Saturday, December 26, 2020

Month-by-Month Memories of 2020

Those that have been reading this site for some time know that I have my own approach to writing about the year in review. Rather than trying to juggle with the adjective “best,” I review my articles for the year and then try to single out the “most memorable concert” for each month of the year. Similarly, I try to write about recordings in terms of their memorability. In this case I do not try to take a month-by-month approach, preferring instead to offer an alternative to following the GRAMMY nominations (which I have not yet reviewed for this year, assuming that there will be some form of award ceremony).

It goes without saying that this year is different. For all intents and purposes the “physical concert experience” went “off the map” and just about any San Francisco venue, once Mayor London N. Breed ordered the cancellation of all public performances, events, and gatherings at the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center on March 6. As a result, I have organized my review of this year in terms of my own writing activities, preparing a month-by-month account of the memorability of the articles themselves, as well as what those articles were reporting.

I suppose the good news is than, even in the shadow of COVID-19, I have managed to keep myself as busy as ever. As a result the process of making choices has not changed much from what I did a year ago. The only difference is that those choices now involve “virtual” experiences, as well as the few “physical” ones I encountered during the first three months of the year. That said, here is my month-by-month account with hyperlinks to the associated articles:

January: Alla Kovgan’s Cunningham documentary. Readers may recall that the first thing I said about this film was that calling it a documentary would sell it short. In documenting the artistic evolution of choreographer Merce Cunningham over the period from 1944 to 1972, Kovgan decided to use three-dimensional cameras to capture contemporary performances of his dances. Given how much Cunningham’s work involved the interplay of space and time, providing a more faithful account of how both dancers and those in the audience experienced space significantly enhanced the viewer’s appreciation of what the choreographer was doing. That said, I should also confess that watching this film turned out to be a much more delightful trip down memory lane than I had anticipated!

February: Garrick Ohlsson’s Brahms recital for San Francisco Performances. This was the third of what was to be a series of four recitals presenting all the solo piano compositions by Johannes Brahms. This was the program that took on the Opus 5 (third) piano sonata in F minor, a beast so unwieldy that I do not expect to encounter it in recital very often. As I had hoped, Ohlsson made the encounter thoroughly engaging and indelibly memorable.

March: Lockdown is announced at the intermission of a San Francisco Ballet performance. I was in my junior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the northeast blackout of 1965, meaning that, for many years, I would frequently be engaged in conversations that began “Where were you when the lights went out?” That question will now change to “Where were you when shelter-in-place was imposed to prevent the spread of COVID-19?” Ironically, I was in the War Memorial Opera House for the opening night performance of George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, my first encounter with a performance of Balanchine’s choreography in about 40 years. How could the occasion be anything other than memorable?

April: Balanchine’s “Duo Concertant” on film. It did not take me long to realize that watching films and video through the Internet would be the best way to keep up my writing. I also decided to afford myself the luxury of writing about what I felt were significant archival offerings, rather than restricting myself to “fresh” (at least relatively) content. After having written about a new album of Igor Stravinsky’s music for violin and piano prepared by Portuguese violinist Bruno Monteiro, I realized that my own interest in Stravinsky’s “Duo Concertant” had much to do with by having seen the choreography that Balanchine had created for this music. Much to my delight, I found a YouTube video of a performance by the dancers for whom the ballet was created, Kay Mazzo and Peter Martins. Balanchine’s choreography situated the musicians on stage, where they would be “visited” by the two dancers; and on this 1975 film by Hugo Niebeling, jointly produced by Unitel and the ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, second German television) public television channel, those musicians are violinist is Cees Van Schaik, accompanied by Gordon Boelzner at the piano. The performance has the intimacy of “chamber music for two musicians and two dancers;” and I would say that it is one of the best ways to get to know Stravinsky’s neoclassical approach to composition.

May: “Appalachian Spring” danced by the “original cast.” Martha Graham was a (many would prefer “the”) leading pioneer in the history of modern dance in the twentieth century. While many know “Appalachian Spring” as music composed by Aaron Copland, the original score was written for Graham’s choreography on a commission by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation in the Library of Congress. There are several generations of films and video of the performance of that choreography. However, it is often overlooked that, when the dance was first performed, the role of the Preacher was performed by Merce Cunningham. Having known about Cunningham’s role in this dance only through my reading, I was delighted to find the entire film available as a YouTube video. Granted, this is not for casual viewing; and the problems with image quality can be frustrating. Nevertheless, it is invaluable in documenting Cunningham’s talent before he left Graham to pursue his own way of creating and performing dance.

June: Balanchine’s “Agon” on film. Much of the history of modern ballet in the twentieth century involves the close partnership between Balanchine and Stravinsky. One of the most important works to emerge from that partnership was “Agon.” Balanchine’s choreography was inspired by pre-Classical forms, such as the French court dances from the seventeenth century. However, on the music side, this was the first music that Stravinsky wrote based on the twelve-tone technique developed by Arnold Schoenberg. As might be guessed, Stravinsky had his own way of doing things; but the result is one of the most absorbing instances of the application of atonality to pre-Classical structures. Sadly, the YouTube video leaves much to be desired; but it should still be able to satisfy the curiously attentive.

July: New Year’s Eve at Covent Garden with Die Fledermaus. Royal Opera House audiences have made a tradition of attending a performance of Die Fledermaus, the operetta composed by Johann Strauss II, on New Year’s Eve. Two videos have been made of this event. The “commercial release” documents a performance on New Year’s Eve of 1983, featuring soprano Kiri Te Kanawa as Rosalinde, baritone Hermann Prey as her husband, Gabriel von Eisenstein, and baritone Benjamin Luxon as Dr Falke. However, I first encountered this production in 1977, when these leading vocalists were younger and somewhat more refreshing. Fortunately, there is a YouTube video of this earlier performance, which looks like it was taken from a videotape recorded from a television broadcast (which, as I recall, was on a commercial channel and introduced by Tony Randall). (However, the first half of the overture is missing.) This was the performance at which Frederic Ashton’s choreography of Strauss’ Opus 410 “Frühlingsstimmen” (voices of spring) waltz as premiered by dancers Merle Park and Wayne Eagling was first presented; and the champagne for this dance is as bubbly as it is for all of the Strauss music performed.

August: Celebrating the Charlie Parker Centennial. There are probably many significant anniversary events that were overlooked due to pandemic conditions. However, the one that probably influenced me the most was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Charlie (“Bird”) Parker on August 29. I wrote my own centennial article on August 31, giving me the advantage of providing readers with several valuable hyperlinks, rather than putting all of my eggs in one basket. While this left me feeling that I had “done my part,” I still believe that the best way to honor Bird is to listen to his recordings with well-honed attention.

September: Orange Mountain Music releases Simone Dinnerstein’s A Character of Quiet album. Dinnerstein decided to release a recording of Franz Schubert’s final piano sonata, D. 960 in B-flat major, which is introduced by an “overture” consisting of three of Philip Glass’ études (numbers 16, 6, and 2). This was no mere gimmick. There are any number of ways in which both the content and the expressive performance of the Glass études serve to prepare the listener for the far vaster architecture of the Schubert sonata. Indeed, early last week, the YouTube stream of Dinnerstein’s Live from Columbia recital used the second étude to introduce the first movement of D. 960; and watching her perform (with first-rate video work) made the Glass-Schubert transition all the more logical.

October: In search of “positive thinking. This month saw the release of Inside, a Summit Records album of music by Scott Routenberg. The eleven tracks seemed to reflect the impact of quarantine on the composer’s longing for the “outside.” Sadly, that longing was expressed through a rhetoric of blandness that simply did not go down well with my own approach to surviving lockdown conditions. As a result, I coupled my account of the new album with personal impressions of Schoenberg’s orchestration of Brahms’ Opus 25 (first) piano quartet in G minor. When performed properly, this music is not only spirited but also downright funny, sometimes hysterically so. Such raucousness goes much further in helping me to get through a pandemic than any instance of “soothing blandness!”

November: Before Eric Dolphy’s death. Another countermeasure against blandness can be found in the jazz performances of Charles Mingus, particularly involving the impact of saxophonist Eric Dolphy. The Mingus Jazz Icons DVD presents selections from three of the concerts that took place during the European tour that Mingus arranged in April of 1964. Dolphy played in all of those concerts, joined by Dannie Richmond on drums, Jaki Bayard on piano, Johnny Coles on trumpet, Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone, and, of course, Mingus on bass. The last of these concerts took place on April 19. Dolphy remained in Europe and was performing in Berlin on June 27 when he had to be hospitalized. He died after falling into a diabetic coma on June 29. The DVD has been uploaded to YouTube, and it is a valuable resource in capturing some of Dolphy’s last efforts.

December: Danny Clay’s latest new work for Volti. The 42nd season of Volti, the Bay Area’s a cappella vocal ensemble that specializes in new music, was planned as four mini-concerts, each featuring a world-premiere performance by a different composer. This month’s concert (the second) presented Danny Clay’s Singing Puzzles. The music was created for sixteen socially-distanced vocalists, reflecting Clay’s preference for guided improvisation over the constraints of score notation. The music was created for not only the vocalists but also Volti’s Artistic Director Robert Geary serving as conductor, sometimes making for a “concerto for conductor and chorus.” The performance was expertly documented as a video that is now available through YouTube.

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