SFCM Orchestra Off to a Disappointing Start

Last night I livestreamed the first performance of the season of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) Orchestra led by Edwin Outwater. As usual, the concert took place in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall. Sadly, the audio delivery could not have been weaker, meaning that I had to crank up the audio on my screen to the maximum level. Even then, there were passages that just did not come across, particularly in the quieter moments in the concluding selection, the “Concerto for Orchestra” by Witold Lutosławski.

The “core” of the program consisted of two familiar works by Claude Debussy. The intermission was preceded by “Ibéria,” the second of the three compositions collected in Images pour orchestre. Following the intermission, student conductor Chih-Yao Chang took the podium to lead the ensemble in “Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.” His performance was disciplined, and his engagement with the orchestra could not have been better. However, neither of the Debussy selections rose above the level of a dutiful account.

2010 photograph of David Conte (from his Wikipedia Web page)

Most disappointing was the opening selection of David Conte’s “Sinfonietta for Classical Orchestra.” This got the program off to an energetic start. However, it was clear that the video team was not really acquainted with the music. As a result, the account tended to reduce the overall experience as one of busy-work, where video direction informed by previous experience with the music (and, perhaps, a copy of the score) could have given the entire program the benefit of an energetic start.

SFCM Orchestra will Open Season with Conte

Edwin Outwater conducting the SFCM Orchestra in March of 2023 (from the SFCM event page for the concert being described)

Readers may recall that, about a month and a half ago, Pentatone celebrated composer David Conte’s 70th birthday with the release of the album whose full title is Intimate Voices: Chamber Music of David Conte. Conte is Composition Chair at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM); and, this coming Saturday, the SFCM Orchestra will offer its own celebration by beginning the first concert of the season with Conte’s “Sinfonietta for Classical Orchestra.” As usual, the conductor will be Edwin Outwater.

Conte’s sinfonietta will be complemented at the conclusion of the program with the concerto for orchestra completed by Witold Lutosławski in 1954 (after about four years of effort). Between these “bookends” Outwater will conduct compositions by Claude Debussy on either side of the intermission. The first half of the program will conclude with “Ibéria,” the only multi-movement piece in the composer’s Images pour orchestre collection of three works, each inspired by a different European country. The intermission will then be followed by what is probably the most-performed of Debussy’s orchestral pieces, the “Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune” (prelude to the afternoon of a faun). Student conductor  Chih-Yao Chang will take the podium for the performance of this work.

As of this writing, all tickets to the performance in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall at 50 Oak Street have been sold. The good news is that there will be a Vimeo livestream of the event. The Web page for this site has been created; but (obviously) the connection to the Concert Hall has not yet been activated. I plan to attend the performance through this site; and, in my past experiences, activation usually takes place about five or ten minutes prior to the beginning of the event.

Dalene and Hong Disappoint in Herbst

Violinist Johan Dalene (photograph by Mats Bäcker, courtesy of SFP)

Violinist Johan Dalene made a significant impression a little over two years ago, when he made his San Francisco debut through the Shenson Spotlight Series curated by the San Francisco Symphony. Last night he returned, giving a San Francisco Performances recital in Herbst Theatre, accompanied, once again, by pianist Sahun Sam Hong. This time the impression was not as memorable.

The program was at its best at its “central core” with a performance of Witold Lutosławski’s 1984 partita. What struck me most about this offering was that violin and piano were on equal footing, the best possible testament to the partnership that Dalene has formed with Hong. The work consists of three primary movements separated by “Ad libitum” interjections. Since this was my first encounter with the music, I have no idea how much of the music was improvised; but the performance came across as if both violinist and pianist were muddling their way through the score.

Polish Lutosławski, who led off the second half of the program, was “paired” with Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “Notturno e Danza” in the first half. There was no end of elaborate detail outlined in the program notes by Eric Bromberger, but none of that really came across in Dalene’s delivery. His capacity for expression registered more convincingly with the more traditional composers, the “Tzigane” by Maurice Ravel and the “bookends” of sonatas by Robert Schumann (Opus 105 in A minor, his first) and Edvard Grieg (Opus 13 in G major, the second). There was also an encore of an unnamed work by Grażyna Bacewicz (who was, herself, a violinist).

Taken as a whole, this was an evening best forgotten.

Johan Dalene to Make his SFP Debut This Month

Violinist Johan Dalene (photograph by Mats Bäcker, courtesy of SFP)

Swedish-Norwegian violinist Johan Dalene made his San Francisco debut at the end of January of 2023, when he was selected as one of the chamber music soloists for the Shenson Spotlight Series presented by the San Francisco Symphony. At the end of this month, he will return to San Francisco, again with his accompanist Sahun Sam Hong and the piano. This time his recital will be presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP).

Once again, Dalene will frame his program with two sonatas. His Shenson recital began with Edvard Grieg’s Opus 45 (third) violin sonata in C minor; so, for his return, he will conclude the program with Grieg’s Opus 13 (second) sonata in G major, composed about twenty years earlier in 1867. The program will begin with Robert Schumann’s first sonata in A minor, his Opus 105, composed over a decade earlier in 1851. At the center of this nineteenth-century “framework” will be Maurice Ravel’s “Tzigane,” which was first performed in 1924 (and was most recently performed here earlier this month as Midori’s encore). It will be both preceded and followed by much later twentieth-century compositions. The selection in the first half of the program will be Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “Notturno e Danza,” composed in 1993; and the Grieg sonata will be preceded by Witold Lutosławski’s 1984 partita.

This program will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, March 28. 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). As always, they may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel.

SFS Showcases Brass Players (with Percussion)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the Great Performers Series of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) turned “inward.” The program presented SFS musicians primarily from the brass section. The ensemble consisted of six horn players, six trumpeters, four trombonists (one doubling on euphonium), and two tubaists. There were also three percussionists and one timpanist, but most of the works on the program involved only the brass instruments. The conductor was Brad Hogarth, who provided brief but informative introductions.

This is one of those situations in which it would be wise to begin at the end. Over the course of these brass concerts that I have attended, I have taken an interest in the compositions by Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins. Therefore, it was no surprise that the program concluded with a work that he finished writing in 2022, given the straightforward title “Concert Music for Brass, Percussion and Timpani.” The work consisted of two movements, the first a tribute to Dale Clevenger, the former Principal Horn of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), who had died on January 5, 2022. The second was a tribute to the entire CSO brass section on the occasion of their return to performing after the COVID pandemic. The first movement was particularly poignant, particularly with its wistful nod to “Beim Schlafengehen” from Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs during the coda.

The high point of the evening came with the performance of Magnus Lindberg’s “Ottoni.” I realized, with a bit of regret, that I had not encountered any of his music since Yuja Wang played his third piano concerto with SFS in October of 2022. Lindberg has appealed to me for quite some time, particularly for his successful efforts to push the pendulum away from minimalism; so I like to call him an “unabashed maximalist.” While listening, I jotted some notes about his textures being thicker than any composer I had encountered since Charles Ives while also exercising the spontaneity of Ives’ turn-on-a-dime rhetoric. “Ottoni” was the wildest ride I had encountered for quite some time, and I loved every minute of it.

The other seriously wild ride on the program came from Roger Harvey’s arrangement of Witold Lutosławski’s “Variations on a Theme by Paganini.” The theme (as many will probably guess), comes from the last of the 24 Caprices that Niccolò Paganini composed for solo violin, which was, itself, a set of variations on a relatively short theme. Among many it is best known for the rhapsody that Sergei Rachmaninoff composed for piano and orchestra. Lutosławski, on the other hand, used Paganini’s own variations as a “blueprint,” to which he added his own twists and turns, scoring the results for two pianos. The result was one of Lutosławski’s most prankish efforts, and the brass arrangement made his wild ride even wilder.

The program also included two composers whose works I had not encountered for quite some time. Gustav Holst was represented by Paul Welcomer’s arrangement of A Moorside Suite, which was originally scored for a full brass band. Welcomer’s introductory remarks about brass band traditions in England were particularly informative, making this offering more than a little sentimental. Alex Bedner, currently a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, prepared arrangements of four short pieces by the French organist Maurice Duruflé, which were described as “Motets on Gregorian themes.” Since my knowledge of plainchant is both distant and limited, none of the themes were familiar to me; but the listening experience was still an engaging one.

The weaker selections were the two “urban” offerings. The program opening with music from a suite that Leonard Bernstein compiled from the soundtrack he had composed for On the Waterfront. Between Elia Kazan’s directing and Marlon Brando’s acting, I have to confess that, after seeing this movie several times, I have no recollection of any of the music; and I fear that last night did little to refresh my memory! I was also left cold by Shulamit Ran’s “Chicago Skyline.” Perhaps I have lost my taste for tone poems inspired by urban life!

As might be expected, the audience refused to leave the house without an encore. The encore was the duel scene from the music that Sergei Prokofiev composed for the full-evening ballet Romeo and Juliet. An all-brass account of that scene worked quite successfully, allowing me to re-create the choreography I had seen so many times in my mind.

SFS: The Best Things Come in Small Packages

Visiting conductor Karina Canellakis (photograph by Mathias Bothor, courtesy of SFS)

Last night the first of three San Francisco Symphony (SFS) performances conducted by Karina Canellakis was framed by two large-scale full-ensemble compositions. The first half of the program was devoted entirely to Richard Strauss’ Opus 35 tone poem “Don Quixote” with visiting cellist Alisa Weilerstein assuming the role of the “knight of the doleful countenance’ and Principal Viola Jonathan Vinocour as the knight’s squire, Sancho Panza. At the other end the program concluded with a vigorously full-throated account of Witold Lutosławski “Concerto for Orchestra.”

However, sandwiched between these two auditory spectacles was the first SFS performance of “D’un soir triste” (of a sad evening), composed originally for piano trio by Lili Boulanger. Lili was the younger sister of Nadia, one of the leading teachers during the first half of the twentieth century with particular impact on American composers too numerous to itemize in this article. (The itemization can be found on a Web page.)

Lili was sickly for most of her life, which was only about 24 and a half years. Nevertheless, she was a productive composer. As James M. Keller’s note for the program book observes, “By the time she died, on March 15, 1918, her catalogue included forty-three extant works, plus twenty-two more whose existence was documented but that have not survived.” “D’un soir triste” was composed after an unsuccessful surgery in July of 1917, coupled with a less melancholy work entitled “D’un matin de printemps” (of a spring morning).

The orchestral version of “D’un soir triste” is as rich in instrumentation as the works performed both before and after it. However, its duration was roughly eleven minutes. Once again I am reminded of Buckminster Fuller’s injunction to make more and more with less and less. Listening to “D’un soir triste,” it was impossible to overlook just how skilled Boulanger was in managing such rich instrumentation.

Indeed, she included an instrument untouched by both Strauss and Lutosławski, the sarrusophone, designed to substitute for oboes and bassoons, particularly in outdoor band music. The program book stated that a contrabassoon would substitute for the sarrusophone, but anyone that knew were Steven Braunstein sat could see that he was playing a sarrusophone! One might almost say that the rich sonorities of Boulanger’s music provided excellent preparation for how Lutosławski deployed his own rich sonorities with a much more aggressive rhetoric that kept the attentive listener on the edge of his/her/their seat. Canellakis’ management of this side-by-side contrast was a reminder of why her return visit was so welcome.

“Don Quixote” was another matter. Strauss composed ten tone poems between 1886 (when his “day job” was as a conductor) and 1915. “Don Quixote” was composed in 1897 after he had honed his narrative skills to produce “Tod und Verklärung” (death and transfiguration) in 1889 and “Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche” (Till Eulenspiegel’s merry pranks) in 1895. However, Miguel de Cervantes’ novel was on an epic scale; and, while Strauss certainly knew how to muster instrumentation on an epic scale, a narrative of epic scale was, sadly, “above his pay grade.”

A case in point will acknowledge this shortcoming while, at the same time, suggest that even the best recording technology cannot do justice to Strauss’ ingenious instrumentation. This was my first encounter with the tone poem in a concert setting. Listening to recordings, I always thought I could differentiate the solo sonorities of cello and viola. Sadly, in watching Vinocour at work, I realized that several solo passages I had taken to be for cello were actually for the viola. In my defense I would argue that Strauss was better at portraying the many facets of Till Eulenspiegel’s character than he was in distinguishing Don Quixote from Sancho Panza! I would probably even doubt that he read the novel in its entirety. (He was in the wrong year and the wrong country for Classics Comics!)

The good news was that Canellakis managed Strauss’ full-scale orchestra resources as deftly as she had taken on the Lutosławski concerto. Her chemistry with both ensemble and soloists was consistently attentive. However, she was at her best with her Boulanger selection, making a solid case that the best things come in small packages!

Surprises at SFCM Violin Department Recital

Last night’s video stream of a recital of performances by students in the Violin Department of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) yielded a pair of unexpected surprises. Each half of the program concluded with a performance by a student in the Pre-College Division, rather than a matriculating student in a degree program. These turned out to be the most stimulating offerings of the evening.

The concert concluded with “Subito,” a duo for violin and piano composed by Witold Lutosławski only a few years before his death. Presumably due to the age of the soloist, Grace Huh, the performance was prerecorded. The title is the Italian word for “suddenly” (or sometimes “quickly”); and Lutosławski’s composition was an intense study of different semantic aspects of the term. Huh, working with matriculating accompanist Weicong Zhang, approached every one of the score’s intense gestures with focused fearlessness. She had clearly nailed every technical challenge posed by the score and established an interpretation that never short-changed the underlying expressiveness of the music. Huh is definitely a rising talent to be watched closely.

The Pre-College student that concluded the first half of the program, again with a pre-recorded performance, turned to more familiar repertoire. Nicole Yun played the second movement (Adagio) of Jean Sibelius’ Opus 47 violin concerto in D minor. Her accompanist was also Zhang. Bearing in mind that rich instrumental sonorities play a significant role in establishing the expressiveness of this movement, Yun’s violin work soared above the limitations of the piano accompaniment. As had been the case with Huh, Yun exhibited a confident command of every challenge that Sibelius had posed for the soloist; and, also like Huh, Yun convincingly communicated the expressive side of every phrase.

Those two young rising talents thus evoked impressions that, sadly, overshadowed the rest of the program. Too much of the other six selections proceeded as “business as usual,” making it difficult to determine whether the students’ technical skills were not yet ready to take on expressiveness or whether they just did not have anything to express. The result was a program that as a whole, turned out to be a somewhat awkward affair, made even more awkward by Ian Swensen, serving as host, attempting a casual interview of a few of the performers during an intermission that was probably unnecessary in the interleaving of prerecorded and “live” performances. (This was another situation in which microphones were placed to pick up the instruments, meaning that the interviewing was so casual that it was pretty much inaudible.)

Los Angeles Philharmonic Centennial on PBS

This past Friday PBS broadcast Great Performances: LA Phil 100, a video document of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first performance, presented at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on October 24, 2019. Programming was particularly distinguished for bringing together three conductors, current Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, joined by two past Music Directors, Conductor Emeritus Zubin Mehta, who led the ensemble from 1962 to 1978, and Conductor Laureate Esa-Pekka Salonen, whose directorship took place between 1992 and 2009. The conductors performed in “chronological order,” each bringing his own distinctive repertoire choices.

Mehta led off with a performance of the concert version of the prelude to the first act of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (the master-singers of Nuremberg), which he followed with Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse.” Salonen then performed a single selection, Witold Lutosławski’s fourth symphony, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and given its world premiere with Lutosławski conducting. Dudamel’s contribution was the second of the three suites that Igor Stravinsky had extracted from his score for the ballet “The Firebird,” that suite having been compiled in 1919. The program then concluded with another commissioned composition, this one written especially for this centennial occasion. Daníel Bjarnason, curator of LA Phil’s Reykjavik Festival, composed “From Space I Saw Earth,” whose score required all three conductors to perform. Dudamel took the front-and-center podium to lead the strings and percussion. The other two conductors led separate groups of winds and percussion from the rear. There was also one percussionist in the organ loft with a snare drum and a set of small tuned cymbals that he bowed.

Rather than watch the broadcast itself, I had xfinity store it in my cloud area, giving me the opportunity to navigate the content, should I find that necessary. I then used this morning to watch all of the musical portions, skipping over the “historical background” material inserted between the selections. It has been my experience that such celebratory occasions often tend to be more about the occasion and less about what is actually being celebrated.

Without a doubt the program selection that made the most lasting impact was the Lutosławski symphony. Those familiar with Salonen’s discography probably know that he recorded all four of Lutosławski’s symphonies for Sony during his tenure in Los Angeles. However, I have to confess that, while I have managed to get my head around much of the composer’s chamber music (due in no small part to experiences at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music), his full-orchestra music never really registered with me, even when I chose to write about Sony’s release of all of the recordings Salonen had made for that label.

Watching Salonen in action was quite another matter. One of Lutosławski’s most interesting qualities was his approach to using aleatoric (chance-based) processes, often in a context of thick orchestration of highly diverse instrumental sonorities. When his textures are at their thickest, even the most attentive listener cannot distinguish the full-notated passages from the aleatoric ones. However, when one can watch the conductor, one can see when he is allowing the aleatoric content to unfold. As a result, Salonen emerged as an essential “visual guide” through the overall structural logic of this single-movement symphony; and his guidance was expertly supplemented by camera work led by a director that seemed to have enough knowledge of the score to allow even the most casual listener to grasp just what was making the whole composition click.

Salonen was not the only conductor whose highly-informed approach to expressive performance was abetted by equally skillful video work. When Mehta took the stage, it was difficult to suppress the feeling that he was showing his age. At the podium his physical cues were minimal, but one had only to look at his eyes, even through the medium of a video camera, to see that not only was he alert but also he had brought to the podium his own distinctive approaches to his two selections.

Indeed, where video is concerned, both of those selections posed major challenges. In both cases there are more than a few moments of multiple centers of activity distributed across the entire ensemble. “La Valse” has an overall “narrative arc” that begins in hushed ambiguity, goes through a series of ascents in both dynamics and polyphonic activity, and must culminate in one last climax “to rule them all.” Mehta could not have given a clearer account of that arc, and the video direction that accounted for the wide diversity of those centers of activity could not have been better. All that was missing was better audio quality; and I realized that, on more than one occasion, what I was seeing registered in mind even if I was not hearing it clearly through the loudspeakers.

Wagner’s prelude, on the other hand, begins by firing on all cylinders. Only after that initial jolt does he pull back and begin to prepare the listener for what is about to unfold on the stage. Without being too reductive, I would suggest that listening to this prelude is organized around how Wagner treats the two key themes, the music for the procession of the master-singers, which commands the opening measures, and the “Prize Song” with which the young knight Walther von Stolzing wins the hand of Eva, who stole his heart when he saw her in church at the very beginning of the opera’s first act.

Mehta was at the top of his game in managing the interplay of those two themes, building up to that critical moment near the end of the prelude where both of them are playing out at the same time. Considered only in terms of the demands of balance, this prelude is one of the most challenging compositions in the repertoire of tonal music. (Those who have followed my writing for some time are familiar with my aggravation with any performance in which the brass section drowns out everyone else.) If Mehta’s physical bearing was minimal, it was clear that even the slightest gesture had meaningful impact; and the ensemble, taken as a whole, was always with Mehta to make sure that it registered with every attentive listener.

The only disappointment came from Dudamel’s share of the program There is no questioning his understanding of Stravinsky’s score. (I remember when he led the San Francisco Symphony in the entire score for the ballet, and I was more than merely satisfied with what he delivered.) In this particular case, however, it almost seemed as if he was delivering a business-as-usual performance. This may have been because he was willing to let the other two conductors have all the time they needed and did not have enough left over for his own efforts. However, given that he has significant history with this music in Los Angeles, one would have thought that he could have put the time he had to better use.

In the context of all that preceded it, Bjarnason’s composition came across as little more than a parlor trick. Watching it closely, I found it difficult to be convinced that it really required three conductors. The overall texture of the score would probably have endured the serious efforts of a single conductor willing to admit that he could not manage everything with equal priority all the time. (The usual approach would be to assign responsibility to a few knowledgeable section leaders.) The music itself sounded as if it might have won a competition sponsored by Music from the Hearts of Space. Still, I have had to endure cornier stunts at previous celebratory occasions; and I definitely cannot complain that the composition went on for too long. The bottom line is that the quality of the virtues I enjoyed was so high that it is easy to forgive the proportionately fewer shortcomings.

Sonora Winds Showcase Polish Composers

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

I still seem to be trying to catch up on recent releases by MSR Classics. This past November saw the release of what seems to be the debut album of Sonora Winds. This ensemble is the quartet of Bethany Gonella (flute), Stuart Sutter (oboe), Anastasiya Nyzkodub (clarinet), and Marta Troicki (bassoon), all of whom are based in Minnesota, which is where the album was recorded.

The title of the album is From Shadow to Light: Music for Winds from Poland. The program of the album surveys six twentieth-century Polish composers, none of whom are still alive. The most familiar of these is Witold Lutosławski, represented by a trio for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon. The piece was composed in 1945; and, to some extent, it recalls the the duo piano performances that Lutosławski gave in cafes with his fellow composer Andrzej Panufnik. The other familiar name among the composers on the album is (to me at least) Tadeusz Baird, represented by a prankish divertimento for wind quartet composed in 1956. The remaining four composers are Antoni Szalowski, Wawrzyniec Żuławski (Wawa), Władysław Walentynowicz, and Janina Garścia.

Taken as a whole, all the selections are upbeat in their respective rhetorical stances. This is hardly a surprise since, for the most part, chamber music for winds maintains a sunny disposition. In addition there is enough stylistic variety for one to distinguish one unfamiliar composer from another. As a result the album makes for appealing listening, but I have to wonder if any of these pieces will engage the listener strongly enough to make for a memorable experience. Perhaps having the recording is an advantage, since familiarity tends to grow with repeated listening experiences.

Salonen’s European Preferences for “New Music”

I have now advanced to the fourth of the five categories I identified in planning my listening experiences for Sony Classical’s 61-CD box set of recordings made by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. I identified this category as “Post-Schoenberg” as a way to identify how things changed after the mid-point of the twentieth century for those who chose not to return to tonality (or who never departed in the first place). The first thing that struck me about how this category had been instantiated was the absence of any composers born in the United States. Indeed, the only such composer in the entire collection is John Corigliano; and I have already observed that his film score for The Red Violin did not give him “a particularly fair shake.”

On a more positive side, this category serves up a rather interesting geographic distribution. Three of the composers are French (Olivier Messiaen, Henri Tomasi, and André Jolivet), three are Finnish (Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, and Salonen himself), two are Eastern European, (Witold Lutosławski from Poland, and György Ligeti from Hungary), and one is Japanese (Toru Takemitsu). Where specific compositions are concerned, I have to say that I have several pangs of dissatisfaction. Whether these had to do with Salonen, the record producers with whom he worked, or some combination of the two is unknown to me; but I am relatively confident that most, if not all, of my quibbles would not likely mean very much to anyone whose priority had to do with marketing!

The most significant of those missed opportunities involves the ondes Martenot. Messiaen took a great interest in this instrument; and it figures significantly in the performance of his “Turangalîla-Symphonie,” which is given an impressive account by the recording in this collection. One of the first virtuoso performers on this instrument was Jeanne Loriod, Messiaen’s sister-in-law; and, according to her obituary in The New York Times, she estimated that fifteen concertos had been written for the instrument. These are not enumerated on the instrument’s Wikipedia page; but I know that, in my personal history of collecting recordings, I only encountered one of those concertos, which was composed by André Jolivet, who happens to be the only concerto composer named explicitly on that Wikipedia page.

A 1975 model ondes Martenot (photograph by an unidentified Japanese Wikipedia user, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

I suspect that anyone curious about this instrument would have benefitted from the opportunity to “compare and contrast” Messiaen’s approach to this instrument with Jolivet’s. Alas, Jolivet only appears on a recording of trumpet concertos featuring Wynton Marsalis as soloist, where it is coupled with a concerto by Henri Tomasi. The good news is that the concertos on the vinyl album I had collected are now available in CD form on a release by disques Adès. The other good news is that the other Messiaen selections that Salonen recorded are as impressive as “Turangalîla,” particularly when there is solo piano work being performed by Paul Crossley.

Another instrumental soloist who endows this particular category with considerable life is Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen. He appears on each of the three CDs for each of the Finnish composers in the collection. All three of those composers are capable of taking rather thorny approaches to their emancipated dissonances, but there is so much energy and lyricism in Karttunen’s performing technique that one can take in the full scope of each of the compositions without things every feeling too prickly.

The other real delight in this category is the complete recording of Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre, which is basically a farce about how the end of the world did not happen. All of the vocalists brought excellent diction to the recording sessions, meaning that the absence of a libretto does not pose any serious difficulties. (The absence of some of the descriptions of what is happening on stage, on the other hand, is likely to disappoint those who know the opera.)

Where Lutosławski is concerned, I appreciate that Salonen took the trouble to record all four of his symphonies; but I must confess that I have yet to get my head around any of them. Personally, my most significant discovery in the Lutosławski repertoire was my first encounter with music that made it clear that he had a sense of humor. Fortunately, that side of him appears on one of the CDs with his song cycle Chantefleurs et Chantefables, which the track listing translates as “songflowers and songfables.” These are given a delightful account by soprano Dawn Upshaw, and these are the tracks that give me the most satisfaction.

On the other hand, just as the role of Jolivet seems to have been to support Marsalis, the Takemitsu album seems to have been conceived to promote guitarist John Williams. Yes, Takemitsu took a great interest in the guitar; and I definitely enjoy the inclusion of “Toward the Sea” on this disc, even if Salonen had no hand in it, since it is a duo for alto flute (Sebastian Bell) and guitar. On the other hand Takemitsu’s arrangements of popular songs for solo guitar tend to exceed my tolerance for sugar overload, even if they make for perfectly nice encore selections at a solo guitar recital.

From a historical point of view, all of the composers represented in this category have much to offer adventurous listeners. Unfortunately, market forces seem to have smoothed over many of the rough spots that make the listening so adventurous. There are definitely better selections that will give the seriously adventurous listener a better sense of what made the second half of the twentieth century such an adventurous time.

Roman and Urbański Bring Compelling Dvořák to Davies

Last night visiting conductor Krzysztof Urbański returned to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in Davies Symphony Hall for the first performance of the second program he had prepared for his visit. The entire first half of the program was devoted to Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 104 cello concerto in B minor. The concert had been planned for the SFS debut of Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta, but her newborn baby was unexpectedly not able to travel with her. She was replaced by Joshua Roman, who had just performed last week as a recitalist for San Francisco Performances and had made his SFS debut in February of 2010 under the baton of Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt.

Roman’s repertoire is impressively diverse and eclectic. He played Joseph Haydn (the Hoboken VIIb/1 concerto in C major) with Blomstedt, while last week’s program involved all living composers (one acting as an arranger) with Roman as one of those composers. For all of that breadth of tastes, Dvořák’s Opus 104 probably marked the closest Roman has come to playing an unabashed warhorse in San Francisco. The music positively gushes with sentiment, but its emotional intensity never crowds out the consummate skill behind the concerto’s structure.

Indeed, it is only when one gets away from the recordings and experiences the immediacy of a concert performance that one can begin to recognize many of the subtleties the composer has engaged. As a lover of chamber music, I have particular affection for the duo work that couples the concerto soloist with the concertmaster (Jeremy Constant). This is music in the final movement that soars even higher than the solo cadenza passage for the Adagio ma non troppo (second) movement. On the orchestral side Urbański stationed two trumpeters in the uppermost tier for the “farewell fanfare” that emerges near the concerto’s conclusion.

As was the case with his first program, Urbański conducted the concerto without a score. Not only the soloist but also every member of the ensemble had his full attention for every single measure of this piece. His approach to rhetoric enabled even the first-time listener to appreciate just how extensive was the emotional palette upon which Dvořák drew to shape each of the composition’s three movements. At the same time, those who can no longer count the number of times they have listened to this concerto could appreciate the in-the-moment freshness that was so firmly under the command of both conductor and soloist. It is hard to imagine a past occasion when Dvořák was better served.

As might be expected, Roman returned to play an encore. He dedicated it to all of the victims of the many fires in the northern counties. His intention was to summon up a more meditative spirit in the wake of Dvořák at his most impassioned. He achieved his goal through a movingly expressive account of the Sarabande movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1007 solo cello suite in G major. Bach may have written this music for pedagogical purposes, but last night it was there to help heal many wounded souls. Roman knew exactly how to let the music speak for itself, which is just what the occasion required.

However, the first half of the evening proved to be a tough act for the second half to follow. Urbański followed the intermission with a vigorous account of the overture Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed for his K. 620 opera The Magic Flute. While his attentiveness to detail was as keen as it had been for the Dvořák concerto, he was a bit too blustering for what amounts to a light-hearted fairy-tale cooked up for suburban entertainment. Nevertheless, one could still appreciate the wit behind the music, which made for a refreshing contrast.

More problematic was the major work on the second half, the three-movement composition that Witold Lutosławski called “Concerto for Orchestra.” The title was clearly inspired by Béla Bartók, as was the composer’s intention to give voice to the full diversity of instruments found in the symphony orchestra. However, while Bartók had designed five well-crafted structural frameworks, each of which situated those instruments in different contexts, Lutosławski’s structures came across as somewhat arbitrary; and, in the last of the piece’s three movements, they were downright lumbering. Those more familiar with the folk sources upon which the composer drew for his thematic material may have found it easier to orient themselves. However, even when working with similar folk sources, Bartók always knew how to keep his rhetoric in the concert hall. In disappointing contrast, last night’s performance suggested that thoughts of convincing rhetoric did not occupy much of Lutosławski’s attention.

Jean-Guihen Queyras Trades the Classics for Some Cross-Cultural Jamming

Through his recent recordings with harmonia mundi, French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras has established himself as a rising talent worthy of close attention. This past April, working with violinist Isabelle Faust and pianist Alexander Melnikov, as well as conductor Pablo Heras-Casado and the Freiburger Barockorchester, he completed a “trilogy project” that combined the three piano trios and three concertos composed by Robert Schumann. With the same partners he had previously released a recording of two piano trios by Ludwig van Beethoven, the second (in E-flat major) of the Opus 70 set and Opus 97 (“Archduke”) in B-flat major; and he also partnered with Melnikov to record Beethoven’s complete works for cello and piano.

However, Queyras’ interests extend far beyond the repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Growing up in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, he was friends with the Chemirani brothers, Bijan and Keyvan; and, at the time that Queyras was beginning his cello studies at the conservatory in Manosque, the Chemiranis were learning tonbak  (the Persian goblet drum, also known as the zarb) technique from their father Jamshid, who had been a pupil of the pioneering tonbak player Hossein Tehrani. Fifteen years later Queyras was playing in the Ensemble InterContemporain. This exposed him to not only composers such as Witold Lutosławski and Jörg Widmann but also the possibilities of departing from regular rhythms and equal temperament.

This led to Queyras returning to the Chemirani brothers to undertake some serious jamming sessions based on those approaches to making music that they had acquired through their father. They were then joined by Sokratis Sinopoulos, a master of the lyra, the bowed string instrument used for Cretan folk music. Sinopoulos was no stranger to “cross-cultural jamming,” having performed with jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd at a concert at the Herod Atticus Odeon in Athens in June of 2010. Like the cello, the lyra is held vertically, although, because it is much smaller, it rests on the knee, rather than the floor. This means that the resulting quartet provided bowed sounds in two different registers and distinct sonorities mixed with the elaborately diverse rhythmic patterns of two experts in Persian drumming technique.

The result was a new harmonia album entitled Thrace – Sunday Morning Sessions, released this past September. These are sessions in which everyone gets a crack at the foreground. Indeed, one of the most fascinating tracks is “Dast é Kyan” (the imperial hand), a duo improvisation by the Chemirani brothers in which the interleaving of their rhythmic patterns is so intricate that the album notes by Jean During (translated into English by Rebecca Pilbeam) describe the results as a “4-handed solo.” A similarly intimate chemistry emerges in Queyras’ duo work with Sinopoulos. In the absence of “visual input,” the ear must respond to subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences in timbre to sort out the individual contributions; but the music resides in the resulting fabric, rather than the individual threads.

Queyras also set aside two solo tracks on which he reflected on his Ensemble InterContemporain experiences. The first of these was “Sacher Variation,” composed at the request of Mstislav Rostropovich by Lutosławski as an homage to the conductor Paul Sacher, a champion of many adventurous composers active during the first half of the twentieth century. The second piece was Widmann’s “Étude Digitale,” a similar homage composition, written for the 90th birthday of Pierre Boulez. One might think that the adjective “digitale” had something to do with the adventurous work with computers taking place at Boulez’ IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) as part of that institution’s innovative research projects. However, the adjective actually refers to the fingers, since the étude is a study in a wide diversity of pizzicato techniques.

The overall “programming” of the album thus interleaves the diversity of ventures into “world music” with two of the more adventurous instances of “new music” that emerged following the Second World War. As an “integrated package,” the result comes out very well indeed. The “first contact” will definitely be one of a succession of surprising new encounters; but this is music that one is likely to want to revisit frequently.

A Coincidence of Contradictions

Milton Babbitt died yesterday at a hospital in Princeton at the age of 94.  I was never a great fan of his music, but this was due in no small part to the sparse opportunities to hear it.  I also suspect that Babbitt had as much right to fall back on the same observation that Arnold Schoenberg once made:

My music is not modern;  it’s just badly played.

Nevertheless, I doubt that anyone would question that there is something very challenging about playing a composition in which the composer can claim a rigorous logical argument behind every note.

However, where this reduction ad absurdum of Schoenberg’s serial techniques is concerned, I think that Virgil Thomson made the right call in one of his pieces in The New York Review.  The article was primarily about John Cage, and Thomson noted Cage taking the opposite strategy that every note in a composition would be determined by a rigorously applied aleatoric process.  (Where Cage was concerned, that process usually involved tossing three coins to select a reading from the I Ching.)  Thomson made the claim that the ear could not tell the difference between a product of absolute logic and one of absolute chance, and I think there is a sound point to make.

The reason probably has to do, once again, with the fact that the music is not in the notes.  It is in the actions that go into making music.  As soon as a composer abstracts away from those actions, there are no perceptual criteria that can distinguish the absolutely determined from the totally random.  Artificial life researchers used to say that this was a phenomenon that occupies just the right middle ground between these two extremes, describing that area as “the edge of chaos.”  I find that more poetic that useful, as if it is yet another way to punt on how little we know about motivated action.

The irony is that the time of Babbitt’s death may have coincided with a concert of compositions by Witold Lutosławski.  The focus of the concert was on works based on aleatoric techniques!  We thus had two events occupying opposite sides of a major aesthetic argument during the twentieth century.  Lutosławski died in 1994;  so I assume he has been waiting patiently in heaven to resume that argument with Babbitt.  I wish both of them well in the afterlife!

Eastern European Wonders

I do not know if this was an accident of the timings of the individual works on the program or a deliberate act to prompt our approach to listening; but the program for the final "official" concert by the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall (before the Summer in the City series gets under way) was presented in reverse chronological order. When I wrote about Johannes Brahms during the "Festival" series of concerts that Michael Tilson Thomas had arranged last month, I explored the extent to which Brahms had to contend with "the long shadow of the history of the music that preceded him, particularly that of Ludwig van Beethoven" and suggested that we needed to apply a listening strategy to Brahms that was "both retrospective and prospective at the same time." In many respects this week's program challenged us to apply that strategy on a broader geographical scale, which encompassed one recently deceased composer from Poland (Witold Lutosławski) and two from Czechoslovakia (Leoš Janáček and Antonín Dvořák).

I am actually not sure it is fair to place these three composers in a common category. Beyond the boundaries of geography, Lutosławski is separated from the other two by not only the Second World War but also influences that are about as remote from the Czechs as one might imagine. Indeed, by Lutosławski's own account, his two primary sources of influence are, themselves, radically different: On the one hand there is the influence of the Second Viennese School, which grew out of Arnold Schoenberg and his two primary students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern; and this is the influence that usually comes to mind when we hear performances of Lutosławski's music. However, he was also influenced by Claude Debussy; and we became more aware of that influence in his final years of composition. In his notes in the program book for "Mi-Parti," the Lutosławski composition that began the Symphony program, Scott Foglesong wrote about these influences in terms of an opposition between technical logic (Schoenberg) and expressiveness (Debussy); and, while Foglesong never invokes the noun "dialectic," "Mi-Parti" may best be heard as a resolution of this opposition through synthesis.

Actually, my own first impression of "Mi-Parti" involves a composer whom Foglesong never mentions: Igor Stravinsky. From a rhetorical point of view, the first of this composition's three sections follows the familiar path of a gradual emergence of "signs of life" from some initial sparse gestures to the near-chaos of an entire ecosystem. Stravinsky broke the mold for this rhetorical strategy in the "Introduction" to his Rite of Spring. However, where Stravinsky's gestures were all melodic, Lutosławski distilled the "raw material" for his approach to this strategy to little more than basic sounds (or, as musique concrète pioneer, Pierre Schaeffer, called them, "sonorous objects"). In addition there is an aleatory element to the "ecosystem" that emerges, in which performers play rapid passages based on a pre-specified selection of notes but with the freedom to choose the order in which those notes are played.

The impact on the ear is nothing less than dazzling. While, even in Stravinsky, there is traditionally a sense of an integrated ensemble following a "direction" set by the conductor, Lutosławski's effect comes far closer to that sense of a "primal nature" than anything Stravinsky invoked. As in a rainforest, one is first struck only by how much activity there is; but, as the ears become acclimated to the environment, one begins to be able to extract specific activities from the overall texture. This is not always easy to achieve in a performance, particularly when dealing with an ensemble as large as the one Lutosławski has specified. However, visiting conductor David Robertson did an excellent job of find the right path between leading the Symphony when they needed to be led and allowing them "freedom of choice" when this was what the score required. The result was that, while it was clear that technical logic played an extremely strong role in the conception of this music, not to mention preparation for performance, it was the expressiveness that emerged "at the other end" for the benefit of those of us in the audience.

Janáček preceded Lutosławski by approximately half a century; but he, too, commanded a strong sense of music as a structuring of "sonorous objects." Within Janáček's frame of reference, however, this conception could be approached through the devices of orchestration. The down-side of such an approach is that the underlying "vocabulary" he invoked for melody, harmony, and counterpoint is relatively limited; so, without the narrative thread that runs through his operas, a full evening of his music might end up sounding a bit repetitious. However, any one of his works, taken on its own terms, usually turns out to be a real gem; and, indeed, each of the three movements of his Taras Bulba "rhapsody" (as he called it) is a gem unto itself.

For those unfamiliar with the novella by Nikolai Gogol (or, for that matter, the Yul Brynner movie) that provides the underlying narrative for this rhapsody, the story concerns a Cossack warrior (of the title) and his two sons, Ostap and Andrei. In the context of my argument that the opera Das Rheingold may best be understood as a story of three thefts, Janáček seemed to have regarded Gogol's novella as an account of three deaths (and I would share that point of view). Ultimately, it is the saga of a father who witnesses (and, in the case of Andrei, the younger son, brings about) the deaths of his two sons. (Ostap is executed by the Poles, and Taras finds himself witness.) Leading the Cossacks across Poland to avenge Ostap's death, Taras is ultimately taken prisoner and burned at the stake, but not before going out with one last defiant call to arms to his fellow Cossacks. Janáček's rhapsody depicts each of these deaths in the order in which they occur in Gogol's narrative.

The result is that each movement is, more than anything else, a character study. If his thematic vocabulary was limited, he compensated with rich orchestration and, particularly for Ostap, a keen sense of gesture, which, in many ways, provides a "transition point" between the use of melodic motif employed by so much of the music that had preceded Janáček and that more fundamental concept of "basic sound" that lay at the heart of Lutosławski's musical language. Thus, the order of the program may have served Janáček best of the three composers by providing the opportunity to hear his music both retrospectively and prospectively.

The evening concluded with Dvořák's Opus 104 cello concerto. Like Taras Bulba, this was a relatively late work; but it preceded the Janáček rhapsody by almost a quarter century. Dvořák only wrote three concertos, and this was the last of them. Furthermore, the level of expressiveness he achieved in writing for the cello tends to make this far more popular that the two preceding concertos for piano and violin, respectively. However, that expressiveness had already emerged in his chamber music; so it is no surprise that, towards the end of the concerto's final movement, the cello engages in a dialog with a violin (usually played by the concertmaster) which may have, itself, involved a retrospective view of his compositions for piano trio. Cello soloist Alisa Weilerstein had little trouble homing in on these expressive qualities and meeting the double challenge of holding her own against the entire orchestra while maintaining the intimacy of her brief "conversation" with Associate Concertmaster Nadya Tichman. (Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik had exercised his solo chops during Taras Bulba; so it was nice to see the way "division of labor" was applied to this program!)

Finally, it is interesting to note a somewhat shorter-range view of retrospection and prospection surrounding this concerto. According to the program notes, Dvořák began working on it on November 8, 1894; but his inspiration seems to have originated in the spring of that year. This was when he heard the principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera play his own second cello concerto in a concert (in Brooklyn, probably at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). That cellist was Victor Herbert, barely remembered today and not for his symphonic music but for a string of operettas that became part of the early history of movies with music! Had it not been for Herbert, Dvořák might not have begun his project; and that makes for one great "sweet mystery of life!"

An Excess of Embellishment

How does one win a piano competition? Sandro Russo, who played today's "Musical Lunch Break" concert at St. Patrick's Church in San Francisco, seems to have embraced the strategy of cultivating an ability to execute more embellishing tones per second than any other pianist. This may explain why the London press recently praised his performance of Rachmaninoff's "Variations on a theme of Corelli" for "a complete understanding of the work combined with a flawless technique," since, as was the case with that composer's third piano concerto, "understanding" is very much a matter of apprehending the many layers of embellishment that are applied to a relatively simple background structure. If this is, indeed, Russo's strategy, then it is worth asking whether or not it is possible to prepare a full recital program that is basically "all about embellishment." This was the question behind the "Lunch Break" program; and the answer to the question was almost, but not quite, definitely positive.

The program rested on a foundation of three "schools of thought" about embellishment:

1. The classical view of Haydn, in which embellishment is a necessary, but secondary, "foreground" to a more substantive "background."
2. The virtuoso view of Liszt, in which embellishment is necessary to attract and maintain audience attention, regardless of what may be in the background.
3. The impressionist view of Ravel, who experimented with reducing the "background" to such an absolute minimum that it is more implied by the foreground embellishments than explicitly stated.

From this point of view, Ravel poses the greatest intellectual challenge. With a background that is minimal or absent, the "information content" of the embellishments must be greater than it is in the Rachmaninoff example I previously discussed; and few composers rise to that challenge as effectively as Ravel did in "Une barque sur l'océan," which, interestingly enough, occupied the very middle of Russo's program. It is also interesting that Ravel composed an orchestral version of this work, as well as the solo piano version that Russo performed; and, while Ravel was as much a master of orchestral color as he was of piano technique, the challenge for the keyboard is greater, just because the palette of sound colors is more limited. Consequently, a truly understanding execution of the solo piano version, such as the one Russo provided, is ultimately the far more awesome experience.

On the other hand it would be hard to accuse Liszt's "Rhapsodie Espagnole" of challenging the intellect. Liszt wrote this in 1845 while touring Spain, and it was clearly making a play for local appeal. It is written around two Spanish themes, "La Follia" (which is the theme that Rachmaninoff mistakenly attributed to Corelli, since Corelli had previously written his own variations on it) and the "Jota Aragonesa." Both are relatively simple and are probably about as familiar to today's music lovers as they were to Liszt's audiences in Spain. That kind of familiarity invites an abundance of embellishment, since the ear can still hear the familiar background, however far in the background it may be; and Liszt was never one to stint on embellishments. Indeed, if this piece had been as long as even the shortest movement of the Rachmaninoff third piano concerto, it would have been an equally daunting endurance test; but Russo did not have to worry about budgeting his energy the way Gabriela Martinez did when she took on "Rocky 3." On the other hand I had to wonder whether the piano Russo was playing had been rattling quite as much before he played this piece as it was after he proceeded to the rest of his program.

Liszt was also represented by an arrangement of Saint-Saëns' "Danse Macabre," which was subsequently rearranged (presumably by adding further embellishments) by Vladimir Horowitz. Once again the familiarity of the background allowed excessive embellishment to be the order of the day, and that is precisely what Russo delivered. This was the final piece on the program, and it was certainly a good way to go out with a bang.

Between this and the Ravel, however, was a paraphrase on "The Flight of the Bumblebee" by György Cziffra. I had not previously encountered this composer, who lived between 1921 and 1994; but it did not take me long to figure out what was going on in this particular composition. Basically, Cziffra was doing to Rachmaninoff's arrangement of this familiar chestnut and same sort of thing that Witold Lutosławski had done to Rachmaninoff's treatment of a Paganini caprice, which was to take a far more outrageously excessive approach to embellishing the original. If this is representative of his work, then it is a pity that Cziffra never got out of Europe, since he clearly had the talent to provide soundtracks for the best of the Warner Brothers' cartoons!

I have been putting off writing about the Haydn, because this was definitely the weakest part of the program (meaning that the whole event got off to a poor start). The problem was that, for all his talent in executing all those foreground embellishments, Russo never seemed to figure out where the background was in the Hoboken XVI/46 A flat major sonata that he played. This frustrated me to the point of sending me back to my Wiener Urtext copy of the score, and I have to admit that finding that background is no easy matter. There are plenty of works by Haydn that you cannot just sit down at the piano at start playing from the score without any premeditation, and this is one of them! So, now that Russo has made his reputation with his record-breaking executions of embellishments, I hope that he can now take some time to engage some of his conservatory lessons in analysis. Haydn demands that kind of cogitation, and Russo owe it to his audiences to make more of an effort.