SFS Media to Release Two MTT Song Cycles

courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony (SFS) has announced that this coming Friday will see latest SFS Media release of recorded performances of the ensemble conducted by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT). The new album consists of two CDs, each presenting an orchestral song cycle. The first is taken from the performances of From the Diary of Anne Frank given in Davies Symphony Hall in November of 2018. The second documents the world premiere performances of Meditations on Rilke, performed in Davies this past January. As is usually the case, Amazon.com has already created a Web page to process pre-orders of this new offering.

Due to scheduling constraints, I was only able to attend the first performance of the Rilke cycle. So From the Diary of Anne Frank was a “first contact” experience. As the title implies, Mediations on Rilke is not so much a “song cycle” based on six of Rilke’s poems (translated into English by Robert Bly in the accompanying booklet) as it is true to the composition’s title, using music the reflect on the composer’s reactions to what the poet had expressed through words. As I had previously observed, this makes for a challenging task.

Most important is whether or not the poet had intended his texts for oral delivery. As I put it when I wrote about the premiere performance:

While the poetry may have been conceived for recitation, these are texts that hold up to the luxury of solitary reading.

Thus, the reader can easily be absorbed into the pages of the booklet, perhaps to such an extent that mind is distracted from the music. In this context, if MTT had any meditations to bring to the listener that extended beyond the poet’s choices of words and rhetoric, those meditations failed to contend effectively with Rilke’s own intense expressiveness. Neither the instrumental context nor the skilled vocal interpretations of mezzo Sasha Cooke and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny could escalate the listening experience above the intensity of the reading experience.

From the Diary of Anne Frank, on the other hand, is quite another matter. Most important is that the text is not “literature,” nor was a meant to be. (Indeed, it was never meant to be read by anyone other than the writer.) As a result, MTT made the judicious decision not to set the words to music but to assign them to a narrator (Isabel Leonard on this recording). That said, however, the music itself emerges as “meditations” on the text delivered by that narrator; and, sadly, there are too many situations in which the expressiveness of the music is so intense that it all but drowns out the intimacy of the words themselves.

That said, there is a fascinating twist to the content when considered in our current context. In the early days of the shelter-in-place reaction to the outbreak of COVID-19, The New York Review used its Web site to revisit a previously-published article about Albert Camus’ The Plague. Listening to Leonard reading Frank’s texts, there were any number of turns of phrase that associated hiding from the Nazis in an attic with those “practices of isolation” that Camus depicted in his novel and we were now experiencing through shelter-in-place.

In other words Frank’s diary speaks to the trials we must endure in the immediate present as much as Camus’ novel did. What was once only a teenager’s reflection in excruciatingly trying times can now serve as a guiding light for dealing with the present. Nevertheless, as was the case with Rilke, the real power lies in the words. MTT had as little to add to Frank’s words has he had to Rilke’s, but there is still much to be gained in listening to Leonard deliver those words.