A Muddled Conclusion of E4TT’s Season

Last night the Center for New Music (C4NM) streamed the concluding concert in the 2020/21 season presented by the Ensemble for These Times (E4TT). The performances were captured at the Berkeley Piano Club, but they were streamed through the C4NM YouTube channel. The title of the program was Émigrés & Exiles in Hollywood; and the performers were soprano Nanette McGuinness, cellist Anne Lerner-Wright, and pianist Margaret Halbig.

That title was more than a little deceptive, since the “Weimar on the Pacific” composers shared the program with Polish composers, at least one of whom, Grażyna Bacewicz, left Poland only for her musical studies. However, that deception was the least of the problems encountered in last night’s performance. The only convincing accounts were those given by Halbig’s solo piano performances. She contributed selections by Alexandre Tansman, André Tchaikowsky, and Miklós Rózsa with consistent technical skill and a clear understanding of how to bring expressiveness to the marks on paper. The rest of the program never came close to the bar set by those performances.

Nanette McGuinness singing Hanns Eisler’s “Hollywood” with pianist Margaret Halbig (screen shot from the video being discussed)

McGuinness opened the program with three of the songs from Hanns Eisler’s Hollywooder Liederbuch (Hollywood songbook), the first, “Hollywood,” sung in English and the other two sung in German. There were frequent uncertainties in both pitch and her approach to the underlying expressiveness. Furthermore, in the absence of subtitles, most listeners were probably deprived of how Eisler approached the sharp edges of the texts by Bertolt Brecht that he was setting. Similar problems arose with McGuinness’ delivery of the more affectionate texts set by Eric Zeisl.

Most disappointing, however, were the cello performances. Lerner-Wright seemed to be having consistent problems with finding pitch. These were particularly apparent in her performance of the first four of the 24 solo cello preludes composed by Mieczysław Weinberg. These are all highly demanding pieces with a broad range of expressive stances, several of which are affectionate nods to Dmitri Shostakovich. Sadly, Lerner-Wright never got beyond doing justice to the marks on paper to take on any of that expressiveness, making for a seriously disappointing account of some of the most interesting music for cello written in the twentieth century.