Cappella SF Program “Unveils” New Compositions

The full title of the latest program presented by Cappella SF, performed in San Francisco yesterday afternoon at Mission Dolores Basilica, was Unveiling: New Music from Sweden and America. The offerings included a world premiere of a work by a Swedish composer, Frederik Sixten, the final two movements of a cycle by San Francisco composer David Conte, and the United States premiere of a piece by the youngest composer on the program, Swede Jacob Mühlrad, born in 1991. The program began with the two pieces that were not premieres, the first by American Eric Whitacre and the second by Swede Carl Unander-Scharin.

Composer David Conte (from his Web site)

The most satisfying part of the program came with the completion of Conte’s cycle of four songs entitled Madrigals for the Seasons. The first two, “A Summer’s Day” and “Autumn” had been previously performed, while “Snow-flakes” and “Spring” were being given their premieres. Each madrigal set the text of a different English-language poem, two by American poets Emily Dickinson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and two by English poets John Clare and William Blake. Nationalities altered as the individual songs unfolded: Dickinson, Clare, Longfellow, Blake.

It is worth noting that an earlier version of Madrigals for the Seasons was performed in April of last year at Conte’s Faculty Artist Series recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, sung by soprano Ann Moss accompanied by pianist Steven Bailey. He is currently Composer-in-Residence for Cappella SF, and his works were featured on the Cappella SF album Facing West, which was released in June of 2016. This site has also documented Conte’s two-CD album Everyone Sang, which was released in June of last year.

I offer this background as evidence that I have been listening to Conte’s setting of poetry for some time, and it may be long enough to hypothesize about his method. What I have discovered over the years is a consistent technique that always finds a solid account of both the semantics and the rhetoric of any poem he has chosen to set. My hypothesis is that Conte will not set a poem until he has come to know it as a poem intimately. In my book this is not just a matter of reading it on the printed page and taking in the many details associated with both meaning and structure. Rather, I feel that one does not really understood a poem until one has figured out how to read it aloud at least to one’s own satisfaction, if not that of others.

Every time I listen to one of Conte’s settings of a poem, I feel as if he has already mastered a spoken delivery of that text. He can then progress with the task to transforming that spoken delivery into one that is sung. This may involve a single voice or choral resources with or without instrumental accompaniment.

However, the underlying premise is that the poet has a voice behind any text (s)he has created. Finding and realizing that voice allows the poem to cross the bridge from text on a page to music in performance. From that point of view, yesterday’s performance of Madrigals for the Seasons was as impressive for the way in which it captured the distinct voices of four different poets as it was in disclosing the distinctions across the four seasons.

Sadly, it did not seem as if any of the other composers on yesterday’s program shared Conte’s approach to acquiring and disclosing insights of the texts revealed through the music. Eric Whitacre’s setting of a single verse from the Second Book of Samuel, describing David’s reaction to the death of Absalom, was aggravatingly tedious. Granted, this is a moment of intense grief. However, Whitacre tried to portray that grief through repetition so excessive as to recall Hamlet’s cautionary remark on the danger of trying to “out-Herod Herod.” Similar detachment from Biblical text could be found in Fredrik Sixten’s “Seek Him!,” joining one verse from Amos with one from the Psalms.

More perplexing was Unander-Scharin’s single-movement motet “Djupt under dagens yta” (deep under the surface of the day). This was a setting of a Swedish text by Olov Hartman with a rich and passionate theological subtext. The motet was sung in Swedish; and both Swedish and English texts were included in the program book. Unfortunately, the two versions were presented in succession, rather than beside each other in parallel. Thus, even those with a keen ear for Swedish phonology were at a disadvantage when it came to aligning the Swedish words with the English ones.

However, the program was at its most frustrating at the conclusion with the United States premiere of Mühlrad’s “Time.” This piece took, as its point of departure, the fourth verse from Psalm 19:

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

Mühlrad transforms this twice. He begins as follows:

Their sound goes out through all the earth

and their words to the end of the world.

He then transforms the transformation, so to speak:

Their sound goes out through all the earth

and their words to the end of time.

He then takes this second version as a launching pad for what might best be described as a phonological romp. This begins with a Hebrew version of the first of the two lines followed by verbal deliveries of the word “time” in 27 different languages. All those utterances reveal themselves as faintly discerned objects in an auditory landscape obscured by an intense fog. The best an attentive listener can do is appreciate the thickness of texture, but the linguistic threads from which that texture is woven are so obscured as to make all of those sophisticated lexical details little more than gratuitous preening.

At the end of the day, “Time” emerges as an intellectual exercise that probably looks very good on paper. However, as Conte has consistently demonstrated, the journey from marks on paper to sounds that strike the ear is neither straightforward nor simple. “Time” is so obsessively focused on playing with its phonemes that neither the ear nor the mind behind the ear seem to hold very much currency for the composer. Last night’s performance may have gone so far as to raise the question as to whether the composer actually attached any significance to attentive listening.

The program concluded with a single encore selection. This was a choral arrangement of the BWV 508 “Bist du bei mir” (if you are with me). This is one of the entries in the 1725 Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. Like many of the other entries, the music is not by Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather it is an aria from Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel's opera Diomedes. The name of the composer of the choral arrangement did not sustain the distance of the length of Mission Dolores Basilica!