Disappointing Encounters with SFCMP

Yesterday afternoon at The Lab, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) presented the third installation in its Sound Encounters series. This series involves a collaboration that brings SFCMP musicians together with composers (primarily students) currently working at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), based at the University of California at Berkeley. Due to my always-busy schedule, this was my first opportunity to experience the results of one of these programs.

All of the composers showcased in this installment were also performers. In “order of appearance,” they presented the following compositions:

• Eda Er: “Too Much of a Woman,” scored for solo voice, electronics, amplified objects, and video
• Kevin CK Lo: “The Audience Plays Itself,” scored for solo bass, electronics, cameras, and projection gear
• Aine Nakamura: “Kusottare!,” scored for solo voice and electronics

The program also featured one of the SFCMP musicians, bass player Richard Worn. In the spirit of the CNMAT students, he presented a composition of his own for bass and electronics (“Apocolectric”), as well as providing the bass part for Lo’s composition. He also played two solo works from the twentieth century. The program began with Hans Werner Henze’s “San Biagio 9 Agosto Ore.” Worn’s other selection was “Theraps,” composed by Iannis Xenakis, whose centennial is being celebrated throughout Europe but with almost no attention here in the United States.

In this heavily electronic setting, Worn emerged as the star of the show. His own composition cultivated the sweet spot where the natural sound of his instrument blended intimately with electronic synthesis. There was also a modest bit of theatrics with a lamp sitting on the floor only for the sake of its presence, since Worn performed his composition from memory. That presence had to do with the title of the last of the piece’s three movements, “Lights Out,” an event that signaled the end of the composition.

The other twentieth-century compositions did not hold up very well. However, in fairness to the memory of the composers, I feel it important to observe that the program book provided absolutely no information about their works being performed. Indeed, nothing more than a biographical sketch was provided; and that was sadly inadequate in preparing for the experience of listening to either of the two pieces on the program.

“Theraps” is a Greek word for healing, but relevance to the music is unclear. Xenakis, who taught at Indiana University, wrote a book, which was originally published in French and then translated into English as Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition for publication by the Indiana University Press. Sadly, the book is heavily focused on probability theory, with the occasional nod to abstract algebra and a few intimations of computer programming.

None of this would inform the experience of listening to “Theraps.” Indeed, my own experience reflected on whether Xenakis wanted to compensate for the fact that Luciano Berio had not written a “Sequenza” composition for the bass. As to the Henze offering, presumably it was acknowledging a historical event; but, in the absence of any program notes, the attentive listener could only make educated guesses.

Sadly, the CNMAT offerings never rose to the level of Worn’s performances. More often than not, these seemed to have more to do with playing with technology, rather than harnessing that technology for the sake of making music. This was particularly the case with Lo’s composition, which encouraged the audience to move around, using those gestures to create the score that Worn was playing in real time.

Only in Nakamura’s “Kusottare!” was technology kept to a minimum, working just with video enhancement. My own impression of this composition was that it was a butoh realization of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in the “Scottish play” (Macbeth) by William Shakespeare. Nakamura made her first appearance an a costume that included lengthy sheets of paper with some arcane notation. She subsequently shredded those sheets, handing out the shreds to members of the audience as part of the exit process. Since I was one of the recipients of a shred, I can share it with the readers:

SFCMP to Host Next Partnership with CNMAT

Next month will begin with the third collaboration that will bring together the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) with composers currently working at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), based at the University of California at Berkeley. SFCMP has committed itself to providing a platform for presenting new electro-acoustic works by current CNMAT composers. The contributing composers for this program will be (in order of appearance) as follows:

1. Eda Er: “Too Much of a Woman,” scored for solo voice, electronics, amplified objects, and video
2. Kevin CK Lo: “The Audience Plays Itself,” scored for solo bass, electronics, cameras, and projection gear
3. Aine Nakamura: “Kusottare!,” scored for solo voice and electronics

These pieces will be interleaved with two works composed in the last quarter of the twentieth century and a premiere performance.

The premiere has been composed Richard Worn, who plays bass for SFCMP. The title of his new work is “Apocoletric;” and, following up on the CNMAT visitors, he has scored the piece for bass and electronics. He will also play the two twentieth-century selections, both composed for solo bass. The program will begin with Hans Werner Henze’s “San Biagio 9 Agosto Ore.” The other offering will be “Theraps,” composed by Iannis Xenakis.

The concert will begin at 3 p.m. on Sunday, December 4. 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. General admission will be $35 with $15 for students showing valid identification. City Box Office has created a Web page for purchase of both categories of tickets.

Igor Levit’s Latest Single-Word-Title Album

Igor Levit on the cover of his latest album (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

This Friday Sony Classical will release its seventh solo album featuring the prodigious Berlin-based pianist Igor Levit. Levit began his recording career with Sony with “usual suspects” albums focusing on Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach. The third album then brought together both of these composers with their best-known approaches to composing variations, Bach’s BWV 988 (“Goldberg”) variations, and Beethoven’s Opus 120 set of 33 variations composed on the waltz theme given to him by the publisher Anton Diabelli. He then decided that these “monuments” of variations form deserved a more recent “companion,” so he added to the mix a performance of Frederic Rzewski’s 36 variations on the Chilean song “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” (the people united will never be defeated).

His interest in Rzewski opened a door to a more adventurous approach to repertoire. This included two albums with single-word titles. The first of these, Life, included a shorter Rzewski selection, mixed together with a generous serving of Franz Liszt and Ferruccio Busoni, offering a more than generous share of Sturm und Drang but capped off with the serenity of Bill Evans’ “Peace Piece.” Busoni then returns in the next album, Encounter, with arrangements of chorale preludes by both Bach and Johannes Brahms, selections both composed and arranged by Max Reger, and, as the final “punch line,” Morton Feldman’s half-hour piano solo “Palais de Mari.”

This Friday’s release will be the third album with a single word title: Tristan. As most readers will expect, Amazon.com has created Web pages for pre-ordering both the CD and MP3 versions of this album. The good news about the latter is that it includes the PDF version of the booklet that accompanies the CD.

Those that know the operas of Richard Wagner (or their Celtic legends) will probably recognize that the single proper noun “Tristan” can be unfolded into two common nouns, “love” and “death.” Levit explores these nouns in ways that would probably have motivated Spock to raise his eyebrow. Since Wagner composed very little for piano, Levit chose to begin with one of Wagner’s friends, whose own compositions tended to show off his qualities as a piano virtuoso. That was Franz Liszt; and the opening selection is the last of the three solo piano compositions given the title “Liebestraum” (dream of love).

All three of those pieces were originally conceived as song settings of poems by Ludwig Uhland and Ferdinand Freiligrath. The third “Liebestraum” draws upon the following strophe (as translated into English):

Oh, love as long as you can love!

Oh, love as long as you could crave!

That hour is fast approaching when

You’ll stand and weep beside the grave!

So begins Levit’s coupling of love and death!

The coupling is subsequently pursued through a conjunction of music by Wagner and Gustav Mahler. The prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde introduces the listener to music that depicts the love between these two protagonists. Levit presents this music by performing Zoltán Kocsis’ arrangement of Wagner’s music for solo piano.

This is then followed by Ronald Stevenson’s arrangement for piano of the first (Adagio) movement of Gustav Mahler’s tenth symphony. Mahler never completed this symphony. However, on the final page of the final movement, he wrote “für dich leben! für dich sterben!” (to live for you; to die for you), followed by “Almschi!,” using his pet name for his wife Alma as the “second person” of the preceding phrase. One of the ways in which Mahler may have embodied those words in his music can be found in the first movement, whose climax involves a chord consisting of all twelve chromatic pitches distributed across the different instruments of the orchestra. One might say that Mahler decided to face death with dissonance. There is no questioning the intensity of Mahler’s rhetoric, but I have to confess that no solo piano arrangement can really do justice to how Mahler chose to express that intensity.

Tristan is also the title of a collection of six preludes scored for piano, electronic tapes, and orchestra composed by Hans Werner Henze. On this recording Levit performs with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. I have to confess that my impressions of Henze have been highly variable; but this is probably due, in no small part, to the extremely modest number of occasions I have had to listen to his music. On the one hand he seems to have been very comfortable composing music for guitar. However, when given the resources of a full orchestra, he almost always “pulls out all the stops.”

When Christian Reif made his debut as Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, he began the program with an instrumental excerpt from Henze’s one-act opera “The Bassarids.” The excerpt was only four minutes long; but the decibels were decidedly “over the top.” Nevertheless, when I wrote about this performance, I made it a point to declare, “Reif expertly balanced his resources allowing the listener to appreciate Henze’s well-calculated sense of the interplay of rhythms and themes.” In other words Reif knew exactly how to get the most out of those four minutes of music.

Tristan, on the other hand, is about 40 minutes long. The music is not so much “over the top” as it is “everything but the kitchen sink.” Needless to say, Wagner is part of the mix with music that involves death, rather than love. However, Welser-Möst never seems to find instrumental gestures that will guide the attentive listener along a coherent path that links together the composer’s six preludes.

On the other hand, the album, when taken as a whole, leads the attentive listener to a satisfying conclusion. The “program” concludes, as it began, with a solo piano composition by Liszt. The selection is “Harmonies du soir” (harmonies of the evening), the penultimate of the twelve “transcendental” études. This presents a “nocturnal rhetoric” that “transcends” the inevitability of both love and death. For all of the complex finger-work that Liszt created for this étude, in Levit’s setting the music brings a calming closure to the harrowing journey established by the preceding selections.

“Rare Documents” of Herbert von Karajan

courtesy of Naxos of America

Towards the end of this past November, the Italian-based record label Urania Records (not to be confused with the American Urania label, which is now a property of Warner Communications) released a two-CD album of recordings of Herbert von Karajan entitled Rare Documents. Each of the two CDs couples an extended multi-movement composition with a shorter single-movement offering. Three of the four compositions were recorded in Rome in December of 1953, while the second of the shorter pieces, “Antifone” by Hans Werner Henze, was recorded in Berlin ten years later.

Between 1938 and 1989 Karajan was responsible for some one thousand studio recordings. His “comfort zone” was very much in the domain of familiar repertoire. Rather than explore territory that was too adventurous, he tended to cultivate the diversity of interpretations of a well-known composition through multiple recording sessions. On the other hand the four pieces in this collection were recorded only once; and, because Karajan was not happy with the sound quality, they were never released in his lifetime. Indeed, the works are so unfamiliar that only one of them previously had a place in my collection. This was William Walton’s first symphony in B-flat minor, which is the first selection in the Walton Conducts Walton album produced by The Walton Edition.

Karajan’s Walton recording was made in Rome on December 5, 1953 at a session which also included recording “Musica da Concerto,” composed for viola and string orchestra by Giorgio Federica Ghedini. Walton’s symphony was composed between 1931 and 1934; and, given the amount of time that Karajan spent with the Philharmonia Orchestra during the decade that followed World War II, it is easy to imagine that he would have become aware of at least some of Walton’s work. Ghedini, on the other hand, was not very well known outside his native Italy; and, in all probability, Karajan’s session with the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma led to the world premiere recording of Ghedini’s concerto.

Similarly, the subsequent Rome session on December 21 was probably the world premiere recording of the setting of the Requiem text by the Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister. The vocal work was primarily choral with solos for both soprano and bass. The soprano on this recording is Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and I do not think I have encountered her singing pitches as high as those Sutermeister required in any other recording that she made. The bass part, which tends to be more forgiving, was sung by Giorgio Tadeo, whom I had not previously encountered.

The Henze recording is likely to be the most eyebrow-raising. “Antifone” was composed in 1960. There is a prodigious eclecticism in the diversity of approaches to composition that Henze took, and “Antifone” may be taken as representative of the thornier side of his styles. It is hard to imagine Karajan working with edges sharper than those he had encountered in Igor Stravinsky, but he definitely gave Henze a fair shake. Given how seldom Henze’s music is encountered these days, Karajan’s interpretation of “Antifone” definitely makes this album “worth the price of admission,” as P. T. Barnum might have put it.

Details Announced for Fête Concert’s Shakespeare Program

When the Fête Concert Series announced the plan for its 2016–17 season, it was determined that the birthday celebrant for the final performance would be William Shakespeare; but, at the time of the announcement, a venue had not been finalized. Now that all details are in place, they may be provided. The title of the program will be To Sing or Not to Sing: Modern Composers Celebrate Shakespeare. Three composers will contribute, one with a guitar solo and the other two setting Shakespeare texts.

The guitar solo is by Hans Werner Henze, who composed two sonatas based on characters from Shakespeare’s plays. Patrick Smith will play “Royal Winter Music,” which was inspired by the opening monologue of the play Richard III, delivered by the Duke of Gloucester (not yet crowned king) with the ironic (and punning) opening lines:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York

This will be complemented by settings of Shakespeare texts intended as songs by Henze’s English contemporary, Madeline Dring, and a Shakespeare-inspired sonnet by Ted Zoldan.

The most recent work on the program involves an innovative approach to Hamlet. Christian Jost composed an opera in 2008 in which the words of the title character were divided between a soprano soloist and a choir. “Hamlet Echoes” is a distillation of this treatment composed as chamber music for viola, soprano, and piano. The performers for the two vocal selections will be sopranos Chelsea Hollow and Anne Hepburn Smith. The instrumentalists will be pianist Paul Dab and violist Erica Zappia.

The original plan had been to present this program tomorrow, since Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564. However, that date was changed to May 6, a week from this Saturday. The venue will be the Center for New Music (C4NM), located at 55 Taylor Street, half a block north of where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. The performance will begin at 8 p.m. with a pre-concert reception at 7:30 p.m. General admission will be $20 with a $10 rate for students, seniors, and C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Vendini event page. The reception will offer wine, cheese, and dessert; and, because this is a birthday event, as is always the case at Fête Concerts events, a party hat will be included!

Christian Reif Makes an Impressive Debut with the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra

Yesterday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, Christian Reif gave his debut performance as Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO). This was not, however, his first appearance on the podium in Davies. That took place on September 30, 2015, when he led the San Francisco Symphony in the West Coast premiere of Ted Hearne’s “Dispatches,” composed under the support of the New Voices project. Under that project Reif had given the world premiere of this piece with the New World Symphony during his first season there as Conducting Fellow because Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) was indisposed at the time. Since Reif knew the music so well, MTT arranged for him also to conduct the West Coast premiere at Davies.

Yesterday’s concert followed the traditional overture-concerto-symphony format; but, once again, physical health required a change in programming, this time where the concerto was involved. Violinist Jason Moon, 2016 winner of the SFSYO Concerto Competition, had been scheduled to perform Jean Sibelius’ Opus 47 concerto in D minor but unfortunately needed to withdraw because of injury. He was replaced by Alexi Kenney, who had served as SFSYO Concertmaster during the 2010–11 season and is currently in the Artist Diploma program at the New England Conservatory, where he is studying with Donald Weilerstein and Miriam Fried under the Charlotte F. Rabb Presidential Scholarship.

To call Kenney an adequate replacement would be the height of understatement. His nuanced shaping of every gesture in the solo part made it clear that he owned this concerto. His command of soft dynamics revealed a solid confidence that he knew how to make himself heard at any level of loudness. Such breadth of expression found the perfect match in Reif’s work as conductor. Reif clearly agreed with Kenney’s approaches to dynamics, phrasing, and tempo and knew exactly how to align the orchestra not only to match Kenney’s expressive gestures but to respond to them with the phrases that Sibelius had conceived for such accompaniment. Some might think that this concerto selection was all about ambitious display; but Kenney presented it as if it was his most favorite violin composition, hoping that attentive listeners would enjoy it as much as he did. In doing so he made himself an ideal role model for the rising SFSYO talents.

Indeed, following the intermission, those talents came across as just as suitably matched to the symphony selection as Kenney was to Sibelius’ concerto. That symphony was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 54 (sixth) in B minor, definitely not a composition to take lightly. Indeed, Opus 54 is almost notoriously unwieldy. While it is only about half an hour in duration, the first twenty minutes are taken up by the opening Largo movement. With that as context, the remaining two movements, with tempo markings of Allegro and Presto, almost fly by like lightning. Furthermore, the extended scope of that opening movement affirms the proposition that Shostakovich had significant interest in the music of Gustav Mahler; and that Largo now stands as his most capable attempt to think in terms of “Mahler time.”

Psychologically, Shostakovich was recovering from having endured denunciation by Soviet authorities in the wake of his Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District opera. Rehabilitation had begun with his Opus 47 (fifth) symphony in D minor, given its first performance on November 21, 1937. The Opus 54 Largo may thus be taken as a retrospective account of his own recovery process, while the following Allegro may be taken as a positive affirmation of an authoritative power that, in retrospect, was taken to have done the right thing.

Nevertheless, one cannot avoid thinking that there is a hidden message in the Presto. On the surface it comes across as the sort of galop that often serves as music for the apotheosis of a major full-length ballet. However, there is also an unavoidable sense that this is circus music, perhaps intimating that life in the Soviet Union had been reduced to the farce of a series of circus acts with Joseph Stalin as the ruthless ringmaster. Still, Reif seemed less interested in whether this symphony had an agenda and more committed to making sure that the entire SFSYO ensemble mastered both the grammatical complexity of the score itself and the intensity of expression behind those marks on paper. Opus 54 was a bold undertaking for a debut performance, but Reif rose to the occasion and could not have done a better job at establishing his credentials.

The “overture” selection also demanded full SFSYO resources. “Maenads’ Dance” was the final movement from a three-movement instrumental suite that Hans Werner Henze extracted from his one-act opera “The Bassarids,” itself structured as a four-movement symphony. The opera used a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman based on Euripides’ The Bacchae. All three proper nouns refer to a violently fanatical cult devoted to the god Dionysos, also known as Bacchus (hence Euripides’ title). The play is about the mortal King Pentheus of Thebes, who is determined to destroy the cult (which is led by his mother) and is torn to shreds when he encounters their frantic revels. The instrumental selection depicts both those revels and the death of Pentheus.

If Reif had decided to begin his debut season with a bang, he could not have picked a better selection. The excerpt is only about four minutes long, but it almost takes that much time to read the entire list of percussion instruments required for the performance. In spite of all of those decibels, Reif expertly balanced his resources allowing the listener to appreciate Henze’s well-calculated sense of the interplay of rhythms and themes. Pentheus’ screams when attacked were expertly rendered through a horn solo taken by Ellie Antici, while Co-Principal Cello David Basili depicted the discovery of Pentheus’ body parts by his mother.

Taken as a whole, this was a program more likely to be found at an evening subscription concert, rather than an afternoon “family event.” SFSYO has a long history of rising to the many challenges set forth by difficult repertoire. Reif clearly appreciates that history, and yesterday afternoon’s program made it clear that he intends to continue and extend it. Perhaps it is time for these musicians to show their worth in a less casual (and, by corollary, less “family-friendly”) setting. Many of them are likely to be the next generation of musicians whose performances we shall attend regularly, and introducing them to a more formal concert setting might be beneficial for all involved.

SFCM New Music Ensemble Presents a Fascinating Coupling of Henze and Kancheli

Last night in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) New Music Ensemble offered up a highly intriguing program in which an extended composition by Georgian composer Giya Kancheli was flanked on either side by works of Hans Werner Henze that featured plucked strings.

Between 1990 and 1995 Kancheli worked on a four-part cycle entitled A Life without Christmas. The program note by Susan Harvey describes the underlying concept of the cycle as “the nightmare of a brutal, unjust world that grinds down the capacity for joy and love, and against which the spirit must struggle to remain uncorrupted.” Since he was born in Tbilisi in 1935, Kancheli grew up in a culture in which an ideology that included Marxist atheism was reinforced by the horrific administration of Joseph Stalin. The terror that Stalin wrought was so mercilessly intense that Dmitri Shostakovich could never shake his fear of it, even over the two decades he lived after Stalin’s death.

Each of the four compositions in A Life without Christmas is named for a set of prayers. In addition, each has its own unique instrumentation. “Morning Prayers” was scored for chamber orchestra and tape, “Midday Prayers” for soprano, clarinet, and chamber orchestra, “Evening Prayers” for eight alto voices and chamber orchestra, and “Night Prayers” for string quartet. Last night Nicole Paiement conducted the New Music Ensemble in a performance of “Midday Prayers.”

Harvey also cited Alfred Schnittke as acknowledging Kancheli’s “rare gift of being able to suspend all sense of time.” Schnittke knew enough music history to recognize that this gift had an honorable legacy, reaching back at least as far as Ludwig van Beethoven; but no one would confuse “Midday Prayers” with the quiet timelessness of, for example, the Adagio sostenuto movement of Beethoven’s Opus 106 (“Hammerklavier”) piano sonata in B-flat major. Kancheli’s rhetoric is one of extended auditory landscapes whose features are almost too subtle to be recognized until the entire auditory field is torn asunder by an onslaught of decibels for which “brutal” is definitely the most apposite adjective. Such dynamics are seldom associated with a chamber orchestra; but Kancheli’s instrumentation calls for horn (Liam Herb), two trumpets (Camas Stredder and Peixiang Li), two tenor trombones (Nicole Hillis and George Jones), bass trombone (Sam Patchett), two percussionists (Mika Nakamura and Diego Becerra), and electric bass guitar (Ramon Frermin), accounting for almost half of the full ensemble. (So says the program sheet. I could have sworn I saw a tuba as well.)

The soprano (Rachel Spund) only joined the ensemble for the coda, singing excerpts from the Sayings of Jesus on the cross in Latin (which may not have been the specific texts in Harvey’s notes). The use of text from the Passion in a cycle mourning the absence of the celebration of the Nativity did not go unnoticed. If Schnittke admired Kancheli, then he probably appreciated the latter’s sense of irony as much as his unique approach to time-consciousness. The clarinet part (performed by Andrew Friedman) frames the entire landscape at its most featureless. Friedman’s command of the barely audible was, to say the least, awe-inspiring. It made for a suspenseful opening and was just as chilling in the coda, as the sonorities lapsed back into the silence from which they had subtly emerged.

If Kancheli’s music involved subtle suggestions with violent disruptions, Henze’s rhetoric was more disposed to straightforward declamation. Both the opening and concluding compositions featured David Tanenbaum, both SFCM alumnus (class of ’78) and currently Chair of the Guitar Department. The latter piece, Ode an eine Äolshärfe (ode to an Aeolian harp), written between 1985 and 1986, was dedicated to him. The piece began as a cycle of four poems by Eduard Mörike; but, as the work progressed, Henze dropped out the vocal line leaving behind only the titles of the poems. The guitar does not replace the vocalist but, instead, provides an alternative perspective on the Mörike poems.

In this case the instrumentation involves more familiar chamber orchestra resources but with a few significant differences. There are no violins, but there are three pre-classical instruments, a viola d’amore, a gamba, and an oboe d’amore. The first of these (performed by Laura Rubinstein-Salzedo) is in a highly tenuous position. The instrument is distinguished by the presence of sympathetic strings, which resonate in response to the pitches of the bowed strings that cross the bridge:

Photograph showing the sympathetic strings of a viola d'amore (uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Aviad2001, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

In other words this is the one instrument in the ensemble that comes closest to the “spirit” of an actual Aeolian harp. The sonorities may best be appreciated in Johann Sebastian Bach’s use of the instrument in his BWV 245 setting of the Passion text from the Gospel of John. Bach has the instrument accompany a tenor aria, and the sympathetic strings provide an almost spooky setting for the text. Henze, on the other hand, blends the instrument in with not only the gamba but also two cellos and two violas. This seems like an almost perverse decision to employ the instrument in a setting in which its chief asset is inaudible (unless Henze intended a cryptic assertion that Aeolian harps were best left unheard).

Beyond this peculiar approach to instrumentation, however. the music offers a rich fabric of sonorities that weave in and around the guitar solos (enhanced with amplification at last night’s performance). Henze’s music is not always readily accessible, but both Paiement and Tanenbaum offered rhetorical shaping that would guide the attentive listener through many of the composer’s complexities. Somewhat more accommodating was the opening selection of three short Henze pieces, entitled “Carillon,” “Récitatif,” and “Masque,” scored entirely for plucked strings. For this performance Tanenbaum was joined by SFCM faculty member Emily Laurance on harp and guest artist Dana Rathe on mandolin.

Henze composed these pieces in 1974. While they are highly individual and innovative works, those who know their ballet will probably wonder whether or not “Carillon” may have been inspired by the music that Igor Stravinsky wrote for George Balanchine’s ballet “Agon” in 1957. There is no guitar in the score for “Agon;” but one of the dances (Stravinsky’s latter-day take on a galliard) has a delightful interplay in which harp and mandolin weave around each other’s lines. That same sense of interleaving pervades all three of Henze’s short movements, suggesting that he may have enjoyed what Stravinsky had done and decided to pursue the idea at greater length.