Guitarist Vieaux Partners with Mezzo Cooke

SFP Guitarist-in-Residence Jason Vieaux (photograph by Tyler Boye, courtesy of SFP)

Last night’s guitar recital by Jason Vieaux, co-presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts, was a special occasion on several accounts. Vieaux is currently the SFP Guitarist-in-Residence, and this was his third appearance in the SFP Guitar Series. On this occasion, however, he was joined by mezzo Sasha Cooke, who also happened to be making her third SFP appearance. While Vieaux performed two solo selections, the remainder of the program was devoted to duo performances.

From a personal point of view, I was looking forward to yet another opportunity to listen to songs by Franz Schubert accompanied by a guitar, rather than a piano. My “first contact” with this approach took place at one of the SFP Salon programs presented at the Hotel Rex. Baritone Philippe Sly was accompanied by guitarist John Charles Britton, and their partnership led to the release of Schubert Songs an album of sixteen of those songs. Most recently that baton was picked up by Nikola Printz, who sang songs from the D. 957 Schwanengesang and D. 911 Winterreise cycles accompanied by Jon Mendle on guitar as part of their Schwabacher Recital Series program, which they presented a little over a year ago.

Cooke selected four songs for last night’s recital: “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (D. 118), “Schlaflied” (D. 527), “Nacht und Träume” (D. 827), and “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” (D. 774). I was particularly struck by how Vieaux subtly reworked the ostinato pattern of the spinning wheel in D. 188 to accommodate more manageable fingering without disrupting the tension conveyed through that ostinato. As expected, Cooke endowed each of these songs with her own account of the underlying personal dispositions.

The one “cycle” on the program was the opening selection, Manuel de Falla’s collection of seven canciones populares españolas (Spanish folksongs). Falla originally composed this for soprano and piano. According to my records, my last encounter with a guitar performance involved the duo of guitarists Eliot Fisk and Ángel Romero performing without a vocalist. This was also an SFP/Omni offering, which took place in March of 2018.

Personally, I prefer it when a setting of songs involves a vocalist, and Cooke knew exactly how to capture the delivery of each of those seven songs. She brought that same sense of interpretation to the “Aria” movement from the fifth of  Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras compositions. This was originally written for solo soprano and an orchestra of cellos, but last night’s version for guitar and voice was the composer’s own arrangement.

The other arrangement on the program was Roland Dyens’ version of “A Felicidade” by Antônio Carlos Jobim for solo guitar. Personally, I would have preferred to listen to how Cooke would manage the lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes; but, as another song puts it, “you can’t always get what you want!” This was the second of Vieaux’ two solo performances. The first of these was the second movement of the four-movement Paths of Light suite, which Pat Metheny composed for Vieux. It has been a while since I have listened to Metheny’s compositions, and this account left me curious about the other three movements.

The program closed out in a more popular vein. Cooke brought her own take on songs from two of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals, Into the Woods and Follies, both capturing the ways in which the composer could get under the skin of the characters his music had been composed to portray. This was followed by two songs from the Beatles’ White Album, Paul McCartney’s “I will” and John Lennon’s “Julia.” For those of my generation, this felt like a nostalgic reflection on a turbulent past. The duo then returned for one encore. Cooke shifted from the Beatles to Michael Tilson Thomas to sing his “Not everyone thinks like you,” an engaging afterthought for a program of songs rich in their own individual perspectives.

Final SFP Guitar Recital to Include Sasha Cooke

Jason Vieaux and Sasha Cooke (from an SFP Web page)

Many readers probably know by now that JIJI’s performance this past Saturday was the only solo recital to be presented in this season’s San Francisco Performances (SFP) Guitar Series, as well as the third of only four solo recitals in the Dynamite Guitars series presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. That said, the final SFP series offering will be a particularly special occasion. Guitarist Jason Vieaux will perform with mezzo Sasha Cooke, who is not only the one vocalist to participate in a guitar program but also well deserves the title of “Special Guest Artist.”

Where my own tastes are concerned, what will make this particularly “special” for me is Cooke’s decision to perform a set of four songs by Franz Schubert with guitar accompaniment. The fact is that I have been aware of this approach to singing Schubert since November of 2013, when bass-baritone Philippe Sly presented a one-hour recital of Schubert songs for an SFP “salon” at the Hotel Rex. That subsequently led to the release of an Analekta album on which the two of them gave an account of sixteen Schubert songs. Most recently, mezzo Nikola Printz included two Schubert songs in the Schwabacher Recital Series performance they gave almost exactly a year ago, accompanied by guitarist Jon Mendle.

Mind you, because this is the Guitar Series, the solo repertoire will not be overlooked. Vieaux will play Four Paths of Light, a suite for solo guitar composed by Pat Metheny in 2021. This suite was included on Metheny’s Road to the Sun album, with Vieux performing it.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 8. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Tickets are now on sale for $65 for premium seating in the Orchestra and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $55 for the Side Boxes, the center rear of the Dress Circle, and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $45 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. SFP has created a secure Web page for online purchases. Orders may also be placed by calling the SFP subscriber hotline at 415-677-0325, which is open for receiving calls between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.

CMC Announces 2nd Concert with Conversation

Guitarist Jason Vieaux (from his Eventbrite event page)

Next month the Community Music Center (CMC) will present its second Concert with Conversation event, made possible through a partnership with San Francisco Performances (SFP). Following up on this month’s offering with Cuban pianist and composer Alfredo Rodríguez, next month’s performer will be guitarist Jason Vieaux. Vieaux was one of the artists that contributed a streamed video to the SFP Front Row Premium Series through its Front Row Web Site.

He had made his SFP debut in October of 2017 in a duo recital with Julien Labro, alternating between bandoneon and accordina, a variant of the melodica using an array of accordion buttons, rather than a piano-like keyboard. (This was also a debut performance for Labro.) Vieaux made his solo debut almost exactly two years later. That program featured selections from his recently-released Play album. Details for his performance at CMC have not yet been announced, but they will include music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Leo Brouwer, Pat Metheny, and Jorge Morel, as well as Vieaux’ own original compositions. This will be Vieaux’ second Concert with Conversation appearance.

As usual, this will be a one-hour event. It will begin at 6 p.m. on Friday, November 12. The venue will be the CMC Concert Hall, which is located at 544 Capp Street, between Mission Street and South Van Ness Avenue and between 20th Street and 21st Street.

There will be no charge for admission. However, registration through an Eventbrite event page will be required. Due to high interest and limited-capacity seating, CMC expects this event to reach capacity quickly. Anyone that cannot attend is asked to contact the Mission District Branch at 415-647-6015 or through electronic mail to info@sfcmc.org. This will allow release of the reservation to other patrons.

Engaging Arrangements for Guitar and Bandoneon

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances presented the first concert in the annual Guitar Series that it organizes in partnership with the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The featured guitarist was Jason Vieaux. The program was a duo recital for which Vieaux was joined by Julien Labro, alternating between bandoneon and accordina, a variant of the melodica using an array of accordion buttons, rather than a piano-like keyboard. Both Vieaux and Labro were making their respective SFP debuts.

The entire program consisted of arrangements that were prepared by the performers.  Most straightforward were the prelude and scherzo movements that Rossen Balkanski scored for guitar and piano. In this case Labro basically transcribed the piano part to fit the fingering suitable for the button keyboards of the bandoneon.

Both players collaborated on arranging Astor Piazzolla’s “Esucalo” (shark), which was originally composed for tango violinist Fernando Suarez Paz, who probably played it with one of Piazzolla’s combos. However, the music itself was a significant departure from the sorts of tango idioms one tends to associate with Piazzolla. Indeed, the rhythmic patterns were sufficiently complex that any attempt at dance would strain the efforts of even a sophisticated choreographer. As Vieaux and Labro played it, the music still reverberated with that “Piazzolla flavor;” but their execution amounted to an impressive account of the score’s uniqueness.

Vieaux’ other arrangement was of the Pat Metheny song “Antonia.” This was one of two selections in which Labro shifted from bandoneon to accordina. Metheny had originally scored this with an accordion as lead instrument, resulting in a rhetoric that was both sensitive and nostalgic. Vieaux’ arrangement captured that spirit, but the programming of the piece seemed to provide a respite from the more ambitious selections being presented.

Most ambitious was Radamés Gnattali’s Suite Retratos (portraits). Each of the four movements depicts a major Brazilian composer, and that composer is associated with a particular style. In order of appearance, Pixinguinha is represented by a choro, followed by a waltz for Ernesto Nazareth, a schottische for Anacleto de Medeiros, and the corta jaca (the Brazilian version of the tango) for Chiquinha Gonzaga. The suite was originally composed for two guitars and was part of the repertoire of the duo of Sérgio and Odair Assad. Each of the movements is punctuated with tropes and idioms associated with its respective composer. Labro’s arrangement maintained those references, translating the give-and-take between two guitarists into an equally engaging exchange between guitar and bandoneon.

Most fascinating, however, was the opening selection, which was Labro’s arrangement of Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres” (brothers). This is probably Pärt’s most familiar composition. The score consists of a series of chord sequences, each with either eight or nine chords. Soft percussion beats are inserted to punctuate those sequences. Pärt has prepared or authorized eighteen different versions of the basic score; and other groups have adapted it for their own resources. The California Guitar Trio of Hideyo Moriya, Bert Lams, and Paul Richards may well have learned the piece simply by listening to the ECM New Series Tabula Rasa album, which includes one performance by violinist Gidon Kremer and pianist Keith Jarrett and another by the twelve cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Labro’s arrangement tended to follow the version performed by Kremer and Jarrett (which was the piece’s original version). Labro’s account of some of the more elaborate arpeggios that Kremer played at the very beginning of his performance was impressively virtuosic. Percussion involved both Labro and Vieux knocking on their respective instruments. Pärt’s rhetoric of a hushed but intense stillness registered just as effectively as it has done in other violin-piano interpretations. The choice to begin the evening with this selection made it clear that this entire program would offer all the benefits of attentively focused listening.

The encore, on the other hand, was another matter. Vieaux and Labro let down their guard with an arrangement of the Tears for Fears song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” Labro returned to accordina for this one, making it clear that the encore was about having fun with a pop song from a more carefree past.

Collaborating Composers

Earlier this week I found myself reviewing the Gavin Bryars discs in my CD collection. I first became seriously aware of Bryars during my time at Schlumberger, when I used to listen regularly to John Schaefer's New Sounds program on WNYC. (I say "seriously" because my first actual contact with Bryars was in late 1971, since he was the only person who had written to me requesting a copy of my doctoral dissertation! At that time, however, I had absolutely no idea who he was, let alone what he was actually doing.) One of Schaefer's programs featured "Jesus' Blood never failed me yet" in its original recording, which filled one side of a vinyl LP issued as part of Brian Eno's Obscure series. The work absolutely fascinated both my wife-to-be and me. In a sort of parody of Maurice Ravel's "Bolero," the composition was based on a tape loop of a British tramp singing this hymn on the text that Bryars assumed as his title, accompanied by a "live" chamber ensemble playing providing the tramp with more elaborate background on each iteration. It took me forever to find a copy of the recording, which I finally got when a British friend sent me a package of several of the major Obscure releases. By then I had also been exposed to the other side of the vinyl, "The Sinking of the Titanic," which offered a different (but equally fascinating) take on variation-through-repetition.

With the advent of compact discs, it became easier to collect Bryars' music; and I started learning more about him. I learned, for example, that the overall architectures of both "Jesus' Blood" and "Titanic" had been determined by the duration of music that would fit on a single LP side. Thus, when they were released on CD, they were no longer coupled; each work now pretty much filled the capacity of a single CD. More interesting, however, was my discovery of how many of Bryars' compositions seemed to grow out of musicians with whom he came to work; and those musicians made for an interesting mix of the genres they usually performed. For example "After the Requiem," composed in 1990 added Bill Frisell's approach to jazz on an electric guitar to three of the members of the Balanescu Quartet with an alluringly moody result. Similarly, in 1987 Bryars, himself a double bass player, composed "By the Vaar" for Charlie Hayden, who has performed bass in some of the most experimental jazz groups.

There is, of course, nothing new about composers working directly with performers. It is a practice that can probably be found in every era of music history. What is more interesting is the emergence of genre-crossing in what we tend to call "serious music;" and Bryars is far from alone in this practice. Each of Steve Reich's "Counterpoint" works was composed with a specific soloist in mind; and in "Electric Counterpoint" the soloist was Pat Metheny (who has experimented with collaborations of his own involving composers as radically different from his own style as Ornette Coleman, who, just to illustrate the complexity of the social network, frequently performed with Charlie Hayden as his bass).

We may have the Sixties to thank for at least part of this kind of cross-fertilization. After all, Frank Zappa's early fascination with Edgard Varèse (because the guy behind the counter in a record shop could not imagine why anyone would want to listen to that kind of music) eventually led to his collaborative work with Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain; and we should probably take at face value claims from The Beatles about the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen (even if, as I have suggested, Stockhausen was more reticent about his own influences). More important, however, is the way in which this trend provides us with yet another reminder that the music is all about the performance, rather than about a composer wrestling with filling up the pages of blank sheets of manuscript paper. As a corollary we have come to recognize that each genre engenders a different approach to listening. So the crossing of genres is an opportunity for the synthesis of new listening strategies, which will then engender new approaches to composition and performance that will elicit their own new approaches to listening. Has music ever before be so alive with so many avenues for creativity?

The Music of the Script

All my writing about the extent to which a musical composition may be viewed as a conversation may have obscured the fact that the complementary side of this relationship is often equally valid. It may be that one of the ways in which we shall remember the innovations of twentieth-century drama will be through its capacity for "composing" scripts in which the "drama" resides in the musical qualities of the text. I was reminded about this yesterday, while reading Chloe Veltman's review of the Cutting Ball Theater Company's production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame for SF Weekly. She described Beckett as the author of "famously abstract dramas," her first example being "Play, featuring a chorus of three heads sticking out of massive urns." Having seen this piece several times, I certainly do not dispute her description; but I also remember Beckett having written about the fact that he viewed this work as an experiment in writing a dramatic script based on musical principles. This was probably a reflection of his admiration for James Joyce, who tried to structure the "Sirens" chapter of Ulysses as an eight-voice fugue. Interestingly enough, there is a paper about this chapter by Nadya Zimmerman published in the Journal of Modern Literature in 2002 entitled "Musical Form as Narrator;" and, to a great extent, that would also describe what Beckett was up to in Play. Once you recognize that the title plays (so to speak) on the ambiguity that confounds drama and musical performance, you discover that the underlying story is painfully concrete (and is basically a tale that goes back at least as far as Dante, if not further); but it reveals itself as the underlying musical form plays itself out (so to speak). In other words the way to deal with this text is not to hide behind propositions about abstraction but to deal with it as a performance of both drama and music.

One of the first American dramatists to pick up on this technique was Sam Shepard. The Tooth of Crime, for example, was about musicians, incorporated music (which Shepard composed), and fabricated new metaphors around the terminology of music. By the time we get to Cowboy Mouth, we are dealing with a script composed almost as if it were a jazz improvisation (the improvisers being Shepard and Patti Smith); and the role of "the music itself" in the performance is considerably diminished. (These days, alas, fewer and fewer people seem to be left who know Shepard from his plays, rather than his film acting work.)

I have been thinking about this approach to drama as a result of having just seen the film version of Lanford Wilson's play, Lemon Sky courtesy of the Sundance Channel. Wilson's first full-length play, Balm in Gilead, was structured both around and through music in a spirit similar to Shepard's work but going in different directions. By the time he got to Lemon Sky he was working more specifically with "the music of narration," playing out a plot through multiple narrators who weave among each other in a manner not that different from the voices of one of the fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. In the film (which is actually a video produced in 1988 at WGBH for the series American Playhouse) this musicality is further enhanced with a score by Pat Metheny and drum solos by Jack DeJohnette, which exhibit a contrapuntal relationship to the delivery of the narration texts.

The lesson I have learned from this complementary view is that it enables a more integrated approach to some of my recent writing. I have been interested in what it means to be a good listener (to music) and a good reader (of texts); but it had not previously occurred to me that these practices might be two sides of a common coin. Yes, I tried to approach both through the foundation of the trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric; but I had not yet made the connection that a commonality of foundations might imply a commonality of strategies of practice. This may change as these posts continue to reflect my listening and reading experiences!