LCCE: Too Much Talk; Not Enough Cello

The full title of last night’s Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) concert was Cello Heaven with Nina Shekhar: World Premiere Performance and Discussion. The focus of the program was the world premiere performance of Shekhar’s “if these walls,” which was scored for two cellos and had been commissioned by LCCE cellists Leighton Fong and Tanya Tomkins. Shekhar’s name may be familiar to regular readers: Cellist Anita Graef opened her Old First Concerts recital on Sunday afternoon, March 14, with a performance of Shekhar’s solo cello composition “Cajón,” an imaginative exploration of the interplay of bowed passages with percussive sounds from the body of the instrument. Fong began last night’s program by playing this piece.

Sadly, too much of last night’s program involved talk, rather than music. Fong, Tomkins, and Shekhar all had things to say about the music; but little of that verbiage threw much light on the opacity of Shekhar’s new composition. (For that matter, Graef had been far better prepared to introduce “Cajón” than Fong was.) In all fairness, however, talking about new music is no easy matter, due in no small part to the differing perspectives of composers and performers.

The fact is that, even in settings like Davies Symphony Hall, efforts to provide a verbal introduction to music that has never before been played in public often devolve into fumbling blather. Recently, the best exception to that rule has been the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP), which has a long tradition of pre-performance discussions that involve both composers and performers. Since becoming SFCMP Artistic Director, Eric Dudley has guided those discussions with a firm and well-informed hand; and, when SFCMP had to “migrate into cyberspace” during lockdown, he skillfully replaced those panel discussions with well-edited video remarks collected in appropriate settings.

None of those skills were captured in last night’s LCCE video. Too much time went into saying nice things about cellos and cellists, and it was clear that Shekhar had a keen ear for the wide diversity of sonorities that could be produced by the instrument. However, I am not sure that I ever came away with a convincing justification for the title of her new composition, let alone any sense of structure or rhetorical intent. Basically, it was “something that happened” for about five and one-half minutes; and there was little sense of any “what” or “why” behind that something, neither while performance was taking place nor over the course of the subsequent discussion.

Tanya Tomkins and Leighton Fong leading the cellists playing Clarice Assad’s “Lemuria” (screen shot from the video of last night’s LCCE offering)

Fortunately, there was still good news for those that enjoy cello music. Between the two Shekhar performances, the program included an archived video excerpt of the conclusion of Clarice Assad’s “Lemuria,” which was performed at an LCCE concert in January of 2019. This piece was scored for a large ensemble of cellos led by two soloists (Fong and Tomkins) along with a generous battery of percussion instruments played by Loren Mach. The composer herself added vocals, but they were not particularly evident on this particular video clip. The entire work left me bubbling with enthusiasm when I first encountered it, and I was more that delighted to have my memory tweaked!