SFS: More Imaginative Chamber Music

This morning, when I was reviewing past articles about performances in Davies Symphony Hall to prepare for this one, I noticed a preference for the adjective “imaginative.” That was certainly the case last month with the chamber music recital presented by members of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). This month’s offering, presented yesterday afternoon, was right up there were no shortage of imaginative takes on the genre.

The program began with a composition by one of the leading double bass players of the nineteenth century, Giovanni Bottesini. I was fortunate to learn much about this instrument through recitals given by Gary Karr, back when I was on the “other coast.” He would often introduce a performance with some verbal patter, saying things about his instrument like “You just want to hug it!” and “Think of it as chocolate!” Yesterday’s offering presented four bassists: Charles Chandler, Bowen Ha, Orion Miller, and Daniel G. Smith (SFS Associate Principal).

Their selection was “Passione amorosa,” composed by Bottesini for two basses and piano. The quartet arrangement was by Klaus Trumpf. The performance almost immediately took me back to the high spirits of Karr’s recitals, complete with the tongue-in-cheek qualities behind those spirits. Bottesini’s virtuoso demands were positively jaw-dropping; but all four of the players delivered a solid and confident command of every challenge that the composer raised. This could not have been a better way to prepare audience attention for the entire afternoon of chamber music.

Indeed, Paul Schoenfield’s “Café Music” was the perfect successor to “Passione amorosa.” If Bottesini was jaw-dropping, Schoenfield was just plain raucous. He wrote “Café Music” as a reflection on a night when he was the “house pianist” at Murray’s Restaurant in Minneapolis, determined to make sure that the “dinner music” for the guests was not just “background music!” He distilled those memories into a three-movement composition for piano trio, performed yesterday by violinist Melissa Kleinbart, Amos Yang on cello, and pianist John Wilson. They delivered a solid account of every one of Schoenfield’s twists and turns without ever short-changing the madcap spirit of the rhetoric.

Portrait photograph of Bohuslav Martinů taken in 1945 (source unknown, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Czech Republic license, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)

The second half of the program took on a somewhat more sober tone. It began with a nonet composed in 1959 by Bohuslav Martinů. His instrumentation supplements a wind quintet with violin, viola, cello, and bass. This makes for a rich blend of sonorities, which figure significantly in the composer’s approach to overall rhetoric. The entire composition follows a “standard” three-movement framework: fast (Poco Allegro)-slow (Andante)-fast (Allegretto). This makes for a rich palette of sonorities complemented by the inventiveness of the composer’s thematic vocabulary. The wind players for this performance were Blair Francis Paponiu on flute, oboist Russ de Luna, Matthew Griffith on clarinet, bassoonist Justin Cummings, and Jessica Valieri on horn. They were joined by violinist Chen Zhao, Matthew Young on viola, cellist Davis You, and Bowen Ha on bass. This year has gotten off to a good start for Martinů with Steven Isserlis’ recital this past February but also because he was not overlooked in the recorded repertoire of David Oistrakh, recently reissued by Warner Classics.

The program concluded with Dmitri Shostakovich’s third string quartet, his Opus 73 in F major. This was composed not long after the end of World War II. His first major post-war undertaking was his Opus 70 (ninth) symphony in E-flat major, whose high spirits did not go down well with the Soviet authorities. To convince those authorities that the quartet would be a more “sobering” reflection on the past war, he provided them with “titles” for the quartet’s five movements:

1. Blithe ignorance of the future cataclysm
2. Rumblings of unrest and anticipation
3. Forces of war unleashed
4. In memory of the dead
5. The eternal question: why? and for what?

These titles were not included in yesterday afternoon’s program book, which is probably just as well! This was quartet music to be taken on its own terms; and my only annotation in my program book was for the final movement: “Fugue of sorts!”

Once again, the afternoon, taken as a whole, was a satisfying one, combining fond memories of the past with new adventures in discovery.

Noa Wildschut’s Spotlight Debut at Davies

Violinist Noa Wildschut (photograph by Simon van Boxtel, courtesy of SFS)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony presented the third in its series of four Spotlight concerts, all of which involved debut appearances under SFS auspices. The offering was a recital by Dutch violinist Noa Wildschut accompanied by German pianist Elizabeth Brauss, both appearing in Davies for the first time. The major work on the program was Maurice Ravel’s second violin sonata in G major.

This sonata was composed in 1927, meaning that it predates both of Ravel’s piano concertos. On the other hand, it postdates George Gershwin’s two major concertante compositions for piano and orchestra, “Rhapsody in Blue” and the three-movement “Concerto in F.” Gershwin had approached Ravel for lessons earlier in the Twenties. Ravel declined the request on the grounds that he “would probably cause him to write bad Ravel and lose his great gift of melody and spontaneity.” (Hollywood distorted history by writing that line as “If you study with me you'll only write second-rate Ravel instead of first-rate Gershwin.”)

Ravel labeled the second movement of his sonata “Blues;” and, to some extent, that movements serves as his sincere reflection on “first-rate Gershwin.” It begins with a strumming, which may have been inspired by the banjo required in the original “Rhapsody in Blue” score. However, it also reflects on Ravel’s earlier venture into jazziness of the duo between the teapot and the broken china cup (which is sung in English in pidgin Chinese) in Ravel’s one-act opera “L’enfant et lest sortilèges.” Indeed, those familiar with this opera can probably hear the teapot singing “I punch your nose” while listening to this sonata movement.

Neither Wildschut nor Brauss was shy in their account of this movement. Indeed, their dedication to evoking Ravel’s spirit spilled over in the wild “Perpetuum mobile “ of the final movement. This made the opening movement almost a calm before a storm to follow, although there are few jazzy riffs in seconds coming from the piano that foreshadow the adventures to follow.

Ravel’s sonata followed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 304 sonata in E minor. This consists of only two movements, an Allegro followed by a Tempo di menuetto. There is a tendency to associate Mozart’s minor key music with his darker side. However, Wildschut’s deliberately heavy-handed bowing on the G string (the lowest of the four violin strings) suggested that she was approaching the music with a more prankish rhetoric. This would have been perfectly consistent with the brash side of Mozart’s personality in his early twenties. Indeed, he composed the sonata while visiting Paris and may have deliberately thumbed his nose at French music-making practices. One seldom encounters such raw rhetoric in a Mozart sonata; but there was much to admire (and raise eyebrows) in Wildschut’s rhetorical approach to the score.

The second half of the program involved more recent music. “Sarasvati” was composed for the duo in 2018 by Joey Roukens. The title refers to a river in the north of India, but it is also the name of a goddess mentioned about 50 times in the hymns of the Rig Veda. Roukens limits his “orientalism” to a few pentatonic gestures evocative of Balinese gamelan music. However, as the score develops, the thematic material becomes more “Westernized;” and any sense of that river as a major force of nature emerges through Roukens’ own lexicon, rather than appropriation of Eastern resources.

The jazzy rhetoric of Ravel’s sonata movement returned with much gaudier attire in the final selection, Paul Schoenfield’s Four Souvenirs. This was composed in 1990, about five years after his more familiar “Café Music” piano trio. Both pieces probably reflect on an earlier stage in Schoenfield’s career, when he was house pianist at Murphy’s steakhouse in Minneapolis. Each of the Souvenirs movements explores a different dance form, but the rhetoric is more nostalgic than the raucous spirits of “Café Music.” Both Wildschut and Brauss knew how to capture that underlying sense of nostalgia without allowing the rhetoric devolve into mush.

The encore selection was presented with a dedication to the people of the Ukraine. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 107 was entitled Ten National Airs with Variations for Flute and Piano. The seventh set of variations involved the Ukrainian tune “Ikhav Kozak za Dunaj.” The music may not have been familiar, but the spirit could not have been more genuine.

Paul Schoenfield After “Café Music”

courtesy of Naxos of America

Back when I was first beginning to hone my skills in writing about the performance of music, I discovered that I often encountered piano trio recitals that included “Café Music,” composed in 1985 by Paul Schoenfield. Indeed, the trio was performed frequently by a local group, the Aleron Trio, which, sadly, has since disbanded. As I understand the composition’s background, it was written on a commission by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, supposedly inspired by Schoenfield’s days as a house pianist at Murphy’s steakhouse in Minneapolis. Since I knew nothing about that venue, I found that I liked to describe its wild Looney Tunes rhetoric as evoking a more familiar café setting, the Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars with music provided by a guest band of Muppets.

Recently Schoenfield composed what amounts to a successor to “Café Music.” “Last Silence” is also a trio but with different instrumentation, scored for flute, violin, and piano. A little over a month ago, Azica Records released an album entitled Last Silence that features this composition as its final selection. The performers are Martha Aarons (flute), Lev Polyakin (violin), and Frances Renzi (piano). The score was commissioned by Polyakin and Renzi. Like “Café Music,” the score amounts to a roller coaster ride visiting popular forms and tropes given amusingly warped interpretations. The album also includes four pieces for violin and piano that Schoenfield called Souvenirs, also involving playful distortions of familiar dance forms.

The album includes three other trios with the same instrumentation as “Last Silence.” One of them reaches back to the end of the nineteenth century, César Cui’s Opus 56, described as Cinq petite duos, suggesting that these five little pieces were conceived for two “soprano” instruments accompanied by piano. From the first half of the twentieth century, there is a pair of “interludes” composed by Jacques Ibert in 1946 for flute, violin, and harpsichord or harp. The remaining offering is a three-movement trio composed a little over ten years later by Nino Rota. Rota is probably best known for providing music for the films made by Federico Fellini between 1950 and 1979; and, on this side of the pond, he composed the music for the first two of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films.

All of the selections on this album are delightfully entertaining, even if Schoenfield is the only one of the four composers deliberately intending to pull the listener’s leg. This is definitely upbeat music. As readers know by now, I continue to prefer stimulation (particularly when seasoned by wit) to soothing rhetoric when it comes to enduring COVID-19 conditions. Last Silence offers the perfect example of what my preferences seek!

SHCS Presents Chamber Music for Winds

Demarre McGill, Michael McHale, and Anthony McGill taking their bows at the conclusion of their recital (from the YouTube video of that recital)

Following up on last month’s two-piano recital given by Garrick Ohlsson and Kirill Gerstein, this afternoon the Baltimore-based Shriver Hall Concert Series (SHCS) streamed a video of the McGill/McHale Trio. The trio couples the McGill brothers, Anthony, who is Principal Clarinet with the New York Philharmonic, and Demarre, Principal Flute with the Seattle Symphony, with pianist Michael McHale. The video is a recording of a recital that took place in December of 2019 at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. The program was organized around three trios interleaved with solo opportunities for each of the players and one arrangement for the entire group. The video will be available for subsequent viewing until 8:59 p.m. on Wednesday, December 9, accessible at a price of $15 through an SHCS Web page.

Each of the trios could be characterized as descriptive, with considerable variation in what was being described. All three were being given their (virtual) premieres in Baltimore. The opening selection, “A Fish Will Rise” by Chris Rogerson, was inspired by Norman Maclean’s semi-autobiographical book A River Runs Through It. More specifically it provides musical impressions of Maclean’s description of fly fishing during the long summer days in western Montana. Rogerson’s capacity for evocation was strong enough to connect even with those with little (if any) fishing experience. True to its title, Guillaume Connesson’s “Techno-Parade” was inspired by techno dance music, overloading the score with embellishments that go way beyond the incessant repetitions of its source material.

Finally, Paul Schoenfield’s sonatina could easily have been given the title “Café Music Strikes Back.” Those following my writing for some time probably recall that “Café Music,” first performed in January of 1987, was the composer’s unabashedly loopy account of his days as the house pianist at Murray’s steakhouse in Minneapolis. According to my archives, I once described this music as “more suited to the Mos Eisley Cantina, possibly hosting a guest band of Muppets.” The sonatina was composed in 1994 and may well have been directed at those who could not enough of the raucous humor evoked by “Café Music.” Since I was clearly one of Schoenfield’s targets, I could not have conceived of a better way for the trio to wrap up its program.

The trio arrangement was for music that Antonín Dvořák had originally written for piano four hands and then orchestrated. The trio played the last of the eight Slavonic dances in the Opus 46 collection, a furiant in the key of G minor. The was arrangement by Michael Webster, a clarinetist also performing in a trio with flute and piano. His arrangement worked quite well, and the performers definitely did justice to the spirit of Dvořák’s music.

For their solo performances, both of the wind players selected sonatas by Francis Poulenc. The flute sonata was the more playful, managing to throw in a rapid-fire citation of one of the few themes for flute associated with Johann Sebastian Bach. The clarinet sonata gave a more subtle account of shadings between dark and light. This time the composer being cited was Sergei Prokofiev, a somewhat prankish gesture drawing upon his flute sonata. In the interest of keeping the solos on French soil, McHale played “Jardins sous la pluie” (gardens in the rain), the last of the three pieces that Claude Debussy collected in his Estampes (prints).

The entire program lasted for roughly an hour and fifteen minutes; and, between the diversity and the top-notch musicianship of all three players, the experience went by like lightning.

The Naughton Twins’ “All-American” Album

Christine and Michelle Naughton (photograph by Jack De Gilio, courtesy of Unison Media)

Exactly two months ago, Warner Classics released its latest album of performances by the piano duo of twin sisters Christina and Michelle Naughton. The title of the album is American Postcard, and it surveys works by four American composers. It is perhaps fairest to list them chronologically according to date of birth: Aaron Copland, Conlon Nancarrow, Paul Schoenfield, and John Adams (the last two born within about a month of each other).

Only one of the pieces on the album was composed for four hands on one keyboard, Schoenfield’s “Five Days from the Life of a Manic-Depressive.” The Nancarrow sonatina was originally written for solo piano, but it was so complex that Yvar Mikhashoff prepared a four-hand version. The two Copland selections are arrangements of orchestral music, “El Salón México,” scored for two pianos by Leonard Bernstein, and “Variations on a Shaker Melody” (basically an excerpt from the score for “Appalachian Spring”), set for four hands by Bennett Lerner. The two Adams compositions are both arranged by Preben Antonsen. “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” is a four-hand arrangement of the orchestral fanfare of the same name; and “Roll Over Beethoven” is a two-piano transcription of Adams’ second string quartet. This album presents the world-premiere recording of the arrangement of “Short Ride on a Fast Machine.”

Taken as a whole, this is a highly engaging package. The overall disposition is a sunny one, even in the Schoenfield piece, since the composer is particularly gifted when it comes to taking tongue-in-cheek stances. Where the selections are based on orchestral sources, the sonorities are clearly more limited; but those limits do not obscure the joy of what can be communicated through only one or two keyboards. (Where “The Rite of Spring” is concerned, one frequently hears more of the “internal” details in the piano version than when they are struggling to be heard over the rest of a large and loud orchestra. On the other hand, “Appalachian Spring” was originally composed for a chamber orchestra; and I feel as if Lerner never quite captured the spirit of Copland’s transparency in his arrangement.)

Nevertheless, I have to take issue with the advance material that I received along with this new recording. Here is how the contributing composers are described:

Two of them, Aaron Copland and John Adams, are among the most prominent of the last 100 years; the other two can be described to some degree as mavericks – Conlan [sic] Nancarrow (1912–1997) and Paul Schoenfield (b. 1947).

To this I find it hard to resist saying:

I remember John Adams when he was a maverick!

More specifically, my knowledge of Adams goes back to 1975 with Brian Eno’s release of the second album on his Obscure Records label. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only recording of Adams’ three-movement suite American Standard in its entirety. (The second movement, “Christian Zeal and Activity” managed to find its way onto a Nonesuch album and became part of The John Adams Earbox.) For that matter, when I first heard “Grand Pianola Music” performed (for the first time, I think) in New York at the 92nd Street Y, there was noticeable hostility in its reception. Perhaps the author of that sentence linking Adams to Copland is working on a book about Adams with the planned title From Maverick to Monument!

MOR to Make Fourth Annual Visit to Bay Area

Soprano Roslyn Barak, courtesy of Music of Remembrance

Readers may recall that, near the end of May of last year, the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) hosted the third annual visit to the Bay Area by the Seattle-based musicians of Music of Remembrance (MOR). This organization has the mission of remembering the Holocaust through music with concert performances, educational programs, recordings, and commissions of new works. This month it will return to present its fourth annual concert.

The program will present premiere performances of two new compositions. The first of these will be “Snow Falls” by Ryuichi Sakamoto. The piece is a concert treatment of the melodies he composed for the film Nagasaki: Memories of My Son, setting a poem of the same title by Kiyoko Nagase. The second will be Christophe Chagnard’s “Gaman,” a multimedia work that addresses the experiences of American citizens of Japanese ancestry that were forced into incarceration camps during World War II. In addition soprano Roslyn Barak will interpret songs written and performed by prisoners held by the Nazis in the Tererzín concentration camp. Finally, there will be a performance of Paul Schoenfield’s Sparks of Glory, a suite of four portraits of Holocaust defiance.

This concert will again take place in the SFCM Concert Hall. The entrance is at 50 Oak Street, halfway between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street and a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station. The performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 24, and should last about two hours. Premium tickets in rows A through J of the Center section will be $60. All other tickets will be $45. These will include specific seats designated for wheelchair access, and a seat can also be allocated for the companion of the wheelchair user. Online ticket sales are being managed by Brown Paper Tickets, but the order form has been set up on the event page for this concert on the Music of Remembrance Web site. Tickets may also be ordered in advance by calling 206-365-7770.

There will also be a post-concert reception for meeting the contributing artists over wine and hors d’oeuvres. The reception will begin immediately after the performance. Tickets are $100 and may be purchased both through the event page and by telephone.

AdAstra Piano Trio Makes a Nonstandard Recording Debut

A little over a week ago the Polish label CD ACCORD released the recording debut of the AdAstra Piano Trio. Also based in Poland, the group consists of violinist Anna Szabelka, cellist Łukasz Frant, and pianist Joanna Galon-Frant. The title of the album is Episodi, which is taken from the first selection, “Episodi e Canto perpetuo” (episodes and perpetual song) by the Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. In fact the entire album is devoted to American and Eastern European compositions written during the last century.

At the very least this is a refreshing change from piano trios that feel determined to establish their chops through familiar nineteenth-century repertoire, daring to cross over into the next century only for the likes of Maurice Ravel or possibly Dmitri Shostakovich. The American composers on the album are Henry Cowell (his 1965 “Trio in Nine Short Movements”) and Paul Schoenfield (his 1985 thoroughly loopy three-movement “Café Music”). The other Eastern European is the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, represented by a 1997 piece that Grove Music Online translates from the Russian as “3 Merry Pieces,” which is apparently based on much earlier pieces composed for solo piano.

Curiously, this is not the first piano trio album to draw its title from Vasks. In 2012 the Boulanger Trio also used it as an opening album selection, following it with the two Shostakovich piano trios, providing a rare opportunity to listen to the seldom recorded Opus 8 trio in C minor. Similarly, AdAstra has prepared a program of rarely heard pieces. However, here in San Francisco there is one notable exception: “Café Music” has received a generous amount of exposure, particularly by the Aleron Trio before they disbanded. It was written on a commission by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, supposedly inspired by Schoenfield’s days as a house pianist at Murphy’s steakhouse in Minneapolis. However, when I have written about this piece in the past, I have described it as “more suited to the Mos Eisley Cantina, possibly hosting a guest band of Muppets.”

Unfortunately, Schoenfield’s over-the-top sense of humor has not translated well to this recording. In fairness, however, it may be the case that it does not translate well to any recording. The very sight of three highly disciplined performers deftly jumping through all the hoops set up by Schoenfield’s score is as much a part of the fun as is the music itself. When it comes to comedy in music, the Shchedrin selection fares much better on recording, particularly the second of the three pieces, whose title in English translates into “Let’s Play and Opera by Rossini.” Structured as a coloratura aria with an introductory recitative, the piece indulges shamelessly in Rossini quotes and packs no end of low-comedy gags into a little more than two minutes. For this listener, at least, Shchedrin having fun with Rossini is a lot more satisfying than the fun he had with Georges Bizet when he prepared a score for a ballet about Carmen choreographed by his wife Maya Plisetskaya.

The more serious selections by Cowell and Vasks lead the listener into more exploratory domains. Both composers were interested in the technical potential of all three of the instruments in both solo and ensemble capacities. Furthermore, each of the two compositions amounts to a series of relatively brief studies. One might regard them both as sets of études; but these are “studies” directed at the ears of the attentive listener, as well as at the technical skills of the performers. From this point of view, the opportunity to revisit the Vasks composition turned out to be a very welcome one, while my reaction to the Cowell pieces simply involved wondering why I had to wait so long to listen to them for the first time.

How long will we have to wait before AdAstra makes their first tour of the United States?