Duo Gazzana Release New (and Diverse) Album

Cover of the album being discussed

I am not sure how the latest ECM New Series album of performances by Duo Gazzana came to my attention, since I have not been able to associate it with any recent entries in my Inbox! This should not be a surprise, since that album has no title other than the listening of the five contributing composers: Francis Poulenc, William Walton, Luigi Dallapiccola, Alfred Schnittke, and Valentin Silvestrov. (This is not their “order of appearance” that I encountered when I downloaded the tracks!)

That said, I have now listened to the album several times; and I am delighted to be able to add it to my library. When I last wrote about performances by the Italian sisters Natascia Gazzana (violin) and Raffaella Gazzana (piano), I gave them “high marks for eclecticism!” Those familiar with all five of the above composers will probably agree with me that the duo’s commitment to eclecticism is as strong as ever. In this case, however, I would further argue that there is also a generous share of wit across all five of the contributing composers.

Mind you, while Schnittke is definitely capable of tongue-in-cheek rhetoric, his tongue tends to be a forked one! Silvestrov’s wit, on the other hand, is one of twists and turns (although it is impressive how many he can pack into a mere five minutes)! Poulenc’s sonata, on the other hand, is basically a Gallic romp, which I have known (and loved) for more than several years. My impressions of Walton’s toccata, lasting about a quarter of an hour, tended to remind me of when I learned that he once conducted the Hoffnung Festival Orchestra with a fly swatter! The final track is Dallapiccola’s “Tartiniana seconda,” which I probably would appreciate more were my knowledge of Tartini more thorough!

My overall impression is that I was entertained by this album, but it was an entertainment that activated a generous number of my “little grey cells” (with apologies to Agatha Christie)!

SFP’s Annual “Gift” to Subscribers and Donors

Violinist Geneva Lewis (courtesy of SFP)

Every year San Francisco Performances (SFP) offers a free concert to its subscribers and those that had donated at the level of Member or higher. Last year there were actually two of these “Gift” concerts, the first taking place in February with a performance of the piano trio with pianist Juho Pohjonen performing with cellist Jonathan Swensen and Stephen Waarts on violin and the second in April (almost exactly a year ago) with cellist Camille Thomas accompanied at the piano by Julien Brocal. This year’s event took place last night in Herbst Theatre, a performance by violinist Geneva Lewis, making her SFP recital debut and accompanied at the piano by Evren Ozel, making his SFP debut as well.

The program provided an impressively broad scope beginning with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the opening selection and spanning to the last decade of the last century with Valentin Silvestrov’s “Post scriptum.” The early nineteenth century was represented by Robert and Clara Schumann, both of whom composed sets of three “Romances” for violin and piano. The program concluded at the other end of the century with César Franck’s A major sonata, which he composed as a wedding gift for the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe and has been acknowledged (including by Wikipedia) as his most popular work.

I found this to be an engaging journey of both the familiar and discovery. I have become familiar with Silvestrov primarily through ECM recordings, so I was looking forward to this recital opportunity. I was not disappointed; and, in the last of the three movements, Lewis ripped into pizzicato passages that had me on the edge of my seat! I also found myself wondering whether the final movement of Clara’s sonata served as reflections on Robert.

Most important, however, was how the Franck sonata served as a “grand finale.” Franck himself was a keyboardist, and it quickly becomes evident that his intention was that the two “voices” should perform as equals. Lewis and Ozel seemed to be aware of this intention and could not have done a better job of satisfying it. Following up on this “joint debut” appearance, I hope that the wait for a return visit will not be too long!

SFP: Plans for 2025 Gift Concert

Tickets are now available for the annual Gift Concert recital presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). The “gift” is that subscribers and donors are entitled to tickets at no charge. However, they are now available for seating by the general public in the Orchestra and Boxes at the price of $45. As usual, they may be purchased online through an SFP Web page or by calling 415-392-2545. Remaining tickets will be available at the door with a 50% discount for students and 20% off for seniors.

Violinist Geneva Lewis (from the SFP Web page for purchasing tickets)

This year’s recitalist will be violinist Geneva Lewis, whose parents are from the United States and New Zealand. She will be accompanied by American pianist Evren Ozel. She has prepared an imaginative program that will present works by both husband and wife in the Schumann family. In the first half of the program, she will play Clara Schumann’s Opus 22 set of three Romances. This will be complemented in the second half by another set of three works of this genre, this time composed by Robert Schumann and published as his Opus 94. The entire program will be framed by sonatas from two different centuries. The opening selection will be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 301 sonata in G major, and the recital will conclude with César Franck’s A major sonata. The center of the program will also be a sonata, this time by the living composer Valentyn Silvestrov, who gave his sonata the title “Post Scriptum.”

This concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 22. It will take place in Herbst Theatre, whose entrance is on the ground floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. This venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel.

Crossing Boundaries with Alex Coke & Carl Michel

Every now and then I encounter an album that straddles the boundary between chamber music and jazz. According to my records, the last time I did a deep dive on this genre-crossing was a little less than three years ago, when I wrote about Pivotal Arc, an album of recent compositions by saxophonist Quinsin Nachoff. This time the title of the album is Emergence, and the performance is by a sextet led by Alex Coke, trained in flute but also a tenor saxophonist, and guitarist Carl Michel. As one will see from the above hyperlink, Bandcamp is currently offering this album in both physical and digital forms.

Emergence performers Alex Coke (saxophone), Carl Michel (guitar), Elaine Barber (harp), James Suter (bass), Bob Hoffnar (pedal steel), and Carolyn Trowbridge (vibraphone) (courtesy of Jazz Promo Services)

The remaining members of the sextet account for impressive diversity. Elaine Barber is Principal Harp with the Austin Symphony Orchestra. Bob Hoffnar plays pedal steel; but he has worked with performing Conduction, Butch Morris’ approach to structural improvisation. The remaining two members are James Suter on bass and Carolyn Trowbridge on vibraphone, both involved with adventurous approaches to jazz.

Both Coke and Michel contribute four of their compositions to the album, and one of the tracks is by Hoffnar. Of the remaining three tracks, two involve adventurous jazz composers, John Coltrane (“After the Rain,” from John Coltrane’s Impressions album) and Paul Motian (“Garden of Eden,” from his ECM album of the same title). The remaining track involves another composer associated with ECM, the second of the thirteen Bagatellen by Valentin Silvestrov.

It would (probably?) be a fool’s errand to try to sort out the improvisations from the notated passages while listening to any of these tracks. As Duke Ellington (supposedly?) said, “It’s all music!” For example, the Silvestrov piece was composed for solo piano. On this album the performance begins with Barber playing the music as it was written on her harp; but, as the track progresses, the other players enter, often inventing their own accompanying phrases. It might be fair to say that the music gradually undergoes a transition from keyboard music to chamber music to jazz. Indeed, that idea of transitioning by adding embellishments once the tune has been stated cuts across the overall technique for most (but, depending on the acuity of the listener, not necessarily all) of this album’s tracks.

Like Barber, all of the performers on this album are based in Austin. How often they come together to explore repertoire is anybody’s guess. Prior to Emergence, they released Emissary during the pandemic in October of 2021. What happens next is anybody’s guess!

Andsnes Recital Highlights Latest Album

courtesy of Jensen Artists

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Leif Ove Andsnes presented the second solo piano recital in this season of the San Francisco Symphony Great Performers Series. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to a cycle of thirteen compositions that Antonín Dvořák called Poetic Tone Pictures, his Opus 85. This is also the title of Andsnes’ latest album for Sony Classical, which was released at the beginning of this past November. Presumably, last night’s recital was part of a tour conceived to promote the recording.

The duration of the entire album is 56 minutes, which is a significant amount of time to listen to thirteen unfamiliar pieces of music. To be fair, Dvořák provided vivid titles for each of the individual pieces; and Andsnes cannot be faulted for providing accounts that clearly reflected those titles. One also encounters a few surprises along Andsnes’ journey through these thirteen pieces. The most vivid of these comes around the halfway mark with the performance of “Sorrowful Reverie,” which turns out to have a tango as its primary theme!

That tango may have been a valuable stimulus for those whose attention was beginning to lag. Movements like “Goblins’ Dance” and “Bacchanalia” may have been strategically placed as subsequent prods to attention, but they did not have quite the same effect as that tango. The “Furiant” movement made for a better draw of attention, particularly since its Allegro feroce tempo was applied to a mazurka. For all the many assets that an attentive listener can mine from this cycle, there still remains the possibility that the entire journey will not be able sustain full engagement.

However, the “path of discovery” followed the Tone Pictures with an unfamiliar encore. This was a short composition by Norwegian composer Harald Sæverud, whose “Ballad of Revolt” is well known in his native land. Andsnes then closed out the evening with a more familiar encore, the last of Frédéric Chopin’s four Opus 30 mazurkas, composed in the key of C-sharp minor.

The first half of the program also served as a journey from the less-known to the familiar. Andsnes began the program with “Lament” by Alexander Vustin, one of the less-known Russian composers of the twentieth century. This 1974 composition was followed by an early twentieth-century work by Leoš Janáček, the two-movement piano sonata he composed in 1905. In fact, the sonata has the title “1. X. 1905,” named for the date of a demonstration at which one of the protestors was bayoneted. This was followed by the third of Valentin Silvestrov’s thirteen bagatelles. Andsnes then closed out his program by reverting to the first quarter of the nineteenth century to play Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 110 piano sonata in A-flat major, which is probably best known for the composer’s wild approach to a fugue whose subject is also played in inversion.

Taken in its entirety, Andsnes’ program was impressively extensive. Nevertheless, duration tended to lead to occasional lapses in attention. Personally, I would be happy to see Sony Classical provide a “companion” album accounting for all the works that were performed in addition to the Dvořák Opus 85 collection.

Marko Topchii’s Video to Premiere on Sunday

Ukrainian classical guitarist Marko Topchii (courtesy of the Omni Foundation)

Readers may recall that, about a month ago, I attended the video shoot for the latest Live at St. Mark’s performance presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The performance was a solo recital by Ukrainian classical guitarist Marko Topchii. This morning Omni announced that the video will be released for its premiere viewing this coming Sunday, October 30, at noon. The YouTube Web page for this video has already been created. It will provide a “countdown” in the lower-left corner to remind viewers of when it will be available. That corner also includes a “Notify me” button.

Full program details were provided in my account of the video shoot and are still available for preparatory reading. The “bare-bones” summary of the program is as follows:

• Lute Suite in E Minor BWV 996 by Johann Sebastian Bach
• Kitsch-Music 1 by Valentin Silvestrov
• La Gran Sarabanda by Leo Brouwer
• Passacaille by Alexandre Tansman
• Étude 19 (Jondo) by Angelo Gilardino
• Comme un Hommage: Ravel by Arnaud Dumond
• Toccata by Joaquín Rodrigo
• Encore:  Un Sueño en la Floresta by Agustín Barrios

The duration of this program was approximately one hour. Topchii performed on a guitar made by Julian Dammann.

Marko Topchii’s Recording Session at St. Mark’s

Last night St. Mark’s Lutheran Church hosted the latest video shoot for the Live from St. Mark’s concert series presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. The performance was a solo recital by Ukrainian classical guitarist Marko Topchii. Over the course of about an hour, he presented an engagingly diverse repertoire.

The one lengthy work on the program was the opening selection, Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 996 lute suite in E minor. One of my more memorable observations was the way in which he was able to make the Courante movement sound like a dance, a rare occasion for any of the many performances of Bach’s instrumental music. Furthermore, as one would have hoped, Topchii added embellishments (albeit limited) to any repeated passage. This was music performed as Bach would have wished, even if the instrumentation was different.

The Bach selection was complemented by George Frideric Handel, but not in the expected way. Leo Brouwer’s “La Gran Sarabanda” is basically an elaborate fantasia based on the Sarabande movement from Handel’s HWV 437 keyboard suite in D minor. Brouwer structured this relatively short piece as an introduction, followed by a theme (the Handel source) and a set of variations, concluding with a coda. Topchii’s approach to Brouwer was followed by another nod to Bach himself in the performance of Alexandre Tansman’s “Passacaille,” following the Bach structure of a set of variations on a stately theme concluding with a fugue.

The other works on the program written for guitar were by Joaquín Rodrigo (a toccata), Arnaud Dumond (an homage of sorts to Maurice Ravel), and Angelo Gilardino (one of the études collected in his five-volume Studi di virtuosità e di trascendenza). That étude was challenging unto an extreme; and the combination of both listening to and watching Topchii rise to all the challenges was a jaw-dropping experience. In addition, the opening Bach suite was followed by one of Topchii’s arrangements. This selection was a solo piano composition by Valentin Silvestrov (also Ukrainian). Topchii performed the first in a cycle of five pieces given the collective title Kitsch-Music. This turned out to be a reflection on sentimentality with very few sharp edges of irony.

Topchii did not announce his encore, but I was fortunate enough to track down the details. The offering was “Un Sueño en la Floresta (Souvenir d¹un Reve)” by Agustín Barrios. I have encountered this music in the past, and I have become familiar with Barrios’ works. However, I am still only beginning to associate titles with performances!

Taken as a whole, Topchii’s performance provided just the right balance of a secure command of challenging technique with a broad scope of expressiveness. In the course of only an hour, the attentive listener encountered no end of opportunities to occupy both mind and emotions. I shall do my best to let readers know when the resulting video will be available for viewing!

Next Omni Video Shoot to Present Marko Topchii

Ukrainian classical guitarist Marko Topchii (courtesy of the Omni Foundation)

Those following this site recently and regularly probably know by now about Live from St. Marks, a concert series presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. These are recording sessions for videos of guitar recitals that will then be made available for viewing through the Omni Web site. The recitalist performs before a limited audience of ticket holders. Seating is not reserved, meaning that those with tickets can situate themselves in areas that are not dominated by the video crew.

The first video shoot of the current season took place this past Friday. The next will take place one week from today. On that occasion the recitalist will be Ukrainian classical guitarist Marko Topchii. His last “appearance” took place in May of last year, when Omni streamed a video recording of a solo recital performance given in St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv.

For his visit to St. Mark’s Topchii has prepared a diverse program. He will begin with Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 996 lute suite in E minor. He will include selections from several familiar composers that have contributed to the guitar repertoire, such as Leo Brouwer, Alexandre Tansman, and Joaquín Rodrigo. Less familiar composers will be Angelo Gilardino and Arnaud Dumond. He will also perform his own arrangement for guitar of music by the Ukrainian composer Valentyn Silvestrov, the first of five pieces originally composed for piano that Silvestrov collected under the title Kitsch-Music.

This recording session will take place in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. The performance will begin at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, September 27. Tickets are being sold in advance but only over the phone. The number to call is 415-242-4500, and all tickets are being sold for $30. There will also be tickets sold at the door between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. on the evening of the performance. Primary and secondary school students will be admitted for free. The church is located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the intersection with Franklin Street.

O1C to Host Ukrainian Benefit Concert

Ukrainian-American pianist Stanislav Khristenko (from the O1C event page)

At the end of this month, Old First Concerts (O1C) will present a special Ukrainian benefit concert. The program will be a solo recital featuring Ukrainian-American pianist Stanislav Khristenko. His program will be framed by the music of Frédéric Chopin, beginning with the Opus 53 (“Heroic”) polonaise in A-flat major. At the other end the program will conclude with all four of the ballades: Opus 23 in G minor, Opus 38 in F major, Opus 47 in A-flat major, and Opus 52 in F minor. Between these “bookends” Khristenko will play music by two Ukrainian composers, Borys Lyatoshynsky and Valentyn Silvestrov, as well as the Opus 3 set of variations by the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski.

This recital will not be live-streamed. There will only be in-person attendance. The performance will take place in Old First Church at 1751 Sacramento Street, on the northeast corner of Van Ness Avenue. It will begin at 8 p.m. on Saturday, June 25. General admission will be $25 with a $20 rate for seniors. Students with identification will be admitted for $5. Tickets may be purchased online through the Web page for this concert. That Web page also includes a gofundme window for making donations. The goal is $2000; and, as of this writing, $400 has been raised. O1C is presenting this concert in collaboration with the Ross McKee Foundation, which presented Khristenko’s local debut at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Hélène Grimaud’s Provocative Piano Recital

Pianist Hélène Grimaud (from the event page for last night’s recital)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony presented the second program in its Great Performers Series, which features (usually) one-night-only concerts by recitalists and ensembles. For this particular offering the program was a solo piano recital by Hélène Grimaud. The first half of that program consisted of interleaving relatively short compositions by (in order of appearance) Valentin Silvestrov, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Frédéric Chopin, separated by short pauses without giving the audience a chance to applaud. The second half was then devoted entirely to Robert Schumann’s Opus 16 Kreisleriana.

This was not the first time that Davies hosted a program in which an “extended composition” was “synthesized” by stringing together music originally intended to be performed in isolation. Unless I am mistaken, my first encounter with this technique also took place during a Great Performers Series piano recital, the one presented at the end of October of 2017 by Daniil Trifonov. Grimaud’s “synthesis” was far more ambitious, weaving a much more elaborate fabric from a provocative diversity of threads.

Most provocative was her decision to begin with the first of the thirteen bagatelles for solo piano that Valentin Silvestrov composed in 2005. Half of Grimaud’s latest Deutsche Grammophon album was devoted to Silvestrov’s music, but only one of the tracks was a solo performance. The bagatelles, on the other hand, are exercise in extreme miniaturist style, reflecting what the composer calls “naïve music.” The stillness of the first of those bagatelles seized audience attention through an intimacy established through simplicity and brevity.

Sadly, the almost mystical stillness of that bagatelle was quickly shattered by what can only be described as a brutalist approach to Debussy, Satie, and Chopin. One can probably make a case that this approach was scrupulously calculated, since each of the composers seemed to have been given his own controversial interpretation. In many respects the Satie performances were the most ironic, since Satie’s scores frequently involve text remarks to the performer that tend of be provocative but both amusing and disturbing at the same time. However, Grimaud  made it clear that she had her own way of doing things, hammering out every note on the score page that suggested that every instant of the performance was isolated from every other. If she had opted to go for disturbing, rather than amusing, then the extent of her success was almost frightening.

If her intent was to disturb throughout the first half of her program, then she succeeded just as effectively with the Debussy and Chopin selections. These two composers embody radically different approaches to the keyboard repertoire. However, Grimaud reduced both of them to that same “hammered out” approach, situating Debussy and Chopin on the same “playing field” as Satie. It was as if her intention was to dispense with the radical differences among all three composers by undermining the very foundations of expressive interpretation. If Silvestrov’s aesthetic was based on a stillness that is incompatible with expressiveness, then Grimaud responded to his music by reducing the expressiveness of Debussy, Satie, and Chopin to absurdity, a technique that might have amused Satie but does no favors to either Debussy or Chopin.

The dispassionate nature of that technique returned after the intermission with her approach to Schumann. The title of the Opus 16 cycle was inspired by the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann about a fictitious conductor named Johannes Kreisler. The earliest of the novels also bore the title Kreisleriana. Here, again, there was a sense that Grimaud was hammering out the notes as if each one needed to be distinctly separated from the others. This may well have been an evocation of the provocative traits of Kreisler’s character, using Schumann’s music as a magnifying glass held up to those traits. The result was a radical thinking about how to approach Schumann’s approaches to “narrative” foundations; and Grimaud may have left her audience seriously reconsidering their thoughts about listening to the “tone poem” qualities of several of Schumann’s extended piano compositions.

Grimaud took three encores, playing each without introducing it to the audience. I could not easily identify any of them. My current “working hypothesis” is that they were all drawn from the rather generous supply of solo piano preludes composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff. [added 1/30, 6:15 a.m.: My hypothesis was almost correct. All three encores were composed by Rachmaninoff. However, they were not preludes but three of the movements from the Opus 33 Études-Tableaux collection: the second in C major, the third in C minor, and the last in C-sharp minor.]

Brilliant Classics Discovers Valentin Silvestrov

Composer Valentin Silvestrov at the piano (photograph by Smerus, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Unless I am mistaken, last month was the second time that Brilliant Classics released an album of music by a composer who first came to attention thanks to the efforts of Manfred Eicher’s ECM New Series releases. As might be guessed, the first time involved the composer Arvo Pärt when, at the end of 2013, Brilliant released a two-CD set of the “complete piano music” by Pärt performed by Dutch pianist Jeroen van Veen. Last month Brilliant released Touching the Memory, an album of compositions for piano and strings in different combinations, all by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.

Silvestrov’s name is frequently linked with Pärt’s as well as that of Giya Kancheli, another composer that has benefited significantly from ECM New Series recordings. Indeed, on Touching the Memory, each of these two composers is the dedicatee of a Silvestrov composition. The earlier of these is “Hymn-2001,” composed for string orchestra in 1999 and dedicated to Kancheli. The second is the Opus 64 set of three postludes for solo piano, composed in 2005 and dedicated to Pärt. The other “ECM connection” comes from the pianist on Touching the Memory, Alexei Lubimov, who is the pianist for the performance of “Zwei Dialoge mit Nachwort” on the ECM Bagatellen und Serenaden album of Silvestrov’s music. (This was my own “first contact” with Silvestrov.)

According to my records, most of what I have written in the past about Silvestrov was for Examiner.com, meaning that those articles were purged from the Web when AXS shut down Examiner.com operations. On this site, however, I revisited Silvestrov in November of 2017, when ECM released Hieroglyphen der Nacht, an album of compositions for either solo cello (Anja Lechner) or cello duo (Lechner and Agnès Vesterman). What is important is that I was able to approach Touching the Memory with a relatively rich background of past listening experiences.

I should therefore begin by repeating an observation made about Hieroglyphen der Nacht, which is that Silvestrov’s compositions “require a rather intense approach to focused listening.” This is also true of both Pärt and Kancheli, which is one reason why these three names often get to share a common phrase in a declarative sentence. However, each of the composers orients that focused listening in a different direction.

What makes Silvestrov interesting is that his recordings suggest that the process of making the recording is as relevant as that of playing the instrument(s) required by the score. All of the recordings on Touching the Memory were made at the Dada Studio Brussels (Belgium). For each of the tracks, reverberation figures as significantly as the attack and decay properties of each of the notes. I have no idea whether those sounds of reverberation come from the Dada space itself or from the capture technology; but, as a result of all of my past listening experiences, I have concluded that those reverberations are as much a part of each composition, whether coming from Lubimov’s piano work or the strings of the Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles conducted by Jean-Paul Dessy, as the physical ways in which the instruments translate pitch classes into sounds.

Back when I was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working at the campus radio station, I would sometimes bring fellow students over to listen to an album I was thinking about airing. I remember once doing this with a recording of John Cage. After a few minutes, my friend said, “I get what he’s doing. It’s cool. What’s next?” At the risk of sounding too academic, I would say that this was a case of listening to the process while ignoring the product. Silvestrov requires a listener willing to attend to both process and product, treating the two as inextricably linked. I am not sure I can think of any other composer whose works require that kind of focus while listening; and, to be fair, it takes more than a bit of experience to get into that kind of groove.

From that point of view, Touching the Memory provides as good an opportunity for building up such an experience base for Silvestrov as one is likely to find.

Silvestrov’s Cello Music on ECM New Series

courtesy of Universal Music Group

My encounters with the music of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov seem to have been few and far between. “First contact” apparently took place right around the time that I was beginning to focus on writing about music. It came from an album entitled Bagatellen und Serenaden released by ECM New Series in the fall of 2007. It was probably a good way to start, since the “Bagatellen” part of the title involved Silvestrov himself playing those works on piano. However, according to my records (which may not be thorough, thanks to the inadequacies of the Wayback Machine), I did not write about Silvestrov until the release of the ECM New Series album entitled Sacred Works.

This happened to come around the time that George Benjamin was serving as composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Symphony; and I had put a fair amount of effort into preparing for the performances of his music in Davies Symphony Hall. The result was my first venture into exploring the idea that the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of a composition could be organized around the properties of what I called “the sound itself,” rather than the usual conventions of melody, harmony, and counterpoint. Silvestrov did not so much abandon those conventions as relegate them to the background; and I realized that the priorities of his Sacred Works album could also be found in that earlier Bagatellen und Serenaden album.

All this should serve as background for the fact that Silvestrov turned 80 this past September 30. ECM honored the occasion with the release of its latest all-Silvestrov album, Hieroglyphen der Nacht (hieroglyphs of the night). The album consists entirely of compositions for either solo cello or cello duo. The “lead” cellist is Anja Lechner, who is joined by Agnès Vesterman. To some extent Silvestrov’s retrospective account of what he has been doing over the past decades seems to mesh with my own initial impressions.

He is clearly interested in that idea of “the sound itself;” but he seeks it in places I had not considered. Thus, he has said, “My own music is a response to and an echo over what already exists;” and he calls his accumulated catalog a series of “codas” to music history. On Hieroglyphen der Nacht, “what already exists” can be found in the works of Robert Schumann, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Tigran Mansurian, another composer whose works have been released on ECM New Series recordings. The “codas” for both Schumann and Tchaikovsky are actually three-movement suites, whose titles are dates, those of Schumann’s birth and Tchaikovsky’s death, respectively. However, the presence of both of these composers is, for the most part, implicit, thus contrasting noticeably with the far more explicit presence of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in “Der Bote” (the messenger) on the Bagatellen und Serenaden album.

Philosophy aside, what makes this new album particularly interesting is the capacity of the cello to explore a wide diversity of sonorities. Even more interesting is that Silvestrov focuses almost entirely on pitched sonorities without turning to more percussive techniques such as col legno or knocking on the body of the instrument. On the other hand the “Elegie” that he composed in 1999 requires the cellist to play two suspended gongs of different sizes (in addition to the cello). This brings me back to my own focus on “the sound itself” and the act of making that sound, without necessarily trying to establish a connection between that sound and “what already exists.” Drawing upon my past experiences with linguistics, I would venture to say that, while Silvestrov seems to take a highly “context-dependent” approach to what he composes, I see no trouble with advocating a “context-free” approach to listening to what he has created.

For those who have not yet encountered Silvestrov’s work, I have no trouble recommending Hieroglyphen der Nacht as a “first contact” experience. Given that they require a rather intense approach to focused listening, it is to the listener’s advantage that almost all of the tracks are less than five minutes in duration. (Anyone with experiences involving the music of Anton Webern should have no trouble fitting in with these structures.) The exceptions are the last of the three movements of “Elegie” (which is where the gongs are added), which is about eleven minutes long, and the 2003 “Augenblicke der Stille und Traurigkeit” (moments of silence and sadness), which Silvestrov wrote for Lechner. This is music that benefits from cumulative experience; and, whether or not those accumulated experiences amount to “echos” matters less that whether the sympathetic ear is attuned to the immediate present.