Technical Difficulties at Old First Concerts

Sarah Cahill and Kate Stenberg (courtesy of Old First Concerts)

Yesterday afternoon Old First Concerts (O1C) hosted a duo recital performance by violinist Kate Stenberg and pianist Sarah Cahill. I have been following this duo for several years and have delighted in the extent to which every program they prepare is a journey of discovery. As has been the case for several months, yesterday’s performance was live-streamed; and, sadly, the technology behind streaming was not managed nearly as well as it had been for those last few months of “live” concerts from the Old First Presbyterian Church.

From the receiving end it was difficult to determine why the webcast was so problematic. One issue seemed to be that there were two cameras, each with its own microphone. In past O1C live-streams it was clear that independent microphone placement was critical to the audio experience (which included providing a separate microphone for a performer to offer verbal commentary). Yesterday afternoon Stenberg’s comments were almost entirely inaudible; and Cahill, speaking from her piano bench, fared only slightly better. More critically, the microphones for the two cameras being used had different levels of audio quality, leading to many disturbingly jarring changes in sonority when the shot angles changed. Old First had a good thing going as their offerings grew from solos to groups of different sizes, but yesterday felt as if all past technical progress had unraveled.

This was unfortunate because Stenberg and Cahill had definitely prepared a “listener’s program.” The role of sonority itself was established with the very first selection on the program, Somei Satoh’s “Birds in Warped Time II,” one of the earliest offerings for recorded listening to that composer’s music when New Albion Records included it on its Litanies album, performed by violinist Frank Almond and pianist Margaret Leng Tan. Sonority was equally critical in the two world premiere performances, each for one of the two musicians playing solo and both preceded by a videotaped introduction by the composer.

Cahill’s solo was “Summer Days,” composed by Mary Watkins. Watkins’ introduction stressed the extent to which the music was inspired by imagery. Thanks to Watkins outlining her images, the attentive listener could appreciate how those images had been interpreted in terms of sonorities, rather than just thematic material. Stenberg’s solo, which preceded Cahill’s, presented two short pieces by Ronald Bruce Smith, the second of which, “Horizon,” was a thoroughly engaging study in homophony.

The remainder of the program was devoted to “landmark compositions” of the twentieth and nineteenth centuries. In the first half of the program, these consisted of movements extracted from duo sonatas by Germaine Tailleferre and Ruth Crawford (composed in 1926 before she met at subsequently married Charles Seeger). The second half of the program coupled Lili Boulanger’s 1911 “Nocturne” with an arrangement of the spiritual “Deep River.” Samuel Coleridge-Taylor composed that arrangement for his solo piano collection 24 Negro Melodies, and violinist Maud Powell prepared the arrangement of that arrangement for violin and piano.

The program then concluded with an expressive account of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 100 (second) violin sonata in A major. The program notes offered an informative account of how the sonata included thematic material from three of the songs that Brahms had composed during the same summer (1886) when he was working on the sonata. However, those notes overlooked a more prankish element of appropriation in which the opening three notes unmistakably evoke the “Prize Song” that Walter von Stolzing sings in the third act of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. There may be a tendency to think of Brahms in opposition to Wagner, but Brahms was actually an admirer. So his prankish gesture was, in all probability, an affectionate one.