Monday, February 4, 2019

Eclectic Chamber Music from SFS Players

There was considerable diversity in yesterday afternoon’s Chamber Music Series presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in Davies Symphony Hall. The selections spanned a timeline from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. The most recent work on the program was by a living composer; and, of particular interest, the composer was better known for his work as a jazz pianist, Chick Corea.

Corea has established himself through several memorable contributions to the jazz literature. My own favorite is “Spain,” which begins by suggesting that he is following in the footsteps of Gil Evans’ arrangement of the second movement of Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” for Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain album but wastes little time growing an entirely different plant from Rodrigo’s “seed.” His contribution to yesterday afternoon, however, was a trio for flute, bassoon, and piano (called simply “Trio”) with a score written out in its entirety.

As James M. Keller observed in his notes for the program book, Corea’s “higher education” was confined to a month at Columbia University and “a brief spell” at the Juilliard School (probably briefer than Davis, who spent an entire semester there). There is thus a rather strong sense of the intuitive in his trio, particularly since he had to be conscientious about every note that each of the three musicians played. My guess is that many would be happy to dismiss this piece as evidence of a dog walking on its hind legs. Nevertheless, the music always resides in how it is performed, rather than in the marks the composer makes on the paper; and bassoonist Rob Weir, flutist Tim Day, and pianist Britton Day (son of Tim) certainly put their all into giving the piece a creditable account. I certainly would not confuse it with any of Corea’s jazz work; and, given a few more performances like this one, I might even grow to like the piece!

There were also traces of jazzy rhetoric in the sextet written in 1933 by the Dutch composer Leo Smit. However, it was a “Francophile” jazz that had more to do with Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc than with what jazzmen like Duke Ellington were cooking at that time. Indeed, Smit’s sextet seems to have been inspired by the instrumentation for Poulenc’s sextet, a wind quintet and piano. On the other hand there appear to be some reflections on the tune “Deep Purple,” which Peter DeRose composed in 1933; and it would not be out of the question that Smit may have heard the tune on the radio while working on his sextet.

Both of the Days and Weir also performed in the sextet ensemble. The other members were Russ deLuna on oboe, Luis Baez on clarinet, and Robert Ward on horn. The sextet opened the afternoon’s program and amounted to an affable way to do so. Nevertheless, it seemed as if pianist Day was further in the background behind the wind quintet than one would have expected. (I used to have a vinyl recording of Poulenc playing his sextet with the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet; and, as might be guessed, Poulenc was almost never in the background!) My guess is that the six players had worked out the right balance in their rehearsal setting but had not counted for how much the piano (even with the lid all the way up) would have to project through all those wind sonorities into the Davies audience space.

Balance between piano and instruments was on much firmer ground in the piano trio performance by violinist Diane Nicholeris, cellist David Goldblatt, and pianist Gwendolyn Mok. They played five of the 24 Negro Melodies that Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had published as the first part of his Opus 59. (The second part was a Romance for violin and piano.) Coleridge-Taylor composed these for solo piano; but, when violinist Rachel Barton Pine visited the Salon at the Hotel Rex in February of 2016, she played an arrangement of “Deep River” accompanied by Lara Downes on piano. That arrangement was made by Maud Powell, but I have not yet identified who prepared the piano trio arrangements presented yesterday afternoon. (“Deep River” was not included in the set.)

Photograph of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor taken around the time of the composition of his Opus 59 (photographer unknown, restored by Adam Cuerden, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Coleridge-Taylor was born in 1875 in the Holborn district of London (England) to an English mother and a Sierra Leone Creole father, who was a physician. By 1896 he had achieved recognition as a composer with supporters that included Edward Elgar and Charles Villiers Stanford. The author of his Wikipedia page states:
Coleridge-Taylor sought to draw from traditional African music and integrate it into the classical tradition, which he considered Johannes Brahms to have done with Hungarian music and Antonín Dvořák with Bohemian music.
This serves as a useful perspective when listening to the Opus 59 song arrangements; and yesterday’s players gave a clear and expressive account of the rearrangements of that content for piano trio. If the music itself was not particularly true to its original sources, than that simply means that, as an arranger, Coleridge-Taylor was in the same league as Brahms and Dvořák!

Through what may not have been coincidence, the program concluded with a Dvořák selection, his Opus 77 (second) string quintet in G major. This piece is rather unique in that the fifth part is taken by a bass (Daniel G. Smith). The “string quartet” players were violinists Nadya Tichman and Amy Hiraga, violist Nancy Ellis, and cellist Peter Wyrick.

This is far from the only Dvořák composition that explores the dark shades of the very low register in chamber music. Those who know their chamber music probably know the bass best for its role in Franz Schubert’s D. 667 (“Trout”) piano quintet, in which one encounters similar coloration in the low register. However, Schubert let the bass take a crack at one of the variations in the third movement, while Dvořák was not so generous. The result thus amounts to what could almost be taken for another Dvořák string quartet presented under distinctively different lighting.

Opus 77 wrapped up an afternoon of unfamiliar offerings but offered a conclusion with the most familiar frame of reference.

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