Next Clerestory Program Inspired by Bridges

The western section of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge photographed by a DJI Mavic Air 2 Drone (photograph by InvadingInvader, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Most readers do not need to be reminded that bridges play a major role in the San Francisco Bay Area. Indeed, I still remember that, on my first visit to San Francisco (with my parents because my father was attending a conference), we took our rented car on the “circuit” that consisted of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. In should therefore be no surprise that the Clerestory vocal chamber ensemble should organize their first performance of the season around a program given the full title Bridges: Music Connecting Places & Times.

As of this writing, full program details have not yet been announced. Nevertheless, contributing composers have already been identified. These include those from the early period of music history, such as Josquin des Prez, William Byrd, and Henry Purcell, the twentieth century (Sergei Rachmaninoff and Arvo Pärt), and living composers, such as Steven Stucky. Lesser-known composers will include, from the past, Sigismondo d’India (a contemporary of Claudio Monteverdi) and Tiburtio Massaino (a Roman friar), and, from the present, Jung Jai-Il (who has provided the music for video games) and Abbie Betinis.

The San Francisco performance of this program will take place and the end of next week on Saturday, November 16, beginning at 8 p.m. The venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street. Tickets may be purchased through an Eventbrite Web page with prices of $35 for general admission, $25 for seniors, and $5 for students.

Sibelius Saves the Day as SFS Season Ends

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the first of three performances of the final subscription program in the 2021–22 season of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). This was basically an overture-concerto-symphony program with both the overture and the concerto receiving their first SFS performances. These were, respectively, Steven Stucky’s “Radical Light” and John Adams’ “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” with pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. The symphony was Jean Sibelius’ Opus 82 (fifth) in E-flat major.

Salonen was clearly in his comfort zone conducting this symphony. There is a sense of a vast expanse that is so intricately crafted that, in 1919, the composer pared down the version he had completed in 1915 from four movements to three. While the overall duration of the symphony is half an hour, there is an intensity to the pace of all three of those movements through which one loses all sense of the passing of time. Indeed, the concluding coda is so meticulous in its extensive use of rests that time only “gets back into joint” with the concluding perfect cadence:

from the Wikipedia page for Sibelius’ Opus 82

If Salonen provided a first-rate account of Sibelius’ command of craft at its finest, whether it involved imaginative phrasing or ingenious instrumentation, neither of the preceding offerings rose to those same heights. Stucky composed “Radical Light” for Salonen during the latter’s tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was originally composed for a series of concerts planned as a Sibelius festival. Apparently, “Radical Light” was performed between Sibelius’ final (seventh) symphony, Opus 105 in C major, and his intensely ambiguous Opus 63 (fourth) in A minor.

Stucky’s rich instrumentation provided an excellent complement to Sibelius’ own approaches to orchestration. However, Stucky’s score was far richer in the percussion section while, ironically, ignoring the timpani entirely. It was decidedly briefer than any of the Sibelius symphonies. However, once the opening gestures had been established, the attentive listener could be forgiven for wondering if the composer had run out of things to say. Indeed, there was almost a sense of “enough is enough” that set in less than halfway through the performance.

Even more disappointing was Adams’ latest venture into music for piano and orchestra, composed for Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and first performed on March 7, 2019 with Yuja Wang as piano soloist. There has always been a prankish side to Adams’ work, the best example of which remains his raucous “Grand Pianola Music” with two pianos, abundant percussion, and three female vocalists channeling The Supremes. Where his latest concertante work is concerned, the question is not one of who has “all the good tunes” as it is one of when the piano will back off and let us listen to the rest of the orchestra.

Mind you, there is no shortage of good raucous humor in the score. Indeed, the gags play out from the very first measures, which are sure to remind anyone of my age that the theme music for the television detective series Peter Gunn first brought Henry Mancini to public attention. Nevertheless, none of Adams’ “good tunes” ever rise to the wit that abounded back in his “Grand Pianola” days; and, as a result, I came away from this music more with wistful melancholy than with a bounce in my step.

Fortunately, there were a few intimations of such bounce in Ólafsson’s encore selection. He played the three very brief selections that Béla Bartók collected under the title Hungarian Folksongs from the Csík District. Simplicity and quietude were just the right antidote to assist recovering from the excesses of Adams’ concerto.

Salonen Serves a Feast of Diverse Sonorities

Esa-Pekka Salonen at the SFS podium (from the event page of the concert being discussed)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director Designate Esa-Pekka Salonen presented the first of three performances of the first of the two programs he prepared for his visit to the SFS podium this month. Taken as a whole, the concert abounded with a prolific diversity of sonorities in imaginatively different combinations. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to the music of Maurice Ravel, represented by both chamber music intimacy and the full breadth of SFS resources. The first half, in turn, was divided into one selection from the string section and another for winds, brass, and percussion.

The program began with the first SFS performance of music that Steven Stucky had composed for Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1992, “Funeral Music for Queen Mary (after Purcell).” This took, as its point of departure, music composed by Henry Purcell for the funeral of Queen Mary II of England scored originally for four trumpets, along with a choral setting of the funereal sentence “Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts.” Those of my generation probably know this music best for “filling out” a Seraphim album of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 243 setting of the Magnificat canticle performed by the Geraint Jones Singers. (Seraphim was the “bargain label” division of Angel Records.) A few years after this album had been released, Wendy (then Walter) Carlos appropriated the opening march giving it the same bizarre Moog synthesizer treatment that had been applied to the Switched-On Bach album in preparing the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange.

Stucky’s approach had less to do with Carlos’ fondness for “special effects.” Instead he deconstructed Purcell’s material, engaging a broader spectrum of resources resulting in a diversity of perspectives on relatively straightforward music for a somber ceremony. Part of that reconstruction involved music that had not been in Purcell’s score but that Jones had added for his album, an additional part for the timpani that punctuated each phrase of the funeral march. As might be guessed, Carlos went haywire over that amendment, while Stucky allowed it to grow on the attentive listener over the course of his composition’s ten-minute duration.

All this made for thoroughly engaging listening, particularly for those more familiar with Jones’ scholarly recording than with Carlos’ ear candy. Personally, I could never quite grasp where the funeral sentence emerged in Stucky’s score; but the outline of sections in the program book said it was there. Purcell’s brass canzona was given the most imaginative treatment. On Jones’ recording it evoked the echoing brass choirs one would encounter in the music of Giovanni Gabrieli. Stucky, on the other hand, had the brass lines dissolve into dissonant clouds in the wind section, as if the winds were mirroring the acoustics of the St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Most importantly, however, was the diversity of sonorous details evoked by Stucky’s score and Salonen’s meticulous focus on guiding the attentive listener through each of those details.

The diversity of Stucky’s sonorities were perfectly complemented by Benjamin Britten’s ingenious devices for a full string section in his Opus 18 song cycle Les Illuminations. The variety of instrumental designs for winds and brass may be more diverse than the basic shape of the instruments in the string family; but each of the instruments (violin, viola, cello, and bass) has its own distinctive palette of sonorities. When all those instruments are assembled together, the variety can be just as rich as anything mustered by winds and brass. Furthermore, drawing upon the usual orchestral layout, Britten clearly added a spatial element to that diversity. This was most evident in the “call and response” of the opening fanfare; but, throughout the entirety of Opus 18, Britten was clearly conscious of which sounds were coming from where.

Soprano Julia Bullock sang Britten’s settings of poems by Arthur Rimbaud (which had been published under the title Les Illuminations). (While this music is probably best known by the recording that Britten made with tenor Peter Pears, the song cycle was originally conceived for soprano and strings.) The texts themselves run the gamut from the cryptic to the outrageous. This was a case in which the projections of the English translations contributed to the value of the performance. It is worth noting that the translations were prepared by Bullock herself. However, while Bullock knew how to blend her own sonorities in with Britten’s diversity of string colors, her command of French diction left much to be desired, particularly when it came to making sure that the consonants received just as much attention as the vowels. (Were these texts to be read aloud without the music, neglecting the consonants would constitute a mortal sin.)

Similar problems arose after the intermission, when Bullock returned to sing Ravel’s settings of three poems by Stéphane Mallarmé. This amounted to an “extended chamber music” performance. The instrumentation consisted of two flutes (Tim Day and Catherine Payne, the latter switching to piccolo in the third song), two clarinets (Carey Bell and Jerome Simas, switching to bass clarinet in the same song), a string quartet of violinists Alexander Barantschik and Dan Carlson, violist Jonathan Vinocour, and cellist Peter Wyrick, and pianist John Wilson. Salonen maintained just the right levels of balance and tempo in his conducting; and, once again, Bullock’s translations enhanced the impact of the relationship between music and words. Nevertheless, her diction problems with Britten returned in her interpretation of Ravel.

The program concluded with Ravel’s score for the ballet “Ma mère l’Oye” (Mother Goose). This music began as a five-movement piano duet composed in 1910. However, it subsequently grew to a one-act ballet, lasting about half an hour, with an orchestral score that added four interludes and two movements. This was the part of the program in which Salonen displayed his command of a large ensemble executing the full extent of the score’s rich sonorities. This expanded version receives much less attention than the original piano duet, and it is certainly true that the intimacy of the former gets lost in the rich textures of the latter. Nevertheless, the instrumental score allowed the attentive listener to appreciate the full extent of Salonen’s attention to detail; and this particular listener was definitely not disappointed.

Chanticleer to Continue Season Next Month

The members of Chanticleer (photograph by Lisa Kohler, courtesy of Brenden Guy Media)

Following a highly successful eleven-concert European tour across eight countries, Chanticleer will return home to present the next concert in its subscription season. Entitled Spacious Skies, the program will showcase a vast panorama of American choral repertoire spanning three centuries. The composers to be represented will reach back to colonial times with William Billings and extend forward to include living composers such as Ned Rorem, Steven Stucky, Steven Sametz, Richard Hageman, Matthew Brown, and Mason Bates. The second half of the program will shift to “pops” arrangements of popular, jazz, and gospel offerings.

The San Francisco performances of Spacious Skies will take place at 7:30 p.m on Saturday, March 16. The venue will be the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The building is located at 50 Oak Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station.Ticket prices will be $60 for Premiere seating, $50 for Preferred seating, and $20 for General Admission. All tickets are being sold online through a City Box Office event page.

Giving Mozart his Due

It is almost exactly a year ago that I took San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joshua Kosman to task for a one-paragraph account of a performance of a Mozart piano concerto in the San Francisco Symphony season that ran the gamut from the dismissive to the vacuous. Last time the concerto was K. 482, the pianist was Emanuel Ax, and the conductor was Osmo Vänskä; and Kosman was clearly more interested in a Finnish conductor's approach to two Finnish composers, one familiar (Jean Sibelius) and one contemporary (Kalevi Aho). This time the "victim" was the earlier K. 456 B-flat major concerto, performed by Richard Goode under the baton of Alan Gilbert. As the recently appointed successor to Lorin Maazel in directing the New York Philharmonic, Gilbert has been attracting almost as much publicity as Gustavo Dudamel, who will soon be a permanent fixture at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Ironically, anyone who witnessed Dudamel bring the house down at Davies Symphony Hall with his interpretation of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird would probably be justified in asking, "Yes, but what can he do with Mozart?" In that respect Gilbert provided a broader palette of offerings to feed our prognostications, balancing the Mozart concerto with Carl Nielsen's second symphony (within five years of the "vintage" of the Sibelius symphony that Vänskä had conducted) and the first San Francisco Symphony performance of Steven Stucky's 1988 "Son et lumière" (complementing Vänskä's United States premiere of Aho's much more recent "Louhi").

It may just be that I have fallen under the influence of a city that has a Midsummer Music Festival, but I continue to believe that a performance of Mozart can still tell us a lot about what a conductor can (or cannot) do. Thus, however familiar the music itself may be, the performance of that music is as important as the performance of less familiar compositions. This time at least Kosman doubled the number of paragraphs devoted to this portion of Gilbert's program:

In between, Richard Goode was the soloist in a charming but tonally mismatched account of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 18 in B-Flat, K. 456. The pleasure of Goode's playing is its ineffable lightness; even in the athletic passages of the opening movement or the dark minor harmonies of the slow movement, he kept things fleet and translucent.

But he and Gilbert didn't seem to be in accord on this point. The orchestral playing was much heavier and more emphatic, which - depending on where a listener's attention was focused - either produced a sense of bombast from the orchestra or made Goode sound like a lightweight.

Once again we, as readers, had to contend with relatively stock phrases, which, when confronted with the reality of last night's performance (as opposed to Wednesday night's), did not appear to hold very much weight.

Most important is a need to recognize the broad scope of diversity that cuts across the canon of Mozart piano concertos. Symphony regulars got another "dose" of K. 482 about a month ago, when Jonathan Biss performed it with Herbert Blomstedt on the podium; and, as I have previously suggested, this particular concerto is very youthful in spirit, even if it is chronologically more "mature" than K. 456. Particularly in its first movement, K. 456 is a fabric of many voices, not just those of a give-and-take between piano and orchestra but also within the piano itself. Readers may recall that, for me, the most memorable part of Goode's Berkeley recital (now almost two months ago) was his command of the "discourse" among the three voices of the Well-Tempered Clavier fugue he played at the beginning of his recital. Mozart could display a similar command of such discourse in his keyboard writing, and Goode is a perfect pianist for bringing our ears into the thick of that discourse. More significantly is that a meeting between the multiple voices within the piano and the multiple voices across the orchestra demands significant "accord" (to use Kosman's terminology) between soloist and conductor; and Gilbert had a keen sense of how to engage his multiple resources with those at Goode's fingertips.

A good framework for this kind of performance can be found in the script of Amadeus. There we find Mozart writing about wanting to compose an opera scene that begins as a duet and keeps bringing in more and more characters, thus building up the complexity of the dialog that ensues. This is how the finale to the second act of The Marriage of Figaro was eventually realized. Ironically, Mozart was working on this in the time frame of K. 482. It might not be too far-fetched to view K. 456 as a "rehearsal" of this kind of strategy for managing multiple voices; and that kind of "rehearsal" continues into the two remaining movements of the concerto (although there is also a definite sense of that "inner twenty-year old" in the final movement).

None of this should detract from the attention that Kosman paid to Gilbert's approach to the twentieth-century repertoire, early or late. This is not to say that I subscribe to Kosman's approach to Nielsen. The truth is that I did not give Nielsen much thought until I invested in the recordings of all six symphonies that Blomstedt made with the San Francisco Symphony almost twenty years ago. I remember when Leonard Bernstein promoted the fifth of these symphonies back when I was a student, but I also remember having my curiosity piqued in later years by occasional radio broadcasts. Unlike Kosman, I have never been particularly concerned with matters of "idiosyncratic rhetoric and edgy harmonies." Rather, I was more interested in the way in which Gilbert achieved a significant difference in sound quality in his move from Mozart to Nielsen, then same way that Vänskä had done in his move from Mozart to Sibelius; and, to be more specific, I was interested in how the San Francisco Symphony was engaged to make that move along with Gilbert. Once again, this all comes down to the question of how the program for the entire evening is conceived. Last Thursday I wrote about the "architecture" of a program, because Nikolaj Znaider's recital felt like it was organized around an a priori static structure; but, in contrast, Gilbert's program (like Vänskä's) felt more like a journey. (This was a particularly appropriate metaphor for the program the New York Philharmonic presented on their visit to Pyongyang.) After all, Nielsen's own approach to composition could be seen as a journey from his listening experiences as a student to those of an adult experimenting with synthesizing experiences of his own (possibly in the context of support he received from Ferruccio Busoni, whose own career involved a rather extensive journey).

The way in which Gilbert and the Symphony "made the move" had less to do with whether or not Nielsen's symphony, whose four movements were inspired by the four ancient "temperaments" of choler, phlegm, melancholy, and sanguinity, was more "programmatic" than Mozart's concerto and more to do with a different strategy in how energy was being deployed. Nielsen may be less nuanced than Mozart; but Gilbert and the Symphony could make a virtue out of his more expansive (to invoke an adjective from his third symphony) sense of sound, which has as much emotional depth in its silences as it has when everyone is playing in full force. We could thus leave Davies with a sense of a journey worth making without worrying about whether or not one stop along that journey was, in any way, "better" than another.

This brings us to the "beginning" of this journey, Stucky's "Son et lumière," which was very much a high-energy affair. I have to say that I think that the title was a bit unfair, since it was named for those tourist-trap affairs that cover the world from the Egyptian pyramids to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, plagued by tendentious narration on top of orchestral forces putting out Hollywood sprawl at its worst. Stucky, on the other hand, was probably thinking about the relationship between sound and light in terms of the extent to which an orchestra could be applied as a palette of colors. There was no mention of Olivier Messiaen in the notes that Thomas May provided for this piece; but it was interesting to be able to listen to Stucky's composition in the context of having heard Messiaen's "L'Ascension" at the beginning of this year. In a manner that may be more consistent with Messiaen's mysticism than with Stucky's more cerebral bent, the latter's work seems to have less to do with "sound and light" than with "sound as light" (a position that is reinforced by some of Stucky's own remarks about the work). In that respect the journey began very much the way the Messiaen-to-Mahler journey had begun. This is an orchestra that knows how to be one of those palettes of colors, and Gilbert knew how to use them to deploy those colors.

To my ears, however, those colors came less from Messiaen and more from that earlier colorist, Richard Strauss. The opening (and also closing) gesture sounded to me, for all the world, like a percussion-only interpretation of the opening gesture of the latter's Elektra opera. This is not to say that Stucky's composition was an homage to either Strauss or that particular opera. However, it may have been why I came away dissatisfied with Stucky's choice of title, since I have always found sitting through an evening of Sophocles (even when tarted up by Strauss' orchestra excesses) far more satisfying that watching colored lights shining on the Parthenon!