Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Few Sublime Moments in LCCE French Program

Last night in the Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) presented French Sublime, the third program in its 2019–2020 season. This was a rather intimate affair, involving only four LCCE musicians, Artistic Director and violinist Anna Presler, cellist Tanya Tomkins, clarinetist Jerome Simas, and pianist Eric Zivian. LCCE violist Kurt Rohde also participated, but as the composer of a work receiving its world premiere.

Unfortunately, sublimity was not quite the strong suit at last night’s performance. Indeed, when it came to both theory and practice, the high point of the evening was Simas’ performance of Claude Debussy’s first rhapsody, scored for clarinet and piano. Simas clearly appreciated the diversity of moody qualities in this composition, and the penetrating sonorities of his instrument allowed him to prevail over the many moments of brutal banging away at the keyboard that one tends to expect from Zivian’s LCCE contributions. The sublime could also be found in a very brief nocturne that Lili Boulanger composed for violin and piano. Because the piece was over before you knew it, Zivian never had the chance to build up steam to overwhelm Presler’s sensitive reading.

The remainder of the program did not fair nearly as well. The second half was devoted almost entirely to Olivier Messiaen’s “Quatuor pour la fin du temps” (quartet for the end of time). Rohde’s new composition, in turn, was inspired by his having seen the San Francisco Opera (SFO) performance of Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise (Saint Francis of Assisi), the American premiere of this opera, performed in 2002. Rohde’s influence came not so much from Messiaen’s music as from the costuming of the Angel which sported only a single wing. Rohde thus called his composition “One Wing.”

Given the complexity of the event that inspired Rohde, it was clear that he packed considerable thought into his conception of “One Wing.” However, much of that conception involved a complex relationship between violinist and pianist. This involved many details that looked good on the page of the program book on which Rohde presented his thoughts; but, given the limitations of a single listening experience, few of those thoughts were strong enough to register with even the most sympathetic listener. Furthermore, the relationship between the two performers was again marred by problems of balance, most of which could be attributed to Zivian.

Complexity was also a critical issue in the Messiaen composition. Just as each of the eight scenes of Messiaen’s opera is practically a self-contained reflection on the complexity of Francis’ character, so is Messiaen’s quartet a reflection on five verses from the Book of Revelation. Ironically, while the title of the quartet is consistent with a phrase in the King James Version, “there should be time no longer,” the more scholarly translation of the original Greek in The Jerusalem Bible renders that same phrase as “The time of waiting is over.” Thus, Messiaen’s quartet may be the most famous composition to be inspired by a misreading!

Of greater importance, however, is how, in the same approach found in Messiaen’s opera, the overall composition is not a single reflection but a sequence of eight related reflections. Each of these has its own unique musical language, and different combinations of instruments are required for the different movements. Before the performance began, Presler read the title of each of the movements and a brief description of its content. Notwithstanding George Miller’s scholarly argument that mind is capable of managing “seven plus or minus two” things at once, I doubt that anyone in the audience could keep track of Presler’s eight summaries once the performance got under way. This was information that belonged in the program book to provide the attentive listener with a useful account of what is happening when.

This was my second experience of LCCE presenting Messiaen’s quartet. Many years have elapsed, but I felt that this revisiting was weaker than the earlier effort. Only Simas was consistently on the ball with his contributions, and he did not perform in every movement. Both Presler and Tomkins had noticeable problems with intonation, and Zivian’s outbursts overwhelmed even the extremes he had presented during the first half of the program. By the time the program had concluded, there was little sense of the sublime that would follow any attentive listener out the door.

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