Aris Quartet Launches New CMSF Season

The first chamber music recital in the 2026 Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) season took place yesterday afternoon in Herbst Theatre. The program was performed by the Aris Quartet, whose members currently are violinists Sophia Jaffé (substituting for the ensemble’s leader) and Noëmi Zipperling, Caspar Vinzens on viola, and cellist Lukas Sieber. The program was a straightforward one, framed by two of the three “B” composers.

The program began with Ludwig van Beethoven in a performance of the second of his six “early” string quartets, Opus 18, Number 2, composed in the key of G major. Johannes Brahms provided the conclusion with the second of his Opus 51 quartets, set in the key of A minor. The “middle ground” was taken by Dmitri Shostakovich with a performance of what is probably his best-known string quartet, Opus 110 (the eighth) in C minor.

There is much to enjoy in Beethoven’s Opus 18. One can appreciate his sense of humor during his early period, most evident in the G major quartet with the Allegro “disruption” of the second Adagio cantabile movement. Also, the third movement is a scherzo, making a significant departure from Joseph Haydn’s use of the minuet. (Haydn’s Opus 33 quartets originally had scherzi, but he replaced them with minuets!) The Brahms quartets, receive far less attention; so I was particularly glad to see the Aris Quartet compensating for that shortcoming. They were as attentive to Brahms as they were to Beethoven, and the journey was just as engaging.

Shostakovich was in Dresden when he composed his Opus 110 quartet, and it was inspired by those in Dresden that were victims of the firebombing in World War II. By the time he composed this music, he was not shy in working his initials (D-S-C-H) into the score. Also, those familiar with the “Leningrad” symphony (Opus 60 in C major) know that it included a shave-and-a-haircut motif, which returns in Opus 110, now in a minor key.

Bust of Erwin Schulhoff at the fortress Wülzburg near Weißenburg in Bavaria (photograph by Aarp65, from Wikimedia Commons Web page, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

For the encores the ensemble turned to Czech composers. They began with the “Alla Czecha” movement from Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces for String Quartet. This was followed by Antonín Dvořák’s B. 152, his string quartet setting of Cypresses. The quartet played the penultimate movement, “Nature Lies Peaceful in Slumber and Dreaming.” This provided the perfectly polite and proper way to say farewell to an attentive audience!

New SFS Chamber Music Series Begins at Davies

Yesterday afternoon the Chamber Music Series, performed almost entirely by members of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), presented the first program of the new season. Three composers were represented on the program, appearing in reverse chronological order. The first selection was also the least familiar, composed by Erwin Schulhoff and given the title “Concertino for Flute, Viola, and Double Bass.”

The music was composed in 1925, an encouraging time for a new generation of composers to venture into new territory. Schulhoff reveled in the diversity of that territory, which included Igor Stravinsky’s venture into Neo-classicism, Arnold Schoenberg’s journey from expressionism into atonality, and the enigmatic pursuits of Erik Satie. Schulhoff’s concertino was more interested in contrasting sonorities than in atonality. Those sonorities extended into the upper register when the flute doubled on piccolo. The second movement of the concertino, given the title “Furiant,” allows the piccolo player to evoke the free spirit of a canary escaped from its cage. Schulhoff was somewhat of an outlier in the program that continued with Maurice Ravel and Ludwig van Beethoven; but, given that the Nazis sent him to the Wülzburg prison camp, where he died in 1942, the imaginative scope of his composing deserves more attention that it tends to receive.  Flutist Yubeen Kim, Leonid Plashinov-Johnson on viola, and Bowen Ha on bass did well in choosing Schulhoff  to begin yesterday’s program.

The Schulhoff concertino was followed by the far more familiar piano trio composed by Maurice Ravel a little over a decade earlier in 1914. With the rise of the recording industry, this became a popular piece of chamber music, particular after RCA released its recording the of “powerhouse trio” of violinist Jascha Heifetz, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and pianist Arthur Rubinstein! I suspect that the recording remains a “tough act to follow;” but performance always has an edge over any album! SFS musicians David Chernyavsky (violin) and Amos Yang (cello) performed with pianist Asya Gulua; and they had no trouble capturing the engaging diversity of dispositions encountered in Ravel’s score. Their attentiveness to that score and its connotations made for a listening experience far more engaging than any recording!

An engraving of Ludwig van Beethoven at the age of 26 (1796), executed for the publisher Artaria by Johann Josef Neidl (from Wikimedia Commons)

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to an early (1800) composition by Ludwig van Beethoven, his Opus 20 septet in E-flat major. This was performed by the coupling of three winds (Matthew Griffith on clarinet, Jessica Valeri on horn, and Joshua Elmore on bassoon) with four different string instruments: violin (Wyatt Underhill), viola (Katarzyna Bryla), cello (Anne Richardson), and bass (Daniel G. Smith). The six movements exceed the usual four-movement structure with the addition of a movement of variations and both Menuetto and Scherzo movements. Most interesting was a bass passage plucked by Smith, leaving me wondering if these were the “first steps” of the “walking bass!”

As usually seems to be the case, this was a program in which the familiar rubbed shoulders with the seldom-encountered; and the technical skills of all the contributing musicians made the afternoon my latest thoroughly satisfying journey of discovery.

JIVE to Celebrate First Anniversary for Passover

JIVE performers Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, Simon Barrad, Elizabeth Castro Greenberg, and Ronny Michael Greenberg (courtesy of JIVE)

Almost exactly a year ago, JIVE - Jewish Innovative Voices & Experiences was launched as a concert series. The founders were pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg, countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, and baritone Simon Barrad. As was the case last year, the season will begin with the celebration of Passover. Once again, the founders will be joined in their performance by violinist Elizabeth Castro Greenberg.

The Passover story will be presented through a multi-genre program of Yiddish songs, traditional Ladino music, jazz, operetta, and music from the films Prince of Egypt and Frozen (“Let Us Go”). The program will also include arrangements and compositions by Flory Jagoda, Ernest Bloch, Leslie Adams, Erwin Schulhoff, Joseph Beer, Simon & Garfunkel, and Bonnie Tyler. As might be expected, the music will be enhanced with wine and traditional foods, as well as cocktails appropriate for the holiday.

Once again, the performance will take place at The Century Club of California, which is located at 1355 Franklin Street, between Post Street and Sutter Street. It will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9. General admission will be $100. However, for parties of four or more, admission will be $75 per person. Those aged 30 and under may purchase tickets for $65. Tickets may be purchased through an Eventbrite event page.

DSOLive Returns to Cyberspace

Yesterday evening, DSOLive, the series of streamed performances by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO), returned to cyberspace with a richly diverse program led by Music Director Jader Bignamini. The guest soloist was saxophonist Branford Marsalis. The full title of the program was An American in Paris & Branford Marsalis, and this was one of those occasions in which the soloist performed during both halves of the evening.

Erwin Schulhoff with dancer Milča Mayerová (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Neither of his selections was by a composer born in the United States. In the first half Marsalis performed Erwin Schulhoff’s “Hot-Sonate” for alto saxophone and piano, composed in 1930. Schulhoff had a passion for jazz but never visited the United States. After the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, he would be deported to the Wülzburg prison, where he died on August 18, 1942. “Hot-Sonate” was subsequently orchestrated for solo and chamber ensemble by Richard Rodney Bennett, and that is the version that was performed last night. “For the record” (as they say), it was also the version performed when Marsalis played it with the San Francisco Symphony under the baton of Thomas Wilkins.

The second half began with a performance of Darius Milhaud’s Scaramouche suite. This was originally composed for piano duo but was subsequently arranged for alto saxophone and orchestra. The music is rich with Brazilian influences, inspired by the time Milhaud spend in Rio Janeiro while serving as secretary to French ambassador Paul Claudel. Indeed, the last movement of the suite is a samba choro; and Marsalis was quite at home with its sassy rhetoric.

Only one composer was represented twice on last night’s programs, and his selections concluded each half. As might be guessed, that composer was George Gershwin. His “Cuban Overture” was the perfect sassy follow-up to “Hot-Sonate,” while the entire evening was wrapped up with the comforting familiarity of “An American in Paris.” The “bridge” between Milhaud and Gershwin was Leonard Bernstein with three dance episodes he had composed for the musical On the Town. The program began with the last of the six short compositions that Joan Tower composed under the title Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman.

Taken as a whole, this was an engaging program of American spirit, even if one of the composers never set foot on American soil. Personally, I was glad to see Marsalis getting the attention he deserved. He brought a keen sense of concert rhetoric to his performance, even if the music he was playing was clearly inspired by the “jazz age.” Taken as a whole, this was a vigorous launch of the new DSO season; and I am hoping that future DSOLive offerings will be just as engaging.

LCCE to Present First SFIAF 2024 Concert

LCCE musicians Michel Taddei, Stacey Pelinka, and Phyllis Kamrin (from the SFIAF Web page for this program)

Following an opening reception on April 28, performances for this year’s San Francisco International Arts Festival (SFIAF) will get under way on Wednesday, May 1, and will run through Sunday, May 12. Not wasting any time, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) will present the first concert event of the Festival. Working with Artistic Director Matilda Hofman, three of the instrumentalists of the ensemble have joined forces to present an eclectic program entitled Borealis. Those performers will be violist Phyllis Kamrin, Michel Taddei on double bass, and flutist Stacey Pelinka. Full program details have not yet been provided; but, on the basis of the information I have been able to gather, I can state with some certainty that one of the selections will be a solo performance by Taddei of Tom Johnson’s “Failing, A Very Difficult Piece For Solo String Bass.” The program will also include compositions by Kaija Saariaho, Erwin Schulhoff, and Chelsea Komschlies.

There will be no charge for admission to this recital. The performance will begin at 6 p.m. on Thursday, May 2. There will be no intermission, and the duration is expected to be about 50 minutes. The venue will be El Rio, which is located in the Mission at 3158 Mission Street. An RSVP is highly recommended, and tickets may reserved through the Festival event page for this recital. SFIAF has created a Web page to account for all of the music events; but readers should be cautioned that the order of the list is alphabetical, rather than chronological!

Wilkins and Marsalis: Two Returns to Davies

This afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) presented the first of its three programs featuring highly jazz-informed programming performed, for the most part, with symphonic, rather than jazz-band, resources. The conductor was Thomas Wilkins, who made his SFS debut in December of 2019; and the soloist was Branford Marsalis on alto saxophone, who made his SFS debut in March of 1994. As might be expected, this was not the usual overture-concerto-symphony program. Instead, there was an opening based on three excerpts from Leonard Bernstein’s score for the musical On the Town, two works featuring the saxophone, and “Harlem,” which may be the closest Duke Ellington ever came to composing a tone poem.

Bass player Stephen Tramontozzi (from his Faculty Web page on the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Web site)

Two of the works involved arrangements that deserve attention. The first of these was Marsalis’ first selection, originally conceived by Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff as a sonata for alto saxophone and piano, given the title “Hot-Sonate.” However, this afternoon the piece was played as a concerto in an arrangement by Richard Rodney Bennett. Among the Europeans, Schulhoff had one of the keenest ears for jazz rhetoric; and Bennett seems to have made it a point to make sure that his arrangement would not short-change any of the original version’s jazzy qualities.

It is also worth noting that Marsalis was part of a trio of soloists, reflecting a combo of saxophone, bass(Stephen Tramontozzi), and drum kit (Jacob Nissly). Most important, however, was that Bennett knew how to make sure that he never short-changed the flood of “hot” gestures found in the original score. This selection was being performed by SFS for the very first time.

The other arrangement involved “Harlem,” which was originally commissioned by the NBC Symphony. However, it was first performed by the Ellington band in 1951. The symphonic version was orchestrated by Luther Henderson; but, when Maurice Peress recorded the work with the American Composers Orchestra, he provided his own orchestration. Since both names are included in the program book, it is likely that Wilkins chose which portions of the score would receive orchestration by which composer. Regardless of its “pedigree,” this selection presented just as much impact as one could expect from a program-concluding symphony, complete with some wild percussion works that even spilled over onto Edward Stephan’s timpani.

The other two works on the program had their “roots” in narrative. The opening selection was composed by Leonard Bernstein, drawing upon the score he had originally created for the musical On the Town. From that score he distilled a symphonic suite of sorts, called simply “Three Dance Episodes.” These days On the Town is better known for the 1949 film, which was directed by Gene Kelley (who was also a leading member of the cast). Those familiar with the film would probably recall the scenes from which Bernstein extracted his episodes, but my own opinion is that the music has far more impact in its original narrative setting.

The other narrative came from the film Catch Me If You Can, whose score was composed by John Williams. I have to confess that I never saw this film. As a result, most of my own listening joy came from having a second opportunity to listen to Marsalis lead his trio with Tramontozzi and Nissly. Once again, this “dynamic trio” had a hand to giving the music its first SFS performance. Williams himself call his reworking of excerpts Escapades; and listening to the “escapades” of both the trio and the full orchestra behind them made for a rich sense of satisfaction that had nothing to do with any underling movie narrative! This offering was also given its first SFS appearance, and the music clearly has more than enough substance to justify returning in a future SFS program.

A New Schulhoff Album from Los Angeles

courtesy of Delos Productions

Listening to violinist Susan Freier and cellist Stephen Harrison play Erwin Schulhoff’s 1925 duo for violin and cello this past Monday evening reminded me of the moderately generous number of recordings of Schulhoff’s music that I have accumulated. That number increased by one this past Friday with the release of a new album entitled Shapeshifter: Music of Erwin Schulhoff (1894–1942). The recordings on this album were made possible by the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices, named after philanthropist Marilyn Ziering and conductor James Conlon, which was established at the Colburn School in Los Angeles in 2013.

Conlon appears only on the opening track of the album, Schulhoff’s Opus 43, his second piano concerto, which he described as a “concerto for piano and small orchestra.” Conlon conducts the RVC (Recovered Voices at Colburn) Ensemble; and the soloist is pianist Dominic Cheli. Cheli also gives solo performances of a five-movement suite for the left hand and a brief song entitled “Susi,” which Schulhoff composed while he was part of a jazz piano duo. Cheli also joins violinist Adam Millstein for the recording of Schulhoff’s second sonata for violin and piano. The remaining selection on the album is a set of five pieces for string quartet, each in a different characteristic style. Millstein plays second violin in a quartet, whose other members are violinist Gallia Kastner, violist Cara Pogossian, and cellist Ben Solomonow.

Given the extent of my collection of Schulhoff recordings, none of these were “first contact” selections. Nevertheless, it was still a pleasure to listen to how a new set of performers would bring their own interpretations to these compositions. More important was that the content of this album emerged from the RVC commitment to encourage greater awareness and more frequent performances of music by composers whose careers and lives were disrupted or ended during the years of the Nazi regime in Europe. One might say that, on the basis of past recordings, Schulhoff’s voice has already been “recovered;” but the expressiveness brought to the five selections on this album make for an engaging listening experience while establishing the context in which Schulhoff’s compositions were created.

SFCMP Launches Season with Duo Recital

Last night the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) launched its 2022–23 season with a new approach to programming in a new venue. The only performers were the husband-and-wife couple of cellist Stephen Harrison and violinist Susan Freier, and their recital took place in the Mission at The Lab. The program consisted of six compositions, three on either side of the intermission. Half of them were duo performances. Freier played two violin solos, and Harrison played one work for solo cello. Five of the six composers on the program were women, represented by works as early as 1980 (Libby Larsen’s “Scudding” for solo cello) and as recent as 2017 (two movements from Gabriela Lena Frank’s seven-movement Suite Mestiza). The program concluded with the earliest composition, Erwin Schulhoff’s 1925 duo for violin and cello.

All of this made for an engaging evening of chamber music at its most intimate; and the physical setting of The Lab, while generous, was particularly conducive to that intimacy. From a personal point of view, I definitely had favorites among the composers: Frank, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Schulhoff. Nevertheless, the expressiveness behind each selection locked my attention into all of the offerings. I was particularly struck by how the players had assembled a repertoire that balanced compositions organized around sonorities with those more attentive to the counterpoint and harmonies of conventional pitch classes.

While I appreciate the need for a more balanced approach to gender in preparing concert programs, I have to say that I had a certain bias towards Schulhoff as the “grand old man” of the evening. Sadly, he never advanced to the age of an old man, grand or otherwise. He was born in 1894 in what is now the Czech Republic. However, with the rise of the Nazis in the Thirties, his music was labeled “degenerate” and his Jewish ancestry marked him as a particular target. As a result, shortly after he turned 48, he died shortly after being deported to the Wülzburg prison in Bavaria.

Thus, his legacy as a composer is limited to only a few decades. Nevertheless, there is considerably imaginative diversity, particularly in his approaches to chamber music. Last night’s duo performance providing an engaging account of the freshness he injected into past chamber music traditions. However, for those of us familiar with his biography, it was also a reminder of how much of his imaginative capacity we would never be able to hear due to his untimely death. Fortunately, the consistently upbeat rhetoric of the five living female composers served, at least in part, to soften the blow of Schulhoff’s tragic biography.

SFCMP to Launch New Season at The Lab

Next month the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) will launch its 2022–23 season at a new venue. That location will be The Lab, and the plan is that it will serve as a home for smaller ensemble concerts. That will certainly apply for the first concert of the season, whose only performers will be violinist Susan Freier and cellist Stephen Harrison. They will present a program that had been scheduled for the 2021–22 season and had to be cancelled twice due to COVID and other issues.

The title of the program is Image and Memory. Three of the selections will be duo performances, two will be violin solos, and one will be a cello solo. Three of the pieces were composed during the twentieth century, and the other three were completed during the current century. Program specifics are as follows:

• Augusta Read Thomas: “Silent Moon” (duo, 2006)
• Gabriela Lena Frank: Suite Mestiza (violin solo, 2017)
• Sofia Gubaidulina: duo sonata entitled “Rejoice! Freue dich!” (1981)
• Libby Larsen: “Scudding” (cello solo, 1980)
• Julia Adolphe: “Smile Softly, Softly Smile” (violin solo, 2021)
• Erwin Schulhoff: duo (1925)

The performance will begin at 7 p.m. on Monday, October 10. General admission will be $35 with a $15 rate for students. Because this is the first concert of the season, it is still possible to purchase full-series subscriptions. As has already been reported, there is a single Web page for processing purchases of both the full series and its alternatives. Single tickets may be purchased through a City Box Office Web page. The Lab is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street, a short walk from the corner of Mission Street, where there is a BART station and bus lines running along both Mission and 16th Streets. All attendees must be fully vaccinated to attend this event. Full vaccination is defined as completion of the two-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine administered two weeks or more in advance of the event, along with a vaccine booster.

In addition, this will be the first of two concerts that will take place in the museums and gallery spaces of San Francisco. For this occasion the exhibit will feature Dirge, a portfolio of works by the late Chinese painter Hung Liu. This was commissioned by SFCMP with the request that the content be centered around music. Doors will open at 6:45 p.m., allowing for viewing before the performance, during the intermission, and after the conclusion of the program.

SFCMP to Launch Art House Series Next Week

[updated 4/21, 10:25 a.m.: This concert, scheduled for tonight, has been postponed due to a positive COVID test:

This past September the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) had planned to launch its 2021–22 season by beginning a new series, called the ART House Series. As the title suggests, this was planned to be a more intimate offering; and the first program, entitled Image and Memory, was conceived to present solo and duo performances by violinist Susan Freier and cellist Stephen Harrison. The performance had been planned for this past September 26 but had to be postponed due to pandemic conditions.

“Gallery” of the composers featured on the Image and Memory program (courtesy of SFCMP)

Next week Image and Memory will finally be given its performance by Freier and Harrison. The program, conceived by Artistic Director Eric Dudley, will be as follows:

• Augusta Read Thomas: “Silent Moon” for violin and cello (2006)
• Gabriela Lena Frank: two movements from Suite Mestiza (“Hailli” and “Tarqueada”), scored for solo violin (2017)
• Sofia Gubaidulina: two movements (“Your joy no man taketh from you” and “Listen to the still small voice within”) from a sonata for violin and cello composed in 1981 and entitled Rejoice! Freue dich!
• Libby Larsen: “Scudding” for solo cello (1980)
• Julia Adolphe: “Smile Softly, Softly Smile” for solo violin (2021)
• Erwin Schulhoff: duo for violin and cello (1925)

Following the performance, members of the audience will be free to engage with the performers and other new music enthusiasts. In addition to the music, patrons will have the opportunity to view and discuss Dirge, a portfolio of prints by the late Chinese artist Hung Liu that were commissioned by SFCMP.

This performance will begin at 7 p.m. next week on Thursday, April 21. There will also be a pre-concert discussion about Dirge, which will begin at 6:30 p.m. The event will be hosted by The Lab, which is located in the Mission at 2948 16th Street. Regular readers of this site probably know by now that the venue is a short walk from the corner of Mission Street. The location is particularly good for those using public transportation, since that corner provides bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel as well as a BART station.

General admission will be $15. A Web page has been created for taking orders. Presumably, tickets will also be available for purchase at the door. As usual, SFCMP Members will not be charged for admission.]

Ives Collective’s “Incremental” Programming

Ives Collective leaders Stephen Harrison and Susan Freier (from the Old First Concerts event page)

Yesterday afternoon saw the return of the Ives Collective to the Old First Presbyterian Church to offer the final performance in this month’s Old First Concerts programming. The Ives Collective is managed by cellist Stephen Harrison and Susan Freier, who plays both violin and viola. They are joined by guest artists to meet the instrumentation demands of their programming. Yesterday’s additional performers were violinist Roy Malan and pianist Gwendolyn Mok.

The “incremental” programming involved a one-by-one increase in the number of performers as the program unfolded. Freier and Harrison began the concert with a performance of a duo for violin and cello composed by Erwin Schulhoff in 1925. They were then joined by Mok for settings of five “Negro Melodies” by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. After an intermission, Malan joined the group to conclude the program with Johannes Brahms’ Opus 60 (third) piano quartet in C minor. This “sequence” of compositions was “unified” because all three of the composers had benefitted from encouragement from Antonín Dvořák.

I must confess that the Schulhoff selection was what drew me to this particular concert. About a decade ago, there was a revived interest in his music, due in no small part to Daniel Hope’s promotion of music by composers who perished in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Following up on a recital that Hope gave in San Francisco with Jeffrey Kahane, I began to accumulate (and write about) a moderately generous collection of recordings. However, that source began to run dry by the spring of 2019. Ironically, my last prior encounter with Schulhoff’s music took place on February 9, 2020, when the Apollon Musagète Quartet launched the 2020 season of Chamber Music San Francisco. Almost exactly a month later, lockdown conditions began to be imposed to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Schulhoff’s Wikipedia page organizes his music into four periods. His earliest compositions reflected influences from composers such as Claude Debussy, Alexander Scriabin, and Richard Strauss. This was followed by the influence of Dadaism. Thirty years prior to John Cage composing 4’33”, Schulhoff wrote “In futurum,” whose score consisted entirely of rests. Beginning in 1923 his interests shifted to jazz and neoclassicism, and this was the period in which he composed his duo. His final period reflected his interest in Communist ideology, a factor that led to his imprisonment in the Nazi’s Wülzburg prison during World War II, where he died of tuberculosis.

The duo is a product of upbeat rhetoric without Dada prankishness. The music does not reflect Schulhoff’s interest in jazz, and the second of the four movements has distinct gypsy influences. The movements are relatively brief and were given thoroughly engaging accounts by Freier and Harrison. That similar rhetoric of engagement continued into the Coleridge-Taylor settings.

The weakest part of the program was the “all hands” performance of the Brahms piano quartet. There were serious problems of intonation, which only surfaced during the entire program after Malan joined the group. Opus 60 is the darkest of the Brahms’ three piano quartets, and it deserves a rhetorically intense account. However, because the four musicians never managed to come together as a unified quartet, there was little room for rhetoric to shape the performance. The result emerged as a discouraging slog through music that was intended to draw listeners to the edges of their respective seats.

Apollon Musagète Quartet Launches CMSF Season

Apollon Musagète Quartet members Paweł Zalejski, Bartosz Zachłod, Piotr Skweres, and Piotr Szumieł (from the ensemble’s Gallery Web page)

Yesterday afternoon in Herbst Theatre, Chamber Music San Francisco (CMSF) began its 2020 season with a recital by the Apollon Musagète Quartet. The members of this ensemble are all Polish: violinists Paweł Zalejski and Bartosz Zachłod, violist Piotr Szumieł, and cellist Piotr Skweres. These four musicians were inspired by the Alban Berg Quartet at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, and they studied as a group with Johannes Meissl at the European Chamber Music Academy.

The program they prepared was a straightforward one. Given the context of this year, a Beethoven selection was inevitable. They opted for an “Early Period” quartet from Opus 18, the third of those quartets in the key of D major. This was preceded by another D major quartet by Beethoven’s teacher. Joseph Haydn began the program with his Hoboken III/63 quartet, the fifth quartet in his Opus 64 collection, often known as the “Lark” quartet. The second half of the program was devoted to Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 105 in A-flat major.

The quartet’s account of all three of these pieces was consistently satisfying. I have noticed that, in the Opus 18 set, the D major quartet tends to get overlooked, perhaps because it is not “dramatic” enough to confirm the stereotypical preconceptions of Beethoven. Yet there is much to appreciate in the elegant polish that Beethoven brought to this particular score, and there is more than enough to engage the attentive listener in the polyphonic interweaving of the four instrumental parts. In the context of yesterday’s article, this account was yet another engaging departure from that ghastly “scowling Beethoven” stereotype, leaving me curious as to how this group would approach the quartets that Beethoven wrote later in his life.

As might be anticipated, the Haydn selection was equally good-natured. Opus 64 was the third published collection of quartets dedicated to Johann Tost, who led the second violin section at Eszterháza. The selection coupled well with the Beethoven that followed, an equally elegant model of polyphonic craft basking in D major sonorities that sound particularly sunny when played by the string instruments.

I have to say that I was particularly delighted with the second half of the program on personal grounds. I have grown more than a bit weary of string quartets that assume that the Opus 96 (“American”) quartet in F major is the only Dvořák selection that audiences want to hear. Unless I am mistaken, my only other encounter with Opus 105 in concert was due to the Cypress String Quartet, whose Dvořák scope was much broader (and far more appealing to my personal tastes). Fortunately, Apollon Musagète had no trouble making a case for the virtues of this composition and easily won over yesterday afternoon’s audience with their well-polished and informed account of Dvořák’s logic and rhetoric.

For their encore selection Apollon Musagète took the liberty of departing from more familiar names and compositions. They performed the third of five pieces that Erwin Schulhoff composed for string quartet, each of which amounted to a miniature account of parody. The third of these pieces is entitled (in English) “Czech folk music.” In its brief duration it begins with a ring of familiarity (particularly when played after Dvořák’s music) but does not waste any time in letting both thematic material and rhetoric go haywire. The listening experience thus migrates from mild chuckles to an overt belly-laugh at the conclusion. To some extent one might say the same of the ensemble’s decision to perform in matching outfits of lavender plaid (which, according to the program notes, were custom-made)!

Yiddish without the Yiddishkeit from harmonia mundi

courtesy of PIAS

The title of the latest album to be released by the Jerusalem Quartet on harmonia mundi is The Yiddish Cabaret. That title refers to a project that the group, whose members are violinists Alexander Pavlovsky and Sergei Bresler, violist Ori Kam, and Kyril Zlotnikov, initiated with Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov, funded by a commission from harmonia mundi. The result is a set of five songs setting Yiddish texts sung by soprano Hila Baggio, accompanied only by the string quartet. This music is introduced on the album by Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Opus 26 (second) string quartet and Erwin Schulhoff’s set of five pieces, each based on a different style, scored for string quartet. The album will be released this Friday; and, as usual, Amazon.com has set up a Web page to process pre-orders.

According to the booklet notes provided by Kam, the Jerusalem Quartet was approached by harmonia mundi to think of a concept for a “different” album. The response was to prepare an album of “Jewish music.” (Those are not necessarily “scare quotes;” so I should make clear that I am quoting Kam’s text.) In unpacking that quoted phrase, I feel need to establish some terminological foundations that distinguish three key adjectives, “Israeli,” “Jewish,” and “Yiddish.”

The members of the Jerusalem Quartet are all Israeli. Whether or not they are practicing Jews should not be an issue; but it may be relevant to what they, as a group, take to be “Jewish music.” Schulhoff had Jewish ancestry. He is more accurately described as a Czech composer and none of the pieces in the set of five included on this album would be taken by anyone to be “Jewish.” Of course, as far as the Nazis were concerned, he was Jewish enough to be deported to the Wülzburg concentration camp on German soil in Bavaria. (He entered that camp in June of 1941 and died there of tuberculosis in August of the following year.) On a broader scale, however, none of the composers of music played on previous Jerusalem Quartet albums are Jewish; and, while some of them had interests in Jewish sources, none of those interests arise in the compositions that the Jerusalem Quartet recorded.

Where the adjective “Yiddish” is concerned, it is applied primarily to language that was used by most Jews in Eastern Europe. It reflects a culture that is decidedly different from that of the Israelis or even, for that matter, Jews of Russian descent that moved to Israel. (Three of the members of the Jerusalem Quartet seem to fall into that latter category. Kam is the only member whose name is closer to Israeli than to Russian.) The operative word, however, is “culture.” That culture, known as Yiddishkeit, is shared by many Jews around the world and across the United States. It is so extensive that Yiddishkeit is a part of Jewish life even for those that do not speak Yiddish. Nevertheless, the Internet has enabled an entropy that is more likely to homogenize cultures than to distinguish them. As a result, there is a serious risk that Yiddishkeit will die out, perhaps in a matter of years; but those who embrace it tend to do so passionately.

How does this linguistic exercise apply to the forthcoming release of The Yiddish Cabaret? Let me approach that question elliptically with an old joke that the Great Wall of China is not particularly great, is not even a wall, and is not in China: It is in New York, and it is called the Triborough Bridge! I would postulate that The Yiddish Cabaret is an album presenting songs that are, at best, cabaret music and show few, if any signs, of Yiddishkeit. I would warrant that claim by observing that, here in San Francisco, I have been able to enjoy highly perceptive and thoroughly enjoyable performances of Yiddish songs by Sharon Bernstein, Cantor of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. Bernstein knows more about Yiddish culture than Desyatnikov (who, to the best of my knowledge, is not Jewish) could ever hope to grasp; and her command of Yiddish inflections blows Baggio’s delivery of Desyatnikov’s songs way off the map.

That said, I am always happy to encounter a string quartet willing to take the trouble to record the music of Korngold and Schulhoff.

Next Month NCCO will Dwell on the Last Century

Next month the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) will return to the Veterans Building. Once again they will be led by Music Director Daniel Hope. This time Hope will share solo duties in a performance of a double concerto for violin, piano, and strings. His fellow soloist will be Venezuelan-American Vanessa Perez, who will be making her debut appearance with NCCO.

Guest artist Vanessa Perez (photograph courtesy of Cadenza Artists)

The concerto was composed by Erwin Schulhoff in 1927, originally scored for flute, piano, string orchestra, and two horns. (A recording of that version was discussed on this site earlier this month.) Schulhoff himself was the pianist at the premiere performance in Prague on December 8 of that year. Since I have been unable to find any information about an alternative publication of violin and piano soloists, there is a good chance that Hope will simply play from the flute part in his performance with Perez.

The concerto was well received, but it was banned after the 1939 Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia solely on the grounds of the composer’s Jewish descent. Schulhoff took on a pseudonym to conceal his Jewish identity, and he petitioned for Soviet citizenship. His application was approved in 1941; but, before he could leave, the Nazis deported him to the Wülzburg concentration camp, where he died of tuberculosis on August 18, 1942.

Another Czech victim of the Nazis was Hans Krása, son of a Czech father and a Jewish mother. Like fellow composers Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, and Gideon Klein, Krása was deported by the Nazis to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, which served primarily as a way station for subsequent transfer. All four composers were allowed to pursue their work, providing the Nazis with a powerful propaganda instrument. Nevertheless, accommodations at Theresienstadt were never intended to be permanent; and all four composers were transferred to the Auschwitz extermination camp with the inevitable consequences. Krása will be represented on the NCCO program with a performance of the dance movement “Tanec,” originally composed for string trio in Theresienstadt in 1944.

The program will conclude with another perspective on the dark days of World War II, this time a Russian point of view. NCCO will play Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 110a chamber symphony in C minor. This is actually an arrangement of the Opus 110 (eighth) string quartet made by Rudolf Barshai with the composer’s authorization. In the interest of shining a bit of light in the midst of all the darkness, Hope will begin each half of the program with one of Felix Mendelssohn’s string symphonies. The thirteenth in C minor will begin the program, and the tenth in B minor will follow the intermission.

The San Francisco performance of this program will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 23. The venue will Herbst Theatre, which is located on the first floor of the Veterans Building at the southwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and McAllister Street. Prices for single tickets are $29, $49, and $61. Tickets may be purchased online through a City Box Office event page. Discounted single tickets will be available at the door, $15 for patrons under the age of 35 and $10 for students with valid identification.

As in the past, there will be an Open Rehearsal. It will be held on Wednesday, March 20, beginning at 10 a.m. The venue will be Trinity+St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, located at 1620 Gough Street on the northeast corner of Bush Street. All tickets for Open Rehearsals are sold for $15, payable at the door.

Generous Sampling of Schulhoff from Capriccio

courtesy of Naxos of America

Last month Capriccio released a six-CD collection of the music of Erwin Schulhoff. For no apparent reason, Amazon.com attached the title “Schulhoff: Masterpieces” to the Web page for this release. This probably would have amused Schulhoff himself, particularly in light of the absurdist compositions that emerged under the influence of Dadaism.

However, Schulhoff went through an impressive variety of stylistic phases reflecting a wide diversity of influences; and the fact is that six CDs can hardly do justice to either the breadth or the depth of his efforts. To be fair, however, I have to confess that my own knowledge of Schulhoff’s music amounts to a limited sampling of his entire corpus. Thus, when this release was announced, I welcomed the opportunity to take what I could get.

The CDs themselves are organized by category. The first consists of orchestral music, two symphonies (the second and fifth) and the 1921 suite of jazz movements originally called In the New Style. The second CD offers three concertos, the Opus 43 (second) piano concerto, the Opus 63 double concerto for flute and piano, and the 1930 concerto for string quartet and wind ensemble (which may, or may not, have been Schulhoff’s reflection on Igor Stravinsky’s 1924 concerto for piano and wind instruments). There is also a witty “appendix” in the form of Schulhoff’s arrangement for full orchestra of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 129 solo piano rondo, best known as the “Rage Over a Lost Penny.” The next two CDs offer a variety of chamber music compositions, all for strings. The last two CDs consist entirely of piano music for either one or two pianists.

I have to say that it has been a bit frustrating to account for the Schulhoff corpus in any comprehensive way. I have already encountered two different single-CD albums of the “complete works” for violin and piano, the first of which I discussed on Examiner.com, followed by the second discussed on this site in November of 2016; and it was with a bit of relief that the contents of the two albums were identical! I was therefore glad that none of those (four) pieces were part of the Capriccio collection.

My other past resource involved Schulhoff’s piano music. Parnassus released a single CD of all the recordings made by Schulhoff himself at the keyboard, most of which involved his playing his own music. On what I had hoped would be a more thorough account, Grand Piano launched a project with Caroline Weichert to record the piano music; but, as of this writing, that has resulted in only three volumes. When those three CDs are compared with the two in the Capriccio collection, it is clear that Grand Piano had a ways to go before accounting for the entire corpus.

In the context of my own listening experiences, I would have to say that the two chamber music CDs provided the greatest draw on my attention. To be fair, however, much of the “draw” of that music came from the five pieces for string quartet composed in 1923, because I was fortunate enough to listen to the Telegraph Quartet perform those pieces this past December. While there are definitely jazzy elements in Schulhoff’s chamber music, there is also a much more extended scope of eclecticism. In contrast to David’s coat of many colors, Schulhoff’s chamber music canon is one of many different coats varying not only in colors but also in the style determining the cut of the coat, so to speak. All of the selections offered make for delightful listening; not to mention (at least in my case) a stronger craving to hear more of this work in a concert setting.

This is not to diminish the significance of the other four CDs in the collection. Taken as a whole, this recent release offers the best way to become acquainted with the unique and diverse methods that Schulhoff brings to his compositional efforts. The more one is drawn to his music, the greater the regret that this highly creative candle was snuffed out by the Nazis in the Wülzburg concentration camp on August 18, 1942, soon after the composer’s 48th birthday.

Eastern European Moods from Telegraph Quartet

Telegraph Quartet members Jeremiah Shaw, Joseph Maile, Pei-Ling Lin, and Eric Chin (from their San Francisco Performances event page)

Yesterday afternoon in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances launched its three-concert Discovery Series with a recital by the Telegraph Quartet, winner of the 2016 Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award and currently Quartet-in-Residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The ensemble’s two violinists, Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, alternate in occupying first chair. The other members of the group are violist Pei-Ling Lin and cellist Jeremiah Shaw.

The “discovery” element of the program involved the trajectories of three composers of Eastern European origins. The “source” of those trajectories, so to speak, was Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, represented by his Opus 51 quartet in E-flat major, known as the “Slavonic” for drawing upon indigenous source material, particularly in its second movement based on the dumka form of sharply contrasting moods. Late in his life Dvořák encouraged another young Czech to begin studies at the Prague Conservatory. That young man was Erwin Schulhoff, and he was only ten years old at the time. Yesterday afternoon’s program began with a collection of five pieces, each based on a different geographical origin, only one of which was Czech.

Since he was of Jewish descent, Schulhoff’s career took a turn for the worst after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. He ended up in the Wülzburg concentration camp, where he died of tuberculosis on August 18, 1942. Polish-born Mieczysław Weinberg was more fortunate. He graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory in 1939, just as the Nazis were moving in on Poland; and he managed to flee to the Soviet Union before they got as far as Warsaw.

There he was fortunate enough to meet Dmitri Shostakovich, and the two became close friends. As might be guessed, however, that friendship had its own down-side when, following the end of World War II, Shostakovich once again found himself out of favor with Soviet authorities. Indeed, in February of 1953, Weinberg was arrested on charges of “Jewish bourgeois nationalism;” and the only thing that saved him was the radical shift in Soviet policies that followed the death of Joseph Stalin.

Nevertheless, Weinberg’s achievements as a composer remained in the shadows; and, for the most part, they remained there until after his death in 1996. Since then, however, there has been a growing interest in the vast catalog of his works (his “opus count” ran to 154) thanks, in no small part, to Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer (another Eastern European connection), British director David Pountney, who staged the first performance of Weinberg’s opera The Passenger, and the French Quatuor Danel, which made all seventeen of his string quartets part of their repertoire and recorded them all for the German cpo label between 2006 and 2009. (The entire six-CD collection is available as a box set.)

Telegraph chose to introduce Weinberg’s quartets to their audience with his Opus 35 (sixth) in E minor. This quartet was composed in 1946, the year in which Soviet Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov imposed the Zhdanov Doctrine, which led to Shostakovich’s second denunciation by Soviet authorities. Ironically, Weinberg was not impacted by the Doctrine on the grounds that no one was particularly interested in his compositions! Nevertheless, Opus 35 constitutes a major undertaking on the same epic scale as Shostakovich’s Opus 67 (second) piano trio in E minor, written during the darkest days of World War II.

Mind you, there is no question that Weinberg had his own distinctive voice, which would not be confused with that of Shostakovich. Nevertheless, he shared with Shostakovich a sophisticated discipline for polyphonic structures as a basis for intensely dark rhetoric. Each of the four principal movements of Opus 35 presents its own approach to that darkness through a different tempo.

Curiously, a rapid pace appears only after the first movement, with two intense movements that ferociously pass through like a bolt of lightning with a combined duration of less than five minutes. For those unfamiliar with the piece, trying to follow the movement structure on the program sheet can be a bit disorienting. However, disorientation may have been Weinberg’s way of expressing his awareness of his own state of neglect; and the more we know about Weinberg the man, the better equipped we are to respond to the expressiveness of his music.

Weinberg’s quartet was the only piece played during the second half of the program. The first half offered the balance of a far sunnier rhetoric. There are no dark shadows haunting the four movements of Dvořák’s Opus 51 quartet. Even in the second dumka movement, the Andante con moto section is more wistful than elegiac (and, of course, the essence of dumka is that balance between the discreetly subdued and the overtly raucous). Telegraph clearly appreciated the sheer delight expressed through this music, pleasantly reminding its audience that there is more to the Dvořák quartet repertoire than his popular Opus 96 (“American”) quartet in F major.

The opening Schulhoff selection was probably as unfamiliar as the Weinberg quartet to most of the audience. During the Twenties (yesterday afternoon’s selection was composed in 1923), Schulhoff was as adventurous as many of the more familiar composers of that decade. He wrote an essay in which he had the temerity to propose that, for all of his efforts at appropriation, Igor Stravinsky never really “got” jazz. (Even before I knew about either Schulhoff or his article, I agreed with this observation!) In his set of five pieces, Schulhoff steered clear of the American jazz sources he was getting to know; but he still came up with an outlandishly wacky tango movement. Indeed, each of the five pieces in the set seems to be grounded in parody; and no genre that he considers escapes unscathed. (The perverse liberties he takes with a Viennese waltz in the first piece perfectly establishes expectations for the remaining four.)

Given the intense seriousness of the second half of the program, there was a certain healthy quality in the sense of humor that Telegraph brought to their performance of the Schulhoff pieces. Like any good stand-up comedian, the group knew that the telling of the joke is often more important than the joke itself. They appreciated the discipline required to tell Schulhoff’s jokes the right way, the perfect approach to allowing the audience have a bit of fun before settling into the less frivolous offerings that would follow on the program.

Bruno Monteiro Surveys Schulhoff’s Music for Violin and Piano for Brilliant Classics

Tomorrow will see the release of one of the latest original productions by Brilliant Classics, marking another departure from their past reputation as a “reprint” label. These original offerings have enabled audiences to appreciate many exciting new talents often venturing into unfamiliar repertoire. This new album is the second to feature the Portuguese violinist Bruno Monteiro, who has recorded all of the music for violin and piano composed by Erwin Schulhoff. This is his second project with Brilliant, which had released his album of the complete music for violin and piano by Karol Szymanowski in May of 2015; and Monteiro is performing again with Portuguese pianist João Paulo Santos.

Also again, this is repertoire that fits comfortably on a single compact disc. Indeed, the album has only four compositions, which are presented in chronological order. The first of these is a five-movement suite, which was the composition that Schulhoff cataloged as his Opus 1, although it was not published until long after his death in 2004. This is followed by his first sonata for violin and piano, composed in 1913. The second sonata, composed in 1927, is preceded by a sonata for solo violin, composed in 1923.

Schulhoff is one of the beneficiaries of violinist Daniel Hope’s interest in promoting the work of composers who perished in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. I was fortunate enough to listen to Hope perform the second sonata at a recital he gave with pianist Jeffrey Kahane on a visit to San Francisco. Hope has been particularly enthusiastic about this sonata, describing its Andante movement as “the most powerful and dramatic slow movement imaginable” (taken from the booklet notes by Ana Carvalho, translated into English by Frederick Gifford). Such language tends to reflect the enthusiastic gushing one would often encounter in declarations by Yehudi Menuhin; but, as I said, Hope’s promotion of this music reflected a broader mission.

The fact is that this album presents Schulhoff as a bit of a chameleon, trying out one style and then investigating another. Yet there is no sense that the chronological ordering of these pieces can be taken as a journey through which Schulhoff arrived at a “final voice” to express himself through the violin, with or without piano accompaniment. By the same count there is no sense of the sort of growth that we encounter when we review the violin music of, for example, Béla Bartók.

One of the reasons one comes away this this sense of “trying things out” is that none of the individual movements has very much duration. It would be unfair to say that Schulhoff excelled in exposition but never really got his head around development. However, it would seem that he could not hold his attention on a single idea for very long, preferring simply to let it play out rather than exploring deeper possibilities. Nevertheless, Schulhoff’s “sampling” of thematic material provides a survey of his own influences which can be fascinating on its own. For example, his teachers included both Max Reger and Claude Debussy. Schulhoff was also aware of the Second Viennese School and took interest in Arnold Schoenberg’s approach to working with all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Additional interests included his own Eastern European folk sources and jazz from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

In other words, if Schulhoff never managed to find a comfort zone in working with “deep structures,” there was prodigious diversity in what he could play with on the surface. While Hope’s enthusiasm may have been excessive, there is much to enjoy over the course of listening to the four compositions on this album. Indeed, one can listen to the whole thing in about 75 minutes without worrying about mind wandering very far. Schulhoff may have been a minor figure when compared with those composers from the first half of the twentieth century that dominate the history books, but he is still an engaging one. The Brilliant production team has done well to provide us with this sincerely refreshing account of this particular facet of Schulhoff’s repertoire.