpster fire of our moment? Did the gimmicky participation stuff & the distancing amplification undercut the good moments too much for me? My reaction to this concert bothered me. I feel I should have liked it more, if only out of solidarity & respect with what the artists were trying to do. Did it just hit me at a certain point of information overload? I have struggled with finding & expressing the sources of my disappointment. I can't say Saturday's concert, despite my anticipation, really brought anything new to my thoughts or feelings. I emerged neither energized nor inspired, but exhausted & (more) depressed.  The fault may, of course, be mine.

Benjamin Appl & James Bailieu: Homage to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Baritone Banjamin Appl & pianist James Bailieu recently made a return visit to Herbst Theater & San Francisco Performances with their latest program, For Dieter: The Past and the Future: Homage to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Appl was one of the great lieder singer's final pupils, & considers him a mentor, & he has put together a substantial & rewarding CD set to celebrate his centennial, filled with photographs & information about Fischer-Dieskau & including Appl's renditions of songs associated with different phases of the older baritone's often difficult life. The program at Herbst is similar to that on the recording, but with some differences in arrangement& repertory.

Usually the Herbst stage is, Steinway aside, bare for these recitals, but in this case there was the addition of a stand holding a copy of one of Fischer-Dieskau's self-portraits. Appl & Bailieu both came out, dressed with an unusual formality these days in white tie & tails (though Bailieu was also wearing some stylishly striped socks, though in muted colors). I wondered if the somewhat old-fashioned attire was part of the tribute to a giant of an earlier era.

Between the carefully selected songs, Appl & Bailieu gave us the basic facts of Fischer-Dieskau's life. As he came of age during the Second World War, we obviously start in tumultuous & troubled times; I did not know that he had a disabled brother who was murdered under the Nazi's eugenics policies. Fischer-Dieskau, always a musical child, began singing frequently when he was a prisoner of war in an American-run camp in Italy, after the collapse of the fascist regimes.

Fischer-Dieskau's musical achievements approach the legendary; though I never heard him sing live, his recordings of lieder & opera formed a basic part of my musical self-education. I can't even remember how or where I first heard of him; I just knew that his name on a recording was basically a seal of artistic integrity & therefore the disc would be worth buying & listening to repeatedly. These achievements were, it seems, not mostly mirrored in his private life, which seems to have been marked by depression, self-doubt, & other emotional struggles. He seems to have used such emotions as a spur to keep working & refining his art, though perhaps I should say his arts, as, in addition to singing, he produced an astonishing number of paintings. (Sometimes I think that good time management might be the key skill in life.)

Appl related several of his personal encounters with his mentor, including the last time the two met; I will quote Appl's words from the CD set: "The last time I visited Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in his house on Lake Starnberg was just a few weeks before his death on 18 May 2012; it was important to him to explore Schubert's Hafner-Lieder once again, The themes of these songs include a longing for death, isolation, and reproaches to the gods after a tragic life. He was depressed and his mood was dark; he often fell asleep briefly during the lessons or began to cry. I sensed that this was the last time I would be able to see him."

There were also less somber stories, including one about Appl arriving for a lesson & Fischer-Dieskau coming out to meet him & announcing that he & Julia [Varady, the soprano who was his final wife] had been discussing it at breakfast & they had decided that "Benjamin Appl" was too complicated a name for an international career, & he should now go by "Ben Appl". Appl told us he refrained from responding, "Very well, Mr Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau." What struck me as very amusing about this story was that Fischer-Dieskau's objection was to the younger man's first name, which is fairly common in the English-speaking world & in any case not very difficult, instead of to his last name, which computers struggles with, as it seems to lack the final e necessary for autocorrect's acceptance. People do get hung up on funny things.

Appl sang with a velvety warmth & an attention to meaning that would have given satisfaction to his mentor. The whole recital was clearly sincere & loving & deeply meaningful to the performers, emotions they conveyed to the audience (which thankfully refrained from unnecessary applause that would interrupt the flow of song & anecdote). Most of the pieces were in German, as you might expect, but as we neared the end there was one item in English, the mysterious & evocative setting by Fischer-Dieskau's friend Benjamin Britten of William Blake's Proverb III: "The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship." It's a sentiment that may give some insight into how Fischer-Dieskau managed through life, though the delicately suspenseful, even eerie, music undercuts any possible sense of hearty comradeship.

One interesting bit of information is that the most significant lieder set for the baritone was not Winterreise, as you might expect, but the Brahms Vier ernste Gesänge Opus 121 (Four Serious Songs), a meditative setting of Biblical texts from Ecclesiastes, Sirach, & First Corinthians. (We were given a lovely Der Lindenbaum from Winterreise earlier in the program.)

One significant different between the order of the night's program & that of the CD was the placement of Schubert's An die Musik; this act of profound thanksgiving for the "Blessed Art" opens the recording, but closed the concert. It was preceded by Schubert's Litanei auf das Fest Allerseelen (Litany for all Souls), a prayer for rest for the weary who have passed through life. Together the two songs acted as a summation of the often anguished, always dedicated musician whose art & life we had spent the evening exploring; these two last songs spread over the auditorium like a final benediction. I thought of Larkin's famous lines about the jazz trumpeter Sidney Bechet: "On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes. . . ."

For the encore, Appl first read a long passage from the diaries of Fischer-Dieskau's wife about his first visit to San Francisco (I think this was in the 1950s), a narration of outward triumph but inward risk & uncertainty, as Fischer-Dieskau suffered a few vocal blips but nonetheless triumphed with critics & audience, though he was distressed & anxious enough to leave the theater while the German Consul was looking for him. The final song was another item in English, the folk song The Foggy, Foggy Dew (I assume in Britten's setting, as tribute to their association). Appl's English diction is remarkable, & his telling rendition of the song was both witty & mournful. I wondered if the choice of that particular piece as the encore was a tribute to the celebrated fogs of San Francisco.

San Francisco Performances: Conrad Tao

I was back at Herbst Theater last Friday, as San Francisco Performances was presenting pianist Conrad Tao, & before I fanboy about the concert I'm going to describe what he wore.

Tao came out in a black suit & white shirt. But the trousers were elegantly baggy. And the white shirt was a fitted tanktop. I could tell it was a tanktop because his black jacket had large lozenges cut out beneath the armpits, flashing a bit of flesh. This struck me as ingenious as well as bold: less constriction in the shoulders / upper arms, as well as ventilation (Tao is a very physical player). He wore black shoes & a necklace of relatively large beads, which sometimes looked tan in the light & sometimes olive green.

So why do I mention his outfit? First, because it's rare & refreshing to see a male performer wearing something so unexpected (why should Yuja Wang get all the pianist fashion coverage?). Second, it's because the outfit struck me as an apt metaphor for the concert: outwardly standard, but . . . with a twist.

The "standard" part was Rachmaninoff, & I left the concert feeling that the composer was more interesting than I had given him credit for. The concept, as Tao explained to us – he spoke from the stage frequently, & for once I found it enlightening rather than irritating – was "The Rachmaninoff songbook": an exploration of the connections between the Russian exile & the American pop music of his day (which would be jazz, Broadway, tinpan alley): how they influenced him, & how he influenced them. The rich, melodic, moody music of Rachmaninoff plays well with the elusive moods & bittersweet turns of American pop (back before it turned into the corporate-run sludge machine it is now – only my opinion, of course).

Tao began with three Rachmaninoff preludes (in C major, Opus 32, #1; in A flat Major, Opus 23, #8; in G Major, Opus 32 #5), played with both architectural strength & emotional resilience, followed by Billy Strayhorn's celebrated Take the A Train. As mentioned, Tao is a very physical player; he rises up off the stool, sometimes hums along, taps his feet (even apart from working the pedals or tapping the iPad to change the electronic page). After this first group Tao thanked us for being there & explained the concept of the evening. Then, as he was about to start the second set, he said he had forgotten to tell us that though the pieces were often going to flow into each other, we should feel free to applaud whenever we felt like it. I braced myself, but the audience, as a pleasant surprise, though it did applaud whenever, had the good sense & good taste for once not to trample on the music with intrusive applause.

The second set opened with In Buddy's Eyes from Sondheim's Follies (this was the most recent piece performed, though its setting, a reunion of aging Follies girls, long after both their youth & the Follies have disappeared, fit right into the period, as did its ambivalent emotional message). That was followed by Auf einer Burg (instrumental only) from Schumann's Liederkreis, which I had heard from Mark Padmore & Paul Lewis just a few weeks ago (write-up here).  This is the song about an old knight, a stone knight, silently watching the quiet, rain-washed valley below; a wedding party is sailing by down on the Rhine; the musicians play merrily, but the bride is weeping. A quiet, stately song, with a wistful pang at the end. The set closed with Rachmaninoff's Étude-Tableau in A minor, Opus 39, #2. A twilit set of emotional ambiguity, played with clarity & emotional force by Tao.

Perhaps the talk from the stage worked better (for me) this time because it was clearly built into the program, not some sort of obligatory outreach foisted on someone who'd rather communicate through music. In fact "Artist Discussion" was built into the program as listed in the program book.

The next set opened with Irving Berlin's All by Myself, a surprisingly energetic & jaunty piece for such sad lyrics (denial? delusion? smiling through the tears? a plucky American refusal to give in to life's sorrows?). Tao had clued us into the lyrics, which was useful, as no one hearing the bright, ragtime-ish tune would guess it was a lament. This was followed by Tao's muscular improvisation on Rachmaninoff's famous Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Variation 15. (Tao is a composer as well as pianist.) Tao plays with strength, but also poetry & finesse, as exemplified in the delicate filigree of the next piece, Harold Arlen's Over the Rainbow as transcribed by Tao from a 1953 recording by Art Tatum. The poignancy of the original came through the elegant dissonances of this version. That was followed by Variation 18 of the Paganini Rhapsody, & the set closed with Strayhorn's poignant Lush Life, & here was a surprise: Tao sang it as well as played it. His voice is strong & expressive. I'd call it a cabaret voice, & if Tao decides to add cabaret artist to his achievements as pianist, composer, & fashion plate, I will follow along. Given the number of songs played without their lyrics, from Schumann to Sondheim, it was interesting for the artist to choose this song as the one that needed its lyrics for full effect. Perhaps it's something about the fleetingness of life  the sense of love followed hard on by loss, & still enjoying the beauty of it all that made it resonate in the context of the evening.

The first half closed with Daisies, a song by Rachmaninoff, Strayhorn's Daydream, & Rachmaninoff's Étude-Tableau in C minor, Opus 33, #3. I guess I've been thinking of Rachmaninoff as one of those composers glommed onto by people who resist any whiff of the 20th century (even now, well into the 21st). This concert convinced me I have been foolish in my opinion, & I need to go into the CD collection & start listening again, with cleansed ears.

All of that was the first half! Which ended with many in the audience already standing to applaud. The second half was a single piece, Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, Opus 45, as arranged for solo piano by Inon Barnatan. It's a compelling piece (if I've heard it, it was too long ago for me to bring any thoughts or let me say preconceptions to this performance), in three movements, originally intended as a ballet score. Though the original section titles (Noon, Twilight, & Midnight) were dropped by the composer, you could, if you were so inclined, & had read the information in the program book, see some reflections of the jettisoned titles in the music.

There was one encore, after Tao gracious thanked us once again for staying & for being there for what he described as a "long evening" (I did not feel it was too long!): we were given the song Full Moon and Empty Arms, which was set to music lifted directly from Rachmaninoff. Once again, Tao sang the piece, which expresses the wistful, wishful mood of much of the evening's music, as well as perfectly showing the connections between the classical composer & his fellow musicians in adjacent fields. It was an excellent choice as closer, & rounded off the concert beautifully.

San Francisco Performances: Jeffrey & Gabriel Kahane

Last Friday I was back at Herbst Theater for a dual concert with the Kahanes, père & fils, presented by San Francisco Performances. It was actually their season-opening gala (sort of, as it was preceded by a couple of other concerts), though I was there only for the concert (there was a dinner which was a separate ticket). In fact when I bought my ticket last spring I'm not sure I realized it was part of a gala. I just like the Kahanes.

Gabriel emceed with his usual genially askew humor. He started by saying he was surprised when the gala was suggested to him, as he didn't think he had that level of glamorous renown (my phrasing, not his), until he realized that maybe if you put him together with his father the combination was enough to qualify as a gala host. And indeed most "galas" feature big star performers, usually in something light &, this is important, short. That's one reason I generally avoid galas. But having the Kahanes host is offbeat enough to say good things about San Francisco Performances, & their attitude, both serious & playful, to what they do: expect musical surprises & artistic pleasures, not boldfaced names & fancy attire (actually, a lot of the audience was more dressed up than the performers, who wore basically black jeans & long-sleeved t-shirts, which is what I was wearing, so I did not feel out of place).

The program was mostly announced from the stage. As the concert slipped into the "past performances" archive on SFP's website, it was not updated with the playlist, as I had thought it might be, so I'm going  by memory here. They opened with three "composed folk" songs, sung by Gabriel to piano accompaniment by Jeffrey (& I apologize for the obnoxious use of first names, but it seems like the easiest way to distinguish them under the circumstances). The first was by Bob Dylan. I didn't recognize that, or the others, though I liked them.

Gabriel referenced the current insanity under which we live with some musical settings of the words of Robert F Kennedy Jr. He prefaced these by quoting the latest bit of wacky WTFery from that source: that autism (which the Secretary seems a bit obsessed with) is caused by circumcision. (Which is why all Jewish men & many of us gentiles are autistic – my joke, not Kahane's –sorry if it's in bad taste, but it's difficult to know how to react in face of the firehose of free-associative madness we're sprayed with daily.) Gabriel has a bit of a specialty in these witty & appealing settings of found texts, as witness his celebrated Craigslistlieder & his Fleischlieder. This set lived up to their predecessors. One was a parody of the much-parodied William Carlos Williams poem apologizing for eating the plums in the icebox (so I guess not quite a found text in this case) & another was a setting of RFK Jr's admission or boast about having a brainworm. It was epic.

Jeffrey played several short pieces on piano. There was a Mendelssohn "song without words" (which could describe a lot of the piano pieces; both the classical & the folk-ish fit in beautifully with each other). I think there was also a Schumann piece? We had what Gabriel referred to as the lightning round, in which the two men traded off piano solos, segueing seamlessly from one to the other, fortunately without intrusive applause (the audience was attentive & appreciative, which also set this apart from other "galas"). I think it was right before or after this that Jeffrey told Gabriel that his iPad (Gabriel's, which his father was using) had locked out & all the passwords he guessed (birthdates, &c) had failed. I couldn't tell at first if this was an entertaining bit of business or, you know, reality. It turns out it was the latter. In a bold move, Gabriel gave his father the password out loud on stage. I forgot it immediately (I'm not a numbers guy), so if any of you happen to end up with Gabriel Kahane's iPad, you're on your own breaking the code.

There was a long song to a text by Matthew Zapruder. Very appealing, though it was dense & long enough so that it was difficult to take it all in on first listen (this is far from a criticism, by the way). I think then Jeffrey played one of the Schubert Impromptus.  Then came the only officially announced portion of the program: the world premiere for two pianos of one of the movements of Heirloom, a piano concerto Gabriel had written for Jeffrey. There was a funny & charming story attached to the movement's title: during the pandemic, Gabriel's very young daughter would only eat chicken, & she used to play in a pretend vehicle her mother had made out of a big cardboard box. So the movement, which was bright & sprightly as well as funny & charming, was named Vera's chicken-powered transit machine. (The original piece has been released by Nonesuch records so you can hear the whole thing, & let's support our artists by buying their art!)

There was one encore; Gabriel announced he would leave us with some Joni Mitchell. She is loved by many whose opinions I respect (including, apparently, the Kahanes) but I do not hear what they're hearing in her. I decided I would try to listen with neutral ears, as if I had not heard the name. I don't know if I succeeded in that or not, as I found it the weakest piece of the evening. No harm done, as it had been an engaging & interesting 90 minutes. The respect & love between father & son was palpable & it was a pleasure sharing in their music-making.

San Francisco Performances: Mark Padmore & Paul Lewis perform Schumann

San Francisco Performances opened its season with an all-Schumann program, performed by tenor Mark Padmore & pianist Paul Lewis. I am always happy to hear all three gentlemen.

The first half opened with the Four Hans Christian Andersen Lieder, Opus 40, followed by Liederkreis, Opus 39; after the intermission (which Padmore charmingly referred to in the British way as "the interval"), we had Dichterliebe, Opus 48 – as the opus numbers might tell you, all 33 songs we heard were composed in roughly the same period: according to the program, 1840, the year Schumann finally managed to marry Clara Wieck. Despite the officially happy circumstances of the composer's life at the time, many of these songs are haunted & afflicted with loss. Make of that what you will; of course there is the old warning about answered prayers, but the inner creative impulses of the artist don't always reflect his outer circumstances, even for the Romantics. How could anyone expect something titled Dichterliebe – poet's love – to be straightforwardly happy?

After the opening Andersen lieder, Padmore spoke briefly about the affinity Schumann felt for the writings of that odd spinner of tales. He also mentioned that Schumann was basically a pianist, & we should think of the songs not as verse set to music but as music with words attached. The pellucid playing of Lewis was indeed a highlight of the evening, sparkling & insightful.

With his finely etched features & patriarchal silver beard, Padmore looks like a High Gothic sculpture of one of the prophets, which lends an interesting dimension to some of the songs, such as the solemn conjuration of Cologne Cathedral in Dichterliebe. It seemed to me, with my very limited knowledge of German, that he pointed the words with expressive power, plaintive when needed, thundering on occasion. (I would very much like to hear him sing a program entirely in English.)  The usual adjective applied to British tenors, reedy, doesn't seem out of place; I find it a pleasing quality. And though I have heard these songs sung with more plush tones, given the intellectual & aesthetic integrity & emotional commitment displayed here, the merely plush can seem almost a limitation of what the music contains.

As Padmore pointed out, it's difficult to come up with an encore that could follow Dichterliebe, so he sang one of the four songs that were strangely omitted form the official compilation: Dien Angesicht.

I found it all very satisfying, though the woman behind me managed to make astonishing amounts of noise with her program. I really don't understand this. All the songs are printed there, in the order in which they're sung. Why the endless flipping, folding, searching, creasing, crackling? What is so hard to find? As I was leaving, I heard her say to someone, "That was a nice way to end the week" so I felt kind of bad about my irritation.

San Francisco Performances: Ilker Arcayürek & Simon Lepper

Last Thursday I was back at Herbst Theater for tenor Ilker Arcayürek's all-Schubert recital for San Francisco Performances, with pianist Simon Lepper accompanying him. The repertory was similar to his recent recording The Path of Life, & as explained by the singer, the songs were chosen to illustrate the arc of a life: from Love to Longing (I appreciate that that is the order there) to The Quest for Inner Peace to Resignation to, as a final touch, Redemption. In the Before Time I heard a number of recitals by women that traced the arc of a woman's life & I wanted a man to do something similar, & that was the tenor's plan here.

Arcayürek did an excellent job darkening his voice as the arc progressed, starting with the lively initial numbers, several of which centered around fishing, for some reason (I suppose it is a bucolic & sporty activity; the songs certainly sounded youthful & optimistic), then moving on to the more spiritually searching numbers as well as the emotionally wrenching discovery that one is not loved. There was an intermission, but I wish there hadn't been, as it would have been wonderful to experience the emotional journey straight through. Redemption was a single song, sort of an afterlife lagniappe, Des Fischers Liebesglück, which neatly ties back to the theme of fishing, as well as love & transcendence; the song leaves us "up above / on another shore".

The first song of The Quest for Inner Peace, Die Sterne (The Stars), was particularly touching in its serenity. Of course someone in the audience had to intrude on the moment by applauding (even though the program clearly asked us to hold our applause until the end) & whoever it was didn't even have the respect or taste to wait until the last notes of the song had died away. The one encore, Nacht und Träume, was another inward & contemplative number; as Arcayürek said to the audience while introducing it, the end of The Path of Life is . . . the end (meaning, of course, death) so he wanted to leave us on a more uplifting note.

A very satisfying recital! It was interesting to note that for the second performance in a row (I was at Herbst a week earlier for Jonathan Biss's Schubert concert), a lot of the intermission talk I overheard concerned the SF Symphony's failure to sign Esa-Pekka Salonen for another term. It was understandable the first time, as the news had broken just a day or two before, so it was interesting that it continued into another week. It is a mistake on the Symphony's part that is going to keep on rippling outward for quite some time, I fear.

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: Lawrence Brownlee & Kevin Miller

It's always a pleasure to welcome Lawrence Brownlee back to the Bay, particularly in recital (this is his third for San Francisco Performances), as I believe his most recent appearance at the Opera (just across the War Memorial complex from Herbst Theater, where he performed on Thursday) was in that unworthy vehicle Don Pasquale, which is my nominee for Worst Opera Libretto of All. Brownlee was accompanied by pianist Kevin Miller, & provided a wide-ranging evening with a dazzling number of long-held as well as soaringly high notes. He must have been exhausted by the end, particularly as he mentioned jet-lag from just flying in from the United Arab Emirates, but he gave no signs of any exhaustion, physical or vocal, & the enthusiastic audience was clearly energized by the art & athleticism on display.

He opened with a set of five lieder by Joseph Marx, one of those late Romantic composers who eschewed Modernist innovations, preferring to dwell among the increasingly old-fashioned (at the time) dappled uncertainties & tumescent longings of the last century's turning. The songs were lovely & unfamiliar, though their subject matter was certainly reminiscent of Lied-Land: linden blossoms & longing, nights of love perfumed by roses, dell-dancing sprites, nostalgia & hope. The set opened with Nocturne, proceeded to Selige Nacht (Blissful Night), then Die Elfe (The Elf), Christbaum (Christmas Tree) – a recollection of childhood memories of Christmases past, with a delicately icy accompaniment reminiscent of traditional carols hovering over it – & finally Hat dich die Liebe berührt (If Love Has Touched You), ending on a note of personal affirmation.

After this set Brownlee spoke to the audience; he is a genial & chatty host. He gave us the background for the second set of songs, which would complete the first half: during the pandemic, as he considered new projects, & in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, he conceived the idea that became his recent album Rising, a collection of new songs by Black American composers based on Harlem Renaissance texts (at least, those in the public domain; for copyright reasons, he wasn't able to include Zora Neale Hurston). For Thursday's concert he added a number related to but not officially part of the project, a setting by Jeremiah Evans of Langston Hughes's April Rain Song, a lyrical evocation of Spring showers that formed a nice aesthetic contrast to the sloppy weather that has been sweeping through the Bay Area the past few days.

We also heard Peace, an imploring invocation by Jasmine Barnes to a text by Georgia Douglas Johnson, I Know My Soul, a stirring setting by Brandon Spencer of a text by Claude McKay, Vocalise III by Carlos Simon, a lively & tricky number that Brownlee introduced with a pause, saying he needed to start counting; Beauty That Is Never Old & The Gift to Sing, two settings by Damien L Sneed of texts by James Weldon Johnson, the first an intimate evocation of the sheltering strength of personal love & the second a hopeful proclamation of the power of art, in this case song, to see us through life & its many difficulties. Then we had Romance by Shawn E Okpebholo, a setting of sweet & erotic words by Claude McKay, which Brownlee introduced by saying that while tenors like him can vocally go high, they don't always live high, but this song required him to live up there: again, there was no sense of strain as he stayed up in those heights, & that elevated tessitura gave a heady & on-rushing sense of romantic passion to the setting. Finally we had a setting by Joel Thompson of My People by Langston Hughes, a Whitman-like celebratory catalogue celebrating Black American life that included a wonderful sort of laughing chorus at the end. It wasn't necessary to follow along in the texts, so exemplary & telling was the singer's diction.

It was during one of the quieter moments of  this final set that someone in the audience dropped I don't know what, but it made a very loud sound as it landed. Other than that audience annoyances were mostly of the "very excited" variety, as in the two old biddies a few rows behind me who kept squealing at the long-held high notes. The most egregious audience offense, though, was the old clown who tried to sneak into the seat behind me during intermission with his dog. Yes, a goddam dog. & no, this was not a service animal (he didn't even claim it was an "emotional support" animal, not that I accept that that is a real thing that needs to be foisted on other people, particularly in a concert hall). I cannot even begin to understand the sense of entitlement there. I made it clear that his goddam dog was not welcome near me.

So now we reconvene for the second half of the recital, in which Brownlee explored the Italian operatic repertory for which he is famous. He coupled an aria with a song by four composers: Verdi, Donizetti, Rossini, & Bellini. Brownlee of course is celebrated for his mastery of the bel canto line; he has amazing breath control, but he also can summon an expressive quality, often plangent, that shapes the virile core of his sound. I should also mention the attentive & powerful accompaniment by Miller throughout; there was a lot of byplay between the two performers & they clearly have a simpatico working relationship. From Verdi we had Ad una Stella (To a Star), followed by a ringing & witty version of La donna è mobile, the Duke's ironic aria from Rigoletto. From Donizetti we had the song Me voglio fa'na casa (I Want to Build a House), followed by Allegro io son (I'm so happy) from Rita. Before introducing the Rossini duo, Brownlee noted how important that composer has been to his career, &, as it was Leap Day, wished him a happy birthday. The Rossini song was La lontananza (The distance), one of Rossini's Sins of Old Age, & the aria was D'ogni piu sacro impegno (Then, let all faith be broken) from L'occasione fa il ladro; as with the Donizetti, it was enjoyable to hear something a bit unusual rather than one of the more obvious greatest hits from this composer. The final numbers from our Italian quartet were Bellini's La ricordanza (Recollection) & Nel furor delle tempeste (In the fury of the tempests) from Il pirata. Brownlee & Miller reminded us why Bellini was famed for flowing & beautiful melodies. There was one encore, Someone's Crying Lord, Come by Here, whose pleas for heavenly help for the afflicted are accompanied by a surprisingly jaunty tune. It was a rich & generous evening that Brownlee & Miller gave us.

San Francisco Performances: Raehann Bryce-Davis

After my three days at Gabriel Kahane's Pivot Festival for San Francisco Performances, I was back at Herbst Theater for the fourth night in a row, this time for SFP's presentation of the San Francisco recital debut of mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis, accompanied by pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers.

The recital's general theme was In Honor of Women, & the first half had a woman composer setting a male poet (Amy Beach / Robert Browning) & then a male composer setting a female poet (Wagner / Mathilde Wesendonck). Beach's trio of Browning poems was commissioned by the Browning Society of Boston. They are brief but wonderfully varied; from the very first one, The Year's at the Spring, it was immediately apparent that Bryce-Davis uses words very expressively. She was looking very glam in an ivory sheath covered with light-catching strings of beads, some of which hung loose from the arms. The effect was warm, rich, & striking, sort of like her voice made visible. She had Cilliers speak an introduction to the Wesendonck Lieder, as she was one of those who had been urging the piece on Bryce-Davis. The performance was commanding & intimate. The piano accompaniment was poetic but I felt at times perhaps a bit underpowered, but then the mezzo's voice is an attention-grabber. As the man behind me said more than once, "She's got some pipes on her."

After the intermission, Bryce-Davis came out in a new but still glam look, a sparkly black sheath with broad white stripes running diagonally down the front. Cilliers also had a new outfit, which fit around her like a gilded lily. Both were designed by Bryce-Davis's fiancé, whose name I unfortunately did not catch. [UPDATE: His name is Allen Virgo, & thanks to Lisa Hirsch for the information; click here for her blog entry with a link to her review of the recital.]

The second half was all twentieth-century material, most of it contemporary, though it started with two earlier pieces, Birth, a setting by Margaret Bonds of words by her friend Langston Hughes, & Florence Price's The Crescent Moon, a setting of words by Louise C. Wallace. The on-going rediscovery of Price's work is one of the more exciting concert-hall developments of the past few years. These songs were followed by Melissa Dunphy's Come, My Tan-Faced Children, which revises a section of Whitman's Pioneers, O Pioneers! as a song of Black empowerment. This was written for Bryce-Davis, as was the next series, three songs by Maria Thompson Corley: Black Riders' Freedom Song (written as a tribute in particular to the Black cowboys of the American West), The Beauty in My Blackness, & I Am Not an Angry Black Woman. The latter in particular was a whole dramatic monologue, allowing Bryce-Davis to display, once again, her considerable dramatic skills, covering moods from speculative to wistful to defiant.

By now it was clear how gorgeous & big Bryce-Davis's voice is, but also how emotionally open & engaged her whole personality is. I had seen her in the Met Opera livecast last fall of Anthony Davis's X: The Life & Times of Malcolm X, & I am eager to experience her live in opera. The recital closed with three elegant & lively settings of Jamaican folk songs made by Peter Ashbourne, in tribute to the mezzo's Jamaican mother. As she & Cilliers both said, you can't sing in honor of women & not acknowledge your mothers.

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.

Dido Reimagined: Upshaw & the Brentano String Quartet at SF Performances

Last Thursday, on an evening that fortunately for me was a pause between the fierce storms pounding California, I went to Herbst Theater to hear Dawn Upshaw & the Brentano String Quartet in a beautifully chosen (& beautifully played) program titled Dido Reimagined. The first half featured early modern British composers (Henry Purcell, Matthew Locke, John Dowland, Thomas Tomkins, William Byrd, Robert Johnson); vocal numbers alternated with instrumental, culminating in Purcell's great lament from Dido & Aeneas, When I Am Laid in Earth. The second half was a new monodrama composed for Upshaw & the Brentanos, Dido Reimagined: A Response to Purcell's "Lament", with music by Melinda Wagner setting a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann. San Francisco Performances was the presenter.

Most of the numbers in the first half were relatively brief. After the first one or two, about a third of the audience started applauding after each piece. It's nice that people want to show appreciation but I wasn't wild about this – to me it interrupted the flow & mood of the performance. At least there wasn't that weird tension you sometimes get in concerts between people who insist on applauding after movements & those who support the old "no applause between movement" rules (personally, I like the rule, as I find the applause often, as I said, disrupts the flow & mood, & insisting on applauding seems like audience members imposing their own views in a "look at ME!" way on people who perhaps are there for other reasons – I'm not going to get too worked up about it, though; there are plenty of other things to be annoyed about).

The intricate melancholy knots of this intimate music were (with the usual irony of art born out of sorrow) a joy to hear under the Brentanos (Serena Canin & Mark Steinberg on violin, Misha Amory on viola, & Nina Lee on cello). I wish more string quartets would explore this repertory. Upshaw entered with the quartet (the first number was the song Oh Let Me Weep from Purcell's The Fairy Queen) & instead of exiting & re-entering for the songs she stayed on stage with them throughout, very presently listening, a nice bit of staging that helped create an unbroken & collaborative atmosphere. Unfortunately, contrary to their usual practice, SF Performances did not provide the words to any of the vocal numbers, & though some of them (Dido's Lament, obviously) are familiar, others are less so, & it was sometimes difficult to follow the poetry. This is not a comment on Upshaw's excellent articulation, it's just a reality of the human voice – the higher you go, the more difficult it is to convey words clearly.

Upshaw, of course, is a beloved long-time star among singers, & the qualities for which she is justly beloved – her intelligence, her adventurousness, her commitment to words & music, her generosity in communication – were all present. It's also true that her voice, particularly at the beginning of the evening, was audibly frayed, though less so as the evening wore on (perhaps as she got warmer & more into it?). In the second half, the new piece written for her, she sounded stronger. I have been to some late-life concerts from other beloved artists that were difficult & depressing to listen to, so great was the decline from their athletic prime – I did not feel that here. If anything, for me the signs of aging in her voice resonated with the program's themes of loss & mortality & contributed to the theatrical & thematic power of the performance.

The lack of a printed text was a definite disadvantage to the new piece, which is intended as a re-vision of Dido's story, turning away from the narrative of a woman killing herself over a man's lost love towards one of a woman healing herself. The first lines are "I am not dead / I did not die" & Wagner sets them so that I - I - I is repeated several times over flickering figures – so you get a sense of a woman both asserting her individuality & trying to pull it together. There is a sense of reconciliation with the self at the end (though I couldn't quite make out if the last line was "she [Dido] is live" or "she is loved". In between – well, as I said, it was difficult to follow without the words. I did not get a significant sense of development in words or in the music, however consistently attractive it was. It seems Dido is on a long post-break-up voyage; there are passing references to such non-classical items as the Port Authority & lobster ships, so we seem to be somewhere off the Northeast coast of the United States. There is a long passage referencing the myth of Callisto, transformed into a bear & then into the constellation Ursa Major, which led to a reference to Saint Ursula & her 10,000 Virgins. It was difficult not to feel that the roughly 40-minute piece was a bit meandering.

For a work that takes a determinedly contemporary view of Dido, there is a weird absence of any consideration of her as a political or executive figure: while she's out meditating on love & loss as an act of empowerment & self-healing, just who is ruling Carthage? What force is rushing into that power vacuum? In Dido's case, the personal is definitely political, but this re-imagining of Dido simply removes the political dimension, creating in place of the powerful Queen of Carthage what seems like a modern middle-class woman going through a bad break-up, which, as we all know, is rough, but we also know that, given the polemical point here, she's going to – she has to – come through her troubles with renewed strength. What exactly is at stake?

You can't really rewrite Dido as "not a victim" unless you first reduce her, in her earlier manifestations, to simply a victim, & that I think is not how the character has ever come across. If I'm remembering the Aeneid correctly, Dido has the last word, or rather, the last refusal to speak: when the Roman hero goes to the Underworld, she walks past & disdains to acknowledge him – to use a violent & apt phrase, she cuts him. & of course in Purcell's opera she memorably has the last words, with the emphatic instruction remember me. I doubt anyone walks out of that opera thinking that Aeneas is a great guy & Dido a weakling; the emotional affect is too complex. Berlioz's Dido goes out in a blaze of magnificence. These are all intensely memorable, deeply moving moments. Yes, we go in knowing how the story ends, but each telling reaches that end in a different & revealing way.

To make an obvious point: wandering around working on self-healing lacks the dramatic punch of setting yourself on fire. The former is no doubt a better way to live life, & the impulse to rewrite traditional narratives to examine their assumptions about power is a socially useful & generous one, but you end up with a kind of eighteenth-century moderation & rationality that doesn't really explore the deeper stranger recesses of the psyche, & can seem emotionally out of step with our cataclysmic times.

in which I salute San Francisco Performances

San Francisco Performances announced their upcoming season today. Their offerings are varied and interesting and high-quality as usual (check them out here), but right now that's not my reason for saluting them. My reason for saluting them is their new start times for evening performances: check them out; nary an 8:00 start in the bunch, but all 7:00 or 7:30.

I have already mentioned before and described at length why I feel the once-standard 8:00 evening start time is outmoded, at least in the Bay Area, so I won't rehearse all that again here except to say that BART's recent announcement that for the next year and a half or so, due to retrofitting in the tube, all transbay trains after 10:00 PM on weeknights would be delayed by an extra fifteen-twenty minutes added some urgency to my feeling that weeknight 8:00 start times just weren't working for me anymore (most people I know had given up on them years ago). An 8:00 start time puts all the BART riders right into the delays; with 7:30 starts the problem is avoided.

Live performance is up against a lot of competition in this age of downloadable and otherwise instantly available entertainment, so organizations need to cast as wide a net as possible for their audiences. Forget the social-media flavor-of-the-month; this move to a more accommodating hour is the sort of innovative approach and fundamental rethinking (and the sort of adaptation to present realities) that organizations need.

So San Francisco Performances, consider yourself saluted. I look forward to seeing who else follows their lead.

Kate Royal gives a lesson in love

Several Saturdays ago I headed down to Herbst Theater to hear Kate Royal in recital with Malcolm Martineau, presented by San Francisco Performances. The concert had been rescheduled from last season (or the season before? time does get away. . . ) when Royal had to cancel her tour (someone told me later that it was because she had learned she was pregnant). Shortly after the cancellation we ticket-holders received, courtesy of Ms. Royal and EMI, an apologetic note and a copy of A Lesson in Love, the CD recording of the program she had been scheduled to sing. I thought this was not only a clever way of whetting our appetite for her return, but a lovely and gracious gesture, but then lovely and gracious are adjectives that tend to attach themselves to Royal.

Royal arranged the program in four section that are meant to chart the emotional progress of a woman's life: from Waiting to The Meeting to The Wedding to Betrayal. I can see several reasons why a contemporary singer would not want to end such an arc at the wedding, but even so I found it kind of amusing that the inevitable end is Betrayal. Well, as they say, it's funny because it's true, I guess. The program begins and ends with Bolcom's Waitin', though after the emotional journey of the evening the effect is not so much of circling back to the beginning as of launching a new and deeper cycle.

The songs come from a wide variety of composers, some familiar to recital aficionados and some less so (in addition to Bolcom there was Schumann, Wolf, Liszt, Debussy, Schubert, Tosti, Canteloube, Copland, Beach, Ravel, Faure, Richard Strauss, Duparc, Brahms, Britten, Sibelius, Hahn, and Herbert Hughes), and they are in a variety of languages (mostly English, French, and German). This may sound like a hodgepodge but it all flowed smoothly, with a beautiful emotional logic. Within the four main groups each song delineates a subtly separate emotion. In the first group, after Waitin'. there's Schumann's Jemand (Someone) in which the girl is awake, dreaming of someone she loves; he is distant and possibly unaware of her existence, but she is devoted to him and asks Heaven to protect him - it's a very spiritual, emotional kind of love. That is followed by Wolf's Die Kleine (The little girl), in which she starts off with a sort of fairy-tale description to her mother of three young huntsmen on three shining steeds, then she moves closer to home, saying that when Father returns he and Mother can kiss, but she has no one to kiss, but when she's a woman she will have, and she'll kiss all night long - so this song transitions from a more purely emotional and even childlike view of love towards physical longing. Then this set closes with Liszt's Es muss ein Wunderbares sein (There must be something wonderful), in which the girl (sounding more mature now, combining the spiritual and emotional with the physical) longs to be absorbed in a love that will last through to death. The same care was taken in arranging the other sections.

In the Meeting section, Wolf's Erstes Liebeslied eines Madchens (A maiden's first love song) made some in the audience laugh, for reasons that sort of escaped me. I say "sort of" because - well, first let me explain about the song. A young fisher girl checks her net and she has caught either a tasty eel or a dangerous snake, which wriggles in her hands and twists to her breast and bites her and "blissfully burrowing . . . will be the end" of her. So I assume the audience members who laughed were responding to the obvious phallic symbolism. But the song is really - and I think this is also obvious - about the panic, excitement, and fear of a girl both aching for love and fearful of what it will do to her, tangled emotions that Royal conveyed in a very convincing manner. This doesn't strike me as a particularly comic emotion, but maybe some people are more amused by young people's panic and confusion than I am. Maybe they don't remember what it's like. Moments like that are why I frequently feel bemused by my fellow audience members.

The song after that, Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel), was the most haunting version I've ever heard. I had it going through my head for days afterwards: the subtle emphasis she put on words like nimmermehr ("never"), the slowly building sense of desperation, the hypnotic rhythms of Martineau's piano. To me it was the high point of a moving recital. I only wish there had been surtitles instead of the printed programs; the immediacy of surtitles would have helped a lot given the variety of languages and the specificity of each song's emotional content. The encore was a limpid Danny Boy, and there may be those who can resist that song, but I am not among them.

A to Z

glances backwards and forwards. . . .

Some of my favorite concerts feature artists performing their own music. San Francisco Performances had a wonderful one last year: an evening of music by poet and composer Lera Auerbach, with Auerbach herself on piano, joined in the first half by Alisa Weilerstein on cello and soprano Lina Tetriani. I was particularly interested in this concert since I had been bowled over by The Little Mermaid at San Francisco Ballet (Auerbach composed the score). Her music is lyrical and direct and strong. She also has the gift of being able to talk to audiences about her work in a way worth hearing. The first piece, Last Letter, joined all three performers. The text is from Marina Tsvetaeva's poem Novogodneye (New Year's Greeting). Poetry is notoriously what gets lost in translation and I think I hear this said more about Russian poetry than any other and about Tsvetaeva's poems in particular perhaps most of all. Music is another, and possibly more successful, way of translating poetry.

Auerbach started by telling us a bit about the poem and then reciting it in English (I would have liked to have heard it in Russian as well, but you can't have everything). Tsvetaeva wrote it shortly after the death of Rainer Maria Rilke, which was around the 1927 new year. The two poets (as well as Pasternak) had been engaged in an intense correspondence in the year or so before Rilke's death. Auerbach mentioned the suffering of the Russian poets, and because Russian and poetic suffering is such a monumental "thing" with us, a cultural trope, a number of us laughed knowingly, which didn't seem to faze Auerbach, but I was immediately ashamed of myself; who am I to chuckle at the tremendous historical sufferings I have been spared? Auerbach recommended the collected correspondence to us, and I procured a copy as pleasant penance for my smug Americanness. Anyway that piece was followed by the Sonata for Cello and Piano, Opus 69, the second movement of which, the composer informed us, uses a theme associated with the Little Mermaid in the ballet. The second half of the concert was Auerbach solo, playing her Twenty-four Preludes for Piano, Opus 41. She has composed three sets of such preludes for different instruments (I think the others are for viola and cello, but I might be mistaken) and told us that San Francisco Performances was the only place in the world that had presented all three sets (I know I heard one other at a different concert, but I somehow missed a set). Altogether a wonderful concert.

Then last May I heard the season closer of the New Century Chamber Orchestra, which seems to be having a golden period right now, under music director Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg. Though they are a chamber orchestra they have such a full, rich, and even lush sound - lush yet precise. The concert opened with Grieg's delightful Holberg Suite, whose backward-looking elegance led nicely to the second piece on the program, Commedia dell'Arte, a world premiere by that season's featured composer, Ellen Taafe Zwilich. The first three of the four brief movements are named after famous commedia characters - the trickster clown Arlechinno, his beloved the lovely Columbina, and the boastful Capitano; the fourth movement, Cadenza and Finale, brings them all together. I thought it was a delightful piece, much fresher than actual commedia performances, with amusingly different instrumentation for each movement - for example, a toy drum for the Capitano, which captures his spirit perfectly.

After the intermission came a gorgeous performance of Schoenberg's gorgeous, emotionally rich Verklarte Nacht, and, to close out the ensemble's twentieth anniversary season, the Happy Birthday Variations by Peter Heidrich, in which the eponymous tune is played in the style of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, and Dvorak, and then as a Polka/Waltz, as film music (of the Waxman-Korngold era), as ragtime, as a tango, and then a czardas. The composers and styled are listed in the program but it's actually fun to guess what you're hearing, and though I usually loathe any variation on a guessing game I didn't cheat by looking at my program. That was fun, and the concert was near my companion's birthday, so she had a little serenade. As an encore they played a chamber-orchestra version of "Nimrod," from Elgar's Enigma Variations, which Salerno-Sonnenberg referred to as the most beautiful music in the world.

The connection between these two concerts is that, just as Zwilich was last year's featured composer for NCCO, Auerbach is this year's, with a world premiere coming next May. (More information on that here)