Friday, August 7, 2020

SFP Video Previews: Koh/Andres/Campbell

The next video preview that San Francisco Performances (SFP) has prepared for the third concert in its 2020–21 season actually consists of three separate videos. This will be the first program in the Shenson Great Artists Series. It will bring together three “great artists” that have previously given SFP recitals but never as a trio. Furthermore, in our current context of rapidly-changing repertoire choices,  each of the artists was born in a different decade. In chronological order (without disclosing any details about age), the performers will be violinist Jennifer Koh, pianist Timo Andres, and cellist Jay Campbell. Andres is also a composer, and the program planned for SFP will be in two parts. The first of these will present Andres’ compositions, and the second will be devoted to Leoš Janáček.

The contributing artists will perform in different combinations. Two of Andres’ compositions will be solo works for violin and cello, respectively. Janáček’s “Pohádka” (fairy tale), on the other hand, is a duo for cello and piano; and it will be followed by his sonata for violin and piano. The only selection that will involve all three performers will be Andres’ piano trio. Each of the “preview” videos focuses on one of the three artists.

This most recent of these is the unaccompanied violin composition performed by Koh. The composer is Christopher Cerrone; and the title of his composition is “Shall I Project a World?” (Readers may recall that pianist Anyssa Neumann played Cerrone’s “Hoyt-Schermerhorn” in her Old First Concerts solo recital at the end of this past January.) Koh’s performance was recorded on April 9, 2019 in Vancouver during a recital in the concert series A Month of Tuesdays presented by Music on Main. She was equipped with a headset, presumably with both microphone and earpiece; but it is unlikely that these were activated for this portion of her program. The music was very much an exploration of sonorities, somewhat in the latter-day spirit of Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza” compositions. However, Koh consistently made it clear that the score was not all about technique, endowing every phrase with its own characteristic rhetorical qualities.

The Andres video, on the other hand, presents a selection, which he had previously played for SFP in February of 2018. This was the sixteenth of the solo piano études composed by Philip Glass. The video was recorded when Andres gave a piano recital at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. on January 11, 2015. Through Andres’ performance, the attentive listener/viewer could readily identify the technical challenges that Glass intended to develop with this étude. However, at the same time, attention revealed the many ways in which Andres brought his own expressive interpretation to the score.

Ironically, while Campbell is the youngest of the three performers and commands a repertoire of adventurous modernism, SFP chose to represent him with a video of a performance of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. The selection presented the WoO 46 set of seven variations on the duet “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen,” which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed for the first act of his opera The Magic Flute (K. 620). Beethoven wrote this relatively short piece in 1801, and there are any number of moments when the attentive listener will relish the composer’s capacity for wit. That wit was clearly evident in Campbell’s reading of the score and was perfectly matched to the accompaniment provided by pianist Euntaek Kim. (This being music by Beethoven, listeners are unlikely to be surprised when one of those variations turns out to be a piano solo.)

Campbell was last seen in San Francisco at the end of this past January during the SFP PIVOT series. He shared the program with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and programming could not have been more distant from Beethoven. As a result, those who recall that past event will probably relish the expressiveness that Campbell brings to Beethoven on a video that was uploaded back in March of 2016.

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