harmonia mundi to Release New Ligeti Album

György Ligeti is one of those composers that intrigued me upon “first contact,” which, in my case, was “Atmosphères.” Leonard Bernstein recorded his performance with the New York Philharmonic shortly after having given the New York premier with the New York Philharmonic early in 1964. My interest was reinforced when the music surfaced in the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey; and, for all I know, Kubrick used the Bernstein recording after having rejected the original score that Alex North had composed for him. Fortunately, my awareness of Ligeti was reinforced by conductors that understood him better, such as Pierre Boulez and the pianist Yuja Wang, who included three of his études in her Berlin Recital album. 

György Ligeti on the cover of the album being discussed

The end of this month will see the release of a new harmonia mundi album devoted almost entirely to Ligeti. It will begin with his five-movement violin concerto (first conducted in its final version by Boulez) and conclude with his piano concerto, also in five movements. In the center of the program, so to speak, there is a performance of one of his earliest works, the “Concert românesc,” completed in 1951. Scored for a small orchestra, this amounts to an engaging account of “Ligeti before he became Ligeti!” Interleaved among the three Ligeti selections are two of the five Aus der Ferne compositions by György Kurtág, scored for string quartet.

The primary soloist on this album is violinist Isabel Faust, since she performs the Aus der Ferne movements as well as the violin concerto. The other quartet members are violinist Martial Gauthier, Carole Roth on viola, and cellist Robin Michael. The soloist for the piano concerto is Jean-Frédéric Neuburger. The orchestra is Les Siècles, conducted by François-Xavier Roth. As most readers will probably expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders for this album.

One of the things I like about Ligeti is that he is just as capable of being prankish as he is of being cerebral. This is most evident in the violin concerto, in which one of the solo violin passages is accompanied by four ocarinas. (The more time I spend listening to Ligeti, the more I recognize that there is never a dull moment!)

I was somewhat amused to be writing this while Faust is currently visiting San Francisco to perform with the San Francisco Symphony. For that occasion she prepared Alban Berg’s violin concerto. Most likely, both Ligeti and Kurtág were influenced by Berg; so I took some pleasure in having the opportunity to write a post-Berg article! Nevertheless, both of the composers on this new harmonia mundi album have distinguished themselves with “voices” decidedly different from Berg’s. I continue to look forward to new “contacts of discovery” in Ligeti’s catalog, and I enjoyed the decision of the producers to draw upon Kurtág to provide “spacing” between the Ligeti selections.

Once you get used to the dissonance, you will find that this album serves up an engaging journey of discovery.

Esmé Quartet: Another “Three Centuries” Program

Esmé Quartet players Yuna Ha, Dimitri Murrath, Yeeun Heo, and Wonhee Bae (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

The Esmé Quartet made its debut with San Francisco Performances (SFP) in February of 2022, when it presented the second gift concert for the season. It was formed in 2016 by four Korean musicians studying at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (in Cologne, Germany); and the members were Wonhee Bae (first violin), Yuna Ha (second violin), Jiwon Kim (viola), and Yeeun Heo (cello). Since that time Kim has left the ensemble and has been replaced by violist Dimitri Murrath, currently on the Faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM); and the quartet currently has a residency at SFCM.

As was the case in 2022, the quartet prepared a “three centuries” program. This time the opening eighteenth-century selection was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 575 quartet in D major (complementing the G major quartet that began the first program). Again the second half of the program was devoted to the nineteenth century, this time Franz Schubert’s D. 887 (final) string quartet in G major. The intermission was preceded by the twentieth-century selection, György Ligeti’s first string quartet, given the title “Métamorphoses Nocturnes.” Ironically, I have SFP to thank for my last (and probably first) encounter with this quartet, when I heard it performed by the Castalian Quartet in November of 2021.

On that occasion, I suggested that Ligeti’s quartet “could almost be taken for Béla Bartók’s seventh string quartet.” It was a relatively early undertaking, which I also described as “before Ligeti started sounding like Ligeti.” However, if he had not yet undertaken the thick one-to-a-part textures of “Atmosphères,” one can appreciate the give-and-take rhetoric as the score oscillates between the atonal themes and the thick textures of the full ensemble. In other words, it was through his composition of this quartet Ligeti “found his voice,” which would encourage him to explore those thick textures.

In that context, both the Mozart and Schubert quartets could not have been given better performances as models of transparency. In both of these cases, the counterpoint was so clear that I could easily keep my glance shifting from one instrumentalist to another. Both of these were (at least for me) familiar compositions. Nevertheless, the clarity of the delivery was so compelling that I almost felt as if I had encountered both of these pieces for the very first time.

On my way home from Herbst Theatre, I realized that the in-the-moment spontaneity of the players was chamber music as it should be, possibly even as it was “back in the day” when Mozart played viola in a quartet with violinists Joseph Haydn and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and cellist Johann Baptist Wanhal.

Yuja Wang in Vienna on Deutsche Grammophon

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Crossover Media)

Many readers probably know by now that I have been following the work of pianist Yuja Wang for pretty much as long as I have been pursuing my current writing gig. Indeed, I filed my most recent article about her yesterday morning following her Great Performers Series recital in Davies Symphony Hall. While I continue to be impressed by the dexterity she can bring to massive quantities of notes, I have not always been convincingly satisfied by some of her approaches to interpretation. Indeed, my balance scales took a serious tip to the negative side about two years ago, when I cited her “slam-bang approach to Franz Liszt’s first piano concerto in E-flat major,” going as far as to described her as being a “partner in crime” with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas!

Things were not much better this week, when I realized that I had to turn to her encores to begin my article on a positive note! This morning, in hopes of a shift in context, I set aside time to listen to her latest Deutsche Grammophon album, The Vienna Recital. This provides a complete account of the music she performed at the Konzerthaus, Vienna on April 26, 2022.

The program was structured around two four-movement sonatas. The first of these was Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 23 (third) sonata in F-sharp minor. The other was the third of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 31 sonatas, composed in the key of E-flat major. As usual, most (if not all) of the notes were in the right place. Nevertheless, it was hard to get beyond what amounted to a sense of aimless wandering in her approach to Scriabin. The Beethoven account was delivered with more certainty but not much personality.

Woven among the sonatas were shorter compositions represented by three composers. The first of these was Isaac Albéniz with two of the movements from his Iberia collection. She returned to Nikolai Kapustin (whose music has interested her for the better part of her career) with two selections from his Opus 53, 24 Jazz Preludes. Those were complemented by two of the solo piano études by György Ligeti.

The remaining four tracks on the album accounted for the encores (a rather modest number when compared with Wednesday evening’s encounter). She continued the étude theme with the sixth in Philip Glass’ collection. She then turned to “Danzón No. 2,” which is probably the best known orchestral composition by Arturo Márquez. (This might be familiar to those that followed Mozart in the Jungle.) Her transcription was prepared by Leticia Gómez-Tagle. She then reverted to “old school” selections, an intermezzo by Johannes Brahms (the third in the Opus 117 set) and Giovanni Sgambati’s piano arrangement of music from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice.

Taken as a whole, I would have to say that I was neither more nor less impressed with this recording than I had been with Wednesday evening’s recital.

Imaginative Approach to Cello-Piano Recital

Last night cellist Jay Campbell returned to Herbst Theatre for the second program in the San Francisco Performances Great Artists and Ensembles series. This served as a follow-up to the first program in the series, featuring violinist Miranda Cuckson, which took place exactly one week ago. Campbell was joined by pianist Conor Hanick, who devoted half of the program to solo compositions by Franz Schubert and György Ligeti. These were framed by the duo performances, the first being “gretchen am spinnrade” by Eric Wubbels and the final offering being Francis Poulenc’s sonata for cello and piano. Taken as a whole, the program served up a prodigious variety of emotional dispositions.

The duo decidedly hit the ground running with “gretchen am spinnrade.” It did not take long for even a casual listener to recognize that this music had nothing to do with either Schubert or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The composer himself provided his own description of the music, distilled down to a single sentence: “A manic, hounded piece, alternating relentless motoric circuits with plateaus of regular, ‘idling’ motion.” One could almost associate the music with the dysfunctional world of RoboCop, where the motto is “I’d buy that for a dollar!”

Dysfunctional or not, “gretchen am spinnrade” was definitely music that forced the listener to sit up and take notice. Both Campbell and Hanick seemed to be expending all of their energy for the entire evening on this one dynamo of a composition. At the very least, one would say that this was music that could not possibly be ignored. Personally, I had no trouble being drawn into its dispositional mix of the dynamic and the diabolic, suggesting that, in Goethe’s world, this music had far more to do with Mephistopheles than with Gretchen. For that matter, I would be only too happy for an opportunity to listen to it a second time.

The second half of the program consisted entirely of the Poulenc sonata. The composer began work on this sonata in 1940 but was interrupted by the German occupation. It was completed in 1948; but a corrected edition was published in 1953 (presumably with the composer’s approval). This is very much music for high spirits, meaning that it could not have been a better complement to the program’s opening selection. Back in the early Sixties, Poulenc was recognized as a major composer; but that reputation receded very quickly not long after his death in 1963. The good news is that both Campbell and Hanick knew how to tap into that spirited rhetoric. The sonata may not be “back in vogue;” but, given my own background, I found it more than a little comforting to listen to this music some 60 years after the composer’s death.

Connor Hanick (photography by Laura Desberg, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

If the duo performances proceeded from present to past, Hanick’s solo offerings took the opposite direction. He began with the last of the four impromptus in both of the Schubert collections. D. 899 and D. 935. Both were high-paced compositions, providing the pianist with the best possible opportunity to display dexterity.

He then shifted over to the recent past with three of György Ligeti’s études, two from his first book (“Fanfares” and “Arc-en-ciel”) and one from the second (“L'escalier du diable”). (The English translations for the second and third études are “rainbow” and “the Devil’s staircase.”) To some extent one may say that all of Ligeti’s études have a diabolical streak, and Hanick’s interpretations tended to reflect that position. Personally, I was a bit saddened to realize how long it had been since I had heard any of Ligeti’s études either in recital or on recording. As a result. I was more than a little elated by Hanick’s juxtaposition of Ligeti with Schubert.

Now I find myself curious as to how Hanick would plan a full-evening recital!

Cellist Jay Campbell to Return to SFP

Cellist Jay Campbell and pianist Conor Hanick (courtesy of SFP)

Some readers may recall that the first program in the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Great Artists and Ensembles series will take place at the beginning of next month. The second program will be presented a little less than a week later. The recital will see the return of cellist Jay Campbell. He will be joined by pianist Conor Hanick, who will be making his SFP debut.

The program will begin with Eric Wubbels instrumental setting of “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (Gretchen at the spinning wheel), one of the songs incorporated in Part One of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. This text is probably best known as the D. 118 song composed by Franz Schubert, but Campbell and Hanick will give it an instrumental treatment. On a more conventional side, they will conclude with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 19 sonata for cello and piano in G minor.

Between these two “bookends” Hanick will offer several solo selections. He will begin with two of the impromptus from Schubert’s D. 899 set of four, those in the key of A-flat major and F minor, respectively. This will be followed by three of György Ligeti’s études, two from his first book (“Fanfares” and “Arc-en-ciel”) and one from the second (“L'escalier du diable”). (The English translations for the second and their études are “rainbow” and “the Devil’s staircase.”)

This recital will take place in Herbst Theater, beginning at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 8. The entrance to Herbst Theatre is on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue 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), $60 (remainder of Orchestra, all Side Boxes, and center rear Dress Circle), and $50 (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.

When György Ligeti Became György Ligeti

This coming Friday SWR Classic will release a new album of the complete works that György Ligeti composed for a cappella choir. It requires two CDs to account for this particular aspect of Ligeti’s work. All of the selections are performed by the SWR Vokalensemble, the “house” choir of SWR (Südwestrundfunk), the regional public broadcasting corporation for the southwest of Germany. The group is led by Yuval Weinberg, who became its Chief Conductor at the beginning of the 2020/2021 season. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

Those familiar with Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (however many of us still remain) will have had exposure to one of the selections on this album, “Lux aeterna.” It provided the soundtrack for the “trippiest” episode in the film, which served as a cinematic realization of a bizarre light show. Ligeti composed it in 1966, and it was his first a cappella work since 1952, the “early stage” of Ligeti’s works, written at a time when one of his strongest influences was Béla Bartók.

Ligeti had been born in Transylvania, Romania; but his family was Hungarian Jewish. While he received his first musical training in Romania, his primary influence was the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where he began his career as a professional musician. All that changed in 1956, when the Hungarian uprising was violently suppressed by the Soviet Army. Ligeti escaped to Vienna and would eventually take Austrian citizenship in 1968.

György Ligeti preparing a rehearsal performance (from the Dutch National Archives, in Wikimedia Commons, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

However, the city that most influenced Ligeti’s efforts as a composer was Cologne. This is where composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig were exploring the new possibilities afforded by electronic music. While Ligeti produced very little music in this genre, he was inspired to create similar sonorities working only with conventional instruments.

One of the most successful of his results was “Atmosphères,” completed in 1961 and subsequently appropriated by Kubrick for 2001. Unlike this composition, “Lux aeterna” does not try to evoke “electronic sonorities;” but it does draw upon the tightly-knit polyphony of “Atmosphères.” However, after “Lux aeterna” Ligeti would compose only six short pieces in the a cappella genre.

Thus, the first 45 tracks on this new release reflect back on Ligeti’s more traditional settings of Hungarian texts. In other words, as the title of this article observes, these were the results of the composer’s efforts before he “became” the Ligeti that is familiar to most listeners. Those more interested in his more “experimental” efforts may find these early pieces too bland and/or too predictable. Personally, however, I would prefer these “windows on Hungarian traditions” over the more flamboyant ventures of Franz Liszt into that same domain!

In other words those willing to take a “both sides now” approach to the rich repertoire in this collection are likely to come away more satisfied than they might have anticipated!

Music@Menlo 2021 Releases Seven Albums

David Finckel and Wu Han (photograph by “ralph and jenny” taken at Brock Recital Hall, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama in 2013, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

At the beginning of this month, Music@Menlo released a collection of seven albums of recordings made during performances during last year’s summer festival. That occasion marked the first season to be held in the new Spieker Center for the Arts on the Menlo School campus in Atherton, California. My wife and I were living in Palo Alto when this festival was first launched in 2003 by its husband-and-wife founders, cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han.

Ironically, neither of us have ever attended a performance at this festival. When it was first announced, we were not terribly happy with the price; and we already had quite enough satisfying opportunities at our disposal, including venues in San Francisco (particularly in the Civic Center area), the Stanford University campus, and Burlingame, where the Kohl Mansion is located. There was also some sense that the Menlo festival was for New Yorkers trying to get away during the summer months, somewhat in the spirit of the chamber music we had already encountered during our summer visits to the Santa Fe Opera. Mind you, when we lived on “the other coast,” we thoroughly enjoyed the many opportunities available in both Manhattan and Brooklyn. However, we quickly discovered that the West Coast had its own way of doing things; and we had no regrets in putting our past New York experiences behind us.

Nevertheless, I was drawn to the recent release of those seven albums to see if I had been missing anything. Music@Menlo provides the best Web page for the distribution of this content. On that Web page one can purchase the box set of all seven CDs, while each individual CD is available in both physical and digital form, the latter supporting both download and streaming through Amazon.com and Apple Music (the service previously known as iTunes). Over the last several days I have worked my way through the entire content of this offering, and I am afraid that I came away with no regrets at having missed the performances themselves.

The fact is that, with two exceptions, I have encountered every one of the compositions in the collection over the course of past listening experiences. Furthermore, a bit to my surprise, a healthy number of those encounters took place during recitals, rather than just from recordings. The most substantial exception is a piano trio in F-sharp minor by the Armenian composer Arno Babajanian. This is on Disc 3, situated between the violin sonata by Leoš Janáček (Czech) and a solo cello sonata by György Ligeti (Hungarian). That album then concludes with the Opus 57 piano quintet in G minor by Dmitri Shostakovich (Russian).

The other exception is “Gather,” composed for cello and piano by Patrick Castillo. This short (about three minutes in duration) piece was written on request by Finckel and Han for the opening of the Spieker Center, and they presented its first performance. Gather was also the title of last summer’s festival, carrying connotations of being able, once again, to assemble in groups for the sake of playing music. Castillo deftly wove the opening measures of Robert Lowry’s hymn “Shall We Gather at the River?” into the final phrases of his composition. That brief motif added a bit of poignancy to the idea that all of the musicians participating in the 2021 festival were, once again, allowed to gather.

My guess is that the recordings in this collection are most likely to appeal to those that attended last summer’s festival and would like to revive their memories. I am all for such practices, particularly where chamber music is involved. However, having experienced so much of this content in performance, I am afraid that, taken as a whole, these seven CDs left me cool on how the music was being interpreted, if not downright cold.

Yuja Wang: No Longer Consistently Satisfying?

Pianist Yuja Wang last appeared in Davies Symphony Hall this past January, when she performed as concerto soloist with Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) conducting the San Francisco Symphony. Over the quarter-century of following Wang’s concert appearances, I had found her to be one of the most consistently satisfying performers I had encountered. Sadly, that consistency was shattered by a slam-bang approach to Franz Liszt’s first piano concerto in E-flat major for which Wang and MTT were partners in crime.

Last night I returned to Davies for Wang’s solo recital, and I regret to report that the listening experience was equally dissatisfying. This was more than a little ironic in light of the imaginative attention that went into the program she prepared. Each half of the program consisted of three compositions, the first from the nineteenth century, followed by two from the twentieth. Furthermore, the nineteenth-century offerings were stretched across a wide distance, with the third of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 31 sonatas in E-flat major, composed in 1802, at one end and Alexander Scriabin’s Opus 23 (third) piano sonata in F-sharp minor, composed in 1898, at the other. The twentieth-century composers in the first half were Arnold Schoenberg and György Ligeti, and those in the second half were Isaac Albéniz and Nikolai Kapustin.

The Scriabin sonata was probably the one selection that offered more than a few glimpses of sensitivity. This is the only four-movement piano sonata that Scriabin composed, and there was no break in the transition between the third and fourth movements. (After the fourth sonata, Opus 30 in F-sharp major, the remaining six sonatas were all single-movement without key specification.) Wang was not shy in approaching the intensity of Scriabin’s rhetoric, but there was a sense of keen focus on the music guiding her interpretation that made this an absorbing and satisfying listening experience.

Sadly, the rest of the program tended to be dominated by dispositions at their most extreme, more often than not overshadowing any expressiveness residing in the marks on paper (or, in Wang’s case, images on the screen). Where the Beethoven sonata was concerned, one might have been able to imagine that the composer himself may also have exaggerated expressiveness in his own interpretation for performance. Indeed, as deafness began to overcome him, such exaggeration may have been his only remaining connection to the music. What motivated Wang to pursue similar extremes is anyone’s guess.

The work on the program that probably suffered the most was Schoenberg’s Opus 25 suite, which is probably one of the better examples of the composer’s most disciplined approach to his twelve-tone technique. However, as Virgil Thomson once observed in an article for The New York Review of Books, the real music in Schoenberg’s compositions emerged from his rhythms, rather than his pitch selections. Opus 25 is an excellent case in point, since it reflects on those dance forms that were so familiar to Johann Sebastian Bach in his suites. Sadly, there was no sense of expressive rhythm in Wang’s performance, let alone any suggestion that most of the movement titles referred to dance forms. Her focus seemed to be entirely one of which keys were depressed at which times; and, as might be guessed, any sense of emotional dispositions had vanished entirely.

The closest those dispositions had come to the surface were best found in the final work on the program, two of the movements from Kapustin’s Opus 53, entitled 24 Preludes in the Jazz Style. This was clearly also a nod at Bach. However, there was more than enough expressive rhythm in Kapustin’s “jazz style” to blow away the dust that had accumulated over Wang’s approach to Schoenberg. One could also tell from her physical disposition that she was much more “at home” with Kapustin than she had been with Schoenberg; and, in that comfort zone, she even allowed a few shadows of Bach to be cast over her keyboard.

Almost as engaging was her approach to two of the études selected from the set composed by Ligeti. Her intense focus on getting every note in its proper place was appropriate for her second selection, “L’escalier du diable” (the devil’s staircase, an imaginative attempt to turn an optical illusion into music). On the other hand, the “Automne à Varsovie” (autumn in Warsaw) movement was far more expressive in Ligeti’s conception; but Wang seemed to care about little more than making sure that every note was in its proper place. Nevertheless, her account of Ligeti’s Polish impressions was more convincing than the Spanish sentiments found in the “Lavapiés” (named after a neighborhood in Madrid) movement from Albéniz’ Iberia collection.

I must confess that I lost count of the number of encores Wang took. None were announced. My guess is that, except for one of the Philip Glass études, all of the selections were bravura arrangements of familiar sources. The one for the final movement (Badinerie) of Bach’s BWV 1067 orchestral suite may have deserved a price for “furthest over the top;” but it was quickly lost in the shuffle through the other encores.

Nevertheless, Wang played to a full house. The majority of the attendees seemed to have loved every minute of it. Who am I to complain?

SFSymphony+ Should Let Ligeti be Ligeti

This morning the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) released its first video of the year for on-demand streaming through the SFSymphony+ Web site. The title of the program was LIGETI: PARADIGMS and the performance, conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, required both SFS and the SFS Chorus. The program consisted of three compositions by György Ligeti: “Lux Aeterna,” “Ramifications,” and “Clocks and Clouds.” The first two of these were actually more artifact that performance.

The sounds of the performance of “Lux Aeterna” were processed in such a way as to create a binaural mix, whose sounds had spatial qualities best appreciated by listening with standard stereo headphones. This performance was prefaced with a rather generous exposition of background material. Media artist Refik Anadol set out to create a “virtual data sculpture,” which he called a “data crystal.” This crystal was “seeded” by 32 separate vocal tracks provided by the individual voices of sixteen members of the Chorus singing Ligeti’s “Lux Aeterna” score. The collected data were then processed by Carol Reiley, who deployed what she called “artificial intelligence” (AI) software. (I use scare quotes because I doubt that any of the dozen or so “founding fathers” of AI that met at the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, from which the term “artificial intelligence” first emerged, would have recognized Reiley’s efforts as having much to do with intelligence.)

However, quibbling over terminology is the least of the problems that arose from what amounted to a real-time artifact, which happened to have “Lux Aeterna” as part of the mix. More serious was the sensory overload that was more likely to distract from the music than to enhance it. Those that read the background information, which appeared on this site at the beginning of this month, know that the intentions of both Anadol and Reiley had been to enhance listener awareness of the thick textures in Ligeti’s score. For this listener, however, Salonen’s conducting was more than sufficient in itself. Close observation of both Salonen and the individual vocalists was all one needed to appreciate (and hopefully enjoy) Ligeti’s imaginative and stimulating techniques.

Technology was more useful in contributing to the performance of “Ramifications.” The music is composed for twelve individual string parts divided into two sextets. The reference frequency for one of those sextets was 453 Hz, a quarter tone higher than the 440 Hz standard taken by the other. As might be imagined, it is no easy matter for two different tuning references to be on the same stage at the same time, particularly when the number of instruments involved is the same for both of them. As a result, the “detuning” of the quarter-tone separation was actually realized through digital processing, allowing all of the performers to play their parts under a common tuning pitch. This performance was then enhanced with a “background” of images taken from the Hubble Space Telescope; and, once again, the visual element tended to distract from Ligeti’s music, rather than providing new ways of listening to it.

Natural or synthesized? Only the programmer knows for sure. (screen shot from the video being discussed)

The presentation of the final composition, “Clocks and Clouds,” only extended the disadvantages of distraction. Ligeti was interested in opposing predictable and mechanical (clock-like) music with thematic lines that were unpredictable (cloud-like). This was the one case in which Anadol paid more attention to the music than to his technology. He provided visuals that interleaved cloud images with synthesized ones (once again described as products of AI). These were definitely the least intrusive extensions to the musical performances. Nevertheless, they, too, distracted from the many subtleties in Ligeti’s score that make listening to his music such a rich experience.

SFS Announces First SFSymphony+ of Year

poster design for LIGETI: PARADIGMS (courtesy of SFS)

This past Tuesday, the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) announced the first release of a video for on-demand streaming through the SFSymphony+ Web site. The title of the program will be LIGETI: PARADIGMS, and it will be a performance by SFS and the SFS Chorus conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. As the title suggests, the program will present three compositions by György Ligeti: “Lux Aeterna,” “Ramifications,” and “Clocks and Clouds.”

Readers probably know by now that Salonen has taken considerable interest in expanding the possibilities of the orchestral experience through digital collaboration. For this particular program those possibilities will be explored through the work of artificial intelligence (AI) entrepreneur Carol Reiley, who is one of the SFS Collaborative Partners. Other partners contributing to this production will be media artist Refik Anadol and John Loose, Director of Audio Production at Dolby Laboratories.

Each of the three works on the program will be given its own unique approach to interpretation:

1. “Lux Aeterna” was scored by Ligeti for a sixteen-part mixed choir. For this performance sixteen members of the SFS Chorus will be recorded on 32 separate vocal tracks. Anadol will create a “data crystal,” which will amount of a “virtual data sculpture.” That “sculpture” will be the result of analyzing and interpreting the tracks, drawing upon AI techniques deployed by Reiley. Loose will then create a binaural mix with Dolby Atmos technology, which will provide listeners with a spatial surround-sound experience through standard stereo headphones. The intention is that, through synthesized spatial separation, listeners will be more aware of the individual parts in Ligeti’s score.
2. “Ramifications” is scored for twelve individual string parts, divided into two groups of six performers. The first group consists of four violins, one viola, and one cello. The second group has three violins, one viola, one cello, and one bass, The first group is “detuned,” based on a reference pitch of 453 Hz for A, a quarter tone higher than the standard 440 Hz. In this performance the detuning will be realized digitally, meaning that the players in the first group can play in tune with those of the second group. For this performance Anadol will provide “visual accompaniment,” based on images from the Hubble Space Telescope provided by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
3. “Clocks and Clouds” was originally composed for twelve female voices with accompaniment by a chamber ensemble. The composer’s intention was to depict the opposing paradigms of the predictable and mechanical (clock) and the unpredictability of clouds (and nature, in general). Anadol uses AI algorithms to synthesize original cloud formations based on analysis of seventeen million cloud images extracted from global databases. This duality of natural and synthesized clouds will reflect the dual nature of Ligeti’s score.

SFSymphony+ videos are available for viewing free of charge. However, those visiting the site for the first time are asked to register before being granted access to the content. This will involve creating a password, which will facilitate subsequent visits. The LIGETI: PARADIGMS video is scheduled for upload to the site on January 18, one week from this coming Tuesday. All programs are usually available for viewing beginning at 10 a.m. on the date of release.

Castalian Quartet Makes Impressive SF Debut

Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances presented the second of the six programs in the 2021–2022 Shenson Chamber Series. The Castalian Quartet of violinists Sini Simonen and Daniel Roberts, violist Ruth Gibson, and cellist Christopher Graves had been scheduled to make its debut in the spring of 2020. Now that lockdown conditions due to COVID-19 have been eased, they have planned a tour of debut performances that will include Seattle, New York, Atlanta, and Vancouver, as well as San Francisco.

The ensemble was founded about a decade ago and is based in the United Kingdom. However, their first violin is Finnish and an enthusiastic advocate of the music of Jean Sibelius. As a result, the second half of the program was devoted to that composer’s most mature string quartet, his Opus 56 in D minor, given the title “Voces intimae” (intimate voices). Unless I am mistaken, I have encountered this music in performance (rather than on recording) only once, when it was performed at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in April of 2011.

As the program note by Eric Bromberger observed, the quartet was composed between 1908 and 1909. In the context of more familiar Sibelius compositions, it is situated between the third (Opus 52 in C major) and fourth (Opus 63 in A minor) symphonies. It is not difficult to recognize some of the composer’s more familiar tropes, but the quartet’s “voice” is distinctively different from that of its “symphonic neighbors.” On the other hand, those familiar with the broader scope of the composer’s works are likely to find the rhetoric of the quartet familiar. The Castalian gave the music a convincing account, which, for this pair of ears, was a welcome reminder that Sibelius did not limit himself to writing orchestral music.

The intermission was preceded by the first quartet composed by György Ligeti. This was also given a title, “Métamorphoses nocturnes.” The music was composed between 1953 and 1954. Like the “Concert românesc” (Romanian concerto), which was performed by the San Francisco Symphony at the beginning of this month, this is another example of music composed “before Ligeti started sounding like Ligeti.” Indeed, if  “Concert românesc” reminds one of George Enescu’s “Romanian Rhapsody” compositions, “Métamorphoses nocturnes” could almost be taken for Béla Bartók’s seventh string quartet. Nevertheless, the music definitely has its own unique voice, particularly through the episodic rhetoric of its single movement.

The only disappointment last night came at the very beginning with Felix Mendelssohn’s final string quartet, his Opus 80 in F minor. Given how close this piece was composed to the composer’s death, one can easily describe the music as emotionally intense. While the Castalian players clearly appreciated that intensity, their interpretation tended to be a bit too much on the scrappy side. Mind you, it would probably be fair to say that Mendelssohn was more attentive to rhetoric than to sophisticated structural foundations, recalling the epithet of out-Heroding Herod.

SFP to Present SF Debut of Castalian Quartet

Castalian Quartet members Sini Simonen, Christopher Graves, Ruth Gibson, and Daniel Roberts (from the SFP event page for this concert)

In a little less than two weeks time, the Castalian Quartet will make its San Francisco debut under the auspices of San Francisco Performances (SFP). They will be the second of the six ensembles performing in this season’s Shenson Chamber Series. In fact their plans for this season involve debut performances in other major North American cities, including Seattle, New York, Atlanta, and Vancouver.

The quartet is based in the United Kingdom, where it was founded about a decade ago. The members are violinists Sini Simonen and Daniel Roberts, violist Ruth Gibson, and cellist Christopher Graves. Their program will begin in the nineteenth century and will then advance to two twentieth-century compositions that deserve more attention than they tend to get.

The opening selection will be Felix Mendelssohn’s final string quartet. Written in the key of F minor, it was assigned Opus number 80 after the composer’s death. The piece was Mendelssohn’s last major composition, and he died two months after concluding the score. The remainder of the program will involve two sharp contrasts with Mendelssohn’s rhetoric. The first of these will be György Ligeti’s first quartet, given the title “Métamorphoses nocturnes.” This will be followed by Jean Sibelius’ only published string quartet, Opus 56 in D minor, which also has a title: “Voces Intimae” (intimate voices).

This concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 17. It will take place in Herbst Theatre, whose entrance 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.

Gimeno’s Impressive Debut Leading SFS

SFS visiting conductor Gustavo Gimeno (photograph by Marco Borggreve, courtesy of SFS)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Spanish conductor Gustavo Gimeno made his debut in conducting the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), presenting the first of this week’s three subscription concerts. His concerto soloist was a much more familiar face to those following the classical music scene in this city, pianist Javier Perianes. Perianes made his debut in Davies in June of 2015, playing Manuel de Falla’s “Nights in the Gardens of Spain” under the baton of Charles Dutoit. He returned in October of 2018, this time with Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado; but his concerto selection was the last of Béla Bartók’s three piano concertos. He also made his San Francisco recital debut with San Francisco Performances (SFP) in May of 2017. COVID-19 prevented his return to SFP, where he had been scheduled to give a duo recital with violist Tabea Zimmermann, leaving us to be content with the harmonia mundi album Cantilena, which they would have previewed during their San Francisco visit.

For those of us following Perianes’ repertoire, last night provided our first opportunity to listen to his approach to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His selection was the K. 467 piano concerto in C major. Those of my generation probably remember when this concerto was played to death after its second movement was heavily featured in the 1967 Swedish film Elvira Madigan. It probably took most of us about half a century to shake that clichéd association and go back to enjoying the many virtues of this concerto in its entirety.

Perianes’ partnership with Gimeno could not have been more engaging. This string section is joined by one of the larger complements of winds and brass: one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and two trumpets, and timpani. (The limitation of a single flute shows up frequently in Mozart’s instrumentations. Apparently, he did not like the instrument very much, which makes it ironic that it should have been the focus of his K. 620 opera The Magic Flute.) Timpanist Edward Stephan played a pair of “historical” instruments, to which he returned for the final selection on the program, Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 90 (“Italian”) symphony in A major.

It was clear from the opening measures that Gimeno would command a reliably solid account of Mozart. HIs resources were reduced, but not so much as to weaken the rhetoric of the outer movements, which could alternate between assertive and playful as the score required. Playfulness also figured significantly in the exchanges between ensemble and soloist. As a result, each of those movements served up its own take on enthusiasm without ever devolving into raucousness. The middle Andante movement then served as a “spacer” with its own compelling rhetoric of quietude. K. 467 remains one of the most frequently performed of Mozart’s concertos, but the partnership of Gimeno and Perianes could not have provided a more refreshing account.

As already mentioned, the Mozart concerto, which concluded the first half of the program, was complemented by the final work on the program, Mendelssohn’s Opus 90 symphony. Gimeno’s account of this frequently-performed symphony was as refreshing as his approach to familiar Mozart. The outer movements were given vigorous interpretations with a steady confidence that all that enthusiasm would not run off the rails. My own impression was that Gimeno was more attentive to the interplay of the variety of instrumental sonorities than I have encountered in interpretations by other conductors, who have seemed more interested in the thematic material than in Mendelssohn’s approaches to instrumentation. The inner movements were presented as a “core of quietude;” and both of them benefitted from Gimeno’s appreciation of the subtleties of phrasing.

Each of these familiar offerings was preceded by a sharply-contrasting shorter selection. The program began with the West Coast premiere on Unsuk Chin’s “subito con forza” (suddenly with force). Her point of departure was the high-intensity opening of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 62 “Coriolan” overture, composed for a performance of the play by Heinrich Joseph von Collin of the same name. Indeed, as James M. Keller put it in his program note, the first four seconds quote the opening of Beethoven’s overture; but, after that, all hell breaks loose. In the spirt of P. D. Q. Bach’s “Grand Serenade for an Awful Lot of Instruments,” “subito con forza” extends full-orchestra resources with “an awful lot” of percussion.

The result was rather in the spirit of a roller coaster ride. Those first four seconds provide a faster-than-usual ascent, after which the attentive listener experiences a wild ride that just keeps getting wilder. It goes without saying that the visual experience of coordination in the percussion section was as much fun as Chin’s no-holds-barred rhetoric. If Gimeno wanted to command audience attention through his very first gestures from the Davies podium, he could not have done a better job.

Chin has been recognized as a significant composer for the better part of this century. Ironically, her music also led off last month’s series of subscription concerts with the performance of “Graffiti.” Prior to that time, however, I think it would be fair to say that, here in San Francisco, her name was more familiar than her music. Perhaps these two performance will serve as an alert for better awareness of more of her compositions.

The second half of the program began with György Ligeti’s “Concert românesc” (Romanian concerto). This was last performed in Davies at an SFS Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) concert conducted by Christian Reif in May of 2018. Before that, Edwin Outwater conducted it at an SFS subscription concert in October of 2013. When I wrote about the SFSYO performance I joked that this was composed “before Ligeti started sounding like Ligeti.” Indeed, the music is closer in spirt to the two Opus 11 compositions by George Enescu entitled “Romanian Rhapsody.” In that context it is easy to appreciate both the high spirits of the thematic material and Ligeti’s rhetorical skills. Once again, there was an abundance of percussion instruments; but only two performers were needed to manage them all. The score also included the “sound effect” of a distant echoing horn, which, in this case, was played from behind the Center Terrace seating.

Jenny Q Chai’s Multimedia Piano Break

The title of yesterday evening’s Piano Break recital presented by the Ross McKee Foundation was Humanity First: We Are All in This Together. Pianist Jenny Q Chai supplemented her performances with a diversity of visual media techniques. On the theoretical side, she used visualizations of global warming data compiled by the National Aeronautics and Space administration to “accompany” two of György Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata compositions (the first and the seventh). The visualization for the first movement, which consists almost entirely of different rhythms applied to a single pitch class, presented an animated map showing the progression of temperature change. The seventh movement used more natural images, but the brightness of the video was too dim to resolve just what those images were or why they had been selected.

More abstract was the Bay Area premiere of Milica Paranosic’s “Bubble (in trouble),” played in a setting of a bubble machine and lights. That machine seemed to create bubbles of different sizes, each of which set it own trajectory after having been discharged. This made for a fascinating approach to texture, evoking the sort of playfulness that might be encountered in some of the music of Erik Satie. Nevertheless, the bubbles themselves were so engaging that little attention remained for Pavlovic’s score.

The entire program was framed by two compositions by Jarosław Kapuściński, each with its own approach to visuals. The program concluded with “Side Effects,” a series of short movements each supplemented by a panoramic vista captured by Kacper Kowalski. Each of those vistas had its own approach to how much movement took place, and one was almost entirely static. I am not quite sure that there was any connection between the music and the visuals, but the latter struck me as a compelling reminder of how small we are in the grand scheme of things.

The opening selection, “Oli’s Dream,” supplemented Chai’s keyboard work with electronics and visuals. The latter amounted to letter-by-letter typewriter activity disclosing a poem by Camille Norton. This, again, was primarily a matter of playfulness; but the unfolding of the text struck me as a little too self-indulgent for my personal tastes. Indeed, I am not even sure how that particular piece pertained to the title of the program!

Fortunately, the rest of the program was more proactive in reminding listeners of just what that title declared.

Two Generations of Hungarian Cello Music

courtesy of Naxos of America

This Friday Naxos will release an album featuring the German cellist Gabriel Schwabe playing twentieth-century Hungarian music. The CD is framed by the chamber music of Zoltán Kodály, beginning with the Opus 7 duo for violin (Hellen Weiß) and cello and concluding with the Opus 8 solo sonata. Between these two selections is György Ligeti’s solo cello sonata, which was originally composed in 1948 during his studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where one of his teachers was Kodály. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders of this recording.

I was particularly struck by the fact that this may be the first time these three compositions (or, for that matter, any pair of them) have been juxtaposed on a single album. RCA made a landmark recording of Opus 7 pairing cellist Gregor Piatigorsky with violinist Jascha Heifetz; but I have been hard-pressed to find a recording of Piatigorsky playing Opus 8. More recently, Matt Haimovitz has taken on both Opus 8 and the Ligeti sonata; but I am not sure if he has recorded Opus 7. Personally, I am particularly interested in the Ligeti offering, since it was composed “before Ligeti became Ligeti,” so to speak. Even after it was revised in 1953, it served as a reflection on Hungarian rhetoric. Any explorations of pitches between a pair of semitones are realized only through the rhetorical device of glissando passages. Indeed, the transition between Kodály’s compositions when World War I was just beginning and Ligeti’s following the end of World War II is surprisingly smooth.

Most important is how each of these two composers explored new ways to advance the technical skills of the performer. In that frame of reference, Schwabe serves up a technically adept and rhetorically expressive account of all three of the compositions. Many listeners are likely to wonder why each of these compositions tends to be so unfamiliar. Cello students will probably not have that problem, and I would be only too happy to encounter all three of these pieces in future recital repertoires.

PIVOT Concludes with Dazzling Violin-Cello Music

Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Jay Campbell (from the San Francisco Performances event page for last night’s concert)

Last night in Herbst Theatre the San Francisco Performances PIVOT series concluded, as it began, with a duo of string instruments. Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and cellist Jay Campbell prepared a program that, like the first program of the series, explored the contrasts between past and present. This time, however, the “present” was about as immediate as one could expect, with the second performance of a new composition by Hungarian composer Márton Illés. (The first performance had taken place the preceding evening in Santa Barbara.)

The composition was the third in Illés’ Én-kör series of short pieces scored for two or three instruments. The first was written for two trumpets and horn, and the second was a duo for saxophone and harp. This latest piece thus involved Illés’ first venture into bowed strings for his project. From an information-theoretic point of view, the composition ranked a high entropy score, meaning simply that Illés was throwing at the attentive listener far more than could be conceived as order over the course of a single brief listening experience. It was the sort of piece that would have benefitted from having a second playing immediately after the first, but it was clear that both Kopatchinskaja and Campbell deserved a rest from the intensity they had brought to their performance.

Taken as a whole, the program was a well-balanced mixture of the familiar with the unfamiliar. Thus, the Illés premiere was preceded by Maurice Ravel’s duo sonata. Composing this piece seems to have been a challenge for Ravel. While it consists of four relatively short movements, he worked on the piece between 1920 and 1922 and was uncertain about the results. The piece is usually given a sober reading that plays up the textures of the violin and cello lines weaving among each other.

Last night’s reading, on the other hand, was anything but sober. The give-and-take between the violin and cello parts was attacked vigorously by both players with bowing techniques that bordered on the frighteningly violent. Yet the violence (if you can call it that) was more of a cartoonish nature; and, as the music progressed, the listener was drawn into the Looney Tunes world of Bugs Bunny consistently outwitting Elmer Fudd, except that each instrument got to alternate in taking the roles of Bugs and Elmer. As a result, the attentive listener could definitely appreciate the intricacy of all the technique behind Ravel’s score; but it was the off-the-wall rhetoric of the approach that Kopatchinskaja and Campbell took to their execution that made the experience both absorbing and hysterically funny in equal measure.

Much of the program involved contrasts between the distant past and more recent compositions. Thus, two of the pieces from the 24 duos that Jörg Widmann composed for violin and cello were framed between transcriptions of early two-part counterpoint documented in the eleventh-century Winchester Troper and a fantasia by Orlando Gibbons. (When was the last time that two different Widmann compositions were played in Herbst and Davies Symphony Hall, respectively, within days of each other?) Widmann’s capacity for wit may well have inspired the approach that Kopatchinskaja and Campbell brought to their Ravel performance (which immediately followed the Gibbons selection); and, as a result, there was very much a sense of contrast between the wild abandon of the recent past with the far more sobering rhetoric of the early compositions.

In the second half of the program, a transcription of a chanson by Guillaume de Machaut was framed by very early compositions by Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti. Both of these pieces were short and drew upon folk sources, Greek and Hungarian, respectively. Thus, both of them tended to undermine the usual expectations that one brings to listening to either of these adventurous composers. However, Ligeti’s Hungarian “folk spirit” provided a retrospective reflection when the program concluded with Zoltán Kodály’s Opus 7 duo for violin and cello. Consequently, the entire program emerged as an intricate journey in which both past and present and contrasting emotional dispositions were elegantly interleaved.

The encore selection was taken from the keyboard music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Kopatchinskaja was not more specific; and, as many know, “Bach-the-son” composed a lot of keyboard music. The entire selection was played at a barely audible pizzicato, almost as if the performers decided to poke fun at the very convention of playing encores. (For that matter, there seemed to be no need to identify which of the many Gibbons fantasias was the one played during the first half of the program. Perhaps Kopatchinskaja and Campbell were being just as prankish about the very nature of a recital as they were in their approaches to performance.)

Tenney’s Rigorous Balance of Chance and Choice

Those who have been following my discussion of the articles by James Tenney collected in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory should, by this time, appreciate how much rigor can be found in Tenney’s efforts, whether they are directed toward musical composition or toward imaginative reconceptions of practices that have come to be called “music theory.” When it comes to composition, there is a good chance that Tenney was inspired by John Cage, who could also be meticulously rigorous when called upon to explain the method behind the creation of one of his compositions. What is interesting about Cage is that, while many of those methods were based on a foundation of using a chance technique (such as the ritual for selecting passages to read from the I Ching), there could be prolific diversity in how that technique would be applied. The Silence anthology has two short articles about such applications, one published in 1952 and the other in 1957; and from these we may appreciate how the creation of method was as important to Cage as the creation of the music itself.

Cage’s approach would have an impact on other composers. The best known of these is probably Pierre Boulez. In 1958 Die Reihe published an article by György Ligeti that provided a deep dive into the creation of one of Boulez’ particularly challenging compositions. The title of the article was “Pierre Boulez: Entscheidung und Automatik in der Structure Ia” (Pierre Boulez, decision and automatism in “Structure Ia”); and evidence of Cage’s impact on Boulez is not hard to find. (The article appeared in the English-language edition of Die Reihe in 1960.)

As Ligeti’s title makes clear, much of the composition process is “automatic,” although it might be better to call it “algorithmic.” The connotations of the latter adjective allow us to appreciate that one cannot have an algorithm before first identifying input data, output data, and the relations that connect them. These are the issues that Ligeti addresses in the “decision” portion of his article.

Tenney’s article “About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps” is very much cut from the same cloth that served Cage and Boulez. However, where Boulez was concerned with serial techniques that could be applied to the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered chromatic scale, Tenney was more interested in exploring the pitches of the natural overtone series. He decided to do this by dividing the semitone into six equal micro-intervals, providing him with an equal-tempered gamut that would enable better approximations to upper harmonics, which could be represented terms of smaller “chromatic shifts” from the traditional pitch classes. (The reader should now appreciate why Tenney’s piece was scored for six harps; each harp had a different “micro-shift” in the pitch of its strings.)

In terms of method, Tenney was far more rigorous than either Cage or Boulez. His expertise in higher mathematics allowed him to make rigorous specifications of subtle variations. This was most evident in his effort to extrapolate principles of harmony into the domain of his 72-pitch equal-tempered gamut. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that almost every reader of this article will come away with absolutely no sense of what it would be like to listen to the results.

(Back when I was living in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to listen to a tape that Tenney played of an excerpt from a performance of Changes. I had as much trouble making sense of my listening experience than I had encountered during my “first contact” with “Structure Ia!” I gather that there is now a performing version six guitars, taking the same approach to chromatic tuning; but I missed out on an opportunity to listen to that music played at the Center for New Music.)

It would be easy to dismiss Tenney’s project as “much ado about not very much.” The fact is that it is very difficult to establish the relationship between Tenney-the-composer and Tenney-the-listener. That relationship was always much clearer in Cage’s work: There was none! Cage simply created the “sonorous materials” for a listening experience; and the listener was free to make of those materials whatever (s)he wished.

Tenney, on the other hand, seems to have been motivated by a desire to explore how one could work with pitches based on the overtone series through techniques consistent with pre-existing knowledge of counterpoint and harmony. Those who have followed this site for some time know that he is far from the only composer to be so motivated. The two composers that have probably received the most attention in my writing have been Ben Johnston and, more recently, Harry Partch. Of these three, Partch has struck me as the one that gave the most thought to the sorts of listening experiences that would arise from his techniques. In that context Tenney occupies the space at the other extreme of the pendulum swing, a claim that I shall be happy to withdraw if convinced by sufficient experience in listening to Tenney’s music, rather than reading about his approaches to composition!

Change of SFS Programming for Next Week

As was announced earlier this week, Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) was scheduled to return to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony next week. This was to be a program of three of Claude Debussy’s best compositions, all of which would be recorded live for future release on an SFS Media recording. Unfortunately, MTT became ill after this week’s performances with the New World Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York. The other work scheduled for next week was György Ligeti’s only piano concerto with Pierre-Laurent Aimard as piano soloists.

Conductor James Gaffigan (from the event page for next week’s concert on the SFS Web site)

At next week’s concerts James Gaffigan will return to conduct SFS. The program will still conclude with Debussy’s “La Mer.” However, it will now begin with the “Bacchanale” music from Camille Saint-Saëns Opus 47 opera Samson et Dalila. This will be followed by the Ligeti concerto, and the intermission will be followed by “Something for the Dark” by Sarah Kirkland Snider. This will be a West Coast premiere performance (which means that it will also be a premiere performance by SFS). Also, the SFS Chorus will no longer participate.

The basic “nuts and bolts” have not changed. The concert will still be given three performances, all at 8 p.m. on Thursday, May 9, Friday, May 10, and Saturday, May 11. There will be an Inside Music talk given by Peter Grunberg that will begin one hour before the performance. Doors to the Davies lobbies open fifteen minutes before the talk begins. Ticket prices range from $35 to $170. They may be purchased online through the event page for this program on the SFS Web site, by calling 415-864-6000, or by visiting the Davies Box Office, whose entrance is on the south side of Grove Street between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street. In addition, KDFC’s Rik Malone’s podcast about “La mer” can be found on the event page along with sound clips from previous SFS performances of both that set of three “symphonic sketches.” Flash must be enabled for both streamed content and online ticket purchases. The Box Office is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday, and two hours prior to Sunday performances.

New Hadelich Release Couples Brahms and Ligeti

from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording

This past Friday Warner Classics released its latest album of performances by German-American violinist Augustin Hadelich. Hadelich has made several visits to San Francisco, all of which I have enjoyed for the imaginative approaches he would take to traditional repertoire. In his new album he has not departed from tradition; but he has situated it in a decidedly non-traditional context. Performing with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Hadelich begins with Johannes Brahms’ Opus 77 concerto in D major and follows it with György Ligeti’s only violin concerto, presumably in the final version, which was first performed on June 9, 1993.

I am not sure to what extent these two concertos “inform each other when placed side by side” (Hadelich’s words); but there is no question that the contrasts are striking. As is often the case, Brahms composed his concerto with both awareness of and respect for the structural conventions of the Classical period; but his expressive rhetoric is clearly rooted in nineteenth-century Romanticism. On the other hand Ligeti turns to pre-Classical practices for most of this approaches to structure, refracting them through a generous supply of approaches to expression, many of which are based more on basic sonorities, rather than a thematic lexicon.

One result of this contrast is that one approaches the opportunity to listen to Brahms with a relatively clear set of expectations. Where Ligeti is concerned, even the most attentive listener often does not know quite to expect until (s)he actually experiences it. About a month ago I joked that Esa-Pekka Salonen’s recent cello concerto might be remembered best as “the one with the bongos.” In a similar manner, those who have experienced Ligeti’s concerto are probably likely to associate it with the ocarinas that must be played by the oboist, two clarinetists, and bassoonist. (The two flute players are similarly required to play recorders of different sizes.)

Personally, I feel most at home with listening to Ligeti when he decides to be playful, and there is no shortage of playfulness in this concerto. At the same time, there is also no shortage of distinctively bizarre sonorities, not just from the soloist but also from the ensemble, which requires detuning of one of the violins and one of the violas. Some of those sonorities seem to involve a better realization of natural overtones, but not all of them!

Did Hadelich himself have fun in playing this concerto? I like to believe that he did, as I like to believe that the cadenza for the final movement provided by Thomas Adès was inspired by Ligeti’s own prankish spirit. More importantly, after listening to this recording, I would very much appreciate an opportunity to listen to Hadelich play this concerto in concert.

None of this is to dismiss my enjoyment of his approach to Brahms. For one thing, in this case he prepared his own cadenza for the concerto’s first movement. For another, if the interpretation is not a prankish one, it still overflows with good will. This is a thoroughly joyous account of the concerto, and Hadelich’s joy seems to be shared by Harth-Bedoya’s conducting. Indeed, there is so much “giocoso” in the final Allegro giocoso movement that the attentive listener is well primed for just about anything that Ligeti should choose to serve.

Yuja Wang’s Mostly Russian Recital in Berlin

from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording

At the end of last month, Deutsche Grammophon released its latest recording of Chinese pianist Yuja Wang. Entitled The Berlin Recital, the album is a live recording of a solo recital that Wang gave in the Kammermusiksall (chamber music hall) of the Berliner Philharmonie this past June. The program consisted entirely of twentieth-century compositions by three major Russian composers, four short pieces by Sergei Rachmaninoff, the Opus 70 (tenth) sonata by Alexander Scriabin, and the Opus 84 (eighth) sonata by Sergei Prokofiev. Between the Scriabin and Prokofiev sonatas, she played three of the eighteen études that Hungarian György Ligeti composed late in the twentieth century. (The last études in the collection were actually composed after January 1, 2000; but all of Wang’s selections were earlier than that date.)

This program is nothing if not a thoroughly vivid exercise in distinctively contrasting approaches to compositions. For all those differences, however, the selections are unified in the finger-busting technical challenges they impose. One might almost say that Wang conceived of this recital to demonstrate just how much diversity there can be in the space of technically demanding writing. It is therefore important to call out the extent to which Wang always seems to find just the right expressiveness to affirm that each composition is built on a solid rhetorical foundation, no matter how technically demanding its execution may be.

The contrast in expressiveness is most evident in the two sonata selections. Scriabin’s Opus 70 was the final composition that he called a sonata. It was written in 1913, not long before the composer’s unexpected death from septicemia in 1915. (He was only 43 at the time.) Like all of the sonatas beginning with Opus 53 (the fifth), it consists of only a single movement; and like all of the sonatas beginning with Opus 62 (the sixth), it has no key signature.

The author of the Wikipedia page for this piece describes it as “highly chromatic and atonal;” and it would be fair to say that Scriabin deploys his pitch classes is such a way as to avoid any sense of a perfect cadence establishing a tonal center. In the “Harmony” entry of the 1929 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Donald Francis Tovey wrote:

Scriabin, each of whose last five sonatas is built round its own new chord, complained shortly before his untimely death that he had, after all, not succeeded in getting away from a sophisticated dominant seventh.

If Tovey’s attribution is correct, then it would be fair to say that in his “deathbed confession,” Scriabin sold himself short. Whether or not Scriabin knew of Arnold Schoenberg’s heavy use of the perfect fourth to distance his Opus 9 (first) chamber symphony from cadences based on a dominant seventh, Scriabin used that perfect fourth heavily in in Opus 70 sonata from beginning to end; and the persistent appearance of a C-F fourth in the bass line of the final measures is quite effective in keeping the dominant seventh at bay! Had Scriabin given more thought to ambiguity, rather than traditional harmony, he might have been less dismissive in his “final judgment.”

I do not think I have had an opportunity to listen to Wang play any music based on the Second Viennese School. However, in her interpretation of Opus 70, one gets the impression that she understands the nature of ambiguity and has no trouble letting Scriabin’s harmonic ambiguities remain unresolved. At the same time she also seems to appreciate how Scriabin has created that “sense of an ending” with that persistence of C-F providing an unmistakable foundation for the last nineteen measures of the sonata.

Mind you, this is not my first encounter with Wang playing Scriabin. I believe my first was a concert performance of the F-sharp major poème (Opus 32, Number 1) in 2010; and her 2014 recital in Davies Symphony Hall included a generous serving of Scriabin, culminating in the Opus 68 (“black mass”) sonata. She has a long-standing command of a “biographical scope” of Scriabin’s music in her  wheelhouse; and nothing could please me more than discovering that she is still extending her command of the Scriabin catalog.

As might be suspected, her approach to Prokofiev is quite another matter. Opus 84 is the last of his three “war” sonatas. While there is sometimes a wistful quality in how Prokofiev unfolds his thematic material and a fearless tendency to modulate into remote keys, one never worries about the tonal center being absent, even if it is more migratory than one might anticipate. From a rhetorical point of view, Prokofiev may have been aiming at the weariness of dealing with a war with no end in sight and a longing for a peace that seems out of reach. Nevertheless, there are also unmistakable “militant” qualities, which tend to be most evident in the final movements of each of the three sonatas.

Wang knows better that to try to outdo Prokofiev when it comes to martial metaphors. She is perfectly willing to focus on her technique and simply make sure that she brings clarity to every note that Prokofiev committed to paper. That technique is necessary, particularly for those listening to any of those war sonatas for the first time; and Prokofiev’s legacy could not have been better served than by Wang’s interpretation at this Berlin concert. Indeed, that same attentiveness to clarity serves her Rachmaninoff selections equally well, paying more attention to how she can balance the thematic lines that unfold simultaneously in different registers than to whether or not she can add anything to the expressiveness that Rachmaninoff had already committed to paper.

Where pure technique is concerned, however, nothing can surpass what Ligeti took to be an étude. It is hard to imagine him not feeling prankish about the demands he places on a performer. It would be fair to say that Wang takes a play-it-as-it-lays approach to the three études she selected for her recital. Each one of them requires a massive commitment of both mental and physical cycles, and Wang was could not have been better equipped on both counts. Since I have been fortunate enough to listen to Wang playing more Scriabin on this release, my real wish is that she decides to learn more of those Ligeti études, perhaps to a point where she can give a convincing account of the entire set!