SF Music Day: First Three Offerings

Today is SF Music Day 2020; and, as I write this, I have just experienced the first three of the ten performances scheduled for the afternoon. Rather than treat this as a “live” concert experience, InterMusic SF made the judicious decision to pre-record all ten of the performances. All of the recordings were made on the stage of Herbst Theatre, one of the four venues in the Veterans Building that has hosted SF Music Day performances in the past. Because the performances were pre-recorded, it was easier for the entire production to keep to its schedule and not have to worry about how much time is required for one group to clear the stage before the next one enters with its necessary gear. I shall now account for the performances I experienced in the order in which I encountered them.

One reason that I wanted to “begin at the beginning” was that the schedule opened with the Telegraph Quartet, whose members are violinists Joseph Maile (taking first chair on this occasion) and Eric Chin, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw. They revisited one of the selections from the program they presented at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) a little over a week ago, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Opus 34 (third) quartet. Korngold was born in Moravia but made a name for himself while still a child prodigy in Vienna. He was able to escape the Nazi invasion of Austria-Hungary thanks to the stage director Max Reinhardt, who brought Korngold to Southern California to write film scores.

According to Maile, Korngold refused to return to the composition of “serious” music until Hitler had been defeated. As a result Opus 34 was composed in 1945, the same year as his Opus 35 violin concerto, which was subsequently recorded by Jascha Heifetz. While he used Opus 35 to reflect playfully on many of the motifs of his film scores, Korngold gave Opus 34 a more “formal” treatment, with intense rhetoric behind the thematic material of the quartet’s four movements. Listening to the quartet earlier this month was an exciting and revelatory experience; and, through the freshness that Telegraph brought to their execution, the “second time around” was just as stimulating, if not more so.

Telegraph was followed by a Latin jazz trio led by Ricardo Peixoto playing a seven-string acoustic (but amplified) guitar. He was joined by Marcos Silva on piano and Brian Rice on percussion. Four of the selections were composed by Peixoto along with one by Silva entitled “Not Enough Notes.” (That one left me wondering whether there might be hidden reference to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.) The set also included “Surfboard,” one of the less familiar compositions by Antônio Carlos Jobim. The entire set made for a refreshing contrast with the post-War dispositions of Korngold’s quartet. All six trio selections were entirely “in the moment;” and Peixoto could not have been more generous is allowing both Silva and Rice to take their own solo turns.

from the Program Book for SF Music Day 2020

The pendulum then took a swing back in the opposite direction, this time reaching into the nineteenth century. The trio of violinist Tom Stone, pianist Elizabeth Dorman, and cellist Amos Yang played Johannes Brahms’ Opus 8 (first) piano trio in B major. Stone introduced the performance, noting that he had been playing chamber music with Yang (now best known for his membership in the San Francisco Symphony) for a fair amount of time. When it came to deciding to play a trio, however, Dorman was new to the group.

That factor would probably have been more evident to those that spend a lot of time listening to chamber music; but, for better or worse, I happen to be one of those listeners. As a result I found myself approaching this particular reading of Opus 8 as “work in progress.” Each of the three performers had a solid command of interpreting the marks on the score pages. Nevertheless, when it came to assembling all the pieces, it seemed as if each player was still establishing orientation with the other two. As a result the reading of Opus 8 was a well-organized parade of notes, but the rhetoric behind all of those notes had not yet established itself.

While there is little to generalize over these three offerings, I want to make it a point to recognize the high quality of both audio and video recording in all of these performances. Microphone placement could not have been better, probably meaning that any mixing could be kept to a minimum. None of the problems with video work for the Telegraph Quartet at SFCM were evident. Instead of too much jumping from one camera angle to another, all the video cues were helpful in guiding the ear through Korngold’s polyphony. Camera work for both Peixoto’s trio and the Brahms performers was equally conducive to a satisfying listening experience.