SFCMP’s Rescheduled Flute-Harp Program

Last night at the Noe Valley Ministry, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) presented the rescheduled program entitled Fire and Water, Shadows and Dust. More precisely, the program was presented by two of the players, Meredith Clark on harp and Tod Brody alternating between flute and alto flute. The selections included both duo and solo performances.

Where the solos were concerned, the program provided an opportunity to listen to the first two of the compositions that Luciano Berio entitled “Sequenza.” Berio composed fourteen of these pieces, each requiring different solo “instrumentation” (scare quotes because the fourth composition was for female voice). The first of these pieces, composed in 1958 and revised in 1992, was for flute; and the second, composed in 1963, was composed for harp.

Berio created these pieces to explore the capacity of each the instruments for exploring a wide diversity of sonorities, many (if not most) of which involved sounds not usually associated with the instrument. Given the distance of five years between the first two “Sequenza” compositions, it is unlikely that Berio viewed them as a “matched set;” but, fortuitously enough, they happened to align with last night’s performers.

For those unfamiliar with these compositions, each was its own adventurous journey of discovery, as much for the listener as for the performer. Having one performed on either side of the intermission allowed those in the audience to reflect on the “sonorous scope” of the first as preparation for the same scope of diversity of the second. Taken together, the pieces celebrated the capacity of each of the instruments for “non-standard” performance techniques.

Clark presented two additional solo offerings. The first of these was Suzanne Farrin’s “Polvere et Ombra” (dust and shadow), a reflection on a sonnet by Petrarch. In the second half of the program, she performed a “micro-suite” entitled Three Lil Pretties, composed by Marcus Norris and receiving its world premiere. Both of these pieces followed up on Berio’s “mission,” exploring performance techniques for the harp that one was unlikely to encounter in a symphony orchestra performance. Brody’s other solo performance presented Jennifer Higdon’s “rapid.fire,” a reflection on inner-city crime composed in 1992.

Arnold Böcklin’s “Faun and whistling blackbird” (from the Wikipedia page of Böcklin’s paintings)

Among the duo selections, the most familiar to me was the final offering, the flute-harp version of Toru Takemitsu’s “Toward the Sea,” whose movement titles suggest an American perspective of the Atlantic Ocean (rather than a Japanese view of the Pacific). The program began with Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Fauno che fischia a un merlo” (faun, the whistling blackbird), the title of a painting completed by Arnold Böcklin in 1865. (It would not be out of the question to suggest that this canvas may have inspired Stéphane Mallarmé “L’Après-midi d’un faune” poem, the inspiration for Claude Debussy’s composition and the choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky.) The other duo performance presented three of the movements from Roberto Sierra’s Flower Pieces collection: “Lilacs,” “Forsythia’s,” and “Marigolds.”

Taking the entire experience as a whole, none of the selections overstayed its welcome; and the opportunity to experience a generous share of extended techniques for both instruments was thoroughly refreshing.

SFCMP: Cancelled Concert Rescheduled

Readers may recall that the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) program entitled Fire and Water, Shadows and Dust, originally scheduled for this past January, had to be cancelled. Due to weather conditions, The Lab, which is located in the Mission, sustained major water damage, making the site unsuitable for audiences. This morning SFCMP announced that the program has been rescheduled at a new venue.

Given how much time has elapsed since the selections for this program were first announced, readers will probably want to “review the bidding.” The program was designed to focus on the talents of two SFCMP musicians, Meredith Clark on harp and Tod Brody alternating between flute and alto flute. Here is how the program was described this past December:

This pairing plays an interesting role in the history of twentieth-century music. Between 1958 and 2002 (the year before his death) Luciano Berio composed fourteen compositions for solo instruments or voice under the collective title “Sequenza.” (sequence). The very first two of these pieces were written for flute (1958, revised in 1992) and harp (1963), respectively. Both of those works will be included in the SFCMP program, which will consist almost entirely of twentieth-century music. These will include “rapid fire,” composed by Jennifer Higdon for solo flute in 1992 and duo compositions by Salvatore Sciarrino, Toru Takemitsu, and Roberto Sierra. The solo harp compositions are more recent. The earlier of these is “Polvere et Ombra” (dust and shadow), composed by Suzanne Farrin in 2008. The other will be the world premiere performance of Marcus Norris’ “Three Lil Pretties,” winner of the SFCMP Search for Scores Commissioning Prize.

The new venue for this program will be the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street. The performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 24. General admission will be $35 with a $15 rate for students. Tickets may be purchased through a City Box Office Web page. The venue is a short walk from the corner of 24th Street and Church Street, with Muni transportation running along both of these streets. Any tickets that were previously purchased for the January performance will, of course, be honored.

SFCMP to Highlight Music for Flute and Harp

Readers may have noticed that, for the most part, the current San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) season has focused and solo and duo performances by individual members of the ensemble. Thus, the season began this past October with a focus on violinist Susan Freier and cellist Stephen Harrison, followed this month by solo bass compositions performed by Richard Worn. Next month will see the new year beginning with a program featuring Meredith Clark on harp and Tod Brody alternating between flute and alto flute entitled Fire and Water, Shadows and Dust.

This pairing plays an interesting role in the history of twentieth-century music. Between 1958 and 2002 (the year before his death) Luciano Berio composed fourteen compositions for solo instruments or voice under the collective title “Sequenza.” (sequence). The very first two of these pieces were written for flute (1958, revised in 1992) and harp (1963), respectively. Both of those works will be included in the SFCMP program, which will consist almost entirely of twentieth-century music. These will include “rapid fire,” composed by Jennifer Higdon for solo flute in 1992 and duo compositions by Salvatore Sciarrino, Toru Takemitsu, and Roberto Sierra. The solo harp compositions are more recent. The earlier of these is “Polvere et Ombra” (dust and shadow), composed by Suzanne Farrin in 2008. The other will be the world premiere performance of Marcus Norris’ “Three Lil Pretties,” winner of the SFCMP Search for Scores Commissioning Prize.

This will be the next program to be presented at The Lab. The performance will begin at 4 p.m. on Sunday, January 15. Doors will open early for viewing the art exhibition, beginning at 3:15 p.m. General admission will be $35 with a $15 rate for students. 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. Masks are required, and 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.

Michael Tan will Bring Contemporary Piano Virtuosity to C4NM

Next month may well see one of the most adventurous programs of solo piano music from the middle of the twentieth century to the beginning of the 21st to be offered this year. The pianist will be Guam-born Michael Tan, currently based in Brooklyn and a recent graduate of New York University, where he completed his piano studies with Marilyn Nonken. He has prepared an innovative program, which will be hosted by the Center for New Music (C4NM).

The first half of his program will focus on two of the most significant French modernists in the period following the end of the Second World War. Pierre Boulez’ first piano sonata was composed in 1946, not long after the signing of the final peace treaty of that war. This will be preceded by “Le Traquet stapazin” (the black-eared wheatear), one of the longer compositions in Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux (catalog of birds) and the only one in the second book of the seven-book collection of thirteen pieces. The entire collection was composed between 1956 and 1958; and “Le Traquet stapazin” was composed in 1956.

The second half of the program will be devoted to two living composers, whose music will be played in chronological order. Tan will begin with two of the movements from Michael Finissy’s 1977 collection English Country-Tunes, “Green Meadows” and “Midsummer Morn.” These will be followed by his 1989 “Stanley Stokes, East Street 1836.” The program will then conclude with two pieces composed by Salvatore Sciarrino in 2001, which he called “cruel nocturnes:”

This concert will begin at 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, August 6. C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, half a block north of where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. Admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. In addition to being sold at the door, tickets will be available in advance online from a Vendini event page.

Stradivarius Releases Sciarrino’s Complete (?) Works for Violin and Viola

At the beginning of this month, the Italian Stradivarius label released a recording of Marco Fusi playing the “complete” works for solo violin and viola by the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino. One has to be careful about using the adjective “complete” when the composer is still alive. This may turn out to be particularly the case where Sciarrino is concerned.

Mind you, finding out about his catalog is no easy matter. The usually reliable Wikipedia provides little more than a list of titles and dates to the point that the “Music for a solo instrument” section never bothers to identify the instrument. Fortunately, those with access to Oxford Music Online will find themselves better informed. Grove Music Online has compiled a somewhat more detailed list of works, whose Chamber section has subsections for five or more instruments, two to four instruments, solo piano, and other solo instruments. Instruments are completely specified in all categories.

From this list one learns that Sciarrino composed four works for violin or viola between 1975 and 1979. The earliest of these is “Per mattia” (for Mattia), from 1975, followed by his set of six caprices, presumably reflecting back on Niccolò Paganini, from 1976. On the viola side he composed three “brilliant” nocturnes for viola between 1974 and 1975, followed by “Ai limiti della notte” (at the limits of the night) in 1979. After that David Osmond-Smith, author of the Grove Music Online biography, observes that Sciarrino shifted his attention to the flute. (This does, indeed, account for most of the “other solo instruments” entries in the Grove listing, which also includes, in the “Transcriptions and arrangements” category, a transcription of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 565 D minor toccata and fugue for amplified flute!) However, the Chamber entries go only as far as 2002, meaning that there is no mention of two pieces he composed in 2009, both for solo violin. One of these seems to reflect back on the six caprices, but this caprice must be played on a single string. The other has a title that seems like a rather prankish dedication, “Fre sé” (to himself). (The prevalence of coyness in this music’s rhetoric provides the strongest suggestion that Sciarrino is poking someone, performer or listener, in the ribs.)

Sciarrino has attracted at least moderate attention among musicians in San Francisco interested in contemporary works. His music has been performed in recital by both sfSound and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. In addition those following this site may recall that this past December, violinist Francesco D’Orazio included two of the six caprices in the program he presented at the Italian Cultural Institute. Considering that I had never even heard of Sciarrino prior to moving to the Bay Area in 1995, that definitely counts for something!

However, what is most interesting about this album is that it leaves the impression that in 2009 Sciarrino decided to pick up where he left off in 1979. Because it must be played on a single string, the new capriccio explores glissando playing in greater depth than one encounters in the earlier work. However, all of those early pieces display what may best be called a microscopic attention to instrument sonorities; and that “microscopy” is just as evident in the 2009 compositions.

The result is an album that offers up some fascinating cases for the virtues of fine-grained detail. I have to say that, from a personal point of view, this is an aesthetic stance that appeals to me. The first time I went on a mushroom hunt with John Cage, it was a very dry day, meaning that no mushrooms were to be found. Ever resourceful, Cage took out a pocket magnifying glass; and we spend the time looking at the intricate patterns of lichen formations!

Nevertheless, such detail demands focused attention; and it is unclear just how long one can maintain such a high level of focus. Thus, while any individual track of this album can be highly engaging, there is a case to be made that piecemeal listening with be to the advantage of both the composer and the listener. I would conjecture that D’Orazio decided to play only two of the caprices in his recital not only due to limitations of time but also due to limitations of highly focused attention. There is much to discover on this new album, but the listener who takes his/her time in working through the tracks will likely be the one best equipped to enjoy the fruits of that discovery.

Francesco D’Orazio Plays Solo Violin Music from the Last 70 Years

Yesterday evening the Italian Cultural Institute (Istituto Italiano de Cultura, IIC) hosted a solo recital by violinist Francesco D’Orazio. While D’Orazio’s working repertoire reaches all the way back into the pre-Baroque, last night’s program was confined to the last 70 years of music by Italian composers. Furthermore, once he had presented pieces by two of the leading “grand old men” of Italian music following the Second World War, Luciano Berio and Salvatore Sciarrino, the remainder of the program fit relatively comfortably into the last twenty years.

Nevertheless, the works of those two Italian “post-War pioneers” did much to prepare the attentive listener for what would follow. The program began with the eighth of the fourteen compositions that Berio called “Sequenza” (sequence). Each of these was a study in extended techniques through which the expressiveness of both voice and instruments involves “unconventional, unorthodox, or non-traditional methods” (quote from the Wikipedia page for this concept). Furthermore, each “Sequenza” was a solo composition for a different instrument; and “Sequenza VIII” was composed for violin in 1976. (By way of context, Berio had written “Sequenza VI” for viola in 1967.)

“Sequenza I” had been written for flute in 1958. Earlier in that decade, Berio had founded the Studio di fonologia musicale with Bruno Maderna, his “laboratory” for exploring the possibilities of electronic music. If technology-based synthesis had provided Berio with new ways of thinking about sonority (as it had done for composers such as Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage), then his “Sequenza” efforts amounted to reflecting those thoughts back on more conventional instruments; and each of those fourteen pieces is its own highly compelling adventure as much for the attentive listener as for the performer exploring that palette of extended techniques.

D’Orazio’s performance last night was definitely adventurous for the listener. San Francisco has been a good city for those interested in the “Sequenza” pieces; and my own last encounter with “Sequenza VIII” took place almost exactly a year ago when Sara Cubarsi visited the Center for New Music. By now I am used to “the drill,” according to which the soloist sets up multiple music stands to unfold the score as a single horizontal “landscape.” One thus has a sense of the progress of the piece by watching the performer move from one end of this landscape to the other.

 Francesco D'Orazio, by Luciano Chessa (courtesy of the photographer)

D’Orazio (shown above), on the other hand, played the piece from memory. He had clearly internalized Berio’s score so well that there was an electrifying rhetoric of spontaneity in his performance. Indeed, one could almost listen to what he was doing in the spirit of the jamming practices of some of the more “advanced” jazz musicians, who began to make themselves known during those same years of experimentation after the Second World War. D’Orazio played Berio’s music as if it were the product of some advanced particle acceleration experiment involving a collision between Stockhausen and Cecil Taylor. (Don’t ask who was accelerated to run into whom.) By the time D’Orazio had concluded “Sequenza VIII” our ears were, as John Cage once put it, “in excellent condition” for the remainder of the program, all of which was performed from printed pages.

“Sequenza VIII” was followed by the first and fourth of a set of six capriccios composed by Salvatore Sciarrino. Since Sciarrino was born in 1947, he can be taken as a “second generation” to Berio’s “first.” The choice of that noun “capriccio,” of course, reflects back on its use by Niccolò Paganini; and it makes sense to think of Sciarrino’s pieces as studies to cultivate the new techniques required to play “new music.” Indeed, one might almost think that the capriccios had been inspired by the idea of preparing violinists to play “Sequenza VIII;” but Sciarrino wrote them in 1975, the year before Berio wrote “Sequenza VIII!”

The remainder of the program then leapt forward to the much more recent past. Bay Area composer Luciano Chessa was represented by the “Corrente” and “Sarabanda” movements from his own solo violin partita, whose revised version was completed in 2013. (Chessa also introduced D’Orazio at the beginning of the program.) All of the other names were probably unfamiliar to most of the audience, although all of them were older than Chessa. From oldest to youngest, these were Curt Cacioppo, Ivan Fedele, Michele dall’Ongaro, Nicola Sani, and Fausto Sebastiani. This made for a generous number of “first contact” experiences, the most accessible of which was probably Cacioppo’s 2015 elegy, whose rhetoric was recognizably elegiac. Similarly, Sani’s “Raw,” composed in 2005, came across as a vigorous exploration of some of the most basic (raw?) sonorities that a violin could yield. The only piece given any explanation by D’Orazio was “La Musica di E.Z.” by Michele dall’Ongaro, currently President-Superintendent of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. This was apparently inspired by a horror novel in which evil spirits are kept at bay by music played by a violinist.

Taken as a whole, the program amounted to a study in which just about every conventional concept of “theme” had been abandoned. Time was structured according to the unfolding of different sonorities without any segmentation being established through techniques based on melody, harmony, or counterpoint. Indeed, the only sense of a theme came from D’Orazio’s encore, the twelfth of the thirteen solo violin pieces Michael Nyman collected under the title Yamamoto Perpetuo. These were written for the Japanese violinist Yohji Yamamoto and released on the album Michael Nyman for Yohji Yamamoto. This piece involves a minimalist exploration of a single motif with a sense of a modal center that made for a refreshing shift in listening priorities.