Supertrain Releases New Music Sung by SFGC

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

In my efforts to try to catch up on things before the end of the year, I realized that I had not yet written an account of a major recording project by the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC). This is an album released by Supertrain Records under the title My Outstretched Hand. This is also the title of the first of the three compositions that constitute the album’s “program.” The album begins with Lisa Bielawa’s fifteen-minute setting of an autobiographical text written in Butte, Montana in 1901 by Mary MacLane when she was only nineteen years old. The second work on the album, Aaron Jay Kernis’ “Remembering the Sea—Souvenir de la Mer,” is a three-movement setting of texts by Kai Hoffman-Krull both in the original English and in translations into French. The album then concludes with “If I Were Not Me,” Colin Jacobsen’s settings of two texts by Lydia Davis. Instrumental accompaniment is by The Knights, conducted by Eric Jacobsen; and the Trinity Youth Chorus joins SFGC in the performance of “My Outstretched Hand.”

My initial reaction to this offering was a bit jingoistic: What is SFGC doing with all these New Yorkers? The answer is that the album grew out of the period during which Bielawa was SFGC Artistic Director; and the recording sessions took place after she was succeeded in that position by the current Artistic Director, Valérie Sainte-Agathe. Many readers probably know that Bielawa was one of the first musicians (and, I believe, the first vocalist) to perform the music of Philip Glass; and SFGC figured significantly in a performance of Glass’ “Music with Changing Parts,” which was presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP) in February of 2018. Nevertheless, over the course of her tenure, I found it hard to shake the sense that SFGC seasons had become “all about Bielawa,” rather than “all about SFGC;” and I have taken more than a little pleasure in the ways in which Sainte-Agathe has restored this balance. Even her choice of repertoire for the annual seasonal concert at Davies Symphony Hall last week had an impressive breadth of scope that I had not encountered during the Bielawa years.

As a result, my primary reaction to the My Outstretched Hand album is that it revived many of my spirits of discontent with SFGC right around the time that I was getting over them. Yes, it is true that SFGC is a highly-disciplined organization in which discipline is gradually acquired as the members advance in age. There is also an academic side to the training through which the young vocalists acquire their first encounters with relations between theory and practice. Mostly, however, SFGC membership involves pursuing the rich breadth of approaches that a choral ensemble must command as part of the execution of practice; and that breadth needed to extend beyond the boundaries of the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The bottom line is that there is too much uniformity that cuts across the efforts of the three composers on this album. Much of that uniformity has to do with a tendency to treat words as if they are nothing more than sequences of syllables upon which notes can be hung. As a result, I would defy any of these three composers to give a convincing reading of any of the texts on this album. (I once attended one of the SFP Salon offerings at which Bielawa tried to do this with another text, and the result was profoundly disappointing.) When the words seem to mean so little to the composers, why do they even bother to set music for them?