At the end of last week, this site announced the plans of the San Francisco Opera (SFO) Orchestra to presented free community concerts. The first of those events was given last night at the Minnesota Street Project in Dogpatch. The performers included two different string quartets, three wind players, and a concluding ensemble of four violins and bass. Two of the selections involved vocal music in which the wind players took the vocal parts.
The program began with “Crisantemi” (chrysanthemums), which is probably Giacomo Puccini’s best-known instrumental composition. It was performed by the string quartet of violinists Jennifer Hsieh and Naoko Nakajima, Lindan Burns on viola, and cellist Rachel Ko. It was conceived as a memorial work for King Amadeo I of Spain, and the thematic material would subsequently find its was into Puccini’s Manon Lescaut opera. The players perfectly captured Puccini’s rhetoric of stillness, readily seizing the attention of the audience that surrounded them on all sides.
This was followed by Gustav Mahler’s song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (songs of a wayfarer). The quartet players were joined by Benjamin Brogadir on Cor anglais (English horn) performing the vocal line. The quintet presented an arrangement by Cliff Colnot and Stefan Hersh. This music was probably familiar to many of the listeners, at least some of whom could probably hear the words of the text (by Mahler himself) behind Brogadir’s solo work. The performance may not have had the no-holds-barred intensity of the composer’s score, but it still provided an absorbing account of a highly expressive narrative.
The quartet then accompanied the duo of flutist Stephanie McNab and Gabriel Young on oboe. This time the words transformed into instrumental music came from the text of the “Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’ opera Lakmé. The vocalists in the opera were a soprano and mezzo, and arranger Carrie Weick definitely made the right choice of instruments for those voices. It would probably be fair to say that most listeners know more about this music than about the words being sung, and such listeners would have been more than satisfied with this particular sextet arrangement.
Alberto Ginastera (photograph by Annemarie Heinrich, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
McNab and Young then departed from the vocal repertoire to play the one work on the program without any “vocal connections.” This was a three-movement duo for flute and oboe by Alberto Ginastera. He identified his final movement as a “wild fugue;” and he was not being modest about it! The composer’s Wikipedia page describes him as “one of the most important 20th-century classical composers of the Americas;” but I suspect that most of my generation knew him better by his name than by his music. I have to say that, last night, I deeply appreciated a rare opportunity for the music to take priority over the name!
The program then concluded with the “non-standard” string quintet of violinists Jennifer Cho, Dian Zhang, Barbara Riccardi, and Leslie Ludena performing with William Wasson on bass. This was my latest encounter with a new composer (Julian Milone) deciding to have his way with Georges Bizet’s Carmen opera. By now I have pretty much lost count of the many ways in which this opera has been reworked. My favorite is still the effort by David Hess and John Corigliano to turn the source into an “electric rock opera” in their album The Naked Carmen. I was reminded of this album because it included the Farandole from Bizet’s second L’Arlésienne suite, which Milone also appropriated for his Carmen Fantasy. To be fair, however, last night’s quintet was never as raucous as The Naked Carmen was!
For an encore, all contributing musicians joined forces for an engaging delivery of “To a Wild Rose,” from Edward MacDowell’s Opus 51 Woodland Sketches, providing a calming conclusion to an imaginatively diverse evening.
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