Last night in Herbst Theatre, the Brooklyn Rider string quartet made its recital debut with San Francisco Performances (SFP) with the second installment in this season’s Shenson Chamber Series. This was actually a return visit to both Herbst and SFP, since almost exactly a year ago, the group provided the music for Some of a Thousand Words, a duo performance by choreographer Brian Brooks and dancer Wendy Whalen. The members of the quartet are violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Michael Nicolas.
Holograph manuscript of the first page of the third movement of Beethoven’s Opus 132 quartet (from IMSLP, public domain)
Brooklyn Rider seems to enjoy the idea of preparing repertoire and recordings around “projects.” The title of the project for last night’s program was Healing Modes. It drew its inspiration from the title that Ludwig van Beethoven attached to the third of the five movements in his Opus 132 string quartet in A minor, “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart” (holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode). Four composers (all of whom happened to be women) were commissioned to write “responses” to the “call” of Opus 132 with particular attention to that third movement (whose duration tends to be about twice as long as the opening movement, which is the second-longest movement in the quartet). The composers, in the order in which their works were performed during the first half of the program, were Caroline Shaw, Gabriela Lena Frank, Matana Roberts, and Reena Esmail.
As often happens when some “grand plan” tends to override the nuts-and-bolts of performance itself, the results of Brooklyn Rider’s project were mixed. The two composers whose results were most compelling happened to be the two that had actually experienced the psychological trauma of serious illness and the process of mental healing that accompanied physical healing. Frank’s note for the program book did not give details beyond noting that the treatment took several years during which her “creative endeavors were muted.” The note also acknowledges her Peruvian roots and the role played by her cultural context that sustained her during that extended period of healing.
Those roots were acknowledged in her response to the commission in the form of the second piece she entitled simply “Kanto Kechua” (Quechua song). This was very much upbeat music in which the sense of thanksgiving could not have been more explicit. Brooklyn Rider gave an impressive account of the intricacies of Frank’s text, which made this brief composition one of the most satisfying offerings of the evening. (It is also worth noting that Franck, who is based here in the Bay Area, was not present for this performance. It was explained that she is currently up in Butte County, assisting in the psychological healing of others.)
Esmail’s “Zeher (Poison)” emerged from her encounter with a serious throat infection that would not subside. A key trauma in this experience was the possibility that she might lose her voice, and her composition was written while she was sustaining her debilitating infection. What is interesting about her music is her ability to synthesize her “roots” in Hindustani music with her “Western” training. Similar to the Frank composition, Esmail responded to illness with positive energy in her music, an energy that owed much to the driving rhythms of Hindustani ragas. Here, again, Brooklyn Rider’s technical skills well served the cross-cultural ideas that Esmail’s music expressed.
The contributions of the other two composers were, at best, gratuitous. Roberts’ “borderlands…” could not have been more timely, since it was inspired by the “illness” that seems to have been contracted by our country’s immigration policies. However, while healing that “illness” may have been on Roberts’ mind, there was little sense of her motives in either the music or Brooklyn Rider’s execution.
Nevertheless, even further from the mark was the opening selection by Shaw, “Schisma.” Shaw has a way of writing fascinatingly erudite notes for her music, even when she is confined to a single paragraph. Sadly, over the course of several years of listening to her work, I realize that I have yet to have had an experience in which what emerges from listening lives up to what has been expounded in Shaw’s texts. Ultimately, her music evolves as intellectual exercises that never seem to find a compelling rhetorical voice; and “Schisma” was just another brick in the wall her repertoire has been building.
However, if last night’s commissioned results were mixed, Brooklyn Rider’s account of the “inspiration” for those commissions was far more disappointing. From a technical point of view, they may have been able to account for all of the marks that Beethoven subjected to paper; but they never managed to come through with any coherent sense of expressiveness behind that account. Even the very first notes seemed to emerge as dissonance for its own sake, rather than a presentation of ambiguities in search of resolution. Similarly, there was no sense of the irony in Beethoven having returned to a minuet, rather than a scherzo, in the quartet’s second movement; and the contrast between the almost static rhetoric of the “healing” theme of the third movement with its interruptions of “new strength” passed almost entirely unnoticed.
Apparently, even Brooklyn hipsters still need to learn a thing or two about Beethoven.
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