This morning streaming began for the second SoundBox program to be presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) through its SFSymphony+ service. Soprano Julia Bullock presented Lineage, a program she was originally scheduled to curate in April of last year. Under current conditions she was able to turn the necessity for distancing from a liability into an asset. At the same time the repertoire she selected spanned a “distance” of almost 900 years. Those circumstances then reflected back on Bullock’s choice of a title, which, as she put it, constituted “an audio and visual snapshot of how lineage can inform, influence, impact, and express itself in a musical context.”
The “temporal distance” of the program was framed by the twelfth-century German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen at one end and living composers at the other. On several occasions in the program, the span of distance was “bridged” by segue techniques that allowed for smooth progressions from one century to another. Thus, Hildegarde’s “O frondes virga” (O blooming branch, D 155r), sung by the San Francisco Girls Chorus conducted by Susan McMane, proceeded without interruption into Bullock singing Nina Simone’s “Images,” a setting of the poem “No Images” by the Harlem Renaissance poet William Waring Cuney. While Hildegarde’s text lauds the brach as standing “upright in your nobility,” the protagonist of Cuney’s poem has lost both beauty and nobility through the poverty of urban life that she must endure.
Nina Simone’s “shift into Bach” at the conclusion of “Love Me or Leave Me” (screen shot from the video being discussed)
Simone was also “bridged” to Johann Sebastian Bach. The first musical offering showed her playing the piano in a film of her performance on The Ed Sullivan Show while singing “Love Me or Leave Me.” As she concluded the lyrics, her piano work took over with a rapid-fire two-part invention, which then transitioned smoothly into Sarah Cahill playing one of Bach’s two-part inventions, BWV 784 in A minor. I have to confess that I have had a long-standing interest in Simone and her uncompromising approaches to both music and ideology. As a result, watching that Ed Sullivan clip turned out to be far more informative than I anticipated; and the smooth segue into Cahill playing Bach was the icing on the cake!
That said, I should also observe that, as the performing ensembles grew in size, the viewing became more frustrating. On too many occasions the camera work directed by Steve Condiotti tended to frustrate what the eye wanted to see by looking somewhere else. All of the offerings on the program were on the scale of chamber music, meaning that, for the most part, every performer had some claim on the foreground at some time during the execution of the performance. Such foreground-background relationships often tend to involve how the performers go about interpreting the respective parts of the score. Sadly, Condiotti did not appear to have much awareness of any of the scores for the works being performed, suggesting that he was “winging it” on the basis of his own ears, which were not always the best source of information.
Fortunately, all of the offerings on the program were relatively short in nature. Furthermore, much of the time one could simply enjoy the treasures of Bullock’s voice and the facility with which she could move from one stylistic genre to another. Given how much content she assembled for this offering, the video is definitely worth a second (and probably a third) look.
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