Orfeo Releases New Gubaidulina Album

My interest in the music of composer Sofia Gubaidulina dates all the way back to when I was gearing up for my writing gig. This happened to coincide with when she had a residency with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). I remember seeing her in the audience when one of her pieces was being performed on an SFS Chamber Music program. However, much of my knowledge of her music has come from a relatively modest collection of recordings, which continues to grow from time to time.

Front cover of the new Gubaidulina album recently released (courtesy of A440)

The latest “growth spurt” took place at the end of this past July with electronic mail from A440 announcing new releases for this current month. One of the releases that attracted my interest was an Orfeo album of two Gubaidulina compositions. The first of these was a triple concerto completed in 2017. The concerto soloists included violinist Baiba Skride and cellist Harriet Krijgh. However, rather than follow in the footsteps of Ludwig van Beethoven, the third instrument was a bayan played by Elsbeth Mayer. (The bayan is a Russian accordion with buttons for both the right and left hands.) They were accompanied by the NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk) Radiophilharmonie, conducted by Andrew Manze. The second selection is a five-movement sonata for violin and cello composed in 1981 and given the title “Freue Dich!” (rejoice).

According to my records, this is my first encounter with any concerto by Gubaidulina. Those familiar with her repertoire probably appreciate her talent for evoking unique sonorities from just about any source. Doing this with a bayan is somewhat limited, and it tends to serve as a “voice” that contrasts with not only the other two soloists but also the diverse orchestral sonorities. In that context I have to confess that I would be more interested in experiencing this music in a concert performance than in listening to a recorded account.

While the concerto covers an uninterrupted half hour, the sonata is structured with a moderately long movement in the center and shorter ones on either side. Each movement has a title, which is a sentence fragment involving joy. I must confess that I am not sure about the relationships between the texts and sonorities. Nevertheless, the performance pursues adventurous sonorities, many of which recall past experiences of listening to Gubaidulina’s music.

Since I am never shy about listening to an album multiple times, I suspect that further enlightenment will come of the course of those experiences … naturally (as John Cage would have put it)!

Sheku Kanneh-Mason Returns to Davies

Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason (photograph by Ollie Ali, courtesy of SFS)

Last night cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason returned to Davies Symphony Hall. He had made his debut there with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, in a performance of Edward Elgar’s cello concerto in October of 2022. This time he made his debut in the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Orchestral Series, performing with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. His selection was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 107, a late work (1959) but the composer’s first of two cello concertos.

The music reflects the high spirits of a composer that had successfully outlived Joseph Stalin. The opening rhetoric is unabashedly playful, complete with prankish outbursts from the timpani. The four movements (including a cadenza) are played without interruption; and Kanneh-Mason was clearly as much at home with the lyrical Moderato as he was with the pranks in the opening Allegretto. Sadly, he did not announce his encore selection, but its Adagio rhetoric provided the perfect balance for Shostakovich’s energetic rhetoric. [added 6/14, 1:25 p.m.:

The encore was not by Shostakovich but by his colleague, Mieczysław Weinberg. In 1968 Weinberg composed a set of 24 preludes for solo cello, which became his Opus 100. Unlike the piano preludes of Frédéric Chopin, these were not organized by key signature. Kanneh-Mason played the eighteenth prelude in the collection.]

The intermission was followed by the first SFS performance of Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Fairytale Poem,” which was composed in 1971. Salonen provided introductory remarks, including the narrative of the fortunes of a piece of chalk, which dreams of making elaborate images. Gubaidulina has not been shy about irony; and, as might be expected, the music concludes as the chalk dissolves in its final strokes.

The subtlety of that narrative provided a sharp contrast to the overblown dramatics encountered in Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s tone poem “Francesca da Rimini.” This is based on an episode in Dante’s Inferno, and the listener would have done well to abandon all hope. Anyone familiar with the Tchaikovsky repertoire is well aware of his tendency to repeat himself; but, in this case, he did it to aggravating excess. This is the composer’s Opus 32, written in 1876, by which time he had established himself as a mature composer; but it seems as if he never really got his head around this particular Dante episode.

Fortunately, we could leave Davies with memories of Shostakovich’s high spirits in his “post-Stalin” period!

Mineva Plays Uncompromising Piano Music

Late yesterday afternoon at the Old First Presbyterian Church, Old First Concerts presented a solo recital by pianist Daniela Mineva. I had previously encountered her when she served as a pianist for the Light and Matter program that Earplay presented in February of 2020, the last Earplay program prior to the COVID lockdown. She performed a duo for violin and piano with Terrie Baune entitled “Late Show” by Gilad Cohen. I described this as music of “boldly declaimed phrasing;” and neither player was shy about being bold.

That boldness was given a far more extensive platform in the program Mineva prepared for yesterday afternoon. That platform supported two compositions by Galina Ustvolskaya (her fifth piano sonata and a set of twelve preludes) and single works by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh (“Music for Piano”) and Sofia Gubaidulina (the piano sonata she composed in 1965). The entire program was about 80 minutes in duration, performed without an intermission.

Once again there was nothing shy in Mineva’s approach to execution. She gave a spoken account about the individual pieces, which compensated to the lack of any such content in the program book. In many respects her capacity for verbal description was right up there with those bold declamations of the music itself.

She informed her audience that Ustvolskaya was known as “the lady with the hammer” and specifically called out what she identified as the “obsessive D-flat” in the piano sonata. All this was useful for anyone willing to pay attention to Mineva’s remarks, but the listening experience was still a rather demanding stretch. Of all the works on the program, the Ustvolskaya preludes were probably the easiest to negotiate, primarily due to their brevity.

The Ali-Zadeh composition, which began the program, was also relatively accommodating. This was due, in part, to the piano having been “prepared” in a manner that allowed for a back-and-forth exchange between piano sonorities and those of a cimbalom. The music itself was rich in modal qualities, which, when compared with the compositions that would follow, engaged the attentive listener with an intriguingly understated rhetoric.

Nevertheless, when one considered the program taken as as whole, there were only so many “hammer blows” the listener could sustain before giving in to fatigue. Gubaidulina was basically the “victim” of that fatigue. All of her piano works are relatively early, but they tend to express a rhetorical freshness. By all rights the sonata deserved an attention that had not sustained the hammer blows (literal and figurative) of the preceding compositions.

SFCMP Launches Season with Duo Recital

Last night the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) launched its 2022–23 season with a new approach to programming in a new venue. The only performers were the husband-and-wife couple of cellist Stephen Harrison and violinist Susan Freier, and their recital took place in the Mission at The Lab. The program consisted of six compositions, three on either side of the intermission. Half of them were duo performances. Freier played two violin solos, and Harrison played one work for solo cello. Five of the six composers on the program were women, represented by works as early as 1980 (Libby Larsen’s “Scudding” for solo cello) and as recent as 2017 (two movements from Gabriela Lena Frank’s seven-movement Suite Mestiza). The program concluded with the earliest composition, Erwin Schulhoff’s 1925 duo for violin and cello.

All of this made for an engaging evening of chamber music at its most intimate; and the physical setting of The Lab, while generous, was particularly conducive to that intimacy. From a personal point of view, I definitely had favorites among the composers: Frank, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Schulhoff. Nevertheless, the expressiveness behind each selection locked my attention into all of the offerings. I was particularly struck by how the players had assembled a repertoire that balanced compositions organized around sonorities with those more attentive to the counterpoint and harmonies of conventional pitch classes.

While I appreciate the need for a more balanced approach to gender in preparing concert programs, I have to say that I had a certain bias towards Schulhoff as the “grand old man” of the evening. Sadly, he never advanced to the age of an old man, grand or otherwise. He was born in 1894 in what is now the Czech Republic. However, with the rise of the Nazis in the Thirties, his music was labeled “degenerate” and his Jewish ancestry marked him as a particular target. As a result, shortly after he turned 48, he died shortly after being deported to the Wülzburg prison in Bavaria.

Thus, his legacy as a composer is limited to only a few decades. Nevertheless, there is considerably imaginative diversity, particularly in his approaches to chamber music. Last night’s duo performance providing an engaging account of the freshness he injected into past chamber music traditions. However, for those of us familiar with his biography, it was also a reminder of how much of his imaginative capacity we would never be able to hear due to his untimely death. Fortunately, the consistently upbeat rhetoric of the five living female composers served, at least in part, to soften the blow of Schulhoff’s tragic biography.

SFCMP to Launch New Season at The Lab

Next month the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) will launch its 2022–23 season at a new venue. That location will be The Lab, and the plan is that it will serve as a home for smaller ensemble concerts. That will certainly apply for the first concert of the season, whose only performers will be violinist Susan Freier and cellist Stephen Harrison. They will present a program that had been scheduled for the 2021–22 season and had to be cancelled twice due to COVID and other issues.

The title of the program is Image and Memory. Three of the selections will be duo performances, two will be violin solos, and one will be a cello solo. Three of the pieces were composed during the twentieth century, and the other three were completed during the current century. Program specifics are as follows:

• Augusta Read Thomas: “Silent Moon” (duo, 2006)
• Gabriela Lena Frank: Suite Mestiza (violin solo, 2017)
• Sofia Gubaidulina: duo sonata entitled “Rejoice! Freue dich!” (1981)
• Libby Larsen: “Scudding” (cello solo, 1980)
• Julia Adolphe: “Smile Softly, Softly Smile” (violin solo, 2021)
• Erwin Schulhoff: duo (1925)

The performance will begin at 7 p.m. on Monday, October 10. General admission will be $35 with a $15 rate for students. Because this is the first concert of the season, it is still possible to purchase full-series subscriptions. As has already been reported, there is a single Web page for processing purchases of both the full series and its alternatives. Single tickets may be purchased through a City Box Office Web page. The Lab is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street, a short walk from the corner of Mission Street, where there is a BART station and bus lines running along both Mission and 16th Streets. All attendees must be fully vaccinated to attend this event. Full vaccination is defined as completion of the two-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine administered two weeks or more in advance of the event, along with a vaccine booster.

In addition, this will be the first of two concerts that will take place in the museums and gallery spaces of San Francisco. For this occasion the exhibit will feature Dirge, a portfolio of works by the late Chinese painter Hung Liu. This was commissioned by SFCMP with the request that the content be centered around music. Doors will open at 6:45 p.m., allowing for viewing before the performance, during the intermission, and after the conclusion of the program.

Neoclassicism? It Is What It Is!

courtesy of PIAS

One week from today, Rubicon Classics will release a new album of performances by Norwegian concert pianist Oda Voltersvik. The title of the album is NEO, intended as a reflection on neoclassicism. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders of this new release.

Lexico.com, the Web site managed by the dictionaries division of Oxford University Press, says the following on its “neoclassicism” Web page:

In music, the term refers to a return by composers of the early 20th century to the forms and styles of the 17th and 18th centuries, as a reaction against 19th-century romanticism.

Taking that definition as context, the composers represented on NEO are, in “order of appearance,” Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Sofia Gubaidulina.

Given that Gubaidulina was born in 1931 and is still very much alive, I am not sure she counts as an “early 20th century” composer. Indeed, as a music student during the Communist days of the Soviet Union, she cultivated skills in smuggling scores of composers like Charles Ives and John Cage, apparently with Shostakovich’s sympathy. At the other end of the timeline, so to speak, Voltersvik’s Scriabin selection (which opens the album) is a relatively early work, which seems more focused on extending the rhetoric of Frédéric Chopin than in reacting against it.

That said, my own reaction as a listener has been to dispense with Voltersvik’s “agenda” and deal with each of the four compositions on its own terms. Thus, I have no problems listening to her approaching Scriabin’s Opus 28 “Fantaisie” in the spirit of “Chopin on steroids,” so to speak. On the other hand, I would say that the Prokofiev selection, his Opus 14 (second) piano sonata in D minor, can be approached in the spirit of endowing an eighteenth-century structure with unmistakably twentieth-century rhetoric. Ironically, this is followed by Shostakovich’s second solo piano sonata, his Opus 61 in B minor. This was composed shortly after the Nazis had begun the siege of Leningrad, and any signs of influence from eighteenth-century classicism can probably be dismissed as mere coincidence. More likely, this is music that may have inspired Gubaidulina to seek out her own new directions with compositions like the chaconne that concludes the album. (The label may reflect the seventeenth century, but the music definitely does not!)

Each of the four compositions on this album definitely deserves serious attentive listening. Voltersvik presents each one of them to inspire such a response on the part of the listener. Whether the title of her album is relevant is hardly worth consuming time to argue!

SFCMP to Launch Art House Series Next Week

[updated 4/21, 10:25 a.m.: This concert, scheduled for tonight, has been postponed due to a positive COVID test:

This past September the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) had planned to launch its 2021–22 season by beginning a new series, called the ART House Series. As the title suggests, this was planned to be a more intimate offering; and the first program, entitled Image and Memory, was conceived to present solo and duo performances by violinist Susan Freier and cellist Stephen Harrison. The performance had been planned for this past September 26 but had to be postponed due to pandemic conditions.

“Gallery” of the composers featured on the Image and Memory program (courtesy of SFCMP)

Next week Image and Memory will finally be given its performance by Freier and Harrison. The program, conceived by Artistic Director Eric Dudley, will be as follows:

• Augusta Read Thomas: “Silent Moon” for violin and cello (2006)
• Gabriela Lena Frank: two movements from Suite Mestiza (“Hailli” and “Tarqueada”), scored for solo violin (2017)
• Sofia Gubaidulina: two movements (“Your joy no man taketh from you” and “Listen to the still small voice within”) from a sonata for violin and cello composed in 1981 and entitled Rejoice! Freue dich!
• Libby Larsen: “Scudding” for solo cello (1980)
• Julia Adolphe: “Smile Softly, Softly Smile” for solo violin (2021)
• Erwin Schulhoff: duo for violin and cello (1925)

Following the performance, members of the audience will be free to engage with the performers and other new music enthusiasts. In addition to the music, patrons will have the opportunity to view and discuss Dirge, a portfolio of prints by the late Chinese artist Hung Liu that were commissioned by SFCMP.

This performance will begin at 7 p.m. next week on Thursday, April 21. There will also be a pre-concert discussion about Dirge, which will begin at 6:30 p.m. The event will be hosted by The Lab, which is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street. Regular readers of this site probably know by now that the venue is a short walk from the corner of Mission Street. The location is particularly good for those using public transportation, since that corner provides bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel as well as a BART station.

General admission will be $15. A Web page has been created for taking orders. Presumably, tickets will also be available for purchase at the door. As usual, SFCMP Members will not be charged for admission.]

SFCMP to Present a “Weekend Double-Header”

Next month will begin with the next round of performances in the 51st season of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP). This season the at the CROSSROADS event will feature two separate concerts, both celebrating the 90th birthday of Sofia Gubaidulina. The title of this coupling will be Drama and Poetry.

The first concert will begin at 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 2. The program will feature two of Gubaidulina’s compositions: “Dancer on a Tightrope,” composed in 1993, and the earlier “In the Garden of Joys and Sorrows,” composed in 1980. This program will also present the world premiere of Amadeus Regucera’s recent composition, “At the end, Breathless and Clothed in Fire.” As usual, the performance will be preceded by a “How Music is Made” panel discussion, which will begin at 7 p.m.

The second concert will begin at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 3. There will be only one Gubaidulina composition, but it may be the most familiar to many San Francisco listeners. “Repentance” was completed in 2008 and was performed at a San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Chamber Music Series concert during the composer’s SFS residency in February of 2009. The music involved a solo cello (Peter Wyrick) engaging with three guitars (David Tanenbaum, Thomas Viloteau, and Elliot Simpson) and a bass (Scott Pingel); and the resulting sonorities were almost magical. The program will also include the delayed world premiere of David Chisholm’s “deepfake” (originally scheduled for 2020). The remaining works will be “I am my own Achilles heel” by Du Yun and “Touch/Still” by Taylor Joshua Rankin. This performance will also be preceded by a “How Music is Made” panel discussion beginning at 2 p.m.

Tickets for this series are being sold for $25 for the pair of concerts and $15 for admission to a single performance. There will also be a Digital Access option with a $10 charge for both concerts and $5 for a single. Both concerts will be recorded on video and will be available for viewing by the middle of the week. Once available, access will continue for seven days. SFCMP Members will have free access to both the concerts themselves and the streamed source. Tickets for both options may be purchased online through a single Web page.

Isata Kanneh-Mason’s SFP Recital Debut

Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason (photograph by Robin Clewley, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, Isata Kanneh-Mason made her San Francisco Performances (SFP) recital debut presenting the fourth of the five solo concerts in the SFP Piano Series. She took a generously broad approach to repertoire, and the high point of the program involved two relatively recent compositions on either side of the intermission. Indeed, the post-intermission offering by Eleanor Alberga was so new that, when the program for Kanneh-Mason’s recital was announced on this site about a month ago, it had not yet been given a title. That title is “Cwicseolfor,” the ancient spelling of the noun “quicksilver;” and there was a hyper-charged intensity to Alberga’s impressions of an element that is liquid, intriguingly shiny, and fatally toxic.

The pandemic turned out to provide me with several excellent opportunities to get to know Alberga’s compositions. That included a live-streamed performance of her second string quartet performed by the Telegraph Quartet in October of 2020 (which included a video of a telephone interview with the composer) and Navona Records’ release of an album of her chamber music entitled Wild Blue Yonder. “Wild” was equally applicable to “Cwicseolfor,” whose fast-paced intensity made for an experience tantamount to an amusement park ride, particularly in light of the focused precision that Kanneh-Mason brought to her account of the score.

The work that preceded the intermission was not quite so recent, having been composed in 1962. However, Sofia Gubaidulina only began to receive attention in this country after the 21st century had begun. Kanneh-Mason played her “Chaconne,” which I had been fortunate enough to encounter previously when Sarah Cahill included it in a piano recital for an SFP Salon program at the Hotel Rex, which she entitled Chaconnes, Revisited. This composition took the attentive listener on a ride as wild as the “Cwicseolfor” performance, reminding me that my first impression of the music was that it “was the product of a rambunctious student who had had enough of what [Ferruccio] Busoni had done to Bach.” By coupling Gubaidulina and Alberga on either side of the intermission, Kanneh-Mason left no doubt of the extreme virtuosity of her technical skills.

Those skills served her equally well in her approach to the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff. She performed five of the compositions that he collected in his Opus 39 entitled Études-Tableaux. She rose to the technical challenges imposed by each of the pieces she selected; and, at the same time, she established just the right rhetorical devices to make sure the attentive listener realized that performance was not just a matter of jumping through all the hoops gracefully. (Following Nikolay Khozyainov’s recital this past Sunday afternoon, this seems to be a good week for Rachmaninoff.)

Sadly, music from earlier centuries did not come across as equally convincing. Her approach to Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 38 (second) ballade in F major tended to dwell more on technique than on rhetorical expressiveness. However, most disappointing were the two First Viennese School compositions that framed then entire program. The opening performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 457 sonata in C minor never seemed to get beyond making sure that all the notes were in the right place. The concluding selection, the account of the first of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 2 sonatas, written in the key of F minor, also came across as more dutiful than rhetorical.

Fortunately, the encore that followed was more satisfying. This was the first of the three preludes that George Gershwin composed for solo piano. It also happens to be one of the tracks on Kanneh-Mason’s Summertime album. Apparently, she finds the recent past far more accommodating that either the nineteenth or the eighteenth century.

Isata Kanneh-Mason to Make Solo Debut with SFP

Pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

In a little over a month’s time San Francisco Performances (SFP) will continue its Piano Series with the fourth of its five solo recitals. The recitalist will be Isata Kanneh-Mason, who made her Bay Area debut in December of 2019 in a duo performance with her brother, cellist Sheku, in a Cal Performances recital in Berkeley; and, as has already been announced, the duo will make their San Francisco debut in Davies Symphony Hall towards then end of this coming April. Next month will mark her solo debut here.

The program will feature the performance of a new work by Jamaican composer (now living and working in the United States), Eleanor Alberga. This composition is so new that, as of this writing, it has not yet been given a title! It will be paired with Sofia Gubaidulina’s 1962 “Chaconne.” Her Wikipedia page observes that the titles of her piano compositions “reveal her interest in baroque genres and the influence of J. S. Bach.” In this case, however, her interest seems to be less in the chaconne movement that Johann Sebastian Bach composed for his BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor and more in Ferruccio Busoni’s over-the-top transcription of that movement.

This “modern coupling” will be preceded by a “classical coupling.” The program will begin with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 457 sonata in C minor, followed by the first of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 2 sonatas, composed in the key of F minor. The concluding selections amount to a “Romantic coupling.” Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 38 ballade in F major will be preceded by five of the pieces collected in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 39 Études-Tableaux.

Like the other Piano Series concerts, this recital will take place in Herbst Theater, beginning at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, March 7. The entrance to Herbst Theatre is on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. This venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. Ticket prices are $70 (premium Orchestra and front and center Dress Circle), $55 (remainder of Orchestra, all Side Boxes, and center rear Dress Circle), and $45 (remaining Dress Circle and Balcony); and they may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page. As available, single tickets will be sold at the door with a 50% discount for students and a 20% discount for seniors. Single tickets may also be purchased by calling 415-392-2545.

Cho Returns to O1C with Shakier Rhetoric

Pianist Samantha Cho (from the Old First Concerts event page for her recital)

This past January pianist Samantha Cho had the honor of presenting the first Old First Concerts (O1C) recital of the new year. As was the case at that time, the performance was live-streamed through YouTube and then saved as a YouTube video for subsequent viewing. What struck me most about her technique was her capacity for capturing the rhetorical stances of composers as diverse as Claude Debussy and Edvard Grieg.

Yesterday afternoon Cho returned to Old First Presbyterian Church. Once again her performance was live-streamed, but this time she also played to a limited audience. Also there was again considerable diversity in her selections with a program that involved the music of Domenico Scarlatti, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johannes Brahms, and Sofia Gubaidulina played in chronological order. This time, however, she seemed to exercise less command over her sense of rhetoric; and, at the syntactic level, her ability to “parse” the polyphonic intricacies of these four composers was not as secure as her interpretations of Debussy and Grieg.

Her rhetorical stance seemed most secure in her approach to Mozart’s K. 570 sonata in B-flat major. While this is a decidedly mature composition, K. 570 reminds the listener that Mozart never let go of his capacity for playfulness. Cho seemed sensitive to that playful side of how he invented his themes and then twirled them around a diversity of embellishing techniques. There was also a delightful sense of “repetition with a twist” in his approach to the rondo form of the concluding movement. Cho gave this a particularly engaging account in contrast to the more stilted account of the sonata’s predecessor on the program, the K. 511 rondo in A minor.

Indeed, when it came to rhetorical devices, “stilted” seemed to be the predominant attribute across the rest of Cho’s program. Much of the problem seemed to involve the diversity of polyphonic techniques that cut across the repertoire of the first three composers on the program. The difficulties were most evident in the three intermezzos that Brahms collected as his Opus 117. Each of these short compositions has been realized through a richly-textured fabric; but the challenge in performing these pieces is to allow the user to perceive not only the fabric but also the interwoven threads. Sadly, it seemed as if Cho was still getting her fingers accustomed to the marks on paper, rather than providing an account of the broader perspective.

Similarly, polyphony established the core of the two Scarlatti sonatas that began the program, K. 132 in C major and K. 1 in D minor. It is important to remember that K. 1 was originally published as a set of 30 sonatas collected under the title Essercizi per gravicembalo (keyboard exercises). Presumably, these exercises had as much to do with expressive interpretation as with keyboard dexterity; and, more often than not, expression arose from the interplay of the individual voices in a polyphonic fabric. That approach to performance was not evident in Cho’s accounts of Scarlatti’s music.

The program concluded with two short pieces by Sofia Gubaidulina, “Toccata-Troncata” and “Invention.” Both of these seem to have been conceived a playful jabs at traditions that began to go out of fashion during the eighteenth century. The “nuts and bolts,” on the other hand, could not be more contemporary; and Gubaidulina’s approaches to dissonance are so compelling that the listening experience is practically joyful. Cho seemed both to apprehend and to communicate Gubaidulina’s prankish rhetoric, making for a more than satisfying conclusion to an overall program that was weak on too many fronts.

Clare Hammond Explores Variations on Variations

courtesy of Naxos of America

Towards the end of this past January, BIS Records released its fifth album of solo performances by British pianist Clare Hammond. The title of the album is Variations, which seems to follow up on her previous genre-based album Etude. Each of these releases explores how a familiar form was realized from novel points of view since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Variations surveys seven different works, each by a different composer. Five of them were completed in the twentieth century by Karol Szymanowski (1904), Aaron Copland (1930), Paul Hindemith (1936), Helmut Lachenmann (1956), and Sofia Gubaidulina (1931). The remaining two were composed in the last decade by Harrison Birtwistle (2014) and John Adams (2017). In many ways the chronological journey begins with flamboyant virtuosity, epitomized, perhaps, by the excessive elaborations found in much of the piano music of Ferruccio Busoni (consider the “Fantasia contrappuntistica” discussed on this site this past November); and it concludes with the shortest of the seven selections, engaging the listener with understated wit, rather than overstated technical dexterity.

Indeed, from my own perspective as a listener who still tries to spend some time at a piano keyboard every day, there was something irresistibly engaging about Adams’ “I Still Play,” beginning with the title itself. Adams is a little less than a year younger than I am; so it would not surprise me to learn that, like myself, he approaches a piano keyboard with less dexterity than he used to command. (At least that was the connotation that I personally extracted from the title of his composition!) Hammond’s booklet notes explicitly cited that Adams expected that “an accomplished amateur pianist” could take on “I Still Play;” and, after listening to Hammond’s recording, I found myself thinking about getting a copy of the score.

In that respect “I Still Play” was a welcome relief from the abundant excesses of Szymanowski’s Opus 10 set of variations on a Polish theme, in which the theme tends to be more and more obscured as the variations get more and more embellished. In the context of that composition, one can appreciate why a new generation of composers would emerge to rally under the banner reading “Enough of all that!” Copland’s set of variations accounts for that motto with the boldest strokes imaginable, and I am afraid that I was more than a little disappointed that Hammond’s strokes were not bold enough. Mind you, my own listening experience with this set was significantly influenced by listening to Simone Dinnerstein playing it with much more visceral rhetoric in a recital given in Herbst Theatre back in April of 2010.

Personal encounters also figured in listening to Gubaidulina’s chaconne. By a happy accident, I was asked to turn pages for Sarah Cahill when she played this piece in December of 2016 for a program she had entitled Chaconnes, Revisited. The opportunity to read while listening led me to conjecture that Gubaidulina had been influenced by Busoni’s over-the-top solo piano arrangement of the chaconne movement that concludes Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita. Indeed, I described the influence as leading to “the product of a rambunctious student who had had enough of what Busoni had done to Bach.” I elaborated on this proposition as follows:

While her music never explicitly points to Busoni, the score abounds with tropes that have strong family resemblance to techniques of elaboration encountered in his rethinking of Bach’s chaconne. In other words Gubaidulina set herself to do unto Busoni what Busoni had done unto Bach, and one gets the impression that she did so with gleeful prankishness. To be fair, much of that prankishness amounts to a relatively arcane in-joke; and I shall be the first to admit that I did not “get the joke” after my first encounter with the piece. However, I am now pretty confident that the joke really is there and would be only too happy to hear more pianists play Gubaidulina’s chaconne more often.

In that context, Hammond’s recording left me with the impression that she did not get the joke. (To be fair, Cahill also questioned my thoughts about any prankishness.) That said, I still tend to favor gestures of playfulness found in both the composer and the performer. Where Hammond’s recording is concerned, that playfulness is given its best account in the approaches to Hindemith and Lachenmann, while I feel that there is too much virtuosic seriousness in the Birtwistle offering. Thus, taken as a whole, the selections are somewhat mixed; but the encounters with both Hindemith and Adams made the overall listening experience worth while.

Ensemble Ari Showcases Women Composers

Ensemble Ari is a group of Korean-American musicians based in the Bay Area organized by composer Jean Ahn. Last night she introduced three of those musicians to the “virtual audience” for the latest program to be presented by Old First Concerts. They presented a program consisting entirely of music by women composers. The entire program was framed by two compositions by Amy Beach, between which were presented a recent composition by local composer Addie Camsuzou and selections from a collection of preludes by Sofia Gubaidulina. All three of the performers were also women: violinist Jiwon Evelyn Kwark, cellist Sarah Hong, and pianist Sharon Lee Kim.

The program was organized to feature each of these women as a soloist, after which they all joined forces to play Beach’s Opus 150 piano trio. The trio was one of her last compositions, completed in 1938. In many ways it reflects the influences of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Nevertheless, it is the work of a mature composer that had established an impressive catalog across a multitude of genres; and her “chamber music voice” is decidedly her own. Indeed, from a personal point of view, this is one of the most familiar of her compositions; and I have previously written about two different recordings of it, the most recent having been almost exactly a year ago. While it is dangerous to draw upon recordings as a benchmark for concert performances, I feel that the Ari players never quite captured the compelling rhetoric of Opus 150, perhaps because each of the members had been putting so much time into her solo offering.

Certainly, Kwark seemed more comfortable with Beach’s more sentimental Opus 23, a “romance” for violin and piano. This was a far more intimate composition, and Kwark effectively summoned the appropriate affective spirits behind the thematic material. Kim served as a dutiful accompanist, following Kwark’s lead on the rhetorical progress of the composition and the more youthful spirit behind that rhetoric.

This was followed by a brief selection of Camsuzou’s music. Her instrument is the violin, but in 2018 she composed the first in a series of études for solo piano. In introducing this piece, Kim called out Camsuzou’s keen understanding of the diversity of piano sonorities; and it was impressive to experience how many of them she brought into play over the course of the few minutes allotted to her étude.

Hong, on the other hand, went on a bit too much in her introduction to five of the preludes from the set of ten that Gubaidulina composed for solo cello in 1974. These were an ideal complement to Camsuzou’s étude, since each prelude was conceived to highlight a particular approach to performing technique. Hong’s account was dutiful, but I suspect that there was more wit behind each of Gubaidulina’s preludes than she managed to express.

As a result, the entire program conveyed a sense of impressive technical achievement; but the performers did not always home in on bringing to light those affective spirits behind the prodigious technique.

O1C “Returns to the Music” in Cyberspace

Almost exactly a month ago, Old First Concerts (O1C) informed those on its electronic mailing list of its intention to host three Friday night solo concerts in June. The initial plan was to host the concerts at Old First Church, selling tickets and seating the audience in ways that would maintain the constraints of social distancing. In less than a week the plan was augmented to include a fourth solo concert.

By the end of May, it was clear that a “physical” concert would not be feasible under prevailing conditions. As a result, plans were modified to present the offerings as a series of live stream concerts. The Web page through which tickets could be ordered was updated with two hyperlinks. One led to the live stream Web page on YouTube, and the other connected to a PDF file of the concert program that would have been handed out under normal concert procedure. All of the live stream events could be attended at no charge.

Sarah Cahill (photograph by Marianne Larochelle, from the O1C event page)

Last night this endeavor “officially” got under way with a recital by pianist Sarah Cahill. O1C Director Matthew Wolka provided a few introductory remarks from the Old First sanctuary and explained that Cahill would be performing from the home of one of the O1C board members. Cahill’s instrument was a Fazoli piano with a rich sound that could sustain itself through any of the bandwidth limitations imposed by YouTube. This made for a satisfying listening experience, although Cahill’s remarks were delivered through a microphone with low amplitude level (perhaps to avoid feedback with the microphones deployed for the piano). This just meant that any viewer would have to adjust to “riding the volume control” at the appropriate moments.

Cahill’s program was the latest installation in her The Future is Female project. My last encounter with this project took place a little less than a year ago, when she performed 90 minutes of music by women composers for last summer’s Flower Piano music festival on July 14, 2019. On that occasion I observed that every selection on her program was new to me. This time the “familiarity factor” went up to three pieces previously encountered; but all of those encounters were Cahill performances.

The Flower Piano program covered music composed as early as 1811 and as recent of 2019. Last night’s program selections resided primarily in the twentieth century with two pieces from the current one. The composition most firmly etched in my memory was the chaconne that Sofia Gubaidulina composed as a student in 1962 but has not yet been included in her personal catalog of compositions. (It is, on the other hand, cited on her Wikipedia page.) I first encountered the piece when Cahill presented a San Francisco Performances Salon at the Hotel Rex in December of 2016, entitling her program Chaconnes, Revisited. I suspect that the power of my memory derives, at least in part, from the fact that I happened to be turning pages for Cahill on that occasion, responding to a last-minute request!

Cahill’s program note described this piece as “an homage to Bach,” noting that the normal iterations of chaconne form are extended to accommodate a toccata and a fugue. Nevertheless, my own opinion is that Gubaidulina’s richly virtuosic approach to what began as a theme-and-variations dance form was informed as much by Ferruccio Busoni as it was by Johann Sebastian Bach. After all, Busoni had composed an arrangement of the chaconne that concludes the BWV 1004 solo violin partita that resulted in some of the most flamboyant piano music in the repertoire. Thus, on my last encounter with Gubaidulina’s piece, I wrote that she “set herself to do unto Busoni what Busoni had done unto Bach, and one gets the impression that she did so with gleeful prankishness.” That prankishness may not have been visible in Cahill’s physical demeanor. Nevertheless, the clarity of her interpretation left me chuckling as if I was sharing an old joke with an old friend.

Another “revisited” piece was the last one on the program, “Peggy’s Rag” by Elena Kats-Chernin. Kats-Chernin is based in Australia; and “Peggy” is the Australian composer, Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Her path led from Australia to London and then to New York to get away from World War II. She lived in the United States long enough to receive citizenship, and between 1949 and 1955 she worked for Virgil Thomson as a music critic for the New York Herald Tribune.

As a result, there are more than a few hints of American influences in Kats-Chernin’s brief “rag” (which is never quite ragtime); and the piece allowed Cahill to conclude her program in high spirits. Those high spirits had began to emerge in the scherzo by Grażyna Bacewicz that preceded “Peggy’s Rag.” This was the third of the pieces I had previously encountered, and its vigorous energy was reminiscent to the spunky outrageousness found in the early music of Dmitri Shostakovich before he ran afoul of Soviet authority.

Among the “first encounter” offerings, memory tended to be strongest when there was some thread of familiarity. This was the case with Margaret Bonds’ “Troubled Water,” which was basically a fantasia on the spiritual “Wade in the Water.” More adventurous was “Yeah Yeah Yeah” by Lois V Vierk. Those of my generation will immediately associate that title with one of the early Beatles hits, “She Loves You.” Indeed, the pianist is required to sing some of that tune while working through an avalanche of intricate embellishments. Those embellishments are so extraordinary that they almost seem to have more to do with Led Zeppelin (“Stairway to Heaven”) than with the Beatles. Nevertheless, the listener should be encouraged to take her/his pleasures in what (s)he finds!

Among the remaining offerings, a three-movement partita by Germaine Tailleferre, which she composed in 1957, came across as a sentimental reflection of her younger days, when she was the only female member of Les Six in Paris. Unlike most pre-classical partitas, none of the movements were based on dance forms; but, in contrast, dance made a brief but memorable appearance in Betsy Jolas’ “Tango Si.” (Jolas had studied with Darius Milhaud, one of Tailleferre’s Les Six colleagues.)

Most enigmatic was Elizabeth A. Baker’s “Four Planes.” Baker provided her own program note for this piece. It turned out to be of little help to prepare for listening. Cahill was more informative by showing the actual materials with which she was working to prepare her performance. Nevertheless, both explanations were brief; and I have yet to make the connection between the theoretical ideas I had encountered and the listening experience that was based on practice.

Cahill also had time to add an encore. (This was not a response to the applause of an appreciative audience.) She played a prelude by the African-American composer Julia Perry, written in 1946 and revised in 1962. Perry is another one of those twentieth-century voices that has received very little attention. Sadly, there are way too few opportunities to listen to her music, which should dispirit anyone aware that she wrote twelve symphonies in her lifetime!

Google Honors Masur with Today’s “Doodle”

Google’s “Doodle” honoring Kurt Masur (from the Google home page)

Google users have probably become accustomed to the replacement of the Google logo with an ad hoc digital sketch intended to honor the significance of the date. Those with an interest in these graphic gestures probably know by now that they are called “Google Doodles” and are often used to celebrate birthdays. (The first Google Doodle I encountered was for Clara Schumann’s birthday. I wrote about it on Examiner.com, taking note of the many children climbing all over her.)

Today is the 91st birthday of German conductor Kurt Masur. Sadly, he died at the age of 88 on December 19, 2015 from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He had been a regular visitor to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony; and, once we had become residents of the Bay Area, my wife made it a point to attend as many of his appearances in Davies Symphony Hall as we could manage.

Kurt Masur conducting the San Francisco Symphony on January 13, 2007 (photograph by Magic5227, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

(We also had the good fortune to have a chat with him when he was sitting behind us in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for a recital prepared by pianist Menahem Pressler. I opened the conversation by saying that we were looking forward to his performance of the music of Sofia Gubaidulina, and he could not say enough good things about her.) Over the course of his final visits, one could see the Parkinson tremors when he came out of stage; but once he was focused on the music, his beat was always consistently clear.

However, as Steven Musil’s CNET article about the Google Doodle makes clear, Masur was far more than just a conductor. His music education took place between 1946 and 1948 at the University of Music and Theatre in Leipzig, which, at that time, was in Communist East Germany. He became Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1970 and maintained that position until 1990.

That meant that he was in Leipzig in 1989, the time of the rise of the pro-democracy movement across East Germany, whose results included the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Leipzig Masur was actively part of a group that succeeded in avoiding a bloody confrontation between the police and the pro-democracy demonstrators. Masur’s negotiating skills had such impact that there were subsequent rumors that, with the return of democracy, he would be elected Leipzig’s mayor.

Fortunately, he preferred to maintain music as the principal source of his attention. In 1991 he moved to New York to become Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, holding that post until 2002. Once again, Masur found himself living in “historical times,” since he was working in New York on 9/11. He responded by arranging for the Philharmonic to give a performance of Johannes Brahms Opus 45, known as A German Requiem, drawing on texts from both the Old and New Testaments, as well as the Apocrypha.

To this day Masur is the only conductor with whom I have exchanged more than a few polite words in passing, but my understanding of the nature of listening owes more to the performances I had the good fortune to experience than it does to any of his words.

Sarah Cahill Concludes SFP’s Fall Salons with More Chaconnes

Yesterday evening pianist Sarah Cahill returned to the Hotel Rex to give the final recital in the 2016 Fall Salons series presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). Cahill had concluded last season’s Salon series this past May with a program that examined the chaconne form from the perspective of both the Baroque period and the twentieth century, drawing upon a full-length program she had prepared for the Noe Valley Chamber Music series, which she had performed the previous January. Last night’s program was entitled Chaconnes, Revisited; and it took, as its point of departure, the Q&A that had concluded Cahill’s May Salon.

At that time she explained that she had commissioned local composer Danny Clay to write a new chaconne for her, and she played a brief portion of the beginning. This led to a question from the audience as to when she would play this music in its entirety. Yesterday evening provided the answer to that question (and, hopefully, the questioner was in the audience)!

The title of Clay’s piece was “Still Cycles;” and it took as its point of departure a much earlier chaconne, composed in the key of G major by George Frideric Handel in 1706. Thus, to set context, Cahill programmed the Handel chaconne to precede Clay’s. The chaconne may well have originated in South America at the end of the sixteenth century and then found its way to Europe by way of Spain. It probably began as a dance form and was still serving that purpose in theatrical performances in eighteenth-century France, if not at social gatherings. However, it is better known as a musical form involving a repeated pattern, which may be no more than a bass line, which is elaborated through a succession of variations.

This is basically the approach that Handel took in 1706. The variations themselves provided an opportunity for the display of virtuosity and tended to follow a progression of becoming more and more elaborate. (In the final movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor, perhaps the best-known chaconne to most audiences, that simple-to-complex progression takes place three times, first in D minor, then in D major, and finally back to D minor.) In many ways Handel’s chaconne serves as an introduction to the theme-and-variations technique that would be explored later in the eighteenth century by composer’s such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Indeed, listening to Cahill play Handel on a piano (rather than a “period” instrument), one could almost imagine how this music defined a path to the keyboard music that Mozart would subsequently write.

Approaching that music as a path to Clay, on the other hand, is quite another matter. It is worth appreciating that Clay’s title is a pun. On the one hand it states flat-out that the repetitive structure of the chaconne is still with us. Indeed, the form is still with Clay himself, who explored it in at least two previous works, “La Folia,” which he composed for MUSA to perform in the Young Performers Festival of the 2014 Berkeley Festival & Exposition, and “Providence,” included in the Teleformation program prepared by the Guerrilla Composers Guild and performed at the Center for New Music almost exactly two years ago. In this case the repetitions were provided by a tape on a “period” cassette player with elaborations provided by parts for viola and cello.

At the same time, the repeated structure for Clay’s “Still Cycles” is almost glacial in its sense of time passing, meaning that the basic theme that is being cycled is very “still.” Indeed, Cahill explained that Clay was very flexible in specifying rhythm, allowing the player great flexibility in deciding when one pulse leads to the next. (This approach recalls a technique that Morton Feldman explored in a series of compositions that he called “Durations.”) Cahill was a bit apologetic in informing the audience that Clay’s piece lasted about fifteen minutes. However, her approach to those “still” qualities of the music’s rhetoric could not have been more absorbing. Indeed, this was one of those performances in which (to milk the pun just a little bit more) time itself seemed to stand still. Repetition was no longer grounded in a theme or a harmonic progression but in that clarity with which one could appreciate the recurrence of individual notes, and it was easy to sense how Clay’s technique worked its magic on the entire audience.

Cahill framed her program with two seventeenth-century chaconnes, beginning with Louis Couperin and concluding with John Blow. She also included Cecile Chaminade’s Opus 8, which the composer called a chaconne but which provide to be an engaging little nineteenth-century intermezzo in ternary form. However, one of the most interesting selections of the evening was Cahill’s “encore” performance of the chaconne that Sofia Gubaidulina composed as a student in 1962 but has not been included in her personal catalog of compositions.

In this case I have to confess that my understanding of this piece benefitted not only from my having heard it in the recent past but also in my serving as page-turner for that particular composition last night. As a rule I try to avoid score-following when listening to a performance. (Recordings are another matter.) In this case I had no choice; but following the score as part of turning pages at the right time led to my thinking about this music in a new light.

The source of that light was Ferruccio Busoni, whose most frequently-played composition is probably his arrangement of that chaconne from BWV 1004 for solo piano. One gets the impression that Busoni had scrupulously studied the full panoply of virtuoso demands that Bach had packed into his violin piece and then upped the ante by reworking the score to provide even heavier virtuoso demands on the pianist. Busoni’s result is so challenging that his version continues to be played to death by pianists for whom flamboyant virtuoso display is all that matters.

With that as context, the opportunity to view the score while Cahill was playing it led me to conjecture that Gubaidulina’s chaconne was the product of a rambunctious student who had had enough of what Busoni had done to Bach. While her music never explicitly points to Busoni, the score abounds with tropes that have strong family resemblance to techniques of elaboration encountered in his rethinking of Bach’s chaconne. In other words Gubaidulina set herself to do unto Busoni what Busoni had done unto Bach, and one gets the impression that she did so with gleeful prankishness. To be fair, much of that prankishness amounts to a relatively arcane in-joke; and I shall be the first to admit that I did not “get the joke” after my first encounter with the piece. However, I am now pretty confident that the joke really is there and would be only too happy to hear more pianists play Gubaidulina’s chaconne more often.

Have the "Mavericks" Left Our Shores?

I have to say that I am generally sympathetic with the misgivings that Joshua Kosman voiced in the Sunday Datebook section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle.  The title of his article is “Maverick idea for Symphony festival - new players;”  and the basis thesis (in my own words) is that there is a disconcerting been-there-done-that feel to the San Francisco Symphony American Mavericks festival that is about to begin.  However, if the lion’s share of this festival amounts to revisiting music performed at past festivals, were should we be looking?

As I thought about this, I realized that some of the most striking new music I have experienced does not come from American composers.  Put another way, the “Maverick action,” so to speak, is in Europe and Asia, rather than in the United States.  We got a warning signal that this might be the case when Sofia Gubaidulina was composer-in-residence with the Symphony;  and no one has shaken the tree quite the way she did during her residency.  So, could it be that, if we want to find “mavericks” these days, we need to look to post-Communist Eastern Europe, Finland, Japan, and possibly even China?  If so, then what does that say about the talents of future American composers?

Bruckner, Mahler, and Furtwängler

The abundance of opportunities to hear the music of Gustav Mahler in Davies Symphony Hall here in San Francisco seems to be matched only by the paucity of opportunities to hear anything by Anton Bruckner.  As a young, arrogant, and therefore foolish student, I had little tolerance for Bruckner’s music and held to the distorted precept that Mahler figured out how to succeed where Bruckner had failed.  It was only after my first contact with Henry-Louis de La Grange’s biography of Mahler, as originally published in English by Doubleday, that I began to appreciate the relationship between these two composers.

One sentence from de La Grange captures the beginning of that relationship:

When Mahler entered the university of Vienna on October 1, 1877, he immediately joined Bruckner’s harmony class.

More relevant, however, may be one of the preceding paragraphs:

Whatever one may think of Bruckner’s music—which, despite its real greatness and its undeniable beauty, demands of the listener a spiritual repose rare west of the Rhine—one must admire the warmhearted man, the teacher, the generous older musician constantly discovering and helping talented younger men, and exercising a beneficial influence on the destinies of Mahler, Hugo Wolf, [Hans] Rott, and many others.

I find this interesting in the context of one particular individual among those who “may think” of Bruckner and of those he influenced.  That individual is the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler.  The audio documentary that is included in Wilhelm Furtwängler:  The Great EMI Recordings makes it clear that Furtwängler did not think very much of Mahler.  Nevertheless, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau discusses the experience of recording the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with Furtwängler;  and I find it interesting that the EMI producers decided that this was the recording they would include in their Complete Works collection, which they released for Mahler’s 150th birthday.  I find it equally interesting that Fischer-Dieskau mentioned only one Mahler symphony that Furtwängler conducted, the third, which, by just about any criterion, has to go down as one of the most unwieldy.

Compare what we thus know about Furtwängler’s opinion of Mahler with that 107-CD collection, Wilhelm Furtwängler:  The Legacy, which includes six CDs, one for each of Bruckner’s fourth, fifth, sixth (but only in excerpts), seventh, eighth, and ninth symphonies.  I remember the ninth, because it was in the Deutsche Grammophon vinyl collection through which I first came to appreciate Furtwängler;  but I had no idea that he had recorded so much of the man, particular in comparison with how little he had recorded of Mahler.  Now, as I approach these recordings, I find myself thinking about how little Bruckner I have heard in performance.  The fact is that I have only heard Bruckner performed by the San Francisco Symphony (which Michael Tilson Thomas has fashioned into a world-class champion of Mahler) and only on two occasions in Davies Symphony Hall.  One was in February of 2010 during one of Herbert Blomstedt’s annual returns as Conductor Laureate, when he performed the sixth symphony in A major.  The other was about a year earlier, when Kurt Masur was making one of his periodic return visits to the San Francisco Symphony and chose to couple Sofia Gubaidulina’s “The Light of the End” with Bruckner’s fourth.

Does Bruckner deserve a better shake?  He certainly gets one from Furtwängler, and Masur and Blomstedt seem to have had no trouble passing on that torch.  I also find de La Grange’s grounds to criticism to be a bit amusing, at least in the context of my own listening habits and the opportunities to cultivate those habits.  The fact is that, when I think about spirituality among composers, my first thoughts turn almost immediately to the intense Catholic faith of Olivier Messiaen.  In the context of de La Grange’s remark, I immediately recognize that France is as much west of the Rhine as we are, even if it is a bit closer!  Admittedly, Messiaen may also run a bit short of champions;  but there seems to be more of a tendency to embrace his spirituality, probably because of the ways in which it is coupled to his modernism, while Bruckner is better remembered for that supportive personality that de La Grange cites.  This is probably an unfair perspective, but public preferences are rarely grounded in factors that can be traced back to listening experiences.

Bruckner's Minimalism

That’s a title that should get some attention!  I doubt that very many would ever expect them to appear in the same sentence, let alone as a topic for discussion.  In fairness, however, I should make the disclaimer that I have heard Anton Bruckner’s music in concert exactly once.  It is not that I have been trying hard to avoid him (although where my collecting of recorded music is concerned, I certainly have not tried to build up a major library of his work).  It is more that everyone else seems to avoid him these days, so it is not a matter of choosing one concert over another because of how much Bruckner is being performed in each of them.

The other disclaimer is that, when I did hear Bruckner in concert, I went in rather positively disposed.  That was because Kurt Masur was conducting the San Francisco Symphony.  Ironically, he had coupled Bruckner’s fourth symphony (the “Romantic” in E-flat major) with Sofia Gubaidulina’s “The Light of the End,” which is what really occupied most of my attention when I wrote about this concert on this platform back in 2009.  However, I also ended up writing about how there were parallel factors along which the works complemented each other.

One of those factors had to do with the extent to which Bruckner confined himself to two major harmonic ratios (2:3 and 3:4).  With that kind of constraint, it is almost inevitable that the melodic lines would home in on “repetitive structures” that would probably honor the spirit (if not the actual content) behind Philip Glass’ preference for that phrase over “minimalism.”  Finally, Bruckner seems to have a great rhetorical interest in taking a wide crescendo and stretching it out over an extended duration.  In other words, notwithstanding Glass’ aversion to the term, there is an awful lot going on in Bruckner’s scores that we would call “minimalism” if we did not know who he was and when he was composing.  This may tell us more about how sloppy we are with the terminology we use;  but it may also tell us a thing or two about listening to Bruckner, if not cultivating a greater interest in doing so!

What is Remembered

Since I am not particularly big on top-ten lists, I decided to set myself the exercise of trying to identify one event for each month of this year that I would be only too glad to experience for a second time. Here are the results:

January: The San Francisco Performances recital by violinist Christian Tetzlaff accompanied by pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. This was one of the most imaginative programs I have experienced, bringing together Leoš Janáček, Johannes Brahms, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Franz Schubert. The encores were then by Jean Sibelius.

February: Sofia Gubaidulina's extended visit to the San Francisco Symphony (which is probably my one point of agreement with Joshua Kosman's "Top 10" list).

March: Frank French's two recitals covering all 48 preludes and fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, performed on a modern piano tuned according to a system developed by Thomas Young in 1799. This could well have been the most fascinating recital of the year, and we have a local artist to thank for it. French's intention was to restore the distinctive character of each of the keys covered in Bach's two cycles, a character that is totally lost under equal temperament. By the end of the first recital, my capacity for listening was just beginning to grasp what he was trying to demonstrate. Of all the experiences I would like to repeat, this is the one that means the most to me, just in my own interests of being a better listener.

April: My discovery of selections from György Kurtág's Játékok, performed by Jonathan Biss in a "Concert with Conversation" event organized by San Francisco Performances at the Community Music Center at 544 Capp Street in the Mission District. I was first exposed to Kurtág during Marino Formenti's "San Francisco Piano Trips" recitals in 2007. Since then my primary exposure to his music has come from recitals at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Not only would I enjoy hearing Biss' performance again, but also I suspect I could get more out of his remarks by being more familiar with the music.

May: Bernard Labadie's visit as guest conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, providing highly stimulating accounts of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and George Frideric Handel.

June: The coupling of Alban Berg's 1925 "Chamber Concerto" with Schubert's D. 944 C major ("Great") symphony during the Dawn to Twilight series of concerts by the San Francisco Symphony.

July: Tien Hsieh's recital for the InterHarmony Music Festival, in which she demonstrated her capacity for giving equal "justice" to both Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms.

August: A thoroughly compelling performance of Frederick Rzewski's "Coming Together," given as part of an evening of chamber music at the Old First Concerts series, at the Old First Church.

September: The opening program of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra season, particularly in the approach Nicholas McGegan took to the seventh symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven.

October: Osmo Vänskä's visit as guest conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and the delightful repertoire he prepared for his two concerts.

November: The visit to Davies Symphony Hall by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle, particularly with regard to the program Rattle prepared to cultivate an appreciation for the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

December: The two Aspects of the Divine recitals arranged by pianist Marino Formenti for his second San Francisco Performances visit.

From this point of view, 2009 was definitely a stimulating year. Furthermore, not all of the stimuli came from the usual venues of Davies Symphony Hall and Herbst Theatre, which should serve as encouragement to see what lies beyond the beaten path in 2010!