Music in the Mishkan Announces 27th Season

Poster design for the Music in the Mishkan season (from last year’s announcement of the 26th season)

Violinist Randall Weiss recently announced plans for the 27th season of Music in the Mishkan. He is a long-time member of The Bridge Players. The season will consist of only two performances, which will be performed by the same piano quartet. The pianist will be Amy Zanrosso, and Weiss will be joined by violist Natalia Vershilova and Victoria Ehrlich on cello. Both concerts will be Sunday afternoon events, beginning at 4 p.m. Dates and program selections will be as follows:

February 15: In 1999 Lera Auerbach composed three cycles of 24 preludes accounting for all major and minor keys. According to my records, the chronological order of these cycles accounts for piano, cello, and violin, the last two being duo performances with piano accompaniment. For the first Mishkan performance, Weiss will perform selections from the violin cycle and Ehrlich will do the same drawing upon the cello cycle. These selections will be preceded by a violin sonata in D minor composed by Leon Reinach, who was murdered in the Holocaust. The remainder of the program will offer more familiar selections: Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 120 piano trio in D minor and Robert Schumann’s Opus 47 piano quartet in E-flat major.

April 12: The second program will feature the world premiere of a piano trio by Alex Malinas. It will begin with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 478 piano quartet in G minor. The second half of the program will be devoted to Camille Saint-Saëns’ Opus 41 piano quartet in B-flat major.

As in the past, these performances will take place at the Sha’ar Zahav synagogue. It is located in the Mission at 290 Dolores Street. Ticket prices are $30 for members and $35 for others. All purchases are processed through a single Web page. There will be no physical tickets, but a list will be kept at the door.

New Curtis Studio Release is Better Managed

Trio Zimbalist members Timotheos Gavriilidis-Petrin, George Xiaoyuan Fu, and Josef Špaček (photograph by Visual Narrative, Viktor Jelinek, courtesy of Crossover Media)

My first encounter with Curtis Studio, an album label associated with the Curtis Institute of Music, took place this past May and was nothing short of a very frustrating disaster. The title of the album was Revival, and it consisted of three solo piano selections performed by Michelle Cann. The first two were by Florence Price, her E minor piano sonata and three of the movements from her Fantasie nègre collection. The album then concluded with Margaret Bonds’ Spiritual Suite.

This struck me as the perfect opportunity to introduce the Curtis Studio label to readers. Unfortunately, due to a poor relation between Curtis and its publicist, I could not provide any useful hyperlinks to readers interested in listening to this album. As a result, I was never able to release an informative article; and I bailed on the whole project.

At the beginning of this month, I learned (by another publicity source) of a new Curtis Studio release. This time I received more reliable information, including a hyperlink for digital download from Amazon.com. I was also pleased to see that the new publicity service had provided a similar hyperlink for the Revival album.

The new album presents three piano trios performed by Trio Zimbalist, named after Efrem Zimbalist, who began teaching at Curtis in 1928 and served as its Director between 1941 and 1968. Ironically, none of the related background information seems to have taken the trouble to identify these three musicians by name. Fortunately, the trio has its own Web site with a highly informative “About” Web page. The group is decidedly international. The violinist, Josef Špaček, is Czech, the cellist, Timotheos Gavriilidis-Petrin, is Greek (currently Principal Cello in the Athens State Orchestra), and the pianist is Chinese-American George Xiaoyuan Fu.

The most familiar offering on the album is the final selection, Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 90 (fourth) piano trio in E minor, frequently known as the “Dumky,” since each of the six movements is based on the dumka structure. This composition was on the first recital program that the trio performed. The other two selections are less familiar and more adventurous. The album begins with Mieczysław Weinberg’s Opus 24 piano trio, followed by Lera Auerbach’s first piano trio, her Opus 28.

Both of these composers have decidedly interesting backgrounds. Weinberg was lucky enough to escape Poland after the outbreak of World War II by crossing the Soviet border. He eventually established himself in the musical community with particular support from composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian. Auerbach, on the other hand, defected from the Soviet Union in 1991. Unless I am mistaken, San Francisco Performances has presented four recitals by her, the most recent having been in March of 2018. More recently, her “Triptych—This Mirror Has Three Faces” was performed in a San Francisco Symphony Chamber Music Series concert in October of 2022.

Taken as a whole, the three tracks make for a decidedly engaging listening experience. I always enjoy Weinberg compositions that offer a “nod of gratitude” to Shostakovich. Ironically, prior to my encounter with Trio Zimbalist, I knew almost nothing about the piano trio repertoire in Auerbach’s catalog except for “Triptych.” As a result, her Opus 28 made for a highly satisfying journey of discovery, leaving me hoping that it will not be long before she returns to give another performance in San Francisco.

SFS Brings Low Comedy to Chamber Music

Yesterday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) presented the first Sunday afternoon program in the 2022–23 Chamber Music Series. This was a “three centuries” program with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on the eighteenth-century side and Lera Auerbach representing the current century. Claude Debussy occupied the middle of this timeline with the Opus 10 string quartet in G minor, which he completed in 1893.

The most memorable offering was the only work to be performed after the intermission. This was Mozart’s K. 522 divertimento for two horns and string quartet entitled “A Musical Joke.” Thanks to Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, we now all know that Mozart could be quite prankish, if not downright bratty. One way of describing K. 522 is as a portrait of amateur musicians whose enthusiasm vastly outweighs competence (although the current Grove suggests that Mozart had it in for incompetent composers, rather than players).

Over the course of four movements, K. 522 practically revels in creating a rogue’s gallery of ineptitudes. However, yesterday’s performers decided to dial the comedy up to eleven. Jessie Fellows led as first violin, joined by second violinist Chen Zhao, violist Katie Kadarauch, Mark Wright on bass, and horns played by Jessica Valeri and Daniel Hawkins. Collectively they decided that the humor of the performance could be enhanced with a bit of staging, beginning with all of them decked in powered wigs and eighteenth-century finery.

While, for the most part, the music itself accounts for all the jokes Mozart wished to unfold, yesterday’s performance served up a generous share of physical comedy to emphasize many of the musical blunders. Since Fellows and Kadarauch were closest to the audience, they summoned up their own lexicon of comic gestures and postures to reinforce their playing. Most of this involved aggressive execution of passages best left in the background.

Then there were the horns. As is often the case, the Adagio cantabile movement was scored only for the strings. As often seems to be  the case, there is a tendency for Adagio movements to go on forever. So Valeri and Hawkins left their seats and retired to a small table on the left side of the stage which sported a chessboard and two demitasse cups. The performance thus became a two-ring circus with the quartet slogging its way through the Adagio while Valeri and Hawkins enjoyed their coffee (followed by wine) and played with their chess pieces. (It would be unfair to the chess community to say that they were actually playing chess.)

This was far from my first encounter with K. 522. However, this was the first time I suspected that Mozart had injected some of his earlier themes into the score. More specifically, the final Presto movement seems to include a citation of the “Alleluja” theme from the K. 165 Exsultate, jubilate motet. He even makes this reference a second time for those that did not catch it on the first round.

The first half of the program was more serious but just as engaging. The Debussy quartet was performed by violinists Dan Carlson and Florin Parvulescu, violist Katarzyna Bryla-Weiss, and cellist Amos Yang. There were some intonation problems that required stopping and beginning from the start a second time. However, once that matter was settled, the account could not have been more engaging. I was particularly struck by the pizzicato work in the second movement, whose sonorities in performance were far richer than any I had encountered on a recording.

The Auerbach offering was her second piano trio, performed by violinist David Chernyavsky, cellist Sébastien Gingras, and pianist Asya Gulua. This particular trio was given a somewhat lengthy title: “Triptych—This Mirror Has Three Faces.” It is structured in five movements, which depict the panels of a triptych altarpiece and the “changes in view” as the panels are unfolded. The composition concludes with a “Folding Postlude,” whose thematic material, unless I am mistaken, reflects back on her twelfth prelude for cello and piano.

It has been far too long since I have encountered Auerbach’s music. I had to search my own archives to discover that I had previously written about a recording of her two piano trios in April of 2018! Listening to this trio again reminded me of her aggressive rhetoric with occasional twists of irony. She used to bring engaging recital content to San Francisco Performances programs; and, now that we have gotten past the worst of the pandemic, I would be only too happy to see her return to San Francisco.

Another Disappointing Stepanova Project

Born in Belarus and now living in the United States, pianist Liza Stepanova made her recording debut in January of 2018 with the release of her solo album Tones & Colors. In writing about that offering, I described it as a “concept project,” whose “concept” involved an exploration of “the intersection of art and music” (that quotation taken from the Web page she created for this album). After reading everything she had written about her project, I found listening to her tracks more than a little disappointing and had no qualms in writing about my disappointment.

courtesy of Naxos of America

One week from today Navona Records will release Stepanova’s second album, entitled E Pluribus Unum. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders, which also includes a useful summary description of the album. It will not take long for those taking the trouble to read that description to recognize that this is another concept project. Here are the key sentences from that Amazon.com Web page:

Born out of the political climate of 2017, E PLURIBUS UNUM is an artistic response to the immigration policies implemented by the American government around that time. Stepanova devised a program featuring American composers with immigrant backgrounds, and by doing so she offers a small glimpse of the immense contributions they make to American musical life. The colorful mosaic of E PLURIBUS UNUM does just that, in music that reflects the composers roots and is an embodiment of the motto E Pluribus Unum Out of many, one.

The album comes with extensive program notes. Stepanova presents the works of nine composers (see the above image of the album cover), eight of whom provided one-paragraph accounts of the ideas behind their respective efforts. (The one exception is the composer Lera Auerbach, whose paragraph is written by Stepanova herself.) I found myself reflecting on my favorite couplet from the libretto by Eric Crozier for Benjamin Britten’s opera Albert Herring:

Country virgins, if there be such,
Think too little and see too much.

This is a case of composers saying too much in the paragraphs they provided for music that gives the impression of having little more than superficial thought behind it.

The opening Auerbach track emerges as the best exception to that rule. “An Old Photograph from the Grandparents’ Childhood” is a movement from her cycle Scenes from Childhood, which is less than 90 seconds in duration. Yet her sensitivity to sonority transforms simple melodic material into an intensely personal reflection. If that reflection resonated with Stepanova’s own thoughts, then more power to both of them.

Similar impact is not encountered on this album until the final track (a little over six minutes in duration) by Gabriela Lena Frank, the first of the pieces entitled “Karnavalito.” In her paragraph for the program notes, Frank acknowledges “stylistic nods to the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, a music hero of mine.” Frank’s ability to harness Bartók’s techniques and apply them to the spirit (if not the flesh) of Peruvian sources is engagingly impressive, leaving me curious about any other “Karnavalito” compositions.

Another quote comes to mind that may summarize my overall impressions of Stepanova’s project-based approaches. Back when I was in high school, the CBS television network gave the green light to a ballet-for-television project. The title of the ballet was “The Flood.” George Balanchine created the choreography, and the music was composed by Igor Stravinsky. Robert Craft compiled an English-language libretto that interleaved the Book of Genesis with texts from the English mystery plays associated with both York and Chester. (The score also included a choral setting of the “Te Deum” hymn.) Before the performance (which was broadcast on “live” television), Stravinsky addressed the audience in halting English, concluding with the sentence:

I do not want to tell you more, I only want to play you more.

For all of Stepanova’s impressive keyboard technique, her new album serves up too much telling and not enough playing.

O1C Hosts Helia Music Collective Recital

Banner for last night’s concert showing Helia co-founders Emma Logan and Julie Barwick (above) and violinist Robert Simonds (below) (from the SF Station event page)

For those not yet familiar with the organization, the Helia Music Collective was co-founded by composers Emma Logan and Julie Barwick. Their mission is to support the creative endeavors of woman in music throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. I first encountered them through a program by the period-instrument Liaison Ensemble entitled Early Music Meets New, which juxtaposed works created under Helia auspices with songs by two seventeenth-century women, Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi.

Last night at Old First Presbyterian Church, Old First Concerts (O1C) hosted a program curated by Helia. The concert was a solo violin recital by Robert Simonds consisting entirely of works by women composed between 1990 and this year. The entire program was framed by two short compositions by Missy Mazzoli, beginning with her 2011 “Dissolve, O my Heart” and concluding  with “Tooth and Nail” (2010), performed against a recording of Uzbek music. The other composers on the program were, in “order of appearance,” Molly Joyce, TJ Cole, Alexis Bacon, Sylvia Mancuso, Lera Auerbach, Melody Eötvös, Elizabeth Kennedy Bayer, Logan, Cindy Cox, and Patricia Van Ness.

All of the compositions were relatively short, and the whole evening lasted less than 90 minutes without an intermission. In the absence of program notes, Simonds took the trouble to provide a brief introduction, which often had more to do with establishing a frame of reference, rather than discussing the music itself. Thus, “Dissolve, O my Heart” and Joyce’s “Blue Swell” were introduced as contemporary reflections on past traditions associated with Johann Sebastian Bach and Eugène Ysaÿe, respectively. (Ysaÿe’s solo violin sonatas were, themselves, reflections on Bach, leading Simonds to call Joyce’s piece “reinterpretation of reinterpretation of Bach.”)

A similar sense of wit could be found in other “external” references. Simonds introduced Mancuso’s “Complicit” with the phrase “Shostakovich meets Webern.” (Personally, I felt one really had to know one’s Webern to detect where he was lurking.) Bayer’s “I Lost My Life Savings in the Bitcoin Crash of 2014,” on the other hand, was described as a synthesis of Philip Glass and the Ramones.

Logan’s own contribution turned out to be an exercise in repurposing. “Running Ragged” was originally written as a clarinet solo for Jeff Anderle. Last night Simonds gave the premiere performance of the violin version. The second word of the title is a nod to ragtime; but, as was the case with other referential associations, the word was there for general orientation, rather than to identify any specific underlying model.

Hearing so much unfamiliar music for the first time impedes the ability to asses how well the soloist served each of the compositions. Simonds certainly performed confidently, suggesting a solid sense of both text and context in each of the pieces he played. Nevertheless, an onset of saturation began to emerge as the program neared its conclusion. The Liaison strategy of interleaving distant past with immediate present made for an overall experience that better gauged the limits of attention span.

Delta Piano Trio Showcases Lera Auerbach

courtesy of Odradek Records

About a month ago Odradek Records released a recording of the Delta Piano Trio entitled The mirror with three faces. The trio consists of three Dutch musicians, violinist Gerard Spronk, cellist Irene Enzlin, and pianist Vera Kooper, who only met because they all happened to be in Salzburg (in Austria) in the fall of 2013. Pretty much on-the-spot they “decided to learn some piano trios” (their words in the album’s accompanying booklet), receiving coaching from Wolfgang Redik of the Vienna Piano Trio and Rainer Schmidt of the Hagen Quartet.

The repertoire they decided to pursue when they were first getting started including the two piano trios of Lera Auerbach. This was because pianist Kooper had “stumbled upon Lera Auerbach’s piano music” when she was “searching for contemporary piano repertoire on YouTube” (again quotes from the booklet). The title of the album is a reflection on the title that Auerbach gave to her second trio “Triptych—This Mirror Has Three Faces.” The faces belong (so to speak) to the three sets of 24 preludes she had composed, each covering all of the major and minor keys. These were written for solo piano, violin-piano duo, and cello-piano duo. However, the title also refers to Auerbach’s interest in the details of intricate structure, in this case the folding and unfolding processes involved in viewing a triptych altarpiece.

Those who have been following my writing for some time know that, by living in San Francisco, I have been able to benefit from the close relationship that Auerbach has with San Francisco Performances (SFP). Indeed, the most recent benefit came at the end of last month with the world premiere of Labyrinth, which was commissioned by SFP and written in honor of SFP Founder and President Emeritus Ruth Felt. (For the record, I felt it was appropriate to describe the program that Auerbach prepared for that solo piano recital as a diptych.)

Those benefits have included opportunities to listen to both the solo piano preludes and the set for cello and piano (which Alisa Weilerstein performed with Auerbach), as well as the second trio. Indeed, between concert performances and recordings, I was about as well equipped as one could imagine to approach the trio, which Auerbach herself described as taking all 72 of her preludes and letting them bump into each other (and possibly also reflect on each other from different angles, as if viewed through a tailor’s mirror, which has the same structure as a triptych). The most salient of my memories was the twelfth cello prelude, which subsequently became a “Postlude” for both violin and cello with piano accompaniment and then “reflected” into the final movement of the trio, called a “Postlude” to depict the folding in of the triptych panels. Auerbach herself seems to have appreciated that she was getting quite a lot out of that one theme, since the trio score instructs the performers to imitate “an old record.”

I have now listened to enough of Auerbach’s music to appreciate her ludic approach to composition and her capacity for wit that seasons the games she sets herself to play. I am not yet sure how much of that spirit has found its way into Delta’s recording; but I have no quibbles at all with their allegiance to the letter of her text, so to speak. This will make an excellent companion to the available recordings of the preludes. Those who are really interested in how those preludes are reflected in the trio can navigate their way through all of the relevant tracks to their heart’s content. For my part, I am simply happy to have a solid meat-and-potatoes account of the trio itself.

For that matter I am just as glad to have now a recording of the first trio in my library. Composed in 1992 and revised in 1994, this piece predates the three sets of preludes (all of which were composed in 1999). One can detect influences from both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but one can also find nods to Dmitri Shostakovich. (This trio was one of Auerbach’s first compositions after she left Russia and moved to the West.)

Indeed, any “Shostakovich connection” is probably enhanced by the fact that the Delta album begins with that composer’s Opus 67 (second) trio in E minor. That trio was composed in 1944, placing it after the Opus 65 (eighth) symphony in C minor, so bleak that it suggests that the Second World War had pushed to the composer to the brink of his breaking point. Nevertheless, Opus 67 makes it clear that Shostakovich could still venture into new areas of darkness; and Delta has performed it in such as way as to make that darkness visible (as John Milton put it when describing Hell in Paradise Lost).

Lera Auerbach’s Imaginative Diptych for SFP

Pianist and composer Lera Auerbach (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night Lera Auerbach returned to Herbst Theatre to make her fourth appearance presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). This time she came as the third of the four pianists giving recitals in the 2017–2018 Piano Series. Her program was a particularly special one, however, because the second half consisted entirely of the world premiere of Labyrinth, which was commissioned by SFP and written in honor of SFP Founder and President Emeritus Ruth Felt. This extended suite, roughly 50 minutes in duration, was preceded by another extended suite of approximately the same duration, Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

It would be fair to describe Labyrinth as a “response” to the “call” of Mussorgsky’s suite. However, the response tends to be more one of differences, rather than similarities. Mussorgsky composed a well-considered “promenade” through an imagined but orderly display of drawings and watercolors produced by Viktor Hartmann. Auerbach’s labyrinth certainly has order; but it is, to paraphrase Henry Miller, an order which is not necessarily readily understood. Thus, in place of Mussorgsky’s “Promenade” movements, which guide the lister from one visual impression to another, Auerbach introduces an imagined character called the Traumwanderer (dream wanderer), whose “passages” follow the twists and turns of the composer’s imagined labyrinth in which pictures have been replaced by the “imaginary beings” conceived by Jorge Luis Borges.

However, before examining the nature of these passages and beings, it is necessary to consider Auerbach’s “response” as a pianist to the “call” of Mussorgsky’s score. The very opening notes were delivered with intense attacks and raised dampers that allowed the entire body of the piano to resonate with every note. Rather than serving as a polite entry into a room of images, Auerbach confronted the listener with a challenge:

I know you have heard this music many times before; but, believe me, this time will be different!

There is no doubt that difference was established to a significant, if not awe-inspiring, degree.

The most evident feature involved wild swings between dynamic extremes. Just as wild were her virtually unfettered approaches to rapid passages, played as if the keys were about to fly away from the body of the instrument. In addition there was her ability to invent embellishments for certain passages that had not been captured by Mussorgsky’s marks on paper, every one of which made perfect sense in the context of the notes that the composer did write. Finally, there was some sense of a tongue-in-cheek reminder that Mussorgsky was subject to fits of madness, which were probably related to his alcoholism. Auerbach seemed to be channeling a persona that was not quite in its right mind, but there was never a sense that her own performing was about to run off the rails.

Labyrinth, on the other hand, might be viewed as a journey through efforts to seek out order in the midst of a vast imagined confusion. In addressing the audience before playing her music, Auerbach stressed that the audience was not obliged to know anything about Borges’ imaginary beings, just as most who listen to Mussorgsky’s suite have seen few, if any, of Hartmann’s images. Indeed, even the Traumwanderer music is more of a mood setting than the clearly defined theme of Mussorgsky’s “Promenade” movements. That mood then inhabits those imaginary beings that inhabit Auerbach’s labyrinth, and it is unlikely that even those familiar with Borges’ descriptions would have recognized them on the basis of only a single listening experience.

However, if the level of detail was never “intuitively obvious,” one had no trouble apprehending the overall rhetoric of uncertainty. Indeed, in her remarks Auerbach even made it clear that most listeners could well get lost in her labyrinth. However, she assured all that she would eventually lead us to the exit.

Thus, I have no trouble asserting that my own listening skills were put to the test. Nevertheless, while there were times when, even with the title headings on the program sheet, I was not sure where I was, as I wandered further into Auerbach’s labyrinth, I realized I could look back and detect the first signs of order in where I had been. By the time I reached the exit that Auerbach has prepared, I realized that I was all set to make the journey again. I just hope that I do not have to wait too long for my next venture into that labyrinth!

As a “reward” for our completing her journey, Auerbach served up four encores, announcing none of them. The one everyone recognized was a repeat of the “Ballet of Unhatched Chicks” from the Mussorgsky suite. Auerbach served up a clear sense of humor when she performed this in the context of the entire suite, and her humor was just as enjoyable in the excerpt. That selection was preceded by music by Alexander Scriabin that I have not yet had enough experience to identify. The chicks were then followed by two of Domenico Scarlatti’s 555 keyboard sonatas. Here, too, I cannot recognize all of them specifically; but the second was the K. 9 in D minor, which seems to be a favorite for many pianists, past and present. (In my personal collection of recordings, one of those “past” pianists is Dinu Lipatti.)

[added 3/28, 10:35 a.m.:

The Scriabin encore was the second (in A minor) of the Opus 11 set of 24 preludes in all of the major and minor keys. (I feel very sheepish about this, since I actually put some time into learning to play that particular prelude!) The first of the two Scarlatti encores was the K. 149, also in A minor.]

The San Francisco Performances 2017–2018 Piano Series

The four pianists that will be giving recitals in the Piano Series as part of the 2017–2018 season of San Francisco Performances (SFP) will all be making return visits. Nevertheless, the four of them encompass a wide spectrum of tastes and an equally broad approach to repertoire. Thus, those who attend the entire series can expect to encounter music as early as the work of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and as recent as a piece that will be receiving its world premiere.

As in the past, all four of these recitals will take place in Herbst Theatre, beginning at 7:30 p.m. The entrance to Herbst is on the ground floor of the Veterans Building, located at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The specific dates and their related performers are as follows:

Thursday, January 18: Stephen Hough will return with a program that focuses on the “basics” of Claude Debussy, Robert Schumann, and Ludwig van Beethoven, presented in that reverse chronological order. The core of his Debussy offering will be the two books of three compositions each collected under the title Images. They will be framed by two of the composer’s perspectives on moonlight, beginning with the “Clair de lune” movement from the Suite bergamasque and concluding with “La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune” (the terrace of moonlit audiences) from the second book of preludes. The Schumann selection will be the Opus 17 fantasia in C major; and the program will conclude with Beethoven’s Opus 57 (“Appassionata”) sonata in F minor.

Friday, March 2: Pierre-Laurent Aimard will present two major undertakings in his recital. In the first half he will play the eleven pieces that György Ligeti collected under the title Musica ricercata (researched music). The second half will be devoted to Beethoven’s Opus 106 (“Hammerklavier”) sonata in B-flat major. The program will begin with “Revelation,” composed by the Russian mystic and inventor Nikolai Obukhov.

Tuesday, March 27: Lera Auerbach will return with another imaginatively-conceived program. This one will have a “now-and-then” theme, beginning with the world premiere of a suite created especially for SFP entitled 21st Century Pictures and inspired by the paintings of Ballets Russes dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. This may be taken as a contemporary “response” to Modest Mussorgsky, whose suite Pictures at an Exhibition will constitute the second half of the program.

Thursday, April 19: Polish pianist Rafał Blechacz has prepared a program that will advance through several different stages of musical styles. He will begin with Mozart’s K. 310 sonata in A minor, preceded by the K. 511 rondo, also in A minor. This will be followed by Beethoven’s Opus 101 sonata in the key of A major. The program will then progress to Schumann’s Opus 26, the five-movement “tone poem” (of sorts) entitled Faschingsschwank aus Wien (Carnival scenes from Vienna). He will then conclude with selections of music by Frédéric Chopin, the Opus 24 set of four mazurkas preceded by the Opus 52 (fourth) ballade in F minor.

Subscriptions are now on sale for $260 for premium seating in the Orchestra and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $200 for the Side Boxes, the center rear of the Dress Circle, and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $140 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. Subscriptions may be purchased online in advance through a City Box Office event page. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Single tickets will go on sale on July 31.

NCCO will Conclude 25th Anniversary Season with 3-Concert Festival

This month marks the conclusion of the 25th anniversary season of the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) and the final appearances of Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg as Music Director. The occasion will be recognized through three concert performances, each with a different program, over the course of a single week. Each program, in turn, will have its own title that reflects on advances made by NCCO during Salerno-Sonnenberg’s tenure. Specifics are as follows:

Tuesday, May 16, New Century Creations: This program will be an homage to the Featured Composer Program. This was the process through which NCCO built up its repertoire by commissioning an impressive diversity of composers. The program will present two short works by both Jennifer Higdon and William Bolcom, excerpts from extended compositions by Lera Auerbach, Derek Bermel, and Clarice Assad, and individual works by Mark O’Connor, Ellen Taafe Zwilich, and Michael Daugherty. The Assad excerpt will be taken from Impressions, a five-movement suite that was selected for the opening tracks of Together, the first recording that NCCO released under Salerno-Sonnenberg’s direction.

Thursday, May 18, Farewell to Nadja: This concert will shift attention to Salerno-Sonnenberg herself. She will perform as soloist for the entirety of a “Vivaldi++” program. She will begin with the first four concertos published in Antonio Vivaldi’s Opus 8 collection of twelve entitled Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (the contest between harmony and invention). However, those four concertos are better known by the name assigned to them collectively, The Four Seasons.

This will be followed by the four pieces that Astor Piazzolla composed for his tango quintet (violin-viola, piano, electric guitar, bass, and bandoneon) between 1965 and 1970 and then collected under the title Estaciones Porteñas, which came to be known in English as The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. Piazzolla never intended any connection to Vivaldi; nor, for that matter, did he view these pieces as a single suite. However, between 1996–1998 Leonid Desyatnikov established the “Vivaldi connection” by arranging them as four concertos for solo violin and string orchestra, keeping Piazzolla’s “seasonal” titles intact. This version was first performed by Gidon Kremer, for whom the arrangements were written; and it is also included on the NCCO Together album.

Saturday, May 20, Silver Jubilee Celebration: The “official celebration” of the NCCO anniversary will involve three guest soloists contributing to a program consisting entirely of the music of George Gershwin. Pianist Anne-Marie McDermott will join NCCO in a performance of “Rhapsody in Blue” in the 1926 “theater orchestra” setting orchestrated by Ferde Grofé. This will be followed by a series of selections of Gershwin’s contributions to the Great American Songbook collection. The vocalists for these selections will be soprano Melody Moore and baritone Efraín Solís. The program will then conclude with “An American in Paris.”

All three of these concerts will begin at 8 p.m. in Herbst Theatre at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Festival passes are now on sale for both two and three performances. The price for premium seating for the full series of three concerts is $155, with $125 and $74 for the other sections. The prices for only two concerts are $110, $88, and $52, respectively. It is also possible to purchase single tickets at reduced rates of $55, $44, and $26 when passes are purchased. Arrangements for the purchase of passes can be made online through a Google Forms Web site. In addition, City Box Office has created event pages for the three-concert pass and passes for the concerts on May 16 and 18, May 16 and 20, and May 18 and 20; but these do not include the special rate for additional single tickets.

The prices for single tickets will be $61, $49, and $29. City Box Office has created separate event pages for May 16, May 18, and May 20. All event pages (including those for passes) show the seating plan for Herbst Theatre to illustrate which sections are available for which prices. Finally, single tickets for students showing valid identification will be available at the Box Office for $15.

Kim Kashkashian Returns to ECM New Series in a Duo Album with Lera Auerbach

Violist Kim Kashkashian has been an ECM recording artist since 1985. She has built up an impressively broad repertoire, which has been the basis for an engaging series of releases that range from the nineteenth century to the immediate present. She received a 2012 GRAMMY Award in the Best Classical Instrumental Solo category for her ECM New Series album Kurtág and Ligeti: Music for Viola. (The announcement of the nominees may have been the first time that the name of György Kurtág appeared in the same sentence as “GRAMMY.”)

Her latest ECM New Series recording will be released on CD tomorrow, and this will be the recorded debut of a duo she has formed with pianist and composer Lera Auerbach. As usual, the album, entitled Arcanum, is currently available for pre-order from Amazon.com (for those who are really impatient). Auerbach was responsible for the two selections on the recording. “Arcanum” is the name of the sonata for viola and piano that she composed for Kashkashian. The other selection is her arrangement for viola and piano of the 24 Opus 34 preludes, composed for solo piano by Dmitri Shostakovich.

There is almost always an engaging ludic quality to Auerbach’s work, and each of the pieces on this album seems to be placing its own game into play. In a recent interview, Auerbach explained that “arcanum” means “mysterious knowledge.” The root, “arca,” actually means chest; so more literally the word refers to things that are hidden away (as in a storage chest). Each of the sonatas four movements is given its own “mysterious” title: “Advenio,” “Cinis,” “Postremo,” and “Adempte.” Fortunately, those who choose the browse the booklet accompanying this album will quickly discover that the meanings of these titles have been “hidden in plain sight” under the title “Instead of Program Notes.” Even before listening begins, those who have this album will have experienced a foretaste of Auerbach’s playfulness.

Whether or not there are hidden qualities in the music itself will probably depend on the attitude of the listener. Auerbach is far from shy when it comes to using dissonance; but she is particularly adept at drawing upon dissonant intervals for their sonorous qualities, rather than for harmonic ambiguity. What may be most engaging is her skill at taking on both the full breadth of the piano and the same extent of the viola as sources of sonorities that can then be blended in more ways than many listeners would suppose from listening to earlier repertoire, particularly for the viola. Since Kashkashian has demonstrated many times in the past that no technical challenge is insurmountable for her, she could not be a better partner for Auerbach in exploring that diversity of sonorous qualities. The result is that the attentive listener will probably not have to worry about what Auerbach may have chosen to hide, since there are no end of readily apparent features that will keep the mind behind the ear engaged over the course of multiple listening experiences.

The Shostakovich selection, on the other hand, is the product of a rather extended history. Shostakovich composed the cycle of preludes for piano in 1933, and it would be fair to say that he had created a prankish reflection on the 24 preludes that Frédéric Chopin composed for his Opus 28 collection. Chopin had written one prelude for each of the major and minor keys. Shostakovich not only did the same but also followed the same ordering Chopin had used, a “circle of fifths” ordering as opposed to the “chromatic” ordering that one finds in Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Not long after Shostakovich published these preludes, Dmitri Zyganov, first violinist of the Beethoven String Quartet and a friend of Shostakovich, began arranging the preludes for violin and piano. He would eventually transcribe nineteen of them. Auerbach completed the collection with the remaining five preludes in 2000. In 2008 she transcribed the entire cycle for cello and piano and then created a version for viola two years later. That last project was intended to provide a contrast to Shostakovich’s final composition, his Opus 147 sonata for viola and piano, which is distinguished by its highly dark rhetoric.

In this case the playfulness thus originates with Shostakovich himself. Auerbach’s “mission” was to translate the ludic rhetoric for solo piano into three different instrumental settings; and my own listening experience has now taken in two of them (cello and viola). From a point of view of interpretation, it is sufficient for the performers to focus on being true to the score and let Shostakovich take care of the rest. This makes for a highly satisfying recording in which the humor ranges from the subtle to the raucous. It will now be interesting to see if the duo formed by Kashkashian and Auerbach will continue beyond this album and, if so, how they will further expand their repertoire.

Providing the Listener with Useful Information

This may seem like picking nits. However, I would like to know why the new Cedille Records release of Lera Auerbach's Opus 47 preludes for cello and piano does not bother to give the key along with the tempo for each prelude on the track listing on the back cover. Presumably, anyone who knows a thing or two about Auberbach will know that the Opus 47 preludes follow the same circle-of-fifths-in-major-and-relative-minor ordering of Frédéric Chopin's (as well as Dmitri Shostakovich's Opus 34 collection) that she took for her Opus 41 piano preludes and her Opus 46 preludes for violin and piano. Nevertheless, this seems like the sort of useful information that could be provided for everyone in the first place they are likely to look!

Shostakovich's Move from Chopin to Bach

After all of my interest last month in the Opus 34 set of 24 preludes for piano that Dmitri Shostakovich completed in 1933, which had been arranged as a duet for cello and piano by Lera Auerbach and performed by cellist Alisa Weilerstein with Auerbach on piano, I found myself thinking again of Shostakovich's much later (Opus 87) collection of 24 prelude/fugue couplings. Presumably, the Opus 34 preludes could be taken as a reflection on the Opus 28 set of 24 preludes by Frédéric Chopin; but one of the points that emerged from the comments that Auerbach offered prior to performance involved her interest in seeking out structure in a collection based on a straightforward traversal of the circle of fifths through major and minor keys. Whether or not Shostakovich had intended such a structure, the Auerbach/Weilerstein performance gave at least a suggestion of a narrative arc that carried the listener from one prelude to the next, thus transcending "Winston Churchill's one-thing-after-another characterization of history" that tends to bring down too many pianists who wish to perform the Chopin preludes as an integrated set.

By the time Shostakovich began work on Opus 87, he had endured a series of devastating life experiences that would probably be beyond the comprehension of any listener today. Most important is that in 1933 he had not yet come to the attention of Joseph Stalin. Between 1933 and 1950, when he began work on Opus 87, he had been denounced twice by the Soviet bureaucracy, both times for "formalism" and, on the first occasion, the vulgar depiction of sexual congress in his Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District opera. (Leave it to the Soviets to attack an artist for being both too abstract and too concrete at the same time!) If that were not enough for any individual to sustain, this period also included the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, including the siege of Leningrad, which had inspired two of his most gut-wrenching compositions, the Opus 65 eighth symphony in C minor and the Opus 67 piano trio in E minor.

By 1950, however, his reputation had been at least partially restored; and, as its Wikipedia entry explains, Opus 87 was an unexpected consequence of a listening experience resulting from "official business:"

After the Second World War, Dmitri Shostakovich was Russia's most prominent composer. Although out of favour with the Soviet Communist Party, he was still sent abroad as a cultural ambassador. One such trip was to Leipzig in 1950 for a music festival marking the bicentennial of J. S. Bach's death.

As part of the festival, Shostakovich was asked to sit on the judging panel for the first International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition. One of the entrants in the competition was the 26-year-old Tatiana Nikolayeva from Moscow. Though not required by competition regulations, she had come prepared to play any of the 48 preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier on request. She won the gold medal.

Inspired by the competition and impressed by Nikolayeva's playing, Shostakovich returned to Moscow and started composing his own cycle of 24 preludes and fugues. Shostakovich worked fairly quickly, taking only three days on average to write each piece. As each was completed he would ask Nikolayeva to come and visit him in his Moscow apartment where he would play her the latest piece.

The complete work was written between 10 October 1950 and 25 February 1951. Once finished, Shostakovich dedicated the work to Nikolayeva, who undertook the public premiere in Leningrad on 23 December 1952.

From a musical point of view, what I find most interesting its that Shostakovich's attention had shifted from Chopin to Bach, whose own attention was more pedagogic than virtuosic. Thus, one is less likely to find an overall structure to the collection; nor is there any reason to assume that Shostakovich had intended one. Nevertheless, the Opus 34 preludes clearly reflect Shostakovich's base of experiences and influences in 1933; and I continue to believe that Opus 87 is even more explicitly autobiographical, even if that autobiography is highly encrypted. We know from, for example, accounts of his pupil Sofia Gubaidulina, that, while Bach could confine pedagogy to matters of execution and invention, Shostakovich realized that pupils needed to be informed of certain harsh "social realities," even if it meant concealing that information in a coded language.

Ironically, while Opus 87 is therefore a fascinating collection, I find that I have had few contacts with it. Indeed, my only contact has been with a performance of the final prelude and fugue in the set (in D minor) given at a recital a little over a year ago. On the other hand, as a result of that experience, I managed to discover a set of free downloads of the complete set of preludes and fugues, recorded from a recital given by Denis Plutalov at Watson Hall of the North Carolina School of the Arts on May 23, 2005; and I continue to relish having this collection at my disposal. At some time in the future, I may even work up the courage to try playing some of these works for myself, assuming that I have the will to do so after my current encounter with Alexander Scriabin's Opus 11 collection of 24 (Chopin-inspired) preludes!

Back to Scriabin?

My four-hand partner and neighbor informed me that she would be away for a couple of weeks on a European vacation, and we talked about what I would be playing from the solo repertoire in her absence. I mentioned that, since a selection of short pieces by Alexander Scriabin would occupy a major segment of the recital that Yuja Wang would be giving here on April 22, I figured it was time for me to resume my work on his Opus 11 preludes. I suppose I should not have been surprised at the reaction of a wide-eyed stare; but I have no problem owning up to the sad truth that I do not play Scriabin particularly well. I just happen to be very curious about what makes his music tick, and this seemed like a good way to prepare for a listening experience in the near future.

I first started looking at Opus 11 several years ago, back when my Baldwin grand was my refuge from Silicon Valley life. Opus 11 is a collection of 24 preludes. Like most collections with that head-count, it traverses all of the chromatic keys in both major and minor, using the circle-of-fifths ordering that we find in Frédéric Chopin's collection. Like the Chopin collection, but unlike those of Dmitri Shostakovich and Lera Auerbach, Scriabin's Opus 11 does not appear to have any overall structure. It is just a traversal of the 24 possible keys, and it may not have even been composed with the pedagogical intentions that occupied Johann Sebastian Bach. The only structure that Scriabin defines is that the collection is broken down into four parts, each consisting of six preludes.

Regardless of Scriabin's intentions, however, even trying to play the Opus 11 preludes is a major learning experience. Having engaged with the first three parts in Palo Alto, I decided to begin this morning with the E-flat major prelude, the nineteenth in the set and the first of the final part. This was definitely not music to jump in and play. While the time signature is 2/4, the basic pulse is ten beats to the measure, written as pairs of five sixteenth notes under a common beam. These however are offset by one of these sixteenth beats, so the set begins one sixteenth before the bar line. The accompanying line then breaks down into conventional divisions of the beat into two or three, with the occasional appearance of a division into five (still offset from the underlying pulse by a single beat).

Having been challenged by my Santa Barbara piano teach to take a stab at the fourth movement of Charles Ives' first piano sonata, I have seen passages far more rhythmically eccentric that Opus 11, Number 19. The pages of my Ives score are saturated with vertical lines in pencil, which guided my awareness of what was supposed to align with what; and I expect that I shall approach this Scriabin prelude the same way. This time, however, I am doing so as another facet in my agenda for becoming a better listener, which means that I shall also be spending time consulting my recording of Michael Ponti playing these preludes. If I can figure out how things tick in theory, there is still the question of whether or not I can hear them tick the same way in performance; and that is why I am doing this to prepare for Wang's piano recital. It is not that she will be playing this particular prelude. (It is not on the version of the program I currently have.) Rather, this rhythmic structure of this E-flat major prelude is part of the more general grammar behind Scriabin's "utterances," at least in his writing for solo piano. I think of it as a bit of aural calisthenics to prepare for the selections that will be on Wang's program.

I suppose I shall not know whether or not this is time well spent until at attend the recital itself. For all I know, the matter will not be settled even after I have heard her Scriabin performances. On the other hand, like chicken soup, the effort does no harm; and it has certainly thrust me into an alternative method for learning to listen to piano music.

A Messiaen Connection?

Once again I find myself reflecting on a claim made in an Examiner.com review I wrote this morning. This time the claim was that one of the sources that influenced Lera Auerbach in her Opus 47 collection of 24 preludes for cello and piano was the "Noël" movement of Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus. I can imagine that there might be readers questioning how much exposure a music student who was a teenager during the fall of the Soviet Union would have had to Messiaen. Therefore I wish to state for the record that my very first exposure to the Vingt Regards was a recording produced by Melodiya of the Russian pianist Anton Batagov, originally made in 1989 (when the label said "Made in USSR")!

Ultimately, this exercise was a gentle but humbling reminder of just how provincial the American view of contemporary music was during the second half of the twentieth century, if not in the present day. For most Americans Messiaen was an unfamiliar name; and most of those who did know the name probably associated it with the good intentions of Leonard Bernstein to broaden our horizons, even if those intentions were seldom matched by either understanding or skill. As a rule of thumb, America tended to know far less about what was happening in the name of contemporary music in Europe, on either side of the Iron Curtain, than Europeans (again regardless of the Iron Curtain) knew about what was happening in the United States. Remaining with Messiaen as a case in point, the opera Saint François d' Assise was completed in 1983; but it was not performed in its entirety, let alone staged, in the United States until 2002!

My guess is that American audiences have begun to build up a broader experience base since the turn of the century. This may even be one of the more sanguine consequences of the world the Internet has made. Our awareness of serious music is no longer at the mercy of the Columbia and RCA record labels (both pathetic shadows of their former selves) and the myth of "Big Five" American orchestras that they promulgated in the interest of improving sales. We now live in a world in which we can "virtually" attend concerts, approximating the experiences of those in the concert hall through the power of real-time audio and/or video streaming. This is also a world in which such "captured" performances are archived, allowing the experience to be reproduced at any later time. Then, of course, there are all the amateur (or sometimes better) efforts at video capture that find their way to YouTube, often allowing us to experience performing artists who have not yet mustered the resources for an American tour. None of this will ever be an acceptable substitute for actually being in the performing space, but the Internet is slowly but surely becoming a better way to be aware of just what is happening in the world of serious music than any recording industry has ever been. When it comes to contemporary music, we shall no longer have any excuses behind which our ignorance can hide; and hopefully we shall all embrace these opportunities that facilitate our progress towards being better listeners.