CMSF Concludes Season with Beijing Guitars

Duo guitarists Meng Su and Yameng Wang (photograph by Sophie Zhai, from the Beijing Guitar Duo Web site)

The Beijing Guitar Duo of Su Meng and Wang Yameng is no stranger to San Francisco. They gave their first recital in Herbst Theatre for San Francisco Performances (SFP) in April of 2010. They have also often contributed to the Dynamite Guitars series presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. Yesterday afternoon’s visit returned to Herbst but this time under the auspices of Chamber Music San Francisco for the final program in the ten concerts in this year’s season.

The final work was the only one explicitly composed for two guitars, Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Suite. Su herself provided the arrangement of Claude Debussy’s four-hand piano composition Petite Suite. There was also an arrangement by Sergio Assad, who previously had a major impact on guitar studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He prepared the two-guitar version of Radamés Gnattali’s Suite Retratos, which was originally composed for chamber ensemble. The other guitarist familiar to me was Manuel Barrueco (performing in Herbst exactly one week earlier), who arranged Tan Dun’s Opus 1, Eight Memories in Watercolor. The Beijing Duo played five of the movements from that suite. Enrique Granados was included on the program with his eight Valses poéticos, arranged by Christian Gruber and Peter Maklar; and the program began with Mantanya Ophee’s arrangement of César Franck’s organ composition, Prélude, fugue et variation.

Finally, there was one encore selection. This was an arrangement of “Le tic-toc-choc, ou Les maillotins,” from the eighteenth Ordre in F major from the third book in François Couperin’s Livre de piéces de clavecin. This is one of those keyboard compositions that sounds much better on a harpsichord than on a piano. The plucked strings of two guitars served up an excellent evocation of the spirit the composer had in mind.

Taken as a whole, this was a thoroughly engaging journey through an impressively diverse repertoire. Every composition on the program had its own unique rhetorical stance, and the duo players knew exactly how to capture the full breadth of those stances. It might be fair to note that Su and Wang revisited many of the pieces they presented during their last visit in December of 2023, hosted jointly by SFP and Omni; but that was long enough ago that one could still enjoy the repertoire!

Beijing Guitar Duo Returns to SFP+Omni

Duo guitarists Meng Su and Yameng Wang (photograph by Wasin Prastlap, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, the Beijing Guitar Duo of Meng Su and Yameng Wang returned to the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Guitar Series, presented in partnership with the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. They have been frequent and consistently welcome visitors since their first SFP recital in April of 2010. They served as SFP Guitarists-in-Residence between 2011 and 2015. This is their sixth appearance and the first since the pandemic.

Over the course of my encounters with them, I have been consistently impressed with their performances of transcriptions of piano music. What made Su’s transcriptions for the first half of the program particularly interesting was that both Claude Debussy’s Petite Suite and Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 56 Dolly were composed for four hands on a single keyboard. To take on even richer keyboard textures, they began the program with a transcription by Matanya Orphee of César Franck’s Opus 18 “Prélude, Fugue et Variation,” which was composed for pipe organ. The clarity they brought to all three of these richly elaborate compositions was nothing short of jaw-dropping.

The second half of the program shifted over to the Hispanic repertoire, beginning with transcriptions of three works for solo piano. The first of these was the Valses poéticos collection by Enrique Granados in arrangements by the guitar duo of Christian Gruber and Peter Maklar. This was followed by Miguel Llobet’s transcriptions of two compositions by Isaac Albéniz, “Sous le palmier” from the Opus 232 Chants d’Espagne collection and “Castilla,” the seventh movement in the first Suite española collection (Opus 47). The program then concluded with Astor Piazzolla’s three-movement Tango Suite, which he composed for his close friends, the guitarists Sérgio and Odair Assad. Taken as a whole, this was a refreshing change in perspective from the French repertoire in the first half of the program.

However, the repertoire returned to France for the first encore. This was a selection from the eighteenth Ordre in the massive collection of keyboard music by François Couperin, “Le tic-toc-choc.” This was followed by one of the movements from Tan Dun’s Opus 1 Memories in Watercolor. (I did not catch the title very clearly, but I think it was the “Herdboy’s Song.”)

It goes without saying that I was delighted to have another encounter with the Beijing Guitar Duo. Their approach to repertoire is consistently inventive, and their technical skills live up to any challenge that confronts them. Su is now on the faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Hopefully, this means that there will be many engaging guitar opportunities to come.

DG to Release Daniel Hope’s First NCCO Album

One week from today Deutsche Grammophon will release the first album that New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) has recorded with its latest Music Director, Daniel Hope. To provide some personal context, my very first CD of this ensemble was recorded when Krista Bennion Feeney was Music Director; and I have at least a few of the albums made with Music Director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. When it comes to attending performances, Salerno-Sonnenberg is still at the head of my list.

The title of the new album is Music for a New Century; and, as is usually the case, Amazon.com is currently accepting pre-orders for both the CD and MP3 download, which can be processed on the same Web page. When it comes to “truth in advertising,” all four of the compositions on the new release were composed during the current century. The earliest of these is Philip Glass’ third piano concerto, which he completed in 2017. The most recent composition was completed this year, a piece that Jake Heggie entitled simply “Overture.” The other two works are Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Lament,” scored for solo violin and string orchestra, which was completed in 2019, and Tan Dun’s double concerto for violin, piano, and string orchestra, composed in 2021. NCCO had “skin in the game” of commissioning all four of these compositions; and Heggie’s overture was composed to celebrate the ensemble’s 30th anniversary season.

I have to confess that I have never quite warmed up to that “new” adjective. Both Feeney and Salerno-Sonnenberg were imaginatively eclectic in the programs they prepared, and I was particularly taken with the latter’s decision to begin her tenure by appointing Clarice Assad to serve as featured composer for her first season. On the other hand I was impressed with how Salerno-Sonnenberg was comfortable with being both retrospective and prospective in preparing her programs. On the other hand all four of the Music for a New Century compositions strike me as exuding some degree of nostalgia for the past century with little sense of “new” in the current one.

To be fair, however, the current century is no longer “new.” One hundred years ago from today, the population had experienced all the horrors of its First World War; and, in the United States, people turned to the “Roaring Twenties” to get those horrors out of their collective system. These days pessimism seems to be prevailing more than it ever had in the past, and it is not difficult to find people worrying about whether or not this century will see its Thirties decade. Perhaps novelty is no longer as significant as it used to be!

NCCO to Present Only One Program in Herbst

Many readers probably know by now that the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) launched its 30th anniversary season this past September. What they may not yet have realized is that only one of this season’s concerts will be taking place in Herbst Theatre, which is the only venue where I have experienced past performances, even if I have only been regularly aware of the venue for a little more than a quarter century. That one performance will take place next month, when NCCO and its Music Director Daniel Hope will present a program entitled Cinematic Escapes.

True to that title, the program will begin with Paul Bateman’s rescoring of the music that Bernard Hermann composed for the film Vertigo. Readers may recall that, when Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg began her NCCO tenure in 2008, one of her earliest program selections was a suite based on the music from another Alfred Hitchcock film, Psycho. Vertigo, on the other hand, is set in San Francisco, making the overall theme of the program “closer to home.” That program will also include further Bateman arrangements of selections from the film scores composed by Ennio Morricone (quite some distance from San Francisco).

Guest pianist Alexey Botvinov (photograph by Nikolay Vdovenko, courtesy of NCCO)

Between these two cinematic offerings, NCCO will perform the double concerto that Tan Dun composed for violin, piano, and string orchestra with percussion. The piano part will be performed by Alexey Botvinov, joining Hope’s violin solo. The final work on the program will be a strings-only arrangement of George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” prepared by Clarice Assad, a frequent contributor to the NCCO repertoire during Salerno-Sonnenberg’s tenure.

This program will be performed in Herbst Theatre on Saturday, January 21, beginning at 7:30 p.m. The entrance to Herbst Theatre is the main entrance to the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue, located on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. The venue is excellent for public transportation, since that corner has Muni bus stops for both north-south and east-west travel. Tickets range in price from $30 to $67.50; and they may be purchased through a City Box Office Web page. Single tickets can also be purchased at the door for $10 for students with valid identification and for $15 for patrons under 35.

Omni Foundation to Host Video Shoot of Su Meng

Readers may recall that this past May San Francisco Performances (SFP) and the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts presented video streams of three great classical guitarists, each performing from his/her current home country. The performers were David Russell, based in Palencia, Spain, Marko Topchii, in Ukrainian Kiev, and Xuefei Yang, playing in the fifteenth-century Zhizhu Temple in Beijing, China. Today I discovered that these videos are still available for viewing along with eight additional videos on the Online Series Web page on the Omni Foundation Web site.

The videos shared with SFP are part of a series entitled Omni On Location with recordings filmed from historic sites around the world. There is also a second series entitled Live from St. Marks. As the title suggests, this consists of concerts filmed at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, which is a frequent venue for Omni recitals. These videos are made with the soloist performing before a limited audience. Tickets must be purchased. However, seating is not reserved, meaning that those with tickets can situate themselves in areas that are not dominated by the video crew.

Su Meng (courtesy of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts)

Late yesterday afternoon, Omni announced the first video shoot of the new series. The recitalist will be Su Meng, who is on the faculty at both the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Born in China in Qingdao, Su began her guitar studies at the age of five. She has won first prize in numerous international competitions around the world and holds both a Master’s degree and an Artist Diploma from the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, where she studied under Manuel Barrueco. Barrueco also encouraged her to partner with guitarist Wang Yameng, leading to the formation of the Beijing Guitar Duo. In that capacity they were Guitarists-in-Residence for SFP between 2011 and 2015.

For her Omni video shoot, Su has prepared four “number-based” compositions. She will begin with three of the five movements that Astor Piazzolla collected under the title Cinco Piezas (five pieces). This will be followed by Marc Neikrug’s Three Pieces for Guitar. She will then turn to Seven Desires by Tan Dun, who was born in the Hunan province of China but is now Dean of the Bard College Conservatory of Music. Su’s program will conclude with a set of five bagatelles collected by William Walton.

The video shoot will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, September 17. All tickets are being sold for $55, and only 50 will be sold. The best way to determine if tickets are still available is to call 415-242-4500. In addition Omni has created an event page, which includes a video of Su playing the toccata composed by Sun Wukong.

Isbin’s Album of New Works Written for Her

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

This past Friday Zoho released two new albums of guitarist Sharon Isbin. These are so different in content that they deserve to be treated separately. The title of the more conventional guitar album is Affinity, and all five of the selections were written for Isbin. Four of them are world premiere recordings, and one of those is an innovative arrangement. Isbin’s former student and duet partner Colin Davin prepared a two-guitar setting of Antonio Lauro’s “Natalia” waltz; and Davin joins Isbin for that track of the album.

There is also a solo performance of Tan Dun’s “Seven Desires for Guitar.” Mezzo Isabel Leonard joins Isbin to perform Richard Danielpour’s song cycle Of Love and Longing; and the album takes its title from a new concerto for guitar and orchestra by Chris Brubeck, performed with Elizabeth Schulze conducting the Maryland Symphony Orchestra. The only selection not being given a premiere is Leo Brouwer’s suite El Decameron Negro, which he wrote for Isbin after she won the Toronto Guitar competition in 1975.

My only opportunity to see Isbin in recital took place at Herbst Theatre in October of 2018. She shared the stage with Brazilian jazz guitarist Romero Lubambo. While each of them took a brief solo set in their respective repertoires, their “meeting of minds” made for an inventive and stimulating performance. Isbin clearly has a reputation for “playing well with others;” and her Affinity album sustains that reputation.

That being the case, I must still confess that I was particularly drawn to the Brouwer selection. I have long felt that Brouwer deserves more exposure than he tends to get. My encounters with his music have been few and far between, always leaving me curious about what else he has done. Now we have a piece of his that is likely to be older than many that listen to it, and I still find myself hungry for more.

By the same count every encounter with a composition by Tan leaves me curious about his other works. There is a potentially interesting backstory to Tan’s guitar composition. At a recital by the Beijing Guitar Duo I learned that their teacher, Manuel Barrueco, had prepared a guitar arrangement of Tan’s Opus 1 piano composition, Eight Memories in Watercolor. Apparently, Tan preferred the guitar version to his own, which may have motivated him to compose for the guitar. The results on Isbin’s album make it clear that he was the better for following that motivation, which had begun earlier with his composing a concerto, “Yi2,” for her.

I must confess that the remainder of this album did not have quite as much impact. I have had many opportunities to listen to Leonard, and I always enjoy her vocal qualities. Nevertheless, Danielpour’s approach to setting his texts, poetry by Rumi translated into English by Raficq Abdulla, never left much of an impression. Similarly, while I was struck by Brubeck’s concerto structure as three uninterrupted movements, the thematic material itself did little to tweak the mind behind the ear. That said, the offerings by Brouwer and Tan definitely make this album “worth the price of admission.”

YouTube: No Way to Listen to a Concert

I had an ulterior motive behind wanting to watch the entire Carnegie Hall concert given by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra: Two of the works on the program were "previews," in a sense, of the concerts that Michael Tilson Thomas will be conducting with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall on May 20, 22, 23. One of these amounted to a "sneak peek" at an excerpt from Mason Bates' "The B-Sides," which will be receiving its world premiere at these concerts. The other was to hear Yuja Wang play the second movement of Sergei Prokofiev's Opus 16, his second piano concerto in G minor, which she would be playing entirely at these same concerts. So, when Alex Ross posted the links to the videos of the two portions of the concert on his The Rest is Noise blog, I felt obliged to view at least this material before writing any sort of preview piece for my Examiner.com gig; and, if I was going to watch those portions, why not watch the whole thing?

Why not, indeed? Well, it turns out that there is one perfectly good reason. YouTube technology was designed for the brief snippets that users are expected to upload, which usually do not last more than five minutes. At least that was the case before YouTube recently introduced full-length movies and television programs. Now my guess is that, even with this increase in both volume and duration of content, the snippets will probably continue to do well enough. So, for example, I had no problem watching the "Global Mash Up" of Tan Dun's first (of how many?) "Internet Symphony" (without which I might not have had as interesting a Chutzpah of the Week award). On the other hand the first half of the "concert video" from Carnegie Hall had a duration of 59:32, which is to say longer than the actual content of an hour-long television episode; and the second half ran 1:25:30, which puts it in the league of many feature films.

So what happens when YouTube tries to stream this kind of content to a home in San Francisco with a DSL modem? The answer is simple enough: It isn't pretty! To be more blunt, it no longer counts as music. You cannot listen to Brahms with frequent (almost periodic) interruptions for the player to catch up with the streamer. To paraphrase that old religious saying: the content is so large, and my buffer is so small! Efforts to pause and even back up a bit to give the buffer room for growth were to no avail. Now it would not surprise me if John Cage would have been pleased to hear a performance of his music interrupted by such silences determined entirely by chance, but I wonder how Bates would feel about large portions of cyberspace getting their first taste of his music in this manner!

To relate this to a more satisfying recent experience, the YouTube viewing environment is not the Digital Concert Hall created for the Berliner Philharmoniker. Most important is that the Digital Concert Hall allows you to select the quality of the signal you are receiving. Low quality works just fine for home use; and, if the image lacks the sharpness of full high-definition resolution (which I found very impressive when I had the bandwidth to receive it), at least the music is never interrupted. (Well … hardly ever, in the words of W. S. Gilbert!) YouTube tried to finesse the quality-of-service problem by keeping the durations (and usually the quality of the video signal) down. However, on the basis of the experiences I just had with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra content, I would say that none of the selections are likely to survive intact for most of the folks trying to watch the stuff.

So it turns out that, at least in the current technology domain, my fear of short-attention-span concerts may be even greater than I had anticipated. Even the festivity of the Carnegie Hall occasion itself, regardless of the music performances, could not be held up adequately by the existing YouTube platform. Put another way, what worked at least passably for the auditioning process turned out to be counterproductive for those who crossed the bridge from auditioning to performing. So, for better or worse, it seems that we have learned at least one thing from the YouTube Symphony Orchestra experiment; and I suspect that this lesson will be of great interest to folks like Marshall Marcus over at the Southbank Centre. Whether or not the lesson registers over in the YouTube division of Google will probably depend on whether viewers interested in seeing the pilot episode of Charlie's Angels (currently one of the "Spotlight Videos") have a similar experience to which they react in a similar way!

Crouching Tiger, Hidden CHUTZPAH

It may just be that the buzz from last night's performance by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra (which even echoed on Truthdig) is still rattling around inside my skull; but I have decided that there is enough chutzpah in taking a five-minute romp and hanging the name of "Eroica" on it (even without then subjecting it to a mash up) to merit an award. After all, the set of variations that Ludwig van Beethoven wrote that now carry this name take as much time as most of the symphonies of his contemporaries (which is about half the duration of the "Eroica" symphony). So, since the "chutzpah ceiling" for artistic accomplishment was broken last week, I have no hesitation in granting the Chutzpah of the Week award for this week to Tan Dun, who has found his own path to outrageousness that is definitely on a par with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. While there is no "extra credit" for an act of chutzpah, Tan should also be recognized for doing unto Beethoven a deed worthy of what the ukulele ensemble did to Richard Wagner!

"Where does the project go from here?"

That question that Marshall Marcus, Head of Music for the Southbank Centre, raised when the BBC interviewed him about the YouTube Symphony Orchestra was foremost in my mind this morning as I read Anthony Tommasini's review of their performance last night at Carnegie Hall on the New York Times Web site. Responsible critic that he is, Tommasini treated this concert like any other and, as usual, made some interesting judgment calls. After having read James Oestreich's account of the first day of rehearsals on Monday, I felt that Tommasini's overall assessment of "Quite well" was a promising one. However, like Marcus, I am more interested in last night's concert as an experiment with potential of informing us about the "future of classical music." Of course one should not speculate on the future without recognizing Paul Saffo's caveat: "The future always arrives late and in unexpected ways." So, rather than playing futurist games, I think it might be useful to point out some of the potential indicators, without going out on any limbs about just what may be indicated.

The first indicator was actually the color photograph of the interior of Carnegie Hall, take by Chad Batka for The New York Times, which preceded Tommasini's text. One could barely discern the hall itself amid the flood of color slides projected on just about any available surface. The performers on the stage were only some of the contributing elements of a multimedia extravaganza. This immediately raised a question: If the performers were sharing (competing?) with an abundance of supplementary media, would the act of listening still be primary to this particular concert experience? As Tommasini observed:

There were so many spotlights and projectors in the hall that pianissimo passages in the music had to compete with the whirring sounds of ventilating fans.

That question was further reinforced with Tommasini's report that the three-hour program for the evening "was a potpourri, just movements and excerpts from 15 wildly diverse works." Was this a rejection of the traditional listening experience in favor of a "pops" style aimed at shorter attention spans? Tommasini seemed to be pondering the same question in his account of Yuja Wang's solo appearance:

It was exasperating, however, to hear Yuja Wang, a brilliant young pianist, dash off a rippling account of the perpetual-motion Scherzo from Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. If the program had been differently conceived, she and the orchestra might have played the entire work, which is not that long. Instead, she played a showpiece solo encore, a stunningly difficult but empty-headed arrangement of the “Flight of the Bumble Bee.”

According to Associated Press Writer Martin Steinberg's account, there were further exasperations for those expecting a traditional concert experience:

The Internet generation of performers attracted a youthful crowd that had no reason to feel shy. The staid decorum was suspended for the three-hour concert, which featured 15 short pieces. Thomas sat on the podium at one point, watching pianist Yuja Wang fly through the "Flight of the Bumble Bee." Images of musical notes, geometric patterns and of the players were projected on the walls and ceiling, and the audience was encouraged to bring video cameras.

More representative of the event may have been the composition that Tan Dun created for this occasion, described by Tommasini as follows:

Tan Dun conducted the premiere of a piece written for the occasion, his Internet Symphony No. 1, “Eroica.” This five-minute crowd-pleaser takes riffs from Beethoven’s “Eroica” and folds them into a score teaming with clanking percussion, corny brass chorales, and perky passages that sounded as if Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon had somehow encountered the Lone Ranger.

Thanks to Claire Prentice's review for the London Telegraph, I discovered that a preview "mash up" performance of this work had already been uploaded to the YouTube site (and available for viewing at the beginning of Prentice's article). While I am, as a rule, not particularly big on "mash ups" (since I tend to see them as undermining live performance), I have to admit that this one was pretty effective; and it may even be that this composition works better as a well-crafted video object than as a concert performance. However, this was a video object, clearly a product of someone highly skilled in video editing who may or may not have had experience in performing music. The fact that it was so effective then raised the question of whether the "YouTube" part of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra may have emerged as more important than the "Symphony Orchestra" part.

Given this risk that the virtual world of YouTube could well drown out the physical world of Carnegie Hall, it is important to note that Michael Tilson Thomas used his opening remarks to his physical audience as a sort of exercise in expectation management:

We're meeting a lot of different worlds, the real time world, the online world and the experience of getting acquainted. For us it's been something between a classical music summit conference (and) scout jamboree combined with speed dating.

Perhaps ultimately the whole event had more to do with that "experience of getting acquainted" than with more the more substantive matters of musical performance that Tommasini found lacking; but just what kind of acquaintance was forming? I wonder if the summit conference may have actually been the most significant of Thomas' metaphors. Taken as a whole, the most important element of the experiment may have been the encounter of the YouTube world of performing through video clips with the more traditional world of the immediacy of musical performance "in the flesh." As is usually the case at a summit conference, there were both confrontations and compromises; but, in spite of Tommasini's misgivings, it seems as if there were more substantive deliverables last night than we tend to expect at summit gatherings of world leaders and diplomats.

It may well be that none of these observations will contribute very much to Marcus' primary question. Indeed, there is the risk that, as an experimental approach towards the "future of classical music," this project may not go anywhere. Having used its YouTube property to get this particular dog to walk on its hind legs, Google may decide that it has had enough of this project and go off in search of "the next cool thing." Since he wears a manager's hat, Marcus' major concern is with how the presentation of classical music events will be supported in the future. My guess is that he read Tommasini's account (and possible Steinberg's) with great interest; but he is probably still agonizing over what it will take to keep institutions like his Southbank Centre going, maintaining their reputation for high standards in a time of economic hardship. The greatest disappointment would be that we have emerged from this bold experiment with some exciting memories but with no lessons learned.