Vox Humana SF Announces Second Season

Don Scott Carpenter leading the debut performance of Vox Humana SF

Following up on its debut this past February, Vox Humana SF, the a cappella choir led by its Artistic Director Don Scott Carpenter, has planned two concerts in San Francisco for the coming season. The first of these will be performed only in San Francisco, and the other will “tour” to Belvedere and Healdsburg. City Box Office has created a single Web page for both of these events, which includes specific information about the music to be performed. However, here is a basic summary of what to expect:

Friday, November 8, 7:30 p.m., Grace Cathedral: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s a cappella All-Night Vigil, a setting of the Vespers service, will be performed in its entirety. The will be preceded by two selections by Dmitry Bortniansky, the first Russian to lead the Imperial Chamber Choir when he was appointed in 1796. He composed a series of “concertos” for this ensemble. The program will begin with the eighteenth of these, a setting of Psalm 92 (“It Is Good To Praise the Lord”). He composed seven pieces under the title Kjeruvimskije pjesni (cherubic hymns), the last of which will be performed after the Psalm setting.

Saturday, February 15, 7:30 p.m., St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: Voyages will be a much more diverse offering. The program will begin with the earliest composition, the “Gloria” setting from the 1597 Sacrae Symphoniae collection by Giovanni Gabrieli. The newest will be “God’s World” by José Daniel Vargas and “Paklalakbay” by Robin Estrada, both of which will receive world premiere performances. Other recent compositions will be by Joan Tower (“Descending”), Jake Heggie (“Stop this Day and Night With Me”), and Jacob Mühlrad (“Ay Li Lu”). The nineteenth century will be represented by Fest- und Gedenksprüche, Johannes Brahms’ Opus 109 cycle of three motets for mixed double choir. This will be complemented by one of Gustav Mahler’s settings of a poem by Friedrich Rückert, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’.”

Christmas from the 16th to the 21st Century

Last night Herbst Theatre hosted the third program in the current season of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale entitled Six Centuries of Christmas. The original plan was that the span of time would extend to the immediate present with the world premiere performance of a commissioned work by Roderick Williams, but that composition was apparently not completed in time for performance this month. Instead, the six centuries were spanned by two composers with almost exactly the same names: John Taverner (1490–1545) and John Tavener (1944–2013).

This turned out to be an engaging pairing. Each of the two composers had his own way of creating sacred music in a polyphonic setting, but there was a shared rhetoric of intricacy in the play of multiple vocal lines. It is worth noting that, for all of my interest in early music, which has involved several encounters with Taverner, I realized that, thanks to the Church of the Advent of Christ the King, I have been able to enjoy selections of sacred music by both the those composers.

This was only the first of several pairings in the organization of the performance. Two of those pairings were family-related, serving to conclude both the first and second halves of the program. The first of these began with the all-too-familiar canon and gigue coupling by Johann Pachelbel, followed by a Magnificat setting by his son Charles Theodore Pachelbel (who happens to have been one of the first European composers to move to the American colonies, making a career for himself in Charleston, South Carolina). The second pairing began with a sonata for three violins by Giovanni Gabrieli, followed by another Magnificat setting by his uncle Andrea Gabrieli.

The Gabrieli coupling was, in turn, preceded by a Russian coupling. Like the Gabrieli coupling, it was presented in reverse chronological order, beginning with the “Rejoice, O Virgin” movement from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 37 All-Night Vigil. This was followed by the “Cherubic Hymn” from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 41 Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

The other composers represented on this program were Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Antonio Vivaldi (a solo violin concerto composed for the Christmas occasion), Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, and Johann Heinrich Schmelzer. The program was led from a harpsichord keyboard by Music Director Richard Egarr. Valérie Sainte-Agathe prepared the Chorale. The overall result was a celebratory occasion that was as joyous as it was informative.

The SFS Holiday Brass Concert at Davies

Following up on this past Sunday’s Chamber Music Series program, last night’s program in Davies Symphony Hall was entitled Holiday Brass; and, as should be intuitively obvious, the program featured the brass musicians of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). They were joined by a few “guest artists,” also SFS players: Edward Stephan on timpani, percussionists Jacob Nissly, James Lee Wyatt III, Bryce Leafman, and Stan Muncie, and Principal Bass Scott Pingel. The conductor for this occasion was Edwin Outwater. The program featured one original composition and arrangements for different forms of brass ensembles, following up a basically “classical” repertoire with a jazz offering.

That offering was a brass-based arrangement by Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins of a “seasonal offering” from Duke Ellington’s book. In 1960 Ellington decided he would devote an entire program to the music of another composer for one of his Las Vegas gigs. That composer turned out to be Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Ellington worked with Billy Strayhorn to prepare arrangements of movements from Tchaikovsky’s score for The Nutcracker. The result amounted to a new Nutcracker Suite, complete with alternative movement titles. Higgins extended his brass arrangement of Ellington’s full-band instrumentation to include a rhythm section of bass (Pingel) and drum kit (Nissly).

Only four of Ellington’s nine movements were performed last night. The overture was followed by the “Dance of the Floreadores” (based on the “Waltz of the Flowers”), “Sugar Rum Cherry” (a new name for the Sugar Plum Fairy), and the “Peanut Brittle Brigade” march (mistyped in the program book as “Peanut Butter Brigade”). The original Ellington-Strayhorn version, of course, involved more than brass and rhythm; but Higgins had selected those particular movements for holding up to a brass-only version. This served as the final offering on the program, and it certainly involved performance at its liveliest.

Mind you, this conclusion complemented the program getting off to a lively start. As might be expected, this involved an overture performance; and the selection was Peter J. Lawrence’s arrangement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 96, entitled “Festive Overture.” This allowed listeners to adjust to the sonorities of brass and percussion in the absence of strings and winds, but there were no shortcomings in last night’s raucous account of this overture. The same could be said for Higgins’ arrangement of Sergei Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé suite (which gave trumpeter Mark Inouye a generous opportunity for exercise, performing offstage solos from the rear of the Terrace section).

Higgins’ arrangements of three movements from Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sacrae Symphoniae were not credited in the program. These selections were taken from Sacrae Symphoniae tracks recorded by the National Brass Ensemble, consisting of “26 busy musicians from the top nine orchestras in seven stages.” All three of the movements involved antiphonal exchanges between two brass choirs, each with its own unique complement of instruments.

The only one selection on the program that was not an arrangement a three-movement suite by Anthony DiLorenzo, who composed the music for the documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway. The title of last night’s suite was The Toy Maker, and one could easily associate each of the movement titles with the toy being depicted. As might be guessed, the enthusiastic audience demanded an encore after the “nutcracker sweets.” They got Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” complete with the final horse-neigh delivered by trumpeter Inouye while wearing a horse’s head. Those hi-jinks were followed by a more traditional conclusion with an arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne.” We then all filed out into the “cold winter’s night” warmed by the high spirits of the evening.

National Brass Ensemble at Davies

Last night the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) presented a concert by the National Brass Ensemble (NBE) in Davies Symphony Hall. This group consists of the finest brass players in major orchestras across the United States. In last night’s performance they were joined by two harpists, three percussionists, and one organist. Those resources were mustered for The Ring, an arrangement by Timothy Higgins (SFS Principal Trombone) that constitutes a synopsis of the four operas of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (the ring of the Nibelung). The score was structured in four movements, one for each of the operas.

Skeptics might compare this undertaking with the trick of getting a dog to walk on its hind legs. However, those familiar with Wagner’s version would probably acknowledge that Higgins had clearly familiarized himself with the underlying narrative, as well as the score that Wagner himself had written. Personally, I suspect that anyone that has become acquainted with Wagner’s version would not have faulted Higgins for the excerpts that he extracted and wove together to offer a musical account of the basic narrative that cuts across all four operas. Last night’s performance also benefited from the talents of a first-rate opera conductor. The entire evening was led by Eun Sun Kim, Music Director of the San Francisco Opera.

The first half of the program served up two world premieres. One of these, entitled simply “Brass Fantasy,” was composed by Arturo Sandoval, who was in the audience for the occasion. The music was relatively short but consistently engaging. Sandoval took his bow from his seat in the audience, allowing the performers to enjoy the center of attention.

The other world premiere was “DEIFIED,” composed by Jonathan Bingham. The music was basically a study of palindromes, the title being the first of them. The idea of forward-and-backward reflections was an appealing one, which Bingham explored at a variety of different levels. Nevertheless, the result came across as music that may have looked very good on paper but never quite registered with attentive listening. To be fair, however, listening to palindromes is not a particularly easy matter. There is even a mathematical argument, based on automata theory, that explains the difficulty; but that argument is beyond the scope of those interested only in listening to the music!

The program began with a stimulating account of the fanfare that Richard Strauss composed for the first benefit ball to be held by the Vienna Philharmonic in 1924. At the other end of the program, NBE turned to their only album released thus far, consisting entirely of music by Giovanni Gabrieli. They selected the final track of the album, the second composition entitled simply “Canzon per Sonar.” The next album will be forthcoming, since all of its content was being recorded last night in Davies.

Richard Strauss’ Opacity of Metamorphosis

The return of the full brass section of the San Francisco Symphony may have been the highlight of last night’s program in Davies Symphony Hall; but the “keystone” of the program was the seldom performed “Metamorphosen” by Richard Strauss. This work is distinguished for having been composed for 23 solo strings (ten violins, five violas, five cellos, and three basses). It was composed during the final months of World War II and commissioned by Paul Sacher, the founder and Director of the Collegium Musicum Zürich, which gave the first performance on January 25, 1946. Strauss was present for the occasion and had conducted the final rehearsal.

As may be suspected from the instrumentation, this music is significantly thick in its textures. Arrangements were made last night to prepare a video account of the performance; and, if ever there was a composition in which the eye needed as much guidance as the ear, this is it. Whether or not Strauss bore in mind that the biological process of metamorphosis is frequently opaque will be left for the reader to decide. The larva caterpillar spins itself into it pupal enclosure before its transformation into an adult butterfly; and one can probably make a case that the transformations that unfold in “Metamorphoses” take place at a “deep structure,” which is “hidden from view.”

The author of the Wikipedia page for “Metamorphosen” leads the reader through the abundance of thematic references in Strauss’ score; but that description does little to sort out the “surface structure” from any “deeper” foundations. Personally, I prefer to take the caterpillar-butterfly approach to the overall “journey” through the score. The “larva” is the stepwise descent from G to C in the minor mode, a motif that should be easily associated with the second (funeral march) movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major. The butterfly that emerges at the conclusion explicitly quotes the first four measures of that funeral march in what amounts to the clearest thematic statement of the entire composition. While there is an abundance of material between beginning and end, the textures are so thick that the music could just as easily been locked into its own pupal enclosure.

The reader should be able to appreciate that I have yet to encounter an audio recording that does justice to this music. Salonen’s account last night in Davies provided my first experience in which things just began to make sense. Given that the duration is roughly half an hour, the journey through this music is far from a walk in the park. While I continue to feel more than a little frustrated with this music, I have to confess that, in the midst of last night’s video gear, I am most curious to see whether the addition of video can enlighten the listening experience.

Cologne Cathedral as seen from the Rhine (photograph by AtmikaPaul, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Far more accessible was the instrumental richness of the final work on the program, Robert Schumann’s Opus 97 (third) symphony in E-flat major. Schumann was inspired by a trip to the Rhineland; and the symphony is often known as the “Rhenish.” There are no end of musical references to the churning flow on the Rhine, along with an evocation of the Cologne Cathedral, situated near the banks of the Rhine.

Whatever the composer may have had in mind, however, last night’s performance was, for all intents and purposes, a celebratory declaration that the full complement of brass players had returned to Davies. Cologne Cathedral made its appearance in the fourth movement with the luscious chorale rhetoric of the trombone section, and the horn section never missed an opportunity to seize the metaphorical spotlight. All of that enthusiasm made for a scrappier account of the score than one might usually expect; but there was no doubt that the audience, as a whole, loved every minute of it.

On the other hand those of us interested in “the music itself” got to enjoy three selections for two brass choirs composed by Giovanni Gabrieli and arranged for contemporary instruments by SFS Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins. The two groups of players were situated behind the opposing Side Terrace seats, making for a viable approximation to the polyphonic exchanges one would have encountered in St Mark’s Basilica during Gabrieli’s tenure there. Equally impressive were the polished homophonic passages through which one could appreciate the “heavenly” blending of brass sonorities in different pitch registers.

The brass players are back, and their return was most welcome.

SFCM Brass to Perform 2019 Hoefer Prize Winner

2019 Hoefer Prize winner Alexandra Vrebalov (from the event page for the concert being previewed)

Traditionally, the winning composition for the annual Hoefer Prize has been performed at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) under the aegis of the BluePrint program and presented by the SFCM New Music Ensemble. The prize is awarded each year to an SFCM graduate; and the winner for this year is Alexandra Vrebalov, from the class of 1996. The title of her winning composition is “A Wonderful Panorama of the Heart;” and it was scored for brass choir. As a result, this year’s performance of the prize-winner will be given by the SFCM Brass Ensemble, consisting of student players of instruments in the brass family.

The group will be conducted by Trombone Faculty Member Paul Welcomer; and Vrebalov’s composition will be preceded by Robert King’s arrangements of two selections from the Sacrae symphoniae of Giovanni Gabrieli, the second “Canzon septimi toni” and the “Sonata a 8.” The intermission will be followed by Welcomer’s arrangement of Gustav Holst’s A Moorside Suite. The program will conclude with a performance of “Eastwind” by Jean-François Michel, scored for solo trumpet and trombone with brass ensemble. The soloists will be faculty members Mark Inouye on trumpet and Nick Platoff on trombone.

This performance will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, November 6, at 7:30 p.m., in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall. The SFCM building is located at 50 Oak Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni Station. There will be no charge for admission, but reservations are recommended. Reservations may be arranged online through a hyperlink on the event page for this concert.

SFSYO Takes on a Challenging Premiere

Yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) confronted the challenge of presenting the world premiere performance of “… within the shifting grounds …,” written by Iranian composer Anahita Abbasi on a commission involving collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). This was an ambitious undertaking. Most likely every member of the ensemble had to contend with mastering alternative performance techniques required by the score. In addition the composition had a significant spatial dimension, which required that many of the players be distributed across the available space afforded by the interior of Davies Symphony Hall.

Fortunately, they had the benefit of guidance from a variety of additional resources. Three of the ICE players, violinist Jennifer Curtis, bassoonist Rebekah Heller, and trombonist Michael Lormand were involved in the spatial distribution. (The other ICE performer, saxophonist Ryan Muncy, was part of the on-stage ensemble.) Presumably, all of them have had to draw upon alternative performance techniques for many works in the group’s repertoire; and, hopefully, that meant that they could provide coaching beyond what could be offered by members of the San Francisco Symphony.

On the other hand over the course of the full program of this afternoon, those of us on audience side learned several times that Wattis Foundation Music Director Christian Reif believed emphatically that every performer should have the capacity to listen to all the other performers. Clearly, where separation across significant distances is involve, merely hearing others may be problematic; but when the score itself departs so radically from past performing experiences, escalating the act of hearing to one of listening is even more problematic. Furthermore, just to be fair, that act of listening can easily be just as problematic for the members of the audience as it is for the players.

Fortunately, there are usually at least some on audience side that are better prepared than others. Those familiar with groups such as the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) or Earplay will probably have some familiarity with at least some of those alternative performance techniques; and I still have vivid memories of one SFCMP concert in which the spatial distribution of the players was as engaging as it was significant. Nevertheless, the question remains as to just what the composer of a new work expects to gain from drawing upon such factors as part of the act of creation. This is the real rub behind any world premiere, and I would like to submit humbly that it is rarely the case that even the most attentive listener is prepared to take on that question after listening to the piece only once.

As an aside, Philip Glass upped this ante even higher. In his memoir Notes Without Music he stressed how important he felt it was to be able to experience two distinct productions of any new opera he created. He has set himself a rather demanding standard, but I suspect his reputation is strong enough to allow him to live up to it. However, I think the important point is that Glass himself could not really assess a new creation until he had experienced multiple points of view of it.

Thus, from the limited perspective of one who has experienced only a single performance of  “… within the shifting grounds …,” I have to say that I do not yet feel equipped to offer any value judgements of either the composition or how it was performed. I can say that, while the performance was taking place, I found myself thinking of earlier ground-breaking efforts by composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage; but I have long held to the precept that listening-in-the-present cannot avoid being informed by listening-in-the-past. All I can say as a sincere listener is that Abbasi has tweaked my curiosity enough that I hope this will not be my last contact with her music. On the other hand, as an observer of SFSYO, I feel that preparing this piece must have been a really valuable experience with practices that were probably entirely unfamiliar before these performers encountered their parts.

That issue of players listening to each other was further reinforced by Reif preceding the Abbasi premiere with five pieces, each for a small number of players. This was his way of emphasizing to both SFSYO members and the audience just how much listening to the others matters to him. To be fair I would say that his objective was satisfied with mixed success. For all of its thorny dissonances, the seven brass players, all of whose instruments were muted, presented a vibrantly convincing account of Carl Ruggles’ “Angels;” and I suspect that the success can be attributed to the role that each player contributed to maintaining just the right blend of these seven harshly distinct parts. On the other hand the double brass choir performances of the selections by Giovanni Gabrieli were less convincing, probably because both the polyphony and the variations in dynamic levels were far more elaborate and still at least somewhat beyond the grasp of the players.

The richest balance challenges came with Richard Strauss’ Opus 7 serenade in E-flat major. This was scored for thirteen separate wind parts; and it was clear that some moments of balance were better than others. More problematic was Michael Burritt’s “Fandango 13,” scored for six percussionists who, this afternoon, played without a conductor. This turned out to be a case where listening was a challenging task on the audience side, leading me to wonder what it was like for the players. As one who has listened to quite a bit of the music of Steve Reich, I can appreciate the significance of the composer being aware of the audibility of the manifold threads of a thick texture. My personal conjecture is that the performance of “Fandango 13” was not problematic because of the players but because the composer had not given sufficient consideration to listeners interested in maintaining attention to those manifold threads.

One reason for that conjecture is that the overall balance of the final work on the program, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 92 (seventh) symphony in A major, could not have been better. As textures go, Beethoven wove an impressively thick fabric for this symphony; and there were only a few occasions when the eye captured instrumental activity that the ear could not register. In many ways this was the most challenging work on the program because it was the most familiar. Nevertheless, Reif’s relationship with his ensemble was both technically informed and emotionally expressive. This was anything but “just another performance” of familiar music by Beethoven.

SFSYO Continues 35th Season in March

 

Members of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

[information added 2/26, 12:35 p.m.:

As has already been observed, this season marks the 35th anniversary of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO). The second performance of the season will take place at the beginning of March, and conductor Christian Reif has prepared some imaginative programming for the occasion. Most important will be the premiere performance of “… within the shifting grounds …,” a new work by Iranian composer Anahita Abbasi on a commission involving collaboration the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). Members of ICE will participate in the program. This performance will be live-streamed to the Facebook Page for the San Francisco Symphony. The performance is expected to begin at approximately 2:20 p.m.]

The program will also include one of a set of fandangos scored by Michael Burritt for six percussionists. Burritt is currently Chair of the Woodwinds, Brass, and Percussion Department at the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. While the remainder of the program will consist of more familiar composer names, many of the selections will also involve departures from the ordinary. For example Richard Strauss will be represented by his Opus 7, a serenade in E-flat major scored for thirteen wind instruments, which he composed in his late teens. The selection by the twentieth-century composer Carl Ruggles will be his 1921 “Angels,” which is scored for a muted brass ensemble. Bolder brass sonorities will be found in a selection of canzonas by Giovanni Gabrieli, possibly in the arrangements for modern instruments prepared by Tim Higgins, Principal Trombone of the San Francisco Symphony. Those craving the more familiar will be satisfied by the second half of the program, which will be devoted to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 92 (seventh) symphony in A major.

This concert will be held in Davies Symphony Hall, beginning at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 4. Ticket prices are $55 for reserved seats in the Loge and Side Boxes and $15 for general admission. They may be purchased online through the event page for this program on the SFS Web site, by calling 415-864-6000, or by visiting the Davies Box Office, whose entrance is on the south side of Grove Street between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street. (This is also the main entrance to the hall itself.) There is also a hyperlink for sound clips from the Beethoven selection, which requires Flash for listening. The Box Office is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday.

Is Liszt a Guilty Pleasure?

When Michael Tilson Thomas decided to introduce Franz Liszt’s tone poem, “Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo” to San Francisco Symphony audiences in March of 2009, he decided to preface the performance with some spoken remarks that seemed to verge on the apologetic.  (That stance, however, did not seem to impede his giving the music a second airing almost exactly a year later.)  I suspect that the need for apology had something to do not only with Liszt’s extravagances but also with the fact that the performance had been preceded by György Ligeti’s settings of four excerpts from the text for the requiem mass.  Personally, I felt that the prefatory remarks were not necessary, nor was any need for apology.  After that performance I wrote the following in a post to this blog:

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas introduced the work to the audience by casting it in the same extravagant mold as that of Freddie Mercury's "Bohemian Rhapsody." I suspect that the setting for "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Wayne's World might have been more appropriate; and even better probably would have been We're Only in It for the Money, Frank Zappa's absurdist retaliation against the idea of escalating rock to epic proportions. Still, given Ligeti's own appreciation of the absurd, he probably would have appreciated being coupled with his Hungarian forebear Liszt in this manner.

I suppose the real point is that the very idea of a guilty pleasure is someone oxymoronic.  There is no need to feel guilty about it, let alone apologize, if it does not frighten the horses, as they used to say.  I doubt that Ligeti ever felt particularly guilty about anything he threw into Le Grand Macabre, whether it involved the fornication in an open grave in Scene 1 or the obscenity-laden debate in Scene 3.  We should not feel any guilt in enjoying those theatrical episodes, nor should we feel it over the over-the-top excesses of Liszt’s compositions, whether for orchestra or solo piano.  There may even be knowledge to be gained from the analysis of such musical efforts, just as there is from a scrupulous examination of the polyphony that Giovanni Gabrieli wrote for San Marco (which happened to be on the same San Francisco Symphony program that coupled Liszt with Ligeti).

Musical Conversations-with-Self

Yesterday's exploration of the thesis that communicating with God is more like conversation-with-self than like an actual dialog provided me with an interesting entry point for last night's San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall. The Roman Catholic take on such conversations was represented by three centuries (early seventeenth, nineteenth, and twentieth), two nationalities (Italian and Hungarian), and two religions (Catholic and Jewish). Each perspective approached the relationship between man and God in its own characteristic way, which made for a wealth of diversity.

The evening began with Giovanni Gabrieli's motet "In ecclesiis," from the second volume of his Symphoniae sacrae, published in Venice in 1615, two years after his death. Gabrieli served on the musical staff of San Marco (as deputy to his uncle Andrea) and may be best known for the approaches he took to the spatial deployment of musicians throughout the space of this cathedral. Thus, in many respects, the cathedral became as much of an "instrument" as the performing instruments and voices. This particular motet was set for three mixed choruses, three trumpets, three trombones, and organ; and conductor Ragnar Bohlin had clearly given much thought to how these sources should be spatially arranged in Davies. He decided to keep the brass in their usual place at the back of the stage, place one of the choruses in front of the brass, and place a portative organ in front of that chorus. The other two choruses occupied the far left and right aisles of the floor of the audience area.

The result was moderately successful. Since I was seated off to the side and close to the stage, I had to contend with the problem of being too close to a few of the individual voices in the left-hand chorus. Nevertheless, for the most part I could appreciate the overall sense of balance without difficulty. The only real problem was Davies itself, since this music had clearly been conceived for a space with far livelier acoustics than those of a concert hall. (The very idea of a concert hall had not yet emerged in Gabrieli's time.) As I said, Gabrieli treated San Marco as an instrument unto itself, which meant that he composed for the sustained resonances and echoes that "came with the territory," so to speak. Large blocks of sound took priority over the intricacies of counterpoint; and details became secondary, if not tertiary. Thus, while Bohlin did well in honoring Gabrieli's sense of the spatial, his sense of architectural setting was, of necessity, abandoned. Thus, while "In ecclesiis" may have been conceived to set a context for prayer in a very specific religious space, the secular setting for this performance probably ended up missing the point behind its composition.

Nevertheless, the idea of details absorbed into large masses of sound clearly had an impact on the way in which György Ligeti set four excerpts from the text for the requiem mass between 1963 and 1965. This composition was intended for concert halls; and it is hard to imagine it ever having been performed in a Catholic church for a variety of reasons (including Ligeti's Judaism). Thus, in place of the acoustics afforded by a large cathedral, Ligeti drew upon the resources of a very large orchestra, two mixed choruses, and soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists. In spite of such density of resources, however, detail is far from secondary; and Ligeti even had the chutzpah to include a harpsichord, then setting it in such a way that it could hold its own.

Ligeti's composition was focused on the "Dies irae" sequence, whose dramatic depiction of the Last Judgment has inspired no end of orchestral excesses (not all of which involved setting the text). In the program book Thomas May quoted Ligeti as saying of this movement that "its wild and dramatic passages … allude to pictorial representations of the Last Judgment, particularly to Memling's altar-piece in Danzig, but also to the apocalyptic paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, as well as Dürer's copperplate engravings." My own thoughts drifted further south to Michelangelo's fresco on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo's work is all the more frightening for the ways in which he captured expressions of raw human emotion when confronted with the prospect of eternal damnation; and, for all of his involvement with abstraction in the middle of the twentieth century (including "Aventures," which was sort of a "rehearsal studio" for his requiem setting), Ligeti's composition is intensely humane, even in the face of what May called "an outlandishly Rabelaisian sense of humor." Thus, while that humor may be consistent with Bosch's bizarre images, this is as much a setting for conversation-with-self over "last things" as Gabrieli's music was a setting for prayer in San Marco.

Finally, the evening concluded with Franz Liszt's tribute to the unofficial poet laureate of the Church Militant, Torquato Tasso, whose Gerusalemme liberata was a massive attempt to escalate the First Crusade to an epic of Homeric proportions. Tasso spent much of his life in an asylum and was only honored for his work shortly before his death by Pope Clement VIII. Tasso's tragic life, rather than his epic, is the subject of "Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo," the second of Liszt's thirteen symphonic poems. Liszt was apparently inspired to undertake this composition after having heard a gondolier's song while in Venice. The connection is unclear, since the primary setting for the period of Tasso's life that he chose to depict was Ferrara; but Liszt always had a way of reinterpreting things in ways that would best suit his needs (itself another take on conversation-with-self, the "self" in this case being "the rationalizer"). Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas introduced the work to the audience by casting it in the same extravagant mold as that of Freddie Mercury's "Bohemian Rhapsody." I suspect that the setting for "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Wayne's World might have been more appropriate; and even better probably would have been We're Only in It for the Money, Frank Zappa's absurdist retaliation against the idea of escalating rock to epic proportions. Still, given Ligeti's own appreciation of the absurd, he probably would have appreciated being coupled with his Hungarian forebear Liszt in this manner.

He probably would also have appreciated sharing with Liszt the role of "bookends" on either side of a performance of Maurice Ravel's G major piano concerto. I recently read (and lost track of) a report of a concert in England that coupled Ravel's two piano concertos with George Gershwin's (one being the "Rhapsody in Blue"). The parallels are interesting: Gershwin completed the "Rhapsody" in 1924, followed by a full three-movement concerto in 1925. Similarly, Ravel began with his single-movement left-hand concerto in 1930, followed by the G major in 1931. Last night's performance with soloist Martha Argerich demonstrated just how keen a listener Ravel was when it came to Gershwin's music. Ravel's concerto is, on the one hand, an homage to Gershwin's jazzy rhetoric while, at the same time, a demonstration of his own command of the orchestral palette (which Gershwin never really had). The extent to which this concerto is sustained by its foundation in sonority probably provided the best justification for it sharing the program with sonorous composers such as Gabrieli and Ligeti. If Liszt had any presence in this concerto, it was through his piano virtuosity; but the piano was just about the only instrument that was silent in "Tasso!"