On the surface, last night’s performance in Herbst Theatre by cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist Vijay Iyer, the third of the four programs in the Hear Now and Then Series presented by San Francisco Performances, promised to be an adventurously stimulating journey of discovery. Each of the two musicians has followed an impressive path leading beyond the usual conventions of concert performances. Currently on the faculty of the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, Haimovitz has ventured beyond the usual musical curriculum to spend time at the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise, interacting particularly with its former Director Daniel Levitin. (The booklet for Shuffle.Play.Listen, Haimovitz’ duo album with pianist Christopher O’Riley, consists almost entirely of a conversation that both musicians had with Levitin.) Iyer, in turn, holds a doctoral degree in Music from the University of California at Berkeley with a thesis entitled Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics, based on his research at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies.
The program for last night’s performance made it clear that this would be no ordinary recital. Rather than listing the works to be played, it consisted primarily of a paragraph whose first sentence was as follows:
This evening’s performance will be announced from the stage, giving the artists the opportunity to share the context of the program, and allowing the music to flow seamlessly from one genre to the next.
This suggested some ambitious ventures into eclectic territory, but that suggestion was never satisfactorily realized. This was due, at least in part, to a casual approach to announcement that often crossed the border into inchoate; but also both the approach to programming and the performances themselves came across as unduly muddled, as if the performers themselves had not yet settled on how they would engage with each other.
Sadly, things did not fare much better when each of them played solo. Haimovitz introduced each half of the program with a Prelude movement from one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s six solo cello suites. He opened with BWV 1009 in C major (the third suite) and followed the intermission with BWV 1011 in C minor (the fifth suite), making it a point to play both selections with a baroque bow. Sadly, his technique was inconsistently scrappy and indulgent in unconventional phrasing that conveyed less a sense of adventure and more one of missing the point.
Iyer, on the other hand, often brings a stream-of-consciousness rhetoric to his solo jazz improvisations. The dexterity of his technique can stand as the envy of just about any pianist, classical as well as jazz; and he brings a clarity to his phrasing that allows the attentive listener to acclimate to his motivic and thematic material. On the other hand he seems to have at least a slight aversion of soft dynamics, meaning that, after a while, his rhetorical style has less to do with confident assertion and more with stentorian declamation.
The result was an evening that left the disquieting impression that both performers were trying to find their way along the path from the opening selection to the concluding encore (which was not announced). Whether playing together as a duo or pursuing individual solo work, both Haimovitz and Iyer left an uneasy impression of uncertainty over why they were up on stage and what they should be doing. Perhaps the cerebral side of both of their backgrounds has been getting to them. I came away recalling an old joke about an ant that asks a centipede how he coordinates all of his legs to go in the direction he wants. The centipede starts thinking about how to answer the question and eventually dies without ever taking another step.
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