SFSymphony+ Begins with First SoundBox

This morning SFSymphony+, the new on-demand streaming service presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), got under way with the first SoundBox program of the new year. The program was only about half an hour in duration, a far cry from the original full-evening concept of SoundBox presenting adventurous programming in a context allowing for extended socializing. The title of the program was Nostalgia, introduced in the program book as “three composers look to a past that may or may not exist, while opening new portals to the future.”

In order of appearance, those composers were Freya Waley-Cohen, Missy Mazzoli, and Caroline Shaw; and all three of their respective efforts were created in the last decade. All of the works were composed for strings, with Mazzoli’s “Vespers” requiring only a single performer playing amplified violin with delay and soundtrack at one extreme and Shaw’s double-quartet version of her “Entr’acte” at the other. The program began with Waley-Cohen’s “Conjure,” scored for string trio.

Unless I am mistaken, this was my third encounter with Mazzoli’s instrumental music in performance, the first having been presented by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. However, my most memorable encounter with her work was the West Edge Opera production of her reworking of Lars von Trier’s 1996 film Breaking the Waves into a full-length opera with a libretto by Royce Vavrek. “Vespers” was quite another beast, situating soloist Polina Sedukh in an environment of disembodied voices and other sampled sound sources. Ironically, while the resources were a far cry from those of a full-length opera, it was hard to avoid a sense of alienation associated with Sedukh’s role in this highly-theatrical creation, an alienation not unlike what Bess McNeill experiences as that plot of Breaking the Waves unfolds. The impact of that alienation on “the small screen” may not have been as intense as the operatic experience; but Sedukh’s performance was still unmistakably compelling.

Some of that alienation also seemed to permeate “Conjure.” This may have been due, in part, to the face masks worn by violinist Yun Chu, violist Jonathan Vinocour, and cellist Jill Rachuy Brindel under pandemic conditions. However, just as significant was the sinister quality of the dark projection behind the players created by Yee Eun Nam:

Yun Chu, Jonathan Vinocour, and Jill Rachuy Brindel playing “Conjure” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Indeed, there were occasions when the projection could be seen on the bodies of the performers, almost as if they were being consumed by the environment in which they were situated. James Keller’s note for the program book suggested that the “conjuring” of the title involved “the summoning of a mystical, perhaps malign, spirit;” and it was hard to avoid that sense of malignancy while listening to Waley-Cohen’s music.

I have had a variety of different reactions to previous encounters with “Entr’acte” in its string quartet version, which I first heard in April of 2015 when the Chamber Music Society of San Francisco played it in a Noontime Concerts recital at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral. The piece was conceived as a deconstruction of music from the string quartets of Joseph Haydn; and it did not surprise me that my most satisfying experience came from listening to the piece played by an ensemble with considerable Haydn experience,  the New Esterházy Quartet of violinists Lisa Weiss and Kati Kyme, violist Anthony Martin, and cellist William Skeen. These players always knew how to play up the element of wit in Haydn’s music, and they had no trouble giving Shaw the same treatment. When they played “Entr’acte” prior of a concert by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale in October of 2019, I finally recognized how much of Shaw’s score could evoke “a series of subtle grins and the occasional belly-laugh.”

Sadly, that rhetoric never emerged in the SoundBox performance by violinists Sarn Oliver, Leor Maltinski, Jessie Fellows, and Darlene Gray, violists Yun Jie Liu and Nancy Ellis, cellist Barbara Bogatin, and bassist Charles Chandler. This may have been due to the intense solemnity of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s conducting, if not the need for a conductor in the first place, which seemed to suggest that the octet lacked the intimacy of the original quartet setting. The quotation from Shaw included in Keller’s program note seems to suggest that such solemnity was not intended as a factor, and I found myself wishing that the SFS musicians had stuck with her original version.